How Awe Alters Our Brains and Our Bodies

Source: Monkey Business Images/istock

This post is a review of Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. By Dacher Keltner. Penguin Press. 336 pp. $28.

In an essay published in Woman’s Home Companion in 1956, Rachel Carson described a walk along the beach with her 20-month-old nephew. Drenched by the incoming waves and heavy rain, Rachel and Roger shared a “spine-tingling response to the vast, roaring ocean and the wild night around us.” Lamenting that the instinct “for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring is dimmed and even lost before adulthood,” Carson wished that Roger, whom she raised when her sister died, could acquire an indestructible “sense of wonder” at the world.

Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Born To Be Good and The Power Paradox, agrees. In Awe, Keltner asserts that “a feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world” can serve as an antidote to the “default self,” whose core values — independence, self-control, status consciousness, and dog-eat-dog competitiveness — dominate modern societies, even though they produce anxiety, isolation, loneliness, and depression.

A gifted storyteller, Keltner draws on the experiences of individuals across the world to document the salutary impact of everyday, wild and mystical encounters with nature, music, visual art, literature, religion, the birth of children, and the death of loved ones (including Rolf, his brother).

Acknowledging that the “science of everyday wonder” is new, Keltner also includes empirical evidence. He cites a study in which elderly participants in an “awe walk” became less concerned with the self and more with the outside environment. And another in which participants who experienced awe regularly had lower levels of inflammation in their immune systems (related to chronic threat, rejection, and loneliness) than individuals who felt pride, amusement, or other positive emotions.

We do not know how long the “awesome effect” lasted for these participants. For the individuals who watched BBC’s Planet Earth and then viewed the issue of police brutality in a less polarized way. For white students in the United States who had exhibited prejudice toward Blacks, watched a video about underprivileged Black South Africans, and subsequently gave more money than their peers to the United Fund, a fund for Black colleges. Or for high school or college students who respond to graduation ceremonies by locating themselves “within larger narratives, occasioning awe and ‘fear-ish wonder’ for historically marginalized people entering mainstream society,” and tapping an “instinct to move in unison.”

Most important, perhaps, Keltner, who associates himself with the optimism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James, refers only once, in a paragraph about religion, to the “toxicities of communities” that revolve around awe, and have “given the world tribalism, genocide, and the subjugation of those outside the favored group.” Consider, to cite just one example, the 1934 Nuremberg rally, captured in Leni Riefenstahl’s controversial masterwork, Triumph of the Will.

As it unfolds, Keltner emphasizes, awe stimulates feelings of vastness, mystery, and wonder. At its best, awe teaches us the interdependence of species. It expands our understanding of how to know, see, sense, and comprehend the nature of the world and our place in it.

That said, it seems to me that in its essence, awe is morally and politically neutral. Even as it locates us in forces larger than ourselves, its impact on individuals and groups depends on the context.

A student of “happiness” for over 20 years, Professor Keltner tells us that he has seen “how much health and well-being we gain” by experiencing awe.

“Awesome and awful, it’s so striking that they go together,” photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher tells Keltner. And “they are mine to reconcile.”

Maybe that’s the best takeaway from Keltner’s provocative book.