The Well —
A night where awe took center stage
Big Think and the John Templeton Foundation gathered scientists, artists, and storytellers in Los Angeles to explore the power of awe.
Some events you attend. Others you experience. Our recent gathering — A Night of Awe and Wonder — was decidedly the latter.
The event, produced by Big Think in partnership with the John Templeton Foundation, set out to explore a simple idea: What is awe and how does it inform our lives, our work, and our purpose? In the interdisciplinary style you have come to expect from our work on The Well, we invited seven speakers and a musician to help us unpack the nature of awe from their vantage points.
Dacher Keltner opened the evening by grounding us in what we came for: awe itself. Not as mystical abstraction, but as a universal emotion backed by rigorous science. He framed why awe matters — how it rewires our brains for resilience, dissolves ego boundaries, and makes us more generous, creative, and fully alive.
“Awe,” he explained, “is an emotion you feel in the spine tingling, the lump in the throat, the warmth in the chest — when we encounter vast mysteries we don’t understand. Wonder follows those big experiences of awe. It’s an epistemological state that animates exploration, curiosity, and discovery.”
With that context, the narrative arc of the evening took the audience from awe in the external — the cosmos, deep-sea exploration, even communication with whales — to awe in the personal and intimate.
Janna Levin carried us beyond Earth into the cosmos, where black holes bend reality and the universe reveals its poetic mysteries. She explained that her work — exploring the vast scales of the universe — can cause people to feel a sense of dread or an existential crisis about their imagined insignificance. But she said it has the opposite effect on her: “It gives me a great sense of being part of a grander story of connecting all the way back to the Big Bang.”
Instead of ruminating on our relative smallness, she reminded the audience of our connection to the universe:
You are the glowing, luminous exception in a universe of darkness. You are an arrangement of agnostic atoms, forged in stars that can only act and react exactly as prescribed. Yet you contain multitudes. You are the history of the collisions in the universe, the explosions from stars that threw matter back out into the universe to form into the planets and your body. You are evidence of the entire universe grinding into being. You are a droplet precipitated from the 5% of that gooey residue left over from the Big Bang. And you’re briefly aware and you’re briefly illuminated.
It was a powerful reminder that wonder is woven into the very fabric of existence, including yours and mine.
Victor Vescovo then brought us back to our own planet, albeit its most extreme edges. Through stories of scaling the world’s highest mountains, diving into its deepest ocean trenches, and venturing into space, he showed how pushing into Earth’s extremes sparks transcendence and reveals what we’re truly capable of.
“None of us make it out of here alive,” he reminded the crowd. “So appreciate every moment that you have — work assiduously to grasp small moments of awe every day. In doing so, you will feel more connected to the people around you, to the world around you.”
David Gruber offered something entirely new: a first look at Project CETI’s groundbreaking efforts to decode whale communication. “The window [has] finally opened for humans to use advanced machine learning and robotics to translate what whales are saying,” he said. “This has now led to the largest interspecies communication effort in history, with over 50 scientists from eight disciplines all working together just to know what whales are saying.”
David shared some rare whale-song recordings originally captured by Frank Watlington, the naval engineer who first recorded humpback whales in the 1950s while monitoring hydrophones for Soviet submarines off Bermuda. Watlington later passed his tapes to biologist Roger Payne — David’s mentor — whose analysis helped reveal that whales communicate through complex, structured “songs.” Watching the room lean forward in unison as these intelligent voices filled the space was in itself a moment of awe.
Musician Robot Koch — whose music was described by the BBC’s Bobby Friction as “artificial intelligence discovering religion” — then enveloped us in a performance that felt nearly extraterrestrial. These soundscapes did more than accompany the evening’s themes — they embodied them.
David S. Goyer, the acclaimed screenwriter, director, and producer, explored how moral imagination and wonder fuel the stories that shape culture, drawing from decades of work that’s helped define modern mythology on screen.
“A storyteller is someone who crafts and shares narratives that illuminate the human experience, that invites listeners to see themselves in the stories that we tell,” he said. “Awe is one of the storytellers’ most powerful tools.”
Rainn Wilson then went deep and philosophical, connecting awe to meaning, spirituality, and our longing for something larger than ourselves. He shared the traumatic story of the birth of his son and how it shaped his understanding of the sacred and how even “a drab hallway lit by flickering fluorescent lights lined by folding chairs in the back of a crappy hospital in Van Nuys, California,” where doctors were ultimately able to save the life of both his infant son and his wife, can become “the most sacred place that I can conceive.”
He explains that this led him to a greater conclusion: that true sacred experience can be found beyond religion and ritual. In fact, it is our ability to experience awe and wonder that can unite us. It lives in acts of courage and kindness, and it’s our shared capacity for awe in the face of that beauty, Wilson suggested, that can bring us closer together.
And finally, Kelly Corrigan closed the evening by bringing us home. Her story of losing her mother reminded us that awe does not reside solely in black holes or mysterious ocean depths. Sometimes it dwells in the small, ordinary moments that quietly shape a meaningful life. It was moving, grounding, and the perfect conclusion.
It was an amazing honor to host this event with our friends at the John Templeton Foundation. The evening was a reminder to all of us why we can’t afford to forget how to be amazed. We’ve built a world that too often strips wonder away. We’re buried in screens and schedules, living smaller, more fearful, more disconnected lives than our biology intended. Awe isn’t just a nice feeling — it’s a biological imperative, an antidote to our age of anxiety and isolation.
The conversations that continued long after the last speaker left the stage, the connections being made between people from wildly different worlds, the ideas sparked — that’s what happens when you put awe back where it belongs: at the center of everything.
This article A night where awe took center stage is featured on Big Think.
The post “A night where awe took center stage” by Brandon Stewart was published on 12/16/2025 by bigthink.com