Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder

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.

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.

Wonder, the mental state of openness, questioning, curiosity, and embracing mystery, arises out of experiences of awe.

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

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.

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

Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.

(Ralph Waldo Emerson), free intellectual exchange (Margaret Fuller), ordinary people in their daily lives (Walt Whitman), and mystical experiences found in religion, visions, and drugs (William James).53

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