The human mind can take trauma of the worst kind and find deep meaning. And for me it was that period, and coming out of it, I am a different human being, you know. I feel more open to the world, more loving, more interested in mysteries than answers.
Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today we welcome doctor Doctor Keltner on the show. Doctor Keltner is one of the world's foremost emotion scientists. He's a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and the director of the Greater Good Science Center. Fun fact, he was the scientific advisor behind the beloved Pixar movie Inside Out. He's over two hundred scientific publications and six books, including Born to Be Good,
The Compassionate Instinct, and The Power Paradox. His latest book, which is the subject of our conversation today, is called All the New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can trans Form your Life. In this episode, I talked to docr about the New Science of awe. Emotions like fear and disgust have been extensively researched because of their roles in human survival, but doctor Keltner argues that all
is also essential for well being and community. Music, art, and nature are some of the antecedents that can induce a sense of wonder, inspiring us to be better by recognizing that we're parts of a greater whole. We also touch on the topics of transcendence, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and creativity. It's always great fun chatting with docer. I really respect his work so much, and every time I talk to him,
I just feel so much joy. He's one of the world's leading experts on the science of happiness and all and it's been honor for me to publish some work with him on this topic. But also it was an honor to have this conversation with him and get the chance to discuss his new book. Is awesome. All right, So, without further ado, I bring you, doctor, doctor Keltner.
Doctor.
So great to have you on the Psychology podcast again after all these years.
I know it's good to be with you, Scott and to have a conversation about transcendence.
Yes, yes, I'm sure we've both grown a lot since our last chat on this show. Yeah, six seven years ago or so. My gosh, time fly is. I love this topic a huge Congrats on the publication of your new book. I know you've been working on this research for at least fifteen years. Take me back to the beginning of this research where you're like, you know what, I'm going to try to scientifically tackle a topic that, perhaps to a lot of other psychologists may have seemed out of reach from measurement.
Yeah, thanks for asking that question. That is the big question, you know. John Heyde and I wrote a paper on I think two thousand and one or two thousand and three, and it took a while to get the science going, and I think there were a couple of problems, and thanks for asking the scientific question. You know. One was like how do you get people feel it? You know, and in a lab, you know, which often looks like a little impoverished office. You know, we struggled with that
and early failures. And then the second question is really your question, which is measurement. You know, how do you if this is an ineffable emotion with mystery at the heart of it, people claim, like William James, it's beyond words. A lot of people have felt that what do we do? And you know, I have to say, I mean, one of the most exciting things about writing the book, Scott is like you can now measure awe with a lot of richness, you know, with words like awe, wonder, amazement,
with vocalizations, whoa, with facial behavior, with goosebumps. There's really nice work on the chills now by good Thrash, even with physiology, you know, default mode network. So ironically, and this kind of struck me at the end of the book, you know, thinking about this the measurement issue. You know, I've taught emotion for twenty five thirty years, and ah, maybe one of the more coherent emotions to measure, you know,
it's we can get it. So so I think that's why the AWE science has really grown pretty prolifically recently. Is people realize, like, Wow, this mysterious emotion, you can measure it. You can find it in different life contexts and with laboratory paradigm. So it's been exciting to see.
It's definitely been exciting to see and to be a part of somewhat. We have we have a co authored paper on the measurement on the measurement of all the all scale, that is.
The key scale in the whole field. That's right with David Yats, transformative. I love it.
I love that you said that. Better you saying that than me saying that. Yeah, it is very exciting, and I'm trying to think of where all should be placed within the whole emotions framework, because never really liked the distinction between positive and negative emotions. It seems so.
It is. I agree.
I don't think all is like perfectly fits within either, Like it seems like a hybrid model.
Yeah, yeah it is. It's well, it's a complicated mixture of as a bit of fear in it, sometimes horror, sometimes terror, but awe the feeling of vast mystery. Yeah, I you know your question, and thank you for asking it. Of all the interviews I've done on AWE in the past six weeks, no one has asked that question, And yet it's the question. This defined Yeah, a lot of our works. So you know, I'm a nerd, you know, I know, and and you know there are some embedded
questions here, like how different is awe from fear? Right? The etymology of the word all traces back to the eighth and ninth century fear and dread? Is that really true today? How is awe different from beauty? Like when you just start blown or just move by a landscape painting, and so I would encourage our audience to go to
Alancowen dot com. And Alan is this brilliant computational scientists, and he and I have done like eight to ten large scale studies where people rate their emotional responses to thousands of stimuli gifts, pieces of music, paintings, vocalizations, samples of prosity, facial expressions, photographs, and what you find with the really cool statistical techniques that he's figured out is there are about twenty emotions in this complicated space. There's
a good deal of cross cultural overlap. And AWE is very much in your sweet spot, Scott, which is it's in these self transcendent emotions of emotions that take you away from the self like deep love and admiration and absorption into a stimulus and beauty. But all is its own distinct state, with its own subjective quality of your feelings. And importantly, in almost every way that we see study AWE, from self report to facial expression, the vocalization, it's really
different from fear. You know, fear is like what you know, and AWE sounds different whoa It has a different physiological profile. So that work part of the question is add just a kind of part of fear a version of love, and no, it's its own thing. And I, you know, Descartes Einstein others were like, this feeling of mystery is foundational to the mind. And I think those data attest to that.
Oh yeah, I do. I do think so as well. But just thinking about like, okay, if that's our new classification schemes self transcendent emotions and then then that changes the whole classification schemes, then you have then you have non trans self tressented emotions. So I'm trying to think, like, is happiness a non self transcendent emotion? I'm trying to think, and that I was trying to think in my head, well, which ones really are clearly non self transented emotions? Shame?
But I don't know. Maybe would you say shames of non self trescentdent emotion?
Yeah, you know, And you're rightly calling into question these groupings and they always encounter problems. But self transcendent states you know, you know them well, you know Scott like Awe bliss, joy, gratitude, gratitude, compassion, inspiration, inspiration. I actually and I love certain forms of humor, like the sense of the absurd, like yeah, yeah, my life's absurd. You know, me too, me too, And then they're self conscious emotions shame, embarrassment, guil, pride.
I think they are attachment related emotions love, desire, the filial love, sympathy, and then you get into the fight or flight negative emotions. So yeah, you could question it, but it does pose this interesting question of you know that we have to grapple with, like what are the kind of the cognitive appraisal processes that produce states like bliss, joy off? And I think self transcendence is part of the story.
Yeah, I definitely agree, and I do like putting it in the grouping of self transcendent emotions.
You did, what do you think the problem are that category? No?
I like that category and I don't get ae problems with it, but it just made me think, well, that means then there are non self transcendent emotions. That's the one thing that like kind of like trip me up for a second, because I was like, yeah, what would a trully, non self transentdent emotion look like? Because we're such a social species, right, even things like you know, shame seems to me like it's partly influenced, of course by others evaluations of us, so, but it is still
focused so much on the self. So that is true. That is true.
Yeah, anyway, nice questioning.
Yeah you so, what have you found are some of the biggest triggers of all?
Yeah? Yeah, you know, we did a bunch of work defining on fast miss. You know, it's when we encounter kind of vast stimuli or really beyond your typical frame of reference or scale of perception that are hard to understand or colloquially might we might say mysterious. And then we did a bunch of work on triggers of awe. And one kind of study that I write about in
the book is in the spirit of William James. We got these stories of awe from twenty six countries as diverse as Mexico and India, you know, Poland and Germany, US, Canada, Japan, et cetera. And then the others. We did daily diary studies where you know, we would ask people in different countries every night tell us if you felt some aw during the day, and both of those data converge on the idea, and it really caught a soft guard that it's really you know, what we called moral beauty. The
triggers awe amazing. You know, people's kindness, their overcoming of obstacles, their courage and standing up to the abuse of power amazing, and that kind of that was surprising, you know that it is. Yeah, nature is common as a source of awe spirituality, but man, just the wonders of people, their ordinary goodness really moves us to awe.
I love it. And you briefly just passed by I.
But you mentioned default mode network. YEA said that now that happens to be like my favorite brain network that I that I study in the context of creative creativity and creative thinking and educational neuroscience and work I've done with Mary Helen Emordino Yang and she she has shown in her own research independentomy, that that default mode network is active when we are witnessing examples of moral elevation, but not examples of like visual spatial rotation or like
non human processing. There's something very unique about watching inspiring examples of our fellow humans that activates this brain network. Whereas the you know, the dorslateral prefi on the cortex is like the robotic part of our brain and like.
It down.
Yeah, yeah, I think that that ties in really nicely with the all like experience. I mean, what's your read of the literature. I mean, obviously, no single brain network is going to explain everything. What have you found is the whole terrain of the neuroscience of all and physiology of all. Where are we at with that?
I think we've made really interesting progress. But you know so, but man are their big mysteries. Right, So there's work and I can't remember the specifics of Helen immunor Yang's studies, but from Japan and halland showing all tends to diminish default mode network activation, sort of the quieting of the self. That's a pretty robust finding in psychedelics that Michael Polland
reported upon and that others have replicated. But the big mystery to me, and this is why OZ really interesting for emotion neuroscience, is it is Yeah, okay, the self gets quiet, but all has all these fascinating subjective qualities to it of believing in human beings and wanting to serve if your mind is really creative, so that you have some hypotheses.
Yeah, because what I was saying was the exact opposite of yeah, you're saying yeah, and what I'm saying, yeah, Well, you.
Know, has these different in these different sometimes people study it with in response to nature or other people's goodness or memories of experiences, So there's going to be inconsistencies, you know.
That's it. That's the key, that's the key to this mystery.
It is.
Yeah, it's like it's almost like no surprise that like default motive active when you're social processing, but when it's a nature obviously you know, other things are going to come online and be Yeah. No, that's that's that's the key to this mystery. Is that all kind of transcends any particular brain network.
Yeah, but I think that you know, when I look at the subjective qualities of AWE, like really feeling like you've encountered what's meaningful to you, Feeling a sense of communal interconnectivity, having a sense that you're part of some really vast you know, those are uncharted territories in large part in this this realm of the self transcendent brain.
And I think you and David Jayden and Helen and Mordino Yang and others are going to get to their those answers and they're fascinating questions right about why did we have all this emotion? There's a lot of good work on the chills in all certain kinds of chills at a company, all the goose tingles, and then you know our works our lab's done a bit on bagel tone. All elevates bagel tone. So we're getting there and and it poses really interesting questions about the emotional body and brain.
Were douse all activate bagel toon or do is vagel tone activate all?
Well, everything goes in every direction.
I love it. I love it. That's the right answer or options. See you know the reason why I ask. It's like I could see, you know, be watching something all I could actually activate the calm and connect system as like I know refraction. Fredrickson calls it that the Calman connect system, and you could certainly see that being the case. I also think it can be the case, right that where you have active in the Calman connect system in some other way and that like unlocks your
potential for all. Does that make sense?
Oh my god? Is that a profound need in our empirical study of AWE. You know, we get so we get so locked in in the emotion world of gratitude and compassion and awe and amusement and pride and shame, treating those emotions as the independent variable, right, like all does this? And that's all of the studies of all. All makes you creative, It makes you less polarized, it
reduces stress. But what about the other direction? Right? What about what is the you know, does certain kinds of do certain kinds of meditation make you more prone to awe? Do visits to the woods make you more prone to awe? And so does a high vagel tone profile make you more open awe? No? And those are key, key questions.
Yeah, key questions.
Young researchers out there, go get it.
Yeah, I hope you are your friend to me? Am I young? Yes, the back creaks these days, but I'll take it. Okay, Well, what do you see as the main features of all? I mean, this could have been one of my first questions. Yeah, it'd be better late than ever. Yeah, you know, what do you see as some of the essential features?
Yeah, that's a terrific question. And that took a lot of work, and I drew upon a couple of different sources in writing Awe. Right. The first was the empirical science, and I'll just briefly touch upon that lab studies. But the second was the long standing narrative traditions of expressive writing about awe, spiritual writing, nature writing like Emerson and Margaret Fuller, psychedelic writing, you know, near death experience writing.
Lots of people really write a lot about awe, and you can start to find this essential structure to it or features like you say, you encounter vast mysteries, You feel the sense of awe, and then it really makes the self small and quiet and humble. It opens your mind, you know, people in a state of awe open up into wonder like wow, how in the world do clouds produce lightning? You know? Or how could that skateboarder skate on that railing? So you're like whoa. So you're open
and you're searching for ideas. And then what William James called Saint lie tenancy is that you know that it is fascinating. These big experiences of all kind of make you want to be good for other people. You know that you come out of it like whatever I make of that, I just want to be good, you know, I want to be a kind neighbor, good you know friend, So that is those are sort of the essential features,
and then we it's interesting Scott. You know, I've taught all for ten years and people will come to me and they'll say, I'm not sure I've had an experience of all. You know, Okay, tell me, like, when did you see something fast and mysterious? Well, I was, you know, riding in my friend's plane. Now I accidentally fell out and I've landed a hasty It was amazing, And I'm like, okay, did you feel quiet? Did you kind of tear up at the event? Did you feel some goosebumps? You know?
So we know these subjective qualities to awe as well. So that's sort of a catalog of the essential features of all.
Yeah, this is this is on brand for you, sir. You know you you've spent a lot of your career trying to focus on the good and make the case that we're wired for good as a species. And it makes you a very unique figure, not within the positive
psychology movement, but within the evolutionary psychology. That puts you quite interesting because you could have easily when you started studying the evolutionar psychologists like just gravitate towards you know, like aggression and meeting, poaching, dark stalking, you know David Buss stuff that he loves that shit. But you carved your own unique pathway again within evolutionary psychology. Obviously you did within positives like that's obvious, but within evolutionary I
just want to call that out. There's not a lot of people focusing on that. I do want to give a shout out to my colleague Glenn Gear who recently published the book Positive Evolutionary Psychology, which I wrote the forward too. But yeah, where he tempted to try to reorient the field of evolutionary psychology in that direction. But you've been you know, doing that for ages, so this is in another way, this is carrying on from that tradition, right.
Yeah, you know, thank you for making that observation. And I hadn't really thought about that, but you know, I was captivated by an evolutionary approach to the human psyche and social behavior. And it is true, like the the prevailing evolutionary science that really took hold on jealousy and
mate selection and violence and families violence, et cetera. All the big headline findings rape really fit this kind of bloody and tooth and claw view of human nature, and that frustrated me, you know, and I remember hearing France DEVALSI that offered this really interesting observation. He was a big inspiration for me. You know that book Good Natured where he's like, hey, chimps have have been wired by evolution to feel guilt and empathy, and you know, they
co operate and assist others. And he said, you know, it's interesting. American evolutionists looked at a group of non human primates and all they wrote about was competition of violence. Japanese evolutionary scientists looked at this roughly the same group of non human primates, and they looked, they discerned, and looked,
observed all this cooperation. And so I have really took taken a more of a pro social lens, like look at all the cooperation, and that emerges early the sharing that people like David Rand have documented the capacity the compassion in particular, you know that work showing we have evolved to take care of harm in others, and those started to be portals into a broader view of how we are this social species. We do a lot of
horrible things in the name of our social sociology. But we do a lot of good that's worth profiling.
Yeah, I mean, technically, we evolved. I mean you know this obviously, but we evolved for survival or reproduction, and evolution doesn't particularly care about our happiness. Yeah, a long term well being of the organism. Anything that propagates the
genes is a wind comes up. Yeah, but so one based on that, I mean, I believe some evolutions psychologists infer from that a lot of things that they tend to make us very cynical about the true motives of humans, because you could say, like, well, what looks like altruism, yeah, or night you know, yeah, okay, yeah, guys are nice. But look, let's be honest, they're really nice to get laid right. I feel like you're kind of this like pure,
like joyful human in this field who's like not cynical. Yeah, I know, do you know what I mean?
Though? And it aggravates some people, and I can't help it, you know, Yeah.
I love it. I love you, man, I love that about you.
Yeah. Well, you know, and I actually think, you know, I didn't do the work that really I was. I was probably on the outside or kind of the various empirical findings that now supported a much more favorable view of human nature, you know, and I'm thinking about just Joseph Henrick, the default tendency to show resources, David rand
intuitive sharing, although that's a controversial finding. You know, some of the work on Thomas Cello on the early emergence in humans of assistance and providing help, and then you build that into the nervous system, right that these are all processes enabled by vagual tone and oxytocin and a liken.
That just feels robust to me, that you know that there is this deeply pro social tendency to humans, and so much so I hear Richard Dawkins said he would rename his book the Cooperative Gene knowing no way, Yeah, knowing what he knows about the evolution of properation now from the selfish gene, So yeah, you know. And then the debates about motives like all right, I share all
my resources, I give you everything. You know, am I really secretly trying to be more attractive to other romantic partners? Who knows? You know? What I care about? As Dan Batson really convincingly argued, and Fronst of all is the proximal determinis of behave, you know, and there's a lot of goodness in there.
Yeah, yeah, I agree, I agree. I like you. I like that. I like that a lot. You you know, you personally have been through things, and you know, thanks for your vulnerability in your book, you know, writing about it. Your brother Rolf Believe passed away from cancer. Yeah, and that really changed your understanding of all and and if I'm right and motivated you to write this book, is that right?
Yeah, thanks for asking, Gott. You know, I was moving along with the awe science. I felt like I was four or five years away from really starting to put it into a book. And then my brother Ralph and he and I he's one year younger. We had kind of an experimental childhood. You know. We were born in Mexico, counterculture parents lived in the late sixties and Laurel Canyon kind of this wild place and had a wild upbringing.
You know. Eventually moved to the country and swam and rivers and we did everything together, and he got colon cancer. And colon cancer is horrifying. It's really one of the bad ones. You know. It is just like it is combat, you know, it just brushes the body, and that was brutal. That was two years of total brutality of you know, just chemo and stomach surgeries and so forth, and really horrifying. And then on the night he took a cocktail to end his life, we were all there and and I
was like, you know, really activated. I had no idea what it all meant. I was in a really like we all were, just intense state. And when I saw him, you know, as he was drifting into his the afterlife wherever he goes, you know, he was calm, and you know, he looked different facially, he was smiling, his breathing really responded to us. We would say things and his breathing
would slow down. And the amazing thing, Scott, I don't know if this has ever happened to you, because you study transcendence, you know, from a scientific, academic perspective, is I started to It was this profoundly reverential moment where we were all sitting around him, touching him, and I started to almost hallucinate where you know, like I started, the light around him was really vibrating and pulsating, and I really felt like there was a soul in him
that was moving into that space and then we were there, and like often in cases like this, he waited to die until we were all gone. And it was a transcendent experience of awe to watch him die. And it is a universal human experience of awe to watch people he loved go. It can be horrifying and terrifying as well. And then what happened to me to your latter part of your question is I was blown off the map.
You know, I'm like, I was not sleeping and really eat it in my inflammation system and confused and hallucinating. And you know, Joan Diddon writes about awe the awe of grief almost like a or the grief is like a psychotic state. And I felt like that. I really was like, man, I could barely make sense of things. And I just decided, you know, I got to go find AWE, you know, because I felt totally out of touch with what brought me all in life. And that
led to the book. And my first part of the book writing was, you know, I grabbed a bunch of books that meant a lot to me. I just started writing about AWE and my brother, you know, just like where we found it as kids and what it meant to us, and it started to take shape. And then the voice that I really heard that I think is important for our day coming out of the pandemic and all the depression out there and our kids, is like,
find awe. Man, like get you know, I don't know if you know you me, Kendall, You probably do from.
The of course, yes, I mean you have the same chair in the Florida Orchestra that my grandfather had in the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Are you serious?
Yes, there's the same chair. Third chat, Yeah, I mean maybe because of you, Scott. But she calls me up and she's like, I'm all about AWE. You know, music is aw So I.
Went and I heard her play and had this transformative experience of music. So and I think the lesson there and I know you've thought a lot about this is like the human mind can take trauma of the worst kind and find deep meaning. And for me it was that period and coming out of it, I am a different human being, you know. I feel more open to the world, more loving, more interested in mysteries than answers. So it was a life.
That gave me goose bumps. Oh more mysteries than answers. I'm wringing that down. No, that just gave me goose bumps. Yeah, I mean music for me. For me, cell music is so self transcendent. When I listened to Gilliam, there's there are particular pieces that I could share with you that just bring me such a sense of awe.
What does it do for you? Like, how does it wash over you? Or what does it bring to your mind?
There's something so transcendent, timeless about some of this music. You know, there's no words, it's not like there's a given you any sort of ideology. Yeah, there's something that just you listen. I feel bittersweetness to some of this. I find, particularly the key of E minor really the most self transcendent key.
I'm going to look into that. Why do you think that is? That's really curious.
It's the most bittersweet key. Yeah, it's like so close to E which is bright, but it's not. It's E minor E major, you know it's so bright, but no, it's E minor. I don't know, it's uh or you know C is so bright bright? You know, see see it feels happiness, not transcendent, self transcendent. I don't know. There's something about e Minor. It's uh, there's just like a a real reflection from above that state that it puts me in as opposed to feeling from within. It's
just kind of like a more above reflection. That amazing emotional too.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, and that's one of the mysteries in this book is like you can people feel a lot of awe in response to music and they cry and get teary, do they get goose bumps, they hug, they feel transformed as I did listening to this piece by John Adams. But how sounds do that? Like you're providing a hypothesis about e Minor blows my mind that a pattern of sound can make you feel like things above connect to you. That's amazing. I hope science gets there.
I hope so too. It is absolutely amazing. Well, you talk about other domains in this book, and we already talked, hint, hinted a little bit about nature. Yeah, what does the research show about nature?
I mean Ralph Waldo Emerson, you know, he was a naturalist in the sense of finding awe in the divine in nature. Forty percent of Americans feel nature is animated by a transcendent spirit. I kind of feel that way
when I go backpacking. And the research on this is just astonishing and it is one of the real success stories of all research thus far, a lot of it coming out of South Korea Japan, where they really are interested in forest bathing and rituals in nature as a healthcare solution, and people go out in nature and they just start having this different kind of experience of like, God, I feel like I'm naked in the woods and boundaries are dissolving, and the sounds are and the light is
so bright. And the studies are finding those sounds of water activate parts of your nervous system that are related to AWE. There are certain chemicals in nature that open up your mind to temporal vastness and memory that the imagery itself obviously the sense of interconnectivity. And you know,
there's a ton of data nicely reviewed. I ming Quo in I think twenty sixteen or twenty fifteen, and it's it's just it's hard to beat in terms of lifting is out of it is you know, so you know it and it does it through calming our attention and awe and just the physical soothing on your body, you know,
probably the influence on the microbiome. So it's incredible and really, you know, it's interesting Scott thirty years ago like, oh, it would feel sort of corny to study nature and emotion, and today it's a massively important field, you know, with a lot of real world relevance. So it's it's a good good news.
I love that it keeps coming back to like connection. Yeah, when you're in nature, when you feel connected to nature, does that make you tend to be more connected to I fear fell humans, yell? Do those things go together?
They? Well, what we do know? And this is a you're you're asking such key questions, which is you know.
I was always in trouble in school for those teachers are like Scott, you're asking too many.
I'm trying to teach for a multiple choice here. Yeah, you know. One of the really surprising findings that you were the first to bring up is this, which is you can produce awe in the lab by having people look at you know, film from BBC Earth or really cool images of the northern lights, and you feel awe. And then our studies show even though it's nature, that awe makes you feel more connected to your fellow human beings.
You know, in one of our studies, we had individuals draw social network with little circles that are individuals, and then connect all the circles and when you feel AWE, you have a richer social community produced by nature. And that tells us. It raises this fascinating question of like, how in the world could I go to Yosemite and look at a giant wall of rock and come out of it feeling like I love of my fellow human beings.
It's kind of mysterious, right, And I think the what AWE does is it shifts us out of this sense of self as separate from others to a sense of self as interconnected, no matter what the source. And we need more work on that.
We do, but the work that has already been done on it, as you mentioned, is so groundbreaking and important. Do you think that there's an all deprivation going on in the lives of children today with a cutting of music classes, art classes. Do you have a problem here, Yeah?
I do. I was really lucky, Scott. You know, I was raised by these counterculture parents and they just like, let my brother and I find AWE. You know, nature and dms and the things that we were curious about. You know, I love dinosaurs, and my brother loved magic tricks, you know, and so we just went our ways and developed this sense of awe. And then, you know, in raising my two daughters, now Ly and Sarafina twenty five and twenty three, they did grade in school, and they're
wonderful human beings. But when I looked at what a young person does in many parts of the globalized world. In school, you know, schools oriented, you know, like you said, like the humanities have less of a roll, Art has less of a roll, music less of a roll, oriented to or code, and certain kinds of math, et cetera, which is great. But and then more importantly, like what
do you do after school? We were scheduled out of your mind and you you're doing you know, hip hop dance class and then the you know, the Spanish class, and and you get home at seven, and then you
do your homework, and there was no awe. You know, my kids, my daughters, who are both fierce and love awe, had to like force awe into their lives through going to wild dances and traveling by themselves in South America and and you know, living on farms and and we had take our cultures, taken it largely away from them,
you know, as have digital things. Yeah. So it's but we're designing all curricula at the Greater Good Science Center, and I think there's an AWE movement in education coming that will correct some of these these problems.
These are some heavy themes today. I can't well, you know, there's two ends of this. There's death and then there's life. Now. Yeah, we found in our own paper that we published that one of the biggest triggers of all on our six factor all scale was the other category and the biggest thing in the all category was childbirth. Yea, yeah, that's the other cycle.
That's the other end it is, you know what I'm saying it is And you know, anyone who's watched or had a child, most people feel awe, you know, And I think that there's this deeper lesson there. Like I've thought about when spring arrives, we often feel awe. We're just electrified by the emergence of life. And it got me onto this hypothesis that somehow AWE is a life detector. You know, anytime there's elements evidence of life you're like, wow,
it's emerging and it is vast and mysterious. How what life is. But yeah, childbirth is a serious one. And I love the stories we gathered because people would say like this, I think, as this woman from Japan, like the minute I had a child, I thought about all the generations I'm part of. Now I'm the new generation, and I think about my parents and grandparents right this
intergenerational vastness. It's an amazing experience. When my daughter Natalie was born, she came out of my wife's womb, and the first thing that was funny is she had this little dark hair, which all babies tend to have, and I have blonde hair. My wife is blonde. And I was like, oh my god, you know, I'm not the dad, you know. And then I got over that quickly. But I looked at her face, Scott. I still can remember this to this day, and her face I could just
because I the human face. It had all the features of uncles and aunts and grandmothers put into this genetic miracle. And I was like, wow, you know, this is what reproduction is is taking all of our family members, mixing
it up and bringing a life into the world. So it was mind blowing, credible, and it's cool because now there are movements like I profile in the book, like Mindful of Birthing, where you really you don't you get techniques to figure out the pain and then you focus on that wonder of life and bringing it into the world.
I love that. I didn't know that was a like a thing. Yeah, but primarily probably in California, we.
Are a little susceptible to this kind of thing.
It sounds very California, but I love it. I love it. What about like creativity? Do you what is the research show in that connections between all on creativity?
It's good. And you know when people ask me like, well, god, ah, what do you mean, Like is that good for you? Because I have an image of like encountering a judgmental God and that's not what I don't know if that'd be good for me. But aw is good for your body, it's good for your stress, and it's good for your mind.
And you know, we have done work and that shows you know that a little bit of awe makes you more creative on classic creativity tasks like the remote association's task or thinking of novel associations or relations between objects. It's related to more curiosity for kids in school, which I think is important. It's related to, you know, there's mounting work that you're you're sharper in your reasoning, right you you analyze evidence a little bit more carefully. That's
worked by Lannie Shioda. You're better at science and scientific reasoning tangentially related finding as you make you're less polarized and looking at conflicts. It's not the US them stereotype. It's like, well there's a complicated issue, right so I you know, and you would have guessed this obviously, but you know, we needed to do their work like a little dose of AWE is good news for your curiosity and creativity. And I think most people feel that they know.
Like man, when I feel a little burst of a suddenly I come up, I go walking in the garden or the forest, and I get a new idea about my work. You know, So it's good. It's good news.
Yeah, good fodder for inspiration. Yeah. As you know, there's there's this table of character strengths, uses, and excesses. Every single character strength has the excesses category? Is there a dark side to all of too much?
All?
Like the whole book is like basically one big endorsement for all.
Yeah.
But but is there anything you can say critical at all you know about this thing?
Yeah, most definitely. And the dark side of AWE is is really interesting if you know. One source of it is if you build threat into the experience of awe. Right, So let's say your experience of AWE in a religious context has this threatening structure to it, or judgmental God, or you know, a charisme course of leader who is really threatening but onspiring that will have it won't have the benefits that we've talked about and will close your
mind more and make you feel stressed. So that's one you know, pure Carlo that Valdosolo had cool data showing AWE can make you see patterns that aren't there. Right, it's just a pattern making emotion apopinia. Is that seeing patterns that aren't there? Wow? Yeah?
O over yeah yeah yeah, that's the technical technical term.
And you know, when you think about writing it down, when you think about people indoors QAnon or conspiracy theories or you know, it's worrisome that that this AWE can do that, you know, the dark side of all for us as individuals like you nicely said, like, man, if you're out on that end of the AWE continuum and you're feeling it all the time, you're probably bordering on mania. You know, h too expansive, too, everything's too vast, So
i'd watch out for that. And then I think people have written about the political abuses of AWE, that the Trump rallies, you know, stirring up this collective efforvescence are worrisome. And so you know, you can you can get people revved up on just moving in syncrony and you know, getting exhilarated about an idea, and it can it can lead to problems. So I think there are a huge dark side stall.
Cool, thank you for addressing that. How could people train themselves to find more all in their daily lives? Yeah, you know, you know this.
This is both a you know, thinking about this, and there are hints at practices in the book, you know, and also when you think about the experiments that have been run. But it's interesting to me because I believe that there is an AWE mindset that is like mind that is a has the same power as a mindfulness mindset. So mindfulness is the non judgmental awareness of the contents of my mind and my context. Right, I'm just over
aware of things. Owez. Mindset is I feel in an open way to be in relation to something vast, Right, I'm part of something vast And that's the mindset to cultivate with all Like how am I part of this ecosystem? How do my emotions fit this back cello? Can you know peace? How does my dream life fit this painting by A Kandinski? Or or? And how am I part of this massive people who are dancing at a concert? Oz. Mindset is being in relation to what's fast, and you
can cultivate that, you know. You We did an aw walk study where people just go out and walk and we asked them to think about fast things that you're related to, and it helped their physical pain. So so part of cultivating is the mindset and part is just to find those domains they give it to you, you know, and just pause and listen to music for AWE, think about it. Somebody who's inspired you morally, move with other people,
get out in nature. It's actually pretty easy to cultivate, and there's a lot of work now people are really realizing this. Like, as an example, I was doing a workshop on AWE and this guy who runs the grief programs at Kaiser Permanente, we have this exercise one way to feel ODZ to tell an AWE story. You know. Oh, I was out, you know, backpacking. I saw this electrical
storm almost got here. It was amazing. And so with people who are grieving, he has them tell AWE stories about the people they've lost, right, which in some sense is what my book is. It's an AWE story about my brother. And that is a very simple thing to do in one of life's most challenging moments. It's good for us.
Yeah, I mean you do make clear that even a couple of minutes a day can really influence your whole life. Yeah, at least influence the rest of the day.
Yeah.
I'm just thinking about linkages between this and James Pennebaker's great work on motion promotional processing of trauma through journaling. Could we have an all workbook, and I don't mean like an all notebook. Could we have an all notebook where even just writing down some of the most all like experiences before you go to bed maybe influences your next day. Yeah.
I think that's coming. You know, we have some AWE practices a greater good. And there are wonder books now very much in the spirit and AWE books. I think they're coming, you know too, And I love your idea so nuanced of before you go to bed, write a
story of awe right at a heart. I do this when I was teaching healthcare providers during the pandemic, a top thousands of people remotely, I would have them tell AWE stories about their work, right like peterful, Yeah, and they were just like, it's the hardest time in their careers. But there was a lot of reverential content.
Beautiful. How can all be an antidote to social polarization? Can I help with different political persuasions? Get along?
Yeah? You know, Daniel Stancato, you know we did that paper and you know, you find there are classic ways to measure polarization. Do I think you know that disputes over police brutality or woke education, or gender identity or incarceration are they polarized? Do they have just adversarial enemies on side? And that's it? And in a lot of people we have become more polarized. It's a big problem in the political sphere. But AWE reduces the tendency to polarize,
and you we've little experiences of all nature. And then you judge the adversaries in ideological disputes and you think they're they have more common ground, right, they're not fanatical enemies. I think that's you know, I love your question because it just points to ways in which we can shift the discourse of our times and move away from this like Trump versus you know, Bernie or whatever, and move a little bit more toward kind of what are the
common grounds in different ideological persuasions? Where can we make progress? So thanks for asking. It was a paper I'm proud of.
Of course, all this stuff is related to each other, like your idea of collective effervescence, you know, moving in unison and ritual dance, religion put. I mean when you go to these political you look at the Trump political rallies, there's collective effervescence there, you know, but it's not necessarily one. That's again, there's a dark side, all right, Like it's not like a collective effervescence necessarily leads you to uh love your outgroup.
Yeah no, not at all. And you you and in fact, it's probably the opposite, and there's a little bit of work on that that collective movement can lead us to polarized groups. You know, when you like, I remember reading about the massacres in Rwanda and the Hutu's, it was so much collective stuff like dance and chanting and drugs and you know, weaponry and just moving through villages. And I think that the collective effervescence of it just unleashed
the violence of that in some exponential way. So yeah, you know, our task is to rely on reason to make sense of whether these emotions are benefiting the greater good, and to do it on a podcast like this.
That's right, that's right. Oh boy, how is all cumulative?
Yeah, yeah, you know, we that's one of the deeper questions about these self transcendent emotions more generally compassion, gratitude, bliss is people have this sense. There's a little bit of work on this in gratitude work, And then we
have one study on awe. You know, when you have an our experience like you you know, you go to a concert with friends, or you go to a political march and you feel transformed, or you go backpacking, you come out of it and for the next week, you're like, God, I'm feeling like things are different, you know, I feel different about my life. And that suggests that that experience is cumulative. It builds on itself in some interesting way.
We have one study that shows indeed, the more we practice aw once a week, the greater the awe with the practice. How is you know which I see smiling? Like, that's the question, And I think part of it is, like you notice more aw right, Like, oh, after backpacking, got it, I'm looking at the sky a little bit more. You are reflecting on bigger systems that you're part of.
You go to a political rally and you're moved by Bernie Sanders and sudden you're like, wow, I should be thinking about how this tax critique applies to education or prison systems. So it has as it builds, but we just don't know much about it. And I think it's one of the greatest questions in the field, the field of psychedelics. This is one of the big questions. Is you know, people feel like it changes them for a long time.
How you know?
And we'll hopefully figure out.
Yeah, I can't wait to know the answer to this. All right, Well, let's end this interview talking about this last chapter of your book, which is so interesting. It's on the fundamental unifying purpose of all. Yeah, let's bring all these threads together today and tell me a little bit about that.
Yeah. That was a hard one to really to write, Like what's all really about? And I think that there are two answers. One we've touched upon is you know that AWE folds us into collectives and a ton of data on that thesis, and that makes sense. It's in you know, you nicely asked about new evolutionary approaches to the human psyche, and it is this group selection. I got to be part of a collective and ALL does that in a lot of different ways in terms of
action and feeling and self representation. But I, you know, I was really interested in the kind of the phenomenological coherence to AWE. What is it about? And it really I was searching for it. And you know, what does encountering somebody who moves you morally due to you or
feeling being out of nature? And the thing that it does is, in my views, it really makes you realize the systems you're part of, and you shift out of this very narrow self focus of specific actions within a context, and you go deeper and it reveals that life is made up of all these systems, right, the system a social system of your neighborhood, a system of ideas and a discipline, systems of sounds like you hinted out in music, and all reveals that to you and then invites you
to be part of those systems. And what's interesting about that to me, Scott is you know, you and I have thought a lot about meaning, like young people finding meaning, you and I finding meaning, finding meaning after your brother dies, and meaning in some sense is about locating your individual identity in broad systems. Is it a spiritual system that really gives you strength or sense that you're part of nature or a social movement? And that is the core
of all. And it took you know, some investigation to get there, but I think it's a big deal. I think that too. Like we've talked about young people, they aren't thinking quite as much about these broad systems that you can be part of and all it is a very important pathway to that realization.
Beautiful, I love it, and I love I love how just how far one so one one construct can take us. I mean, we're it all pivoted around all today and we're talking about large scale social dynamics and systems and fundamentally remapping society. I love it. Not every construct can do that in psychology, right construct?
You know?
So yeah, all is a good one. All is a good one. Yeah, Doctor Keltner, thank you so much for the chat today, and I wish you all the best and the rest of your book tour.
Yeah. Thanks, Scott, It's always good to be with you.
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