Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder

(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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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