Awe

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: