Unexplainable - Awestruck

Episode Date: June 7, 2023

Awe is what takes our breath away when we face a sky full of stars or listen to a moving piece of music. But scientists are still trying to pin down why we feel such a powerful emotion, and whether it’s possible to cultivate more of it in our lives. For more, go to http://vox.com/unexplainable It’s a great place to view show transcripts and read more about the topics on our show. Also, email us! [e-mail] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. When he was a kid, Dacker Keltner, spent a lot of time in the mountains of California with his brother, Rolf. We had this wild childhood together, and we wandered the hills and swam in rivers, and it was a release. But it wasn't a perfect childhood.

The time outdoors was also an escape. It was really a tough town that we grew up in. My parents' marriage was not going well, and just to find something other out there on the kind of tough land of the foothills of the sierras with oak trees and granite outcrop. One place in the Sierra really captured the brother's attention. We would make this drive up to this really wild river, the Yuba River.

And the Yuba River kills five to ten people each year because the rapids are tough, the rocks are tough. We'd go there every day. We were 15, 16 years old. You know, no adults around. And we used to jump off these granite cliffs into these small pools, you know. And my brother was really bold and courageous, and he was just courageous, and he just like jump, you know, poosh, and he was a great swimmer. And just the, you know, the transcendent release of like landing those jumps, getting into the

river, cold water, hot rocks, granite. He remembers feeling awe. It's that feeling of encountering something vast and incredible and maybe even a little scary. And Dacker kept coming back to this feeling. Even decades later, when he became a professor of psychology and his brother, a speech therapist. They were still in cahoots, sharing moments of awe. But their relationship was cut short when Rolf passed away a few years ago. He died of colon cancer and I was blown off the map.

And I was in this really difficult state, barely functioning. And I had made so much meaning of life out of my brother. You know, we'd kind of grown up together, raised each other. Now he was gone. And I couldn't talk to him. I couldn't get meaning from him about what was happening. Dacker needed to find his way out of grief. And so he turned to the emotion that defined his relationship with his brother. He and I found our brotherhood in awe. And I knew in my gut and in my viscera that awe,

whatever my life was supposed to be, if I just went after it, it would illuminate or reveal like, this is what you care about, Dacker, you know. And I turned to the emotion to do that work that he was so good at. Dacker's a psychologist at UC Berkeley, and after his brother's passing, it felt natural to turn to his academic research. I was doing science of awe and thinking about it, and I had to take time to not only think about the mystery of his death and what came after, but this science and how I could really pursue it to find meaning in life again because I was in real deep trouble.

Dacker's been doing this research for over a decade, and he really wanted to nail down this emotion. what awe means, how to study it, how to measure it. There's no emotion like it, in fact, that has more mysteries around it in terms of the scientific inquiry. I'm Manning Wint, and this week on Unexplanable, it's clear that awe is a powerful emotion. It can move us to tears, send chills up our spines, and sometimes completely change the course of our lives. But why do we feel it? This emotion, as powerful and unique as awe. Aw feels like an abstract emotion that's hard to pin down. But Dacher has a simple definition.

Aw is the feeling of encountering something that's vast and mysterious that you don't understand. It's a pretty universal emotion, but he wondered, why do we feel it in the first place? As I started to do the science, it was clear to me that I needed to gather stories of awe to understand awe, right? You know, we surveyed people from 26 countries from India to Poland to China, China, to Mexico, to Brazil, to the U.S., to New Zealand, really different countries. Dacker and a couple other researchers collected over 2,000 stories to figure out, when do people actually feel awe. He was surprised to find out that the most common reason people felt awe

was when they saw someone doing something kind or courageous. But he also heard experiences of something called collective effervescence. It's the energy you feel when you're moving with others in unison, usually in a crowd. There's a sense of shared purpose, a contagious. of energy. So when you're dancing with others or you're in a stadium or in a protest or in communal prayer, you feel like you're a drop in the ocean. And nature was actually a big reason people reported feeling awe, like when they'd look up at a starry sky or down at the Grand Canyon.

Dacker found that all kinds of experiences can lead to awe. Visual art, music, spirituality, and then epiphanies, like big ideas, like, oh my God, you know, I just discovered evolution, you know, and then life and death. People feel a lot of awe around the life cycle, you know, watching babies born, watching people die. And he found that awe isn't just a happy feeling. It can also be kind of scary. You feel small, and sometimes you feel terrified, and you feel like your boundaries are dissolving between people, between you and other things out in the world, be it a tree or a person at a rave or whatever it is.

So it's got a lot of complexity. The real simple defining part of awe is just encountering something that shakes you out of your feeling of normal. That makes you feel small, humble. And by definition, it really resists language-based rational analysis. And a lot of people have commented on the ineffable qualities of awe. You can't. It's hard to describe. I guess why study it and have a science of it? Yeah, well, you know, when I first started this work on awe, people are like, are you sure you can study that,

you know, scientifically? And it's like, maybe we can't, you know. And my goodness, how would you measure it? You know, we know that awe registers in certain patterns in the body, little tingly sensations up the back of your scalp. awe manifests in activation of the vagus nerve, which makes your heart slow down and makes you feel sort of warm in the chest. We can measure it. We can get it in the lab. So much as with the other emotions that have been well studied, like anger, fear, and disgust, and amusement, laughter, we can pinpoint when people feel awe. We've made enormous progress that allows us to confidently say, like, this is all. What happens in the brain when we feel awe?

Is this something that we know? Like, how do we know? Yeah, you know, this is starting to happen. And, you know, what neuroscientists do, there's groups in Holland and Japan and the United States that are studying what happens in the brain during awe. And you present people with an awe-inspiring video.

What happens when you shatter a wine glass using nothing but sound? You know, Planet Earth, BBC Planet Earth, or the slow-mo guys. Oh, it went from the bottom. Wow. You're awestruck and you're in an fMRI scanner and they measure region activation in the brain.

And what we find across studies and cultures is it deactivates the default mode network, which is these big chunks of cortex that are really about the self, right? The regions of the brain involved in self-representation get quiet during awe. And so that tells us when you feel awe, the self is quieter.

There's a little bit of early work showing that awe also more positive forms of awe activates reward circuitry in the brain. And so that gives it this euphoric sort of exploratory, curious quality to it of like, wow, I just saw something really weird, but I just feel like I got to figure it out. And that would be dopamine that's really animating that inquiry. So that's all we know right now. Yeah, still early. More to come.

I mean, there are a lot of mysteries that await and a lot of barriers to this work. You know, awe requires vast things. Yeah. And psychological laboratories are small and uninspiring in terms of awe, fluorescent lights and 9 by 12 and the like. And so very often in our research, you know, Mandy, we had to go out and we interviewed people at Yosemite. We took people up to a clock tower that looked out at a view of the bay in San Francisco. we stood people near big trees.

Other scientists have looked at people at mosh pits and sporting events, right? So you've got to go to awe to study it. And that gets hard. Yeah. I'm curious about what studies have been done about how awe impacts us. Like, I'm wondering if there's one or two key experiments that you feel are really robust that helps you understand awe's impact on people. Yeah, I'll tell you about two.

One was the Paul Piff's study, which is all you have to do, you know, these are Berkeley students. They go out, we take them to this eucalyptus grove. They look up into the eucalyptus trees, which is really beautiful for a couple of minutes. They feel awe or in the control condition. They look up at a science building. Then we say thanks, you know, and oh, here's a bunch of other questionnaires you can fill out. And these are well-validated measures of like how narcissistic are you? Do you think the world would be better if you ran it?

It's one of the questions on the questionnaire, you know, and awe diminished the narcissistic tendencies in this questionnaire. Also, it diminished tendencies towards entitlement, like the world owes me a lot. It made our students, we asked them at the end of the study, hey, you know, we're going to pay you, how much money do you want for this experiment? And our awe-filled participants needed less money, right? So they're less transactional in how they approach the world. And that brief experience of looking at the trees in awe makes our students less narcissistic, less entitled, more generous.

A second study was really one of the first lab studies of awe. This is by Michelle Chioda in our lab where we took undergrads to our paleontology museum at Berkeley. and there's this incredible replica of a T-Rex skeleton. And it's, you know, 12 feet tall, and it's just awesome. And so they stand next to it, or they look down the hallway and they're standing in the same place. And then in this study, we had them complete one of the most widely used measures of identity,

which is you give a participant a little stem, I am, and a blank line, and they fill it in 20 times. I am, you know, progressive, I am, nortive, I am Norwegian, I am right-handed, I am, you know, a mammal, I am, you know, two-legged, or whatever it is. And then we coded their responses. And, you know, what's been well documented in many countries that have been globalized is we've become hyper individualistic. I am my preferences and my traits and my qualities that differentiate me from other people. And awe made people focus on what they share with other people, collective characteristics.

I'm a human, I am a, you know, a Berkeley student, I am somebody, you know, like all mammals who breathes air or what have you. So they really transform the self to be more collective. So those studies tell us that these brief experiences of all, right, have these transformative effects. They transform yourself, they transform your generosity. Other studies, they transform lower stress, greater well-being, shifts in physiology. And those are important studies in the field. just to show, hey, we can study this emotion. And I guess this gets back at the question of like, why do we feel awe in the first place? Why do we evolve to do this? Yeah.

Well, a lot of people, you know, David Sloan Wilson, Franz de Vall, and others have started to really make the persuasive case that humans are hypersocial, very collective. And we needed to evolve mechanisms that shut down self-interest, that made the self small so that we could think about other people, collaborate with others, coordinate our actions with others, right? Well, awe is a very powerful solution to what evolutionary types call the, you know, the cooperation problem or, you know, the problem of self-interest, which is you, in a lot of human social life, to thrive,

we needed to not follow our self-interest, not take somebody else's mate or food, but share, right, and collaborate. And awe does that. It just immediately deactivates the regions of the brain that are involved in self-representation, the self-itself, and it makes you open to other people, altruistic, collaborative. And I think that the evolutionary story has come into focus, which is we evolve this emotion because it helps us merge with others to become a collective to face peril. You know, it makes us strong, and mysteries require strength. They require collective knowledge, collective discourse and collective physicality to protect ourselves. And so you bond together through these experiences to face the mysteries or perils.

And that's what awe does. It almost seems too good to be true that just looking up at a tree or going to a natural history museum can make us better people. And there are real limitations to these studies about how awe impacts our behavior. These are small studies and many haven't been replicated. And it's also hard to know if being set up to feel awe creates the same feeling as the real spontaneous experience that people have. We also don't know very much about the long-term effects of awe, what happens if we experience it alone versus with others, or when it might be a bad experience instead of a good one. So there's a lot more questions than answers here.

And scientists like Dacker are still working out exactly how to study something so slippery. And in fact, we had to invent new measures, right, of self-report measures. and it took some unique developments to study it. But a lot more experiments need to be done. And then they will need to be replicated in other cultures, of course, and with new measures, but it looks pretty good, and it's pretty promising. We don't need science to tell us that awe is something worth cultivating in our own lives, even if we don't fully understand it.

Anyone who stood in front of a raging waterfall or has been moved by someone's kindness can tell you that. And for DACR, that meant not only doing experiments, with his lab, but also figuring out how could he find awe on his everyday life? How can any of us? That's after the break. It's all about you. And when you fly with Virgin Atlantic

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And he knows because he's done it. Coming out of my brother's loss and feeling so bereft and disoriented and really in trouble. And I literally kind of devoted my life to awe for a year. or two. He started out by doing what felt most intuitive. You know, my brother and I grown up in mountains, and I just start hiking, you know, Sierras, the Alps, you know, just was just out there in nature with a new intensity. But he also took inspiration from the stories of all that he'd collected in his research. So he'd spend more time with works of art and literature. And ponder and read Walt Whitman and, you know, the writers, Emerson and Virginia Woolf that my mom taught.

He also sought out people who inspired him. And it happened to be prisoners and veterans and students in under-resourced schools. And over time, Dacker has developed a kind of practice, one that he still does today. When I walk places, I look at trees, I stop and touch them. I notice the sky a few times a day. I look at sunsets. Take a deep breath and follow the sounds and think about what the patterns mean. So this is exactly how Dacker teaching.

teaches people to cultivate awe. Just pause, slow down, take some deep breathing, and then look around and look at really small things and then look at larger things that small thing is part of. Like you could go outside and look at one cloud and then look at the system of clouds that they're part of. Look at one leaf on a tree. Look at a big pattern of leaves. Look at one person in a crowded, busy street in New York City.

and then look at the whole system of people and ask yourself questions that really that are about mysteries, you know, how is it that people can coordinate their behavior in a big city like this? Or gee, you know, if the sound of the wave is really, you know, replicated by other waves

and their sounds, and they become the sound of the ocean, what is that system of waves? What are waves, right? And then you can apply it to cooking or being with friends or going backpacking, or what have you, is to go in search of awe.

Hearing Dacker talk about how to cultivate awe, I realized I've kind of been doing this myself recently. I've been paying attention to how the trees have been blooming in New York City, how different birds have been coming out, and just how wild it is to be surrounded by so many people in such a giant city. And this is kind of what we've been doing with our show for so long, and talking to people about their most awesome moments. Like when I talked to Nicola Molliom,

Mase, a marine biologist who went to the deepest part of the ocean. Like my eyes, I didn't believe, like, what I was seeing. Congratulations. Welcome to Challenger D. Oh my gosh. I was just freaking out, but in that moment, I was just like, holy moly. Surface, LF, depth, 108, niner, eight. I still can't fathom the depth that we're at, like 6.8 miles.

I was like, holy moly, that is deep. Just the feeling of, you know, being at that depth, we're literally a tiny dot. If you think how vast the ocean is, you know, we were the first set of eyes to see this location. I also talked to Andy Glucencamp, a scientist searching for a long-lost salamander in an underground aquifer.

Oh, wow. Oh, so there is water down there. 90 feet down. Echo. This is how deep? 360. 360 feet. I'll walk up to one of these,

be totally unimpressed to I look down it, and then I get, you know, dizzy. The mind starts to reel, just thinking about, what, it's going on down there. But you don't have to go to the bottom of the ocean or explore underwater caves to find awe. Aw is in the gap between what we know and what we don't. And it invites us to get closer to the mysteries,

big and small that surround us all the time. And that's one of the beauties of awe is it produces wonder, which is our sense-making efforts when we encounter vast mysteries. And in some sense, life's like that, which is you just go from one mystery to another, right? And then you let your curiosity

and in those moments after grapple with, what does that tell me about my life, you know, and remember it, and find coherence and narrative there, which is what meaning is. and that will take you a long way. This episode was produced by me, Manning Nguyen. There was editing from Brian Resnick and Meredith Hodnott.

Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, music from Noam Hassenfeld, and fact-checking from Thienn-Wyent. Bird Pinkerton handed her key to the octopus. The octopus pulled out a matching key of her own and inserted the two keys into a small black box in the corner of the room. Suddenly, everything went,

dark. If you want to hear more from Dacker, he has a book out called Aw, the new science of everyday wonder and how it can transform your life. If you have thoughts about this episode or ideas for the show, please email us. We're at Unexplanable at vox.com. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week.