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Awe depends on mental time travel
Time travel and awe
Chimpanzees may feel something like it, but awe as humans have it rests on a broad metacognitive ability: mental time travel. Picture sitting in someone else's chair and looking at yourself from there, or zooming back into the past and forward into the future. Adopting another person's perspective in space comes from the same skill as reminiscing and imagining.
Beyond the senses
Awe works that way too. A person adopts a vast point of view that is not tied to whatever the senses are delivering right now. Animals seem stuck with the content the senses hand them in the moment, while humans use consciousness flexibly, which is why they can plan and write novels and fiction.
A flexible consciousness
Ask anyone what is in their consciousness at this moment, and it is rarely what sits in front of them. It is daydreams and plans scattered across places and times. That same flexibility gives the human mind the power that sets it apart from any other animal.
How do researchers test animal mental time travel?
In a 1998 study in Nature, Nicola Clayton and Anthony Dickinson at the University of Cambridge let western scrub jays cache worms and peanuts. After a short delay the jays went for the worms they preferred, but after a long delay, when the worms would have rotted, they went for peanuts. The result suggested that the birds remembered what, where, and when. Whether it equals human mental time travel is still debated.
How did researchers define awe scientifically?
In 2003 psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt proposed that awe has two core features: perceived vastness and a need for accommodation, meaning that the experience does not fit what a person already understands. Vastness can be physical, like a mountain range, or social, like a figure of great power. A 2015 study led by Paul Piff in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that awe led people to feel a smaller sense of self and to act more generously. The two features made awe distinct from other positive emotions such as joy.
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