Pushkin.
Awe is an emotion that you feel when you encounter something that is vast or beyond your frame of reference that you can't understand with your current knowledge.
Daker Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and he's an expert on the emotion of awe. Maybe you felt awe the first time you saw a natural wonder like the Grand Canyon, or when your child was born. Whatever the experience, it likely changed the way you view the world.
These momentary experiences of awe, through their shifts, their challenges to your belief system, you tend to look at the world more carefully. You tend to entertain alternative hypotheses, and those are all cognitive strategies that help us be more resilient.
On today's episode, we explore awe, the science behind it, why it matters, and how we can find more of it in our everyday lives. I'm Maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. Daker Keltner has spent the last twenty five years studying the science of emotions. His latest book is called AWE, The New Science of Everyday Wonder and
How It Can Transform Your Life. In it, Daker argues that this powerful and mysterious emotion is actually critical to our well being. Long before Daker was an academic, he was a self described sixties wild child. He and his younger brother Rolf were constantly seeking out new adventures.
My brother and I had these extraordinary early experiences of awe every summer since my mom taught at a public university. We'd hop into our VW bus and just like drive for a month, and we drove into the Rockies one time. And you know, I mean this is nineteen sixty eight. This was the parenting of the era where we would just wander in the wilds and my parents were like, see you at dinner when we were seven and nine.
You know that we just saw extraordinary things. But one in particulary members one of our first nights camping, we were camping in near the Pacific Ocean, and we just slept in the sand and heard the ocean, saw the big sky, you know, in these old cotton sleeping bags, and just felt like we were bonded together through on wonder and it continued all the way till the end of his life.
Tell me more about that.
Yeah, you know, we just did everything together. And then he six years ago started to depart from me, which is he got colon cancer and that's a horrific disease and it was brutal for two years. And then he chose to take a cocktail and end his life because he had stage four and knew what was coming. And you know, I got a call from his wife, Kim, that he had done that, and we all rushed up to his home in the foothills of the Sierras. And I had been waiting for this. I've been preparing for this.
I write about how to approach in an open way the loss of young people whom you care about. And he was lying on the bed and his face was turned to the side, and he was smiling this particular smile that looked as if he was being called into something transcendent. It almost looked a little blissful. And I'm a scientist, and I'm like trying to make sense of this.
I have no religious background, you know, very naive spiritually, and I just saw some part of him being pulled into other dimensions that I just felt the space was vibrating and pulsating, and there was this glow and I felt Awe. You know, we were all around him in this moment of reverence, and I was like, wow, what is life? You know, what is his life? His life
is my life? What do I make of that? And I was incredibly reassured by our science, which is around the world contrary to Western assumptions, people find the passage of life all inspiring. It's one of the biggest mysteries we'll confront And I was awe struck. Then in the grief, I descended into you know, a Joan Didion like psychosis. I was just like man. I was knocked out of
my ordinary ways of understanding the world, really struggling. Had all these extraordinary experiences of sensing him and hearing his voice, and I went in search of Awe. And part of that search was to think about our experiences together my brother Off and me, write about them, find them again. And it taught me that Awe is a mysterious part of the happiness equation.
You know, it seems like you, even as children, you stumbled upon AWE before you even recognized what it was. That it was an emotion that one can feel. I mean, you were blessed with an environment that was so all filled. And I do wonder looking back. I mean, we'll get into the definition of on a moment, but looking back, what is it due to a relationship when you are sharing in one of the most profound human emotions one can have with another person.
What an extraordinary question? And I had that's the first person to ask me that question. What it does, AWE is about dissolving the sense of individual self, the boundaries between self and other, and merging you with others in almost a spiritual way, like we share a soul or a deep sense of meaning in the world, whatever you want to call it. And Maya, that's what it did.
You know. We had all these incredible experiences of the wildness of Laurel Canyon in the late sixties and the crazy figures there and music and festivals and Martin Luther King's death, and what it merged in Ralf and I was a shared mind. It's one of the great human achievements that we can share a representation of reality with other people and all gets you there quickly and time
and time again. My brother and I would have these extraordinary experiences where it was like our minds saw reality together. I'm grateful.
Yeah. I love the framework that you provide around AWE because it is really hard to disentangle feelings of AWE from other emotions that we feel, like wonder and fear. And you talk about two defining characteristics of AWE, So one is received vastness and the second is a need for accommodation. And I'd really love to flesh out these two concepts because I think these will be aids for those who are listening to try to figure out, you know, how I kind of met the criteria for an awe
inspiring experience. So let's start with this notion of perceived vastness. Can you help us understand what that is?
Yeah, you know, vastness can be physical, like one time I actually met Will Chamberlain. He's seven feet tall. I was like, wow, you know that guy's big, you know, and I was awestruck. It can be temporal when you think about the vastness of time you know that a redwood tree lives, for example, And it can be semantic. It can be conceptual, like wow, the idea of evolution is vast I mean it just accounts for every instant
of every living form. I think what happens with OZ You realize that you are part of larger systems of life that you don't ordinarily understand. That I am part of a long family history, a cultural history indigenous to I'm part of an ecological system, I am a living form, I'm a species within an ecosystem, and AWE opens our eyes to the very important idea that I, as an individual, am embedded in larger systems of meaning.
And what about the need for accommodation? What does that mean?
Yeah, you know, that's kind of the mystery component. And I like using the word mystery because it just avoids that clunkiness of psychological terminology. But you need for accommodation, But that's.
Rolls off the tongue decker, you know. No, I enjoyed the scientific paper for what it's the worth. But yes, I appreciate the use of the word mystery.
Thank you you and three other people. So yeah, need for accommodation is that you see things, and ordinarily most of what we perceive sort of is readily made sense of with our knowledge structures for better and for worse. And then what happens with AWE is it really transcends your current understanding knowledge about the world, and you have to accommodate your knowledge structures. And that's where wonder comes in,
which is wonder is a state that follows AWE. Why this big experience of all You know, Newton in de Kart were blown away by rainbows and in the following state of wonder they did the math and the physics color theory to figure them out. So need for accommodation is the sort of state as AWE unfold three, you realize, God,
I got to really update my belief systems. I got to change my thinking about what humans can do, or what children are like, or the nature of an ecosystem, or what music can do emotionally, and so we change our knowledge as a result of all.
Yeah, this is my favorite component of AWE and we'll return to it in a bit that I think the need for accommodation is. What a powerful force, especially in our current society, to force mental agility upon us. Anyway, this is really interesting, but I'll save it. I'll save it for a little later. I want to establish the basics. So I was incredibly excited to learn from your research and your scholarship that there are far more sources of
awe than I'd realized. And based on what you learned, you've categorized awe into what you call the eight Wonders of life.
You know what we did, Maya is we gathered twenty six hundred stories from people from twenty six cultures ranging from India to Mexico to Brazil to Chile to Poland.
We translated them, a team of us classified them, and we came up with what I call the eight wonders, which are being out in nature, you know, the big sky, the mountains, the Grand Canyon, spiritual stuff, praying, being awestruck by the bag of a gita, having a relationship to spirit or God, music, something you know, well, you know, just being at a concert and Taylor Swift or peeky pop or what symphony, visual design, paintings, cars, buildings. I
love this. One big idea is you know, infinity, big data, AI, life and death brings people off, watching people be born,
watching them go. And then two that really surprise me, which are collective effervescence or moving in unison with people, dancing, singing in a choir, cheering at a sporting event, chanting at a political protest, and then the one that I still marvel at, which is moral beauty, which is just being moved when you witness people's sacrifice and courage and character and overcoming and wisdom, right, just being blown away by how good human beings can be.
You know, those last two you hit on are the ones that I absolutely love, moral beauty and collective effervescence, because one, I think they're underappreciated sources of awe. Certainly I was unfamiliar that moral beauty is a source of awe, and I feel like this is the form of awe Decker that I feel all the time, more than I feel awe when it comes to seeing a beautiful sunset, more than any other source of off. Maybe music comes close, actually,
because I have a very personal relationship with music. But the feeling that I get when I witness other people's courage, kindness, resilience, I mean, I'm so moved. And maybe it's because I'm trained as a cognitive scientist and I'm so fascinated by human psychology that when I witness these kinds of acts, I feel really transformed by them. And so I loved learning that Not only is this a source of awe,
but it's the most widely felt source of awe. I mean, that's also inspiring that when you pull humans, they don't say the sunset, they say other people, what other people bring to the table. I mean, I find that remarkable because all the beauty of all the other source of awe is not lost on me, right, But to think that that came to the top of the list, I find that onspiring. Honestly, I actually.
Get goose by at your reflection. I was surprised too, and I didn't expect moral beauty to be a common source of awe. I thought it was all nature and religion, and it was this robust and very shared experience in these twenty six different countries that you see. It's so interesting that we tear up and are ready to do good in the world when we see people sacrifice. Yeah, that when we see courage somebody overcoming racism writer sexism. You have shifts in your physiology of oxytocin release where
you feel more open to the world. And once you wrap your mind around this, the prevalence of moral beauty and how it inspires us, then you start to think about the people who have changed your life through their moral beauty. You know, a teacher or a coach, or someone in the streets you think about, how wow, once you open your eyes to it, you can walk through a city and suddenly you see seventeen acts of moral
beauty that are holding the society together. So I too, like you, my, and I'm grateful you brought it up. I feel like we live in this era of toxic politics, no commentary there, you know, Instagram comparisons, cynical views of human beings, and yet there's so much moral beauty to keep us inspired.
So the other one that you mentioned is this notion of collective effervescence. So this is just in the shared, sometimes synchronous experiences that we all have, right, singing a song together, dancing together for people who have you know, religious background, praying together. Right, these are very powerful, poignant experiences.
And it was so interesting. I was recently talking to a coworker of mine and we were talking about Taylor Swift concerts, which are of course a huge source of off for people worldwide, massive, and the prices of the tickets were just so high that I was asking her, I was like, how did you psychologically defend paying for these tickets because you know, you could, in theory just wait for the special to come out and watch it that way, or wait for like I don't know, maybe
they're alternatives. And she said something that was so interesting because I was just in the throes of reading your book, Decker, and so it's just like the dots connected. She said, you know, I would go to a Taylor Swift concert even if Taylor wasn't there performing and singing, if it was just tens of thousands of people sharing in the
experience of singing and dancing together to her songs. And I thought that was such a beautiful sentiment that that's the experience she was going for, that's the one she can't approximate by hearing the concert in a Netflix special. And so yeah, I just love your thoughts on that.
Well, you know, collective effervescence is this high level ecstatic feeling you have when you are with others and moving in unison in a way in which you start to share attention about something significant and it has this awe feeling of goosebumps and tears and tingly and you're starting to merge with others. And what I love about this wonder of life is that it reveals the important power of things you wouldn't ordinarily consider, like dance, right, Like dancing.
You know most people, you get them talking about dancing at the last wedding, they're out and they're like, that's the best time I've had in yours, you know.
Yeah.
Or sports. You know, sports are games. You know, they are games, and people are just like you said with the Taylor Swift example, like games are so meaningful. They cry when their teams lose and win.
Oh totally.
You know, they feel a sense of common cause with other fans.
And I mean, in this moment, I feel such gratitude for our minds, Like it didn't have to be the case that we could get so swept up in these experiences. Like you said, sports completely manufactured human experience. If you think about the cosmic stakes, zero cosmic stakes, Yeah, around such team wins and yet and yet right, we feel so bonded through these experiences. We feel so bonded by
hearing music together, dancing together. And you know this speaks to a huge component of awe, which is a feeling that we are part of a bigger collective.
Yeah, and I'll quote Malcolm Clemens Young who was a minister whom I interviewed for the book, and he just I was in conversation with him and he said, you know, you can pray or meditate, or contemplate or reflect on what life means, but when you do it with other people, something changes. And I agree, and that's why your friend she's like, all I have to do is be around my friends who are fans of Taylor Swift, and I get a very big part of the magic, and that's collective effiveescence.
After the break, we'll talk about how all can affect our minds and our bodies and how we can become more open to all inspiring experiences. We'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plans. I've heard you say elsewhere that you think the central challenge of the mental health crisis today is too much self focus. Yeah, and that it seems like AWE helps us stave off narcissism,
self absorption, self focus. So can you tell me a little bit more about that, and also just neuroscientifically, what's happening to us in the presence of AWE.
Yeah, thank you for contextualizing it in our mental health crisis of this era. And you know, I mean I've taught at a university for thirty years. I've seen twenty year olds for thirty years, and there has been this, you know, because of cultural values and the rise of individualism and the competition and the new technologies, too much focus on the self. And AWE is you know, it's so interesting when you ask people, tell me about an
early experience of AWE that you had. Does one come to your mind?
Yeah, one does. So. I was, I mean the younger part of my life. I was adding concert violinist. And I remember one night in particular, when I was twelve, I was at summer music camp and I was lying in bed in the dark with my discman back in the day when we had CDs, and I was listening to a recording of the Beethoven Violin Concerto, and I felt it took over my physiology. My heart raced along with the melody. I felt shivers down my spine during certain phrases. I mean, I was so moved by the
experience and it was so overwhelming to me. I mean, I could not believe that I was having I mean as close to a spiritual experience as I've ever had someone who's not religious, like you said, spiritually naive. That was probably the closest I've ever come.
What we know neurophysiologically to your question is those experiences of awe, even in children, the tears, the goose bumps, that gives you the sense of chills, and the activation of the vegas nerve is part of this parasympathetic autonomic nervous system which opens you up and makes you curious about the world. We know neurophysiologically in the brain. All leads to the deactivation of the default mode network.
Do you mind sharing what the default mode network does?
Yeah, the default mode network does many different things, but one of the things that people write about is it's about the self, self representation, your goals, your intentions, your memories about yourself. So what it tells us is this neurophysiology. It's really useful that the dampening of the default mode networks the chills, the quiet, the vagus nerve gives you the warmth in the chest. Your self is starting to dissolve,
and then you're becoming open to the world. It's that wonder and mystery and need to discover.
You know what I'm reflecting on in this moment, is that awe takes some degree of intentionality. I mean, when I reflect back on it, my life as a violinist was very complex because it was very stressful as well. I mean, I was I was studying at Juilliard from the time I was nine. I was on like the speed train, you know, I was really trying to go pro so many prodigious kids around me. That made me
feel incredibly insecure. And you can't really have the inspiring experience if your mental chatter is sabotaging all the time because you're unwilling to appreciate the joy of music because you're thinking about Rachel nextdoor, who can like run laps around you musically, right, And so I'm just thinking back, you know, there were so many moments where I lost
sight of music's awe inspiring abilities. But it would be in these moments where I would have just like an experience of hearing music, not my own, just hearing music, where I feel like I regained access to the magnificence of it. I regain access to this feeling that I'm really small and music is really big, and that I was, like you said, a part of a collective like it dampened that individualistic competitive young maya. I need to win every concerto competition, vibe in favor of man. This stuff
is so beautiful. Yeah, and I can't believe I can be part of this experience.
Yeah. You know your commentary is it will speak to the parents out there, and you know, the people who have gone through really competitive pressure cook childhood. It's like you did of how we've taken so many things. It should bring us all music and sports and doing math and writing fiction and what have you, and just the there's more pressure on young people and we've lost those moments. Yeah, that are why we do the thing in the first place.
It's not the grade per se. And so I hope your narrative inspires people out there.
I hope so too. And it's okay to have a dynamic relationship with all. I mean, I think that's what I realized is exactly, especially in my teenage years when I was filled with angst and I became a much more self conscious musician. That was probably when my all was muted the most. But then you are able to reclaim it.
And you know what, I really encourage people coming out of this conversation is to think about those eight wonders. You know, where will you find on music tomorrow or visual design or out looking at the moral beauty of people? You know, one simple thing that we tested is you know a lot of people walk. They do it for the health benefits, but why not add some all?
Yeah?
Right, why not put down your devices, open up your mind a little, go somewhere mysterious, and then just look for large and small patterns out there in the natural world, the urban world. You can do it with music and it ironically, even though people think that AWE is mysterious and impossible to produce, it's something we can find pretty easily if we just shift out of this modern pressurized mindset.
Yep, I love to dig in to the impact all has on our psychology. So do you mind sharing a study or two about the impacts of awe? Yeah?
You know, maya. We started to compile these findings that little moments of AWE make you more generous, you share with strangers, you have a better inflammation profile, You are more creative, you polarize politics less, you see more common ground in ideological adversaries. And I always start, you know, I have taught happiness twenty five years at Berkeley and elsewhere, and just was like, wow, man, this is powerful, this
emotion is good for us. And then we got to do a very unusual experiment, which is we took veterans and under resourced teenagers out rafting on the American River where my brother and I used to raft as kids, and so it had this deep personal resonance to me. And you know, when you raft, it's all you see the currents of the river and the beauty of the water, and you almost are thrown out of the raft. You're thrown out of the raft. It's wild. People are hooting
and hollering. And what we found is that half day experience for veterans and teenagers living in hard places, going to tough schools, really tough under resource schools, dropping PTSD symptoms for veterans, Oh wow, yeah, I mean to get a week of relief from a rafting trip of that scales is really striking. And then for the teenagers, they were getting along better with their parents, they felt like they had community, they were feeling less stressed and greater well being.
So there's going to be a surge in a sign ups for rafting trips among parents nationwide.
Absolutely and rightfully so Dacker.
Helped my teenager be nicer to me. That's what they're all going to be saying to you. That's great.
And you know, that's why I'm really excited about AWE making its way into the manial health offerings, all being part of recovery from a surgery, you know, all being an approach to grief for cancers. We are just publishing a paper where we have an AWE training program that we delivered to health care providers during the pandemic, and just a minute of AWE a day led to greater well being, less stress, and greater physical robustness for health care providers. So good news for microdosis of all.
You know, I have this hypothesis I love to run by you, which is that because when we experience AWE, we find ourselves updating our view on something. I do wonder if there's any spillover effects whether opening our minds up more generally helps us become more adaptable in other ways, that it actually makes us more resilient in the face of change.
Yeah. You know, people who feel AWE they handle stresses better, they handle traumas better. They just can look at the problem from any different angles, and that's beneficial. Those are all cognitive strategies that help us be more resilient.
And there is research showing that the what we'll call like agility of mind, that that transcends the specific area that was induced by the awe. Is that right?
Oh yeah, it's so important. You may feel awe as the result of music or beautiful nature imagery, and it produces these more general emotional and cognitive states, the cognitive state being I am aware of multiple perspectives. I'm looking at evidence really hard. I'm thinking a more sophisticated way about systems around me that allows for resilience in your own personal life or in parenting or what have you. So they are broad effects with lots of skill over in good ways.
Yeah, and I mean, I know your research looks at the role of of cognitive closure, so our desire to find a rive at definitive answers and conclusions for things. And it seems like as humans we fall on this continuum. Like some people have a deep need for cognitive closure cough cough me, And then there are people who are much more like free wheeling, open to mystery, open to not having answers.
Yeah, spot on.
Okay, So now please tell me and help me, my dear friend, Acker, is it possible for me to become a slightly more open person, to cultivate a state of mind where I am more open to mystery, more open to uncertainty?
Yeah, you know, of course, But how you know a couple of pathways to think about one is really cultivating an AWE practice if you will, like, make it part of your regular If you're a meditator, you love gratitude exercises or service work, Okay, make AWE part of your practice. And we do know AWE opens your mind and your neurophysiology. I might add, to be able to entertain more mysteries
and more uncertainty. You know, we haven't talked about psychedelics or spirit medicines, but they too are sources of AWE, widely used by twenty thirty million Americans, and they make you more tolerant of uncertainty and more open to the fact that most of the great questions in life can't be answered definitively. So if you're not born wildly open to experience, you can cultivate it. But go in search of AWE through these eight wonders and see where your mind goes.
Sorry laughing right now, because I'm realizing that my lack of openness is also going to prevent me from doing a psychedelic trip because I'm too scared of having a bad experience. Yeah. So I can't even know. But what I do like a very promising message from what you just shared with me is it seems like there's a virtuous cycle here. So the more you invite AWE, the more open you might become to it. And so I really like that. That's something I can hold on to.
And I mean even my very conservative, scaredy cat nature can embrace.
So that's great, our virtuous cycles that you will benefit from.
My I love that.
Yeah. And you know in the book, I had this really interesting experience where, unlike you, I don't know a lot about music, but like most people, I love it. It changed my life. And I interviewed a cellist, Jumy Kendall.
I loved that part of the book.
Yeah, and she was playing a piece by John Adams, this great modern composer whom I like. But the piece was really challenging for me. I didn't get it, but there were moments in it that opened up my life, and so even if it feels unnatural, once the awe arises, it leads to this broadening of your mind to understand mystery.
Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed my conversation with Dhaker, you might enjoy our episode with author Michael Pollin called how Psychedelics Can Change Our Minds. We'll link to that episode in the show notes and enjoin me next week. When I talked to world renowned violinist min Kim All is what initially drew her to a career in music, and after she endured a tragic loss, it's what helped bring her back to life. That's next
time on A Slight Change of Plans. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate Parkinson Morgan, our sound engineer Andrew Vesto, and our producer Tricia Bobita. Louis Scara wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. Special thanks to Stefan Jaquie for letting us play a bit
of his beautiful performance. Of Beethoven's Violin Concerto in this episode. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industry, so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker. See you next week