The Emotion Scientists Largely Ignored
For most of psychology’s modern history, awe was considered too vague, too spiritual, and too culturally variable to study rigorously. Researchers focused on fear, joy, anger, and sadness — the so-called basic emotions with clear evolutionary utility. Awe sat in an awkward corner, associated more with religious experience and poetry than with measurable brain states or adaptive function. It was the kind of word that appeared in sermons and sonnets, not in peer-reviewed journals. That changed in 2003, when psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt published a landmark theoretical paper in the journal Cognition and Emotion, proposing that awe is a distinct, universal emotion defined by two core features: perceived vastness and a need for accommodation — the mental effort required to absorb something that does not fit existing cognitive frameworks. Their paper was not an experimental study but a theoretical scaffold, precisely the kind the field needed. It gave researchers a rigorous, operationalizable definition, and it cracked open a scientific door that has since become a remarkably busy corridor.
What makes awe scientifically unusual is that it occupies the boundary between positive and negative emotion. Unlike happiness or contentment, awe carries a faint edge of threat — a smallness, a dissolution of the self, a momentary suspension of the internal narrator that normally keeps our sense of identity intact. Keltner’s team at the University of California, Berkeley, calls this the “small self” phenomenon, and it turns out this self-diminishment is not merely metaphorical or poetic. It has a measurable neural signature, a physiological footprint, and — most unexpectedly — a set of downstream consequences for physical health that no one anticipated when the science began.
What Happens Inside the Brain During Awe
Functional MRI studies conducted over the past decade have begun mapping what awe actually does to neural architecture in real time. Research published in 2020 in the journal Psychological Science found that awe reliably deactivates the default mode network — the brain’s self-referential system, the circuitry responsible for rumination, internal monologue, and the ongoing maintenance of personal narrative. This is the same network implicated in depression and anxiety disorders when it becomes chronically overactive. Awe, in effect, quiets the part of the brain that keeps telling you who you are and why you should worry about it. The relief this produces is not trivial. For people whose default mode networks have become stuck in loops of self-critical or threat-anticipating thought, even a brief deactivation can feel profound.
Simultaneously, awe activates regions associated with salience detection and reward, including the anterior insula and the ventral striatum. These are structures that light up when something genuinely important is happening, when the brain decides that the current moment deserves full attentional resources. Crucially, studies by neuroscientist Andrea Gaggioli and colleagues in Italy have found that virtual reality experiences designed to induce awe — placing subjects at the edge of vast simulated canyons or inside representations of the observable universe — produce measurable reductions in cortisol and increases in oxytocin. The body responds to perceived vastness as though it has genuinely encountered something transformative, even when the vastness is entirely synthetic, and the subject is sitting in a laboratory chair wearing a headset.
Perhaps most surprising is the effect on time perception. A 2012 study by Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs, and Jennifer Aaker at Stanford University found that inducing awe made participants feel as though they had more time available. Subjects who watched awe-inducing video clips reported significantly less time pressure and greater willingness to volunteer their time to help others, compared to control groups who watched neutral or merely pleasant content. The researchers proposed that awe expands perceived time by fully drawing attention into the present moment, disrupting the anxious forward projection that makes ordinary time feel scarce and perpetually insufficient. This finding is particularly relevant in an era of chronic overscheduling, when the subjective experience of time poverty is among the most commonly reported sources of stress in industrialized societies. The prescription, if the research holds, may be less about managing calendars and more about engineering moments of genuine wonder.
The Immune System’s Unexpected Response
One of the most counterintuitive findings in awe research involves cytokines — small signaling proteins that regulate immune responses and inflammation throughout the body. A 2015 study led by Jennifer Stellar at UC Berkeley measured cytokine levels in participants who reported experiencing a range of positive emotions, including awe, compassion, joy, and love. The researchers used dried gum tissue samples to measure interleukin-6, a cytokine associated with chronic systemic inflammation. Among all the positive emotions studied, awe was the strongest predictor of low interleukin-6 levels. This was not a marginal effect. Chronic inflammation is implicated in a staggering range of diseases, from cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes to Alzheimer’s and certain cancers. The idea that an emotion could move that needle was not something the field had seriously entertained.
The mechanism is not yet fully understood, but researchers hypothesize that awe’s suppression of the default mode network reduces the stress-related neural signaling that drives the production of inflammatory cytokines in the first place. Put simply, the brain’s experience of smallness and wonder may tell the immune system to stand down from a state of low-level emergency — a state that, in modern humans, is often not triggered by genuine physical threat but by the relentless cognitive churn of self-monitoring, social comparison, and anticipatory anxiety. Awe may interrupt that churn at a level deep enough to produce measurable biological consequences.
This has led to early-stage clinical interest in awe-based interventions for populations with elevated inflammatory markers, including veterans with PTSD and patients undergoing chemotherapy. A 2021 pilot study at the University of Virginia found that combat veterans who participated in weekly outdoor “awe walks” in natural environments showed significant reductions in PTSD symptom severity over eight weeks, alongside measurable decreases in inflammatory biomarkers. The sample size was small — 59 participants — and the study lacked a rigorous control condition, but the signal was strong enough to prompt larger follow-up trials that are currently underway at multiple institutions. The intervention costs almost nothing. It requires no pharmaceutical development, no clinical infrastructure, and no insurance authorization. It requires a trail, a sky, or an ocean, and the deliberate intention to look up.
Awe at Scale: From Cathedrals to Cosmos
The architecture of awe has been exploited by human institutions long before neuroscience had a vocabulary for it. Medieval cathedral builders understood intuitively that height, light, and geometric complexity could overwhelm the individual into a sense of sacred smallness, and they engineered their structures accordingly. The Gothic vault, rising to 48 meters at its apex in Beauvais Cathedral in northern France, was not merely a decorative achievement — it was, in a functional sense, neurological engineering. Pilgrimage routes were designed to deliver travelers into spaces of overwhelming scale after long periods of confined, exhausting, and deliberately monotonous travel, thereby maximizing the contrast effect, which dramatically amplifies the emotional impact of awe. The suffering of the journey was, in part, a preparation of the nervous system for the destination.
Contemporary researchers have found that the most reliably awe-inducing stimuli share specific geometric and perceptual properties: fractality, depth cues suggesting vast scale, and what psychologist Richard Wiseman describes as perceptual surprise — a mismatch between what the observer expected and what they actually encounter. This is why the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, released in July 2022, produced a documented global spike in self-reported awe and well-being, detectable in large-scale social media sentiment analysis. Images of galaxy clusters 4.6 billion light-years away, rendered in false color but geometrically faithful to the underlying data, triggered the same neural cascade as standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon. The brain does not require physical presence. It requires sufficient information to register genuine vastness, and modern imaging technology has become extraordinarily good at delivering that information.
This has prompted a nascent field sometimes called awe therapy or vastness-based intervention, which uses high-resolution cosmic imagery, virtual reality environments, and guided outdoor experiences to deliberately induce the emotion in clinical populations. Researchers at Johns Hopkins and New York University, already deeply invested in psilocybin research — which reliably produces awe-like states through chemical means — are now comparing the neural profiles of pharmacologically induced awe with those of environmentally induced awe. The central question they are asking is whether the therapeutic benefits observed in psychedelic trials are driven by the emotion of awe itself, rather than by the specific pharmacological mechanism that triggers it. Early data suggest the answer may be yes, which would represent a significant reorientation of how those therapeutic benefits are understood and potentially replicated without controlled substances.
Conclusion
What the science of awe reveals, taken together, is that an emotion long dismissed as too ineffable for serious study turns out to be one of the most consequential states the human nervous system can enter. It quiets self-referential rumination, expands the subjective experience of time, reduces inflammatory signaling in the immune system, and appears to produce measurable improvements in psychological well-being across diverse populations and delivery methods. It is also, by the standards of clinical intervention, almost absurdly accessible. It can be found in a clear night sky, in the opening bars of a symphony, in the sight of a newborn, or in a photograph of a galaxy cluster taken by an infrared telescope at the edge of the solar system.
The deeper implication may be this: the human nervous system appears to have evolved not merely to tolerate experiences of vastness and self-dissolution, but to need them. Chronic absence of awe — a life lived entirely within the familiar, the manageable, and the self-referential — may carry genuine biological costs that researchers are only beginning to quantify. In that light, awe is not a luxury or a spiritual indulgence. It may be closer to a nutritional requirement, one that modern environments have become increasingly efficient at withholding.