Astronauts take a look at Earth from space
Are you enlightened?
And here's the strange thing.
Humans have sent more than 650 people into space
Some of these guys are military pilots.
There are engineers
We have physicists.
All of them have received the strictest training in reason
But a large number of them
After returning from space
Personality has changed
People quit their jobs to go green.
Some people start studying philosophy
Somebody started a charity.
Someone said something that sounded like a Zen quote
Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell
On the way back from the moon to the earth
Looking out the window at the earth and the stars
Suddenly had an experience he called samadhi
It takes a Buddhist and Hindu practitioner a lifetime to make it possible
Achieved state of consciousness
He said that at that moment
I felt the oneness of everything.
This guy had a Ph.D. in aerospace from MIT.
A naval test pilot
He's the hardest technocratic guy you can think of
After he came back from the moon
He started an organization called the Institute for the Sciences of Mind.
Spend the rest of my life studying the nature of consciousness
A military scientist trained in the highest level of rationality
One look at the earth
Enlightened
This is not an isolated case
This is a phenomenon that has a name.
So, 1987.
After interviewing a large number of astronauts, space philosopher Frank White
They gave it a name.
It's called the general effect.
You can Baidu its definition
Frank found out
A large proportion of astronauts spend long periods of time in space
Will report some degree of cognitive shift
The earth they see and the earth they understand on the ground
They're two completely different things.
Hello
Hello.
I am Wang Lijie
Today I want to tease down this space overview effect in depth with you
But I'm not going to tell you a heartwarming story about space.
Here's what I'm going to do.
Using the cognitive framework that our channel has established
To explain a problem
What's really going on inside the astronaut's brain?
How could a single glance at the Earth produce such a profound cognitive shift?
But here's the thing.
This transformation
We're not going to space.
Is it possible to reproduce it on the ground?
Let's see what the astronauts actually reported
There's an observation module on the International Space Station called the Dome Module.
Seven windows facing the earth
Astronauts often float there between jobs
Just quietly looking out the window
Artemis 2 mission expert Christina Koch described
You look through the dome.
See the Earth suspended in the background of the entire universe
You see that little, little blue line in the atmosphere.
To the dark side of the earth
You'll see a smaller green line.
Marking the edge of the atmosphere
And then you realize.
Everyone you know
It's all wrapped in that green line
And everything outside the line is completely lethal
You can't see the border.
You don't see the religious divide.
You can't see the boundaries of politics.
Retired astronaut Mike Foreman said
If you weren't an environmentalist before you went to space
You'll be at least half an environmentalist when you come back.
Because when you look at how thin that atmosphere is
How fragile is that membrane that protects us?
You think about this.
God
We have to protect this thing.
There are several recurring keywords in astronaut descriptions
awe
fragile
Unification
Borders disappear
self-shrinking
Pay attention to these words
If you are a regular viewer of this channel
You should be starting to feel familiar
Because we've seen these words in several videos
Except they're not about space.
It's meditation.
LSD
Predictive coding.
Now let me put the overview effect on the operating table in neuroscience.
Remember the core theory I talked about in the Predictive Coding issue?
Your brain is not a passive receiver
It's an active predictor.
It starts by making up a model world
We then calibrate it with sensory data.
The reality you are experiencing at this moment
It's essentially a controlled hallucination generated by the brain from top down
So here's the problem.
What are the raw materials for brain prediction models?
Is all your past experience
You have been born until now
Your brain has accumulated a set of prior beliefs about what the world looks like
And there's a very central part of these prior beliefs.
It's called the self-model.
Who are you?
Where are you?
Where are your boundaries?
What's yours?
What is someone else's?
The physical basis of this self-model
It's the default mode network DMN that we talked about in detail in the meditation issue.
Default Mode Network
You're most active when you're not doing anything specific.
It's doing three things all the time.
rummage through old accounts
script
Write a play review
It's a never-ending narrative generator.
It has only one core product
My story
I am Wang Lijie
I am an angel investor
Where do I live?
What do I like?
What am I worried about?
Where are my boundaries?
These narratives make up your sense of self.
And here's the kicker.
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study published in 2019 found that
When people experience the emotion of awe
Default mode network activity drops significantly
Specifically
frontal pole
diagonal gyrus
posterior cingulate cortex
These are the core nodes of the default mode network
Significantly reduced active level in awe experience
at the same time
Enhancement of frontal-parietal network activity associated with attention and saliency detection
In human terms
When you are struck by something extremely vast
The module in your brain that keeps nagging me and me suddenly goes quiet
It's replaced by a kind of preoccupation.
immersive
The state of looking out
The researchers use a very precise term to describe this state
self-shrinking
Subjects after experiencing awe
Report that you feel smaller
It's not that the body gets smaller
It's that the mental boundary of me shrinks.
Or dissolved
Now you put that finding together with the astronaut's report.
What did the astronauts see in the dome?
They saw the whole earth
A blue sphere suspended against the dark background of the universe
Wrapped in an incredibly thin atmosphere
There's a sense of grandeur and wholeness in this visual stimulus.
Far more than anything you can encounter on earth
You're amazing enough to stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon
But that's just a crack in the earth's surface
What you see from space is the entire earth
Your whole world
Your entire frame of reference
The physical vehicle of your entire identity
Shrunk into a blue marble
The enormity of this visual stimulus
direct
Violently activates the awe response
And the core neural mechanism of the awe response is
Default mode network, not active
It's a temporary dissolution of our sense of self.
That my world that your brain has spent decades painstakingly constructing
My Country
My City
My House
My bank account.
My social circle
Suddenly it's visually compressed into a box without any boundary markers.
The blue ball
Your brain can't find any anchor points to maintain those fine distinctions
Where is America? Where is China?
Where are the rich and where are the slums
Those categories simply don't exist in that perspective.
Do you know what this means in the context of predictive coding?
It's a higher-level prior belief in the brain.
Those about who I am
How the world is divided
Deep-seated assumptions about what matters and what doesn't
All of a sudden, a huge prediction error signal hits.
What your brain predicts about the world and what you actually see in front of you
between
And there's a big gap.
You have national boundaries in your prediction model.
But your eyes tell you there's nothing there
Your prediction model has a distinction between mine and yours
But your eyes tell you it's just the whole
The brain faces such huge prediction errors
You have two choices.
The first is to insist on a priori
Reduce the error signal
That's just an illusion
Borders are real
The second is the update prior
Maybe borders are not the entities I thought they were
Maybe the world is more integrated than my previous model.
And what's unique about space is that
That visual stimulus is so overwhelming
So undeniable
So complete
The brain's first choice doesn't work at all.
You can't deny what you saw
Your prior beliefs were forced to undergo a massive update
Your self-model is forced to undergo a redesign
This is the neuroscientific mechanism of the omnibus effect.
Through an extremely vast visual stimulus
Triggers a powerful awe response
Causes a sharp drop in network activity in default mode
The prior beliefs of the self-model are greatly loosened
Ultimately leading to a deep cognitive reconstruction
Add a sentence
A 100 percent Pure Land Buddhist
When I saw the statue of Amitabha Buddha
There is also this sense of awe
Therefore, the faith and vows of the Pure Land Sect are fulfilled
Put the letter
Put it first
Because of this deep-seated belief
It gives you a sense of awe.
And awe
It helps you become enlightened.
Back to Space Overview Effect
There's a deeper question here that's worth asking.
Why seeing the whole can lead to self-shrinking
Think about it.
In your daily life
What has the default mode network been doing?
It's maintaining a narrative.
I am the protagonist
The world is the background
You are in your own life story
Always be the central figure
Your brain's predictive model organizes everything based on you.
Near important
Far away doesn't matter
Important to me
It's not about me
The whole cognitive architecture is egocentric.
But when you look at the Earth from space
The architecture is broken.
Because from that perspective
You can't find yourself.
You know you're on the space station
Do you know where your home is on earth?
But you're not in the picture you see
Only one complete
without a center
Uniform whole
Your brain is forced to switch from a first-person perspective to a God perspective
And one of the fundamental characteristics of God's perspective is that
No protagonist
When there is no protagonist this information is processed by your brain
The default mode is the I am the center of the world narrative maintained by the network
Temporarily lost support
This is why astronauts repeatedly use Sense of Unity
Unity
Boundaries disappear these words
It's not because they become mystic.
It's because their brain experiences a physical self-model.
The process of deactivation
OK
If you follow me here
You should have discovered an extremely important fact
This default mode network deactivation
Loose self-model
Neural mechanisms that produce a sense of unity and oneness
We've met somewhere else
We talked about it in the meditation issue
One of the core neural characteristics of deep meditation
That's the default mode, a decline in network activity.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of long-term meditators reveal
Their posterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex
Default mode The two most important nodes of the network
Activity is significantly reduced
What were the subjective experiences they reported?
Ego ablation
A Sense of Oneness
Borders disappear
Did you find it?
Neurologically, the overview effect and deep meditation point to the same thing.
Default mode network deactivation
Temporary dissolution of the self-model
Certainly.
There's a big difference between the depth and the duration of these experiences.
Let's just say that they have core neural mechanisms in common.
They're just different paths to the same destination.
Astronauts use an extremely large external visual stimulus
Meditators use continuous internal attention training
But the core neurological event they trigger is the same
The one who nagged me, my consciousness was temporarily quiet
The primordial spirit emerged
So you see something bigger.
I was extremely excited about this.
Because it suggests a deeper conclusion
The experience of enlightenment.
Mystery Experience
Oneness
It may not be some kind of paranormal phenomenon
It's not a cultural construct.
It's a specific neural state of the human brain.
One of the default modes, a dramatic decrease in network activity.
self-model
Or the end of consciousness-only learning
The state of temporary deconstruction
Different cultural traditions describe it in different languages
Buddhism is called Selflessness
In Hinduism, it's called Brahman-Self Unity.
Christian mysticism is called unity with God
Astronauts call it the Overview Effect.
But the underlying neurological event could be the same
But here it is.
I know you must have a question on your mind
Because if I were you
I would ask the same
I'm on TV.
I have also seen countless shots of the earth from space on the video website.
The photo of the blue marble.
I've seen it hundreds of times
documentary
Live, 4K
Ultra high definition
Even VR headsets
Seen everything
Why should I swipe my phone after reading it?
Time to order takeout
There is no shadow of the overall effect at all
Why do astronauts become enlightened at a glance?
I've watched it a hundred times, it's the same as never watching it
That's a great question.
Because it directly points to an extreme in predictive coding theory
Key concepts
precision weight
Remember that?
In the framework of predictive coding
The brain doesn't process information equally.
Every sensory signal comes in
The brain assigns a precision weight to it
You can think of it as a credibility score
High-weight signal
The brain takes it seriously
Allow it to shock and renew prior beliefs
Low weight signal
The brain just ignores
Transcendental beliefs don't budge.
When you were watching a documentary on the couch
What precision weight does your brain assign to that image?
Very low.
Because your brain knows exactly what that is.
That's a pixel on a screen.
Your body is on the sofa
Your feet are on the floor
Your coffee is handy.
Your phone vibrates in your pocket
Your entire sensory system is telling the brain the same thing
You are in the living room
This is a video.
Your brain has absolutely no reason to think that picture will affect your life
Has any meaning
So it weights the precision of that visual signal almost negligibly.
What happened?
You look at that blue marble
You think it's beautiful.
Then the default mode network continues to operate at full speed
So you're watching and you're wondering what's for dinner?
What to prepare for the meeting tomorrow?
Did anyone like the Moments sent last time?
I was sitting on my couch watching a video of the Earth, my self-model.
Stay where you are completely.
Didn't move a millimeter
The impact of that visual information
Can't even touch the threshold of your transcendental beliefs
But things are completely different in space
So let's start with this.
You're floating in zero gravity.
I can't emphasize this enough.
Your vestibular system
It's the balance and spatial orientation system in your inner ear.
Is continuously sending a signal that it has never sent since birth
Gravity is gone
Your brain has accumulated decades of prior models of up, down, left, right.
Suddenly all fail
That alone
It has already pushed your brain to a high level of alertness
Highly open state
Because the brain is in an environment where the prior model fails on a large scale
Will automatically increase the accuracy weight of all sensory signals
It's talking like crazy.
I don't know what the rules are here.
I need to take every piece of information that comes in seriously.
And then...
You float up to the dome window.
What you see are not pixels on the screen.
What you see is the real earth
Just outside the window.
And there's a vacuum outside the window.
You know that glass is the only barrier between you and death
The precision weight your brain assigns to this visual signal
Fill it up directly.
Because this is not a video.
This is first-hand sensory data for survival.
All your senses are confirming the same thing at the same time
Are you really here?
That blue thing is really your whole world
And here's the thing.
There's nothing in space competing with this visual signal.
No phone vibration
No delivery guy knocking on the door
No background music
Without the soft touch of a sofa to remind you that you are at home
Your sensory pathways are almost entirely occupied by this one stimulus.
This is called sensory channel monopolization in the science of attention.
When a stimulus monopolizes almost all of your perceived bandwidth
It's hard to keep the network running in default mode
Because cognitive resources have been almost completely drained
So
You see the Earth.
Watching on TV and watching in space
They're really different inputs to the brain.
One is low-precision weighting
Competing with other signals
The picture wrapped in the frame of this is just a video
It can't even knock on the door of a priori belief
The other is the highest precision weight
Total Sensory Immersion
You are really here
Outside the window is the first-hand experience of the blessing of the existential crisis of death
It went straight through the walls of a priori belief like a cannonball
This also explains why the overall effect of VR simulations is effective, but
Far less than a real space experience
VR is better than TV
Because it occupies more sensory channels
It creates a greater sense of immersion.
The brain gives it a higher weight of accuracy than television
But VR is not real after all
Your vestibular system knows you're still on Earth
Your body knows you're not weightless.
Your survival instinct knows you're not at the edge of a vacuum
So VR has a higher precision weight than TV
But much lower than real space
It can trigger certain components of the overview effect
But it can't trigger the complete one.
Explosive cognitive reconstruction
Let's use an analogy.
Watching the earth on TV
It's like someone describing a dish to you that you haven't eaten yet.
You intellectually know it's delicious
But you don't drool.
And the VR sort of smelled that.
Feel a little bit
But it's not even close.
Really seeing the earth from space
It's the moment you put that dish in your mouth
All the senses erupt at the same time
Your whole body is involved in the experience
The brain's predictive models have been forced to undergo a comprehensive update
And that's why the overview effect isn't something you just see information trigger.
It's about devotion.
High precision weighted ground
And it's only on the existential level that it can be triggered by experiencing that information.
This is why pure intellectual understanding
You know the earth is round
Space is big, you know.
You know that borders are man-made lines.
It can never replace the experience itself
Your brain only counts by high-precision first-hand senses in transcendental beliefs
According to the breakdown
Will be really updated
The gap between knowing and experiencing
And that's the accuracy and weight gap.
OK
After figuring this out
Let's look at another question
If the overall effect
meditation
LSD triggers the same neural state
Why does the overall effect seem to be particularly persistent?
A lot of what the astronauts described was not a fleeting experience.
It's a permanent cognitive shift.
After they return to earth
The way I see the world is never going back
Meditation requires continuous practice to maintain its effectiveness
Psychedelic experiences often subside after the drug is metabolized
But the overall effect seems to have some kind of once-and-forever quality.
Why is that?
So here's my guess.
The reason why the overall effect is particularly strong
Extremely persistent
It's because it cuts through both sides of perception.
The first level is the emotional level
Awe
shock
vulnerability
These strong emotions create a huge coding window
Let this experience be deeply ingrained in the long-term memory
Just as you will always remember each of the extreme emotional moments of your life
a detail
The overview effect creates a similar flash memory.
The second level is more important
It's cognitive.
The Overview Effect is not a vague mystical experience
It provides a specific
clear
Cognitive anchors that can be invoked repeatedly in everyday life
The picture of the blue marble
Every time you see a border dispute in the future
ethnic conflict
Resource grab news
Your brain can instantly access that image.
From space
There are no wires there
This cognitive anchor constantly reminds you
Those assumptions about boundaries and separations in your prior beliefs
It may not be the ultimate truth
Meditation and psychedelic experiences can hardly provide such a concrete visual anchor
They provide more of an indescribable feeling
What the overview effect provides is a hologram.
You saw it with your own eyes
undeniable
Imprinted in your visual memory
That's why its effects last longer
So much for that.
I want to raise the perspective one more level
Frank Wright, in his work on the overview effect, pointed out that
Very important distinction
In low Earth orbit
The Earth takes up most of your field of vision
What you see here is a big blue sphere.
But on the moon
It's completely different.
You're looking at the whole planet.
Hovering in the dark background of the universe
And it's small.
The experience reported by the Apollo astronauts
More extreme than space station astronauts
It's transformative.
Because it's bigger.
Not as big as the earth
The Earth is small.
And I was even younger
And this leads me to an interesting counterpart.
Psychologists' research on the experience of awe has found
The two central characteristics of awe are the perception of vastness.
And the need for cognitive adjustment
What it means to feel vast is
You encounter something that goes far beyond your current frame of reference
Cognitive adjustment is required.
Your current mental schema can't hold this thing
Must be updated
And these two features are simultaneously pushed to the extreme from a space perspective
The earth as a whole
It represents the entirety of your experience.
All memory
All social relations
Shrunk into a small blue dot
Floating in the void with no end in sight
Your frame of reference has not been broadened
It blew up.
All your past mental schemas
About the country
About identity
About important and unimportant
All need to be rebuilt
That's why astronauts are getting more emotional.
It's a cognitive reconfiguration.
It's not about mood swings.
It is an update at the operating system level.
OK
Now let me go back to the most crucial question at the beginning
This experience
Don't go to space
Can it be reproduced?
From a neuroscientific perspective
The answer is likely to be
OK
Because the core mechanism is not the physical condition in space
Instead, the default mode network deactivation plus self-model loosening this
neural state
Space is just one way of getting there.
Possibly the most violent
trigger method
But there are other paths.
Meditation is a path
Especially those forms of meditation that are centered on open awareness
Such as Zen meditation
Vipassana of Southern Buddhism
Mahamudra and Dzogchen in Tibetan Buddhism
What these methods have in common is that
You can't control your thoughts.
It's about getting away from thought.
Let the default mode network activity naturally decrease
Research shows that
The default mode of long-term meditators has significantly reduced network connectivity
They're more susceptible to self-shrinking.
The experience of awe in the natural environment is another path.
Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon
Looking up at the Milky Way at night away from light pollution
Watch the waves crashing against the cliffs
These experiences all trigger awe reactions and default modes to some extent
Temporary deactivation of the network
The effect is not as extreme as space
But the direction is the same
VR technology is opening up a third path
One study used virtual reality to simulate the experience of looking at Earth from space
Participants' brain activity was recorded using an electroencephalogram
It was found that at the crucial moment of simulating the overview effect
The power of the beta and gamma brainwave bands has dropped
This means that habitual mental structures are temporarily disrupted
Although the effect of VR is not as good as the real space experience
But it did induce similar cognitive shifts in the lab.
These different paths all lead to the same conclusion
The essence of the overview effect is not in space
It's seeing the whole.
Or to be more precise
It's the one where your brain is forced to switch from a local perspective to a global perspective.
cognitive transition process
And that led me to a deeper question.
I haven't thought about this clearly yet.
But I think it's worth mentioning.
Why does our brain operate in partial viewing mode by default?
Think about it.
What does the default mode network do?
It's building me.
A person separated from the world
bordered
Individuals with interests
It splits a continuous stream of experience into my experience and non-my experience
It draws countless lines in a world without natural boundaries
From an evolutionary perspective
It's certainly useful.
A primitive person without self-boundaries does not protect himself
They're not going for resources.
They're not going to reproduce.
Default schema networks and self-models are survival tools that evolution has given us.
But here's the thing.
This tool comes at a cost.
It allows you to cut a whole world into pieces
And clinging to the boundaries between the fragments
And worrying about those boundaries
fight
suffer
From wars between nations to intrigue between colleagues
To your own self-criticism that I'm not good enough
The root cause of all this pain
All the way back to the default model, the disconnected self of which the network is constructed.
What the overarching effect does
What meditation does
What psychedelic experiences do
Is to temporarily close the splitter.
Let you see the whole before the division
Does this sound a lot like what the Buddha said about selflessness?
It's like what I said about returning to Park
Much like we talked about in the Spectrum of Consciousness, going back to the unity of subject and object
I don't think it's a coincidence
If those frameworks we've built on this channel before are right
Consciousness is a spectrum of light.
From deep unity to surface separation
So the aggregate effect is a very powerful piece of evidence.
It shows that the human brain under certain conditions
You can actually see that deeper wholeness.
It doesn't take faith.
No need for doctrine
No cultural prerequisites are required
You just need
In space
In weightlessness
See the tiny blue home
Astronauts didn't become philosophers.
They were pushed up the spectrum of consciousness by a visual stimulus, one that came before them.
Never been there before
In that position
Default mode network is quiet
The self-model is loose.
So they experienced it for the first time
It turns out that separation is not the only way to perceive
Unity is also a reality
repeatable
Neural-based states of consciousness
And this brings up a question that I think is really worth thinking about.
Our entire civilization
Our political system
economic system
international relations
Are based on the perception of separation
I am Chinese and you are American
These are my resources; these are your resources.
That's my interest. That's your interest.
All these institutional arrangements
Implicit a priori assumption
The world is made up of separate individuals and separate groups
And the interests of these individuals and groups are competitive.
But what if what the astronauts saw was closer to the truth?
If decoupling was just the default mode one made up by the network useful for survival but
What about the distorted model?
If you look at it from a higher perspective
They don't exist.
I'm not saying we should abolish borders.
That's not realistic.
I'm talking about
Maybe we need to realize
Our perception of separation
It's not an objective fact.
It's a user interface that the brain created under certain evolutionary pressures.
As Hoffman's interface theory tells us
Evolution doesn't give you reality.
It's useful.
self boundary
group boundary
national border
These are all useful
But they don't have to be real.
The true value of the overall effect
Maybe it's not just how spectacular it is
But it reveals one thing
Your brain is capable of running a different pattern.
In that mode
The separation is gone.
Unity emerged
And that pattern is the same as your daily separation pattern
Has a solid neural foundation
It's not an illusion.
Not self-deception
Not chicken soup for the soul
It's just another legal state of your brain.
Carl Sagan famously said
1990
Voyager 1 is on its way to the edge of the solar system
I went back and took a picture of the earth
In that photo
The Earth is a pale blue dot so small it's almost invisible
Suspended in a beam of sunlight
Sagan looked at the picture and said
Look at that little dot
So here it is.
That's home.
That's Us
Everyone you've ever loved
Everyone you know
Everyone you've heard of
Everyone who has ever existed
Spent a lifetime there
All the joy and pain
All religions and ideologies
All the heroes and cowards
All civilizations are creators and destroyers
All saints and sinners
It's all there.
A speck of dust suspended in the sunlight
Sagan was not an astronaut
He's never been to space.
But when he looked at that photo
He's obviously also experiencing some version of the Overview Effect
That's why I say
You don't need to go to space.
What you need is a strong enough cognitive trigger
One that will make your default mode network quiet down
Something that temporarily loosens your self-model
It can be a photo.
It could be a deep meditation.
It can be a moment looking up at the stars on a stormy night
It can be your in-depth understanding of the video content
Because the ultimate implication of the omnibus effect is not that the Earth is small.
It's that your self is smaller.
And when that self is temporarily quiet
Things you can see
Much more than you think
But it left an open question for me to ponder.
If the general effect and deep meditation activate the same neural state
And what is that unity that they see?
It's a more authentic perception.
Or is it just another controlled hallucination of the brain?
It's just that the control method is different this time
In Seth's framework
Everyday consciousness is a controlled illusion
Is that unity consciousness also an illusion?
It's just that the control parameters are different
Or say
When the default mode network is quiet
The brain actually gets closer to the underlying signals that it normally filters out.
This question
Science cannot answer for the time being
But it may be the question at the very heart of consciousness.
For this issue
What are your thoughts and insights?
Have you at any point experienced a similar narrowing of the self and seeing the whole?
feeling
If there is
Under what circumstances?
What topic would you most like me to talk about in the next issue?
Welcome to leave a message in the comment area to tell me.
I am Wang Lijie
See you next time.