The science of awe

Summary

The Gray Area with Sean Illing (Vox)
Episode: The Science of Awe
Date: May 4, 2026

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Overview

In this episode of The Gray Area, host Sean Illing sits down with Dr. Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and author of Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. Together, they explore the science behind the emotion of awe, dissecting what it is, how we experience and measure it, why it matters both individually and collectively, and its surprisingly common, everyday presence. The conversation blends neuroscience, history, philosophy, and deeply personal stories—offering a nuanced view into how awe shapes our lives and societies.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining Awe and Its Distinctiveness

• Dr. Keltner explains the challenge of pinning down awe as distinct from similar concepts like wonder, reverence, beauty, or horror.

  • Awe: “An emotion that you feel when you encounter vast mysterious things for the most part, and we differentiate that from wonder… [and] from two other feeling states, beauty… and horror.” (Dr. Keltner, 04:18)
  • Wonder: More of an “epistemological state” that often follows awe.
  • Awe is physiologically, experientially, and vocally distinct from fear or amazement (e.g., awe increases vagal tone and fosters connection, while fear heightens heart rate and activates the amygdala).

• Awe vs. Fear:

  • “Fear elevates heart rate. Awe elevates vagal tone—the activation of the vagus nerve—which slows your body down and makes you open and connected.” (Dr. Keltner, 05:55)

• Memorable Moment:

  • Sean describes awe as silence: “To me, the sound of awe is silence. When I’m in awe, I’m sort of rendered speechless.” (Sean Illing, 07:08)
  • Dr. Keltner: “If you’re with friends you might ‘whoa’... very universal around the world.” (07:30)

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2. Awe’s Function: Quieting the Self & Fostering Connection

• Awe tempers the ego and connects us to something greater.

  • “One of the things you argue in the book is that the experience of awe quiets the self. What do you mean by that?” (Sean Illing, 15:22)
  • Dr. Keltner: Our culture is hyper-focused on self—social media, status, achievement—leading to anxiety and loneliness. Awe shifts our attention away from excessive self-focus toward connection and humility. (16:43-17:42)

• The Social Dimension of Awe:

  • Research across 26 countries showed that the most common triggers for awe are social—encountering moral beauty, courage, and virtue in others—more than nature or art. (Dr. Keltner, 19:27)

• Notable Quote:

  • “I thought it would be nature as kind of the primary source of awe… but it was the social stuff that was our most reliable source—other people’s courage and virtue and strength and intelligence…” (Dr. Keltner, 19:27)

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3. Cultural & Evolutionary Roots of Awe

• Different cultures have both universal and unique ways of experiencing awe.

  • “Cultures with a lot of economic inequality have more threat-based, fearful awe… In the United States… awe may feel more egalitarian… in Japan their awe is really quite different, it has more fear in it.” (Dr. Keltner, 21:01)

• Awe and moral beauty foster group cohesion, trust, and social harmony—key to evolutionary success.

  • “There’s all this convergent scholarship and thinking that says we need to cooperate with groups… One of the powerful mechanisms for that is moral beauty.” (Dr. Keltner, 35:20)

• Awe and Storytelling:

  • Storytelling, folklore, and fables across cultures heavily focus on moral beauty and courage to teach values and inspire cooperation. (Dr. Keltner, 38:16-39:41)

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4. Awe in Everyday Life: Examples and Practices

• Everyday awe can be found in small, ordinary moments and actions, not just in grand experiences.

  • Dr. Keltner’s experience at San Quentin prison revealed deep sources of awe among inmates, often tied to simple achievements, relationships, and moments of connection. (44:10)

• Quotes from inmates on awe:

  • “My granddaughter learning how to read,” “Getting my high school diploma,” “Learning about the law,” “The light in San Quentin… off the bay,” “My cellie reading the Quran…” (Dr. Keltner, 46:30)

• The physiological response (tears, goosebumps) to awe, especially in music, is about merging with others and feeling collective identity and connection.

  • “Tears… are really about connection and love… Alan Fiske… has been doing really nice work showing that tears… arise when you feel like you’re merging with others.” (Dr. Keltner, 31:25)

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5. Awe, Grief, and Mystery

• Dr. Keltner shares how the loss of his brother deepened his openness to awe and experiences that transcend scientific explanation.

  • “I had a transcendent experience seeing his soul and seeing space in a different way… I was like, wow… When you watch people go you feel awe at the mystery of life.” (Dr. Keltner, 51:39)

• Awe often arises in response to life’s mysteries, loss, and grief, opening us to spirituality and the limits of rational understanding.

  • “It opened me up… to what we never will understand fully with science and rationality and I feel better for it.” (Dr. Keltner, 52:47)

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6. Awe as the Birthplace of Religion & Collective Spiritedness

• Awe may lie at the root of religious sentiment and spirituality.

  • “Do you think maybe the experience of awe is the birth of the religious impulse?”
  • “I do. That was Emile Durkheim… William James’s project of the mystical feeling, which is a lot like awe, is the beginnings of spirituality…” (Dr. Keltner, 53:23)

• Religious, artistic, and collective practices—concerts, rituals, activism—often revolve around stimulating shared awe or “collective effervescence.” (Dr. Keltner, 53:23)

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7. Cultivating Awe: Practical Advice

• How to Experience More Awe:

  • Just “a few minutes a week” is enough—pause, slow down, put away devices, and open yourself to “eight wonders”—nature, music, inspiring people, visual art, and so on. (Dr. Keltner, 54:48)
  • “Nature, music, reflect on someone who has inspired you, just name them… get to a museum. It’s not that hard. … It’s good for stress, anxiety, long COVID symptoms, loneliness. Just a couple of minutes a week.” (Dr. Keltner, 54:48)

• Memorable Sign-off:

  • “If you’re looking for awe you certainly won’t find it on your Twitter feed so get the hell out of there.” (Sean Illing, 56:15)

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On the ineffability of awe:
  • “In moments of awe, great thinkers come up blank when it comes to words… Words can’t capture the full experience. And subjectively what we know with awe… is it’s a state of deep humility where you don’t know…” (Dr. Keltner, 09:37)
• On awe quieting the self:
  • “We are in the most individualistic, self-focused, some data suggest narcissistic period in human history… and awe gets us out of it.” (Dr. Keltner, 15:35)
• On moral beauty:
  • “If I see a stranger act in a kind way, I instinctively become kinder… We create these little networks of cooperation and kindness.” (Dr. Keltner, 35:20)
• On awe in places of hardship:
  • “Here it is. Einstein’s right. This is everywhere… when I’m around them [prisoners], they tell me we can overcome anything and we have so much moral beauty inside.” (Dr. Keltner, 46:30)
• Three goosebumps moments attributed to Sean’s questions:
  • “You just gave me goosebumps with that question.” (Dr. Keltner, 19:22; 38:16)
• On awe and the body:
  • “Western thought was not only ignored but was openly hostile to the body… And that’s changing because of western science in some sense.” (Dr. Keltner, 33:50)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Defining awe & differentiating related emotions: 04:18–09:37
• Awe vs. fear physiology & expression: 05:55–07:30
• Awe’s impact on the self, neurobiology, and culture: 15:22–17:49
• Universality and cultural specificity in awe: 19:27–22:17
• Everyday awe, examples from San Quentin: 44:10–48:48
• The role of awe in grief & spirituality: 51:39–53:17
• Practical advice on experiencing awe: 54:48–56:19

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Conclusion

Through science, personal narrative, and philosophical musings, Sean Illing and Dacher Keltner show that awe isn’t a luxury or a once-in-a-lifetime feeling. It’s an essential, accessible emotion woven through daily life—especially in our connections to others and acts of courage or kindness. Awe quiets the self, expands our sense of belonging, strengthens communities, and may even form the psychic root of religion and art.

Where to find more:

• Dr. Dacher Keltner’s work and podcast: The Science of Happiness at Greater Good Science Center
• Dr. Keltner’s book: Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

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“Look for awe in a few minutes a week… put down your devices, slow down, and look for everyday wonders all around you.”
— Dr. Dacher Keltner (54:48)

Transcript

[Choiceology Host]

this episode is brought to you by choiceology an original podcast from charles schwab hosted by katie milkman an award winning behavioral scientist and author of the best selling book how to change choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions hear true stories from nobel laureates historians authors athletes and more about why people do the things they do and how to make better ones to help avoid costly mistakes listen to choiceology at schwab dot com podcast or wherever you listen

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[Podcast Narrator]

when someone says they're in awe usually they're talking about something big and grand like a mountain range or a cathedral or maybe a beautiful piece of music or art the kind that overwhelms you when you see it or hear it that is all good but thinking about awe in those ways makes it seem like some kind of luxury feeling something reserved for special places or super elevated states and it makes awe seem like a fundamentally private subjective experience but it might be better to think of awe as something woven into everyday ordinary life something that can show up in in other people or tiny moments of courage or grief or in any of those flashes where you forget about yourself for just a bit and feel caught up in something larger than yourself if we do think of all like that in a much more broad way is it still an individual experience or does it become in a deeper sense a social experience

[Sean Illing]

i'm sean hilling and this is the gray area

[Podcast Narrator]

today's guest is doctor keltner he's a

[Sean Illing]

professor of psychology at uc berkeley and the author of awe the new science

[Podcast Narrator]

of everyday wonder and how it can transform your life this is a book that was recommended to me by two recent guests on the show michael pollan and allison gopnik and i'm glad they did because i really really enjoyed the book for keltner awe is a truly basic experience one we all need and something that can happen almost anywhere and maybe most surprisingly he says awe typically begins not in those grand things i mentioned earlier you know mountains and cathedrals but in the experiences we have with other people or the experiences we have witnessing the actions of other people he calls that moral beauty which is different from natural or artistic beauty this way of thinking about awe opens up a ton of fascinating questions so i invited

[Sean Illing]

keltner on the show to talk about it foreign keltner welcome to the show my friend it's good to be with you sean let's just get right into it i love this book i love this topic and i wasn't even aware that there was a science of awe but now i am and i'm glad i am awe is such a squishy word i think we all use it i think we all vaguely know what it's supposed to mean but we use it interchangeably with other words like wonder or reverence is that a mistake yeah

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

you know and thanks for starting there actually sean you know one of the hardest things about emotion science and the study of off falls within that is we use words to try to describe these complicated subjective experiences right that are in our bodies and in the unconscious and part of our history and that's true of awe right so that's why we do the science of awe so conceptually we differentiate awe which is an emotion that you feel when you encounter vast mysterious things for the most part and we differentiate that from wonder which philosophers have been interested in for some time descartes plato and others which is really what we might call an epistemological state that follows an experience of awe and then we would differentiate awe from two other feeling states beauty and that was an old question of edmund burke and emmanuel kant how is the sublime or awe different from the beautiful and then you gotta differentiate awe from horror right i did research with veterans and they will feel horror on the battlefield very obviously but also some awe so we gotta pull all these states apart scientifically to get precise how would you

[Sean Illing]

distinguish awe from another ordinary emotion like fear or amazement are they just like intense is all like an intense version of that or is it a difference of kind not just degree thank you

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

sean you just asked a question that took us about fifteen years to answer with science so yeah this is what i do sir yeah when we study emotions and this really you know traces back in the western tradition to darwin who wrote about the emotions in eighteen seventy two and then a more contemporary science beginning about thirty years ago when we study an emotion we look at the feeling state or experience we look at physiology we look at the brain we look at your face your voice your body we have all these different ways to measure what an emotion is when it happens and so that science tells us very importantly awe is really different from fear right it's different in its physiology fear elevates heart rate awe elevates vagal tone the activation of the vagus nerve which slows your body down and makes you open and connected fear activates the amygdala awe activates different regions of the brain related to reward um fear sound sounds like ah you know awe has an entirely different vocalization sean what's a sound you might emit if you were feeling awe that's so interesting

[Sean Illing]

that you would say that and ask that because to me the sound of awe is silence when i'm in awe when i'm in awe i'm sort of rendered speechless i i don't i'm sort of overcome with a feeling and i'm just sort of captured by it and and and silent i guess i don't i don't associate sound with it but but what you tell me what awe sounds like i don't know yeah my

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

hunch is if you're around a bunch of giant trees the oldest living organisms on earth you might be silent by yourself but if you're with friends you might whoa right we've studied that sound very universal around the world really different acoustically and fear so we take all these ways to measure an emotion and we do the very important work of differentiating it from closely related states and what it tells us i think is something really important which is you know einstein felt awe was a basic state of mind a basic state of consciousness of being in the world and seeing the world and this science says that's true that it's just part of the organization of our minds an important difference

[Sean Illing]

between a feeling and a state this

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

is getting hard yeah i think we would use the term state as a broader term to say this is a mental state right and the mental state can be a feeling i feel awe it can be a sensation my body itches right it can be more of an epistemological state i can't remember how to do that mathematical function so states are episodes of mental activity or consciousness if you will and then feeling is one kind

[Sean Illing]

i was reading your book and thinking about how i've used the term awe and i basically realized that i usually use that word when i don't really know what i'm trying to describe almost like it's a poetic umbrella for a feeling for which there isn't an adequate word so i just say

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

i'm in awe

[Podcast Narrator]

would you quibble with

[Sean Illing]

that or is that sort of kind of what awe is that it that it it sort of speech almost feels superfluous before it because you're you're overwhelmed in that way and it seems i don't know beyond language

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

i i just got goosebumps at your observation that's a wonderful thought you know in moments of awe great thinkers come up blank when it comes to words you know william james one of my heroes had this almost psychedelic experience on nitrous oxide of all things and he called words tattered fragments you know of you know and michael pollan addresses this in his new book on consciousness that words can't capture the full experience and subjectively what we know with awe as you say is it is it's a state of deep humility where you don't know your knowledge can't make sense of how big the trees are or how beautifully children play or how music can make us cry in an instant we just don't know the rational mind in that moment and i love the idea that one of the purposes of awe is it points out the limits of our knowledge right yeah and then in this state of humility and then we go in search of meaning and understanding which is wonder

[Sean Illing]

i gotta hold for a second did you just call me a great thinker i don't want to pass over that

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

is that did i hear that right or i thought i was did you

[Sean Illing]

compare me directly to william james me and william james basically same quality of thinker that's very kind of you well

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

you know i love the idea that here's an emotion that makes us excited about what we don't know and and what a wonderful emotion to have you

[Sean Illing]

know i was thinking about the the last time i consciously felt awe and i think it was when did you

[Podcast Narrator]

see you know you know who alex

[Sean Illing]

hunold is the the climber yeah yeah they had a show on netflix where he alex climbed a massive skyscraper in taiwan i think it was by far the largest or the the tallest urban climb in history did you see that

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

i didn't see it but i i was awestruck by free solo and what

[Sean Illing]

he did when i was watching that

[Podcast Narrator]

when he got to the top of

[Sean Illing]

that building i i had some feels i felt some real feels and i was surprised by it i mean obviously it's an incredible physical feat right but i mean i you know watch the olympics or other other sporting events and see people do incredibly like physically excellent things all the time and it didn't make me quite feel in awe in that way it was like weirdly moving in a way that went beyond just the physical excellence what do you think's going on in that example what is going on there why am i connecting to that in that way yeah it's

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

you know one of the kinds of awe that we study in our lab is moral beauty or just how we're moved by observing human excellence and there are a couple of kinds that sort of separate in this literature and one is when we are around physical excellence you know and so you might see a chef dice vegetables or ballerina or hip hop artist dance i got to stand next to steph curry as he shot three pointers after practice and he made eighty eight out of one hundred and it was one of the most beautiful things i've ever seen and that's one form of this response to human excellence and then the other is when there's virtue mixed into it kindness and courage and fighting for justice or humility and honnold has tons of courage his life's on the line all the time and so you mix in courage with the physical excellence and it gets you to this feeling of moral beauty or this feeling of elevation or awe why is really interesting and the scottish philosopher david hume a couple hundred years ago got close to it where he said and this is interesting sean like when we see the extremes of human potential that we aspire towards or feel like we could be part of we ourselves begin imagining having those qualities and doing that and we are moved in this realm of the imagination and i think there's a small part of that that's what happens when i see a great physical achievement i'm thinking you know i should pick up the basketball again and start shooting shooting around or whatever it won't look like that and that's one of the great pathways to aspiration and what we do in life is to

[Sean Illing]

inspired by others what was different about the the alex climb is i almost felt like a vague pride like wow look at what a member of my species is capable of doing and you know i have a similar feeling if i'm watching film of you know big wave surfers riding one hundred foot waves in in portugal or ultra marathoners or something like that right but when i see that i'm more like holy that's crazy when i watch alex get to the top of that building it's like i don't know if maybe just climbing is a more direct metaphor for life or something i don't know but it felt triumphant in a way like we did it we did it but when i watch a big wave surfer i'm like i can't believe what that person just did but with alex i'm like look at us i don't know is

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

that weird yeah no that's wonderful it's this you know and one of the things that awe surfaces is that we have this collective self that's a very interesting part of our evolution that we think of ourselves as part of tribes and groups and species and living forms and when we see reminders of the strength of our kind we take it in personally we feel like it's part of who we are and one of the reasons we need these kinds of stories is to remind us of what

[Sean Illing]

we can do one of the things you argue in the book is that the experience of awe quiets the self what do you mean by that what is the self that's being quieted you

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

know you can think about our identities or our minds consciousness as one part of it is the self is the ego is making sure i have food and i'm safe and i'm rising in status and i'm getting paid and i'm achieving my goals and i'm beating out the other people and that's the self and there are a lot of good reasons evolutionarily why we have a very active self in our consciousness but we're also very unusual in that we relate for evolutionary reasons to things that are larger than the self right collectives groups cultural forms like music or art in indigenous traditions and in our own experience ecosystems it's very advantageous to have fuel related to your ecosystem so we're constantly moving from self to self in relation to larger things and you know social scientists for the past forty to fifty years you know christopher lasch the culture of narcissism we are in the most individualistic self focus some data suggest narcissistic period in human history you know just think about you know not only individualism rising in our culture hey i gotta express myself instead of following duties et cetera but now we've added technology to the mix where you know here's just a finding that won't surprise your our listeners and viewers like twenty five percent of the photos we take and post on instagram are of the self and another twenty four percent are me with another person we're so self focused and that's harmful for us and awe gets us out of it you know just like you said it quiets things down it makes us aware of what's around us the neural activation of the self the default mode network is quieted down and we start to see the beauty and the wonder of things around us and that is good news i agree

[Sean Illing]

wholeheartedly but let me ask just to hear your answer when you said just now that focusing on the self is

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

harmful why yeah and i don't mean to get on a soapbox about this but go for it yeah i mean i teach young people jonathan haidt the anxious generation the new data even more definitive being online is making us anxious and detached and lonely it's a struggle and one of the pathways to those struggles of anxiety and self criticism and perfectionism and self condemnation is too much of a focus on the self we ruminate what did she think of me and did i say the right thing and what are other people saying about my talk or whatever that's all good in balance in moderation but it's way out of balance and i think that's why awe struck such a chord is it tells us if you go dance with some friends you'll lose yourself and feel wonderful if you go hear some music you will lose yourself for a moment and feel wonderful if you get out in nature and backpack by yourself you suddenly feel like you're part of the natural world if you take psychedelics or spirit medicines same thing the self dissolves and we feel uplifted and strong

[Sean Illing]

i think most people think of awe as a almost personal spiritual experience but you seem to be suggesting that it's also deeply social maybe even primarily a social experience i mean is that a fair way to put it or am i overstating it yeah you just gave

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

me goosebumps with that question thank you

[Sean Illing]

you know so twice in one look at this man i'm on a roll

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

yeah yeah and isn't that interesting that a great idea that you know a great distillation of a complicated science you just offered moves me yeah you know we we gathered stories of awe from twenty six countries all over the world india mexico china russia japan new zealand us germany all these different countries just write about what made you feel awe when you encountered what's vast and mysterious and off they wrote and you know i thought it would be nature as kind of the primary source of awe it was close but it was the social stuff that was our most reliable source of awe other people's courage and virtue and strength and intelligence and then also shared movement with other people sports politics dance so it really caught me off guard and got me to think much more deeply about awe and in ways i hadn't thought about before that this emotion really makes us feel wonder about other people and our connections to them and how vital that is to

[Sean Illing]

our thriving twenty six countries is a lot i mean do you recall any major differences that emerged there in the picture in terms of like are there big cultural differences in what people respond

[Podcast Narrator]

to or how they answer these sorts

[Sean Illing]

of questions or did it really end up being pretty universal across the board

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

oh there you know it was probably fifty to sixty percent pretty similar across cultures and then thirty percent varying in really profound ways if you look at the broader history of awe you know going back to the spiritual writings of five six hundred years ago and you think about different spiritual traditions there's kind of an oceanic kind of awe right where you're merging with others you feel oneness right and then there's a more hierarchical threat based awe of you think about being judged by god in the old testament and you know and and just this whoa this wow i am so submissive vis a vis this awe inspiring entities and that one varies across cultures cultures with a lot of economic inequality have more threat based fearful awe that's profound right so it tells us you know over you know in the united states where we're you know in certain contexts where it may feel more egalitarian awe or if you talk to somebody from japan their awe is really quite different it has more fear in it dreadful feeling judged so we found that as one of our key differences

[Sean Illing]

so in those very hierarchical religious cultures is awe in that context almost indistinguishable

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

from fear yeah and that's you know in this other line of science that i've done with alan cowan we've really gathered a ton of data with statistical techniques to map you know experiences in these spaces of meaning or semantic spaces and we get tricked by words because words imply that awe is really different from fear but in actuality as alan and i have found our emotions are always blending with other states becoming intermingled with them and their meanings and yeah in those instances awe will start to feel like fear or terror or horror right and that's the complexity of emotion that we try to study is that inevitable mixing of states

[Podcast Narrator]

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[Choiceology Host]

this episode is brought to you by choiceology an original podcast from charles schwab hosted by katie milkman an award winning behavioral scientist and author of the best selling book how to change choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions hear true stories from nobel laureates historians authors athletes and more about why people do the things they do and how to make better ones to help avoid costly mistakes listen to choiceology at schwab dot com podcast or wherever you listen

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[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

foreign

[Sean Illing]

this really does push on our intuitions i think about awe because awe sort of again it feels like an experience that almost takes you out of the regular world yeah right it transports you momentarily right and you're just sort of you know floating as it were but in a lot of ways it seems like what you're saying is that it really does the opposite it actually reconnects us to it or regrounds us to the human world which is a very different thing which makes it all the more interesting that i think we we we miss that and almost think of it in a way that's directly at odds with not only what it is but like what the great beauty of the thing is that it is a reconnection or a thing that you know takes us out of ourself and reconnects us to other selves i mean it's

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

so important just for us to dwell on that you know jane goodall one of my heroes wrote about awe she observed it in chimpanzees and i agree as did charles darwin felt that reverence and devotion were seen in other species so it is a mammalian thing and jane goodall said that awe is really being amazed at things outside of the self and i love that phrase for our times and i think we've thought of awe very much influenced by the five hundred years that we've lived through of spiritual writings about awe but the wonders of of life and the natural world and human collectives and sports and culture and music are also outside of the self and that's what happens with awe as you are walking along and suddenly as in some of our research you start looking at the light on a tree and the leaves and the clouds drifting by and you pause and you see all these patterns and your sense of self starts to be connected to those patterns in nature and you feel awe and that is right here in front of us as you said and it's one of the most important discoveries in our research is what i called everyday awe it's people are finding it pretty regularly and it's just right

[Sean Illing]

around them that's definitely one way to read the book as saying that that how should i put this that modern life overdevelops the ego you know the the the striving self the comparing self the isolated self and awe is very valuable because just explodes that i mean is that do you think of that as like the the chief psychological maybe even spiritual benefit of all as an

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

emotion i i do you know and we've got that empirically that you know in terms of this what we call the diminishing of the self or the small self you know when you're near yosemite and you're asked to draw yourself you draw a really small being in a bigger context compared to other studies that's so fascinating yeah you know when you are feeling awe and you're in conversation with someone else you're not as inclined to talk about yourself you're more curious about the other person or humble when you take psychedelics and when you feel awe in music that self related region of the brain is smaller deactivated so there are a lot of ways in which the self gets small the thing we haven't done as good a job at capturing i feel and is also part of the power of awe is the relationality to large what i wrote about as systems of things if you're a backpacker or you're alex honnold whom we started with climbing a big mountain there are going to be moments where you're just feeling like you are part of all of the surroundings and that's also part of the power of awe it's like god i'm part of this when yumi kendall whom i interviewed for the book who's one of the country's great cellists in philadelphia when she wrote about playing she says she gets up on stage and starts playing and tears up and cries and gets goosebumps and she said i feel like i'm part of the audience and i'm part of the history of music and that's what awe does is it makes you feel part of a very big thing

[Sean Illing]

i mean i would say i'm kind of a crier anyway that's a good time i cry a lot during during movies certain and especially at concerts you know there's a handful of concerts that just absolutely like reduced to me to like a groveling ball of tears john

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

you got to tell me one of

[Sean Illing]

the experiences jose gonzalez is a musician i've seen live he he reduced me to tears sufjan stevens i think also did it there's an icelandic band called sigur rosal with my wife in new orleans and she was basically propping me up i don't even know what they're they're speaking a language i don't even speak but it doesn't matter because like you know like music is sort of a proto language right so like whatever it's just it's tapping into something that's beyond before words and so you just feel it you just feel it then the only way i knew how to express that was just was just crying but i mean is that i just thought of it as like a response to unbelievable beauty but is it really awe is that really what that what

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

that is i think so i think you know and there's a little bit of work that it that helps us answer the question and what a beautiful kind of journey to the question i'll just call out sufjan stevens who when my brother passed away and i write about it in the book there was something about his music that brought me into an understanding of grief and the universality and meaning of grief so thank you to sufjan stevens yeah so the tears are a physiological process there are these little lacrimal glands that release tears there are a few different kinds of tears you can look at the protein structure of tears and kind of make inferences based on that but importantly is one tears are part of a branch of your nervous system called the parasympathetic autonomic nervous system which is really calming orienting to others being open to connection the vagus nerve is part of it which i study in my lab also activated by awe so it already tells us tears in the semantic space of emotions are different from fear and anger and disgust they're really about connection and love right so that's interesting in its own right and then alan fisk at ucla has been doing really nice work showing that tears are kind of arise when you feel like you're merging with others you share identity and that feels right to me and it's part of awe which is your body's in this open space physiological state you're seeing suf john stevens or jose gonzalez and you're with people and your tears are saying this is who we are this is my people and we need that information as we navigate life i do think

[Sean Illing]

there's something to the idea that western philosophy enlightenment thinking for all of its fruits and there are many has tended to forget the it has tended to forget the body to elevate language and thought i mean even though the body is master in so many ways and so many of the most important human experiences like awe often arrive in the body first and only later get translated imperfectly into language i mean i don't know i'm ranting but there's something there

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

i hope no it's profound and you know the the two heroes of the science of awe early in west earlier in western thought are david hume the great scottish philosopher who wrote about moral beauty as we've discussed and he was called a sentimentalist in the seventeen forties and thirties and then he influenced charles darwin who you know i'm just publishing this paper on everything that darwin said about the body as it relates to consciousness yeah and now we know neuroscientifically that all this information from the body goes up through the vagus nerve to your brain goes up into the insula in your brain and tells you what's going on in the gut or your heart et cetera and the body drives a lot of our basic perceptions of the world you know of morality and kin and you know who we love and what our political concerns are so western thought was not only ignored but was openly hostile to the body in part because of original sin and christianity and that's changing because of western science in some sense let me go back

[Sean Illing]

to what you just said about moral beauty it's come up a couple of times

[Podcast Narrator]

why is that so powerful like

[Sean Illing]

why is why is other people's kindness and strength so moving for us maybe even more moving than mountains or cathedrals what is it about moral excellence that

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

really moves us you know and we in the social biological sciences have been in the midst of a rethinking of our evolutionary history and how we've evolved as a species into what darwin called he called sympathy our strongest instinct and those communities with the most sympathetic members will flourish and you know there's all this convergent scholarship and thinking that says we need to cooperate with groups we need to share resources so that we in the common famines of our evolutionary history we didn't die we need to warm each other most importantly sarah blaffer hirdy we have these hyper vulnerable offspring that take you know decades to reach the age of independence you know our offspring are more vulnerable than any mammal on the face of the earth and we cared for them in communities so we need a lot of mechanisms within this framework to build groups to sacrifice to be selfless to share and care and there's a ton of scholarship on that and one of the ways one of the powerful mechanisms for that is moral beauty and if i see a stranger act in a kind way i instinctively become kinder and so what that means is we create these little networks of cooperation and kindness if i see a stranger act in a kind or courageous way i aspire in my identity to be kinder and more cooperative here's where it gets really interesting it's a very powerful tool for young people right if young people it can be really threatening to be courageous if you're five years old right and it may not be the optimal thing for our group but if they see it in other people and they say oh that's what it means to be an upstanding person or somebody of character and they start to learn in their bodies and minds how to embody these principles these cooperative principles so the consensus now is we need a lot of different pathways to to collaborate with each other it's good for societies who cooperate better do better if you yourself cooperate more are kinder you will live longer empirical science shows it's good for your nervous system it's good for your relationships around you and moral beauty is just this superpower of promoting that well i mean on some

[Sean Illing]

level when you're seeing moral beauty you are seeing the phenomenon that makes life together possible on some level right and instinctively evolutionarily some somewhere in our brains

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

we know that yeah and you just gave me goosebumps again so that's three that's enough that's three yeah so yeah you know check this out think about folklore and the stories we tell so yeah fires are four hundred thousand years old new archeological evidence suggests and one of the things that happened with fires it changed our diet you know fair enough but we gathered together at night and we started to tell stories first with our bodies in these proto languages like you said and then with stories and all cultures have fables and legends and fairy tales and they're really important forms of culture and how we learn how to be a good human being and a new science is finding that their chief ingredient is moral beauty you hear about cinderella who worked hard and had these mean stepsisters and wins the prince you know through her virtue et cetera so that power of moral beauty gets into our culture it gets into the stories we tell and the the fiction we write and i believe the art that we we're working on visual art is a form of moral beauty right that inspires us to like you said kind of get along so that we can survive i mean for me

[Sean Illing]

it's it's often about political courage which really is a spe that that that's a species of moral beauty really you know and whether it's iranian women publicly removing their hijabs in protest right knowing it might mean death whatever you think about the hijab that's courage yeah or nelson nelson mandela or yeah a soldier a soldier jumping on a grenade to save a friend or a buddhist monk setting himself on fire protest i mean part of yeah part of me thinks man that seems really tragically misguided and sad but also i'm completely in awe of the physical and especially the spiritual

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

courage yeah i mean historians and political theorists are starting to suggest like these moments of profound moral courage change the world you know so the vietnam monk setting himself on fire in protest of the vietnam war i remember it as a kid like wow this situation is that serious that a human would do that and you know you can go through history you know thomas clarkson is one of my favorite stories where he at the time the institution of slavery was three quarters of the european economy and he wrote an essay about should we be allowed to enslave humans and he was he just fell over weeping at the thought that that's what we do to fellow humans and he courageously bonded with the abolitionists started spreading the word showed images of of a human atrocity on the slave ships and it changed europe right these little moments of moral courage where you will sacrifice yourself for others or for some idea are really really important it was interesting in our stories from around the world malala kept coming up you know and people are like man you know this young girl fighting for the right to educate against the taliban you know being harmed physically move people in japan and norway just to see it on tv and it's interesting to think about our current political times that that's what we need you know we are in a really debased state right now politically for a lot of reasons and that's what we should be thinking about is where is the moral courage as a direction for future politics

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[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

dot com psst it's mushrooms with maddie

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[Sean Illing]

i really did want to ask you about your experiences at san quentin the legendary california prison what did that experience what did that experience teach you about all and maybe she could just say briefly what you did there just for context i was moved by that part of the

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

book thank you yeah i used to teach this essay by atulga one day on i think it was in the new yorker about solitary confinement and when you put prisoners in solitary confinement they go crazy and it is torture and they become psychotic and they beat themselves and then i had the privilege of being asked to write an amicus brief against solitary confinement and there was this protest by prisoners that led to the largest hunger strike in prison history against solitary confinement at pelican bay maximum security prison and it was led by rivals of several different gangs who are usually violent against one another and they bonded together over this issue protested i got called into the case and i wrote about how in solitary confinement you're not allowed to in pelican bay you don't even touch fellow human beings you don't get to hug your kids when they visit they work against that and i wrote about the touch deprivation and that case was cited in favor of the prisoners couple thousand prisoners got out of solitary i felt very good about that and then i got invited because of that to go to san quentin as part of the restorative justice program led by people like lewis scott inside darnell washington who's now in la teaching meditation to the kids in the park he grew up in he was formerly of the bloods so i go inside there are a few of us in there one hundred eighty prisoners they're all bigger than me they lift weights a lot you know and i'm like wow i'm here all day and i did this many times and then you start to feel the hunger for moral beauty inside like these guys they know they've harmed they know they've killed they feel horrible they've hurt their families they're in constant meditation and reflection on making amends like we do and then they grow things you know they as tupac shakur said roses out of concrete they create newspapers and music and drama and humanity and i sean i stood up i was asked to give a talk and i report on this in the book and i was like i gotta ask these one hundred eighty guys like where do you find all right here and they're the best answers i've ever heard and it was like my granddaughter learning how to read getting my high school diploma learning about the law the light in san quentin you know in off the bay my cellie reading the quran reading the bible meditate i was just like wow here it is einstein's right this is everywhere and to this day i'm still involved with a lot of prisoners in their efforts and friends with them when i'm around them they tell me we can overcome anything and we have so much moral beauty inside you know

[Sean Illing]

what i love about just that whole scene is it really does illustrate your point that awe is not some kind of luxury emotion for the privileged that it's this core human experience and it shows how even in prison awe is still fundamentally a relational thing people are experiencing it through their relationship with their children or fellow inmates or through their relationship with music or scripture or through restorative justice as you were just saying which is fundamentally about moral repair which is fundamentally about our relationship to other people right it's still the same thing in prison or outside and yeah it's just i don't know like i said i was really moved by that thank you that part of the book and i just think it concretizes your point

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

in a really powerful way yeah thank you for saying that and i was surprised i really was you know when you go in you're with one hundred eighty men in blue you know i look you know i look a lot different i've come out of this life of privilege you know berkeley professor and the like and you see this humanity and this urge to connect and promote the good tell stories of moral beauty stories of protest how they're charged five times what they should pay for a candy bar you know et cetera the labor the what they earn in their labor you're weeping you know you're it's just that's what people do because you're open to this essential quality of who we are that you can't suppress you know it's there when i work with veterans it's very common in combat with when you're you know and historians have written about this you see your adversaries in iraq or now iran very horrifically you see the humanity it's right there you know and and you got to build upon it and it blew me

[Sean Illing]

away i wanted to ask you about your brother who passed away you mentioned him a few minutes ago after your brother died it seems like your relationship to awe and mystery changed or evolved a little bit i mean how did how did the grief of that alter the way you think not just maybe about awe but about things that science can't fully explain

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

yeah you know i was blessed to have you know a brother of awe roth he was you know i'm working on a new book on moral beauty and it's like asked me to define moral beauty it was my brother you know he he fought off bullies he taught the poorest kids in the foothills of the sierras he he didn't tolerate any racism he broke up fights he just had this quality to him very humble guy and he passed away from colon cancer which is you know and you don't want to i don't want to smooth over all the hardship like there's a lot of violence in prisons there's a lot of ugliness there's a lot of ugliness as you die and as you are a brother of watching somebody pass away panic and grief and i didn't feel rage but just like existential confusion and then sean you know on the and on the night of his passing i was sitting there by his side and i was holding his shoulder and talking to him with our family thinking about our past and throwing the baseball with him and the camping we did and i'm

[Sean Illing]

a

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

data driven guy i believe in neurons and cells and hadn't thought too hard about consciousness and i had a transcendent experience seeing his soul and seeing space in a different way truly and i've had a lot of these psychedelics and meditation and yoga and exertion this was in its own category and i was like wow and i knew from our research around the world it's common when you watch people go you feel awe at the mystery of life and then after not only did i hear his voice all the time in winds and you know and i see him in places and i felt his identity in the sun i felt his hand on my back two times where it was on my back you know and i was just like okay i'll wait it'll pass it was still there so as a as a skeptic like me it changed everything for me you know it opened me up it opened me up to thinking about metaphysics and spirituality it opened my spirit up to what we never will understand fully with science and rationality and and i feel better for it i feel more open to dialogues with a fundamentalist christian who has different political views than myself and that's happened through awe or a mormon right and so yeah it was a big life shifting experience of mystery and beauty

[Sean Illing]

do you think maybe the experience of awe is the birth of the religious

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

impulse i do i really do and you know that was emile durkheim the great french sociologist that vibrating together when you at that concert you had this experience jose gonzalez collective effervescence right yeah collective effervescence you know that was william james's project of the mystical feeling which is a lot like awe is the beginnings of spirituality and this is what i learned from working with jonathan haidt on awe john studied a lot of the world's religions when we wrote about awe twenty five years ago twenty years ago you read the bhagavad gita you read the great buddhist texts and sutras you read the yoga sutra of patanjali it's a lot of awe right and emerson and thoreau and julian of norwich so it's right there and what i like is it's back to our overarching thesis which is however we get to this emotion what it does for us is it makes us be part of large things and take care of them in indigenous traditions the ecosystem around us and then in religion the people around us and we need that if you're

[Sean Illing]

right and i think you are that awe is this basic human need what is your advice to people looking to snatch a few minutes of it every

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

day yeah you know i've taught happiness for thirty years at berkeley and teach it to medical doctors and federal judges and hard you know people with hard jobs and i always tell people like look for a few minutes a week that's it and with awe pause slow down your breathing a little put down your devices open your mind and rely on those eight wonders right so look around at nature sunsets and clouds and trees listen to music that really that means something to you like stop the spotify playlist and find something that means something to you when the bob dylan movie came out i was just weeping the whole time because i grew up on bob dylan when i was three years old i liked the beatles but bob dylan was everything and it just opened me up you know nature music reflect on someone who has inspired you and just name them and like oh yeah man that teacher in high school they gave me that right just look for visual things get to a museum it's not that hard and we got a ton of new data showing it's good for stress anxiety long covid symptoms loneliness just a couple of minutes a

[Sean Illing]

week well if you're looking for awe you certainly won't find it on your twitter feed so get the hell out

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

of there yeah and get off of the devices i think that's a perfect

[Sean Illing]

place to go if besides getting your book where can people go to follow your work and your latest research yeah

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

i have the science of happiness podcast at the greater good science center and we have a lot of awe represented and things you can do so there are there's a lot we can start working with in terms of those couple of minutes a week to find some

[Sean Illing]

all right people let's get started tyker keltner this is great thank you for

[Dr. Dacher Keltner]

coming in thank you sean it's been a great conversation

[Podcast Narrator]

all right here we are at the end of another wonderful

[Sean Illing]

episode i love docker i love this topic it really was catnip for yours

[Podcast Narrator]

truly as always we want to know what you think so drop us a line at the gray area at vox dot com or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at one eight hundred two one four five seven four nine once you're finished with that please rate review subscribe to the podcast it helps us grow our show this episode was produced by thor new writer and beth morrissey who also runs the show engineered by shannon mahoney fact checked by melissa hirsch and alex overington wrote our theme music our executive producer is miranda kennedy the gray area comes out on mondays and fridays find it wherever you listen to podcasts if you watch podcasts while you listen you

[Sean Illing]

can do that too go to youtube

[Podcast Narrator]

dot com vox for video versions of the gray area the show is part of vox support support vox's journalism by joining our membership program today go to vox dot com members to sign up and if you decide to sign up because of this show let us know

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