Papers by Christian Egelund Sørensen
Religionsvidenskabeligt tidsskrift, Nov 15, 2023
Religionsvidenskabeligt Tidsskrift, 2023
In this article, I present an analysis of research into the experience of awe. Awe has been chara... more In this article, I present an analysis of research into the experience of awe. Awe has been characterized as an emotion encompassing a perceived vastness, a need for cognitive accommodation, so that the individual might assimilate the new and overwhelming experience and, ultimately, attain a feeling of meaningfulness. Additionally, I present Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime and Rudolf Otto's notion of the numinous in order to illuminate the most important characteristics of awelike experiences. I proceed to present the hypothesis that experiences of awe originate in experiences of prediction errors. Prediction errors occur with a mismatch between anticipated sensory data and the actual data. I argue that experiences of such errors on a massive scale can explain feelings of vastness, the need for cognitive accommodation, and meaningfulness, and more fundamentally, why certain perceptions illicit experiences of awe, while others do not.
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Papers by Christian Egelund Sørensen