Mar 06 2010
Familiarity Breeds Boredom?
Man, wouldn’t it be cool to walk the surface of Mercury?
Yet, if you did it every day . . . ho-hum?
Due to psychology mechanisms such as habituation (with repeated exposure to a stimuli we respond more and more weakly), novel events tend to excite us more.
Before I head out into my relatively rich and wild backyard (relative to Mercury’s desert landscape) to do some gardening, I wish I could shake the bulk of my familiarity with it from my mind. My experience would be less tedious and more WOW!
[photo thanks to NASA]
