Instant Genius - How finding moments of awe can bolster your mental health

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

Great mountains, beautiful movies and moments to appreciate life in all its glory. These are all experiences that make us feel a sense of awe, but what actually is awe, why do we feel this emotion and is it good for you? We spoke to Dacher Keltner, a leading psychology professor and author the book Awe: The New Science Of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life to find out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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to appreciate life in all of its glory. These are all experiences that make us feel a sense of awe. What is happening in our brains in these moments? How has it changed through history? And can you cultivate awe in your own life? We spoke to Dhaka Keltner to find out. He's a psychology professor and the author of the book, The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life,

out in paperback on January 2, 2024. He takes us through a deep dive of awe, teaching usable tricks and important information on what of life's most important emotions. So like a lot of emotions, or has this almost mystical feeling, something that it can't be pinned down. And I'd love to hear how you personally describe the concept.

Yeah, you know, emotions are hard to capture with words, as the Irish philosopher Edmundberg said, you know, that words are often misleading guides to understanding our interior experience. And awe is at the top of that list. It's, you know, it's experience often when you've, feel it intensively, it seems to be beyond words, it's mysterious, you can't quite make sense of it. But it's really actually kind of ironic that, you know, as the science awe has evolved, we've

learned a lot of ways to describe and measure it. So I define awe as an emotion that we feel when we encounter vast things that are beyond our current knowledge structures. You see vast trees, or you hear a vast sound in a cathedral, or you encounter a vast idea. So it's really when we encounter vast mysteries. And, you know, we can understand awe through that definition. We can understand awe through the sensations that it produces, which are interesting to study scientifically, tears, the warmth in the chest, which is the activation of the vagus nerve that I studied in my lab, the chills, which is a particular kind of response of muscles

contracting around hair follicles. So we have really, although, you know, many like William James and others felt it awe was ultimately ineffable. I think we can describe it and study it and learn about it. You touched on it a little bit there. What is it that we're actually experiencing? What's going on inside our brains and our body when we experience these moments of all? Critical to understanding an emotion is what the philosophers call the intentional object of the emotion. What is it about? Right. And our research has found that this unfolding of awe of you encounter something that's vast and mysterious in nature or the extraordinary kindness of

somebody will often trigger awe, which I call moral beauty or spirituality or music. What happens as it moves through your body, this wave of emotion, is very interestingly, it deactivates the default mode network in the brain, big chunks of cortex that are involved in self-representation. And this is a physiological correlative, you know, the sense that your ego is dissolving during awe. You feel small and humble. It moves into the vagus nerve, this big bundle of nerves that wanders through your chest and down into your gut, which when it's activated, tends to enable you to connect to other people, which is part of awe. You feel the boundaries between self and other dissolve, and you feel part of something large. Very interestingly, there are a couple

of studies showing it activates oxytocin release, a little chemical produced in the hypothalamus, an oxytocin enables cooperation and sharing and experiences of awe produce what William James called these saintly tendencies. Like, man, I'm so overwhelmed by this piece of music, right? I've got goosebumps. And then as the emotion unfolds, you want to give, you want to be part of a community. So awe, what is it about? It really starts in the sense that the self dissolves.

You're no longer worried about the daily concerns of the self. It then sort of merges into the sense of like, I'm part of something larger, be it a community, a history, an ecosystem. And then it produces these tendencies to be kind and cooperate, which are important to human evolution. And I feel like much like other, what I guess you would describe as positive emotions, you know, this idea of being happy or excited or calm, are there some health benefits of, you know, being in these states of all?

I mean, this is one of the most surprising lines of work and sets of discoveries in the study of awe recently is its health benefits. We know intuitively, like if you go walking on one of the great trails in the Lake District in England, right, you come out of it and you're like, I feel stronger, I feel healthier, you know, I feel better about life. Ralph Aldo Emerson, the great American writer, said, you know, there's nothing that nature cannot repair through awe. and indeed experiences of awe through music or nature or encountering other people's courage, the moral beauty domain of awe, they are associated with better cardiovascular function, reduced inflammation in the immune system. The immune system heats up the body to fight pathogens when it's chronically activated. It's bad news for the body.

Aw cools down that response. There are new intervention studies of awe. showing little moments of awe help you feel less depression during the COVID pandemic, less anxiety, even less pain. We did a study of elderly individuals who did an awe walk once a week, and they came out of that study feeling less physical pain, which is a huge condition of the elderly. So, you know, this is why medical institutions are getting very interested in how do we give this away, right? It's almost a prescription for health. You were mentioning just there about the idea of an oar walk.

Could you go into that a little bit more? Yeah, you know, this came out of, in some sense, the great tradition of walking that emerges in, you know, it's a human tendency to walk. We are a wandering itinerant species. You know, we came out of Africa and walked to all the continents. But more recently, you know, the great European traditions of walking that begin with, you know, 18th century and the ascent of Montblanc

then Europe goes crazy and everybody's walking and the British have some of the great walking trails in the world that Rebecca Solnott, the author writes about brilliantly in her book about walking. And so, you know, I've loved backpacking and walking. And I's like, you know, there's just something magical about it. Maybe we could design a just a way to walk once a week that has a bit of awe in it, right? And so Virginia Stern and I, who she's a neuroscientist, had people who are 75 years old or older. and that's a very interesting age because at that age, 75 years old,

you start to feel more depression and anxiety because you see people die and people you love people you love. And so once a week, Alex, they go out and we just ask them like, on your regular walk, like go someplace that's a little mysterious that fills you with a childlike sense of wonder, you know? And then as you're there, like pause, breathe a bit

and just let your mind put away your checklist and your phone and just let your mind wander and look for things that are vast like the you know the sky and small leaves on a tree and that those clues are ways that we can access awe and our seven after eight weeks of doing this once a week our elderly participants as i said they felt more joy more kindness and less physical pain which i think is you know it's a multi-billion dollar problem in the health care system in the United States. So that's what's wonderful about Oz. You can add it to almost anything. You know, you can be listening to a piece of music and you just say, okay, just for a moment, I'm really going to listen to where the mysterious sounds go and what it reminds me of in my

own life. And suddenly you're tearing up a little. And that's the power of Oz to find it in anything. You touched on there a little bit, which is a question that I want to ask. Is it something that I guess you can cultivate, or does awe tend to be this feeling that just happens naturally? It's out of your control. You know, I mean, in some sense, this is why we do science. You know, Alex, when I started this research 15 years ago, I had a couple of misconceptions about awe. And one was that it's really just about nature and religion.

You know, I'd read a lot of spiritual writings, and then there are the great environmentalist writings, you know, Britain has some of the greatest traditions in those areas. And I thought, this is a religious and natural emotion. And in fact, the central source of awe around the world, you know, we've studied about 30 countries is other people. You know, just their courage, how they overcome things, overcome poverty, show their character and their virtue. And moving with other people, you're at an arsenal football game and you start doing the cheers. And suddenly you're like, this is transcendent, you know.

So other people was a surprise to us. And then the other big surprise was, you know, if you ask people like, tell me about your life of awe. And they'll be like, oh, well, let's see. Twelve years ago, I went to the Alps. And in actuality, people feel all very regularly two to three times a week. And you can cultivate it. Even though it washes over you, the emotion, in some sense, spontaneously, you can find contexts and mindsets to feel awe. So one thing to do is just take a few minutes once a week, find a place that might bring you awe, a garden or sunset or listening to a piece of music, just pause and breathe and open your mind and just follow the patterns of music with for the patterns of light in the sky, et cetera.

And you'll start to feel the emotion very often, and we've tested that. And then, you know, the other thing I write about is, you know, awe is a companion to, some of our most human creations, music, visual design, ideas, spiritual practice, nature, other people's actions. And so just go search, you know, go seek it out, go to museums, etc. So, and this is coming. There's work in China. There's work in the United States. This is coming to hospitals, just all interventions where we just remind ourselves, watch the BBC Earth once a week, right? That's one of our primary ways we get people to feel on. You're like, wow. So it's much more around us than you might imagine. And you've been touching on

ideas of religion and the environment, all of these different areas where it can be found. Obviously, you know, life is more online than ever now. And with it, we have these, I guess, these moments that should be considered or inspiring put in front of our eyes just constantly one after the other, you know, and often it's with the aim to make you feel something. Is that an over-stimilization? of your idea of awe? Does it reduce your ability to experience it? Or is it just more adding more awe to your daily life? You know, Alex, I think that's one of the deepest unanswered questions in this field is through the study of awe. You know, it's interesting. We surveyed people from 26 countries around the world. And this is India, Mexico, Brazil, Poland, West Germany, New Zealand, all over the place.

We just had them write stories of awe. not a single story featured an experience in technology, right? And that's really striking that there were films, if you call that technology, I'd call it art, and there was music, but no one mentioned, you know, Facebook and a Google search and their smartphone. And I think that tells us something really important that you got to be, it has to be a direct experience and not mediated. And then I think the real concern here is, is six to eight hours a day, we're looking at a smartphone, especially young people. That's a small screen. It's coming at you fast and fragmented. And I think it's a foil of awe or an adversary of

all, frankly. And our data bear that out. So it's a real challenge, you know, that I think technology faces, which is these new platforms. Like, how do you, if you want to enhance people's lives, And we know awe, you know, a lot of what is out there in the digital universe can bring us awe. New art, new music, new political ideas. But how do we deliver it to people through technology devices that bring us on? And it's a real, I worry about it. I really do. It could, like you say, commodify it, reduce it, over-stimulated.

And that's worrisome. So you're no better than anyone probably in the world right now that there's, a long history of this word. We talk about the idea of something being or inspiring as something amazing, it's exciting, it's happy, but its origins are in this idea of terror or dread or fear. And I'm curious, at least in your eyes, how we've got from that idea to something that's positive and happy and, you know, there's some beautiful feeling. That's one of the great questions in the science of emotion, you know, which I've been part of for a couple of decades, which is we have these words and then they have connotations in this sort of semantic space of what the emotion

might mean conceptually. And then there's our actual experience of the emotion, right? And those are distinct things and often only map onto each other somewhat. And it really is true in the case of awe, which is the awe emerges etymologically in the eighth and ninth centuries in old English, old Norse in old English. And it really referred to fear and dread and terror. And And that was the concept that was grappled with by Edmund Burke, who wrote very importantly about awe and Emmanuel Kant in the 18th century. And now when scientists like myself study awe, about three quarters of the time, it's really a positive experience. You feel joyful and enthusiastic and free and creative, all empirical findings. So what happened?

How did it change? And I think a big part of it is just the improving human conditions, which is, you know, back in the eighth and ninth century when people are using the word awe, there were plagues ripping through villages and a quarter of babies died before the age of two. Average life expectancy was 40, 45. There was a lot of famine and, you know, destruction. And so the things that were really vast at that time and inexplicable were horrifying. And medicine comes in and the concept of the law and, you know, the idea that we shouldn't torture people, which was commonplace. And I think, It's, you know, what has become vast and mysterious has changed.

You know, our ideas about nature of change, and it's more positive. It's interesting, though, Alex, you know, today, people your age who are younger, I've noticed their feelings of awe about nature are now colored with a sense of dread, right? Climate crises, the Amazon is burning. We're destroying coral reefs. So this is the nature of human emotion. It's always changing with history and the concept of awe. is always in flux.

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Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. And obviously as you're saying there, you know, the idea of what's or inspiring in the 1800s is different to what's or inspiring today. But I'm curious if there's, I guess, a difference in what people consider to be or inspiring across the world. You know, just culture come into this? What's or inspiring in religious communities in America, I assume, is very, very different to Japan or to the outbacks of Australia. Yeah, you know, deep question and the way we approach it, we actually have been,

looking at those stories of awe from 26 cultures, you see, first of all, just differences in the content, right, that of awe, that what is natural awe where I live in Berkeley, California is redwood trees and the ocean, and then you go to other parts of the world and it's deserts and big bright skies, right? And so that's different, and that's consequential. We found a really interesting difference, which is that in East Asian cultures, and this is very fitting with the East Asian sense of self and community, they find more awe in social experiences, great teachers, watching a violinist, right, a swimmer going to the Olympics, kind of exceptional human performance. And in the West, it's more tilted towards nature. And I think that flows out of what we've talked about,

of the great walking traditions and mountaineering and backpacking and the like. And this one's really interesting, which is that in more religious cultures, and this will make sense, right, and also more economically unequal cultures where there's greater economic inequality and the hierarchies are more clear, awe becomes more fearful in those cultures. You might feel awe and then fear the judgment of God. You might be in a culture where there's really well-eastern. demarcated socioeconomic status differences and the awe starts to have this sense of fear or peril. And that's striking, right? It changes the effects of awe. So culture is always at play in the construction of emotion and deeply so in the case of awe. And there's this idea in, I guess not just

the field of awe, but generally in emotion of the Stendhal syndrome, you know, where people experience these, I guess, psychosomatic symptoms when they're exposed to. objects of great beauty or, you know, in this case, or at its highest level. Is that just almost like too much awe? It's an overload of it. Yeah. One of the fascinating things about studying human emotion is that we are, individual variation is profound in humans. You know, it's just how evolution emerged and shaped us. And this is true of all the emotions, right? There are people who don't feel awe, maybe 1% of the population.

And then there's a sector of people who feel a lot of awe, right? Intense awe. And they're striking. They tend to have these rushes of the physiology of all that we've talked about, of tearing up a lot and goosebumps a lot, uncontrollable goosebumps, just hitting them at different times. And they tend to have, I might want to say, an oceanic relationship to the world that's a little bit more spiritual.

or cosmic, you know, where the boundaries between self and other aren't as clear. And that's all shaping a person's life in the extremes, right? So we always are interested in the extremes of emotion to learn about why we have these states. And talking about, I guess, extreme emotions, is there, is there, I guess, an opposition to all? I'm sure you've heard of this concept of, you know, the Paris syndrome where people visit Paris and then they're, just let down by it not being the city they were expecting. Is there something that's just the polar opposite? Yeah, you know, it's so informative to ask that question.

Like if awe is about vast mystery and myself dissolves, and I feel like I'm part of something larger than myself, you know, Jane Goodall felt the chimpanzees, felt awe. And she said, it's really the beginning of their feelings of awe or spirituality and just being amazed at things outside of the self. So that's all. Well, what's its opposite? And, you know, one possibility is horror where you are encountering vast things, right? Images of the Holocaust, right? Wow. So many dead bodies, but it's about destruction. And we move toward horror as opposed to awe fundamentally, I think, is about life. It's about

this is what's generating meaning in life. So that's one candidate. I taught a bunch of teenagers recently and a student, I think, offered a just as compelling answer. He said, you know, it's boredom. You know, it's just like when you're sitting there, very fitting for a teenager, and he's like, it's just like it's the absence of meaning, the absence of things that are vast that you can connect to. So those would be two candidates, boredom, and even more, you know, sort of a sense of anore me, like purposelessness,

like, I'm adrift, I'm alienated. And then horror is another good candidate to think about. And talking about, again, extreme emotions, boredom, horror, or all of these different things, there tends to be, or at least, you know, it's often spoken about this idea of, you know, basic emotions, the ones where we all know and experience regularly, sadness, happiness, fear, surprise, you know, very inside out kind of thing. Where does author into all of this? Is it a combination of these things or is it its own entire thing separate from the basics?

Thank you for asking that question because that's defined about 25 years of my career, and nobody really pays attention to it. You know, there's this great trajectory in the science of emotion that awe is part of, which begins with Darwin really, and Aristotle in some sense and other early writers. And Darwin lays out, you know, hey, there are these 53 emotions that are part of mammalian evolution, human evolution, writes brilliantly about emotions across species. And then along comes Paul Ekman, you know, a famous psychologist in the U.S. who studies the face. And he says, well, there are these basic core emotions that are irreducible. They're part of evolution. And they have a distinct expression, distinct meaning, which we've been talking about, distinct physiology, and then a distinct experience, a feeling state. And I would, you know, we have spent, I've really spent 20 years working from that approach. and in our latest work, and this is really the work of Alan Cowan,

who has remarkable visualizations of our research, you can make a case for 20 different emotions as being basic, that when we hear music in China or the U.S. or the UK or Brazil or Mexico, people will say, like, that kind of music makes me feel awe. There's a vocalization of all, like, whoa, right? That is universal. There are physiological correlates of all we've talked to. about. And even Jane Goodall and new scientists studying non-human emotion or emotion other social mammals

are starting to say, maybe there are these precursors of awe in mammalian behavior. So it's a basic emotion. And it's so interesting, sorry to go on about this, but we don't know the developmental emergence of awe. But my hunch is babies start feeling awe really early in life, you know, which tells us it's fundamental. There are these YouTube videos that somebody directed me to called Babies and Tunnels. And when a little baby's in a car seat

and they go into a tunnel and it becomes pitch black. It's like existence is over, you know. And then when they come out of the tunnel and you have to watch the videos, it's like they're awestruck, they're vibrating like, well, so because there's life again.

So I think it's as basic, it's so striking. It's as basic as, as fear or disgust or anger. You know, and Einstein said that this emotion is the fundamental human emotion that is a basic state of consciousness that gets us to science and art.

And I think the science is lending credence to them. I have to say, I don't think I've ever seen anyone look more or inspired than a baby 90% of the time. Yeah, you know, and why we haven't thought about that and study that. And what that tells us is, early in life, one of the things we've learned about

Oz, it's an engine or a catalyst of discovery and learning about the world. And early in life, Oz's going to be there animating discoveries. And we need to figure that out and sort of look at that scientifically. So I'm curious, as someone who has dedicated much of your life to the study of emotion and or in this sense,

are there examples of awe-inspiring moments that stick out to you, whether they're your own or like people that you've interviewed or anything that you've studied? You know, thank you for asking that. I mean, I think, and our listeners can ask themselves the question, like, let me just think about some recent experiences of awe, you know, that I've had. And, you know, I think the ones that will seem intuitive are, oh, nature, being at a rock-and-roll concert, et cetera. So those are intuitive, but there are several that just struck me in this work that are surprising, you know, and that's part of the reason we do this kind of science is to get beyond

cultural stereotypes. I remember many years ago teaching, talking about awe, probably 10, 12 years ago, and this woman said, I remember feeling awe as my sister was passing away, and I was holding her hand, and we were all around her, and we were thinking about her life. I felt her last breath in her body. And that is a human universal that is very surprising, that we feel awe in grappling with the life cycle, birth and death. And around the world, people feel the wonders of awe

at the mystery at the end of life. That surprised me and really stuck with me. The other one, you know, it's so interesting is what I call everyday awe in the book. and it's this finding that we feel awe two to three times a week. It's there to cultivate. You could find it. I got goosebumps a couple of times talking to you, Alex.

It's embarrassing. I'm just hearing your questions. I'm like, wow, that's so interesting. And I remember being in the UK on the tube, and I was giving a talk at a bookstore, and this gentleman said, you know, I just felt awe. You know, I was in the tube, and it was busy, and I made eye-to-eye contact with this woman,

and we just sort of recognized each other's humanity, right, in the daily flow of life. And I felt awe. And when you look at the neurophysiology of eye-to-eye contact, it's profound. It activates vagus nerve, oxytocin, the sense of connection. So that tells us it's also there in these little moments that we often fail to see that are profound. So it's been one of the joys of studying this emotion is it opens us up to the existential forms of all. and then the everyday forms of all. So to finish it, for people who are seeking out awe,

they're trying to live a life that's more awe-inspiring in that sense, what are maybe a few tips that they can use to find more ore in their lives or ways they can seek that out? First of all, they can go to the Greater Good Science Center. We did an awe calendar, you know, just like finding awe a few days a week, you know, with little practices. But more generally, I think there are two things to be thinking about. in our pursuit of awe.

And one is what we built into the instructions for the awe walk and other studies we've done, which is it's like an awe mindset. Just find a place that might be beautiful and awe inspiring to you. You know, take it and pause. And just pause, quiet down, settle into some deep breathing, and put away your phone and your checklist and your concepts and just and then think about i love this perceptual orientation of orienting to vast things wow i'm sitting by this garden and i look at this whole array of flowers and then look at small things right i'm going to look at one flower and look at its

petals and its design and that movement from vast to small brings us off very often edmund And Burke wrote a lot about it, the great Irish philosopher. So it's the awe mindset of pausing, quieting, and just looking for the vast and the small. And the second thing is to use those eight wonders that I write about in the book, which is, you know, think about a place in nature that brings you off. Go there regularly. I go to, when I walk to work, I always walk by this stream. And I always pause even for just a minute. And it brings me a little bit of awe.

Think about music. Think about visual things that bring you off. quotes, big ideas, you know, and moral beauty. You know, just think about who are the people in my life that have really brought me tears or inspired me. So, you know, I am really excited. You know, we thought this emotion was just spiritual, ineffable. We can't find it in daily life. The opposite is true, right? And there are ways we can cultivate it to good effect. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius.

That was Daka Keltner, talking about awe. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and newsagents, as well as on your preferred app store. Alternatively, you can come and find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal,

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