The psychology of wonder
DESCRIPTION:
It has been empirically proven that those who experience wonder perceive time differently. Dacher Keltner and awe research explain why awe forces the brain into the present moment, why fear and admiration are closely related, and why the loss of wonder is an underestimated symptom of chronic exhaustion.
Why the wonder of amazement stretches time – and what burnout has to do with it
Anyone who truly marvels knows that afterwards, nothing is the same as before. Time stretches out. The self takes a brief step back. And for a moment, the world is bigger than any to-do list.
What it’s all about:
· What happens psychologically and in terms of cultural history when we marvel,
· Why awe alters our perception of time,
· What Pablo Neruda and recent studies have in common, and
· Why the loss of awe is one of the underestimated characteristics of chronic exhaustion.
Anyone wishing to understand what goes on inside us when we are overwhelmed by something will find an answer here that is neither esoteric nor trivial.
Awe: What actually happens?
Anyone who is awed by the Northern Lights over a winter landscape, a full rainbow in the evening sky, a sentence that suddenly puts everything into words – gains something from it. But what exactly? The phenomenon is easier to experience than to describe, and that is no coincidence: wonder sets in precisely where our usual categories no longer suffice.
Scientists have been researching wonder for a long time. The feeling is a cognitively graspable state with measurable effects on the brain, the body and the perception of time.
How does psychology define wonder?
Awe encompasses a whole family of related states: from quiet curiosity through deep admiration to the terror of being overwhelmed. In 2003, US psychologist Dacher Keltner, together with Jonathan Haidt, presented the most influential definition: awe arises when grandeur forces the mind to adjust. The mental schema must reconfigure itself.
Keltner deliberately distinguishes aesthetic wonder from other positive emotions, such as joy or pleasure. Not every intense experience is meant: it requires something that transcends one’s own measure. What this means in concrete terms varies from person to person, but the basic structure is the same: the experience cannot be smoothly categorised. And that is precisely what makes this state so significant.
Amazement or awe?
Amazement activates areas of the cerebral cortex, including the insular cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex. Both regions are responsible for integrating physical signals and affective evaluations. At the same time, characteristic autonomic changes occur: the heart rate slows, breathing deepens, and shivering sets in.
Jennifer Stellar and her team demonstrated that such experiences are associated with lower levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines. This suggests a link between emotional experience and neuroendocrine regulation. Research has only begun to explore this.
Between admiration and terror
Awe is not exclusively pleasant. Aristotle was aware of this ambivalence. For him, thinking begins with awe: the noun θαῦμα (thauma) means in Greek ‘miracle’, ‘marvel’, ‘wondrous phenomenon’, and partly also ‘something strange/astonishing’.
The verb θαυμάζειν (thaumazein) is relevant to the act of wonder, meaning roughly ‘to marvel, to be astonished, to admire’ and regarded in the history of philosophy (Plato, Aristotle) as the origin of philosophising.
The same experience of wonder is thus processed differently depending on one’s inner stability: those who marvel without sufficient resources experience the greater as a threat. These conditions are just as important as the act of marvelling itself.
Literature and the cultural history of wonder
The experience of being amazed is not a modern invention. It has permeated literature for centuries. In her work on the cultural history of wonder, the scholar Nicola Gess, a professor at the University of Basel, has shown how, since the early modern period, texts have not only addressed the wonder-worthy but also staged it aesthetically: as an interruption of discourse, as an open question, as a problem of representation that tradition must continually re-pose.
The aesthetics of wonder is an attempt to bring a fundamental human experience into a manageable form whilst preserving its intrinsic value, without dissolving it through explanation.
Insight through wonder
Together with Mireille Schnyder (University of Zurich) and Hugues Marchal, Nicola Gess has presented extensive studies on the poetics of wonder. Each century develops its own forms of shaping wonder: from mysticism to contemporary literature. The magnificent is a form of insight. It generates an understanding that mere imagination cannot produce.
This state brings something new into consciousness, not through argument but through experience. Professor William J. Peters, who analysed the aurora observations following the Ziegler Arctic Expedition (1903–1904), noted precisely this: what was marvellous in the most original sense of the word was not the Northern Lights themselves, but what observing them under extreme conditions triggered in the men’s consciousness. The urge to understand remained alive where everything else faded away.
Awe, burnout and the enigma of timelessness
Strangely enough, those who are under chronic stress for a long time gradually lose access to experiences that momentarily suspend the self. What once filled one with wonder happens. As if the exhausted system were protecting itself from overstimulation by raising the threshold of perception, and in doing so, it loses sensitivity to precisely what creates a sense of time’s density.
Psychologically, this is a mystery that must be carefully unravelled: what has made allowing oneself to be overwhelmed feel threatening? When did the system begin to avoid the uncontrollable? The question of when someone last truly marvelled is rarely trivial in therapeutic work, and the pause that often follows is frequently more revealing than the answer.
Why does awe alter our perception of time?
In one of his later poems, Pablo Neruda described two streams of time: one that devours the past, and one that reveals what lies ahead. The central verse in Neruda’s poem reads, in essence: “Time divides into two streams: one runs backwards, devouring what you live; the other moves forward with you and discovers your life.”
It then goes: “In a single minute they came together: this is it, this is the hour, the drop of a moment that will sweep away the past. It is the present, it is in your hands …”
This is more than just a poetic ‘wow’ effect. It is an empirically confirmed finding. The poem’s central point – responsibility for the present – thrives on the subject, still allowing itself to be gripped and unsettled by its own past, rather than dismissing it as fixed history; this susceptibility to being affected is, structurally speaking, a form of wonder.
To put it another way: wonder manifests as a perceptual attitude that interrupts the seemingly ‘self-evident’ continuity of life, thereby making it possible to consciously redirect the flow of time rather than merely passively repeat it.
In 2012, Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs and Jennifer Aaker demonstrated that, following an ‘experience of awe’, people perceive available time as significantly greater – despite the objective duration remaining identical. Awe expands subjective time by dampening the default mode network, which is otherwise responsible for rumination, future planning, and dwelling on the past. Consciousness lands in the present because the experience forces it there. Pausing is its consequence, not its prerequisite.
Neruda’s verses are sublime in the literal sense: lifting one up, towering above all else. What he grasped intuitively has been proven by science as a measurable state: the stretching of time through experience defies common sense.
Both approaches, Neruda’s and Rudd’s, touch upon the infinity of what can be experienced: they describe something marvellous in the sense that it reaches the limits of understanding and is nevertheless real. That is the true message: wonder is not a luxury one indulges in once everything else is sorted out. It is a prerequisite for time to be experienced and not merely to pass.
The most important points at a glance
· Those who marvel experience time subjectively as longer: this is empirically proven, not a metaphor
· Awe differs from other positive emotions through its own neurobiological signature and measurable effects on immune markers.
· The ambivalence between awe and threat is structural: the same experience has different effects depending on one’s inner stability.
· The natural and human sciences describe the same phenomenon from different perspectives: with astonishingly similar findings.
· Chronic exhaustion dampens the capacity for wonder: this is not a peripheral symptom, but part of the feedback mechanism that sustains exhaustion.
· Allowing oneself to be amazed means allowing oneself to be influenced: a willingness that systematically diminishes under constant stress.
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