It sounded as if the Streets were running
And then—the Streets stood still—
Eclipse—was all we could see at the Window
And Awe—was all we could feel.
—Emily Dickinson
When the Moon’s shadow glides over the Sun and the world goes dark, birds call in alarm, bats emerge into the uncanny night, flowers close up their petals, and zooplankton rise to the ocean’s surface.
And humans? Humans are overcome with awe. Many accounts of total solar eclipses use the word—like the poem Emily Dickinson wrote to a friend in 1877, which probably refers to an eclipse that had passed over her Amherst, Mass., home 2 years earlier.
What is awe? What does it feel like? Why does it exist? And what is it about a total solar eclipse that seems perfectly designed to provoke it?
In an essay in her 2020 book Vesper Flights, nature writer Helen Macdonald tries to find words for the ineffable. It’s 2006, and to get into the path of totality, she has traveled to ancient ruins on the Turkish coast, where she’s about to experience “a flood of primal awe”:
I stare at the sky as the sun slides away, and the day does too, and impossibly, impossibly, above us is a stretch of black, soft black sky and a hole in the middle of it. A round hole, darker than anything you’ve ever seen, fringed with an intensely soft ring of white fire. Applause crackles and ripples across the dunes. My throat is stopped. My eyes fill with tears. Goodbye, intellectual apprehension. Hello, something else entirely.…
And then something else happens, a thing that still makes my heart rise in my chest and eyes blur, even in recollection. For it turns out there’s something even more affecting than watching the sun disappear into a hole. Watching the sun climb out of it.
Writing 50 years earlier, biologist and author Rachel Carson wondered, “What is the value of preserving and strengthening this sense of awe and wonder, this recognition of something beyond the bounds of human existence? Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.”
Investigating Awe
Researchers have taken a renewed interest in the science of emotions in the past 4 decades.
“I think people might have felt a little leery of being a scientist studying the sublime or the spiritual. It almost sounds New Agey.”
It took them a while to get around to awe, said Dacher Keltner, a psychologist and codirector of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. “I think people might have felt a little leery of being a scientist studying the sublime or the spiritual. It almost sounds New Agey,” he said. Yet awe is foundational to our experience of music, literature, art, and spirituality, he explained. “It’s a central emotion in other disciplines, and we just had forgotten it.”
When Keltner turned his attention to awe, it was so rich in surprises that he spent the next few decades trying to understand it. (In 2023, he published an entire book about it, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.)
Awe is a slippery, mysterious emotion that—like the experience of totality—is difficult to describe. In a 2003 paper, Keltner and a colleague wrote that awe is located “in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear.” Paradoxically, it can be triggered both by threat and by great beauty or virtue. But two things are central to the full experience of awe: the perception of vastness and the “inability to assimilate an experience into current mental structures.”
In other words, Keltner wrote, “awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.”
To study awe, Keltner and his colleagues did experiments with people in different settings: They conducted detailed surveys about past experiences of awe; analyzed people’s facial expressions, vocalizations, and brain activity in the lab; and observed their behavior and self-perception while gazing up at big trees, white-water rafting, and standing beneath a full-sized replica of a T. Rex skeleton.
Together these studies have taught us a lot about the physical and mental characteristics of awe, he said.
“It has this vocalization of like, ‘Whoa!’” Keltner said—an ancient, wordless sound made by everyone from that guy in California exulting over a double rainbow to isolated communities in the Himalayas exposed to undersea footage for the first time. People’s mouths drop open, they tear up, they feel chills and goose bumps, their hair stands on end. They want to huddle with other humans, like the social animals we are. Then comes what Keltner called “the boundary-dissolving sense of being part of something much larger.”
“As you encounter vast mystery, your self starts to get really small,” he said. “You feel humble, your ego diminishes, then physiologically, you really open up to the world and to other people…. And then you want to do good—be a better person, be more truthful. That’s the unfolding that we documented both outside and then in the labs.”
Community and Connection
Before Macdonald saw her first total solar eclipse (in Cornwall, England, in 1999; it was cloudy), she imagined viewing it in “romantic solitude.” Other people would just get in the way of her communion with nature, she thought. But when the light dimmed, and the crowds ringing the coast all raised their flashing cameras at once, she felt only connection.
“I’d wanted a solitary revelation but had been given something else instead: an overwhelming sense of community, and of what it is made—a host of individual lights shining briefly against oncoming darkness,” she recounted in Vesper Flights. “When you stand and watch the death of the sun and see it reborn there can be no them, only us.”
Awe can actually be heightened by the presence of others, said Keltner—whether it’s viewing a natural spectacle like ocean phosphorescence or a tornado, listening to sublime music, or raising our combined voices in prayer or song. “When we put our minds together, it’s transcendent. When you’re all focusing on the same thing, and your bodies and your voices are starting to synchronize…there’s a power to it that you can’t get just looking at the solar eclipse by yourself.”
That enhanced sense of community and connection is probably the reason awe exists, said Keltner. “Feeling awe, you’ll sacrifice for the tribe, you’ll work for it, you feel more identified with it. It integrates you into social networks.”
“Being in the presence of vast things calls forth a more modest, less narcissistic self, which enables greater kindness toward others.”
Studies by Keltner and his team bolster the theory that awe-inspiring experiences foster our desire to work together and share resources. In one, participants who had just spent a minute gazing into towering eucalyptus trees were more likely to assist a person who dropped a bundle of pens into the dirt than another group who were directed to look at a mundane building. In another, Dutch children aged 8–13 were more likely to help refugees after watching an awe-inspiring video. “Being in the presence of vast things calls forth a more modest, less narcissistic self, which enables greater kindness toward others,” Keltner wrote.
But what sorts of vast things? Keltner and his team gathered “narratives of awe” drawn from accounts of encounters with nature, psychedelic trips, spiritual revelations, and pilgrimages. They also collected awe stories in 20 languages from 2,600 people in 26 countries—and although it turns out there is significant cultural variation (in Japan, for instance, awe is more commonly imbued with a feeling of threat), there are commonalities, too.
At first, the scientists assumed that nature-based experiences would be most likely to trigger awe—eclipses, natural disasters, the northern lights, the Grand Canyon. Nature was important, the study showed, but was eclipsed by something else: Around the world, people are most commonly awed by other people. This type of awe can take the form of the “collective effervescence” we may feel in religious ceremonies, sporting matches, stadium concerts, festivals, political rallies, or weddings and funerals.
For instance, Māori performing arts—like the haka, a ceremonial chant and dance, and the karanga, a welcome—are explicitly designed to incite ihi, wana, and wehi, three components of awe. “Ihi is a psychic power that elicits [an]…emotional response from the audience,” wrote scholar Nathan Matthews (Ngā Puhi) in the essay “The Physicality of the Māori Message Transmission.” “The response is referred to as wehi; a reaction to the power of the performance. Wana is the condition created by the combination…it is the aura that occurs during the performance and which encompasses both the performers and the audience.”
In 2013, Beyoncé “felt the ihi” when a backstage crew in Auckland welcomed her with an impromptu haka, and she responded with her own spontaneous wehi—shaking her head, slapping her thighs, erupting in joyous laughter. Nicola Hyland (Te Atihaunui-a- Pāpārangi, Ngāti Hauiti), a senior lecturer in theater at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, wrote about “this interchange of ihi and wehi that evoked the wana of the performance…. The intangible wana is electric. When I witness a haka performed live (and often even in recordings), it feels as though my insides are roaring. The hairs on my arms stand on end, my heart throbs, and I almost always weep. A powerful internal physical violence, a tearing, a drawing in—but also healing and cathartic…. It is clear that Beyoncé felt something like this.”
Most often of all, Keltner’s study found, awe is evoked by “moral beauty”—witnessing great courage, kindness, strength, self-sacrifice, or overcoming.
“It was one of the most uplifting surprises of the whole project,” Keltner recalled, “that we care so much about other people—and that when we see human goodness, we’re moved as powerfully as at a rock concert or Taylor Swift” show.
Chasing Totality
For some people, though—like Australian clinical psychologist Kate Russo—nothing else approaches the immersive and intoxicating awe elicited by “intersecting the Moon’s shadow wherever it may be cast on the surface of the Earth.… It’s quite profound for some people. People will say it’s even more powerful than the birth of their first child.”
For Russo, chasing totality has become both an addiction and a way of life.
“No matter how prepared you are, you are never prepared for it.”
Her first eclipse was the same one as Macdonald’s, in 1999—though Russo had taken a trip to France, where the skies were clear. It blew her mind. “No matter how prepared you are, you are never prepared for it. I just was overcome with that unexpected emotional overwhelm. The world is a different place afterwards. It has to be. And then you just think, when is the next one?”
Russo has now seen 13 total solar eclipses. At first, she was a tourist, using her holidays to travel to wherever caught her eye in the path of totality, from Madagascar to a boat heading west into the Pacific from the Galápagos Islands.
In 2012, the Moon’s shadow crossed Russo’s home state of Queensland, not far from where she’d grown up. She’d been living in Northern Ireland for years but moved back to Australia 6 months before the eclipse. She soon realized that the communities in its path were woefully unprepared for the experience.
Newspaper articles explained the physics of eclipses but didn’t mention their emotional impact. Residents talked about getting out of town to miss the madness, and the city of Port Douglas was planning a marathon that would begin at the moment of totality.
“I was like, this is just bonkers. Anyone who’s seen an eclipse will know that that’s never gonna work,” Russo recalled thinking of the preparations. Closing off streets for the marathon would restrict people trying to move into the path, she said, and the runners themselves would be hopelessly distracted from either the race or the celestial event unfolding all around them.
Russo now runs an eclipse-planning business to help towns and cities prepare—and she’s a passionate evangelist for experiencing totality at least once in your life. “It’s almost like my life’s mission to be able to share it with as many people as possible,” she said.
During the annular solar eclipse of 14 October 2023, Russo piloted a field study of eclipse-induced awe using mobile electroencephalographic headsets. At the moment of annularity—when the clouds thinned, revealing a ‘ring of fire’ around the Sun—subjects’ brain waves showed a spike characteristic of awe.
Russo hopes to do the same experiment during a future total eclipse. Annular or partial eclipses are certainly interesting and can inspire awe. But being fully enveloped in the Moon’s central shadow is next-level, she stressed.
“That is the most incredible, freaky, goose bumps, hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck-standing-up thing. You have to go all in. You have to get into the path.”
Communing with the Corona
The other thing eclipse chasers obsess over is the cloud cover.
Ryan Milligan, an astrophysicist at Queen’s University Belfast, has traveled to 10 total solar eclipses. Eight of those were what he calls “successful”—there were clear skies. In 2020, however, Milligan wasn’t so lucky. He had managed to get himself to southern Chile at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and yet when the moment of totality came, thick clouds covered the sky. The same thing happened in 2015 when Milligan was in the Faroe Islands. “It’s soul destroying. It’s just—it’s crippling,” he said.
Clouds obscure many of the awe-inspiring features of a total eclipse, he explained: the oncoming sweep of the Moon’s shadow “like a column of darkness hurtling toward you at 1,000 miles an hour,” the 360° sunset, planets and stars suddenly appearing, and the Sun’s filaments and prominences looping like flames from behind the black face of the Moon.
“Everyone tries to look for an ideal location with a nice backdrop, but I’m like—weather’s everything,” Milligan said. When the skies are clear, the awe payoff is huge, he added. “It’s a real, visceral, primeval experience. Everything’s wrong, the light is wrong, the shadows are wrong—it’s perfectly safe, obviously, and you know what’s happening. But it’s a real overwhelm, a really powerful hit. And it’s such a fleeting experience.”
In April 2023, Milligan drove from Belfast to Dublin; flew to Munich, then Bangkok, then Singapore, then Perth; and then drove 1,250 kilometers up the west coast of Australia—all to experience 60 seconds of totality.
“I wouldn’t do that for a partial eclipse, I wouldn’t do it for a meteor shower,” he said. “You wouldn’t do it for any other astronomical or celestial event other than the total solar eclipse.”
As a solar physicist, Milligan has an extra layer of appreciation for that rare moment when all but a tiny fraction of the Sun’s light is obscured. For a handful of minutes, you can take off your protective glasses and see, with the naked eye, our star’s corona and chromosphere—two layers of its elusive upper atmosphere.
Milligan has been studying the solar chromosphere for 20 years, but the only glimpse he ever gets of it is the “beautiful red ring” it leaves around the Moon during a total solar eclipse. “When you get to see that, you’re like, ‘That’s where I work!’” he said.
The rest of the time, sitting in front of a computer, “it’s easy to feel detached from the reason you got into astronomy in the first place—that you want to explore space, you want to understand the universe,” he said. A regular dose of totality keeps that awe and wonder alive.
Microdosing Awe
In 2017, Nicholas Scarsdale was a graduate student researching exoplanets at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He and a group of friends—“surface physicists, several biochemists, a couple of mathematicians”—met in Philadelphia, piled into two cars, and proceeded to drive 14 hours to South Carolina to see the so-called Great American Eclipse.
“The human element of wonder really overwhelms any sort of intellectual knowledge. You’re just like, wow—you can’t help but just be present.”
As the big moment approached, Scarsdale’s crew wound up in a small town. A stage and food trucks were set up on a soccer field, and the group joined about 200 other people waiting for totality.
When it came, Scarsdale and his friends were “a bunch of big nerds…standing in a field just going, whaaaaat is haaaaappening,” he remembered. Hands on their heads, eyes bugging out, jaws dropped. “Just, like, absolutely stunned. It’s so hard to fathom, or to express, what it’s like for the Sun to just go out. The human element of wonder really overwhelms any sort of intellectual knowledge. You’re just like, wow—you can’t help but just be present,” Scarsdale said.
He was immediately hooked and looks set to become an eclipse chaser himself. “If I had an infinite amount of money, the first thing I would make sure I do is wind up viewing every single total solar eclipse for the rest of my life,” he said. “Even for somebody who isn’t spiritual, I think it evokes a sense of spirituality—like, I am here, in this moment, just experiencing this one single thing.”
For city-born Scarsdale, other awe-inspiring moments that have come close include his first views of the Milky Way in dark skies, Saturn’s rings through a telescope, and the monolithic rock of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park—views that “challenge your everyday intuition for how things are in the world,” he said.
These kinds of experiences are good for us, Keltner concurred. “Just get out and find awe, and you’ll be better,” he said.
You can microdose on awe every week, if you’re paying attention. Awe is all around.
Preliminary evidence from a review article in Perspectives on Psychological Science suggests that awe releases oxytocin, reduces inflammation, decreases our focus on ourselves, and gives us a greater sense of meaning.
But you don’t need to chase totality to the other side of the world to experience awe, Keltner emphasized. You can microdose on it every week, if you’re paying attention. Awe is all around. One of his recent studies found that “every third day, on average, people feel that they are in the presence of something vast that they do not immediately comprehend.”
Keltner encourages people to take regular “awe walks.” Try to tap into your sense of wonder, he advises, and imagine you’re seeing your surroundings for the first time.
“You don’t need to wait for the eclipse,” Keltner continued. “The night sky can be great. The sunset can be great. Watching clouds can be great. Yeah, the eclipse is extraordinary. But there’s a lot of extraordinary awe around us.”
—Kate Evans (@kate_g_evans), Science Writer
27 March 2024: This story has been updated to correct the location of the marathon mentioned. It is Port Douglas.