University of California, Berkeley, Professor of Psychology and author of Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life Dacher Keltner opens the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Seven theme exploring “Wonder and Awe” Monday in the Amphitheater.
Awe is ancient — a “very old human tendency,” said Dacher Keltner, but one that we’re learning more about every day, and one, he thinks, that’s “especially germane and relevant to the crises of our times.”
Keltner is a social scientist whose research focuses on the biological and evolutionary origins of compassion, awe, love and beauty; a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab, his most recent book is Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life. And so Keltner took the stage Monday morning in the Amphitheater for the Chautauqua Lecture Series, discussing the “awe” of the Week Seven theme “Wonder and Awe — A Week Celebrating Chautauqua’s Sesquicentennial,” share what new science can tell us about an emotion as old as humanity itself.
Among Keltner’s bona fides is acting as scientific adviser to the Pixar film “Inside Out.” About 15 years ago, Pixar’s chief creative officer Pete Docter approached Keltner, asking him to come by the studios to talk to the team about the science of emotion — something Keltner had been studying, at that point, for the better part of 30 years.
“We have five emotions inside young Riley’s mind,” Docter told Keltner. “If you could add one emotion for the emotions that are driving the narrative of this young girl in ‘Inside Out,’ … what emotion would you add to this young woman’s mind?”
Awe, Keltner said. But why was that his answer? He quoted the following luminaries in their fields —
Albert Einstein: “The most beautiful experience we can experience is that of the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of art and science.”
Rachel Carson: “We have to teach our children to wonder. It is an antidote to all of the difficulties that arise as we age in life.”
Charles Darwin: “It is not possible to give an idea to the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion that fill the mind. I remember my conviction that there’s more in humans than the mere breath of the body.”
Einstein, Keltner said, meant that awe and mystery are fundamental to the human mind. From Carson, we glean that awe is fundamental to human emotion and the way we adapt to the world.
“Awe, very simply, is an emotion we feel,” Keltner said. “It’s a brief experience when we encounter vast things that transcend our understanding of the world. … Awe is about the vastness of human experience that we don’t understand. For definitional purposes, awe produces a state of curiosity that philosophers call wonder. It is the engine of asking questions and inquiry and discovery that led, for example, Charles Darwin to make sense of everything that he was seeing in five-and-a-half years on the voyage to come up with the theory of natural selection. Awe is our emotion that we feel when we encounter vast mysteries.”
Keltner and his team of research collaborators set out to pinpoint where human beings find awe. To do so, they gathered stories.
“Philosophers talk about understanding our mental states, feelings like awe, by telling stories. Stories are a basic property of the human mind,” he said. “We tell stories about everything.”
This has been the case for hundreds of thousands of years, and “in this new spirit of social sciences,” Keltner and his team gathered stories of awe from 26 countries across the globe.
“This isn’t just Western Europeans writing about awe or Californians sitting in a hot tub,” he said. “This is people from Mexico and India and Brazil and Poland and Germany and Canada and New Zealand and Japan and China and South Korea and Russia.”
Speakers of 20 languages translated these stories, and it took two years to classify them all into eight categories — “eight wonders of the world.”
These categories are, roughly: mystical experiences in spirituality, “big ideas,” nature, life, death, moral beauty, “collective effervescence,” and music.
Data-driven studies on the new frontiers of science mean hundreds of thousands of experiences of awe and other emotions can be distilled into statistics, and some clarity — awe, with scientific proof, is different from other emotions with similar heft, like fear or horror.
“In this complicated language of emotion through the face, expressions of awe are distinct,” Keltner said.
Keltner approaches emotions as “evolved products,” in the tradition of Darwin, as “things that have been shaped by our mammalian evolution.” Awe, he said, has deep evolutionary roots.
“Is it part of all human’s experience? Even all social mammals experience? I believe that it is,” he said.
Jane Goodall observed, in the chimpanzees she studied and lived with for decades, something she called a waterfall display. When chimps encounter “vast forces in nature” — like waterfalls, or big winds — they fluff up their fur in a piloerection reflex. More simply: chimps get goosebumps.
“How many of you had a goosebumps experience at Chautauqua? You get this ripple of tingles up your back,” Keltner said. “… That’s awe or goosebumps. It’s a physiological response.”
If spirituality is just “being amazed at things outside of yourself,” why wouldn’t this apply to chimpanzees?
“We are at a crisis of self-focus in our culture of narcissism,” Keltner said. “Here is an emotion, as Jane Goodall says, that takes us out of ourselves, beginning in our chimpanzee relatives.”
In studying awe and its evolution, Keltner looks at sounds produced by human beings. From singing to laughter, it’s “all produced by the most remarkable communication system that’s ever evolved in the history of life, which is our vocal apparatus.”
It takes 100 muscles to make sounds, with a person’s mouth, tongue, jaw, nasal passage all working in configuration. It’s astonishing to think of the sounds humans share with other mammals — “the ancient sounds of emotion,” he said.
With this, Keltner put a test before his Chautauqua audience — and there would be right and wrong answers. He gave the crowd gathered in the Amp a series of words, and asked them to make the sound associated with that emotion or concept.
The prompts “sympathy” and “joy” got predictable responses, while “sadness” elicited something from the audience that “sounded like zombies about to attack me,” Keltner said.
In all seriousness, “there’s not an emotion you can cultivate in your life that is better for your mind, your body, your community, and the natural environment around us than awe,” he said.
Keltner described how simple experiences, like observing nature or listening to music, can evoke awe. His research involved participants engaging with trees, attending musical events, and even watching slow-motion videos. These activities consistently led to increased altruism, humility, and a greater sense of community.
“Awe activates your sense of belonging to a social network,” he said. “Awe makes us more humble, more realistic about our talents, more interested in other people’s talents and, how about this one? — Awe helps us see the conflicts of today, police brutality, foreign interventionism, abortion, as less polarized. We see the underlying humanity in the people who differ from us.”
And, “awe is really, really good for your body.”
One significant finding from Keltner’s research is awe’s ability to enhance physical health. He cited a study where older adults who took weekly “awe walks” showed substantial reductions in stress-related inflammation. This highlights awe’s potential in combating chronic diseases and improving overall health.
Keltner also discussed the physiological mechanisms behind awe. The vagus nerve, a crucial component of the autonomic nervous system, is activated during awe experiences, promoting heart health and reducing inflammation. This connection underscores the holistic benefits of cultivating awe in daily life.
“This is the mind-body nexus,” he said. “People with high vagal tone, elevated vagal function, are healthier. A little minute or two of awe activates the vagus nerve — it is good for your heart.”
From the history to the science, Keltner moved to a personal story about awe. He lost his younger brother — “the greatest brother one could have” — to colon cancer.
“In my grief, having lost this companion of awe, in that moment of watching him go was a moment of awe like a lot of people experience,” Keltner said. “It was a transcendent experience for me, of sensing his soul, really sensing it, feeling a space beyond what I could see as this deductive, rational scientist believing in it.”
Keltner went off “in search of awe,” and he now believes society faces a similar moment of grief and reckoning.
“We are in a time of crisis, there is no doubt about it — you probably feel it,” he said. “The data are clear. We have a mental health crisis, especially in our young people today, historic levels of depression and anxiety and so on. We have a physical health crisis in the United States. … We spend more on healthcare than any country in the world, our life expectancy is dropping, we have a social crisis” of loneliness, pointing to U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s work on what he calls an epidemic of loneliness.
Keltner concluded by encouraging Chautauquans to integrate awe into their lives. He led the audience through a breathing exercise, sitting up straight and breathing in, breathing out, and asked everyone to call to mind someone of moral beauty — someone “whose courage and kindness and resilience inspires you.”
He encouraged nature walks, or “awe walks,” to experience “fundamental, expansive awe,” and the reminder from Ralph Waldo Emerson that there is “no disgrace, no calamity, that nature cannot repair.” Keltner reminded the audience that awe can be found “in moving in unison with other people — singing together, walking together, going out into public protests, getting into recreational events, dancing together.”
Finally, he led Chautauquans in a moment of “collective effervescence.” Keltner instructed everyone to stand, face the person next to them, and mirror each others’ movements.
“When we sync up with other people,” he said, “a lot of good things happen.”
Keltner is a scientist who didn’t grow up with religion, and after his brother’s death, he thought a lot about the cycle of time.
“It is the law of nature, the cycle of time. We are born, we grow, … we begin to decay and we die,” he said, “and it, depending on what you believe, goes around and around.”
But even reflecting on the cycle of time, studies show, lends perspective and peace. It offers a sense of calm.
Keltner shared a photo of a cemetery in Kyoto, Japan, where the principle of wabi-sabi means to let man-made designs change with time, becoming something else.
“The smallest sprout shows there is really no death / And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas’d the moment life appear’d. / All goes onward and outward,” Keltner quoted Walt Whitman.
“We have charted how awe is good for you,” he said. “Brief experiences of awe change your body, change your sense of self, make you kind, build community and then give you a sense of purpose and meaning through moments of awe.”
