Why Do You Feel Awe?

You’re standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon for the first time.

Or you’re in a cathedral, and the choir starts, and the sound fills the space and your chest does something.

Or you watch someone do something extraordinarily generous — sacrifice something real for a stranger — and you feel your eyes fill.

Whatever the trigger, the experience is similar: a sense of something vast, a momentary dissolution of ordinary self-concern, something that feels like the opposite of the small daily noise you usually live inside. The word for it is awe.

Psychologists have been studying it for about twenty years. What they’ve found is that awe may be one of the most unusual and important things the human nervous system does.

Defining the Undefinable

In 2003, psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt published the first systematic psychological framework for awe.

They proposed that awe requires two components:

Vastness: a perception of something that exceeds your ordinary frame of reference — literally large (mountains, oceans, skies), or large in a more abstract sense (moral exemplars, deep time, the scale of the universe, extraordinary human achievement).

Accommodation: the need to revise your current mental schemas to incorporate what you’re perceiving. The experience forces a kind of cognitive recalibration. What you’re seeing doesn’t fit into your existing categories cleanly.

The combination produces the signature feeling: the sense of being small, in a way that isn’t frightening but seems, paradoxically, freeing.

Keltner and Haidt identified several categories of awe triggers: the natural world (vastness of landscape, weather, the night sky), art and music, witnessing great skill or virtue in another person, and — notably — encountering novel or profound ideas. Mathematical elegance, scientific cosmology, philosophical insight can all trigger genuine awe in the right mind encountering them for the first time.

What’s Happening in the Brain

Awe activates the default mode network differently than most experiences. The DMN — which handles self-referential processing, planning, rumination, and the ongoing narrative of self — is ordinarily very active. Awe seems to suppress it.

Neuroimaging studies show that awe-evoking stimuli (vast natural landscapes, great art, scenes of extraordinary human virtue) reduce activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and other DMN nodes associated with self-concern. The brain quiets the ongoing narrative.

This corresponds to something people consistently report in moments of awe: you stop thinking about yourself. The usual stream of concerns, plans, and self-evaluations goes quiet. You are simply present to what is in front of you.

The suppression of self-related processing is also associated with a distinctive physiological signature: goosebumps. The piloerection response — arrector pili muscles raising the hairs on your arms — is reliably associated with awe and, in music, with the “chills” or frisson response. Both appear to involve a brief activation of the sympathetic nervous system in a context of positive arousal, producing the skin response.

The Small Self Effect

In 2007, psychologist Michele Shiota and colleagues documented what they called the small self effect: awe reliably reduces subjective sense of personal importance.

People in awe-induced states rate themselves as smaller, their personal problems as less pressing, their individual identity as less central. They become more aware of belonging to something larger than themselves.

Counterintuitively, this makes them more generous, not less. Experiments by Griskevicius and colleagues found that people in awe-induced states were more willing to donate to others, more cooperative, less individualistic in their decision-making.

The working hypothesis: awe is an evolutionarily functional emotion that periodically reminds social animals of their position within a larger collective — reducing excessive self-interest and promoting the cooperative behavior that made human societies viable. In the same way fear promotes survival-relevant behavior and disgust promotes disease avoidance, awe promotes pro-social, collectivist behavior.

Awe Reduces Inflammation

One of the stranger findings in awe research comes from physiological studies.

Stellar et al. (2015) measured levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines — proteins associated with the immune system’s inflammatory response and, when chronically elevated, with depression, cardiovascular disease, and early death — in participants who reported experiencing positive emotions including awe.

Awe was the single positive emotion most strongly associated with lower levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines.

The mechanism is not fully understood. The likely pathway involves the interaction between the autonomic nervous system, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, and immune function. Awe appears to produce a distinctive physiological state — low arousal but high positive valence — that differs from both excitement (high arousal positive) and calm (low arousal positive), and this state has measurable effects on inflammatory markers.

This means that the subjective experience of awe isn’t just pleasant. It may have direct physiological benefit at the level of immune and cardiovascular function — which explains why people who regularly encounter awe-inducing experiences (through nature, art, or community) tend to report better health outcomes even after controlling for other variables.

Awe Expands Time

In 2012, Melanie Rudd and colleagues published a study on awe and time perception.

Participants induced into an awe-state (by watching a video of vast nature) versus a happy-control state (watching a video of colorful confetti) subsequently felt they had more time available. They were more willing to volunteer time, more patient, less rushed. They placed higher value on experiences over possessions.

The mechanism seems to involve the DMN suppression: when self-concern quiets, the mental chatter about schedules, obligations, and future plans quiets with it. The present moment expands to fill the space.

This is consistent with phenomenological accounts of awe across cultures — the sense that time briefly stops, or changes quality, or that the ordinary world receded.

Secular Awe

For most of human history, awe was primarily the province of religion. The experience of the numinous — Rudolf Otto’s “mysterium tremendum et fascinans” — was described as the core of religious experience across traditions: the sense of encountering something vast and important that exceeds human understanding.

Modern secular culture has partly lost the social scaffolding that reliably produced this experience. Fewer people attend religious services; the natural spaces that produced awe in pre-industrial populations are less accessible or less visited; the pace of modern life works against the slow, contemplative attention that awe requires.

But the capacity is intact. The neurological architecture hasn’t changed. What’s required is contact with vastness — physical or conceptual — and the willingness to let the small self step back.

Carl Sagan understood this. His Pale Blue Dot passage — about a photograph of Earth taken by Voyager 1 from 6 billion kilometers away — is designed to produce awe through ideas rather than sensory experience. A point of light. All of history on it. All the cruelty and greatness and love and war, on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

You don’t need a canyon. You need something that makes you briefly aware of how small and strange and brief all of this is.

Standing at the edge of something vast, your ordinary self-concern goes quiet.

That’s not a malfunction. It’s one of the things the human brain does that has no clear analog in other animals — the capacity to feel small not as a threat but as a relief.

The small self isn’t the worst version of you. It might be the most honest one.