Stories of life and death, the seventh wonder of life, were common around the world. We are awestruck by how, in an instant, life comes out of the womb. And on the other end of the life-death cycle, when a person makes the transition from being a breathing physical being to some other form of existence, as I observed that night in watching Rolf die. Here is a cycle-of-life narrative from Indonesia, revealing how in grief our minds turn to ideas about the ways the departed remains with us:
That time around six years ago at the Sardjito hospital in Yogyakarta, me along with my father and other siblings waited for my mother who was sick, she had been hospitalized for one week and hadn’t regained consciousness. That time we were waiting until Mother met her maker, we were extremely heartbroken and sad at that time, however we realized that we shouldn’t drown in too much sorrow. Our future is still long. It was only after Mom left us that we realized how important is a mother and a wife, that now all of us have grown to appreciate and love our wives who are the mothers of our children.
This story leads us to epiphanies—when we suddenly understand essential truths about life—which were the eighth wonder of life. Around the world, people were awestruck by philosophical insights, scientific discoveries, metaphysical ideas, personal realizations, mathematical equations, and sudden disclosures (such as a wife leaving her husband for his best friend) that transform life in an instant. In each instance, the epiphany united facts, beliefs, values, intuitions, and images into a new system of understanding. Here is an epiphany from Japan that delighted me, because I had found awe in my childhood in art and natural history museums and later in Darwin’s theory of evolution:
Just before I was twelve, I saw a science museum exhibit and understood the evolution of biology. I realized that human beings are undoubtedly only one species of many creatures (not particularly advantageous compared to other creatures).
We can find awe, then, in eight wonders of life: moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spirituality and religion, life and death, and epiphany. If you are offended that your favorite form of the sublime did not make this periodic table of awe, the Eight Wonders of Life Club, perhaps you’ll find solace in this: our “other” category encompassed 5 percent of the responses worldwide. This category included stories about incredible flavors, video games, overwhelming sensations (for example, of color or sound), and first experiences of sex.
It also merits considering what was not mentioned in stories of awe from around the world. Money didn’t figure into awe, except in a couple of instances in which people had been cheated out of life savings. No one mentioned their laptop, Facebook, Apple Watch, or smartphone. Nor did anyone mention consumer purchases, like their new Nikes, Tesla, Gucci bag, or Montblanc pen. Awe occurs in a realm separate from the mundane world of materialism, money, acquisition, and status signaling—a realm beyond the profane that many call the sacred.
A Space of Its Own
The etymology of the word “awe” traces back eight hundred years to the middle English “ege” and Old Norse “agi,” both of which refer to fear, dread, horror, and terror. The legacy of this etymology is deep. If I asked you now to answer our current question—What is awe?—you might define it in terms related to fear. Remember, though, that when “ege” and “agi” emerged in the spoken word some eight centuries ago, it was a time of plagues, famines, public torture, religious inquisition, war, and short life expectancy; what was vast and mysterious was violence and death.
When we use the word “awe” today, are we describing an experience similar to fear, or a variant of feeling threatened and seeking to flee?
Another question is this: Do our experiences of awe differ from our feelings of beauty? We feel beauty in response to all manner of things that can bring us awe, from skies to music to vibrant neighborhoods in cities. Is awe just a more intense feeling of beauty?
Up until recently, the science of emotion had no answers to these questions. The study of emotional experience had largely focused on those six states Paul Ekman had studied in the 1960s, eliciting emotions like fear and disgust with images of horrifying, repulsive things—spiders, snarling dogs, bloody gore, feces—and, for sensory pleasure or joy, photos of chocolate cakes, tropical beaches, beautiful faces, and bucolic nature scenes. No study had sought to inspire awe in its participants. Had it done so, it still would have failed to capture that experience, since the most widely used emotional experience questionnaire, which measures these positive states—active, interested, proud, excited, strong, inspired, alert, enthusiastic, determined, attentive—makes no mention of awe or beauty (or amusement, love, desire, or compassion, for that matter). The experience of awe was uncharted.
To map the experience of awe, I was fortunate to carry out the following study with my computationally minded collaborator Alan Cowen, a math prodigy well versed in new quantitative approaches to mapping the structures of human experience. Alan first scoured the internet, locating 2,100 emotionally rich GIFs, or two-to-three-second videos. The GIFs our participants viewed extended far beyond the images and videos relied on in the past to elicit Ekman’s six emotions, to include things like dog pratfalls, awkward social encounters, a moving speech by Martin Luther King Jr., delicious-looking food, couples kissing, scary images of hairy spiders, terrifying car crashes, rotting food, weird and transfixing geometric patterns, beautiful landscapes, baby and puppy faces, amusing mishaps of cats, parents hugging infants, dramatic storm clouds, and so on. After viewing each GIF, our participants rated their experience on more than fifty emotional terms, including, most germane to our present interests, awe, fear, horror, and beauty.
One day Alan dropped by my office with a data visualization of his results, which I present above. What in the world are we looking at? That’s what I first asked Alan. After detailing the new statistical analyses he derived to produce such an image, he explained that each letter refers to a GIF in our study, and each GIF is placed spatially in terms of which emotion it predominantly evoked. The overall distribution of emotions is called a semantic space. The streets of London have their maps, and so too do our emotional experiences.
You will notice right away how rich our emotional experience is; in this study, people felt twenty-seven distinct kinds of emotions. Many emotional experiences, this visualization reveals, are emotion blends, or mixtures of emotions, for example, of sadness and confusion, love and desire, or awe and horror. Emotional experience is complex.
Where does awe fall in this semantic space of emotion? Is it simply a kind of fear? No, not by any stretch of the imagination. As you can see, our feelings of awe, toward the bottom, are far away from fear, horror, and anxiety. This in part is what astonished me so in watching Rolf die: that despite the horrors of cancer and the profound losses in his leaving, the vastness of his passing and the mysteries it unearthed in my mind left me in awe.
Instead, feelings of awe are located near admiration, interest, and aesthetic appreciation, or feelings of beauty. Awe feels intrinsically good. Our experiences of awe, though, clearly differ from feelings of beauty. The GIFs evocative of the feelings of beauty were familiar, easier to understand, and more fitting with our expectations about our visual world—images of oceans, forests, flowers, and sunsets. The awe-inspiring GIFs were vast and mysterious—an endless river of cyclists in a road race; an undulating, spiraling swarm of birds; the time-lapsed changes of a star-filled sky in the desert; a video of flying through the Alps as seen through a bird’s-eye camera; a trippy immersion in Van Gogh’s Starry Night.