The first is a cold shiver and shudder—what I will refer to as cold shivers—which accompany feelings of horror and dread. Human depravity and baseness can trigger cold shivers, for example when reading about genocide, torture, cannibalism, or pedophilia. Cold shivers are accompanied by the sense of being alienated, alone, and separate from others. In mystical experiences involving cold shivers, the individual feels condemned by an omnipotent god, fearing an afterlife of solitary torment and isolation, reminiscent of Dante’s hell. Our more everyday experience of the eerie—when we feel a strange and unexpected emptiness in a familiar place—can trigger cold shivers.
A second kind of chills is a tingling sensation in the arms, shoulders, back of the neck, and on the crown of the head—“goose bumps.” ASMR resembles this form of the chills. This was the sensation that washed over me in returning to the eastern Sierras to hike to Duck Lake, as Rolf and I had done before he passed. Studies have found that goose bumps are associated with a heightened sense that you are joined with others in community. Our experiences of awe are accompanied by goose bumps but not cold shivers. Once again, more evidence of the distinctions between awe and fear and horror.
If we follow these two kinds of chills back in our evolutionary history, where does this journey take us? Here is the latest thinking on the mammalian beginnings of awe, or, if you feel a bit expansive, the evolution of the soul.
Alongside eating and keeping oxygen at the right level, maintaining the right body temperature is fundamental to survival. Complex brain and body mechanisms kick into gear when we are too hot or too cold. Highly social mammals, such as certain rodents, wolves, primates, and humans, have an additional tool in their tool kit for handling extreme cold: they huddle. This is in keeping with a broader evolutionary principle, that social mammals like rats, dogs, and humans lean in and coordinate with others when facing peril.
Social mammals’ first response to extreme cold is piloerection, the bodily reaction underlying goose bumps. Piloerection causes the skin to bunch, rendering it less porous to the cold. Visible piloerection signals to others to huddle, initiating proximity and tactile contact, which in humans takes the form of supportive touch and even embrace. Proximity and tactile contact activate a neurochemistry of connection. This includes the release of oxytocin, a neurochemical that travels through the brain and body promoting openness to others, and activation of the vagus nerve. When our mammalian relatives encountered vast and perilous mysteries—numbing cold, roaring water, sudden gusts of wind, thunderous deluges, and lightning—they piloerected, and found warmth and strength in drawing closer to others.
Should huddling be unavailable, mammals facing perilous cold turned to shivering and shuddering, vigorous muscle contractions that warm the body’s tissues. Today we humans shiver and shudder when facing imperiling mysteries and unknowns alone; when feeling rejected socially, ostracized, or acutely lonely; or when encountering the horrors others perpetrate. The cold shivers have a much different neurophysiological profile than goose bumps, involving activation in threat-related regions of the brain (the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex) and elevated blood pressure. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea, the protagonist Roquentin experiences a “horrible ecstasy,” trembling and becoming nauseated when he looks at a chestnut tree while sitting alone on a park bench. His trembling and shuddering embody the central idea of existentialism, and for some the individualistic twentieth century: that we are alone in making meaning out of the mysteries of life.
Awe indeed follows Whitman’s “beautiful laws of physiology.” Our tears register our awareness of vast things that unite us with others. Our goose bumps accompany notions of joining with others and facing mysteries and unknowns together. Today we may sense these laws of bodily awe when moved by a favorite musical group, or in calling out in protest with others in the streets, or in bowing our heads together in contemplation. And in such rushes of tears and chills, Whitman’s body electric, we may glean a sense of what our souls might be.
As chills and tears wash over us, we often are left wordless and wondering, appreciating what is vast and mysterious about our place in it all. Being the hypersocial primate, we often reflexively communicate with others about the wonders of life. We do so in body movements and sounds that were our earliest language of awe.
Whoas
Rainbows stirred Newton and Descartes, we have learned, to some of their best mathematics and physics. For Paul “Bear” Vasquez, such harmonious colors in the sky led to a creation for our digital age. His three-minute video from 2010 of his encountering a double rainbow outside his home in Yosemite has been seen, as I write, nearly fifty million times. In the video you watch a double rainbow’s appearance over grassy foothills near Yosemite. Over the course of the three minutes, Vasquez travels through the sounds of transcendent states. He exults with whoas and ecstatic aahs. He howls. He cries and laughs the kind of existential laugh we emit when recognizing something vast and profound, beyond the narrow view of the default self. As the video nears its end, he observes, “Too much” and “Oh my god,” and wonders several times, “What does this mean?” In awe, we utter sounds of transcendence.
For Charles Darwin, Vasquez’s whoa illustrates how we alert others to the wonders of life and align ourselves in understanding and action. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals from 1872, Darwin detailed the evolution of our emotional expressions, like the chimpanzee waterfall dance or social mammals huddling when feeling perilous cold. Three of the emotional expressions he described are relatives of awe: admiration, astonishment, and devotion. Admiration involves a smile. Astonishment— when we are stunned by a vast, unexpected event—lacks the smile, but involves the hand placed over the mouth. And devotion involves behaviors that signal a recognition of the sacred. The face points upward. The body kneels humbly. The eyes close, as in Bernini’s well-known sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Hands might be open and turned up, as in Giotto’s painting of Saint Francis preaching to an audience of birds as he wondered “much at such a multitude of birds and at their beauty.”
Is there a universal expression of awe, one that has united us throughout our evolution to recognize together the wonders of life? To answer this question, my Yale collaborator Daniel Cordaro gathered data in China, Japan, South Korea, India, and the United States in search of the body of awe. In a lab in each country, most often just an empty classroom, participants first heard short stories about emotional situations from a speaker of their native language, and then they expressed the emotion portrayed in the story with their bodies in whatever fashion they liked. It was an experiment in emotional charades. Eight months of coding the millisecond-by-millisecond unfolding of bodily movements revealed the following.
People from the five countries screamed with fear, snarled in anger, licked their lips and puckered during desire, and sometimes literally danced with joy. What about awe? Across the five cultures, people expressed awe with eyebrows and upper eyelids raised, a smile, jaw drop, and head tilting up. About half of the bodily movements of awe were universal or shared across cultures. A quarter of each expression was unique to the individual, shaped by that person’s life story and genetics. And about 25 percent of the movements were specific to each culture, in the form of culturally specific “accents.” In India, for example, the expression of awe included a seductive lip pucker; perhaps it’s all those erotic sculptures and treatises on tantric sex that are embodied in the Indian expression of awe.