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Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also directs the Berkely Social Interaction Lab. He has researched awe for nearly 20 years.
Below, Dacher shares 5 key insights from his new book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. Listen to the audio version—read by Dacher himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. The awe checklist.
Awe is considered by many to be a basic state of mind, yet it is surprisingly hard to define. It is as the great philosopher William James said, “ineffable.” It’s hard to put to words, but science reveals an awe checklist of sorts.
You know you’re feeling awe when experiencing particular qualities, such as appreciating something as vast and mysterious. In turn, your sense of self will be small—which is actually the deactivation of the default mode network (DMN), which is where the ego resides in the brain. You will feel humble and quiet. You may vocalize a universal sound of awe: Whoa. And then your body gets into the act, what Walt Whitman called the body of the soul. You may tear up, get the goosebumps, or the tingles that people now call ASMR, and your heart may feel warm (which is the activation of the vagus nerve). Awe is identifiable through a checklist of body symptoms.
2. Awe is good for you.
It’s hard to find something that is better for your body and mind than experiencing a bit of awe. Studies where people look up into the trees or take in vast views or think about somebody who is morally inspiring find that brief experiences of awe calm the stress response and make a person feel more connected and less lonely. Awe has been seen to reduce depression, reduce PTSD symptoms in veterans, and is also good for cardiovascular health and the immune system.
“Awe is identifiable through a checklist of body symptoms.”
Awe is good for you. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said of a big awe experience on a cold day out on a commons in Massachusetts, there is nothing that nature (in this case awe) cannot repair.
3. Everyday awe.
If you open your eyes, embrace mystery, move into questions, be unscheduled, wander and wonder, you will find everyday awe. We have done a kind of research called Daily Diary research in China, Japan, Spain, and the United States. Every night for two weeks, we asked people, “Did you feel an experience of awe?” On average, people in these countries felt awe two to three times a week.
What was striking in this research were the stories people told about being awe-struck by the intelligence of somebody in a chemistry class, or a leaf falling from a tree that reminded somebody of the passage of time, or music that was playing in a town square. If we open our eyes, there are wonders of everyday awe all around us.
4. The eight wonders of life.
We gathered stories of awe from 26 countries, from communities of every kind of religion, economic development, political structure, and sense of self. They wrote about what they felt was vast and mysterious. It took a couple years to translate these stories, and then classify them as a means of answering the question, where do you find awe? This is how we identified the eight wonders of life.
You find awe in moral beauty, such as people’s kindness, courage, and ability to overcome obstacles. You find awe in nature, and in collective movement. Emil Durkheim, the great sociologist, felt that collective, synchronized movement was the core of religion because it activates awe. People find awe when they dance, cheer for sports teams, or perform rituals in religious ceremonies.
Music is a long-standing source of awe. We’ve been making music for eighty to a hundred thousand years: our chanting, singing, electric guitars, symphonies, and lullabies all bring awe. One person I interviewed called the awe felt from music a cashmere blanket of sound.
“If we open our eyes, there are wonders of everyday awe all around us.”
Visual design is another wonder of life. This awe can come from great paintings, Berlin Street art, or even a child’s psychedelic finger painting.
The sixth wonder is spirituality. The great insights of the Buddha, Arjun in Hinduism, St. Paul on the road to Damascus, or indigenous traditions offer the ecstatic awe of mystical experience.
A rather surprising wonder of life is big ideas. We had a student from Japan in a natural history museum feeling absolutely astounded, like Ralph Waldo Emerson was at the evolution of life, or how Charles Darwin felt when he figured out natural selection through his own awe experiences.
Finally, our eighth wonder of life is the beginning of life and its end. Watching people come into the world and then watching people go is a remarkable source of awe.
5. Awe is transformative.
Awe will change your life. I love asking people to tell me about a time when music or a concert changed their life, where it really spoke to them, or revealed something fundamental about who they are and their purpose. People have volunteered stories of seeing Peter Gabriel, New Kids On The Block, or a hip hop show, and they start tearing up and almost quivering at the sense of epiphany, discovery, and transformation which that music had brought them.
I believe that the purpose of awe is to reveal the big systems of life: the ecosystems, social systems, cultural meaning systems, moral systems, biological systems, solar systems. Feeling awe reveals the deep structure of the world, and then we start to transform. We transform in our sense of self and our understanding of the world. We transform in our sense of mystery about life. We become, as Jane Goodall said, amazed at things outside of ourselves.
“Life is about one mystery after another, and awe leads us on that journey.”
I wrote this book when I was in search of transformation. I had watched my brother Rolf succumb to colon cancer, which was brutal and horrifying. In my grief, I felt adrift, without a purpose, just waking up, stressed out, depressed, anxious, and very confused. A lot of people today feel like this. Since the pandemic, depression and anxiety have risen 30 percent.
I felt no awe, but I went in search of it. I approached mystery, following things I had questions about, seeking the unknown, wandering, and letting myself wonder. I also used the eight wonders of life as a roadmap. Moral beauty, nature, collective effervescence, music, visual design, spirituality, big ideas, and really thinking about the beginning and end of life.
I interviewed people in prisons, listened to music that I didn’t understand, did spiritual retreats, hiked a variety of mountain ranges, attended dance performances and sporting events. I spoke to ministers and contemplative scholars in indigenous traditions, just asking about awe. The pursuit of awe transformed my life. It didn’t teach me the final answers to the beginning and end of life or why my brother passed, but it taught me what Lao Tzu said in the Tao Te Ching (the great book that I was lucky enough for my dad to give me) that wonder into wonder and life unfolds; life is about one mystery after another, and awe leads us on that journey.
That feeling—of being in the presence of something vast—is good for us. And, counterintuitively, it can often be found in completely unremarkable circumstances.
By Dacher KeltnerWhat gives you a sense of awe? That word, awe—the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world—is often associated with the extraordinary. You might imagine standing next to a 350-foot-tall tree or on a wide-open plain with a storm approaching, or hearing an electric guitar fill the space of an arena, or holding the tiny finger of a newborn baby. Awe blows us away: It reminds us that there are forces bigger than ourselves, and it reveals that our current knowledge is not up to the task of making sense of what we have encountered.
But you don’t need remarkable circumstances to encounter awe. When my colleagues and I asked research participants to track experiences of awe in a daily diary, we found, to our surprise, that people felt it a bit more than two times a week on average. And they found it in the ordinary: a friend’s generosity, a leafy tree’s play of light and shadow on a sidewalk, a song that transported them back to a first love.
We need that everyday awe, even when it’s discovered in the humblest places. A survey of relevant studies suggests that a brief dose of awe can reduce stress, decrease inflammation, and benefit the cardiovascular system. Luckily, we don’t need to wait until we stumble upon it; we can seek it out. Awe is all around us. We just need to know where to look for it.
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.
Read: Make time for awe
Another common source of awe is just … taking a walk. In her cultural history of walking, Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit theorized that walks can produce an awe-like form of consciousness in which we extend the self into the environment. We can make connections, for example, between our own thoughts and the other human beings we see moving through their day, or patterns in nature—the movements of wind through trees or the shifting clouds in the sky.
Along with Virginia Sturm, a UC San Francisco neuroscientist, I studied the effects of an “awe walk.” One group of subjects took a weekly walk for eight weeks; the other group did the same but with some instructions: Tap into your childlike sense of wonder, imagining you’re seeing everything for the first time. Take a moment during each walk to notice the vastness of things—when looking at a panoramic view, for example, or at the detail of a flower. And go somewhere new, or try to recognize new features of the same old place. All of the participants reported on their happiness, anxiety, and depression and took selfies during their walks.
We found that the awe-walkers felt more awe with each passing week. You might have thought that their capacity for awe would start to decrease: This is known as the law of hedonic adaptation, that certain pleasures or accomplishments—a new job, a bigger apartment—start to lose some of their thrill over time. But the more we practice awe, it seems, the richer it gets.
We also found evidence of Solnit’s idea that the self can extend into the environment. In the awe-walk condition, people’s selfies increasingly included less of the self. Over time, the subjects drifted off to the side, showing more of the outside environment—a street corner in San Francisco, the trees, the rocks around the Pacific Ocean. Over the course of our study, awe-walkers reported feeling less daily distress and more prosocial emotions such as compassion and amusement.
Read: What it would take to see the world completely differently
The arts, too, can make us feel connected to something boundless and beyond words. In one diary study, many people wrote that music brought them moments of awe and stirred them to consider their place in the great scheme of life. When we listen to music that moves us, dopaminergic pathways—circuitry in the brain associated with reward and pleasure—are activated, which open the mind to wonder and exploration. In this bodily state of musical awe, we often get the chills—signs, studies have revealed, that we are collectively engaged in making sense of the unknown.
Visual art activates the same dopamine network in the brain—and can have the same transcendent effect. When exposed to paintings, research has found, people demonstrate greater creativity. One study, which involved more than 30,000 participants in the United Kingdom, found that the more people practiced or viewed art, the more those individuals donated money and volunteered two years later.
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.
This article has been excerpted from Dacher Keltner’s new book,
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