The Small Self

For most of the history of psychology, awe was overlooked — too rare, too grand, too close to religion to fit neatly on a questionnaire. The basic emotions got the attention: fear, anger, joy, disgust, the fast reflexes of survival. Awe seemed like a luxury. But over the past two decades a small group of researchers has taken it seriously, and what they have found is that awe is not a luxury at all. It is a precise psychological instrument for a specific job: cracking open the self so that a person can take in something larger than their existing picture of the world. And that, it turns out, is very close to what the deepest psychedelic experiences do.

Two ingredients: vastness and the need to update

In 2003, Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt wrote the paper that put awe on the scientific map. They proposed that awe has two core appraisals — two things the mind registers that, together, make an experience awe rather than mere joy or surprise (Keltner & Haidt, 2003). The first is perceived vastness: the sense that you are in the presence of something far larger than yourself — vast in physical size (a mountain, a cathedral, the ocean), but also vast in beauty, in number, in ability, in meaning. The second, and the more profound, is the need for accommodation.

“Accommodation” is a term borrowed from the psychologist Jean Piaget. Your mind carries a set of mental structures — schemas — that it uses to make sense of the world. Most of the time, new experiences assimilate: they slot neatly into what you already know. But sometimes you meet something your existing structures cannot contain, and the mind must accommodate — it must revise, expand, or rebuild the map itself. Awe, Keltner and Haidt argued, is the emotion of exactly that moment: standing before something so vast that your model of the world has to grow to hold it. That is why awe feels like a door opening. Something has exceeded your frame, and the frame has to change.

The small self

If awe forces the mind to expand its map to accommodate something vast, a striking consequence follows for the one thing sitting at the center of every mental map: the self. When the world suddenly looms large, the self, by contrast, shrinks. Researchers call this the “small self” — and it is the most reliable and consequential effect awe produces.

In a landmark set of five studies, Paul Piff, Dacher Keltner and colleagues induced awe in thousands of participants — by having them stand in a grove of towering eucalyptus, or watch footage of vast natural scenes, or recall an awe-inspiring memory — and then measured how they behaved (Piff et al., 2015). The awe-struck reported feeling that their individual self and its concerns were smaller and less important. And that shrinking of the self had a moral shape: compared with controls, people in awe were more generous in sharing resources, made more ethical decisions, felt less entitled, and were more willing to help. Crucially, the researchers showed the “small self” was the mechanism — the diminished ego statistically explained the boost in kindness. Awe makes us better to one another by making us, for a moment, less about ourselves.

The brain in awe: turning down the self

What does this look like inside the skull? If awe quiets the felt self, you would expect it to quiet the brain system that builds the self. That system has a name that will be familiar to readers of this journal: the default mode network (DMN), the set of midline regions — anchored in the medial prefrontal cortex — that hums whenever we engage in self-referential thought: rumination, autobiographical memory, mind-wandering, the ongoing narration of me.

When Michiel van Elk and colleagues scanned people while they watched awe-inducing videos of vast natural scenes, that is precisely what they found: feelings of awe were accompanied by reduced activity in the default mode network (van Elk et al., 2019). The self-referential machinery turned down. The subjective “small self” had an objective neural correlate: less of the brain devoted, in that moment, to constructing and maintaining the ego. Awe, in other words, is one of the ordinary, sober ways a human being can loosen the grip of the default mode network — no substance required — simply by encountering something vast enough.

Why this rhymes with psychedelics

Readers who have followed this journal will feel the resonance immediately. A quieted default mode network, a dissolved or diminished sense of self, a flood of meaning, a feeling of connection to something larger, an experience so big it forces a person to update their model of reality — this is not only the description of awe. It is, almost line for line, the description of a profound psychedelic experience.

Peter Hendricks made this connection explicit and argued for it forcefully: that awe is a core mechanism underlying psychedelic-assisted therapy (Hendricks, 2018). In his model, the classic psychedelic-occasioned mystical experience is, at its heart, an experience of overwhelming awe — a vastness so total it demands the deepest accommodation a mind can perform. And awe’s signature product, the small self, is essentially the same phenomenon that psychedelic researchers call ego dissolution. The therapeutic power that follows a psychedelic session — the drop in depression, the softening of addiction, the renewed sense of connection and meaning — may flow, in significant part, through awe: the vast experience shrinks the entrenched, ruminating self, and in the space that opens, a person can rebuild a wider map of who they are and how they belong.

An emotion built for updating the mind

Seen this way, awe and psychedelics are two routes to the same neuropsychological event: the temporary relaxation of the self-model and the forced expansion of one’s frame. Awe reaches it gently, through the world — a canyon, a symphony, a birth, a night sky. Psychedelics reach it pharmacologically, through the brain’s serotonin system and the entropic, near-critical loosening of habitual patterns. But both arrive at a state where the rigid structures — including the structure called “I” — become briefly plastic, and something larger can be taken in. It is why awe has always lived at the border of the spiritual, and why the safest, most freely available medicine for a too-tight self may simply be to go stand somewhere vast.

There is also a quieter, practical lesson. Awe is trainable and abundant. You do not need a mountain range; researchers find everyday awe in music, in art, in acts of moral beauty, in the slow reveal of a scientific idea, in the face of a child. Cultivating it — deliberately seeking the vast — appears to be one of the more reliable, low-cost ways a person can become momentarily less self-preoccupied and more connected, generous and open. The emotion evolved, it seems, to keep the self from closing in on itself.

The honest cautions

The science of awe is young and, like all of affective neuroscience, imperfect. Inducing genuine awe in a laboratory or an fMRI scanner is hard — a video of a waterfall is a pale substitute for the real rim of the canyon — so the effect sizes are modest and the neural findings, while consistent with the “small self” story, come from a still-small literature that is actively being replicated and refined. Awe also has a darker side the tidy version omits: it can be threatening as well as uplifting (think dread, or the awe manipulated by authoritarian spectacle), and threat-based awe does not carry the same prosocial glow.

The psychedelic link, too, is a well-argued hypothesis, not a closed case. That awe, the small self, and ego dissolution share features and neural themes is clear; that awe is the mechanism of psychedelic healing is a strong claim still being tested. What is fair to say is that awe and psychedelics illuminate each other — each a window onto the same remarkable fact about the mind: that the self can be loosened, that loosening it tends to make us kinder and more open, and that the experience of vastness is one of the deepest levers we have for changing who we are.

Go stand somewhere vast

We spend most of our lives assimilating — fitting each day into the map we already have, the self we already are. Awe is the mind’s built-in interruption of that closed loop: the moment the world exceeds the map and the map has to grow. It shrinks the self and, in the same motion, enlarges the world; it makes us feel small and, precisely because of that, makes us kinder. Whether it arrives through a cathedral of trees or a mystical experience occasioned by a molecule, its gift is the same — a brief, precious loosening of the grip of the ego, and the chance to become a little larger by first becoming a little smaller. It may be the most human way there is to touch the vast.

OOTW Journal is educational and does not provide medical advice. The neuroscience of awe is a young field, and the proposal that awe is a mechanism of psychedelic therapy is a hypothesis under investigation, not settled fact. Psychedelics are controlled substances, are not safe for everyone — including people with a personal or family history of psychosis or bipolar disorder — and nothing here is a recommendation to use them.