Awe is not a luxury emotion. It is not something reserved for mountaintop moments or orchestral performances. Researchers have spent the past two decades making a compelling case that awe — that feeling of being in the presence of something vast and mind-expanding — is one of the most consequential emotions for human wellbeing, and one of the most neglected.

Dacher Keltner and the Science of Awe

The scientist most associated with awe research is Dacher Keltner at the University of California, Berkeley. Keltner, along with Jonathan Haidt, published a foundational paper in 2003 defining awe as an emotional response to stimuli that are perceived as vast and that require what they called accommodation — a revision of existing mental frameworks. You cannot experience awe without your current understanding being challenged. That is definitional. What Keltner found in subsequent experimental work changed how researchers think about the emotion's function. In studies where participants were induced to feel awe — by watching expansive nature videos, standing next to tall trees, or viewing images from space — they reported reduced self-focused thinking, greater feelings of connectedness to others, and increased prosocial behavior. Participants given awe inductions were more likely to volunteer their time and more likely to report that individual success mattered less than collective wellbeing. The self, experientially, got smaller.

The Body in Awe

Awe has a distinct physiological profile that separates it from other positive emotions. Keltner's group documented what they called goosebumps or piloerection as a reliable physical marker of awe — the same reflex that mammals use to appear larger when threatened, repurposed in humans as a social signal of being moved. Participants in awe studies showed reduced activity in the default mode network, the brain's self-referential hub. When you are genuinely awed, the part of your brain running the narrative of "me" goes quiet. This is not trivial. Excessive default mode activity is associated with depression, rumination, and anxiety. Awe appears to interrupt that loop. A study from the University of Toronto found that people experiencing awe reported time feeling more expansive and available, which may explain why even brief awe experiences reduce the subjective sense of busyness and time pressure.

Awe and Inflammation

One of the more surprising findings in this literature involves the immune system. Keltner's lab, in collaboration with Jennifer Stellar, measured cytokine levels in participants after different emotional states. Positive emotions in general were associated with lower pro-inflammatory cytokines, but awe showed the strongest association of any emotion tested. The researchers interpreted this as evidence that awe may have downstream effects on physical health through its regulation of the inflammatory response. Chronic inflammation is implicated in depression, cardiovascular disease, and several cancers, so an emotion that reliably reduces it deserves serious attention.

A Tangent Worth Taking

There is something odd about how industrialized culture has structured access to awe. We are largely surrounded by human-scale things — walls, screens, familiar faces, indoor environments. The stimuli that reliably trigger awe — vast skies, oceans, mountains, ancient forests, extraordinary music performed live — have been pushed to the margins of daily life and reframed as leisure activities rather than necessities. Indigenous and contemplative traditions did not make this mistake. Many built regular contact with vastness into the rhythms of daily and seasonal life, not as an indulgence but as maintenance.

Cultivating Awe Deliberately

The good news from the research is that awe does not require a flight to Patagonia. Keltner's group has documented awe experiences in urban environments, in encounters with excellent strangers, and even in thinking carefully about mathematical concepts or evolutionary time. What matters is the presence of perceived vastness and the willingness to let your existing frameworks be revised rather than defended. Practices that cultivate this include slow walks with deliberate attention, stargazing, immersion in music, and what some researchers call awe walks — ordinary outdoor walks where the intention is to notice scale and complexity rather than clock mileage. Participants in awe walk studies reported increased positive affect, reduced distress, and greater feelings of social connection compared to control walkers, even though both groups walked the same distance. The emotion that makes you feel small, it turns out, also makes your life feel larger.