Look at THIS! — Why the Phrase That Stops Us in Our Tracks Says Everything About How We Experience the World
There is something almost primal about the phrase “Look at THIS!” It spills out of us before we have time to think, before we can dress the moment in polished language or considered opinion. It is raw and urgent and human in a way that very few expressions manage to be. Whether you are standing at the edge of a canyon at sunrise, pointing your phone at an absurdly large mushroom you found in the backyard, or tugging a friend’s sleeve in a crowded museum, those three words carry everything: surprise, joy, the desperate need to share, and a fundamental belief that whatever you are looking at is too good to experience alone.
This post is about that impulse — where it comes from, what it does to us neurologically and socially, and why, in an age when we are drowning in images and information, the capacity to be genuinely stopped in our tracks by something worth pointing at may be one of the most important things we can cultivate.
The Anatomy of a Moment Worth Sharing
Before we can talk about why we say “Look at THIS!”, we have to talk about what produces the moment that triggers it. Psychologists sometimes call this state of sudden, overwhelming positive engagement an “awe experience.” The researchers Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, who have studied awe more rigorously than almost anyone, describe it as arising when we encounter something vast and challenging to our existing mental frameworks — something that forces us to expand the way we think about the world just to make room for it.
Awe, crucially, does not require a mountain. It scales all the way down from grand natural landscapes to a spider spinning a web on your porch railing in the morning light. What matters is the sense of being enlarged by the encounter, the brief dizzying feeling that the world is bigger, stranger, and more intricate than you remembered it being five minutes ago.
That feeling is what drives the exclamation. When something genuinely surprises us into awe — even a small, domestic, Tuesday-morning variety of awe — we instinctively reach for the nearest other person. We want a witness, and we want one immediately. “Look at THIS!” is a verbal pointing finger, an emergency broadcast of wonder.
Why We Cannot Keep Wonder to Ourselves
The urge to share is not merely social politeness. It is hardwired into our neurology in ways researchers are only beginning to fully map. When we experience something pleasurable or striking, the brain’s reward pathways activate, and sharing that experience with another person amplifies the reward. Studies using neuroimaging have shown that the act of communicating positive experiences to others lights up the same mesolimbic dopamine pathways as the original experience itself — sometimes even more intensely.
In other words, telling someone about the extraordinary thing you just saw feels almost as good as seeing it. And actually pulling them over and making them see it too? That is the full version of the experience, the complete circuit.
This is why social media was always going to become what it became. The technology did not create the impulse — it just removed the geographical constraints. Instead of grabbing the person standing next to us, we could suddenly grab everyone we had ever met, plus a few thousand strangers, all at once. The phrase “Look at THIS!” became the architecture on which entire platforms were built.
But something has also been lost in that scaling up, and it is worth spending a moment with that loss before we move on.
When Everything Competes for the Pointing Finger
Here is the paradox of the attention economy: the more things compete to trigger our sense of wonder, the harder it becomes to feel genuine wonder at any of them. Platforms built on the premise of “Look at THIS!” have engineered their feeds to maximize the number of times per hour they can activate that response — and in doing so, they have contributed to a kind of wonder fatigue that many people feel acutely without necessarily being able to name.
When every video is described in its thumbnail as the MOST INSANE THING YOU WILL EVER SEE, when every recipe is ABSOLUTELY MIND-BLOWING, when the rhetoric of superlative amazement is deployed constantly and indiscriminately, the words lose their traction. The pointing finger becomes background noise. We scroll past things that should stop us cold because we have been conditioned to expect that the next thing will be equally extraordinary, and the thing after that, on and on forever.
This is not a moral failing on anyone’s part. It is a predictable psychological response to overstimulation. The brain is wired to notice contrast, to respond to things that stand out from their context. When everything is designed to stand out, nothing does. The signal drowns in a sea of identical signals.
Understanding this helps explain why genuine, unmediated moments of “Look at THIS!” feel so different from their curated online equivalents. When a child grabs your hand and hauls you across the yard to show you a caterpillar on a leaf, the absence of production value is the point. The roughness and spontaneity of it is what makes your heart do that small, involuntary thing it does.
The Science of Noticing
If wonder fatigue is the problem, then the capacity to notice — to actually see the world in front of you rather than the curated version of it — is a significant part of the solution. And noticing, it turns out, is a skill with a real learning curve.
Mindfulness practitioners, naturalists, photographers, and painters have all, in their different ways, spent centuries developing the art of noticing. What they share is a commitment to slowing down perception enough to let things register before the categorizing, labeling part of the mind takes over. The poet Mary Oliver, who spent a lifetime writing about the natural world, talked about paying attention as a kind of discipline — not passive receptivity but an active, deliberate practice of presence.
The neurological case for this is compelling. Research on expert observers — birders, for example, or radiologists reading scans — shows that expertise changes not just what you know but how you see. Training your attention to rest on something long enough to really take it in creates new perceptual habits. You start to see things you would previously have walked straight past.
This is what separates the person who strolls through a forest thinking about their inbox from the person who crouches down every twenty yards to examine moss patterns on a rock. It is not a difference in intelligence. It is a difference in the practice of looking.
Look at THIS! as a Social Act
We have talked about the neurology, but the social dimension of this phrase is equally rich and worth unpacking. “Look at THIS!” is fundamentally an act of invitation. It is one of the most generous and vulnerable things we do with other people, because embedded in it is an admission: I cannot hold this alone. I need you here with me for this to be complete.
That vulnerability is easy to miss because the phrase is usually delivered with excitement rather than tenderness. But think about what it asks of the other person. It asks them to interrupt whatever they were doing, to redirect their attention entirely, to see what you are seeing and — ideally — to feel something of what you are feeling. It asks for a moment of genuine alignment between two minds, and those moments are rarer and more precious than we typically acknowledge.
When it works — when the other person looks and their face opens up and they say “oh WOW” or “how is that even possible” — there is a specific quality of connection that results. It is not the deep, slow connection of a long conversation or a shared grief. It is brighter and more fleeting than that. But it is real, and it is irreplaceable, and it is one of the small renewable energies that hold relationships together over time.
Think about the people in your life with whom you share this kind of moment most easily. The people who you know will look when you point, who will actually see it rather than glance and nod, who will bring their own attention and delight to the encounter. Those people are treasures. And the fact that you can be that person for someone else — that you can show up fully for their moments of pointed wonder — is one of the most underrated gifts you can offer.
Children and the Original Version of Wonder
Children are the purest practitioners of “Look at THIS!” — and spending time with them is one of the most reliable ways to recalibrate a worn-out adult’s capacity for noticing.
The developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik has argued that young children are not, as we often casually assume, less conscious than adults. They are differently conscious: more broadly attentive, less filtered, taking in the world with what she memorably calls a “lantern” of awareness rather than the narrowly focused “spotlight” of adult attention. A toddler encountering a puddle is not merely recognizing a puddle. They are experiencing a puddle — the reflections in it, the way it moves, the sound it makes, the cold shock of it through a shoe — with an intensity and freshness of perception that most adults left behind sometime in elementary school.
What children model for us, whether we realize it or not, is the experience of a world that has not yet been fully categorized and filed away. Every walk is different. Every bug is interesting. Every cloud is an event worth stopping for.
You do not need to achieve a child’s level of unfiltered perception — it would be cognitively exhausting and socially impractical. But you can let children remind you that the world has not actually become less interesting since you were seven. You have simply gotten better at ignoring it. The wonder is still there, waiting to be pointed at.
How to Get Better at This
So what does it look like to actively cultivate the capacity for genuine wonder — the kind that produces a real, spontaneous “Look at THIS!” rather than a manufactured one?
A few things seem to help reliably. Spending time in nature is near the top of the list, partly because natural environments are genuinely full of extraordinary things and partly because they tend to slow down our nervous systems in ways that make us more perceptually available. Research on “nature relatedness” consistently finds that people who spend more time outdoors and who feel a connection to the natural world report higher levels of well-being, curiosity, and — relevant here — awe.
Deliberately seeking out unfamiliar experiences also helps. Novelty is one of the brain’s most reliable triggers for the kind of heightened attention that leads to wonder. Traveling to places you have never been, eating foods you cannot identify, listening to music from traditions you know nothing about — all of these shake loose the perceptual habits that cause us to sleepwalk through familiar territory.
Reading deeply, particularly reading outside your specialty or comfort zone, exercises a form of noticing that translates outward. When you spend time attending closely to the specific details of a well-written description of anything — a street in another century, the interior experience of a character very different from yourself, the mechanism of a biological process — you are training the part of your mind that pays attention.
And perhaps most simply: slow down. Walk slower. Eat more slowly. Spend more time outside without a destination. Let your eyes rest on things rather than scan past them. The world does not reveal itself to people in a hurry.
The Phrase as Philosophy
There is a kind of philosophy embedded in “Look at THIS!” that is easy to overlook because the phrase is so common and casual. But if you pull it apart, it contains a whole set of assumptions about the world and our place in it.
It assumes that the world is worth looking at — that reality, at the level of sensory encounter, is not a backdrop to life but the substance of it. It assumes that other people are worth sharing the world with — that experience is not a private transaction between a self and the universe but something that happens most fully in the space between people. It assumes that surprise is good — that to be caught off guard by something beautiful or strange or unexpected is a feature of existence rather than a disruption of it. And it assumes that the right response to encountering something extraordinary is not to hold it at arm’s length and analyze it, but to lean in, to gesture wildly, and to demand that someone else come look right now.
These are not trivial assumptions. They amount, in aggregate, to an approach to life built on openness, presence, generosity, and an almost defiant commitment to finding the world interesting. In a cultural moment that often rewards ironic detachment and performative exhaustion, the unguarded “Look at THIS!” is quietly radical. It refuses to be cool. It insists on care.
A Final Word
The next time something stops you — really stops you, mid-stride, mid-thought, mid-scroll — pay attention to that stopping. Do not rush past it. Do not immediately reach for your phone to document it before you have even experienced it. Let it land. Let your perception expand to take it in.
And then, if there is someone nearby, grab their arm. Turn them around. Point.
“Look at THIS.”
Not because the thing you found needs an audience. Not because sharing it will make it go viral or earn you anything at all. But because wonder is one of the few things that reliably grows larger when you give it away, and because the person you turn to will look at you, after, with something in their face that says: thank you for that. I needed that. I forgot.
We all forget. That is why we need each other to keep pointing.
