Awe The new science of everyday wonder and how it can transform your life

Dacher Keltner

Book - 2023

"From professor of psychology at U. C. Berkeley and one of the foremost experts on the science of emotions comes a groundbreaking and essential exploration into the history, science, and understanding of awe, and a guide for how we might all cultivate a deeper sense of awe and transform our lives and our world Awe, one of the most elusive emotions, is hard to pin down. How do we begin to measure the goosebumps we feel when we first see the Grand Canyon, or the utter amazement when we watch a child walk for the first time? How do you put into words the collective effervescence of standing in a crowd and singing in unison, or the wonder you feel while gazing at centuries-old works of art? Up until fifteen years ago, we didn't know h...ow to measure awe, the feeling we get when encountering vast mysteries that transcend our understanding of the world. Scientists were studying emotions like fear and disgust, emotions that seemed essential to how the human race endures. But recently, we've come to realize that through the span of evolution, we meet our most basic needs socially. We survive thanks to our capacities to cooperate, form communities, and create culture that strengthen our sense of shared identity - actions that are sparked and spurred by awe. In AWE, Dacher Keltner, one of the leading experts on the science of emotions, presents a radical investigation and deeply personal inquiry into awe. Revealing new research into how awe transforms our brains and bodies, alongside an examination of awe across history, culture, and within his own life, Keltner shows us how awe leads us to appreciate what is most humane in our human nature. And during a moment in which our world feels more divided than ever before, we need a story of awe, an invitation to cultivate awe in our everyday life as an antidote. If we open our minds, it is awe that sharpens our reasoning and orients us towards big ideas and new insights, that cools our immune system's inflammation response and strengthens our bodies. It is awe that activates our inclination to share and create strong networks, to take actions that are good for the world around us. It is awe that transforms who we are, that inspires the creation of art, music, and religion. At turns radical and profound, brimming with enlightening and practical insights into the power of awe, AWE is both an invitation and a field guide, from not only one of the leading voices on the subject, but a fellow seeker of awe in his own right, to place awe as a vital force within our lives"--

Saved in:

Bookmobile Nonfiction Show me where

152.4/Keltner
0 / 1 copies available

2nd Floor Show me where

152.4/Keltner
1 / 3 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
Bookmobile Nonfiction 152.4/Keltner Due Apr 18, 2024
2nd Floor 152.4/Keltner Due Apr 16, 2024
2nd Floor 152.4/Keltner Checked In
2nd Floor 152.4/Keltner Due Mar 30, 2024
Subjects
Genres
Self-help publications
Published
New York : Penguin Press 2023.
Language
English
Main Author
Dacher Keltner (author)
Physical Description
xxvi, 309 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 255-295) and index.
ISBN
9781984879684
  • Introduction
  • Section I. A Science of Awe
  • 1. Eight Wonders of Life
  • 2. Awe Inside Out
  • 3. Evolution of the Soul
  • Section II. Stories of Transformative Awe
  • 4. Moral Beauty
  • 5. Collective Effervescence
  • 6. Wild Awe
  • Section III. Cultural Archives of Awe
  • 7. Musical Awe
  • 8. Sacred Geometries
  • 9. The Fundamental It
  • Section IV. Living a Life of Awe
  • 10. Life and Death
  • 11. Epiphany
  • Acknowledgments
  • Credits
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This wonderful outing by University of California, Berkeley psychology professor Keltner (The Power Paradox) lays out a scientific overview of awe. He contends that awe is a "basic human need" that's good for one's well-being and produces a transcendent sense of dissolving boundaries between the self and the wider world. Pondering why awe sometimes produces tears, Keltner suggests that adults might tear up as a learned reaction from childhood when one cried while feeling "small and lacking agency," an emotion similar to the overwhelming sensation that accompanies awe. The feeling has practical applications, the author posits, detailing scientific studies that found awe to be associated with lower levels of inflammation and capable of mitigating perceptions of political polarization. He outlines the "eight wonders of life" that are most likely to induce awe: moral beauty (e.g., courage in battle), collective effervescence (e.g., participating in a political rally), nature, music, visual art, spirituality, mortality, and epiphanies. Their power, he writes, stems from their likelihood to remind the beholder that "we are part of many things that are much larger than the self." Eye-opening science and Keltner's appropriate sense of wonder add up to an enlightening take on the importance and potency of awe. Readers will be enchanted. (Jan.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Keltner's (psychology, Univ. of California, Berkeley; Born To Be Good) book considers what awe is and the contexts in which it arises. It looks at how awe transforms thoughts of self, one's relationship to the world, and physical reactions to it. The author analyzes personal stories in which his participants exhibited awe at the beauty they discovered in libraries, art institutions, and scientific explorations. He looks at finding collective effervescence in activities like dance, professional basketball, and other collective movements. He also examines nature and how it has been used as a source to heal the traumas of combat, loneliness, and poverty. The richness of nature has been used to open eyes, minds, and hearts, and lets people see their problems on a smaller scale, enabling them to sort out solutions to their problems. Finally, Keltner explores awe in music, visual arts, religion, and spirituality. He also probes life and death, while positing eight wonders of life where awe reveals personal insights into the meaning of life. VERDICT This book is destined to become a classic and should be included in any behavioral and social sciences library.--Claude Ury

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

How and why the sensations of awe create deeply memorable moments in modern life. In this insightful report, Keltner--a psychology professor and director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California and author of Born To Be Good and The Power Paradox--parlays his two-decade career teaching the nuances of happiness into a focused guide to discovering awe and bliss in the human experience. Through stories from a wide variety of careers, callings, situations, and perspectives, the author explores the kind of deeply embedded first-person spiritual and emotional truths that "science simply cannot capture." These anecdotes include his own brush with the enduring grief of losing his younger brother, who had colon cancer and died via assisted suicide, an event the inspired him to write this book. Keltner identifies four recognizable aspects, or "stories," of awe. In early chapters, the author probes scientific and theoretical viewpoints, and he examines how awe is defined and measured, why it occurs, and the methods uniquely exhibited by individuals who experience it. This research is bolstered by Keltner's firm belief in the eight wonders of life, which include simple gifts like collective effervescence ("human waves of awe"), nature, music, personal epiphanies, and the marvels of life and death. Most compelling are the personal stories, which demonstrate a fascinating assortment of opinions and perspectives on what people individually consider awe-inspiring. The author's interest in restorative justice brought him to San Quentin State Prison, where inmates shared the things that bring them awe from behind bars as well as how music, visual art, and nature contribute to stress-relieving, growth-inducing sensations. Through his work as an expert in the science of goodness and human emotions, Keltner ably renders these transformative, defining moments with illuminative prose and encouragement for readers seeking their own awe-inspired deliverance. A timely reminder to appreciate the awe-inspiring everyday wonders flourishing all around us. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

One Eight Wonders of Life An Awe Movement Begins The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. ¥ Virginia Woolf The last time the word "awe" hit me with the force of personal epiphany, I was twenty-seven years old. I was in Paul Ekman's living room, having just interviewed for a fellowship in his lab to study emotion. Ekman is well-known for his study of facial expression, and a founding figure in the new science of emotion. At the conclusion of his querying, we moved to the deck off his home in the San Francisco hills. We were embraced by a view of the city. Thick fog moved through the streets toward the Bay Bridge and eventually across the bay to Berkeley. Stretching for conversation, I asked Paul what a young scholar might study. His answer was one word: Awe. At that time-1988-we knew very little scientifically about emotions: what they are, how they influence our minds and bodies, and why we experience them in the first place. Psychological science was firmly entrenched in a "cognitive revolution." Within this framework, every human experience, from moral condemnation to prejudice against people of color, originates in how our minds, like computer programs, process units of information in passionless ways. What was missing from this understanding of human nature was emotion. Passion. Gut feeling. What Scottish philosopher David Hume famously called the "master of reason," and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, termed "System 1" thinking. Emotions have long been viewed as "lower" and animalistic, disruptive of lofty reason, which is often considered humanity's highest achievement. Emotions, so fleeting and subjective, others observed, cannot be measured in the lab. Our passions were still very much uncharted some seventy years after Virginia Woolf's musing. Ekman, though, would soon publish a paper-now the most widely cited in the field-that would push the scientific pendulum firmly toward emotion. In this essay, a field guide really, he detailed the what of emotions: They are brief feeling states accompanied by distinct thoughts, expressions, and physiology. Emotions are fleeting, shorter-lived than moods, like feeling blue, and emotional disorders, such as depression. He outlined how emotions work: they shift our thought and action to enable us to adapt to our present circumstances. To approach the why of emotions, Ekman took a cue from Charles Darwin: Emotions enable us to accomplish "fundamental life tasks," such as fleeing peril, avoiding toxins, and finding nutritious food. Emotions are central to our individual survival and our evolution as a species. A young science had a field guide, and scholars promptly went exploring. First, scientists mapped anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, and joy, the emotions whose facial expressions Ekman had documented in the hills of New Guinea in the early 1960s. Next to appear in the lab were the self-conscious emotions-embarrassment, shame, and guilt. Studies charted how these states arise when we make social mistakes, and how blushes, head bows, awkward appeasing smiles, and apologies restore our standing in the eyes of others. Sensing that there is more to the mind, brain, and body than negative emotions, and more to the delights of life than "joy," young scientists then turned to studies of states like amusement, gratitude, love, and pride. My own lab got into the act with studies of laughter, gratitude, love, desire, and sympathy. An emotion revolution in reaction to the cognitive revolution was underway, moving psychological science beyond its dry and cool cognitivist account of the mind and inattention to the body. Neuroscientists were mapping "the emotional brain." Studies alerted those interested in the secrets of love to the finding that marriages dissolve when partners express contempt to one another. Our culture wars over abortion, race, class, and climate crises could be traced back to gut feelings about the moral issues of our times. For faring well in life, emotion scientists determined that we are better served by cultivating our "emotional intelligence," or EQ, than our IQ. Today we are still in the midst of "an age of emotion" in science, one that shapes every corner of our lives. One emotion, though, would not get the call for this revolution, an emotion that is the provenance of so much that is human-music, art, religion, science, politics, and transformative insights about life. That would be awe. The reasons are in part methodological. Awe seems to resist precise definition and measurement, the bedrock of science. In fact, how would a scientist study awe in a lab? How could scientists lead people to feel it on cue and measure its near-ineffable qualities, or document how awe transforms our lives, if, indeed, it does? There were theoretical barriers as well. As the science of emotion got off the ground, it did so in a theoretical zeitgeist that held that emotions are about self-preservation, oriented toward minimizing peril and advancing competitive gains for the individual. Awe, by contrast, seems to orient us to devote ourselves to things outside of our individual selves. To sacrifice and serve. To sense that the boundaries between our individual selves and others readily dissolve, that our true nature is collective. These qualities did not fit neatly within the hyperindividualistic, materialistic, survival-of-the-selfish-genes view of human nature so prominent at the time. One cannot help but suspect that personal hesitations were at play as well. When people talk about experiences of awe, they often mention things like finding their soul, or discovering what is sacred, or being moved by spirit-phenomena that many believe to be beyond measurement and the scientific view of human nature. Emotion science had a field guide, though, a road map for charting the what, how, and why of awe. What awe needed first was a definition, the place where all good scientific stories begin. What is awe? Defining Awe With emotion science turning its attention to the varieties of positive emotion, in 2003 my longtime collaborator at New York University Jonathan Haidt and I worked to articulate a definition of awe. At the time, there were only a few scientific articles on awe (but thousands on fear). There were no definitions of awe to speak of. So we immersed ourselves in the writings of mystics about their encounters with the Divine. We read treatments of the holy, the sublime, the supernatural, the sacred, and "peak experiences" that people might describe with words like "flow," "joy," "bliss," or even "enlightenment." We considered political theorists like Max Weber and their speculations about the passions of mobs whipped up by demagogues. We read anthropologists' accounts of awe in dance, music, art, and religion in faraway, remote cultures. Drawing upon these veins of scholarship, we defined awe as follows: Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world. Vastness can be physical-for example, when you stand next to a 350-foot-tall tree or hear a singer's voice or electric guitar fill the space of an arena. Vastness can be temporal, as when a laugh or scent transports you back in time to the sounds or aromas of your childhood. Vastness can be semantic, or about ideas, most notably when an epiphany integrates scattered beliefs and unknowns into a coherent thesis about the world. Vastness can be challenging, unsettling, and destabilizing. In evoking awe, it reveals that our current knowledge is not up to the task of making sense of what we have encountered. And so, in awe, we go in search of new forms of understanding. Awe is about our relation to the vast mysteries of life. What about the innumerable variations in awe? How awe changes from one culture to another, or from one period in history to another? Or from one person to another? Or even one moment in your life to another? The content of what is vast varies dramatically across cultures and the contexts of our lives. In some places it is high-altitude mountains, and in others flat never-ending plains with storms approaching. For infants it is the immense warmth provided by parents, and when we die, the enormous expanse of our lives. During some historical periods it is the violence humans are capable of, and during other times protests in the streets against the machines and institutions that perpetrate violence. The varieties of vastness are myriad, giving rise to shifts in the meaning of awe. "Flavoring themes," Jon and I reasoned, also account for variations in awe. By flavoring themes, we meant context-specific ways in which we ascribe meaning to vast mysteries. For example, you shall learn that extraordinary virtue and ability can lead us to feel awe. Conceptions of virtue and ability vary dramatically according to context: whether, for example, we find ourselves in combat or at a meditation retreat, whether we are part of a hip-hop performance or a chess club, whether we live in a region of religious dogma or one governed by the rules of Wall Street. How we conceptualize virtue and ability within our local culture gives rise to variations in awe. Another flavoring theme that shapes the experience of awe is supernatural belief systems-beliefs, for example, about ghosts, spirits, extraordinary experiences, gods, the Divine, heaven, and hell. These beliefs imbue experiences of awe with culturally specific meanings. For example, for many people across history, experiences of awe in encounters with mountains, storms, winds, the sun, and the moon have been flavored with local stories and beliefs about the Divine. For others, those same mountains, storms, winds, the sun, and the moon stir a different kind of awe, one more grounded in a sense of what is sacred about nature but lacking the sense of the Divine. Perhaps most pervasively, perceived threat also flavors experiences of awe, and can layer fear, uncertainty, alienation, and terror into our experience of the emotion. Perceptions of threat explain why people in certain cultures-such as the Japanese or Chinese-feel more fear blended with awe when around inspiring people than people from less hierarchical cultures do. Why psychedelic experiences with LSD, MDMA, or ayahuasca inspire pure awe for some and are flooded with terror for others. Why encounters with the Divine are filled with fear in some cultures, whereas in other cultures that lack ideas about a judgmental God they are defined by bliss and love. Why dying is oceanic and awe-filled for some and horrifying for others. And why cultural symbols like the American flag can move some to tears and chills, and others to shudder in the sense of threat and alienation. In awe we encounter the vast mysteries of life, with flavoring themes like conceptions of virtue, supernatural beliefs, and perceived threat giving rise to near-infinite variations. Eight Wonders of Life Emotions are like stories. They are dramas that structure our day, like scenes in a novel, movie, or play. Emotions unfold in actions between people, enabling us, for example, to comfort someone in need, show devotion to a loved one, redress injustice, or belong to a community. Having defined awe, our answer to the question "What is awe?" needs next to move to people's own stories of the emotion. When William James, a founding figure in psychology, went in search of understanding mystical awe at the turn of the twentieth century-an exploration we will consider later-he did not have people rate their feelings with numbers. He did not do experiments. He did not measure physiological reactions or sensations, which had long fascinated him. Instead, he gathered stories: First-person narratives, utterly personal, about encounters with the Divine. Religious conversions. Spiritual epiphanies. Visions of heaven and hell. And in discerning the patterns in these stories, he uncovered the heart of religion: that it is about mystical awe, an ineffable emotional experience of being in relation to what we consider divine. Guided by this approach, Professor Yang Bai, a longtime collaborator of mine, and I gathered stories of awe from people in twenty-six countries. We cast our net broadly because of the scientific concern about "WEIRD" samples: those composed disproportionately of people who are Western, Educated, Individualist, Rich, and Democratic. Our participants were anything but WEIRD. Participants included adherents to all major religions-many forms of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism-as well as denizens of more secular cultures (e.g., Holland). Our participants varied in terms of their wealth and education. They lived within democratic and authoritarian political systems. They held egalitarian and patriarchal views of gender. They ranged in their cultural values from the more collectivist (e.g., China, Mexico) to the more individualistic (e.g., the United States). In our study, people were provided with the definition of awe you have considered: "Being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world." And then they wrote their story of awe. Speakers of twenty languages at UC Berkeley translated the 2,600 narratives. We were surprised to learn that these rich narratives from around the world could be classified into a taxonomy of awe, the eight wonders of life. What most commonly led people around the world to feel awe? Nature? Spiritual practice? Listening to music? In fact, it was other people's courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming. Around the world, we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty, the first wonder of life in our taxonomy. Exceptional physical beauty, from faces to landscapes, has long been a fascination of the arts and sciences, and moves us to feelings of infatuation, affection, and, on occasion, desire. Exceptional virtue, character, and ability-moral beauty-operate according to a different aesthetic, one marked by a purity and goodness of intention and action, and moves us to awe. One kind of moral beauty is the courage that others show when encountering suffering, as in this story from the United Kingdom: The way my daughter dealt with the stillbirth of her son. I was with her at the hospital when he was delivered and her strength in dealing with this left me in awe. My little girl grew up overnight and exhibited awesome strength and bravery during this difficult time. The courage required in combat is another time-honored source of awe. This is a stirring theme found in Greek and Roman myths, gripping scenes in films like Saving Private Ryan, and war stories veterans tell, as in this story from South Africa: I was in the Angolan war. One of our soldiers got shot. An officer risked his life and fears to drag the soldier to safety. In the process the officer was wounded but continued saving the soldier's life. I came out of hiding and secured the area for enough time in order for the officer to drag the soldier to safety. Excerpted from Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life by Dacher Keltner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.