Awe Is a Response to Mystery

Source: Dacher Keltner

This post is part 1 of a 2-part series.

Dacher Keltner, Ph.D., is the founding director of the Greater Good Science Center and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. His latest book, AWE: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, presents a radical investigation and deeply personal inquiry into this elusive emotion. With new research into how awe transforms our brains and bodies, alongside an examination of awe across history and within his own life during a period of grief, Keltner shows us how the cultivation of awe leads to an appreciation of what is most humane in our nature.

Mark Matousek: You describe awe as a naturally occurring phenomenon that promotes survival. How is that so?

Dacher Keltner: I approach the self-transcendent emotions from an evolutionary perspective that traces them to our history as social mammals and benefits they provide for survival. When people encounter vast mysteries that they don’t understand, this elicits this cascade of responses that we call awe, which serves a vital function. For example, we get goosebumps, which are a mammalian response of binding with others to face peril. We have tears, a parasympathetic response, as well as activation of the vagus nerve, conceptual processes that prompt feelings of being small and connected to large, often spiritual forces.

That is the deep evolutionary structure of awe, and our research in 25 countries shows that these emotions are really part of our mammalian DNA and benefit us because they connect us to collectives. They help us cooperate and collaborate and sense our collective identity. There’s an increasing consensus now that we survive by cooperation and being part of a collective, and awe is the big booster of that tendency.

MM: What happens when a person becomes awe-deprived?

DK: When we’re awe-deprived, we’re vulnerable to depression and anxiety. We have too deep a focus on the self that technology can exacerbate. We’re spending too much time on a small screen, for instance. We begin to feel isolated and disconnected and may show a [heightened] stress profile. We lose our imagination. There are a bunch of studies showing that awe catalyzes our imagination. This seems to be connected to some of the difficulties kids are facing, part of which is pandemic-related. We don't wander enough in our culture or embrace mystery. We’re always test-driven and result-driven, and tend not to embrace complexity, which is a major source of awe. This is why, in part, our young people are more stressed than ever and vulnerable to depression, anxiety, and other conditions.

MM: How does awe enrich the imagination?

DK: Experiences of awe prompt us to start to imagine what’s beyond our current knowledge. When my brother passed away, as I describe in the book, I approached death like a scientist would: Well, give me proof, I don’t know what’s beyond. Yet I had these experiences I couldn't explain. A couple of times I could actually feel his hand on my back. He had these big hands, and I’d sit there and think, "God, I still feel him there." That challenged my ordinary understanding of the world and led me to imagine what might account for that. Perhaps my body stored memories of his touch? Or maybe in a quantum physics world, he can still touch me. Awe spurs us to reflect on what we don’t understand and is one of the great sources of the imagination. It can also open us to spiritual experience and wondering what the divine forces of supernatural might be like.

MM: In the book, you talk about eight "gateways to awe." I was fascinated to learn that the most common gateway for most people is what's known as moral beauty. Can you say more?

DK: After gathering stories of awe from around the world, we found that moral beauty was the most common theme. Seeing someone making a great sacrifice or a courageous person overcoming disease or poverty is awe-inspiring. Like when we’re blown away by people’s courage and kindness. You hear about Malala [Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate] fighting the patriarchy who tried to kill her because she was pushing for the rights of women and girls to be educated, for example. When we hear about her courage, it prompts us to imagine how we could be more courageous. I see examples of moral beauty all the time. I’ll be walking through Berkeley and see someone give away all their money to an unhoused individual—just spontaneously—and think, “Wow, look what people do. Look how much they’re willing to help others and sacrifice.” It’s a reminder of how we can inspire each other. We need these examples more than ever today.

MM: It’s also a reminder that awe-inspiring things don't need to be majestic in scale.

DK: Exactly. That's one of the other misconceptions that I had when I began my research, that awe is really about the Grand Canyon, or something enormous, when it's all around us, in fact. Awe doesn’t need to be epic or grand. Albert Einstein, among others, believed that awe is a basic state of consciousness. We just have to push stuff to the side and take in what’s wonderful.

MM: Let’s talk about another common gateway to awe: collective effervescence. We all know that group excitement can be positive or negative, incited by a sports event or rock concert or by some kind of cult activity, such as a Nazi rally.

DK: Like any human characteristic, collective effervescence can be used for good or bad. The same is true for all the wonders of life. Emile Durkheim [the French sociologist] has this amazing characterization of collective effervescence, describing how people in groups start to move in unison, which we do instinctively. This gives us an exultant feeling, like we're part of a tribe, a we that's greater than ourselves. This prompts the experience of awe, for better and for worse. When you read the accounts of the Rwandan genocide, those Hutus were dancing, chanting, and moving together when they killed people. One of my favorite discoveries in the collective effervescence work is the power of dance, which scientists haven't paid enough attention to. Dance is incredible. It brings so much emotion and awe, and there’s now a new science of dance that’s talking about its benefits. Similarly with sports, which was considered "not serious" by scientists for a long time.

One of the major downsides of technology is that it’s broken down the opportunity for collective effervescence. We don’t listen to music together. We don’t share movies or sports events together. We stream with one or two people, and that's a real loss that the purveyors of technology need to reconsider.