Awe
An important emotion, now studied scientifically; Keltner’s new book explains how, as well as the role of awe in physical and mental wellbeing and a meaningful life
In his new book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, UCal-Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner relates his own story of how he came to study emotions, narrowing on the more neglected positive emotions (fear and anger had previously been subject to far more study), and finally on awe, which for a number of reasons was a difficult thing to both define and measure. The activity of reading this book caused a number of awe-filled experiences for me, and was very much a worthwhile one for understanding an emotion that I now realize even more clearly has played a vital role in making my life a richer, more meaningful one.
One of the things Keltner and his colleagues did to get a better understanding of awe was to send out surveys to a broad range of people - across 26 very different cultures (to avoid the problem of bias toward the WEIRD cultures to which many psychological studies are subject - western, educated, individualist, rich, and democratic) asking for narratives of the experience of awe. They defined it this way: “Being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world.” They received 2600 responses which were then translated. As varied as the responses were, they could be classified into 8 categories, which Keltner deemed the “eight wonders of life.”
I was a bit surprised with the order of which were most common (thinking first of encounters with the vastness of nature, such as in a forest, at the ocean, in the mountains, etc.). Instead, the order by how commonly each appeared was as follows: the most common was other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming, which Keltner and his colleagues called moral beauty. Second was what they called collective effervescence (borrowed from sociologist Emile Durkheim). These are experiences of feeling at one with a larger group, such as in a ritual (wedding, bar mitzvah, funeral, etc.) or large crowd feeling as one, such as a political rally, sports celebration, parade, etc.
Third is the one I thought of first, which was nature, whether a spectacular event such as lightning, storms, earthquakes, sunsets, or simply seeing the night sky in all its wonder, or being in the mountains, among large trees, or any encounter with the larger natural world. Fourth was music, whether at a concert, listening alone, chanting in a religious ceremony, or singing in a group. Fifth was visual design - think of impressive buildings, paintings, jewels, even vast machinery has been able to cause awe in a viewer experiencing its power, complexity, and capabilities. Sixth was spiritual and religious awe, whether a conversion experience, or achievement of a state of nirvana, bliss, satori, etc. Seventh came stories of life and death - the birth of a child or death of a loved one, experiences giving a vivid awareness of the cycle of life. Finally, the eighth was epiphanies, when some essential truth is suddenly understood, whether a philosophical insight, scientific discovery, or any other moment when seemingly unrelated things or ideas suddenly come together to make sense in a new way. 95% of the narratives received fell into one of these 8 “wonders of life”, so there is still room for an “other” category of things like overwhelming sensations or experiences other than those above.
Once Keltner and his colleagues had this taxonomy of awe, they could more effectively study how awe actually works physiologically and psychologically, as well as studying its effects. Some of these studies are fascinating, given how they measured things that seem so difficult to measure. For example, to test the apparent pattern that awe caused a diminution of one’s sense of ego/self (making one feel like a smaller part of a larger collective), they had people draw a little stick figure of themselves on graph paper that already had a sun, ground, and sky. People did this among a grove of spectacular eucalyptus trees, or facing the other direction, at a campus building of no particular beauty. The group looking at the awe-inspiring trees drew themselves much smaller. In addition, a collaborator of the experimenters walked by and purposely dropped a bunch of pens - the awe-inspired group did far more helping with picking them up. This is just one study, so read the book to get more of the fascinating evidence for the effects of awe, and pretty good account of how awe’s evolution as a human emotion can be explained.
The latter part of the book focuses on the ways in which experiencing awe more regularly enhances mental and physical health and wellbeing, and also fairly simple ways in which people can consciously nurture a more awe-rich life, with more regular experiences of awe cultivated into one’s normal routines. The nice part about this is that potential for awe is all around us if we are paying the right kind of attention to the right sorts of things. A good place to start is with simply reading this book, as I found myself, numerous times in the course of reading it feeling the “wow!” or “whoa!” responses that are clear markers of the experience of awe.
For a richer discussion of the book, listen to this very good episode of Hidden Brain, where host Shankar Vidantam interviews Dacher Keltner, who gives some excellent insights into how he ended up having awe as his field of study, in addition to describing some of what he has learned in his years studying it.