I love learning about things that make the world feel considerably stranger than it did five minutes earlier. Space is particularly good at this. You start with a pretty photograph of a galaxy, learn how far away it is, and suddenly the fact that you're sitting on a planet trying to decide what to make for dinner seems fairly ridiculous. The photograph hasn't changed, but your understanding of what you're looking at has gotten much bigger.
That reaction is part of what interests me about awe. A huge tree, an extraordinary piece of music, or a scientific fact that takes a minute to sink in can pull us out of whatever we were thinking about. I wanted to know what researchers have actually found happening during those moments, because the experience is fascinating before anybody starts promising that a sunset will fix your entire nervous system.
Awe Begins When Something Exceeds Your Usual Explanation
In their 2003 account of awe, psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt proposed two central ingredients. The first is perceived vastness. The second is a need for accommodation, which means having to adjust your existing understanding to make room for what you've encountered. The vastness can involve physical size, but it can also involve an extraordinary ability, an idea or something that feels enormously important.
That's why I like the distinction between enjoying a view and being overwhelmed by it. You can think a tree is lovely, then start considering how tall it is, how long it's been growing and how much has happened around it. The same tree can send you into a completely different set of thoughts. I find that shift interesting because it leaves room for wonder in places we might ordinarily pass without giving them much thought.
A Tiny Object Can Give You a Very Large Thought
A moth wing or a spider web is small enough to overlook, but looking closely can lead to questions that feel much larger than the object. How does an animal make something that intricate? What does the world look like through its senses? I love the way an ordinary garden can turn into a collection of questions about engineering, chemistry and perception without anything particularly dramatic having to happen. A little pocket magnifier would be lovely for that kind of looking. I’d take it into the garden and give a leaf or an empty web a few extra minutes before heading back inside.
That also helps explain why two people can respond differently to the same thing. One might be absorbed in the structure of a web while the other is primarily concerned about where its owner has gone. Both are perfectly understandable ways to respond to a spider situation. The interesting question is what the experience means to the person having it, which is considerably harder to measure than the size of the web.
The Brain Study Is More Interesting Than an Off Switch
A 2019 fMRI study by Michiel van Elk and colleagues involved 32 participants watching awe-inducing, pleasant and neutral videos. They were asked either to become absorbed in the scenes or to count changes in camera perspective. During absorbed viewing, several regions associated with the default mode network showed less activity for the awe videos than for the comparison videos.
That network is associated with processes including thinking about ourselves and mind-wandering. The researchers interpreted the findings as consistent with reduced self-focused thought, while cautioning about precisely how their regions overlapped the network. They hadn't directly measured mind-wandering. Their result concerns relative activity during particular tasks, so describing the whole network as shutting down gives the finding a much more dramatic meaning than it has.
I still find the task itself wonderfully odd. Somebody was watching an impressive landscape while lying inside a scanner and counting camera changes, which sounds like a fairly determined attempt to turn a beautiful view into homework. The comparison matters because the way we engage with something can be part of the experience. A brain scan can help investigate that relationship without becoming a photograph of wonder itself.
Awe Can Feel Wonderful and Unsettling at the Same Time
There is also a frightening side to vastness. In a 2017 study of threat-based awe, Amie Gordon and colleagues found that threatening experiences of awe differed from positive ones in reported feelings, physiological responses and momentary well-being. Threat-based awe was associated with indicators of greater sympathetic arousal, while positive awe showed indicators of greater parasympathetic arousal in their physiological experiment.
A storm can be impressive and dangerous, and feeling overwhelmed by it makes sense. Awe doesn't automatically tell the body that everything is safe. I can appreciate the beauty of lightning while also strongly preferring a situation in which nobody has to test how conductive they are. The setting belongs in the explanation, along with whether the person feels secure enough to enjoy what they're seeing.
A 2025 study using virtual reality and EEG adds another interesting detail. In data from 43 participants, the intensity and duration of mixed positive and negative feelings helped predict reported awe. The researchers also found relationships between those mixed feelings and patterns in their EEG analyses. This was a particular experiment with considerable individual variation, but it makes room for something recognizable: being moved by an experience can involve several feelings at once.
Feeling Smaller Can Change How We Relate to Other People
Researchers sometimes call the reduced prominence of ourselves during awe the small-self effect. In five studies published in 2015, Paul Piff and colleagues examined awe, generosity and helping behavior. Their work included an experiment in which people looked up at towering trees. Compared with a control condition, that experience was followed by more helping and less entitlement.
Across the studies, feeling smaller helped account for part of the relationship between awe and concern for others. These are findings about particular measures and situations, rather than a guarantee that an impressive view permanently improves somebody's character. Still, I think it's an appealing possibility that a moment of looking beyond ourselves can influence what we do next. An enormous tree making somebody slightly more helpful is a fairly good contribution from something already busy being a tree.
Wonder Can Change How Much Time We Feel We Have
In three experiments published in 2012, Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs and Jennifer Aaker found that participants experiencing awe reported more available time and less impatience than people in comparison conditions. The work also examined decisions such as willingness to volunteer time. The finding concerns the subjective experience of time, which is different from the clock actually slowing down.
I wish the clock part were available, because there are several days when I could use that feature. Even so, the distinction is interesting. We tend to treat time as something we simply read from a screen, while the experience of an afternoon can feel completely different depending on what occupies it. This research gives us a specific example of how an emotion can affect that sense of availability without handing us extra hours.
Feeling Less Stressed and Slowing the Heart Are Different Findings
A 2025 experiment with 67 college students examined responses to stress followed by videos intended to produce amusement, awe or a neutral state. Amusement and awe helped with perceived stress, but immediate heart-rate recovery appeared similar across conditions. Amusement produced faster recovery in perceived stress, while increased positive emotion in the awe condition lasted longer than in the neutral condition.
That is a useful distinction when we talk about what an emotion does to the body. A person can report feeling better without every physiological measurement changing in the same way. The result gives us something concrete to be interested in, while leaving plenty of questions about how different people respond outside an MRI scanner. A lovely experience can matter even when the heart hasn't produced the dramatic announcement a headline might prefer.
The Inflammation Finding Was an Association
A 2015 paper by Jennifer Stellar and colleagues found that a greater tendency to experience positive emotions was associated with lower levels of the inflammatory marker interleukin-6, measured in oral fluid, in healthy participants. Awe had the strongest relationship among the individual positive emotions they examined. The researchers themselves noted that their studies couldn't establish which direction the relationship ran.
So the finding doesn't show that looking at a mountain treats inflammation, or that somebody who is ill has failed to appreciate enough beautiful things. I think the relationship between emotional life and physical health is an interesting scientific question. Turning an early association into a cure would also put a rather unreasonable amount of pressure on both the person and the mountain.
There Is an Actual Study Behind Awe Walks
In a study first published online in 2020, Virginia Sturm and colleagues randomly assigned 60 healthy older adults to ordinary walks or walks with instructions designed to encourage awe. Both groups took a 15-minute outdoor walk each week for eight weeks. The awe group reported more awe and positive social emotions during their walks, and their photographs increasingly gave more space to the surroundings and less to themselves.
The researchers also found changes in daily emotional reports, including reduced distress over time in the awe group. Anxiety, depression and life-satisfaction measures taken before and after the study didn't improve in either group. That's encouraging research about a particular activity and group of people, with a more limited result than the promise that walking outside will repair everyone's mental health.
Personally, I like the idea of paying attention to what makes a place interesting without turning the outing into another assignment. A tree, a cloud formation or the structure of a flower can be a perfectly good starting point for a question. I'd prefer to leave room for curiosity to wander a little, because deciding in advance exactly how amazed I'm supposed to feel sounds like an excellent way to become irritated with a perfectly innocent flower.
A Moving Song Doesn't Establish a Universal Chemical Recipe
Music adds another reason to be careful with the phrase brain chemistry. A 2011 study by Valorie Salimpoor and colleagues found dopamine release during intensely pleasurable music listening in selected people who reliably experienced musical chills. Anticipation and the peak emotional response involved different patterns. That is fascinating evidence about a specific musical experience, which I've also discussed in my article about goosebumps.
It doesn't establish that every experience of awe begins with a dopamine surge followed by oxytocin. Different methods answer different questions, and a scan showing activity changes doesn't automatically identify a sequence of chemicals. I think the real music finding is already extraordinary. A collection of sounds can become deeply rewarding to a particular listener, and the anticipation can be part of what makes the moment so powerful.
About the Wellness Headband Linked Here
This article includes a link to the NeoRhythm headband from Omnipemf. The manufacturer describes it as a PEMF wellness device, using pulsed electromagnetic fields. Its product FAQ says it hasn't been evaluated by the FDA and doesn't claim to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent a medical condition. That's the company's account of its status, rather than evidence that the headband produces awe.
The studies about videos, walking, music and emotions can't establish a benefit for a different product. I wouldn't turn their findings into a promise that a headband creates wonder, heals the vagus nerve or reproduces the effects of being outdoors. The interesting questions here concern how we respond to experiences, and a product claim needs evidence about that product.
I Like That There Is Still So Much to Wonder About
The part of awe that keeps my attention is the shift in scale. We can be absorbed in something ordinary, then encounter a fact or a view that makes our existing explanation feel too small. I find it wierdly entertaining that learning enough about a tiny insect can do that just as effectively as reading about an enormous object in space. Curiosity has a fairly impressive range.
I also like leaving a little room for the experience to remain personal. Researchers can ask about feelings, record behavior and examine activity in the brain, while the person having the moment still gets to describe why it mattered. There's an enormous world available to be interested in, from the structure of a web to the distance between galaxies. I have a feeling I'll keep finding reasons to write about it.
Related Reads
Sources
Keltner and Haidt. Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion. 2003.
Van Elk et al. The Neural Correlates of the Awe Experience. 2019.
Lee et al. Awe Is Characterized as an Ambivalent Affect in the Human Behavior and Cortex. 2025.
Piff et al. Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior. 2015.
Rudd, Vohs and Aaker. Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time. 2012.
Tsujimoto et al. Buffering Effects of Amusement and Awe on Stress Responses. 2025.
Stellar et al. Positive Affect and Markers of Inflammation. 2015.
Omnipemf. NeoRhythm Product Information and FAQ. Manufacturer source.
