Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder

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

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.

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

(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

like rats, dogs, and humans lean in and coordinate with others when facing peril.29

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

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

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.

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