Week 10: The self against a much larger scale

Opening unit 4 — the psychology of awe, "small self" effects, and why a known fact can suddenly become a felt one

26 April 2027

Research on awe describes it as arising from an encounter with something that overwhelms your existing mental categories — vastness, in scale or in significance, that your ordinary frameworks weren’t built to hold. One consistently reported effect is a temporary shrinking of the sense of self: people report feeling smaller, less central, and — counterintuitively — more connected rather than more isolated, in the same moment.

Outline#

• awe as a response to “vastness” that exceeds your current mental categories, and why that framing fits a night sky especially well
• the “small self” effect: why feeling smaller so often reports as more alive rather than more diminished
• opening unit 4: the self measured against something enormously larger than itself, three different ways