In subsequent mapping studies with similar methodologies, Alan and I documented other ways in which awe is distinct from fear, horror, and feelings of beauty (for relevant emotion maps, go to alancowen.com). The sounds we use to express awe with our voices sound different from our vocalizations of fear (and closer to vocalizations of emotions we experience when learning new things, like interest and realization). Our facial expressions of awe are easily differentiated from those of fear. The music and visual art that leads us to feel awe differs from that which evokes horror and beauty. Our experiences of awe take place in a space of their own, far away from fear and distinct from the familiar and pleasing feelings of beauty.
Everyday Awe
With stories from around the world and maps of emotional experience, we have begun to chart the what of awe. Perhaps, though, you have reservations. When we recall stories of awe—the core methodology of the twenty-six-culture study—we likely call to mind more extreme, once-in-a-lifetime experiences—saving a stranger’s life, being one of the millions at the festival of Guadalupe in Mexico City, visiting the Grand Canyon, watching a mother die. Artistic portrayals of what brings us awe—GIFs, music, paintings in our awe-mapping studies—are stylized and idealized representations. Neither method captures what awe is like in our daily lives—if there is even such a thing.
In search of everyday awe, Yang Bai, University of Michigan professor Amie Gordon, and I carried out several studies in different countries with a method known as the daily diary approach. This method brings into the lab the very human tendency to write and journal about our emotions, to translate feelings into words. In one study, people in China and the United States wrote about daily experiences of awe—if they occurred—each night for two weeks. Here is a story from China, which speaks once again to the power of museums to bring us awe:
In the national museum, I saw the exhibition of bronze wares in Shang dynasty, the exhibition of Picasso’s art works, and the exhibition of statues of Mao Zedong. . . . I was blown away by the delicate statues, the refined shapes of the hands, the structures of males’ and females’ nudes of Picasso’s art works, and the story, revealed by bronze wares, of the female warrior Fu Hao. I was in awe.
Fu Hao was a female general who fought to preserve the Shang dynasty some three thousand years ago—moral courage from Chinese history. And this study participant is not alone in appreciating the marvels of the hand: the sculptor Rodin saw hands as spiritual parts of our body, and in his sculpture The Cathedral, two right hands point upward, creating a mysterious sense of light and space one would find in a forest or cathedral.
A Berkeley student felt awe in learning about the causal processes of chemistry, that fundamental, invisible layer of life underlying visible reality:
I was at work in the lab and was taught a new process that I had no experience with until today. The effects of very subtle changes in temperature on the outcome of the process was awesome in the literal sense. The actual tool that was used for the process was also awesome.
Another found awe in thinking about the vastness of big data:
It was in my sociology class about social media. I was awestruck and humbled by the vastness of data and the power it exerts over each and every one of our lives, whether we choose to ignore it or not. Social media and technology amass so much data about our lives that is hard to comprehend—to the point where our every heartbeat can be timestamped.
The results from these daily diary studies dovetailed with what we learned from our twenty-six-culture study: In our daily lives, we most frequently feel awe in encounters with moral beauty, and secondarily in nature and in experiences with music, art, and film. Rarer were everyday awe experiences of the spiritual variety (although had we done the study at a religious college, this no doubt would have been different). We also confirmed, as in our mapping studies, that most moments of awe—about three-quarters—feel good, and only one-quarter are flavored with threat.
Culture shaped awe in profound ways. Students in Beijing more commonly found awe in moral beauty—inspiring teachers or grandparents and virtuosic performances of musicians. For the U.S. students, it was nature. And here is a cultural difference that left us shaking our heads: the individual self was twenty times more likely to be the source of awe in the United States than in China. U.S. students could not help but feel awe at getting an A in a tough class, receiving a competitive fellowship, telling a hilarious joke, or, for those true narcissists, posting a new photo on Tinder.
Sometimes the most important finding in a scientific study is a simple observation, free of any hypothesis or pitting of theoretical perspectives against one another. And this was true in our daily diary research: people experience awe two to three times a week. That’s once every couple of days. They did so in finding the extraordinary in the ordinary: a friend’s generosity to a homeless person in the streets; the scent of a flower; looking at a leafy tree’s play of light and shadow on a sidewalk; hearing a song that transported them back to a first love; bingeing Game of Thrones with friends.
Everyday awe.
Great thinkers, from Walt Whitman to Rachel Carson to Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, remind us to become aware of how much of life can bring us awe. It is a deep conviction in many Indigenous philosophies from around the world that so much of the life that surrounds us is sacred. Our daily diary findings suggest that these great minds and cultures were onto something: the wonders of life are so often nearby.
Transcendent States in 1,372 Slides
With stories of awe from around the world, twenty-first-century emotion-mapping techniques, and hearing people’s reports of everyday awe, we can now offer an answer to the question “What is awe?” Awe begins in encounters with the eight wonders of life. The experience of awe unfolds in a space of its own, one that feels good and differs from feelings of fear, horror, and beauty. Our everyday lives offer so many occasions for awe.
As Rolf’s colon cancer reduced his body from a broad-shouldered 210 pounds to a frail, starving 145, the future of his life was increasingly clear. And so I sought to look to the past, to distill the story of our brotherhood.
On my second-to-last visit with Rolf, about ten days before he passed, we took in 1,372 photos from the fifteen years our family had been together before our parents divorced. They were mostly black-and-white slides tucked away in small, yellowing cardboard boxes. They hadn’t been looked at for years. They dated from 1963—our shared baby years in Mexico—to 1978, our last days as an intact family in England.
Rolf, my mom, and I looked over the photos, proceeding year by year. From the early 1960s: photos of us held aloft in our young parents’ arms as babies, cheeks pressing into cheeks, adult hands cupping fuzzy heads. Slides from the late 1960s chronicled our Laurel Canyon years and wandering summer vacations in our blue Volkswagen bus. Peering out of tents in the Rockies, surrounded by aspens. Climbing down rocky, wild coastal cliffs off Highway 1 near Mendocino, California. At art shows of my dad’s. Late ’60s music festivals and renaissance fairs and Fourth of July communal celebrations in the mountains. Long-haired collective effervescence everywhere.
The 1970s brought a move to the foothills of Northern California, a new VW bus, and a Huck Finn–like freedom of early adolescence on our five acres with a pond. Shooting hoops on the basketball court my dad had built in a star-thistly pasture. Inner tubing and rafting down rivers. A bicentennial trip across the United States in 1976—vast plains of cornfields out the windows of the bus, my brother and I spoofing and mugging at Monticello.