Awe

Darwin looked outward, tracing our emotional expressions back in evolutionary time to mammalian patterns of behavior, as Jane Goodall did in her observations about the chimpanzee waterfall dance. James looked inward, offering ideas about how emotions originate in our bodies. Their writings offer a radical thesis: transcendent emotions such as devotion, bliss, beauty, and awe—what you might think of as the subjective life of the soul—are grounded in bodily responses. Within the science of emotion that Darwin and James helped found, the tears, chills, and whoas offer clues to the origins of awe in our mammalian evolution, revealing its primordial meaning, its elemental qualities, before language and symbolic acts of culture.

The emotional body has long been vilified as sinful, animalistic, base, and below matters of reason, and antithetical to what is primary and good in human nature, or what I have called the soul. The science we are soon to tour will lead to a different view, one best expressed by the poet Walt Whitman. Late in his life, Whitman observed that the soul follows “the beautiful laws of physiology.” In seeking to understand the why of awe, and how it originates in mammalian tendencies that shaped its universal patterns in humans, we will go in search of those laws, encountering questions such as: Why do we tear up at others’ acts of kindness and overcoming? What does it mean when we get the chills while listening to music or standing with others near a young couple at the altar? How might we think about the evolution of our soul?

Tears

Our current scientific understanding is that tears come in at least three varieties. There are no doubt many more. A first is the near-continuous watering of the surface of the eye produced by the lacrimal gland just above and behind the cornea. This kind of tearing smooths out the rough surface of the cornea so that you can see the world more clearly.

A second kind of tear arises in response to physical events—chopping onions, thick smoke, a gnat flying into your eye, a poke to the eye when roughhousing with kids. It is produced by the same anatomy as the first kind of tear but is a response to a physical event.

And then there are tears of emotion, when the lacrimal gland is activated by a region of your nervous system that includes the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve wanders from the top of your spinal cord through your facial and vocal muscles and then through your lungs, heart, and intestinal wall, communicating with the flora and fauna of your gut. It slows your heart rate, calms the body, and through enabling eye contact and vocalization can bring about a sense of connection and belonging. In tearing up at the sight of mountains I had hiked with Rolf, I was recognizing how those mountains gave us the feeling of stride-by-stride belonging one finds in hiking.

Some 2,500 years ago, scholars offered one taxonomy of the tears of emotion: we shed tears of sorrow, gladness, contrition, and—closest to awe—of our experience of grace, the feeling of Divine provenance of the kindness and goodness of life. Examples of this last kind of tear—sacred tears—appear throughout our history. For Saint Francis of Assisi, it was the divinity in all living beings that brought him such tears; legend has it he shed those tears so often that he went blind. For Odysseus, such tears arose frequently during his odyssey when he marshaled the courage to face overwhelming trials.

Translating these observations to contemporary science, anthropologically minded psychologist Alan Fiske has proposed that we tear up when witnessing acts of “communal sharing”—a way humans relate to one another grounded in the sense of interdependence, caring and sharing, and a sense of common humanity. So vital is this way of relating in our collective life that when we witness acts of communal sharing—a stranger’s generosity, one person soothing another, or two athletic adversaries embracing—tears well up in our eyes. During political elections, Fiske finds, we are moved to tears by candidates who unite us: during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, campaign videos of Hillary Clinton moved her supporters to tears, and videos of Donald Trump did the same for his red-hatted supporters.

Tears, then, arise when we perceive vast things that unite us into community. The way this meaning of tears changes as we age adds texture to this thesis. Early in life, a child’s tears are a lifeline to parents. Children cry to signal hunger, fatigue, physical pain, and separation, vocalizations that within a tenth of a second activate an ancient region of the brain (the periaqueductal gray) in people nearby, which prompts compassion and caregiving. Our early experiences of tears connect us to what may be our first encounters with what is vast and uniting, our caregivers, who pull us into skin-to-skin contact and calm with soothing touch, rhythmic movement, melodious vocalizations, and bodily warmth.