Overview effect

Mm-hmm.

So I, I said in the book, I think it was a mild version of the overview effect.

So, um, can you have the experience on the Earth? Well, it's pretty clear that some things that we do, like meditating, praying, and I've even got some evidence that psychedelic drugs can come close.

If the effect is a feeling of unity and oneness with the planet, or with humanity, or the universe, well, people have been attempting to have that-

We are s- we are all astronauts.

We're all crew members of that spaceship, and that doesn't require that you have the kind of experience that we're talking about, but it's a version of it.

So that's a long answer to a short question, but it's one that a lot of people ask, of course, and the overview effect definitely has analogs to other experiences-

Yeah

It feels like a metaphor for giving up on a better future.

To fully understand why a book about people doing a treadmill workout in zero gravity wins a Booker Prize, we need to discuss a real world psychological phenomenon known as the overview effect.

I've heard of this.

This is a cognitive shift reported by actual astronauts when they view the Earth from space, right?