A remarkable event is happening at my house this weekend. My two daughters are excited about astronomy. If you think their sudden interest has been sparked by the lunar eclipse on Sunday night, you’d be partly right.
“It’s a super blood wolf moon,” one of my daughters reminded me. “It just sounds really cool.”
I know that my daughters will be seeing a total lunar eclipse, an alignment of the sun, Earth and moon. I know the moon’s tint won’t exactly be ‘blood’ red, and I know we won’t hear wolves howling in my neighborhood. But if my daughters think it’s really cool, then I’m all in.
According to an article in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, astronomers are divided on the name that’s been given to the lunar event. “I hate that terminology,” one person says. After all, astronomers don’t use the term “blood red” to refer to a total lunar eclipse. One astronomy professor admitted she looked up the term “wolf moon” when she first heard it (In folklore, wolf moon is a full moon occurring in January). The origin of the term “Super blood wolf moon” is something of a mystery. But it sticks.
Most astronomers seem to be okay with the name because, as one scientist says, “it’s getting everyone’s attention.”
And that’s the point. People pay attention to what’s unusual, different or distinctive. A neuroscientist once told me that the human brain “looks for something brilliant and new. Something that stands out. Something that looks delicious.”
A blood red moon sounds delicious to vampires and, as it turns out, the human brain. “The unusual, unpredictable or distinctive are powerful ways to harness attention in the service of creating interest,” writes molecular biologist John Medina in Brain Rules.
While I’m not advocating that scientists go overboard with phrases that sound more at home in popular novels than they do in serious academic papers, I am suggesting that educators consider packaging ideas to sound fresh, unexpected, surprising and different.
In Seth Godin’s classic marketing book, Purple Cow, Godin tells the story of a family trip in France. As they drove down rural roads, they were enchanted by scenes of grazing cows in gorgeous fields. After twenty minutes, the cows got boring. “A Purple Cow, though. Now that would be interesting,” Godin writes. Something remarkable, Godin reminds us, is something worth talking about because it’s new, interesting and different.
In Godin’s now famous TED Talk on the subject, he explained the marketing idea behind Silk Soy milk. It’s not milk, but once it was put in a milk carton and and placed next to real milk in the refrigerated section of the grocery story, sales tripled. “They didn’t triple their sales with advertising; they tripled it by doing something remarkable,” says Godin.
A total lunar eclipse would not have grabbed my daughters attention. But who can resist a Super Blood Wolf Moon? I know where I’ll be at 8:41 p.m. in Northern California—enjoying something remarkable.