"Some events you attend. Others you experience. Our recent gathering - A Night of Awe and Wonder - was decidedly the latter. The event, produced by Big Think in partnership with the John Templeton Foundation, set out to explore a simple idea: What is awe and how does it inform our lives, our work, and our purpose? In the interdisciplinary style you have come to expect from our work on , we invited seven speakers and a musician to help us unpack the nature of awe from their vantage points."
"Dacher Keltner opened the evening by grounding us in what we came for: awe itself. Not as mystical abstraction, but as a universal emotion backed by rigorous science. He framed why awe matters - how it rewires our brains for resilience, dissolves ego boundaries, and makes us more generous, creative, and fully alive. "Awe," he explained, "is an emotion you feel in the spine tingling, the lump in the throat, the warmth in the chest - when we encounter vast mysteries we don't understand.""
"Janna Levin carried us beyond Earth into the cosmos, where black holes bend reality and the universe reveals its poetic mysteries. She explained that her work - exploring the vast scales of the universe - can cause people to feel a sense of dread or an existential crisis about their imagined insignificance. But she said it has the opposite effect on her: "It gives me a great sense of being part of a grander story of connecting all the way back to the Big Bang.""
Awe operates as a universal emotion grounded in scientific research, producing spine-tingling physiological responses and catalyzing wonder, curiosity, and exploration. Awe rewires neural pathways to increase resilience, dissolve ego boundaries, and promote generosity, creativity, and vitality. Perspectives ranged from cosmic scales—black holes and a felt connection extending back to the Big Bang—to ocean depths and interspecies communication. Wonder serves as an epistemological state that follows awe and animates discovery. The interplay between vast external phenomena and intimate personal experience demonstrates how encounters with mystery reshape perception, purpose, and motivation across scientific, artistic, and narrative domains.
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