How Awe Transforms Our Relation to the World
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and science.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
A sense of wonder so indestructible it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile
preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strengths.
RACHEL CARSON
On a bustling day in 2010, I was working in my office when I received a call from Pete Docter, whose film Up had just won an Academy Award. He was calling to ask if I would talk with his
team about his next film. The main characters, he continued, would be five emotions inside the mind of Riley, an eleven-year-old girl. The film was tentatively titled Inside Out.
On my visits to Pixar’s campus, Pete would take me to a sequestered room where he and his cocreator, Ronnie del Carmen, passed the hours drawing storyboards for Inside Out (a typical film is based on 70,000 to 120,000 storyboards). I had prepared for questions of a technical nature: What does the face look like during envy? What color best conveys disgust? Instead, we tackled questions about how emotions work. How does feeling shape thought? How do emotions guide our actions?
Like great novels and films so often do, Inside Out dramatizes two central insights about how emotions work. The first is this: emotions
transform how we perceive the world—the “inside” of Inside Out. For example, studies find that if you are feeling fear, you will perceive more uncertainty in your romantic partnership, think it more likely you will die from a weird disease or terrorist attack, remember more readily harrowing moments from your teens, and detect more quickly an image of a spider on a computer screen. During fear, our mind is attuned to danger. Each emotion is a lens through which we see the world.
The “out” of Inside Out refers to how emotions animate action. In the film, it is the five emotions that move Riley to action. As eighteen-month-old Riley dodges an electrical outlet, Bill Hader’s voice of Fear narrates the action. When Riley plays hockey with sharpened elbow ferocity, Lewis Black’s Anger moves her forceful actions forward on the ice. Emotions are much more than fleeting states in the mind; they involve sequences of actions between individuals as they negotiate social relationships.
Let’s turn to the Inside Out of awe: How does awe transform how we see the world? And what actions do experiences of awe lead us to take upon encountering the vast mysteries of the eight wonders of life?
Something Larger Than the Self
Our experiences of awe seem ineffable, beyond words. But you might have noticed an irony at play: awe’s ineffability hasn’t stopped people from telling stories of awe in journaling, writing poems, singing, composing music, dancing, and turning to visual art and design to make sense of the sublime. In our narration of experiences of awe in these symbolic traditions, a clear motif emerges: our individual self gives way to the boundary-dissolving sense of being part of something much larger.
For hundreds of years, awe has been a central character in spiritual journaling, in which people write—to this day—about their encounters with the Divine. Fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich had sixteen visions of Jesus’s compassionate love. These stories of awe became
Revelations of Divine Love, one of the first books written by a woman in the English language, and influential in shifting Christian theology toward an emphasis on a compassionate, love-based faith. Julian of Norwich used the phrase “I am nothing” throughout to express her feelings of awe in relation to Christ’s love.
Some of the most influential passages in nature writing in the global West, those of Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, and Carson, portray the self as dissolving during experiences of natural awe. This dissolving of the self would transform early feminist Margaret Fuller, a central force in American transcendentalism, an editor at the influential magazine The Dial, and author of the bestselling treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century, all remarkable achievements during a deeply sexist time. At the age of twenty-one, Fuller had an experience of awe that began in the pews of a church and then continued outdoors under “sad clouds” and a cold blue sky:
I saw there was no self; that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered; that I had only to live in the idea of the all; and all was mine.
Awe freed Fuller of the very gendered self of the early nineteenth century to go in search of “the all,” a life of expanding freedom and empowerment.
The vanishing self, or “ego death,” is also at the heart of psychedelic experiences. In a story of awe, modern author Michael Pollan choked down a piece of a magic mushroom containing psilocybin, and then lay down with eyeshades on, listening to music. He saw his self, represented as a sheaf of papers, disappear::
a sheaf of little papers, no bigger than Post-its, and they were being scattered to the wind . . .
Pollan perceives his self to expand in ways fitting for a food writer married to a painter:
I looked and saw myself out there again, but this time spread over the landscape like paint, or butter, thinly coating a wide expanse of the world with a substance I recognized as me.
The personal always imbues the transcendent.
What exactly vanishes during awe? Aldous Huxley called it “the interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run the show” in making sense of what disappeared during his experiences with mescaline. This is a pretty good approximation of how psychological science makes sense of the default self. This self, one of many that makes up who you are, is focused on how you are distinct from others, independent, in control, and oriented toward competitive advantage. It has been amplified by the rise of individualism and materialism, and no doubt was less prominent during other time periods (e.g., in Indigenous cultures thousands of years ago). Today, this default self keeps you on track in achieving your goals and urges you to rise in the ranks in the world, all essential to your survival and thriving.
When our default self reigns too strongly, though, and we are too focused on ourselves, anxiety, rumination, depression, and self-criticism can overtake us. An overactive default self can undermine the collaborative efforts and goodwill of our communities. Many of today’s social ills arise out of an overactive default self, augmented by self-obsessed digital technologies. Awe, it would seem, quiets this urgent voice of the default self.
How would one study the vanishing self of awe? In our first effort, Yang Bai camped out in Yosemite National Park. Over the course of a few days, she approached more than 1,100 travelers from forty-two countries at a lookout at the side of State Route 140. That lookout offers an expansive
view of Yosemite Valley, a natural wonder that led Teddy Roosevelt to observe:
It was like lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hand of man.
As a measure of their sense of self, participants were asked to draw themselves on a sheet of graph paper, and write “me” next to their drawing. In a control condition, travelers were asked to do the same thing at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, a place more evocative of lighthearted, carefree joy. Other research has found that simple measures—the size of the drawn self and how large you write “me”—are pretty good measures of how self-focused the individual is. Below are randomly selected drawings from this study: to the left is one from Fisherman’s Wharf, and to the right, a drawn self in Yosemite eight squares from the left
Simply being in a context of awe leads to a “small self.” We can quiet that nagging voice of the interfering neurotic simply by locating ourselves in contexts of more awe.
In related work with Yang Bai, we found that the “small self” effect of awe arises in all eight wonders of life, and not just vast nature. Finding awe in encounters with moral beauty, for example, or music, or when struck by big ideas, quiets the voice of that interfering and nagging neurotic. We also found that awe leads to a vanishing self when this elusive construct is measured by other means, like simple self-report measures (e.g., “I feel small”; “my personal concerns are insignificant”).
What about other core convictions of the default self, of being distinct, independent, in control, and seeking to prevail over others? To explore how awe expands our sense of self from feeling independent to feeling part of something larger, Arizona State University professor Michelle Shiota and I carried out the following study. We took college students to a paleontology museum and had them stand facing an awe-inspiring model of a T. rex skeleton. In the control condition, participants stood in the same location but looked down a fluorescent-lit hallway. Participants then filled in this sentence stem twenty times: “I AM .” People in the control condition defined themselves in terms of distinct traits and preferences, in the spirit of individualism and its privileging of distinctness over common humanity. People feeling awe named qualities they shared with others—being a college student, belonging to a dance society, being human, being part of the category of all sentient beings.
Another pillar of the default self is that we are in control of our lives. This conviction in agency and freedom has many benefits but can blind us to a complementary truth: that our lives are shaped by vast forces, like the family, class background, historical period, or culture we happen to be born into. To test whether awe opens our minds to the vast forces that shape our lives, University of Toronto collaborator Jennifer Stellar and I took college students up to the observation deck of the Campanile tower on the UC Berkeley campus, opened in 1914. It is 220 feet in the air and provides students with an expansive view of the Bay Area: its bay, bridges, cities,
arteries of roads, and fog-laced, ever-changing skies. When eighteenth-century Europeans floated above the ground at about this height in the first hot-air balloons, one early balloonist perceived “the earth as a giant organism, mysteriously patterned and unfolding, like a living creature.” Many astronauts experience a scaled-up version of this sensation, known as the overview effect, when looking at Earth from out in space. Here is astronaut Ed Gibson in 1964 offering his own story of awe from space:
You see how diminutive your life and concerns are compared to other things in the universe. . . . The result is that you enjoy the life that is before you. It allows you to have inner peace.
In our study, participants enjoying an expansive view also reported a greater sense of humility, and that the direction of their lives depended on many interacting forces beyond their own agency.
Awe’s vanishing self has even been charted in our brains. The focus in this work has been the default mode network, or DMN, regions of the cortex that are engaged when we process information from an egocentric point of view. In a nuanced study from Japan, one group of participants watched videos of awe-inducing nature (footage of mountains, ravines, skies, and animals from BBC’s Planet Earth). Other participants viewed more threat-filled awe videos of tornadoes, volcanoes, lightning, and violent storms. Both led to reduced activation in the DMN. This finding would suggest that when we experience awe, regions of the brain that are associated with the excesses of the ego, including self-criticism, anxiety, and even depression, quiet down.
The positive form of awe, though, led to increased connections between the DMN and a region of the brain (the cingulate cortex) involved in our sense of reward. Threat-based awe led to increased connections between the DMN and the amygdala, which activates fight-or-flight physiology—more evidence of the flavoring of awe by threat. It is worth noting now that
sources of mystical awe—meditation, prayer, and psilocybin—also reduce activation in the DMN. The same is likely true of other wonders of life.
As our default self vanishes, other studies have shown, awe shifts us from a competitive, dog-eat-dog mindset to perceive that we are part of networks of more interdependent, collaborating individuals. We sense that we are part of a chapter in the history of a family, a community, a culture. An ecosystem. For Walt Whitman, this transformation of the self felt like a song:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Feeling part of something much larger than the self is music to our ears. This transformation of the self brought about by awe is a powerful antidote to the isolation and loneliness that is epidemic today.
Wonder
In The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes details how awe transformed science during the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. One example of this transformative power of awe is the scientist William Herschel, who as a young man was awestruck by how the moon hovered in the sky, surrounding him in its light, during his nighttime walks. He would be moved by awe to build the largest telescope in the world and painstakingly map, with his sister Caroline, the movements of stars and comets in the sky. Their discoveries put to rest the “fixed stars” thesis, that a two-dimensional pattern of a couple thousand stars revolved around Earth in unchanging ways. Instead, they opened the world’s eyes to a near-infinite, ever-changing, three-dimensional space of billions of stars. This epiphany led the philosopher John Bonnycastle to this story of awe:
Astronomy has enlarged the sphere of our conceptions, and opened to us a universe without bounds, where the human imagination is lost. Surrounded by infinite space, and swallowed up in an immensity of being, man seems but as a drop of water in the ocean, mixed and confounded with the general mass. But from this situation, perplexing as it is, he endeavors to extricate himself; and by looking abroad into Nature, employs the powers she has bestowed upon him in investigating her works.
Like so many stories of awe, Bonnycastle’s about the vast mysteries of space reveals the emotion’s unfolding pattern. It begins with vastness
—“universe without bounds”—and mystery—“human imagination is lost.” What follows is the vanishing of the self—“drop of water”—and the sense of being related to something larger—“immensity of being.” And as the default self fades, the mind opens to intellectual questioning and searching that awe inspires (“investigating her works”). Or wonder.
Wonder, the mental state of openness, questioning, curiosity, and embracing mystery, arises out of experiences of awe. In our studies,
people who find more everyday awe show evidence of living with wonder. They are more open to new ideas. To what is unknown. To what language can’t describe. To the absurd. To seeking new knowledge. To experience itself, for example of sound, or color, or bodily sensation, or the directions thought might take during dreams or meditation. To the strengths and virtues of other people. It should not surprise that people who feel even five minutes a day of everyday awe are more curious about art, music, poetry, new scientific discoveries, philosophy, and questions about life and death. They feel more comfortable with mysteries, with that which cannot be explained.
A stereotype of awe is that it leaves us dumbfounded and dazed, ready to subordinate reason to dogma, disinformation, blind faith, a local guru or trendy influencer. The scientific evidence suggests otherwise. In the state of
wonder that awe produces, our thought is more rigorous and energized. As one historical example, Isaac Newton and René Descartes were both awestruck by rainbows. In wonder, they asked: How is it that rainbows form when the sun’s light refracts through water molecules? What is the precise angle that produces this effect? What does this say about light and our experience of color? This wonder over rainbows led these two scholars to some of their best work on mathematics, the physics of light, color theory, and sensation and perception.
Laboratory studies have captured how awe leads to more rigorous thought. In one such study, after being led to experience awe by recalling a time of looking out at an expansive view, college students were more discerning between what is a strong argument, grounded in robust scientific evidence, and a weak argument, based on a single individual’s opinions.
With our thinking energized by awe, we place vast mysteries within more complex systems of understanding. We perceive natural phenomena like tide pools, pollinating bees, or ecosystems gathering around a “mother tree” as the result of intricate interacting systems of causal forces. We see human affairs as the result of complex webs of cause-and-effect relations in history that transcend an individual’s intentions. When thinking about our own lives, we become more aware of how vast forces—our family, our neighborhood, a generous coach or teacher, a fateful encounter with a wise elder, the good health we may enjoy—shape the courses our lives take. In awe, our minds open in wonder to the systems of life and our small part in them.
Saintly Tendencies
In moments of awe, then, we shift from the sense that we are solely in charge of our own fate and striving against others to feeling we are part of a community, sharing essential qualities, interdependent and collaborating. Awe expands what philosopher Peter Singer calls the circle of care, the
network of people we feel kindness toward. William James called the actions that give rise to the circle of care the “saintly tendencies” of mystical awe—to sacrifice, share, put aside self-interest in favor of the interests of others. Our studies find that these “saintly tendencies” arise in encounters with all eight wonders of life.
In one study on this theme, longtime collaborator and professor at UC Irvine Paul Piff and I led one group of participants to feel awe by watching BBC’s Planet Earth. Other participants watched the hilarious antics of dogs, bears, cats, monkeys, and apes in their natural habitats in the British comedic nature show Walk on the Wild Side. When given points that would determine a chance to win money and asked to share with a stranger, people feeling awe gave more. In fact, they gave more than half their points to a stranger.
Awe empowers sacrifice, and inspires us to give that most precious of resources, time. Memphis University professor Jia Wei Zhang and I brought people to a lab where they were surrounded by either awe-inspiring plants or less-inspiring ones. As participants were leaving the lab, we asked if they would fold origami cranes to be sent to victims of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Being surrounded with awe-inspiring plants led people to volunteer more time. The last pillar of the default self—striving for competitive advantage, registered in a stinginess toward giving away possessions and time—crumbles during awe.
Awe awakens the better angels of our nature.
The Sequel
Perhaps there will be a sequel to Inside Out. And who knows, perhaps Awe will be a character in Riley’s mind, transforming her sense of self, opening her to wonder, and inclining her to saintly tendencies after encounters with the wonders of life. In the sequel, Riley could be older, perhaps a college student, and moved by Awe to youthful encounters with moral beauty,
dancing at parties, outdoor concerts, and late-night conversations about the meaning of life, all so very fitting for a young adult.
And if I had my druthers, in this sequel Riley would be a budding neuroscientist. If so, there could be a scene in which she presents to her lab a video called “Waterfall Display,” which is narrated by her hero, Jane Goodall. In the video, a solitary chimpanzee approaches a roaring waterfall. He piloerects (fluffs up his fur). He moves in swaying, rhythmic motions, swinging from one branch to another near the rushing river. He pushes large rocks into the river. At the end of this “dance” he sits quietly, absorbed in the flow of water. Jane Goodall observes that chimpanzees do the waterfall dance near waterfalls and roaring rivers, as well as during heavy rainstorms and sudden winds. She then speculates:
I can’t help feeling that this waterfall display, or dance, is perhaps triggered by feelings of awe, wonder, that we feel. . . . So why wouldn’t they also have feelings of some kind of spirituality, which is really being amazed at things outside yourself?
At the short video’s conclusion, Riley would pose questions to her lab. Is the chimpanzee’s piloerection the same as our chills? What do those chills mean, anyway? Do chimpanzees have spiritual feelings? Why do we feel awe?
