“Brief moments of awe are as good for your mind and body as anything you might do”. Dacher Keltner on maybe our most important emotion
Keltner begins speaking at 2.44 (click here)
Here’s a fascinating new book by Stanford professor Dacher Keltner, on Awe. Above is a presentation from Berkeley campus in Sept 2022, and below are some extracts from a Noema article, which opens with the writer spending an awesome moment with Keltner at California’s Point Reyes:
For the last two decades, Keltner, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, has been a leading light of a scientific movement to examine our least-understood emotional state in all its gauzy complexity.
His latest book, “Awe,” describes two decades of research and arrives at a radical conclusion. Far from being an undefinable caprice, awe, to Keltner, is a panacea, an evolutionary tool that holds the key to humanity’s capacity to flourish in groups.
On an average day, a person might come to a place like Point Reyes without feeling anything more profound than a slight unburdening of the soul. But if you lean into that feeling even for just a moment, the benefits can be manifold. Proponents of this new science believe that experiencing awe may be an essential pathway to physical and mental well-being.
By taking us out of ourselves and expanding our sense of time, it counteracts the self-focus and narcissism that is the root of so much modern disenchantment. To experience awe, to fully open ourselves up to it, helps us to live happier, healthier lives.
The lightning-in-a-bottle sensation that had fizzed through me at the viewpoint is the keystone of religious devotion and the wellspring of human curiosity. It’s a feeling that inspires our desire to seek novelty, to see and make art, to gather in celebration, in worship and in grief.
According to Keltner’s book, seeking “brief moments of awe is as good for your mind and body as anything you might do.”
Photo by Carl Cerstrand on Unsplash
There are some interesting caveats in the first few reviews of the book. Take this from New Scientist:
As director Steven Spielberg tells Keltner when he explains his focus on film-making as a means to convey wonder, “we are all equal in awe”. For me, if there is one downside to this thesis, it is the fact that people will be unequally exposed to awe because they have less access to the experiences that induce it, such as geographical wonders, stunning nature or transformative culture.
Secondly, this from The Guardian’s review:
His case is often convincing, and yet as a lay reader this text left me with more questions than answers. Is awe always the pathway to happiness? Anyone who dips into the troubled history of the 20th century will learn that fascism was adept at harnessing the power of awe, whether through monumental architecture or mass rallies.
Keltner briefly writes about a veteran of the Iraq war, but he doesn’t pause to unpack the meaning of the US military strategy which, in part, took the name of his subject: “shock and awe”. “Awe” here is not ennobling, but an instrument of domination, as those on its receiving end well understood (some Arab writers translated “awe” in this phrase as tarwī˛: terror).
All this suggests, at the very least, that the meaning of this elusive emotion may not be as far from its fearful origins in Middle English as we suppose. That if one can write a book extolling awe, citing Gaudí, Romanticism and Nelson Mandela, there is another one to be written which draws on the work of fascist architect Marcello Piacentini, the Rajneeshpuram cult and the nuclear bomb.
And that to call an emotion good or bad depends a great deal on our assumptions about human nature and history.
More here. Yet as a response, Keltner writes in the Atlantic:
In our daily-diary studies, one source of awe was by far the most common: other people. Regular acts of courage—bystanders defusing fights, subordinates standing up to abusive power holders—inspired awe. So did the simple kindness of others: seeing someone give money to a broke friend or assist a stranger on the street.
But you don’t need a serendipitous encounter with a Good Samaritan to experience awe. We often find inspiring stories in literature, poetry, film, art, and the news. Reading about moral exemplars, say, protesting racism or protecting the environment was a pervasive source of awe for our participants…
…Nearly three years into a pandemic that’s made many of us feel powerless and small, seeking out the immense and mysterious might not seem appealing. But often, engaging with what’s overwhelming can put things in perspective.
Staring up at a starry sky; looking at a sculpture that makes you shudder; listening to a medley of instruments joining into one complex, spine-tingling melody—those experiences remind us that we’re part of something that will exist long after us.
We are well served by opening ourselves to awe wherever we can find it, even if only for a moment or two.