Off Balance with Awe

Cayte Bosler, while examining the benefits of awe in The Atlantic, quotes Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota:

"The experience of awe is one where you are temporarily off-kilter in terms of your understanding of the world," explains Vohs. "People mostly walk around with a sense of knowing what is going on in the world. They have hypotheses about the way people behave and what might happen; those are pretty air-tight. It is hard to get people to shake from those because that’s just how the brain works. We are always walking around trying to confirm the things we already think. When you are in a state of awe, it puts you off balance and as a consequence, we think people might be ready to learn new things and have some of their assumptions questioned."

It's one of the reason that I like space so much. The scale is so huge that it puts your mind a perspective that its hard to achieve on an everyday basis.