On 6 April 2026, four astronauts made history as they flew around the far side of the Moon. During this lunar flyby, the Artemis II crew, comprising Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen, reached a farthest point of 252,756 miles from Earth, setting a record for the greatest distance humans have ever travelled in space.

Hansen tried to put the experience into words. “When we were on the far side of the moon, looking back at Earth, you really felt like you weren’t in a capsule. You’d been transported to the far side of the moon. And it really just bent your mind. It was an extraordinary human experience. We’re so grateful for it.”

He was describing something astronauts have reported since the Apollo era, called the overview effect. The term, coined in 1987 by space philosopher and author Frank White, refers to the profound shift in perspective that comes from seeing Earth as a small, fragile sphere against the blackness of space. Astronauts who experience it often come home changed, more aware of the planet as a single shared system and more committed to humanity as a whole.

Writing in Scientific American in the wake of Artemis II, psychologists observed that the overview effect may be best understood as a particular kind of awe: the feeling of encountering something so vast and complex that it transcends our existing understanding of the world.

Most learners will never travel to the Moon. But that same emotion turns out to be one of the most powerful forces in human learning, and a growing body of research suggests it offers a meaningful opportunity for educators and program designers.

In search of awe

Psychologist Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center. He has spent decades studying emotions such as compassion and gratitude, and has more recently become one of the world's leading researchers on awe.

In a recent study, Keltner and his collaborators, Yang Bai and Maria Monroy provided people with a definition of awe: “being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world”, and then asked them to write their own stories of awe.The study collected 2 600 narratives from doctors and prisoners, midwives and combat veterans, poets and basketball players. Some stories were enormous, such as the birth of a child, standing in front of a mountain, or watching a loved one die. Many were ordinary, such as dusk light on an oak tree, a stranger's act of moral courage, or a child's laugh.

Two findings stood out. The first is that awe is far more available than most people assume. Participants reported feeling awe roughly twice a week on average, which means it is not reserved for grand or rare moments. The second is that across all twenty-six countries, the same eight sources kept appearing in people's stories. Keltner calls these the eight wonders of life: moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spirituality and religion, life and death, and epiphany. Awe, in other words, is a near-universal human experience, and it is far more accessible in everyday life than we might think.

That accessibility matters for educators and program designers, because it means awe is something that can be deliberately invited into a classroom, a training room, or a curriculum.

Two emotions, two complementary jobs

Over the past two decades, neuroscience and cognitive psychology have provided learning designers with strong justification for prioritising curiosity. Many studies have shown that if a student is curious, or the subject matter generates curiosity, learning is deeper and retention is better. This scientific grounding gave the field hard evidence to support designing for wonder rather than just content delivery.

The behavioural economist and psychologist George Loewenstein describes curiosity as the emotion we feel when we notice a small gap in what we know. A surprising fact, a question without an answer, or a puzzle just out of reach all pull us in. We want to fill the gap, so we lean forward and pay attention.

Instructional designers, edtech platforms, and even social media algorithms all use curiosity to hold our attention. It works, and it is worth keeping in the designer’s toolkit. But the research suggests curiosity has a partner that has been quietly underused.

In a 2024 paper in Foundations of Science, Francis Heylighen argues that curiosity and awe expand knowledge in different ways. Curiosity arises when we encounter a specific gap in what we know. Because the gap is local and manageable, new information can usually be incorporated into our existing understanding through a process psychologists call assimilation. Awe, by contrast, is triggered by something so vast or unexpected that it challenges our existing mental framework. Rather than simply adding a new piece of information, awe can require accommodation: the restructuring of our understanding to make sense of a larger reality. In this way, curiosity fills gaps in a map we already have, while awe can force us to redraw the map itself.

What the research is showing about awe

Keltner and his colleagues have spent the last fifteen years studying awe with the tools of psychology and neuroscience. The findings are encouraging for anyone who designs learning.

In their foundational 2003 paper, Keltner and Jonathan Haidt argued that all clear cases of awe share two features, which are a sense of vastness and the need for accommodation.

In a article published in 2019, psychologist Jonathon McPhetres reported four pre-registered studies involving 1,518 participants. Participants who watched awe-inducing videos, including footage of vast natural phenomena, became more aware of gaps in their own knowledge than participants in control conditions. This increased awareness of what they did not know was consistently associated with greater interest in science and scientific learning.

In a 2020 paper published in the Journal of Personality, Anderson, Dixson, Monroy, and Keltner reported across three studies that people who are more prone to experiencing awe also tend to be more curious. This relationship appeared both in participants' self-reports and in ratings provided by people who knew them. The researchers also found links between awe, curiosity, and positive academic outcomes, suggesting that students who are more readily moved by vast or mysterious experiences may be more inclined to explore, learn, and engage intellectually.

What this looks like in practice

From the studies discussed in this article, three principles emerge for program designers. The shift they point to is less about adopting new techniques and more about widening the emotional palette designers already work with.

Move from knowledge gaps to knowledge horizons

Alongside the puzzle to be solved, show learners the larger landscape the topic opens onto. This includes the questions that remain genuinely unanswered, the connections to fields they had not imagined as related, and the scale of what experts still do not know. McPhetres' work suggests that this kind of framing makes learners more aware of what they do not know and more motivated to find out.

Design for accommodation alongside assimilation

Build at least one experience into every program where the learner's existing framework is gently stretched and invited to reorganise. This is uncomfortable by design. It is also where deeper learning tends to happen.

Use the eight wonders

As mentioned previously, Keltner identifies eight reliable sources of everyday awe, which are moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spirituality and religion, life and death, and epiphany. Most learning environments could accommodate at least one or two sources by including a guest speaker with a story of moral courage, a piece of music to open a session on creativity, or a walk outdoors during a strategy offsite. These experiences can reach parts of the learner that a slide deck cannot.

A closing thought

The Artemis II astronauts did not just travel further than any human before them. They came back changed, their minds stretched by the sheer scale of what they had witnessed. But awe is not a privilege reserved for those who leave the atmosphere. It is available in classrooms, training rooms, and boardrooms every day, ready to be framed and presented to enhance learning and perspective.