Heather Lanier, "The Science of Awe and the Essay" (Assay 12.2)

ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
12.2

Heather Lanier

The Science of Awe and the Essay

I was headed to South Bend, Indiana to give a talk at the 2025 NonfictioNow Conference about the science of awe. In my carry-on luggage were ample notes about how awe might inform our essay-writing. Awe gets us out of our small selves, my notes said. Awe makes us more creative, the research showed. But my watch told me my flight was departing within the hour. So, I was rushing through the Philly airport, wheeling my suitcase past ambling travelers, unaware that awe was doing its best to chase me.

It began with the loomers. I buzzed by two senior-age folks weaving multi-colored thread through looms. Looms! In the middle of PHL! “Walk up and weave,” their sign read. I later learned that they were a contingent of the Guild of Philadelphia Handweavers. Did I stop? No. I plowed forward.
A few feet later, a man in a button-up shirt sat with a typewriter, clicking away. “Dream Poet for Hire,” his sign read. Ross Gay would totally stop, I thought. Ross Gay would turn this into a stunning delight essayette. I buzzed by Dream Poet, too.

At my gate, I sat and closed my eyes. I heard the unwrapping of snacks, the announcing of flight departures, and a loud south Jersey guy on his phone. Then I heard what sounded like the drumline of a marching band.

It got closer, the drumline. The rat-tat of a snare, the timbre of a tenor, the tim-tam of cymbals, the boom-boom of a bass. When I opened my eyes, a real live drumline marched right past the gate.

It was, I later learned, the Seventy-Stixers, the official drumline of the 76ers basketball team. I joined the large circle of travelers watching. People smiled and bopped their heads. They pulled out cameras. Two toddlers danced in jammies. The rhythm was so irresistibly danceable that only the stiffest of us stayed still.

In other words, at eleven A.M. on a Tuesday, the Seventy Stixers turned PHL gate C19 into a collective event. A discordant space of fatigue and anxiety transformed into a place with a nexus of energy, with its own heartbeat.

Collective effervescence, I thought.

Collective effervescence is one of Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner’s “eight wonders of awe.” “Collective effervescence” describes that tingling feeling you get when you are immersed in a group. It happens at sporting events and collective dances, and apparently it happens if drumlines parade past airport gates and pause for an impromptu performance.

When the Seventy-Stixers about-faced and marched on, we travelers didn’t seem to know what to do with ourselves. We went back to staring at our phones, biting into our breakfast sandwiches, and eyeing the flight departure boards. In other words, we returned to our solo worlds.

This is precisely what scientists tell us awe does: it catapults us from our small, egoic concerns into new ways of seeing. It puts us in relationship with something larger than ourselves, whether that be community, nature, or the divine. Keltner, a renowned scientist in the study of human emotion, defines awe as follows: “Being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your understanding of the world” (Keltner 7).

I suspect I’m not alone when I say that Keltner’s definition of awe captures what I want from essays. I want the essays I write to leave me changed after finishing them. An essay often starts with a question, then proceeds when the essayist considers various threads and angles to explore that question. An essayist might start from a narrow pinpoint of a topic, like a memory of a doctor’s appointment or a weird encounter at a fish fry. But the essayist often widens that pinpoint moment, expanding outward into “something vast and mysterious,” as Keltner says, something that “transcends [the essayist’s original] understanding.” My best essays disrupt the way I knew the world before I started writing. A good essay can put me and, hopefully, the reader in a place that is, if not full-blown awe, then awe-adjacent.

Which leads me to ask: What can the science of awe teach about writing essays? How can essayists apply the science of awe to the craft of essay-writing? Can writers create essays that intentionally induce awe?

The Neuroscience of Awe & the Sense of Self

Allow me to start with some fundamentals about what awe does. Some aspect of a person vanishes when they experience awe. Modern psychologists call it our “default selves.” The default self is the version of you that, as Keltner puts it, is “focused on how you are distinct from others, independent, in control, and oriented toward competitive advantage” (Keltner 33). (See: Me at the airport, snaking between travelers.) This default self is goal-oriented: it gets stuff done, it catches flights on time. However, it increases a sense of separateness—from others, and everything else on the planet.

This default self is different than the narrating ones that essayists fashion for readers. The default self is unintentional. It’s not a deliberate construct but an egoic pattern a person falls into. The narrating self is an artistic construct that both befits and enables an essay’s discoveries. The narrating self can exhibit the same neurotic impulses as the default self—if that is what the essay needs—but it is intentional rather than habitual. It has to encompass and transcend the ego. As Montaigne says, “Painting my self for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than the original ones” (qtd. in Klaus 1).

Off the page, a dominant default self creates a lot of the collective woes of our times (climate crisis, war, corporate greed, AI-slop made from the uncredited work of real humans, etc.) Individually, a dominant default self can also increase our anxiety, self-criticism, and depression.
Experiences of awe actually quiet our default selves. Neuroscientists detect this by observing regions of the cortex called the Default Mode Network. Keltner cites a study in Japan where participants watched awe-inspiring nature videos. Afterward, scans showed measurable decreases in participant’s Default Mode Networks. Other studies show the same effects from mystical experiences like meditation, prayer, and psilocybin. In other words, as Keltner puts it, “When we experience awe, regions of the brain that are associated with the excesses of the ego, including self-criticism, anxiety, and even depression, quiet down” (Keltner 36).

Awe researchers found that the default self is replaced by a sense that we are a part of a network of interdependent beings. Awe reminds us of our belonging in larger communities and ecosystems. Awe can therefore support the fashioning of narrators that help enable these connective, expansive discoveries for both essayist and reader. Awe, in other words, can be a remedy for the most troubling aspects of our times.

Writing From Awe

I will leave the question of “how to find awe” to Keltner, who writes an entire book on the subject (Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform You). Suffice it to say, even when essayists aren’t trying to spark awe in their readers, writing from a place of awe can serve as a superfood to one’s creativity. Even seeking small moments of awe in daily life can enliven one’s readiness for essay-writing. “In our studies,” Keltner writes, “people who find more everyday awe show evidence of living with wonder. They are more open to new ideas. To what is unknown… To the absurd. To seeking new knowledge. To experience itself, for example of sound, or color, or bodily sensation” (Keltner 39).

Keltner’s list sounds like a menu of what I’d love to order for my inner landscape before I begin an essay. Writing from a state of openness—to new ideas and to the unknown—is essential if an essayist wants to make a discovery. Being attuned to the body’s sensory experience helps ground the essay in what Mary Karr calls “carnality.” The sights, smells, tastes, touches, and sounds of our lives help make the mind’s concepts palpable for the reader. For instance, Sonya Huber’s essay collection, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System, is filled with complex ideas about pain—how its presence shapes identity, how its reception is gendered. Yet, the book is also rooted in the body. “The Lava Lamp of Pain” begins with a palpable description: “The pain sat warmly on the surface of my hands up to the elbows like evil, pink evening gloves…” (Huber 7). Kiese Laymon begins “Da Art of Storytellin’ (A Prequel)” by viscerally describing both the work his grandmama performed at a chicken plant (“wrists wandered deep in the bellies of dead chickens”) and the careful way she got dressed each morning with primping and powder—“so fresh, so clean” (Laymon 31). Readers might recognize that last phrase as the refrain of Outkast’s hit by the same name, and the essay eventually launches into an analysis of the southern Black hip-hop group, beloved by Laymon. An essayist often needs a keen awareness of the body’s senses in order to prepare readers for nuanced explorations of the mind.

Keltner also says that awe makes a person more open to “the directions thoughts might take during dreams or meditations” (Keltner 39). Dreaming and meditating sometimes feel akin to following an essay as it unfolds on the page or screen. Awe, therefore, likely makes writers more able to participate in that essayistic necessity of unexpected directions: an image that pops into one’s subconscious and becomes an orienting metaphor, a philosophical question that widens the stakes of a moment. In a page, Ross Gay can go from a conversation with his girlfriend, to a lexiconic tendency of his mother, to his sixth-grade pals singing Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh’s “La Di Da Di.” As Philip Lopate writes, “Nonfiction writing thrives on daring, darting, subjective flights of thought. You must get in the habit of inviting, not censoring, the most far-fetched, mischievous notions” (Lopate 43). Essays often come alive when writers follow unexpected detours, and awe can make writers more open to those detours.

Keltner’s researchers also found that awe energizes our thinking. For example, a group of college students were asked to recall a time when they experienced awe—in their case, by remembering an expansive view. After their recollections, the students were more discerning about the strength of an argument, noting which claims were grounded in evidence and which were based on opinion. Contrary to popular belief, awe does not just send a person into a soupy dream space. It can actually make a writer sharper and more discerning—something I desperately need when my essays take me into complex conceptual material.

We don’t need to write an essay from a place of awe. Certainly, other emotional experiences can serve as origins: rage, grief, to name a few. But even in our sorrow or anger, being open to new ideas, allowing more spontaneity in our thoughts, and being more discerning in our cognition are all beneficial ingredients for essays.

Here’s one last argument in favor of writing from a place of awe: It can quantifiably improve not just the states of mind for writing, but the results of writing. In one study, several students were asked to write a poem in response to the question, Why are we alive? These students also reported the amount of awe they felt while writing. Their poems were then evaluated by two groups of people: 1) literature PhD students, and 2) average readers. The PhD students rated the poems based on “sublime” criteria from ancient Greece. (e.g. How bold was the poem? How passionate? How skilled in language? How elegant in structure?) The average readers simply read the poems and reported how inspired they felt (Keltner 62).

Here’s the fascinating result: the more the original writers felt awe while they wrote their poems, the more “sublime” the PhD students judged the poems, and the more inspired the average readers reported the poems making them feel. In other words, awe seems to beget awe. It can also beget better writing—writing that is both professionally more esteemed and personally more impactful (Keltner 63).

Writing Towards Awe

Awe is induced, Keltner says, by hanging out with big trees, and looking at panoramic views, and meditating in an ashram, and attending punk rock shows. It can also occur, he says, when you have “peak experiences with music, visual art, poetry, fiction, and drama” (Keltner xviii). Notice, however, that Keltner leaves out the reading of memoirs or essays. His omission probably says less about his personal prejudices and more about our culture’s preconception of nonfiction as a fact-delivery-system instead of an artform. Still, the omission is a reminder that many average readers don’t expect awe of essays.

Yet, essays are a perfect mode to induce awe. The question is: How might the scientific understanding of awe inform craft?

Consider the effects of one popular, awe-sparking destination: Yosemite National Park. In a study meant to determine how awe can decrease a person’s self-absorption, researcher Yang Bai approached over 1,100 travelers from 42 countries at a breathtaking Yosemite lookout point. She then asked them to draw and label themselves on graph paper. A separate control group of tourists did the same at a different location—Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco (Keltner 33).

One way researchers measure a person’s degree of self-focus is to ask the person to draw themselves and then label their portrait “me.” The size of the figure as well as the M and E letters correlate to a person’s degree of self-fixation. The tourists who spent time standing beside a Yosemite lookout point drew themselves as much smaller than the tourists who spent time in Fisherman’s Wharf. In a comparative sampling, one figure drawn by a Yosemite traveler measured three times smaller than a figure drawn by a Fisherman’s Wharf participant. What’s more, the figure inspired by Yosemite was labeled “me” quietly, in cursive lowercase. The figure inspired by Fisherman’s Wharf was written in large caps: “ME!”—with an exclamation point!

Skeptics could argue that the difference in the self-portraits is just about scale: stare long enough at something big, and you’ll see yourself as physically small. However, continued studies have shown that after participants gaze at expansive views, they report a greater sense of humility. They also believe “the direction of their lives depended on many interacting forces beyond their own agency” (Keltner 36).

In emotion science, these studies are used to prove that awe reduces the preoccupations of our default selves. For essayists, the Yosemite study also can serve as a useful craft metaphor. The Yosemite lookout point induced awe partly because of its vastness. The small self was cast against a larger, impressive reality. Here’s Keltner’s definition of awe again: “Being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your understanding of the world.” How might writers achieve “vastness” in essays?

Keltner is careful to point out that “vastness” does not just mean physical, like taking a walk beneath the sequoias. It can also be temporal. A smell can transport you back in time. This often occurs during memoir- and essay-writing, as evidenced by Andre Aciman’s “Lavender.” “Life begins somewhere with the scent of lavender,” reads the first sentence (Aciman 3). Aciman then spends the first page detailing his associations between lavender, his father, and a profound sense of comfort and safety. “Smell lavender,” he writes, “and you couldn’t pull us apart” (Aciman 4). Just a few sentences later, we are fifty years ahead in time, in a department store, where Aciman is smelling vials of cologne and searching for the one his father wore. In the essay, lavender becomes a portal through time. It also becomes a portal to different versions of Aciman’s self, and into a deeper meditation on the entire nature of selfhood. When cast against the vastness of time and philosophical musings, the self shrinks in relief. Note, however, that it begins with something seemingly small: a single scent.

Another way to open a temporal portal to vastness—and therefore awe—is via history. Cast your personal experiences against the wide expanse of others before you, seeing what came decades or centuries ago, and you can create that “Yosemite effect.” The generations before you loom as large as mountains, right-sizing your small—but still significant—personal tale. Even a quick use of historical research can open up an essay and wow a reader with connections, such as in Melissa Faliveno’s essay “Tomboy.” Faliveno explores questions of sexual and gender identity when no category or word quite suffices. A short passage identifying the historical background of the word “tomboy” reveals its sexist and racist roots, identifying the slippery nature of language to name who we are.

We can also point to whole books where an essayist’s historical research casts a single person’s story against a panoramic whole. In Hyper: A Personal History of ADHD, Timothy Denevi alternates between his experience with the condition and a history of the diagnosis, from the late 19th century to modern day. In Yarn: Remembering the Way Home, Kyoko Mori knits the narrative of her marriage and its unraveling with her deepening understanding of needlework in both Japan and the U.S. In American Breakdown, Jennifer Lunden weaves her experience of chronic illness with the story of the 19th-century writer, Alice James, in order to expose American industrialization’s impact on chronic illness. Awe doesn’t always have to feel good. It just needs to expand (and sometimes even explode) our understanding of reality. Historical vastness can do this because it helps us see our small place in a greater temporal whole.

To recap briefly: there’s physical vastness, and there’s temporal vastness. However, there’s also a third kind of vastness Keltner mentions: conceptual. Through statistics, studies, scientific explanations, sociological theories, and other big-brained concepts, an essayist can put a small-ish subject in a greater landscape of ideas. Even when lightly used, such as in JoAnn Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter,” the mentioning of the cosmos can extend a reader’s eye to larger horizons and induce awe. In her essay about her crumbling marriage, a squirrel-infested house, and her friendship with eventual victims of the 1991 University of Iowa shooting, Beard uses “the fourth state of matter”—a.k.a. plasma—more as a cosmic metaphor than as literal research. Still, the reference has an awe-inducing effect because it casts the singular experience against the existence of something vast and unexplainable.

Of course, concepts can be factually relevant to an essay, not just metaphorical. In “The World Wasn’t Made Straight Up and Down,” I focus on two ordinary subjects directly outside my window: cherry tomatoes still forming on autumn vines, and a four-year-old neighbor who was kicked out of school. The child’sMy neighbor’s IEP specified that he needed an aide to succeed, but the district did not provide him with an aide. When the child’s rule-breaking behaviors escalated from his lack of support, the school said they couldn’t teach him. I wrote about the injustice of my neighbor’s education, and my dwindling tomatoes, and I realized I was really writing about abundance and scarcity. I found the phrase “a capitalist rhetoric of scarcity,” from Candace Fujikane’s Mapping Abundance. Our institutions’ claims of “not-enoughness” are often rhetorical and only for certain people. I also researched the impact of the earth’s tilt on season, and on cycles of scarcity and abundance, and this led me to research what our world would be like if the planet were in fact “straight up and down.” Lastly, I ventured into some ancient history, examining how our transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agrarian societies spawned the social injustice humans tolerate today. I end somewhere near here:

Maybe . . . the world [is slanted] so that we have to reach for each other. So that our abundance of tomatoes must be shared. So that we sometimes need, and cannot ever, any of us, go it alone. If that’s the case, these silos we’ve built are offenses in a battle against our tenderness. They are lies against our gift of mutual need. The world is not made straight up and down: we’ve responded with a pathology in how we treat each other. In our architecture of border fences and budget formulas, we’ve responded with a pathology of independence and scarcity and disregard. Which means we need to knock on each other’s doors. Offer our jars. Become more entangled. Oh, but we need so much more than that. (Lanier)

My small subjects were the tomatoes in my garden and my four-year-old neighbor. By making use of some historical and conceptual “vastness,” I attempted to illuminate the deeper connections between our personal stories, our care for each other, and our planet. Whether it induces awe, only a reader can judge.

Even when focused on the personal, the essay can cast the self against the vast landscapes of time, space, history, and ideas, invoking a sense of “whoa” and “wow” in the process.

Epiphanies & White Space

It’s more than coincidence that one of Keltner’s “eight wonders of awe” is “epiphanies,” and the late great essayist, Brian Doyle, titled his American Scholar blog by the same word. Epiphanies and essays go hand in hand. Keltner writes that an epiphany “unites facts, beliefs, values, intuitions, and images into a new system of understanding” (Keltner 18). I could just as easily substitute the word “essay” for epiphany in that sentence and articulate my personal poetics of the essay.

As I mentioned earlier, an essayist doesn’t write to prove their ideas about things. They write to explore and discover. I know I have an essay to write when I can sense a connection between a series of seemingly disparate scraps: a memory, a research study, an image, a pop song that won’t quit. Usually, the scraps are collected under the umbrella of a nagging question I might not even have the words for yet. The writing becomes a catalyst for an epiphany about that question. Essayists toss beliefs and intuitions onto the page, interrogate them, research questions associated with them, recall images their subconscious brings to them, and in the process, shape an essay into something that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

In her online lecture series, poet Ellen Bass says that a poem is not a reporting of an emotion—it’s an enactment of it. The same could be said of the essay and its epiphany. If drafting the essay is a catalyst for an epiphany, revising it can become an enactment of that epiphany.

In “Toward a Collective Poetics of the Essay,” Carl H. Klaus argues that one key difference between articles and real essays is that articles can be easily recapped. Real essays defy summarization. This is evidenced anytime Generative AI attempts to summarize literary essays: the results are laughably weird and desperate. The algorithm fails to capture the enactment of an epiphany, focusing instead on slices of content it condenses into dead wood. Or, to use another analogy, the algorithm keeps a husk of a human body but can’t perceive the heart, let alone the circulating blood that brings oxygen to every part.

In an essay, the epiphany’s enactment can sometimes work by fragmentation and juxtaposition and white space, highlighting the unsayable between the things said. Or, as Deborah Tall and John D’Agata write in their defining statement on the lyric essay, “It might move by association, leaping from one path of thought to another by way of imagery or connotation, advancing by juxtaposition or sidewinding poetic logic.” These techniques suit awe-inducing essays well. Awe is evidence that our previous understanding has been transcended. But the new state of transcendence can’t always be captured or explained. Keltner says that part of awe’s effect is its ineffability. It can leave a person speechless as they perceive the truth of a mystery that can’t quite be encapsulated. The lyric essayist—nay, sometimes all essayists—braid threads of content, fracture sections, and add white space as ways to leap across images, time, and ideas, and leap over the conceptual mind. The under-explaining—the suggesting rather than explicating—can induce its own awe.

Conclusion

Adversaries of creative nonfiction regularly pop up in the cultural zeitgeist to argue that much of our genre is myopic and solipsistic, with all its focus on singular stories and me me me. But when essayists write under the influence of awe, they automatically expand their sense of self and benefit their writing with increased openness, creativity, and sharpened thinking. Likewise, when essayists write towards a poetics of awe, they might just be able to disrupt the default mode networks of their readers, enabling them to perceive, for even a paragraph, the deeper connections between one another, our ancestors, and our planet.

So, Essayists, go out and find awe—even small bits of everyday wonder. And if it happens to chase you in an airport, via handweavers or drumlines or poets for hire, stop and notice. I can’t guarantee that you’ll make your flight, but you’ll probably write better essays in the process.

Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited.

Heather Lanier's memoir, Raising a Rare Girl (Penguin Press) was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. She's also the author of four poetry collections, including Psalms of Unknowing (Monkfish). Her work has appeared in The Sun, The Atlantic, Longreads, Colorado Review, TIME, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Rowan University, and her TED talk has been viewed three million times and translated into 18 languages. You can subscribe to her Substack, The Slow Take, for occasional essays about the strange beauty of being human.

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