Eminent psychologist Nicholas Humphrey has written of the biological advantage of being
awestruck.
How fortuitous he says for a species to find its own ability to contemplate, to marvel
at its own existence has been evolutionarily advantageous.
In other words, it has been biologically selected for because it informs our life with a sense
of cosmic significance that makes us work harder to persist and to survive.
In other words, awe has helped us survive.
A recent study out of Stanford on the subject of awe kind of validates this idea.
They have found that regular incidences of awe leave residual benefits upon the individual
that persists such as increased feelings of empathy and compassion towards others, increased
feelings of altruism and increased feelings of general well-being.
In this study, they define awe as an experience of such perceptual expansion, such perceptual
vastness that you literally have to reconfigure, upgrade your mental schemata just to accommodate,
just to take in the scale of the experience.
This is amazing.
We've all felt this before.
The first time we stared upon the Grand Canyon or succumbed to the immersive power of an
IMAX film, but perhaps the most exquisite account of the experience of awe was articulated
by the brilliant Ross Anderson when writing about the Hubble Space Telescope.
Pay attention.
He says that the Hubble has given us nothing less than an ontological awakening, a forceful
reckoning of what is allowing us to contemplate space and time on a scale just shy of input.
Why?
He says gazing upon the famous Deep Field Photograph literally allows us to mainline
the whole of time through the optic nerve to fit something so impossibly large to something
so impossibly small.
It seemed incredible.
He says through the sheer aesthetic force of its discoveries, the Hubble distills the
impossibly complex abstractions of astrophysics into these singular expressions of color and
light, vindicating Keats famous couplet.
Beauty is truth, truth, beauty.
The Hubble Space Telescope
