Awe

Awe is the emotion that Michael Pollan uses to connect psychedelic experience with changes in perception, meaning, and behavior. Psychologist Peter Hendricks proposes that awe may help explain how psychedelics loosen deeply rooted patterns, particularly in addiction: by making a person feel part of something larger, it can redirect attention from the isolated self toward other people and the wider world. The idea offers a possible psychological link between the intensity of a psychedelic experience and the motivation to change, while leaving open whether awe is a cause or a consequence of that change.

Awe and the small self

Hendricks’s account begins with a problem of attention. People with addictions may know that their behavior is harming their health, careers, and social lives, yet fail to register the harm it causes others. Addiction can narrow a person’s concerns around the substance or behavior that has come to define daily life. Hendricks suggests that awe can interrupt this self-enclosure: an encounter with something overpowering may make the individual feel small in relation to a larger whole, whether that is a community, nature, or a spiritual reality.

The shift matters because it can turn attention outward. As Hendricks reports Dacher Keltner’s account, awe may support altruism by making people feel they belong to something larger than themselves. The resulting “small self” is not simply diminished; it is less exclusively occupied with individual interest and more available to the group and the common good. In the context of addiction, that change in perspective could make the effects on loved ones newly salient. A renewed sense of connection and responsibility, alongside the positive feeling of belonging, may help supply motivation to change.

Evidence from ordinary encounters

Keltner’s research offers behavioral examples of this outward turn. In an experiment in a eucalyptus grove on the UC Berkeley campus, volunteers spent a minute looking either at the trees or at a nearby building. A confederate then approached, stumbled, and scattered pens. Participants who had looked at the trees were more likely to help pick them up than those who had looked at the building. The scene makes the proposed link concrete: even a brief encounter with soaring trees was followed by a greater willingness to assist another person.

In another experiment, participants drew themselves before and after viewing awe-inspiring images of nature. Their later self-portraits occupied considerably less space on the page. The change in scale gave visible form to the idea of the small self, while the helping experiment showed a related social consequence. Together, these findings suggest that awe need not depend on an extraordinary or explicitly religious event to influence how people see themselves in relation to others. Hendricks extends that possibility to psychedelics, which he describes as a pharmacological intervention capable of occasioning profound awe. That proposal is a therapeutic possibility, not proof that awe alone accounts for treatment outcomes.

A bridge across psychedelic phenomena

For Pollan, awe helps bring several strands of psychedelic research into relation. It appears in accounts of mystical experience, the overview effect, self-transcendence, a richer inner life, and the creation of new meanings. These experiences differ, but each can involve a disruption of familiar perspective: the individual encounters something that exceeds the usual frame through which the world is understood. Awe may therefore offer a shared emotional vocabulary for experiences that researchers otherwise explain in spiritual, psychological, or neurological terms.

Pollan also places awe beside ego dissolution, which he regards as among the most important and therapeutic reported effects of psychedelics. When the sense of a separate self recedes, people may experience transcendence, sacredness, unity, infinitude, or bliss. The mind then tries to make sense of an experience that exceeds its ordinary categories, and its explanations may take supernatural or spiritual form. Awe belongs to this interpretive process as well as to the experience itself: its force and mystery can unsettle familiar ways of thinking. Yet Pollan does not settle whether awe brings about these changes or arises from them. Its value in the account is partly that it connects them without pretending their causal sequence is known.

Aftereffects and limits

Pollan describes his own altered-state experiences as periods of tasting, rather than attaining, ego-transcending awareness. For several weeks after each psychedelic session, he felt more present to the moment and less inclined to dwell on what came next. He also found himself more emotionally responsive, more readily moved to tears or smiles, and more likely to think about death, time, and infinity with wonder rather than anguish. Waves of compassion, wonder, or pity could arrive unexpectedly. These are personal aftereffects, not evidence that awe produces the same outcome for everyone.

The shift did not last unchanged. After about a month, familiar mental habits and the expectations of other people drew Pollan back toward his baseline. His account therefore resists the idea that a powerful experience automatically creates a durable transformation. What remained was the memory of another possible way of being, which he compares to the accounts of depressed patients who felt nourished or inspired by time outside depression’s confinement. In this framing, awe is consequential without being a cure by itself: it can make connection, compassion, and an expanded perspective feel possible, while the return of ordinary habits marks the limits of what an episode alone can secure.