What is Cognitive Wonder?

Awe through science, philosophy, and science fiction

Photo by Jason Strull on Unsplash

The feeling I love the most is when a simple idea clicks, making the world look different. Suddenly, the implications of the idea are everywhere and a whole extra dimension of thinking opens up. This is what I like to call ‘cognitive wonder,’ and it’s what draws me to science, philosophy, and science fiction.

I’ve always been an avid reader, mostly reading fantasy books when I was young. But as a teenager, it wasn’t long before I got into reading science and philosophy—initially on some immature quest to seem intellectual—and it ended up having a profound effect on me.

One of the first science books I read was Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Being raised religiously, I thought this was somehow an act of dissent—even though as Roman Catholics we accepted evolution.

Until then, I had considered evolution a brute fact about the world. Species got “better” in some vague sense over time, and that was just how the world worked. I had some hazy idea that there was evidence for evolution, like fossils that showed change over time, but I had no concept of a theory or mechanism to explain the “why” part. Critically, I didn’t even recognize there was a “why” that required an answer.

Reading Darwin opened my eyes. I’m lucky that Darwin’s writing holds up so well that a teenager can understand it a century and a half after it was published. The mechanism of natural selection made sense, which is what made it so profound. It was easy to grasp and outlined the basic story of so much of our world.

To quickly summarize: in each species, not every member of every generation survives long enough to reproduce. Those that reproduce don’t do so equally. Those that reproduce more will have their traits (genes) more highly represented in the next generation. 

For example, imagine an animal with a coloration that blends perfectly with its surroundings, making it harder for predators to spot. This gives it a higher chance of survival, and therefore, a better opportunity to reproduce and pass on its coloration to its offspring. Over time, as individuals with these helpful traits reproduce more than those without them, these traits become more prevalent in the population. 

Various pressures—resources in an environment, competition for those resources, and predators—will make individuals with some traits able to reproduce more than others. These factors combined dictate which traits will become more highly represented in the next generation.

New traits will appear because of random genetic variations, and if they are helpful (in the current environment), they too will become common in the population. Over many, many generations, these changes can accumulate into profound adaptations within a species, and this is how evolution occurs.

Coming to grips with this explanation for evolution made sense of things I had accepted as true but didn’t understand—like that species had evolved—and gave me a new way of thinking about biology. A giraffe’s neck wasn’t long just so it could eat the leaves on tall trees. Its neck also told the story of the selection pressures its ancestors were under; a subtle but important distinction that existed wherever I looked.

This understanding of natural selection opened my eyes to new mysteries—how did spiders come about their elaborate web spinning? Previously, I just accepted that spiders spin webs because it’s how they catch their food. But now I knew their ability to create silk and the complex behavior of spinning a web would have had to come about gradually. What were these intermediate steps? What were the environmental pressures that shaped the trajectory of spider evolution? These questions—if not necessarily their answers—were now open to me. I didn’t know how spiders had come to be in their current form, but I could see the questions that needed answers to understand it.

The world came to make more sense, but also got bigger and more full of mystery. Observations that used to be “just the way things were” now seemed to beg for speculation and explanation. A previously hidden dimension in our world was opened up that I could explore through thought.

That’s the kind of thing I mean when I refer to cognitive wonder. When we experience cognitive wonder, the world opens up, and we become more cognizant of the principles underlying it. What we previously accepted as brute facts become mysteries, the previously unquestionable becomes comprehensible, and we gain new tools to look at the world with. If the world seems small, it’s because we haven’t understood it well enough to know how much there is to know.

Cognitive Wonder in Science Fiction

It's not just scientific theories that evoke this sense of cognitive wonder for me. In fact, I first stumbled upon the term cognitive wonder in a review:

Cognitive wonder at its challenging best.

- Locus review of Greg Egan's Teranesia

This quote resonated with me. The phrase "cognitive wonder" captured something important about my love in both science fiction and nonfiction. Stories by authors like Greg Egan that delve into the concepts of mind uploads always excited me, prompting hours of contemplation, but I couldn't really articulate why. The term cognitive wonder seemed to capture it.

After coming across the term, I was excited to research cognitive wonder to better understand what it was specifically I found so engaging. Disappointingly, I found it isn't a standard term. Instead, the science fiction community talked about "sense of wonder" as one hallmark of the genre, typically brought on by the vastness of space or amazing technologies. For instance, the sheer magnitude and power of the Death Star in Star Wars, emphasized by Obi-Wan Kenobi's line "That's no moon. It's a space station," perfectly encapsulates this sense of wonder.

Some of the wonder talked about in science fiction seems to be the same cognitive wonder I mean—for example, the strange alien intelligence in Peter Watts' Blindsight that forces us to question our concepts of intelligence and consciousness, or the strange post-humans in Greg Egan's Diaspora that make us question identity and the purpose of existence. But the term "sense of wonder" seems much broader and includes wonder that is not cognitive. The Death Star, wonder-inducing as its introduction is, remains confined within the Star Wars universe and gives no big revelations or thoughts about our universe. I wanted to better understand the contrast between a sense of wonder and cognitive wonder, so I kept digging.

Sense of Awe and the Need to Accommodate

As I researched feelings of wonder, I kept coming across a closely related concept: awe. The academic literature on awe, specifically the breakdown given by Haidt, was extremely helpful.

Haidt surveyed what awe means in different fields: philosophy, psychology, sociology, and religion. He looked at the types of experiences that evoke awe (including scientific theories in his list, which was my first hint this was related to cognitive wonder). He came up with two core components of awe: vastness and accommodation. 

Vastness is simple enough. It simply means the concept or experience evoking awe must be large in some sense—maybe large implications, power, or simply physical bigness.

Accommodation is the concept I found more useful. This refers to an experience or concept forcing you to adjust your mental structures to accommodate it. Your current ways of thinking cannot make sense of the concept or experience, so the way you think needs to change. Learning about natural selection changed my concept of evolution from "species change and get better over time" to "natural selection causes more reproductively fit traits to become more prevalent in a population, leading to species changes over time". My concept had to change to accommodate this learning, changing how I understood the world.

Cognitive wonder isn't equivalent to Haidt's awe. It's also about the concept forcing you to grapple with intellectual challenges it raises. Going back to Star Wars: putting ourselves in the position of the characters and seeing the Death Star might evoke awe. It is a vast artifact that forces us to reconsider our conceptions of human capability. But it wouldn't be cognitive wonder. Natural selection would, and the difference is in the implications. Natural selection changed how I thought about a large part of the natural world, and the complexity of that change meant there was a lot of "meat" on that change to think about.

My current conception of cognitive wonder places it as a subset of awe. It requires both of Haidt's components, but one more ingredient. A phenomenon evokes cognitive wonder if it:

1. (Accommodation) Forces a rethinking of our current mental structures.

2. (Vastness) Has a large scope in terms of how fundamental the mental structures it forces us to rethink are.

3. (Complexity) Presents intricate, layered, or multifaceted challenges to our understanding, prompting intellectual engagement.

This definition of cognitive wonder best articulates and ties together my interests in science, philosophy, and science fiction. Scientific theories can evoke cognitive wonder because they can force us to see past the phenomena we take for granted and inform us of the hidden mysteries beneath. Philosophy can force us to question what we think we know, exposing our concepts as not as rock solid as we thought. And science fiction can illustrate the implications of either through narrative. Cognitive wonder breaks us out of our everyday thinking and introduces us to hidden dimensions in our world in ways that are both empowering and humbling. It transports us to (indulge me here) a cognitive wonderland—a place where our minds can change, explore, and (indulge me again) evolve.