The Shock of Awe

The Shock of Awe Awe-some Sauce, Weekend Whats 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.) 2 Reddit Credit Ending an incredibly stressful week in Providence, the Brown shooting suspect killed himself after being cornered by authorities (with a lot of help from citizens). The break came when the shooter was linked to another crime. CNN : How investigators zeroed in on the Brown University shooting suspect and linked him to the killing of an MIT professor . + NYT (Gift Article): A Reddit Post Led to a Breakthrough in the Brown Shooting Investigation . “Three days after the deadly shooting at Brown University, officers received an anonymous tip that stuck out from a flood of information. It directed the authorities to a post on Reddit. ‘I’m being dead serious. The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental,’ the Reddit user posted, according to an affidavit filed by the police in Providence, R.I. That tip would later lead to a breakthrough not only in the search for the campus attacker but also the hunt for the suspect in the murder of a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It also ended the dayslong manhunt that had put both the Brown...

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