Among other things, awe promotes curiosity, explains Anderson. This is because we experience things out of our normal frame of reference, things we can’t easily categorize or understand. When we are curious, we are drawn out of ourselves. We seek information from others. With their mixture of fear, beauty and mystery, these experiences also tend to get seared into our memory. I will probably never forget seeing my son’s face for the first time, or peering into the Grand Canyon as a child, or watching Northern Lights swirl in an Alaskan sky or driving through a surreal lightning storm in Texas.
