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 light-hearted, 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: