Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder

Awe is about our relation to the vast mysteries of life.

For infants it is the immense warmth provided by parents, and when we die, the enormous expanse of our lives.

Why dying is oceanic and awe-filled for some and horrifying for others.

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.

Annual Review of Neuroscience 32 (2009): 289–313. For recent thinking on the amygdala, see: FeldmanHall, Oriel, Paul Glimcher, Augustus L. Baker, NYU PROSPEC Collaboration, and Elizabeth A. Phelps.

by Robert Hass, the U.S. poet laureate from 1995 to 1997, in a twelve-minute tour of the role of awe in literature and poetry at a conference in Berkeley in 2016. As he detailed this idea, he embodied literary epiphanies with whoas, our ancient sounds of recognizing the sublime.

wealth undermines everyday awe and our capacity to see the moral beauty in others, the wonders of nature, or the sublime in music or art.

Awe is the emotion we experience when we encounter vast mysteries that we don’t understand. Why

He outlined how emotions work: they shift our thought and action to enable us to adapt to our present circumstances.

sense of wonder so indestructible it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strengths.2 • RACHEL CARSON