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We developed a systems view of life to adapt to the central challenges in our hypersocial evolution. Systems thinking allowed us to track the shared caregiving of our vulnerable young, the network of coalitions that defined our relations with friends, the more fluid social hierarchies we shifted to, and all the forms of collective activity that made up our daily life—food sharing, collaborative labor, defense, and celebration. Systems thinking emerged in our relation to nature and underlies traditional ecological knowledge. Our survival depended on our understanding of the social system—community—we are part of, and our relation to ecosystems; our minds developed a systems way of understanding, grounded in a new neural architecture of our social brains. Many Indigenous peoples developed this view of the grandeur of life thousands of years ago.

As Andrea Wulf tells it in her wondrous The Invention of Nature, the centrality of systems thinking to awe, science, and art is embodied in the life story of nineteenth-century scientist Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt would be drawn to the Andes in the spirit of wonder and write about nature as a web of life—each living form exists within “a network of forces and interrelationships.” His drawings of the maps of flora, fauna, climates, and geology of the twenty-thousand-foot Ecuadorian mountain Chimborazo would give birth in Western thinking to the idea of an ecosystem. System was Humboldt’s big idea, shaping Darwin, who traveled on the HMS Beagle with Humboldt’s books; Thoreau and Emerson in their writings about nature; Gaudí’s organic and architectural wonders like the Sagrada Família; environmentalists and revolutionaries like Simón Bolívar (Humboldt abhorred the system of slavery); and poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth. Systems thinking is always composting.

Our default mind blinds us to this fundamental truth, that our social, natural, physical, and cultural worlds are made up of interlocking systems. Experiences of awe open our minds to this big idea. Awe shifts us to a systems view of life.

New studies are documenting how. The pattern to these results is that awe shifts our minds from a more reductionistic mode of seeing things in terms of separateness and independence to a view of phenomena as interrelating and dependent. For example, brief experiences of awe shift us from the illusions of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century thinking that we are separate selves to realize that we are embedded in complex social networks of interdependent individuals. Awe moves us to a sense that we are part of the natural world, one of many species, in an ecosystem of species dependent upon one another for survival. Awe opens our eyes to the idea that complex systems of interdependent adaptations gave rise to the millions of species that make up the living world. Awe even leads us to see systems-like patterns of agency organizing random sequences of digits.

Awe enables us to see that life is a process, that all endless forms most beautiful are deeply interconnected, and involve change, transformation, impermanence, and death.

Finding Our Place in the Systems of Life

Since that day on Paul Ekman’s deck when he pointed me in the direction of awe, I have charted the systems of awe to tell its scientific story.

Awe begins with our miraculous eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin responding to the images, sounds, scents, tastes, and touches of the eight wonders of life. Our sensory systems represent these encounters in neurochemical patterns that make their way to the prefrontal cortex, where we interpret the wonders of life with the symbolic systems that are language and culture. Being moved by awe triggers the release of oxytocin and dopamine, a calming of stress-related physiology, and vagus nerve response, systems of millions of cells working to enable us to connect, be open, and explore. The complex systems of muscles in the face, body, and vocal apparatus enable us to convey to others what we find wonderful. Tears and chills, themselves end results of systems behind our eyes and under our skin, signal to our conscious minds the presence of vast forces that require we merge with others to adapt and understand. Being cultural animals, we turn to ever-evolving cultural systems, of chanting, song, and music; painting, carving, sculpture, and design; poetry, fiction, and drama; and supernatural explanation and spiritual practice—our archives of awe—to bring others into a shared understanding of the wonders of life.