Experiencing more moments of awe can lead to improvements in quality of life, according to a study published earlier this year that focused on this ephemeral human phenomenon. The investigators recruited both community members and healthcare providers to respond to surveys about their daily emotions for 22 consecutive days. The study, in the journal Scientific Reports, found that “the more daily awe people experienced, the less stress, less somatic health symptoms, and greater well-being they felt.” The investigators concluded that “daily experiences of awe can benefit individuals during times of acute and chronic stress—such as the Covid-19 pandemic.”

One of the study’s authors, Dacher Keltner, PhD, is a professor of psychology and co-director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. He has spent his career studying a range of emotions—most recently, the emotion of awe. He has outlined his findings in his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. The Wellness Letter spoke with Professor Keltner about his work, finding meaning in life, and why the ability to experience awe is a critical human phenomenon.

Wellness Letter: Can you describe the work of the Greater Good Science Center?

Dacher Keltner: The Greater Good Science Center is about taking the latest scientific knowledge on topics related to well-being, and then putting it into the hands and minds of a broader public. We do this in a variety of ways. We engage in research, we publish articles and essays, we suggest healthy practices that anyone can engage in. One major journalistic outreach is our podcast, which covers the science of well-being. We develop specific curricula about these issues for teachers and healthcare providers and interested citizens. The name Greater Good comes out of the utilitarian philosophy from the Age of Enlightenment—that one way to think about happiness is to try to advance the happiness of as many people as possible.

Of course, finding meaning and finding happiness is always shape-shifting, it’s always changing as life changes. Things intrude—your parents get sick, your child struggles with drugs, we have a pandemic, whatever the case may be. Life has challenges. Life has suffering. And the tools that we provide are good for everybody in the pursuit of the meaningful life.

WL: People tend to associate psychology with depression, anxiety, and other mental health difficulties. But your work is in the field called positive psychology. What does that involve?

DK: In our work, we shift the focus to try to reach beyond psychopathology to include the full spectrum of human experience. That’s the domain of positive psychology. If you’re suffering from major depression, or profound anxiety, or schizophrenia, and you’re asked on a scale of 1 to 10 how you’re doing or how much you like your life, you’d score in the 1-2-3 range. But there are also lots of people elsewhere on the continuum, who are doing moderately well yet want to feel better about life and want to live a more meaningful life.

For a long time, the science of emotion was dominated by the focus on negative emotions, like fear and anger, with thousands of publications and lots of advances scientifically. And as a young scientist, 30 years ago, I was like, “God, there’s all this positive stuff—we should study things like gratitude and compassion and love and desire and laughter and amusement.” And I did a lot of work on those positive states. We studied modalities of communication that are very good for expressing positive emotions, like touch. We did some work on oxytocin [a hormone that, like endorphins, produces positive feelings]. We began to study the vagus nerve, which is a part of the physiology that really is about connecting.

WL: So now you’ve focused on awe. Why?

DK: If you’re starting to map the positive emotions out there, the feeling of awe is in that space. Awe, like Einstein said, just seems to be right at the heart of so much of humanity—music, art, physics, sports, spirituality. This emotion is intertwined with so much that is meaningful to humans. I grew up in the late ’60s. I was raised by a dad who was a visual artist and a mom who taught poetry and romanticism at Cal State Sacramento, and I was interested in awe conceptually. And then, in 2019, my brother died, which was a transformative event for me. I was just blown away and I would say awestruck by the idea of death. And that really led me to investigate it in depth.

Every evolved characteristic of human beings has been crafted and shaped by evolution to do certain things for the individual and the collective. And I think what awe does, fundamentally, is it tightens up collectives and locates an individual within a collective. Whether that’s good for society is a different issue. But awe, most often, I think is good. I think the more music people listen to, the more art they see, the more they think about people who are morally inspiring, and the more they dance and get out in nature, it’s a good thing.

WL: But what is it? What is awe?

DK: Awe is an emotion you feel when you encounter vast things that you don’t understand with your current knowledge. Things that are mysterious. And we started our work with awe thinking you couldn’t really measure it, that it’s just evanescent and hard to pin down. But in fact, we can measure it. In this field, we measure emotions through many different angles or different means—physiology, behavior, language. When it comes to awe, starting with physiology, goose bumps are measurable, for example—you can photograph them. Tears are measurable. The warmth in the chest that people feel is measurable. Then you get to behavior. We can measure awe by the widening of the eyes, or certain facial displays. Or by specific kinds of vocalizations, like “Whoa!”

With awe, we really feel like we are small and humble, but we also feel that we’re part of something greater than ourselves. You feel aware of larger networks, that you’re part of a community or a social system. That’s different from love or compassion or other closely related emotions. You could be listening to a concert in a symphony hall or in a mosh pit, or out in nature, or taking psychedelics or spirit medicines. We could look at all of those situations and ascertain how much awe you were feeling.

WL: And what are the benefits to experiencing awe?

DK: We’ve done a lot of work on this. What we know is that a little brief moment of awe makes you less stressed. It makes you feel like you’re less lonely, like you’re more connected. It activates the vagus nerve, which is this big bundle of nerves that helps with healthy heart regulation and is associated with reduced inflammation. That’s important because inflammation drives many 21st-century diseases. What is a brief moment of awe? It means just pausing for a moment, and thinking about something inspiring.

WL: I think people often understand awe in the context of physical vastness, like seeing the Grand Canyon. You also talk about feeling awe when seeing compassionate acts or considering moral beauty. Is that a different kind of awe?

DK: Well, everyone has a frame of reference that they consider reality, a default sense of reality. And it has certain statistical regularities—this is how people tend to behave, this is how tall a person tends to be, and so on. And when we’re moved by other humans or awed by their actions, that’s because they’ve transcended that frame of reference. So that’s when you hear a singer’s voice and think, “Wow, I’ve never heard a voice like that before.” Or when someone behaves in a particularly generous way that is way beyond your usual set of expectations. This is related to the idea of vastness but a little bit different. The idea is that awe can be inspired by something that exceeds our default way of perceiving the world.

WL: How do you distinguish awe from a spiritual or religious experience? 

DK: William James oriented us in the field to start to think about religion as being about feeling, and awe is one of many kinds of religious feelings. A lot of conversions or spiritual epiphanies involve having a transcendent experience, or a supernatural experience, as social scientists would say, that is way beyond your ordinary reality. You can’t make sense of it. And that’s the feeling of awe. And then it propels a supernatural explanation when you start to think about gods and surreal forces and the like. And so cognitive scientists looking at religious experience suggest that at the heart of a lot of religious devotion is some kind of supernatural encounter that we try to make sense of, and that leads us to create belief systems to explain what happened.

WL: But is that necessarily good? Can that force also be directed in negative or destructive ways?

DK: Yes, awe can be put to pernicious uses. You can appreciate moral beauty and be moved to awe by Gandhi or Martin Luther King or Jane Goodall. But Trump supporters are moved by Trump, who has defied the status quo and exceeded the expectations of how people behave. Music can bring about incredible community, but it was also used as part of the Rwanda genocide. Hitler was very interested in visual art that would inspire Nazi sympathy. This raises the question of what are these collective emotions, maybe collective rage or collective pride, that are associated with these nationalistic or tribalistic problems? Maybe awe promotes a broader sense of collective and pride promotes a narrower sense. And that’s an empirical question that needs to be addressed to sort out this ambiguity.

I think another critique is the commodification of awe. Now we know how to find awe in sacred spots in nature, so everybody goes there, and they destroy the natural environment. We can manufacture awe through expensive workshops and retreats and the like, but maybe that harms the great American tradition of finding your own unique way. And psychedelics, or what we also call spirit medicines, can connect you to these sources of meaning that cultures have been developing for millennia—music, visual art, big ideas, contemplating death, dancing and physically moving together. But now instead of taking psychedelics and finding healing and connection on their own without mediation, people are paying others to monitor them and take them on a journey.

WL: So what’s the bottom line? What can people do to increase their experience of awe?

DK: The bottom line to experience awe is, first, to allow yourself five minutes a day to pause, slow down, put away devices, and wonder and wander, moving toward awe and how you are part of something larger than the self. And second, to do this contemplative work in relation to the wonders of life, be it nature, or music, or thinking of someone’s moral beauty, or moving in unison with others, or something visual that astounds you, or a big idea in a sacred text of yours.