{"id":3000,"date":"2013-09-02T23:32:32","date_gmt":"2013-09-03T04:32:32","guid":{"rendered":"Over the weekend, the radio show\u00a0On Being<\/em> broadcast an episode titled \"On Exoplanets and Love: Science that Connects Us to One Another.\" For the show, the host Krista Tippett interviews Natalie Batalha,\u00a0a research astronomer at NASA Ames Research"},"modified":"2013-09-02T23:32:32","modified_gmt":"2013-09-03T04:32:32","slug":"it-changed-my-brain-in-exciting-ways","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/cornerstonef13\/2013\/09\/02\/it-changed-my-brain-in-exciting-ways\/","title":{"rendered":"“It Changed My Brain in Exciting Ways”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the weekend, the radio show\u00a0On Being<\/em> broadcast an episode titled “On Exoplanets and Love: Science that Connects Us to One Another.” For the show, the host Krista Tippett interviews Natalie Batalha,\u00a0a research astronomer at NASA Ames Research Center and a mission scientist with the Kepler Space Telescope. You can listen to the whole interview and read the transcript on the\u00a0On Being\u00a0<\/em>website<\/a>, and I recommend it. It’s a fascinating conversation about the search for life on other planets.<\/p>\n

\"exoplanetsandlove\"<\/a>At the very least, listen to the first seven minutes. In the first section of the show, Batalha reflects on how she became a scientist. She initially studied business in college; but one day in a introductory physics class, she had an epiphany. Batahla describes what happened when her professor used an everyday example to explain light refraction:<\/p>\n

And he’s describing this and he uses this analogy, the rainbow of color on an oil slick, floating on top of water, which, of course, we’ve all seen. It’s something so common to us. And at the same time, he’s writing down all these mathematical equations on the board, and it just struck me at that moment: my gosh, the universe is not a random collection of chaotic events. It can be explained with numbers. It can be explained with math. . . . And at that moment, I think I all of a sudden had this idea that maybe all of the mysteries of the universe are there for us to discover. Maybe there’s no limit to what we could know if the universe is so ordered. And that was very profound to me, so at that point there was no going back. . . . [V]ery quickly I did learn how to think that way, and it changed my brain in exciting ways.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Batahla describes discovering a new way to understand and explore the world. And she claims this new way of thinking changed her brain.<\/p>\n