The Neuroscience of Awe: How Wonder Rewires Your Brain for Cognitive Flexibility and Emotional Resilience
“Money, fame, class, and titles are just symbols, or opportunities, for making a difference. Real power means enhancing the greater good, and your feelings of power will direct you to the exact way you are best equipped to do this.”
Executive Summary
Awe is not a poetic idea. It is a neurobiological reset that expands perception, quiets the ego-centric narrative, and increases psychological flexibility. When you experience awe, whether standing before a vast landscape or noticing the play of light through leaves on an ordinary street, your brain stops relying on familiar internal models and opens to new possibilities. This is predictive recalibration, a moment when the nervous system shifts from threat-based vigilance to openness, from rigid certainty to flexible curiosity, from self-absorption to connection with something larger. Psychologist Dacher Keltner, whose decades of research have defined the scientific study of awe, describes it as a self-transcendent emotion that diminishes the self not by eroding self-worth but by reducing self-preoccupation. Awe widens perspective, reduces over-identification with immediate stressors, and trains the nervous system to experience safety and meaning in ordinary life. The brain you build creates the life you live. Awe is how you build a brain capable of seeing your life with clarity, gratitude, and wonder.
Read: The Neuroscience of Journaling: How Handwriting Builds Self-Trust and Rewires Your Brain
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The Transformative Power of Awe: How Wonder Rewires Your Brain and Expands Your Life
How to Integrate Practices Into Identity: The Neuroscience of Lasting Transformation and Behaviour Change
Why Awe Matters in Modern Life
We live in a time of endless novelty. More content, more experiences, more stimulation than at any point in human history. And yet, most people rarely experience awe. They move through their days without pausing to notice beauty, scale, or subtlety. They consume images of extraordinary landscapes on screens but feel nothing. They pass moments of quiet wonder, a bird in flight, light breaking through clouds, the care between strangers, without registering them. This is not because awe is rare. It is because the conditions required for awe have been eroded by the very systems designed to capture attention.
Chronic stimulation narrows perception. When your brain is constantly bombarded with input, it shifts into efficiency mode, filtering out anything not immediately relevant to survival, productivity, or social comparison. The neural networks responsible for noticing beauty, for sensing scale, for feeling connection to something larger, become less active. You stop seeing what is in front of you because your brain has learned to process the world as data rather than experience. The brain becomes so focused on managing immediate concerns that it loses access to the very experiences that provide perspective, meaning, and psychological resilience.
Modern life pushes the brain into analytic mode, reducing sensitivity to beauty, scale, and subtlety. Analytic mode is the cognitive state in which you are problem-solving, categorising, evaluating, and judging. It is essential for navigating complexity, but when it dominates, it disconnects you from the perceptual richness of the world. You see a tree and think "tree." You see a sunset and think, "Nice." You pass a moment of human connection and think nothing at all because your mind is already elsewhere, planning, worrying, rehearsing. This is automaticity, and while efficient, it is deadening. It flattens experience. It reduces life to a series of tasks, obligations, and evaluations rather than moments worth inhabiting.
Awe reconnects people to meaning, orientation, and their place in the world. When you experience awe, the analytic mode softens. The self-referential narrative quiets. The brain shifts from evaluating to perceiving, from thinking about the world to being present within it. Awe reminds you that you are part of something larger than your immediate concerns. And this reminder does not diminish you. It locates you. It gives you a sense of place, of proportion, of belonging. Keltner's research shows that awe increases feelings of connection, not only to other people but to life itself, to the natural world, to the sense that existence is meaningful even when it is difficult.
Awe is not escapism. It is perspective recalibration. When you are caught in rumination, when your problems feel insurmountable, when your identity feels fixed and limiting, awe interrupts. It shows your brain that the frame you have been operating within is not the only frame, that the predictions you have been generating are not the only possibilities. This does not solve your problems, but it changes your relationship with them. It creates space. It reduces the intensity of self-focused distress. It allows you to see your life from a distance, with more clarity, more compassion, more possibility. This is why awe is not a luxury but a psychological necessity, especially in times of transition, uncertainty, or overwhelm. It is how the brain resets, recalibrates, and regains the flexibility required to navigate complexity without collapsing into rigidity or despair.
✍️ Ready to take this further?
If this spoke to you, it’s because you’re ready to stop living by default and start living by design. The next step is choosing how you want to strengthen your inner architecture:
👉 Explore the 30-Day Journal - neuroscience-backed daily prompts to rewire patterns, build the brain for the life you want to live, and connect with your future self
👉 Book Office Hours - bring the knot, and we’ll untangle it together in a focused 1:1 session designed to bring clarity, strategy, and momentum where you need it most
The Neuroscience of Awe
Awe is a distinct emotional state with a unique neural signature. It is not simply happiness or contentment. It is a complex, self-transcendent emotion that engages multiple brain networks simultaneously, creating a shift in perception, identity, and nervous system regulation that is measurable, replicable, and profoundly transformative.
The default mode network, the DMN, is one of the primary networks affected by awe. The DMN is responsible for self-referential thinking, for the internal narrative you construct about who you are, what you should be doing, what went wrong, and what might go wrong. In most people, the DMN is overactive, generating a constant stream of thoughts about the self that are often repetitive, negative, and disconnected from the present moment. When it dominates, it creates a sense of being trapped inside your own mind, unable to access the richness of immediate experience.
Awe temporarily reduces DMN activity. When you experience something vast, beautiful, or overwhelming in scale, the brain's self-referential processing quiets. The constant internal commentary softens. You are no longer thinking about yourself. You are simply perceiving. Keltner describes this as the "small self" effect, the sense that your individual concerns, while still valid, are not the entirety of what matters. This is not self-negation but self-contextualisation. You are still here, still present, but you are no longer the centre of your own awareness. And this shift produces humility, connectedness, and emotional openness.
The salience network determines what your brain treats as important, what gets your attention, and what gets encoded into memory. In most people, the salience network is biased toward threat, toward what could go wrong, toward what needs to be managed or avoided. Awe recalibrates this network. It heightens attention to patterns, novelty, and meaning rather than threat. It trains the brain to notice rather than defend, to be curious rather than guarded, to orient toward beauty and connection rather than fear and scarcity. After experiencing awe, people report noticing more beauty, more moments of connection, more reasons for gratitude. This is not because the world has changed but because the brain's filter has changed.
The parietal cortex, particularly the regions involved in spatial perception and body awareness, is also affected by awe. The parietal cortex constructs your sense of where you are in space, how large you are relative to your environment, where your body ends, and where the world begins. Awe shifts this spatial perception, creating the experience of vastness, of being small in relation to something much larger. Keltner's research shows that this "small self" experience does not diminish self-worth but reduces self-absorption. And this reduction is psychologically beneficial because self-absorption is exhausting. When you are constantly preoccupied with your own concerns, the nervous system remains in a state of tension. Awe releases this tension by showing the brain that you are part of a larger system, that your concerns, while real, are not the entirety of existence.
The autonomic nervous system also responds to awe in distinct ways. Awe induces physiological calm without suppression. Unlike relaxation practices that aim to reduce arousal, awe maintains a state of alertness whilst simultaneously calming the nervous system. Heart rate variability increases, signalling that the nervous system is flexible, adaptive, and capable of responding to the environment without being overwhelmed by it. This is the state in which the parasympathetic and sympathetic branches are balanced, allowing you to be both present and regulated, both engaged and calm. This state is essential for learning, for creativity, for emotional resilience, for the capacity to hold complexity without collapsing into reactivity or avoidance.
Read: The Default Mode Network: From Rumination to Revelation
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✍️ Ready to take this further?
If this spoke to you, it’s because you’re ready to stop living by default and start living by design. The next step is choosing how you want to strengthen your inner architecture:
👉 Explore the 30-Day Journal - neuroscience-backed daily prompts to rewire patterns, build the brain for the life you want to live, and connect with your future self
👉 Book Office Hours - bring the knot, and we’ll untangle it together in a focused 1:1 session designed to bring clarity, strategy, and momentum where you need it most
Awe as Predictive Expansion
Awe is not simply an emotional experience. It is a predictive event, a moment when the brain's automatic forecasting systems pause, recalibrate, and update their models of what is possible, what is safe, and what matters. This connects awe directly to the predictive processing framework that underpins all five practices in this series.
The brain generates models of what will happen next based on patterns learned from the past, and it uses those models to guide perception, emotion, and behaviour. Most of the time, these predictions are efficient, allowing you to navigate the world without consciously processing every detail. But they are also limiting. When predictions go unchallenged, they become rigid. The brain stops updating its models. It filters out information that contradicts its expectations. It locks into familiar patterns, familiar identities, familiar ways of seeing the world. This is the "certainty loop," the state in which the brain prioritises stability over growth, efficiency over exploration, the known over the unknown.
Awe disrupts habitual prediction loops. When you encounter something vast, beautiful, or beyond your capacity to fully comprehend, your brain experiences prediction error at a fundamental level. It cannot categorise what it is perceiving. It cannot fit the experience into existing models. It cannot predict what will happen next. And instead of dismissing this error, instead of filtering it out, the brain pauses. It stops generating automatic predictions. It opens to the moment as it is, without trying to make it familiar, without trying to control it, without trying to reduce it to something manageable. This pause is where transformation happens.
When the brain encounters vastness or beauty, it recalibrates and updates internal models. The DMN quiets. The salience network shifts. The parietal cortex adjusts your sense of scale. And in that adjustment, the brain's rigid predictions loosen. You are no longer operating from the assumption that tomorrow will look like yesterday, that who you are now is who you will always be, that the problems you face are insurmountable. Awe introduces flexibility. It shows the brain that the models it has been holding are not fixed, that the predictions it has been generating are not inevitable, that the identity it has been defending is not the entirety of who you are.
Awe softens the rigidity that keeps people stuck in old identities and patterns. Certainty feels safe, grounding. But when certainty becomes rigidity, it limits growth. The brain becomes so invested in maintaining its existing models that it resists change, even when change is necessary. Awe reduces the brain's dependence on certainty. It teaches the nervous system that uncertainty is not inherently threatening, that the unknown can be a source of wonder rather than fear, and that flexibility is more adaptive than control.
Awe makes the brain more willing to accept new futures. This is the bridge between visualisation and awe. Visualisation asks the brain to imagine a future self, to hold a model of who you are becoming. But if the brain is rigid, locked into certainty, heavily invested in past-based predictions, visualisation feels implausible, unconvincing, threatening. Awe creates the cognitive flexibility required for visualisation to work. It loosens the grip of old identity models. It expands the frame of what feels possible. It shows the brain that transformation is not only achievable but natural, that the self is not fixed but evolving, that the future does not have to replicate the past. Awe teaches the system that the unknown is not inherently threatening but can be beautiful, nourishing, and meaningful.
Read: Why Serotonin, Not Dopamine, Builds Long-Term Wellbeing
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Why We Stop Noticing (and How It Shrinks the Mind)
Awe is not rare. The world is full of moments that could evoke wonder if the brain were primed to notice them. But most people move through their days without seeing what is in front of them. This is not apathy. It is perceptual blindness, the predictable consequence of cognitive efficiency, chronic stress, and digital saturation.
Cognitive efficiency leads to perceptual blindness. The brain is designed to become efficient at processing familiar environments, freeing up cognitive resources for tasks that require deliberate attention. But efficiency comes at a cost. When something becomes familiar, the brain stops perceiving it fully. It generates predictions about what it expects to see and then uses those predictions to fill in the details, rather than actually processing the sensory data. This is why you can walk the same route every day and never notice the tree that has been there for years, why you can live in a city and never see the architecture. The brain is not seeing the world. It is seeing its predictions of the world. And predictions are always simplified, always incomplete, always less rich than reality.
Stress increases tunnel vision. When the nervous system is in a state of chronic vigilance, when the amygdala is overactive and the prefrontal cortex is overloaded, perception narrows. The brain allocates attention to immediate threats, immediate tasks, immediate concerns. It filters out anything not directly relevant to survival or problem-solving. You stop noticing beauty because beauty is not relevant to the problem you are trying to solve. You stop sensing connection because connection is not relevant to the threat you are trying to manage. You stop experiencing awe because awe requires a nervous system that is calm enough, spacious enough, flexible enough to open to something larger than the immediate moment.
Digital saturation reduces sensitivity to subtle beauty and micro-moments of meaning. The brain adapts to the level of stimulation it receives. When you are constantly exposed to high-intensity input, bright screens, rapid cuts, algorithmically optimised content designed to capture attention, your baseline for what feels interesting, engaging, or meaningful shifts. Subtle experiences, the play of light on water, the quiet presence of another person, the slow unfolding of a natural process, no longer register as salient. They are not intense enough, not novel enough, not stimulating enough to break through the noise. The capacity for awe atrophies. The neural networks that support subtle noticing, that respond to beauty, that generate feelings of connection and meaning, become less active, less accessible, less integrated into everyday experience.
The nervous system becomes patterned toward threat, not wonder. When you spend most of your time in analytic mode, in problem-solving mode, in vigilance mode, the brain learns that this is the default state. It expects to be evaluating, categorising, defending. It does not expect to be perceiving, connecting, opening. And this expectation shapes what you experience. You can be standing in front of something objectively beautiful and feel nothing because your nervous system is not in a state that allows awe to arise.
Awe requires slowing, noticing, and softening perceptual boundaries. Awe is not something that happens to you. It is something you train. You train the nervous system to shift out of vigilance mode and into receptive mode. You train attention to move from analytic to perceptual. You train the brain to notice what is actually present rather than what it predicts should be present. This training is not complicated, but it is deliberate. It requires that you slow down, that you turn your attention outward in a way that is curious rather than evaluative, that you allow yourself to be affected by what you see rather than immediately categorising it, explaining it, or moving past it.
Read: How Emotions Are Constructed - Neuroscience Meets Human Design
✍️ Ready to take this further?
If this spoke to you, it’s because you’re ready to stop living by default and start living by design. The next step is choosing how you want to strengthen your inner architecture:
👉 Explore the 30-Day Journal - neuroscience-backed daily prompts to rewire patterns, build the brain for the life you want to live, and connect with your future self
👉 Book Office Hours - bring the knot, and we’ll untangle it together in a focused 1:1 session designed to bring clarity, strategy, and momentum where you need it most
Awe Walks: The Accessible Doorway Into Wonder
An awe walk is not a hike. It is not a trip to a dramatic landscape. It is not reserved for people with time, resources, or access to nature. An awe walk is a formalised practice: intentional movement combined with intentional noticing. It is a way of training the brain to shift out of automatic prediction and into present-moment perception, and it works not because of where you go but because of how you attend.
Awe walks are not about scenery. They are about perceptual orientation. You can experience awe in a forest, on a mountain, beside the ocean. But you can also experience awe on an urban street, in a park, in your own neighbourhood. Awe is not dependent on extraordinary environments but on the state of your nervous system, the quality of your attention, and your willingness to notice what is actually present rather than what you expect to be there. Keltner's research demonstrates that awe arises not only from vast natural landscapes but from everyday moments: the laughter of a child, the kindness of a stranger, the way light filters through a window, the resilience of a plant growing through concrete. These moments are always available. What is not always available is the perceptual openness required to notice them.
Awe walks activate the sensory cortices, shifting the brain from conceptual to perceptual mode. When you walk with the intention of noticing, of seeing, of sensing, you are engaging the parts of your brain responsible for direct sensory experience rather than the parts responsible for categorising, evaluating, or planning. You are not thinking about the tree. You are seeing the tree: the texture of the bark, the way the branches move in the wind, the pattern of light and shadow. This shift from conceptual to perceptual is what allows awe to arise.
Why, even an urban street, a shadow, a pattern of light, or the presence of two people sharing a moment can evoke awe. Awe is not about magnitude in the conventional sense. It is about encountering something that exceeds your capacity to fully categorise or comprehend it, something that disrupts your automatic predictions and invites you to simply be present with what is. A shadow cast across a wall can be vast in its simplicity, in the way it shifts and changes, in the way it reveals the movement of the sun, the passage of time, the impermanence of everything. Two people sharing a moment of care can be overwhelming in its humanity, in the reminder that connection is real, that kindness exists, that people are capable of holding each other even when the world feels hard.
The practice is simple but precise. Choose a time and a place. It does not need to be long. Fifteen minutes is enough. It does not need to be remote. Your neighbourhood is enough. Begin by slowing your pace. Walk at a speed that allows you to notice, to sense, to take in what is around you. Bring your attention to your breath, to the sensation of your body moving, to the feeling of your feet on the ground. This grounds you in the present moment. And then, shift your attention outward. Not in a scanning, evaluative way, but in a receptive, curious way. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you notice that you usually walk past without registering?
Look for patterns. The way branches intersect against the sky. The rhythm of people moving through space. The interplay of light and texture. Look for scale. The height of a building. The vastness of the sky. The smallness of your body in relation to the environment. Look for moments of connection. People caring for each other. Animals moving with purpose. The evidence of life continuing, persisting, adapting. Allow yourself to be moved by what you see. Do not explain it, categorise it, or move past it. Simply take it in. Let it affect you.
This is not escapism. It is attention training. It is the practice of shifting the brain out of the habitual prediction loops that narrow perception and into the present-moment awareness that expands it. And when you do this regularly, when you train the brain to notice, to soften, to open, something shifts. The world does not change. But your experience of the world changes. You begin to see beauty where you previously saw only routine. You begin to feel a connection where you previously felt only isolation. You begin to experience meaning where you previously felt only overwhelm.
Read: Repair, Rewire, Remember, Return: A Nervous System-Led Framework for Real Transformation
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✍️ Ready to take this further?
If this spoke to you, it’s because you’re ready to stop living by default and start living by design. The next step is choosing how you want to strengthen your inner architecture:
👉 Explore the 30-Day Journal - neuroscience-backed daily prompts to rewire patterns, build the brain for the life you want to live, and connect with your future self
👉 Book Office Hours - bring the knot, and we’ll untangle it together in a focused 1:1 session designed to bring clarity, strategy, and momentum where you need it most
The Emotional Effects of Awe
Awe is not simply a cognitive experience. It is an emotional one, and the emotions it generates have measurable effects on behaviour, relationships, and psychological well-being. It increases feelings of connection, compassion, and pro-social behaviour. Keltner's research demonstrates that after experiencing awe, people are more likely to help others, to act generously, to prioritise collective wellbeing over individual gain. This is not because awe makes you selfless in an unrealistic way, but because awe shifts your frame of reference. When you experience the "small self" effect, when your individual concerns feel less central, you become more aware of others, more attuned to their needs, more capable of holding space for their experience.
Awe reduces obsessive self-focus and softens rigid narratives about the self. When the DMN quiets, when self-referential thinking softens, you stop being so preoccupied with your own story. The narrative you have been telling yourself about who you are, what you are capable of, and what is wrong with you loses some of its grip. This does not mean you stop caring about yourself or your life. It means you stop being trapped inside the story. You gain perspective. You see that the narrative is not the entirety of who you are, that the identity you have been defending is not fixed, that the limitations you have been believing are not inevitable.
In addition awe supports emotional regulation by widening the window of tolerance. The window of tolerance is the range of emotional intensity you can experience without becoming dysregulated, without collapsing into overwhelm or shutting down into numbness. Awe expands this window. When you experience something vast, something beautiful, something that puts your concerns in perspective, your nervous system learns that it can hold more. It can tolerate more complexity, more uncertainty, more emotional intensity without needing to immediately resolve it, avoid it, or shut it down. This is emotional resilience: not the absence of difficulty but the capacity to hold difficulty without collapsing.
Finally, awe interrupts repetitive stress patterns, offering micro-recovery moments. Stress is not inherently harmful. Acute stress, when followed by recovery, strengthens the nervous system. But chronic stress, when there is no recovery, depletes it. Awe creates these pauses. When you experience awe, even for a few moments, the sympathetic nervous system calms. Heart rate variability increases. The body shifts out of vigilance mode and into a state of regulated alertness. This is not deep rest, but it is recovery. It is a micro-reset that allows the nervous system to recalibrate, to release accumulated tension, to return to a state of flexibility rather than rigidity.
Read: You’re Not Supposed to Know It All: How Collective Intelligence Redefines Success, Ideas, and Decision-Making
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Awe and Identity: Becoming Someone Who Sees Their Life
Identity is not only shaped by the stories you tell yourself about who you are. It is shaped by what you notice, what you attend to, and what you allow to register as meaningful. When you spend most of your time focused on problems, threats, and limitations, the brain constructs an identity around scarcity, around what is lacking, around the sense that life is primarily a struggle. But when you train yourself to notice beauty, vastness, and connection, the brain constructs a different identity, one rooted in sufficiency, in possibility, in the sense that life is not only difficult but also rich, meaningful, worth inhabiting fully.
Awe loosens old identity patterns by revealing a bigger frame of reference. Most people's identity is constructed from a narrow set of experiences, beliefs, and narratives. When you experience awe, the frame expands. You see yourself in relation to something larger: the natural world, the cosmos, the continuity of human existence, the interconnectedness of all life. And in that larger frame, the identity you have been defending feels less absolute. The beliefs you have held feel less fixed. The limitations you have accepted feel less inevitable. This is not self-negation. It is identity expansion.
The brain becomes less preoccupied with micro-threats and more oriented toward meaning. When the salience network is constantly scanning for threats, the brain prioritises immediate concerns over long-term meaning. Awe recalibrates the salience network. It teaches the brain that meaning is also salient, that beauty is also worth attending to, and that connection is also important. And when meaning becomes salient, the micro-threats lose some of their grip. You still notice them, but you are no longer consumed by them. You can hold them in perspective.
Awe supports identity transformation because it disrupts the narrative of limitation. When you are stepping into a new version of yourself, the brain resists because it is invested in the old identity, in the familiar patterns, in the predictions it has been generating for years. Awe weakens this resistance. It shows the brain that identity is not fixed, that the self is not a solid thing but a fluid process, that who you are now is not who you will always be. This creates the cognitive flexibility required for transformation.
Awe helps people witness their life with depth, gratitude, and perspective. Most people live their lives without fully inhabiting them. They move through their days on autopilot, thinking about the past or worrying about the future, without ever being fully present to what is actually happening. Awe brings you back. It reminds you that this moment is real, that this life is yours, that you are here, now, capable of seeing, feeling, experiencing. And this reminder is grounding. It is what allows you to make decisions from clarity rather than fear, to act from values rather than urgency, to lead your life rather than simply survive it.
✍️ Ready to take this further?
If this spoke to you, it’s because you’re ready to stop living by default and start living by design. The next step is choosing how you want to strengthen your inner architecture:
👉 Explore the 30-Day Journal - neuroscience-backed daily prompts to rewire patterns, build the brain for the life you want to live, and connect with your future self
👉 Book Office Hours - bring the knot, and we’ll untangle it together in a focused 1:1 session designed to bring clarity, strategy, and momentum where you need it most
How to Practice Awe in Daily Life (Science | Strategy | Soul)
Awe is not a feeling you wait for. It is a state you train. And the training is accessible, practical, and surprisingly simple once you understand the mechanisms involved.
Science: Slow the Nervous System to Allow Perceptual Openness
Awe requires a nervous system that is calm enough, spacious enough, flexible enough to open to something larger than immediate concerns. When the sympathetic nervous system is in overdrive, when the amygdala is hyperactive, when the prefrontal cortex is overloaded, the brain does not have the bandwidth for awe.
Begin with breath. Slow, deliberate breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system, signalling to the brain that you are safe, that there is no immediate threat, that it is possible to shift out of vigilance mode and into receptive mode. Before you begin an awe walk, pause. Take three deep breaths. Feel your body settle. Notice the transition from doing to being, from thinking to sensing.
Engage multisensory noticing. Awe arises when the brain is processing rich sensory information rather than abstract concepts. What do you hear? What do you feel? What do you smell? The more senses you engage, the more present you become, and presence is what allows awe to arise.
Allow prediction errors. Let the unexpected feel wondrous, not threatening. Most people's brains are trained to treat prediction error as a problem, as something to be corrected, explained, or dismissed. But prediction error is also the doorway to awe. When something does not match your expectations, pause. Do not immediately explain it. Simply take it in. Allow the brain to experience the mismatch without needing to resolve it.
Strategy: Choose Familiar Environments and Notice Micro-Moments
Awe does not require travel or dramatic landscapes. Awe is often more accessible in familiar environments because familiarity allows the brain to relax, to stop scanning for threats, to shift into noticing mode rather than vigilance mode.
Choose a familiar environment. Your neighbourhood, a local park, the street you walk every day. The goal is not novelty but depth of attention. When you walk the same route with the intention of noticing, you begin to see details you have overlooked for years.
Look for micro-moments of awe rather than extraordinary scenes. A bird landing on a branch. The expression on a stranger's face as they laugh. The way shadows move across a wall. The resilience of a plant growing through concrete. Keltner's research shows that awe is not dependent on magnitude in the conventional sense but on the capacity to be moved by what is present.
Notice the human connection. Grandparents with children. Acts of kindness. Care between strangers. One of the most reliable sources of awe is witnessing the ways people hold each other, help each other, and show up for each other. These moments are profoundly moving because they remind you that connection is real, that people are capable of extraordinary care even in ordinary circumstances.
Use the walk to shift from thinking to observing. Most people walk while thinking. They are planning, worrying, rehearsing, and evaluating. Awe walks reverse this. The walk becomes foreground. The thinking becomes background.
Soul: Let Yourself Be Moved by What You See
Awe is not only a cognitive or physiological practice. It is a practice of opening to life, of allowing yourself to be affected by what you see, of recognising that beauty, vastness, and connection are not peripheral to meaning but central to it.
Let yourself be moved by what you see. Most people have learned to suppress emotional responses in public, to remain composed, to keep feelings private. Awe asks you to soften this suppression. If something moves you, let it. If you feel tears, let them come. If you feel your chest open, let it. This is not about being dramatic or performative. It is about allowing the natural emotional responses that arise when you are present to beauty, to vastness, to connection.
Allow beauty to soften your internal world. Most people's internal world is harsh. They are self-critical, self-judging, self-doubting. They carry tension, worry, and the accumulated weight of unprocessed stress. Beauty is not a distraction from this harshness. It is a counterbalance. When you allow yourself to take in something beautiful, when you let it register fully, it softens the internal landscape. This softening is not an escape. It is nourishment.
Let awe remind you that you are part of something larger. This is the deepest function of awe. It locates you. It gives you a sense of place, of proportion, of belonging. When you experience something vast, something beautiful, something that exceeds your capacity to fully comprehend it, you remember that your individual concerns, while real, are not the entirety of what matters. You remember that you are part of a larger system, a larger story, a larger unfolding. And this memory is liberating.
Awe Walk Prompts (Neuroscience-Based)
Prompts are invitations for the brain to shift into noticing mode, to engage perceptual networks rather than conceptual ones, to attend to what is present rather than what is predicted.
Noticing Prompts
What detail did I almost miss? This prompt trains attention. The brain is constantly filtering out information that it predicts is irrelevant. When you ask yourself what you almost missed, you are training the brain to notice the details it usually dismisses. Over time, this question expands the perceptual field.
What did my brain predict, and what surprised me? This prompt makes the predictive process visible. When something surprises you, when it does not match the prediction, that is a prediction error. And prediction error is the doorway to awe. This question teaches you to notice the mismatches, to recognise when reality exceeds expectation.
Emotional Prompts
What feeling is awakened in my body as I take this in? This prompt engages interoception, the brain's ability to sense internal states. Awe is not only a cognitive experience but an embodied one. When you witness something beautiful, your body responds. This question asks you to notice those responses, to feel them fully.
Where do I sense expansion or softening? This prompt attunes you to the "small self" effect. Awe often creates a physical sensation of expansion, of softening, of the boundaries between self and world becoming more permeable. When you notice this sensation, you are training the brain to recognise that self-transcendence is not threatening but nourishing.
Integration Prompts
What shifted in my perspective today? This prompt supports integration. Awe changes perception, but the change is subtle. Without reflection, it is easy to move past the experience without encoding it. This question asks you to name the shift, to articulate what feels different.
What does this moment teach me about what matters? This prompt connects awe to meaning. Awe is not only about feeling good or experiencing beauty. It is about remembering what is important, what is worth attending to, what gives life depth and purpose.
✍️ Ready to take this further?
If this spoke to you, it’s because you’re ready to stop living by default and start living by design. The next step is choosing how you want to strengthen your inner architecture:
👉 Explore the 30-Day Journal - neuroscience-backed daily prompts to rewire patterns, build the brain for the life you want to live, and connect with your future self
👉 Book Office Hours - bring the knot, and we’ll untangle it together in a focused 1:1 session designed to bring clarity, strategy, and momentum where you need it most
The Leadership Application: Awe as a Cognitive Tool
Leadership is not only about decision-making, strategy, or influence. Leadership is about holding a wide enough perspective to see beyond immediate problems, flexible enough thinking to generate novel solutions, and enough emotional capacity to stay grounded under pressure whilst remaining open to others. Awe is central to these capacities.
Awe widens perceptual fields, improving strategic thinking. Most strategic thinking is narrow, focusing on the immediate problem, the immediate market, and the immediate competitors. Strategic breakthroughs often come from seeing patterns that others miss, from noticing connections that are not immediately obvious. Awe trains this capacity. When you experience awe, the brain's perceptual field expands. You see more, notice more, hold more in awareness simultaneously. The salience network becomes more attuned to patterns, to complexity, to novelty. And this attunement translates directly into strategic advantage.
Awe increases cognitive flexibility, reducing rigid patterns and increasing innovation. Innovation requires the capacity to see beyond what already exists, to imagine what is not yet real, to hold multiple possibilities simultaneously without needing to immediately resolve them. Awe builds cognitive flexibility by disrupting the certainty loop. When you experience something that exceeds your capacity to categorise it, your brain stops defending its predictions and opens to new information. This openness is what allows innovation to emerge.
Awe strengthens compassion and relational intelligence. Leadership is relational. It requires the capacity to read others, to hold space for their experience, to navigate complexity with care rather than control. Awe interrupts self-focus. When the DMN quiets, when self-referential thinking softens, you become more attuned to others. You notice what they need, how they are responding, what they are experiencing. This perceptual attunement is what builds trust, what creates psychological safety, and what allows teams to perform at their highest level.
Awe helps leaders step out of threat-based decision-making. Most leadership decisions are made under pressure, under time constraints, under conditions of uncertainty. And when the nervous system is in threat mode, decisions become defensive. Awe recalibrates the nervous system. It shows the brain that safety and uncertainty can coexist, that openness is not vulnerability, that flexibility is strength. And when the nervous system is regulated, when the amygdala is less reactive, when the prefrontal cortex is online, decisions become clearer, more aligned with values, more capable of holding complexity.
How Awe Prepares the Mind for Integration
Awe is the fourth practice in this series, and it serves a specific function in the developmental arc. Journaling consolidates the self by teaching you to witness your own mind. Meditation stabilises the self by training attention and nervous system regulation. Visualisation stretches the self by generating future-oriented identity models. And awe softens the self, creating the cognitive flexibility and emotional openness required for integration, for weaving the practices together into a coherent system, for allowing transformation to stabilise rather than fragment.
Awe loosens cognitive rigidity and opens the mind to integration. Integration is the process of holding multiple aspects of your experience simultaneously, of recognising that you are not one thing but many things, that your life is not a single narrative but a complex, evolving system. This requires cognitive flexibility. When the brain is rigid, locked into certainty, defending a single identity or a single story, integration is not possible. Awe loosens this rigidity. It shows the brain that the self is not fixed, that identity is fluid, that the narratives you have been holding are not the entirety of who you are.
After journaling, meditation, and visualisation, awe supports the synthesis of identity. Journaling gives you clarity about your thoughts. Meditation gives you the capacity to witness those thoughts without being consumed by them. Visualisation gives you a model of who you are becoming. But without awe, these practices can feel effortful, disconnected, and isolated from the richness of lived experience. Awe brings them together. It reminds you why you are doing this work. It shows you that transformation is not only possible but natural.
Awe makes it easier to connect disparate threads of life into a coherent whole. Most people's lives feel fragmented: work is separate from relationships, past is separate from the future. This fragmentation is exhausting. Awe reduces fragmentation by expanding the frame. When you experience something vast, something that reminds you of the continuity of existence, the interconnectedness of all things, the larger patterns that hold life together, the fragments begin to cohere. This is integration: not the elimination of complexity but the capacity to hold complexity without feeling torn apart by it.
Awe brings people back to meaning, which stabilises long-term change. Change is fragile. Most people start strong and then revert to old patterns because the change was not anchored in something deeper than willpower or motivation. Awe provides that anchor. It connects transformation to meaning, to purpose, to the sense that life is not only about achieving goals or solving problems but about being fully present to the richness, the beauty, the complexity of existence. And when change is anchored in meaning, it becomes sustainable.
Closing Reflection
Awe reminds us that life is larger than our immediate concerns. It shows the nervous system that safety and wonder can coexist, that openness is not vulnerability, that the unknown can be a source of meaning rather than fear. It brings the brain into a state where it can learn, integrate, and transform, not through effort or force, but through presence, receptivity, and the willingness to be moved by what is.
Awe is not occasional. It is not reserved for extraordinary moments or dramatic landscapes. It is a way of seeing, a way of attending, a way of being present to the life you are already living. And when you train your brain to see differently, you live differently. Not because the external circumstances have changed, but because you have changed your relationship to those circumstances. You are no longer trapped inside the narrow frame of your own concerns. You are located within something larger, something meaningful, something that holds you even when life is difficult.
This is the deepest function of awe. It locates you. It gives you a sense of place, of proportion, of belonging. It reminds you that you are not alone, that you are part of a continuity that stretches back through time and forward into the future, that your life is not isolated but interconnected with all life. And this reminder is not sentimental. It is grounding. It is what allows you to navigate difficulty without losing yourself, to face uncertainty without collapsing into fear, to hold complexity without fragmenting into overwhelm.
The brain you build creates the life you live. And awe is how you build a brain capable of perceiving beauty, vastness, and connection even in the midst of ordinary life, even when circumstances are challenging, even when the path forward is uncertain. This is not an escape. This is presence. This is the capacity to witness your life with depth, gratitude, and wonder. And when you can witness your life in this way, everything changes. Not because the world has become easier, but because you have become more capable of seeing it clearly, feeling it deeply, and living it fully.
Work With Me: From Insight to Integration
If this essay resonates, you’re likely already aware of the space between what you know and what you’ve fully integrated. You understand that depth matters, that reflection fuels foresight, and that leadership demands more than execution. Yet bridging that space between insight and embodiment requires more than intention. It requires design, structures that support reflection, practices that strengthen the nervous system, and guidance that translates understanding into sustainable change.
Work with Ann
Ann works with leaders, creatives, and strategists who are ready to:
• Move from mental noise to coherence, learning to regulate attention without suppressing introspection
• Design sustainable rhythms, embedding reflective and restorative practices into high-performance lives
• Strengthen strategic foresight, building the neural pathways between vision and execution
• Cultivate leadership presence, integrating emotional intelligence, focus, and depth
Her approach combines applied neuroscience, strategic foresight, and contemplative practice. We don’t just speak about integration, we build it. Through personalised protocols, accountability frameworks, and iterative refinement, we strengthen the brain’s architecture for sustainable success and creative fulfilment.
How We Can Work Together
1. One-to-One Coaching
Private, high-level work for leaders navigating complexity, transition, or a desire for deeper alignment. Together, we design your cognitive ecology, the rhythms, environments, and neural practices that support integration and long-term clarity.
2. Leadership Development
For teams and organisations ready to cultivate reflective capacity alongside execution. I design custom programmes that integrate neuroscience, narrative work, and strategic foresight, developing cultures that think deeply and act decisively.
3. Speaking & Workshops
Keynotes and immersive workshops on neural integration, creative leadership, and the science of sustainable performance. Topics include the Default Mode Network, attention design, and building cultures of depth and coherence.
Next Steps
If you’re curious whether this work is right for you:
📅 Book Office Hours, A 120-minute session designed for leaders who want to explore a current challenge, clarify direction, or experience how neuroscience-based coaching can create immediate traction.
→ Book here
🧭 Book a Consultation for those seeking long-term transformation through the 16-week coaching experience. Together, we’ll explore whether this partnership is the right next step for your growth.
→ Schedule here
The brain you build creates the life you lead. If you’re ready to design both with intention, I’d be honoured to support that work.
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Recommended Reading
1. Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. Author: Dacher Keltner. Why it fits: The definitive work by the researcher you cite throughout is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the science, psychology, and practice of awe from the world's leading expert.
2. The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. Author: Annie Murphy Paul. Why it fits: Explores how cognition extends beyond the brain into the body and environment, supports your argument that awe trains perception by changing what we attend to in our surroundings.
3. The Predictive Mind. Author: Jakob Hohwy. Why it fits: The academic foundation for predictive processing theory that underpins your "awe as predictive expansion" framework is essential for understanding how awe disrupts prediction loops.
4. The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy in the Everyday. Author: Rob Walker. Why it fits: Practical guide to training attention and noticing what's present, perfect companion for readers wanting concrete practices to support the perceptual training you describe in awe walks.
5. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Author: Jenny Odell. Why it fits: Addresses how digital saturation erodes our capacity for deep attention and connection to place, supports your section on why we stop noticing and how to reclaim perceptual richness.
THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS
Continue the Work: Journal and Coaching Options
The Design a Life You Love Journal
This 30-day self-guided journey combines neuroscience, Human Design, and strategy to help you rebuild your boundaries from within. Through daily prompts, embodiment practices, and Future Self visioning, you’ll rewire the internal cues that shape your external choices.
→ Explore the Journal in The Studio
Private Coaching for Nervous System-Aligned Leadership
If you’re navigating a personal or professional threshold, coaching offers a deeper integration process grounded in cognitive neuroscience, trauma-aware strategy, and your unique Human Design.
This is high-level, intentional coaching for people who want to live, lead, and decide from within.
More Articles to Explore:
Labels Are Not Identity: Expanding Beyond the Boxes We Are Given
Reclaim Your Signature Self: How Neuroscience & Human Design Unlock Authentic Living
The Future Self as a Mental Model: How to Transform Your Life
The Science of Self-Trust: Rewiring the Brain for Confidence, Clarity, and Sturdy Leadership
Identity and Neuroplasticity: Shifting Your Brain Toward the Person You Desire to Be
