The neuroscience of awe
How our brains collapse and rebirth in response to life's vastness
Last month, just as I finished uttering the final sentence of my keynote talk that I was giving in a small mountain town in Austria, I saw a hand rise up from the dark sea of faces in the audience in front of me. The lights went on and the hand came down.
The eyes of the stranger who raised her hand connected instantly with mine. They were kind and hardened eyes at once; disillusioned, beyond ideology. I could tell that the woman was neither a political activist nor an academic, as the majority of people in the audience who had gathered here for Austria’s largest national Utopia Conference Tage der Utopie 2025 were.
Her eyes belonged to someone who worked daily with human bodies and the ever-changing nature that surrounds them: that much I could tell.
“You said in your talk that we need to overcome polarization and the collapse of our democracies through activating our brains’ humanizing capacities. Including towards people we don’t really care about or who are our opponents. But can our brains actually do this?”, she asked.
Usually, I would have answered the question with social neuroscience research on mentalizing, and how taking on the perspective of others, and imagining their inner lives can aid the brain to view them as full human beings with complex emotions; thus making it easier to feel empathy towards them and leading to more desirable political outcomes such as de-escalation, peace-making and reconciliation.
But something in that moment made me hold back. I owed this woman and the place we had all found ourselves in that night a different kind of answer.
The setting at Kulturbühne Ambach in the town of Götzis inevitably gave rise to a sense of reverence in myself, and also, I could sense, in those who were present in the audience. People like me who had traveled to this place from busy and bustling metropoles where we were craving “nature” (or whatever non-human quiet and peace one dreams of on a squeezed and smelly U-Bahn ride on a Berlin weekday evening), swearing to ourselves that next year will be the year when we will leave this goddamn city life behind.
Even inside the sealed performance hall of the Kulturbühne Ambach, I could sense the quietly majestic Alps outside. It made me humble and still. I felt the presence of the Walserkamm Mountain Ridge, the Örflaschlucht Canyon nearby, the endangered pine high moor that had its beginnings in the Holocene, the Alpine Rhine Valley stretching itself out throughout Vorarlberg, and the enigmatic Drei Schwestern chain with its three peaks inside of the Rätikon mountain range, which extended from Montafon in the South to the Rhine River.
A sensual anticipation was carrying my body through the talk, in which I had traversed the last two global centuries of upheaval and destruction, the 1960s cognitive revolution and liberalism’s post-Cold War failures, and my vision of Gesamtkunstbefreiung to liberate us from our brain cells, the drama of our molecular existence and evolutionary haphazardness, with the aim to create a new political philosophy of how we can survive each other and survive the abyss of our modern selves, through a new eroticism towards the disenchanted life.
The sensual anticipation of walking back alone through the dark mountain valley — past the fruit farm with its closed shutters, past the noisy canyon, the night mountain in my back like a protector and threat at once, with a pounding Asian woman’s heart aware of lurking dangers both human and natural on the unlit abandoned path that would lead me back to the soft light of my St. Arbogast lodgings — helped me to get through the emotions of fear and despair that the audience had revealed to me and that I was absorbing, in order to understand.
People felt genuinely helpless about what to do against the rise of rightwing populism in their cities and smaller towns in Austria and Germany, they were confused about how friends and family members had turned into conspiracy theorists, they felt disillusioned by the major democratic parties’ ideologies and lack of strategy for how to still cognitively reach voters (especially after the losses that the Green Party and SPD had been served in the February German election this year).
I looked up from the stage at the mountain silhouette outside the small ceiling window, and replied:
“Perhaps our brains need to experience awe in order to humanize others and themselves correctly in the context of our natural and political world crises. How should I translate awe into German? Maybe as Ehrfurcht or Staunen.”
She let out a sigh of relief.
“I’m so glad you did not say empathy. I’m sick of people just preaching about empathy and shaming others for not being better human beings. Because didn’t you also explain in your talk that empathy and humanization are limited cognitive resources? That we can only do so much every day? That our brains need to use it wisely? So what’s left when all empathy is used up?”
I agreed. And then, for the next ten minutes or so, for the first time during a public lecture, I spoke about the neuroscience of awe.
Awe is a social emotion that is triggered by a vast stimuli. Throughout our childhood but also into adulthood, we have all experienced awe in our lives. It is the moment when something so immense — whether it is physical, conceptual, aesthetic or spiritual — forces us to reconsider previously held beliefs or ideas about life and reality. Awe can be triggered by a great artwork, a musical piece, a Buddhist temple structure, the elegance of the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, the microscopic beauty of brain synapses, the vastness of the ocean, or indeed, the enigmatic majesty of a mountain.
At the brain level, neuroscientists have been able to show its distinct neuronal signature and brain regions involved, which distinguish the awe emotion from other emotions such as excitement or pure arousal.
What makes awe feel like “an earthquake in the brain” is not just the intense nature of the vast stimuli involved but perhaps more importantly, the brain’s need to accommodate the “earthquake” by reorganizing itself, since pre-existing schema do not fit the new awe-inducing experience. It is a bit like the sensation of coming back from mind-altering travels and returning home to one’s old brain and beliefs. In order to feel at home with oneself again, one has to find ways to incorporate the vast stimuli into the structures of the old house, or, in certain cases, rebuild the house altogether.
This is why some argue that awe should be considered a distinct primary emotion, in that just like other primary emotions, awe is innate, hardwired, automatic and universal across cultures. From an evolutionary standpoint, this kind of emotion might have helped humans because awe apparently increases prosociality by being a meaning-making emotion, through which social hierarchies are reinforced (the reverence we feel towards social and religious rituals, artifacts and charismatic leaders, for example), social cohesion is increased, and creativity and reflective processing within the group are enhanced.
At its core though, awe alters how we see ourselves. It leads to a diminished sense of self, where we suddenly feel very small in face of awe-inducing phenomena. In simulated space travel scenarios, researchers recorded altered theta and beta brain waves during awe perception (interestingly, the earth view from space generated more awe in participants than simply traveling through space — perhaps our social brains still need the connection to fellow humans on earth to understand their own selves in relation to vastness). Awe can literally lead to a change in body perception, where one judges one’s own body to be smaller than it actually is.
At the brain level, this smaller self effect is linked to the default mode network (DMN), which is usually implicated in self-referential processing. In a fascinating fMRI study, neuroscientists were able to show reduced activity during awe experiences in the frontal pole, angular gyrus and posterior cingulate cortex — brain regions usually involved in DMN. DMN’s characteristics of self-referential thinking and mind-wandering are also implicated in mental disorders such as depression or neurodiverse conditions such as ADHD, where the DMN is dysregulated.
And indeed, we probably have all witnessed or experienced first hand the healing effects of getting out of our DMN when depressed, by making awe-inducing experiences that feel as if they are pulling us out of the darkness of self-referential gloom. Awe’s vast stimuli can be overwhelming, but sometimes that is exactly what our modern, atomistic DMN-prone brains need.
Another exciting study measuring the brain’s grey matter in people who are disposed towards awe-and wonder-based epiphanic experiences found out that the neural correlates of attention, conscious self-regulation and cognitive control, especially around the anterior cingulate cortex and general cingulate gyrus regions, is more pronounced in people who either naturally or by life-long cultivation choose awe as an everyday experience in their lives (I was proud to find out that the study came out of Hunan Normal University, where my parents’ Chinese hometown is, and that this Hunanese research team is continuing cutting-edge brain research on awe). In other words, choosing awe experiences can help us foster positive and resilient brain abilities related to social regulation and attention.
The behavioral effects of awe are equally impressive. Awe increases humility, life satisfaction, and self-awareness towards one’s community, environment and the human species as whole. It enhances well-being by expanding a sense of time (a topic that always fascinated me, I shall write more about it in another post), where time is suddenly perceived as more abundant, allowing us to slow down and potentially feel a renewed sense of agency and possibility afterwards. Physiologically, it leads to an enticing mix between both arousal and relaxation, the kind of high people usually chase with recreational drug use. Even at the cellular level, awe can lead to a reduction of inflammatory cytokines.
I believe that in the context of the climate crisis, positive awe experiences might have huge potential, not only for humbling people into a more realistic understanding of their precarious human position in relation to earth’s natural habitat and the vastness of the universe, but also for their potential in making people feel more empowered and less fatalistic about what can still be done.
Often, climate activists’ and educators’ strategies are to show people negative doom scenarios that can actually lead to fatalism (“nothing we can do, the problem is too grim”) or cynical nihilism (“if we’re anyway doomed, we may as well be free riders and enjoy it while it lasts”) or focus too much on prosocial emotions directed at other human beings, such as empathy. I wonder if awe, which re-adjusts and re-establishes a relationship between the individual and nature’s immense realities that exceed our small human understanding, might be more appropriate and effective in bringing about increased action and care for our planet.
Should we send our children and the climate deniers and polluters to national parks then? This is indeed a question that I have been discussing with the director of Austria’s magnificent Hohe Tauern Nationalpark in Mallnitz. She told me that some political leaders of climate-problematic countries who visited her National Park were just silent for a while, made speechless by the towering dignity of the mountains. This was more powerful than any accusatory or persuasive words. EEG brain studies on the effect of awe-inducing experiences through nature-based virtual reality scenarios point to promising results that could make climate-directed awe happen in your own living room without even having to travel.
The German landscape architect Dieter Grau, with whom I’ll be speaking at the German National Architects’ Association at their centennial in Potsdam next Friday, says that human beings only care long-term for buildings that they deem beautiful. This, somehow, is the simple but crucial truth about sustainability and culture, but also the environment. Awe experiences of nature and our cultivated sense of being in it should build on awe-based aesthetic and spiritual appreciations of that nature, not just moral obligations and material survival fears — which is what the current climate movement might be relying on disproportionately. We fight because we adore and care about something, not just because we are afraid it might destroy us.
What is at work could also be a historical disconnect. The great Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, in his last work before his death, The Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity, argues that pre-modern societies were immanentist, whereas modern societies that we live in now are predominately transcendentalist. Immanentist cultures did not distinguish between animate and inanimate, nature and culture, dead and living. Rather, they followed a consequential and radical empiricism where gods were in everything around us. Similarly, Hegel laments that moderns are born into a world with already abstracted concepts that they are struggling to infuse with sensual and empirical concreteness, whereas the Ancient Greeks (a bit like Sahlin’s immanentists) were confidently rooted in sensual life, from which they drew abstractions as they pleased.
To put it more simply, what both Sahlins and Hegel might be saying is that in pre-modern times, awe experiences were ingrained in our cultural systems because the empirical world around us was infused with supernatural godly intent and messages, therefore there was no stark distinction made between our individual inner worlds and the external world we inhabit.
The question is if our modern social and political practices actually understand this neuro-awe deficit that they carry. Indeed, it is important to point out here that liberalism is almost diametrically opposed to awe. Awe is based on a fundamentally hierarchical relationship between the individual who experiences it and the stimuli that generates the awe. It is an emotional reaction to the sublime, for which there is no space, deliberately so, in a liberal secularized, anti-hierarchical world order.
This, indeed, was the deepest and most reactionary criticism of the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt against the Weimar Republic’s liberal constitution and society. It is no coincidence that Schmitt at his heart was a Catholic political theologist who believed in an eschatological coming of the Antichrist. His whole friend/foe distinction is about putting people back in their place. A lot of celebration of hierarchies and negative awe at play here, you could say. Schmitt’s revival by sulky leftists who wanted to “own Rawls” (and now just look irresponsible and dumb), actual conservatives, the CCP and even Peter Thiel reflects awe’s darker side and ambiguous nature.
I will only touch on this darker side briefly now and save it for the next Neuroscience of Awe, Dark Version Part II substack post, which will include my view on how metal music and my own feminist efforts in the scene fit into this.
If you are familiar with how my approach to neuropolitics and the human social brain works though, you will know that I do not single out one emotion or cognitive ability as purely “good/rational” or “bad/irrational”. My former neuroscience Doktorvater Lasana Harris, a deep thinker about the human cognitive evolutionary condition, taught me this early on. This is the same reason why I reject a blanket calls for “more emotions” or “empathy no matter what” in democratic politics.
It’s not because it’s necessarily not desirable, it’s simply not feasible. Neuropolitics is an empirical investigation into how our brains actually work and a normative quest to decide what kinds of brains we need for the liberal democratic societies we envision. We then need to learn to become autonomous agents of our vulnerable brains, which is an everyday and ongoing effort.
With awe, there is the positive awe that I have been speaking about up until now but of course, there is also negative awe. Negative awe is defined by fear-or shock inducing phenomena from natural disasters to vengeful gods to terrifying pandemics. But also, if you are Kafka, it’s menacing larger-than-life authority figures like fathers whom you fear in every line you write. Indeed, the German word for awe Ehrfurcht has the word fear etched in it.
As I have talked about in previous posts and my neuropolitics book, Republican US voters and conservatives in general have an affinity for fear-and security based perceptions of the world. From an awe viewpoint, you could argue that they thrive on using negative awe to achieve compliance, cognitive closure and just world beliefs that justify inequality. Just as with positive awe, negative awe can reinforce social hierarchies and make someone feel small and insignificant. Unlike positive awe, the behavioral consequences are however not prosocial and do not lead to a sense of greater well-being.
The most concrete personal example I could come up with is to grow up as an Asian immigrant girl in the highly negative-awe infused patriarchal Confucian Chinese cultural system on the one hand, and my own teenage positive-awe driven literature, philosophy and science world of books on the other hand. Both made me feel small, but in completely different ways.
Indeed, speaking of teenagers, Britain’s “strictest headmistress” Katherine Birbalsingh, a highly controversial figure who advised Michael Gove’s disastrous educational policies and runs the Michaela School in London, said at the ARC rightwing conference organized by Jordan Peterson and Nigel Farage this year, that young men these days just need to and like to be told what to do.
She almost accuses liberals who refuse to deliver this tough strictness as being emotionally neglectful. In a way, she describes the soothing effects of negative awe-inspiring authority. This also is an uncomfortable reality that our vulnerable brains need to understand and become cultivated enough to reject in favor of liberal equality.
The reason why I decided to talk about the neuroscience of awe to the woman in the audience in the Austrian Alps that night is because I believe that the collapsing of one’s previous belief system in response to the sublime vastness of life, and above all, the subsequent accommodation and rebuilding of one’s world view through one’s autonomy and choice, is perhaps in itself one of the most sublime experiences a free individual can have in our post-Enlightenment world.
Where previously organized world religions, monarchs and patriarchs stepped in to rebuild our sense of self, we can finally do it ourselves. In that choice lies a raging and alive eroticism towards reinvention, transformation and the celebration of the material fluidity of life itself. This is what conservatives and right wingers, at the heart of the brutal culture wars that we are witnessing, are rejecting and this is what is worth fighting for in a time where there seem very few allies left.
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You can watch a short version of my Utopie Talk 2025 here (in German)