There is a moment that happens whenever I write about the science behind something that feels a little magical. Someone will inevitably worry that explaining it ruins it. If a gut feeling can sometimes involve rapid pattern recognition, does that make intuition less meaningful? If a lucky charm affects confidence rather than luck itself, should we stop carrying it? If expectations can influence pain, does understanding the nocebo effect make the experience less strange? And if our brains are capable of producing the vivid sensation that another presence is nearby, have we somehow taken all the fun out of a haunted house?

I don’t think so. Over the past few weeks, we’ve wandered through intuition, superstition, curses, and haunted places, looking at what science can tell us about experiences that have historically been described as mysterious, magical, or supernatural. Sometimes we found surprisingly good explanations, while other times we found intriguing possibilities or had to settle for the most scientifically accurate answer of all: we don’t know exactly what happened.

None of that makes the world feel less magical to me. In fact, understanding how something works can sometimes reveal a layer of complexity we didn’t know was there. We may lose one explanation, but what replaces it can be considerably stranger.

We Have a Strange Relationship With Explanation

There is a familiar idea that science and wonder sit on opposite sides of a seesaw. The more we understand something, the less magical it becomes. A rainbow stops being mysterious once you understand refraction, stars become enormous balls of plasma rather than mysterious lights in the sky, a gut feeling becomes pattern recognition, and a ghost becomes perception.

Except that isn’t necessarily what happens. You can understand how a rainbow forms and still stop to look at one. Knowing something about the enormous distances involved in astronomy doesn’t exactly make the night sky boring. Understanding that your brain is constantly integrating information from your body, environment, memories, and previous experiences might actually make a gut feeling more interesting rather than less.

Explanation and wonder don’t have to be opposites, and research on awe gives us an interesting way to think about why. Psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt proposed an influential framework in which awe involves two central features: a perception of vastness and a need for accommodation.

Vastness doesn’t have to mean something physically enormous. A mountain can inspire awe, but so can an idea, an extraordinary act by another person, a piece of music, or the realization that the elements making up your body have a history stretching far beyond your own lifetime. What matters is that the experience somehow feels larger than the mental framework you’re currently using to understand it.

The need for accommodation comes when that framework is no longer quite enough. Something about the experience requires us to adjust, expand, or rethink what we thought we understood. In that sense, awe may not depend on our knowing nothing about something. It can emerge when we suddenly realize that what we thought we understood was much bigger or more complicated than we imagined.

When Your Mental Model Isn’t Big Enough

Michelle Shiota, Dacher Keltner, and Amanda Mossman explored awe in a series of studies published in 2007. Their findings helped develop the idea that awe differs from some other positive emotions because it is particularly associated with experiences that challenge existing ways of understanding ourselves and the world.

That makes awe especially interesting in the context of science because it isn’t necessarily an emotion that asks us to stop thinking. Imagine standing somewhere truly dark and looking at the Milky Way for the first time. You can know intellectually that our galaxy contains an extraordinary number of stars, but seeing that band of light stretching across the sky can produce an entirely different sense of scale. The information suddenly doesn’t fit comfortably into the mental framework you use for ordinary life.

Scientific explanations can sometimes produce the same experience. Learning doesn’t always shrink a mystery by replacing the unknown with a tidy answer. Sometimes it reveals that the thing we thought we understood is connected to systems, processes, scales, or histories we had never considered.

Instead of closing the door on wonder, an explanation can open several more doors behind it.

Science Can Produce Awe Too

There is even research suggesting that awe and scientific thinking may be more compatible than our usual science-versus-magic story implies. In 2018, Sara Gottlieb, Dacher Keltner, and Tania Lombrozo published a series of six studies examining awe as what they called a scientific emotion. They were interested in an apparent contradiction: awe is frequently associated with religious and spiritual experiences, yet scientists also describe awe as part of what draws them toward investigating the natural world.

Across their studies, the researchers found relationships between the tendency to experience awe and aspects of scientific thinking. They suggested that the need for accommodation may help explain the connection because scientific reasoning often requires us to revise an explanation when new evidence no longer fits what we previously believed.

That doesn’t mean experiencing awe automatically makes someone a better scientist, nor does this research establish that awe causes good scientific reasoning in every situation. It does, however, challenge the assumption that wonder disappears once we start looking for an explanation. Sometimes the sense that something exceeds our current understanding may be exactly what makes us want to investigate it.

Piercarlo Valdesolo, Andrew Shtulman, and Andrew Baron have proposed a similar connection between awe and science learning. They argue that awe may help motivate exploration because an awe-inspiring experience can expose the distance between what we currently understand and what we suddenly realize there is left to understand.

That gap doesn’t have to be disappointing. It can make us curious.

The Trick Is Often Stranger Than the Magic

This is where I keep returning to the experiences we’ve explored throughout this series. Consider the feeling that someone is standing behind you when nobody is there. We could call that a ghost and stop asking questions, but researchers have discovered that the experience of a presence can also occur under circumstances that raise fascinating questions about how the brain represents the body and distinguishes between self and other.

In the previous article, we looked at research in which scientists used a robotic system to manipulate the timing between a person’s movements and tactile feedback. Under altered conditions, some healthy participants experienced presence-like sensations. I don’t find that explanation disappointing. I find it completely bizarre that manipulating the relationship between movement and sensation can influence something as seemingly fundamental as the feeling that another person is nearby.

Your nervous system is continuously integrating information related to where your body is, what sensations belong to you, which movements you initiated, and what is happening around you. Most of the time, those processes work so smoothly that you never have a reason to think about them. Discovering what can happen when some of those signals no longer align doesn’t make human experience less mysterious. It reveals how much work is happening underneath an experience we normally take completely for granted.

The same thing happens when we examine intuition. Calling something a sixth sense sounds mysterious, but looking more closely at what the nervous system may be doing hardly makes the phenomenon ordinary. We are capable of drawing on sensory information, bodily signals, memories, learned patterns, expectations, and contextual cues without deliberately analyzing every piece of information involved.

Replacing “magic” with “the brain did it” isn’t much of an explanation at all. The interesting question is how the brain did it, and that question can lead somewhere much stranger.

Understanding Doesn’t Mean Explaining Everything Away

There is another mistake we sometimes make when talking about science and experiences that feel magical. We assume that identifying one plausible mechanism means we have completely explained the experience, when in most cases we haven’t.

Knowing that expectations can influence pain doesn’t mean we can explain every person’s symptoms. Knowing that people can experience a felt presence doesn’t tell us exactly what happened to someone who saw a figure beside their bed twenty years ago. Knowing that humans detect patterns doesn’t mean every coincidence has the same psychological explanation. Scientific findings give us mechanisms and probabilities to investigate, not a magical decoder ring for every individual experience.

Science works by developing explanations, testing them against evidence, revising them, and sometimes discovering that the available evidence isn’t sufficient to reach a conclusion. Saying “I don’t know” is not a failure of that process. Sometimes it is the most accurate conclusion the evidence allows.

There is an important difference between saying, “Science hasn’t explained this particular experience,” and concluding, “Therefore my preferred supernatural explanation must be true.” There is also a difference between healthy skepticism and pretending that science has answers it doesn’t actually have. We can be curious about an experience without immediately deciding what caused it.

Mystery doesn’t disappear just because we approach it scientifically. Sometimes mystery is exactly what sends us looking for better evidence.

Maybe Curiosity Is the Real Magic

Neuroscientists also study curiosity, although it is another concept that resists one tidy explanation. Jacqueline Gottlieb and Pierre-Yves Oudeyer have described curiosity within a broader framework of active information seeking. Humans and other organisms don’t simply wait for useful information to arrive; we actively explore our environments, directing attention toward things that might help us learn.

Think about what happens when you hear an unexpected noise downstairs. You could ignore it, but chances are your attention immediately shifts toward it. You listen again, wonder what caused it, and perhaps go looking for the source. The gap between what you know—something made a noise—and what you want to know—what made that noise?—creates a reason to investigate.

Awe may sometimes make those gaps in our understanding especially noticeable. Something feels too large, strange, beautiful, complex, or unexpected to fit comfortably into what we already know, and suddenly we want more information. Science gives us tools for following that curiosity rather than simply filling the gap with the first explanation that comes to mind.

Perhaps that is why I don’t particularly like the idea that science takes magic away. That argument assumes mystery is valuable only while we remain ignorant of its cause. Once we understand something, the story supposedly ends. My experience has usually been the opposite: good explanations tend to create more questions.

Learn about memory and suddenly you have questions about identity. Learn about perception and you begin wondering how much of your experienced world involves interpretation. Learn about interoception and you start thinking differently about intuition. Learn that expectations can influence pain and you find yourself wondering why we ever imagined mind and body were neatly separable in the first place.

Understanding something doesn’t necessarily close the book. Sometimes it simply gets you to the next chapter.

Keep the Wonder. Keep the Skepticism.

That may be the biggest thing I want to carry out of this spooky little experiment. We don’t have to choose between believing everything and believing nothing. There is plenty of room between unquestioning belief and automatic dismissal, and that middle ground can be a wonderful place for curiosity.

We can carry a lucky object because it reminds us of someone we love without insisting that it manipulates probability. We can enjoy the shiver that runs down our spine in a supposedly haunted house while knowing that darkness, expectation, attention, and perception may all contribute to what we experience. We can listen when our gut tells us something feels strange while still asking whether that feeling reflects expertise, anxiety, previous experience, bias, or something else.

We can also admit when we don’t know. Wonder asks us to stay open to the strangeness of an experience, while skepticism asks us to examine what the evidence actually supports. Those two impulses don’t have to fight each other. Together, they allow us to be fascinated without being credulous and questioning without becoming dismissive.

Maybe that is where the real magic lives. It isn’t in having an explanation for everything or refusing explanations because mystery feels better. It is in realizing how much there still is to understand and being curious enough to keep looking.

So keep the lucky stone if it means something to you. Walk through the haunted house and enjoy the moment when a creaking floorboard makes your heart jump. Pay attention when your gut whispers that something feels strange, and look up at the night sky even if you know exactly why the stars appear to shine.

Then keep asking questions about all of it.

Because understanding the trick doesn’t always make the magic disappear. Sometimes it shows us that the trick was far stranger than we ever imagined.

References & Further Reading

Gottlieb, J., & Oudeyer, P.-Y. (2018). Towards a neuroscience of active sampling and curiosity. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 19, 758–770. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-018-0078-0

Gottlieb, S., Keltner, D., & Lombrozo, T. (2018). Awe as a scientific emotion. Cognitive Science, 42(6), 2081–2094. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12648

Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930302297

Shiota, M. N., Keltner, D., & Mossman, A. (2007). The nature of awe: Elicitors, appraisals, and effects on self-concept. Cognition and Emotion, 21(5), 944–963. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930600923668

Valdesolo, P., Shtulman, A., & Baron, A. S. (2017). Science is awe-some: The emotional antecedents of science learning. Emotion Review, 9(3), 215–221. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073916673212