Philosophers have long been fascinated by our response to great awe. A sublime view may have stopped your hike. Beautiful music may have given you wings. The enormity of the starry sky may have left an emotion of smallness. 'The desert is so huge, and the horizons so distant, that they make a person feel small," wrote Paulo Coelho in The Alchemist. He was right. Your sense of self may evaporate when feeling awestruck. You may feel calmer and feel nicer, more charitable to others. Awe expands our attention to encompass a bigger picture, so reducing our sense of self. Awe is the feeling we get when confronted with something vast, that transcends our frame of reference and that we struggle to understand. It's an emotion that combines amazement with an edge of fear. Awe produces a vanishing self. The voice in your head, self-interest, self-consciousness, disappears. Here's an emotion that knocks out a really important part of our identity. Immenseness, infinitude, indescribability are some of the classical characteristics of mystical experiences that leave a person with a very powerful sense of awe. But Nature is a more powerful source of awe than religion. Scientists have found that feeling awe makes people happier and less stressed, even weeks later, and that it assists the immune system by cutting the production of cytokines, which promote inflammation. In the modern world, though, we're more likely to be gazing at our smartphones than at giant redwoods or a starry sky. And there is concern about the impact of our increasing disconnection from nature, one of the most potent sources of awe.
