The Shock of Awe

Let’s take a break from the daily awful and focus instead on the awe-full. Dana Milbank went looking for some awe and wonder on the walls of the National Art Museum. It turns out that’s not a bad place to start. “New research out of King’s College London gauged people’s physiological responses while they viewed works by Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Manet and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec for 20 minutes. The study, now in preprint, found that participants’ levels of the stress hormone cortisol dropped by 22 percent on average, while markers of inflammation dropped even more sharply and heart rhythms indicated greater relaxation.” (I’m guessing that those results have almost as much to do with what you’re not looking at as what you are; it’s a distinction between experiencing the power of wonder and looking at your phone and wondering what the hell is happening.) Whether art is your awe-seeking drug of choice or not, there are probably some lessons here that we can all use over the holiday season. WaPo (Gift Article): Feeling wonder every day improves our health. Here’s how to do it. “In the days after my visit, I found myself pausing to marvel at things I often take for granted: A Christmas fern poking through the snow, the intricate forms of lichens on a tree, a sweet birch clinging to a rocky hillside, the pink and orange in a winter sunset, the power of a house-rattling windstorm. The more you seek awe, the more you find it.” (By opening about 75 news tabs a day, I’m probably looking for wonder in all the wrong places. But as long as I can keep digging up some examples, I’ll try to combine our daily series of unfortunate events with the occasional splash of awe-some sauce.)