How solar eclipses can affect the brain – 04/08/2024 – Science

The day is May 28, 585 BC, in present-day Anatolia, Turkey.

The Medes, an ancient people who lived in what is now Iran, and the Lydians — a kingdom in the south of present-day Turkey — have been fighting for six years.

The Greek historian Herodotus (485-425 BC) says that the war showed few signs of coming to an end and neither side made significant progress.

It would take a solar eclipse to put an end to the bloodbath.

“As the battle began to heat up, day suddenly turned into night,” wrote Herodotus. “When they saw the change, the Medes and Lydians stopped fighting and became anxious to work out a peace agreement.”

We may not see such a dramatic reaction to the total eclipse that passes through North America on April 8 this year, but recent research indicates that it can have a strong impact on our psychology, evoking our amazement.

There are few events that awaken our amazement more than the series of celestial coincidences that allow us to experience a total solar eclipse. The Moon needs to be the correct size, at the exact distance from Earth and in the right orbit to pass in front of the Sun and completely block its light for a few moments.

Witnessing this surprising event can inspire us to find more humility and care for others, according to research.

“People may be more cooperative — they may say they have stronger social bonds with others and feel more connected to their community,” says psychologist Sean Goldy, from Johns Hopkins University in the United States, who has researched the psychological effects of the 2017 eclipse.

The shock of immensity

After long being overlooked in the scientific studies industry, wonderment has become increasingly fashionable over the past two decades.

It is defined as a feeling of awe and wonder, triggered by the perception of vastness that makes us feel comparatively small.

“It’s an emotion you feel when you realize that something is vast and challenges your worldview,” explains psychologist Jennifer Stellar, from the University of Toronto, Canada. “It’s the feeling you have about an object or person that is so extraordinary that it is beyond comprehension.”

The result could be revolutionary.

Psychologist Dacher Keltner, from the University of California at Berkeley, in the United States, writes in his book “Awe” that the feeling of awe can calm the “persistent, self-critical, arrogant, status-conscious voice of our self, or ego” and allows us to “collaborate, open our minds to wonder, and observe the deep patterns of life.”

It’s a big premise, but Keltner and his colleagues have accumulated a lot of evidence to support it.

In a typical laboratory experiment, psychologists might ask participants to watch videos of awe-inspiring natural phenomena, then fill out questionnaires and perform tasks to measure any changes in mindset and behavior.

Let’s take as an example a 2018 study that examined the effects of wonder on humility.

The research team asked half of the participants to watch a short video that slowly moved away from Earth and into outer space. The others watched a relaxing clip that taught how to build a fence.

Then, the researchers asked both groups to spend two minutes writing, first, about their strengths and then, about their weaknesses.

Confirming the initial hypothesis, participants who had watched the space video were more likely to feel admiration and, in their personal statements, they reported significantly fewer strengths before describing their weaknesses — a sign of humility.

In another study from the same research paper, researchers asked a third of their participants to recall a time when they felt awe.

Another third recalled a moment when they had fun with something funny and the rest recalled a common shopping trip.

Participants then answered a series of questions to determine, on a scale of 0 to 100%, how much various factors had contributed to their achievements in life. These factors included your own talents or external forces such as luck or God.

You might expect that someone more humble would be more likely to recognize these external forces – and that’s exactly what the researchers found for participants who were encouraged to feel wonder.

“This makes sense if awe reduces your self-importance and your focus on yourself,” says Stellar, who was the paper’s lead author.

“Our ego guides our perceptions and decision-making, but when you feel a transcendent emotion like awe, it diminishes the power it has over you,” she says.

Undefined borders

In addition to making us more humble about our abilities, reducing our ego can also help us observe others in a different way.

“When I reduce the focus on myself, the line between me and you can blur. I can see us both as part of the web of humanity,” explains Stellar.

Along these lines, the researchers asked participants to illustrate how close they felt to their community.

They were given pairs of circles. One of the circles represented themselves and the other represented the people around them.

The images looked a bit like a Venn diagram, where the amount of overlap represents the strength of the connection to the community and its importance in the overall identity.

This method may sound somewhat mysterious, but it is a standard measure of social connectedness. And after watching an awe-inspiring video, participants chose circles with considerably more overlap.

We can see similar effects in a study by psychologist S. Katherine Nelson-Coffey of the University of New South Wales in Australia and her colleagues. She asked a group of 47 participants to carry out a spacewalk in virtual reality, accompanied by an audio clip narrating a text adapted from the book “Pálido Ponto Azul”, by Carl Sagan (Ed. Cia. das Letras, 2019).

These participants were considerably more likely to agree with statements such as “I feel closer to others and to all of humanity” than any other group of people who had observed a small model of Earth and Pluto.

Inducing wonder can even lead people to practice more altruistic behaviors.

Psychology professor Paul Piff, from the University of California at Irvine, in the United States, and his colleagues asked some people to watch a clip from the BBC series Planet Earth.

After the video, they were more likely to share tickets for a US$100 raffle than people who had watched scenes from the BBC comedy “Walk on the Wild Side”.

The eclipsed ‘I’

As fascinating as these experiments may be, they may not necessarily reflect people’s spontaneous reactions to natural phenomena outside the laboratory. It’s a concern of Sean Goldy as he prepared his PhD.

“I was looking for a way to study people who felt something really momentous,” he says.

The 2017 total solar eclipse in the United States provided an answer. The rare alignment of the Moon and Sun, resulting in a spectacular corona, seemed highly likely to trigger feelings of awe. Even better, the event would most likely inspire social media posts, which could provide the perfect opportunity to measure immediate reactions to the event.

To collect her data, Goldy turned to X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. By extracting location details from user profiles, Goldy was able to determine which Twitterers witnessed the total eclipse and which ones missed the spectacle.

He then performed linguistic analyzes of the text of the posts themselves. Words like “incredible” and “stunning,” for example, were considered to represent awe, while the use of cautious language — “perhaps” and “might be” — represented humility.

Pro-socialization behaviors were coded with words such as “care” or “voluntary”, in addition to terms of gratitude and love.

The results were elegant enough to inspire awe.

People in the eclipse’s path were about twice as likely to express awe in their tweets. And, as predicted, this was associated with greater humility and pro-socialization behavior.

The effects could also be observed in the pronouns used by people: those who managed to witness the eclipse were more likely to use the majestic plural (“we”), which reflects collective experience, compared to people outside the eclipse’s path.

Goldy highlights that the effects were relatively short-lived. “It only lasted 24 hours.”

But even brief moments of greater connection should be a welcome relief from the stresses of our day-to-day interactions.

In this era of polarization and social division, we can at least find common ground in our wonder at the Universe around us.

_{* David Robson is an award-winning science writer. His next book (in English) is called The Laws of Connection: 13 Social Strategies that Will Transform Your Life, to be published in June 2024 by Canongate (in the United Kingdom) and Pegasus Books (in the United States and Canada) . His account on X (formerly Twitter) is @d_a_robson. He can also be found under the handle @davidarobson on Instagram and Threads.}

_{Read the original version of this report (in English).}