Most of us have felt it at some point. You step into a cathedral, round a bend on a mountain trail, or wander into a sun-drenched courtyard in some old city, and something shifts. The air feels different. Time seems to slow. You can’t quite explain it, but the feeling is undeniably real.
What makes certain places carry that quality? Science has been quietly catching up with what our instincts have always known. There are measurable, deeply human reasons why some locations stop us in our tracks, and others leave us feeling nothing at all.
The Brain’s Ancient Relationship with Space
As we become increasingly urbanized, spending nearly ninety percent of our lives indoors, the divide between human beings and the natural world grows more pronounced. Yet neuroscience tells us that our brains are still wired for nature. This isn’t a sentimental idea. It’s rooted in millions of years of evolution.
From a neurological perspective, this connection has deep evolutionary roots. For millennia, our survival depended on natural landscapes that offered water, food, refuge, and safety. Our brains evolved to feel calmer in environments where such cues were present. When we enter a space that echoes those ancient signals, the brain responds accordingly, whether we’re aware of it or not.
What Awe Actually Does to the Mind
Awe is a complex emotion that occurs when we experience or witness something wondrous, vast, terrifying, inspiring, amazing, or mind-blowing. It can be triggered by experiences as diverse as walking through an untamed natural landscape, viewing a highly complex piece of art or architecture, having a spiritual or religious experience, or witnessing a seemingly impossible athletic feat.
Neuroscientists researching awe have shown that it is associated with reduced activity in the default mode network of the brain, which usually means a reduced engagement with self-reflective thoughts and greater attunement to the present moment. Awe can result in feelings of self-diminishment and enhanced feelings of connection with other people and one’s environment. Research has also shown that awe is capable of prompting prosocial and altruistic behaviors and enhances life satisfaction.
The Geometry of Wonder: Fractals in Natural Places
Fractal fluency is a neuroscience model that proposes that, through exposure to nature’s fractal scenery, people’s visual systems have adapted to efficiently process fractals with ease. Fractals are patterns that repeat at different scales. Examples in natural scenery include clouds, mountains, and trees. This adaptation to fractal patterns occurs at many stages of the visual system, from the way people’s eyes move to which regions of the brain get activated.
Through brainwave and skin conductance research, scientists discovered that simply looking at fractal patterns in nature, whether through a window or within a piece of art, resulted in a striking reduction in stress. Even NASA researched ways to help the psyche of astronauts living in windowless rooms in outer space. What they learned is that observation periods of nature’s fractals, even for less than ten seconds and with only a peripheral view, were sufficient enough to trigger the desired effect of reducing stress.
Vastness and the Feeling of Smallness
In terms of psychological research, the principle of infinity maps onto perceived vastness, which, together with the need for accommodation, constitute the prototypical awe, according to the seminal paper by Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt. Grand canyons, open ocean horizons, towering old-growth forests. These landscapes share one trait: they make us feel genuinely small.
Studies conducted with visitors first seeing Yosemite Valley found that people just feel awe immediately upon arrival. When asked to draw themselves, their self-portraits come out remarkably small. Neuroscience shows that awe reduces activation in the chunks of the cortex associated with self-representation. This isn’t just people telling you what awe is in a semantic association way. The self is genuinely quieter in those moments.
Nature as a Reliable Gateway to Magic
When people are asked to recall awe-inspiring experiences, many often recount times they spent in nature. Psychologists suggest that spending time in natural environments could be a reliable way to induce awe. In different countries with varying landscapes and ecosystems, nature is one of the most common elicitors of awe. Recent reviews found that contact with natural environments promotes more robust health outcomes, including reductions of stress, reduced inflammation, increased parasympathetic activity, and improved immune functioning.
Studies show that exposure to nature reduces activity in the amygdala, the brain’s fear center, lowers cortisol levels, decreases blood pressure, and boosts mood-enhancing neurotransmitters like serotonin. Places that deliver this cocktail of biological calm feel charged with something special, even when we struggle to name what it is.
Sacred Sites and the Physics of Place
The hypothesis of researchers in this field is that at some archaeological sites, there exists a measurable natural audio or electromagnetic phenomenon that enhances their mystical properties. Following this line of research, interesting archaeoacoustic effects have been discovered. Two sites in particular, the Hypogeum of Malta and the Great Pyramid of Egypt, exhibit anomalous acoustical properties.
The composition of the stones used in ancient structures is key to their ability to conduct energy. These phenomena are not produced with any intensity unless the structure is built with crystalline rocks rich in quartz, such as granite. The effect of sacred sites behaving like concentrators of electromagnetic energy is enhanced by the use of stone that contains substantial amounts of magnetite, and being high in quartz makes them piezoelectric, generating electricity when compressed or subjected to vibrations.
Why Openness and Spaciousness Matter
From the perspective of neuroscience, there have been many studies on spaciousness and its components. An fMRI study found that participants judged open rooms as more beautiful, and open interiors activated regions in the temporal lobes that contribute to the temporal dynamics of visual processing. Open space is not merely comfortable. It is actively beautiful to the brain.
Vast open spaces are often a preferred environmental trait, so researchers have looked at specific elements contributing to the perception of openness. Researcher and architect Arthur E. Stamps III discovered, through several rounds of experiments, that horizontal area is the most effective in producing the perception of spaciousness, followed by height. This helps explain why certain places, even modest ones, feel expansive and freeing the moment you enter them.
The Role of Memory and Human Story
A place is rarely just geography. Early people, following herds of animals, wandered large areas of land. They occasionally discovered certain places of power, perhaps a spring, a cave, or a mountain, or maybe a site that had no remarkable visual appearance. Yet these places had a mysterious power, a numinosity, and a spirit. Because of this quality, ancient peoples began to mark these magical places in different ways, often with piles of stones, so that they might be seen from a distance if other humans passed that way in years to come.
When we visit a site that has been considered sacred or meaningful for thousands of years, we’re not arriving fresh. We carry the accumulated weight of every person who stood there before us, felt something, and chose to return. That collective human attention shapes how a place is experienced, even for those who know nothing of its history.
The Evolutionary Case for Awe-Prone Landscapes
Psychologists Alice Chirico and David Yaden suggest that our sensitivity to awe may have evolved because it helped us identify safe places to seek shelter, such as environments with large vistas that would have allowed our hunter-gatherer relatives to see approaching predators or attackers. One study found that modern children show a preference for elevated positions with sweeping scenery that induce awe.
Awe’s ability to elicit cognitive accommodation may also explain why humans evolved to experience this unique emotion. Experiencing awe may be adaptive because it encourages us to take in new information and adjust our mental structures around it, helping us navigate our world and increasing our odds of survival. In other words, magic has always been useful. The places that inspire it aren’t accidental.
When Architecture Channels the Feeling
Biophilic design is a philosophy that seeks to reconnect people with the natural environment through architecture. Far more than a passing aesthetic trend, it draws from evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and environmental psychology to create spaces that support mental, physical, and emotional health. When buildings succeed at this, they don’t just look beautiful. They feel alive.
Environmental neuroscience prompts questions about what the brain and body can do with the places around us, and why and how. The answers to these questions inform the design of our cities, our homes, our workplaces, and the natural environments around us. The most enduring architectural achievements, from Gothic cathedrals to Japanese temple gardens, seem to have understood this intuitively long before the science caught up. They built not just for shelter, but for something harder to define, and far more worth seeking out.