The fact that a discussion on awe finds itself circling back—like
so many discussions—to our technology, made my three days
unwired in the desert feel all the more radical. We’ve got awe! We’ve
got it live right here in the ancient handprints and the umpteen
gazillion stars and the fact that a nerdy bunch of students will head
back to the city with new friends and a new way of looking at past and
present.
As to whether any of this will show up in our cranial currents,
initial results seem promising. Strayer sent me the results from my
wired-up river interlude, and they were consistent with his hypothesis.
A colorful graph showed the power of my theta waves at a range of
frequencies compared to samples from the two groups that stayed in
the city. My theta signals were lower, indicating a prefrontal cortex
on a brief vacation. What the graph doesn’t tell us, though, is exactly
where that energy is going in the rest of the brain. Although Strayer-
the-Scientist wants to keep unpacking the signals like a Matrushka
doll, Strayer-the-Mountain Man understands some mystery will
remain, and that’s okay.
For millennia, humans alone or in small groups have at times
sought out a sparer, more elemental connection to the forces of
nature. They come because they are needing something, and they keep
coming because they are finding it. Their pursuits may be spiritual,
interpersonal or emotional, deeply human and complex and unlikely
to be explained in a bar graph. “At the end of the day,” said Strayer,
his eyes grazing the horizon, “we come out in nature not because the
science says it does something to us, but because of how it makes us
feel.”