Imagine yourself at Victoria Falls, on the border between Zambia and
Zimbabwe, a cascade of water more than a mile wide that plummets 350
feet, twice the height and width of Niagara Falls. Or perhaps straining
your neck for a long, silent look at Michelangelo's ceiling in the
Sistine Chapel. Or maybe hearing your favorite song for the first time
in years, or that moment when the sun crests the horizon at sunrise.
According to Dacher Keltner, a leading expert on the biology of human
emotion and a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, these experiences
share something, a sense of forces that go beyond our understanding of
the world. They are encounters with awe.
The science of awe is relatively new. For the past 15 years, Keltner
has been studying this misunderstood emotion, and drawing conclusions
about the importance of awe in our everyday lives. In his new book,
Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your
Life, Keltner examines how this ineffable feeling has impacted our
minds and bodies across history and cultures.
Atlas Obscura spoke with Keltner about the science of awe, how we
cultivate it in our lives, and how it impacts our experience of the
world at home and afar.
You write in the introduction of your book that your brother Rolf's
passing led you to write it. What was it about that moment that
connected you to the idea of awe?
Well, there were really two catalysts in watching my brother Rolf
Keltner pass away from colon cancer. The first was the fact that the
evening that he passed was transcendent. Just watching him head into
whatever happens after the body goes and looking at him and wondering
what he was feeling. In some sense, death is the vastest mystery and my
brother had a vast place in my life. The second thing that happened,
when I started to grieve his loss, the only word that I could come up
with to describe my mental and physical state was "awe-less."
Everything lost meaning. I felt very disoriented. I felt hot and
depressed and anxious. I just felt like I lost my sense of the point of
living, although I was not suicidal. So I just started pouring out
words about my brotherhood with Rolf, awe, and the meaning of life.
Those words eventually became the book.
How do you define awe? And what is it in the context of our everyday
lives?
In the broadest sense you can define awe as the feeling you have when
you encounter vast mysteries that you can't understand. When I sat
there and I looked at Rolf, a very strong physical guy suddenly
disappearing, I just didn't understand it. So awe is the vast mystery
that you can't make sense of with your current knowledge. Then,
importantly, the second part of defining awe is to say, "Well what's it
about? What context are we in? Where does it happen?" And that's where
the eight wonders come in: moral, beauty, nature, collective movement,
et cetera. It varies profoundly for every person, from one individual
to the next. Some people find awe more terrifying. Some people find it
in different realms such as nature. If people are religious, they'll
find it through belief systems about the divine and spirit. But what's interesting about awe is that there's a universal structure to it. When
you hear other people's stories you understand that it's kind of how
you feel, but in a different way.
In many different countries, we asked people each day to tell us if
they felt awe that day. What we found is that they feel awe about two
to three times a week. You always have to think about emotions as
families of experiences, and there are really extraordinary experiences
of awe, right?
For example, when I got to hug the Dalai Lama, I thought that was
awesome, but that's rare. There are more everyday forms of awe that
people feel quite regularly. People are moved by hearing a lightning
storm or seeing a beautiful sunset or seeing somebody help a stranger
push a car that's broken down. There's all these everyday, beautiful
moments of awe. I hope one of the points of the book is just to open
people up to everyday awe.
You mention beauty as one of the eight wonders of life that create awe.
How does awe differ from joy or contentment or what we experience in
the presence of beauty?
It's fascinating because the science of emotion really started by
looking at the negative emotions-anger, fear, sadness, and disgust-and
then it moved to select positive emotions like pride, laughter, joy,
and love. But it ignored this whole space of emotion that I write about
in the book, called the self-transcendent emotions. The self is always
getting us to strive for goals, to fulfill our desires, and to gain
social status, but there are emotions we feel when we lose the self.
Awe is one of them. Awe is what I feel in relation to something bigger
than myself. Joy is the feeling you have when all of the burdens and expectations of yourself are kind of quiet for a while. Contentment is
where you really feel like you've got enough. Another really
interesting one is bliss or ecstasy, which is where the self just
vanishes completely. You feel ecstasy when you're throbbing with people
on the dance floor, and you think, "I don't know who I am or what's
going on here, but it feels great." So there are these
self-transcendent states that awe is part of.
What are some tangible ways that people can find awe as we navigate an uncertain world: social media, the ongoing pandemic, climate
instability, and more?
I think this is part of why this emotion is getting such attention
right now. In some sense, we have lived through what sociologists say
is an era of self-focus and narcissism. Those emotions and that
self-focus tend to be accentuated by social media. It leads to a lot of rumination, anxiety, and self-criticism.
With respect to the environment, reports say our consuming behavior
plays into how we respond to the climate crisis. Awe is almost the
antithetical state to all this self-focus because it opens you up to
other people. It makes you wonder about things. It makes you turn away
from social media and get outside and explore. Awe studies in China
showed that it makes people eat less red meat, burn less fossil fuels.
So this is an emotion that really gets us to be other-oriented, kinder,
more focused on caring for the natural environment.
Sometimes negative things-maybe a forest fire or flood-can inspire awe
as well, based on their scale or impact. Do you differentiate that
feeling from the more inspiring version of awe?
What an important question, right? Remember, there are eight wonders
that you can experience, like spiritual practice and music and nature
and the like, and they vary in their subjective feeling tones. Some
experiences of awe feel almost fearful. Others are purely blissful and
joyful. So how do we differentiate awe from these related states? We do
this in a couple of different ways. One is within the category of awe,
about a quarter of the experiences are really threatening and you feel
fearful, you feel uncertain, and your body reacts with stress. Three
quarters of the experiences of awe don't have that threat quality. So
that's the first pass. For a lot of people, religious people, it's just
pure joy and bliss. For a subset, thinking about the divine and their relationship to God may feel threatening. They feel like they could be
punished or what have you. So threat is one way to sort out the
variations of awe. We've also done a lot of work that really
differentiates awe from horror. When you think about carnage or
genocide or violence or you see dead bodies, it is mysterious and
mind-blowing, but that's not awe. That's horror, right? Then there's
terror. People feel terror about mortality. That's vast and mysterious,
but threatening and terrifying. And that, too, is really different from
this more inspiring state of awe.
In your book, you write about how awe is what we feel when we are in
the presence of something that transcends our current understanding of
the world. It places us beyond ourselves. How do you think this
approach can impact the way we explore the world at home and afar?
What a terrific question. One of the central insights about what awe
does for us is that it makes us, as Jane Goodall said, amazed at things
outside of ourselves. Our minds, our feelings, our concerns are very
small parts of the world and reality. We know that, but given our lives
and given the importance of pursuing self-interest, we often think
that's the only thing that exists.
Here's an emotion that points you to things larger than the self,
outside of you, and that's why, at the end of the book, I talk about
how awe opens us up to the systems of life. Studying awe, doing
research on awe, thinking about it so much, and having great
conversations like this one opens this up for me. I can look at a tree
and that's a whole system that I can be amazed by. I look at the clouds
roll in or I see kids on a playground using this system of language and
play that connects humans. Or I look at a newspaper article, I read
about a scientific finding that is part of this system of understanding
the world scientifically, or I engage in a ritual with other people and
think about the origins of that ritual in yoga. We are surrounded by
all these vast complex systems that make up the world, both natural and
social, and awe makes us connect to them, which is remarkable. It's
thrilling to feel that.
You define wonder as "the mental state of openness, questioning,
curiosity, and embracing mystery." Atlas Obscura's mission is to
inspire wonder and curiosity about our incredible world. How do wonder
and awe relate to one another?
It's interesting because awe hasn't had as much scientific or
philosophical attention as fear and love, emotional states that we've
made progress in defining, so your questions are right on the mark. Awe
is really a feeling state. It's this emotion you have when you
encounter a vast mystery, then the feeling leads to changes in what you
do in the world, physiology, hormones, and also how you make sense of
the world. It produces the mental state of wonder. So, wonder follows
awe and wonder is more of what you might call an epistemological state.
It's a state animated toward gaining knowledge about the world, and
it's defined by certain qualities. For example, sometimes I am really
open and I'm curious and I gravitate to what is not known, whereas when
I'm proud and arrogant and certain about everything, I only think about
what I know, as a counterpoint. So wonder is a mental state that
follows the feeling of awe.
Why is it so important for us to cultivate a sense of awe in our lives?
In some sense, this is why I wrote this book. Alongside science and my
brother, we're coming out of a pandemic, depression and anxiety are up, isolation is up. Our life expectancy in the United States has dropped collectively for two consecutive years. It's fair to say we're sort of struggling. And the studies find that awe is about as good for you as
anything that you can do. It reduces stress, reduces loneliness. It
makes you feel like you're more deeply intertwined with community. It
elevates health, cardiovascular function. It reduces inflammation
produced by your immune system. It is good for you.
So then the question is: What do I do? Throughout the book, I write
about really simple things you can do. Go on an awe walk, just go out
and look for mystery. Listen to music in a different way. Listen to
music that really defines who you are and what your sense of purpose
is. Tell awe stories. You know, it's so fun when I teach people at
work, and you get people starting to talk about the patient they're
attending to or the student who's really doing well, and they will
really be moved almost to tears. Think about sacred texts for you and
people who really inspire you morally. Look at clouds, look at the
night sky, listen to the ring, there's a ton to do to cultivate
everyday awe. In fact, in some sense this is what culture is, right?
Museums and music shows and films and religion. They are ways to make
us feel awe, so return to them.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/science-of-awe-dacher-keltner
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