For the past 20 years, Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has been teaching the slippery subject of happiness. Now, at last, he believes he has landed on a profoundly simple, scientifically proven method for achieving it: “Find awe,” he writes in his extraordinary new book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (Penguin Press).
As Keltner discusses on the latest episode of our At a Distance podcast, awe transforms us, opening our bodies and minds up to the vast wonders of the universe in a way that plants us firmly in the present. Awe is healing. It brings about joy and meaning, and can even lead to a more rigorous level of thinking. Keltner’s book makes clear that this isn’t some hippyish, woo-woo theorizing; combining both empirical research and rich scientific data, he makes a strong case for why awe should be considered a staple in our daily diet. “You’ve obviously got to have food and water and sleep,” he says on At a Distance, “but awe is right up there.”
Below, a condensed and edited version of our conversation.
Click here to listen to the full interview on our At a Distance podcast.
You define awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” How did you come to this particular definition? Awe seems almost indefinable, but you manage to capture it.
[Laughs] Yeah, it’s funny. Everybody says that awe is indefinable, that you can’t capture it with language, that it’s ineffable. And yet, everybody tries to define it in their old traditions in philosophy and religion and spirituality.
I came to that definition through a couple of pathways. One was the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, from the eighteenth century, who said, “Awe, or the sublime, is about power, or vastness and mystery,” or what he called “obscurity”—we can’t make sense of it immediately. That felt right to me. The experiences of awe I’ve had really had that overwhelming quality to them. I couldn’t make sense of them. So, in the book, I move toward a more colloquial definition: The best way to think about awe is that it’s really about the vast mysteries of life.
You break the book into what you call “the eight wonders of life.” How did you go about creating this structure and identifying these particular wonders?
Awe is such a rich topic historically. It’s about religion and music and nature and psychedelics and political protest and charismatic leaders—all this stuff.
What we decided to do in my lab is survey—actually, more than survey, we gathered stories of awe from twenty-six countries, ranging from China to Mexico to India to Brazil to the U.S. to Japan to Indonesia. “What made you feel awe? When did you last encounter it? What was vast and mysterious?” What we uncovered, once we translated the stories, after a couple of years, is what I call in the book “the eight wonders of life.” It kind of aggravates people: “Ah, c’mon, eight?!” But indeed, they cover about ninety-five percent of the stories. They are: people’s moral beauty, kindness, and courage; nature; collective movement (cheering at a rally or a football game, or doing rituals in a service, or dancing); then you get to music, visual design, and religion or spirituality; and then to two odd ones, big ideas and life and death.
I love how, for the collective one, you describe it as “collective effervescence.”
Yeah, that’s from Émile Durkheim, this great sociologist. He’d observe these small-scale society people, and when they would practice their spirituality, they’d dance and move together and start vocalizing together. That really is the heart of this transcendent, ecstatic experience: Dancing with people, cheering with people, singing with people, choirs, just brings about this bubbling, electric, tingly feeling, together. That’s awe.
I found it really interesting to learn that lab studies have shown that awe actually leads to more rigorous thought.
That surprised me, too!
I was wondering, why is this exactly? How would you explain it?
Thanks for picking up on that. A lot of people feel like, once you feel awe, you’re kind of stupefied, you’re glassy-eyed, you’re like, “Ohhhhh.” And, you know, maybe that’s in the first moments or first seconds of awe—you see a flashing light in the sky and you don’t know what it is. But what we’ve got to remember is that emotions unfold in processes, and awe unfolds into a state of wonder, which is about curiosity and seeking explanation. In the state that awe produces, people are more rigorous in how they think about things. They evaluate evidence more carefully. They are better scientists. They do better in school. They are more sophisticated in their political reasoning. Those are all empirical findings. Brief experiences of awe sharpen your reasoning and intellect.
I have to bring technology into this, particularly screens. You describe how so many of us are operating with an “overactive default self, augmented by self-obsessed digital technologies.” The result, of course, is anxiety, depression, and self-criticism. Is experiencing more awe a way out of this loop? Is awe a potential solution to the things that ail us?
Yeah, it’s astonishing. We’re just starting to make sense of this at the sociological level. I recently visited the Louvre, and I went to see the Mona Lisa. Now, when people see the Mona Lisa, they don’t really look at the Mona Lisa. They take photos of themselves in front of the Mona Lisa. It’s absurd. They’re going into this room with this great painting by Leonardo da Vinci, and instead of looking at the painting and the mystery of the smile, they’re taking a picture of themselves. That’s emblematic of what sociologists are worried about, which is that, in a lot of cultures, people are just too focused on the self: They take pictures of themselves, they look at their Instagram likes, they compare their Instagram likes to other likes, they are self-critical, they are worried about their bodies, they ruminate too much at night about themselves. This is a historical aberration. The mind needs to be aware of the self and track it to succeed in the world. But we need to be aware of the context, we need to be aware of other people, we need to be aware of the environment. And all of this self focus takes us away from that and has led to rates of anxiety and depression that are really high.
When I started to learn about people’s experiences of awe, they would commonly say, “God, I forgot about myself. I disappeared. I dissolved. I couldn’t hear that self-critical voice.” We’ve now got a lot of data that speaks to that. That’s part of why awe is so good for you—it just shuts down what Aldous Huxley called this “nagging, neurotic voice” that’s always like, “Agh! Dacher, you’re not working hard enough, you’re not successful enough. Your bank account isn’t good enough. Oh, look, you’re overweight!” Awe quiets all that chatter down and says, “Hey, look and see what’s big out there that’s worthy of your attention.”
I would say that awe takes you away from the self—and the cell phone.
Ahhh, and we should just call it the “self phone.” [Laughter]
This makes me think of a meme I recently saw that shows Michael Jordan shooting a three and LeBron James shooting a three, and the contrast between the two audiences. In the Michael Jordan era, the audience was all on their feet, screaming and clapping, and in the Lebron era, everyone’s still seated and staring at their phones, taking pictures.
Ugh. There are really deep issues at play here. One of the things awe often brings about—with music, or watching dance or a political rally or a sporting event—is that we all share our attention on that event, and that’s really important. Michael Tomasello, this important developmental psychologist, has said that that ability to share attention—that you and I are aware of the same things—is a miracle. It’s very important to human beings and consciousness. The cell phone disrupts it. We all go to an event, we put up our phones to record it, and we’re not understanding that we’re all sharing the experience of that moment. So it’s serious. Awe brings this into focus.
Could you talk about how another TEK—T-E-K, traditional ecological knowledge—comes into this?
Well, in many Indigenous societies, we felt like we were part of ecosystems. Then, as the Western Industrial Revolution kicked into gear, we began to fear nature. People didn’t like to go outside; they didn’t hike in the mountains. Then, with the rise of Western European technologies, we came to believe that we own nature: We commodify it and we exploit it. That has led to where we are today with overconsumption, burning fossil fuels, et cetera. Awe shifts our awareness of nature to traditional ecological knowledge: There are these ecosystems out there. They are complex processes of different species interacting with each other. I’m one of many species in this system, and we’re all competing and collaborating toward some sort of homeostasis. That is such a radically different view of nature, where we revere resources, and we see ourselves as potential collaborators with other species.
Right. Systems thinking. Which became such a focus of so many people during Covid, too.
Really?
Well, that’s my hope—that this slowdown allowed people to think a lot more about systems thinking. It’s been a focus of a lot of the episodes on this podcast, including a conversation we had with Dr. Suzanne Simard, who talks all about the roots of trees and “the mother tree.”
That’s what awe does. Systems thinking is a major achievement in cognition. Some people believe it’s one of the defining human strengths. It’s like, “There are systems out there—cultural systems, spiritual systems, ecosystems, social systems—and I’m part of them. How do I figure it out?” Awe opens your eyes to that. One of my favorite studies is, you get people to feel awe about, say, viewing nature imagery. They’re like, “Wow, that’s so amazing, those big waves and flocks of birds and patterns of light, and trees and ecosystems or fungi.” And they are more aware of how they’re part of a social system. They’re like, “Oh, wait, I’m not a solitary individual. I’m part of this network that’s connected in different ways.” We need that. Kids need that.
I find it refreshing that you describe awe as “a basic human need.” Which really brings it down to earth. For me, reading that caused such a profound perspective shift: that awe is something that we shouldn’t wait for, but in fact should seek out.
That comes out of science. There was a really important argument made recently, to great effect, in Psychological Science, that we have a need to belong. It’s good for our health. It shows up early in kids. It’s part of our evolutionary history. And I think the data are now in place to make the same case for awe. It’s about a human being being alive.
As I thought about this broader argument of “what constitutes a need?” awe fit the criteria. Kids show awe right away, just like they acquire language and learn to love certain foods and learn to connect to caregivers. Kids are just wild with awe. It’s part of their intellectual development. It’s good for your body. It’s really good for your immune system to get out into the woods or listen to music and feel awe. And then it’s good for your fitting into society. With a little bit of awe, you collaborate more, you build stronger ties. These findings tell us that awe is as vital for children as it is for adults. You’ve obviously got to have food and water and sleep, but awe is right up there.
You write that “one of the most alarming trends in the lives of children today is the disappearance of awe. We are not giving them enough opportunities to discover and experience the wonders of life.” You reference this great 1956 essay by writer and conservationist Rachel Carson called “Help Your Child to Wonder,” which is basically a presentation of an awe-based approach to raising a kid. What are some solutions, as you see it, for creating a greater sense of awe in children?
Oh, man. It was so astonishing to raise two daughters in this era. I was raised in the late ’60s by counterculture parents. I didn’t learn too much in high school, to be honest. [Laughs] But I caught up. What my parents taught me is how to find awe.
When I raised my daughters, the culture was almost the antithesis of what Rachel Carson talks about. She talks about getting outside as fundamental. She takes her nephew out into this rainy storm. With parenting today, kids are spending more time inside on iPads, looking at images of nature. If you read the essay, it’s really just about distrusting language and concepts. When I was [raising my kids], I remember a lot of parents saying, “Oh, it’s really important to teach your kids words and to always label stuff.” I was labeling the hell out of everything. Kids need to learn about phenomena on their own, independent of a parent’s language.
In the essay, Rachel Carson just kind of wanders, in a freeform way, with her nephew. A lot of our kids’ education doesn’t allow for wandering. It’s all focused on tests and scores. She talks about mystery being the engine of what we need to pursue in knowledge. That’s not as much a part of curricula today. It’s such an important essay. Thank you for flagging it.
Neuroaesthetics is another area I wanted to touch on, particularly beauty and art and visual design. At the city-planning level, there are all of these homogeneous nonspaces being foisted upon us around the world, so I think it’s important to emphasize that creating beautiful, thoughtfully constructed buildings and public spaces that encourage greater use and deeper engagement can actually promote collective health and well-being. I think what your book shows is that these are not just nice things to think about and consider. This is science. There are studies that show that when you’re in a beautiful space, you’re almost becoming a better, fuller person.
You’re capturing exactly why I wrote this book. Awe-based design is a deep human tendency in our greatest achievements—the Mayan pyramids, the cathedrals of Europe, the glass windows at the Sagrada Familia, Japanese gardens. There are principles there. We know that urban landscapes have effects upon people’s health and well-being, and I review that evidence in the book. It just urges us to really think about what you’re proposing, which is: There are really clear principles of awe-based design, about degrees of vastness and hints at mystery; and shifts in attention, from the small to the vast; and mystery built into it, et cetera. And there is data that shows that in places with those design principles, the citizens are happier and there’s less crime.
What’s been exciting is that people are starting to think about this. I was talking to an architecture firm in Sweden, and they were saying, “We are starting to design buildings for awe.” I just had somebody reach out who was interested in palliative care facilities and designing for awe and beauty. We know how to do this, and somehow we’ve lost sight of this. I hope our conversation and the book inspires people in that direction.
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As changes in weather patterns, economic realities, and public perception have triggered a wave of climate consciousness over the past few years, renewable energy sources have enjoyed a newfound level of attention, no longer relegated to thlong-sputtering industry of solar power. Factoids like how an hour and half worth of sunlight hitting the earth could provide the world’s total energy consumption in a year have been employed to tease out the industry’s transformative power for decades. Now, with technological advances makincheaper and more efficient than ever, it seems better poised than ever to take on a greater role in weaning humanity off of its fossil fuel and coal depende
Since 1997, when she founded her eponymous (now shuttered) gallery, Elizabeth Dee has been a fixture of the New York artIndependent Art Fair. An elegant, tightly curated event that remains an outlier in its efforts to elevate overlooked, underrepresented, and
What does it mean to revisit a photograph? When a camera shutters, it locks a moment in time, forever trapping the imageGathered Leaves, the latest book by the Minneapolis-based photographer Alec Soth, whose work has long documented lonely souls and fractured dreams in spaces across the United States. In Gathered Leaves, Soth revisits five of his previous books, including in its pages new notes, annotations, text excerpts, and even photo
In 2016, a stampede of people flooded the streets of Taipei, stopping garbage trucks and buses in the wake of their single-minded pursuit. What unifi
Kate Berry’s glowing personality transmits what she seems to desire most: a breath of fresh air, and time to care for her myriad plants; raise her 9-year-old daughter, Quinn; or host intimate dinner parties for friends on the garden-covered terrace of her Domino and of the food, wine, and travel magazine Saveur, Berry has interactions with media that, due to her demanding schedule, tend to be brief and light—and meaningful. She lives her work, which leaves plenty of time for creating media, but not so much for taking it in. As she puts it, “You don’t
Consider the flower. What image blossoms to mind? What emotion does it elicit? For centuries, flowers have persisted as Flora Photographica: The Flower in Contemporary Photography (Thames & Hudson), out August 30, editors William Ewing and Danaé Panchaud compose a selection of vibrant modern floral
Lush fruit trees bursting over a roof. A canopy of plants covering a facade. Intricate bamboo constructions spiraling frVõ Trọng Nghĩa: Building Nature (Thames & Hudson), readers get an inside look into how the celebrated architect has embraced two core themes throughout
As the director of archives and brand heritage at the Michigan-based furniture powerhouse Herman Miller—now known as MilIni Archibong.
The climate writer and essayist David Wallace-Wells has a knack for translating the unimaginable into the painfully realarticle for New York magazine and subsequent book of the same name, The Uninhabitable Earth, played a critical role in jolting the conversation, detailing the varied plagues and, finally, apocalyptic conditions The New York Times, who added him to their Opinion section, where he has begun a weekly newsletter to reflect on the latest in our Anthropocene Age.
“A forest in Norway is growing.” So begins the cryptic text printed on a certificate for the Future Library, or Framtidsbiblioteket, an artwork by Scottish artist Katie Paterson that, over the span of a century, cumulatively builds a collection of wri
At New York’s Lisson Gallery, an unfettered approach to sculpture is the driving force behind a new group exhibition. OnThe Odds Are Good, The Goods Are Odd” presents the work of 11 groundbreaking New York City–based contemporary artists. In the exhibition, sculptures are a m
Earlier this year, Burkina Faso–born Diébédo Francis Kéré became the first African, and the first Black architect, ever
Rising from a patch of spiny ornamental grass on New York’s High Line park, a 9-foot-tall tornado spins in place, whirliWindy”, a new (and first-ever) sculpture by the Moroccan-born, New York–based artist Meriem Bennani, installed near West 23rd2 Lizards” (2020), made with filmmaker Orian Barki and launched on Instagram at the start of the pandemic, depicted the bewilderi
“We think we invent things and create things and define ourselves by ourselves, but that’s not the whole story,” BaratunAmerica Outdoors, a six-part travel series that premiered last week on PBS. Thurston—a writer, comedian, and podcaster who has advised tThe Daily Show, and authored the best-selling memoir How To Be Black—has a knack for navigating nuanced conversations around race, culture, politics, and technology, framing these discussi
The jagged spine of the Rocky Mountains is too beautiful to mar. Yet over the years, developers and builders have manageBuckminster Fuller, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eliot Noyes, and Eero Saarinen completed commissions in the Western United States, transforming it into a hub for architectural modRocky Mountain Modern: Contemporary Alpine Homes (Monacelli Press).
A recurring theme in design critic Alexandra Lange’s work is unpacking how—and for whom—objects and spaces are designed.The Dot-Com City, and surveyed how kids’ toys and physical environments impact their development in her 2018 book, The Design of Childhood. The ways in which outdoor public spaces, with their basketball courts, playgrounds, and skate parks, fail teen girls wa story she wrote for Bloomberg CityLab—one of many publications she has contributed to over the past two-plus decades.
Time standards are one of the many seemingly invisible societal constructs we interact with every day but seldom ponder.Mountain / Time,” the show is a nod to both the local time zone in Aspen, Mountain Standard Time (MST)—which the writer and critic Kylehas hailed for its “apartness” and “sense of detachment from the economic and cultural centers of the nation”—and the conceptual d
Detroit is a city of craft. Of carmakers and Carhartt. Of Motown Records and Eminem. Of iconic midcentury design (Isamu Noguchi’s Hart Plaza and Dodge Fountain, buildings by Mies van der Rohe and Minoru Heidelberg Project. So it’s fitting that, following previous iterations in Copenhagen, last fall, and in Turin, Italy, last month, the Freits latest “Hermès in the Making” exhibition (through June 15). A playful, Willy Wonka factory–like presentation of the company’s know-how, the display offers “an o not to smile while walking through it. Divided into four sections—”A Culture of Traditional Craftsmanship,” “High-Quality Msecret!” Beyond, stations feature artisans in saddle-stitching, porcelain painting, gemstone setting, glove-making, leather wor
Emerging from the pandemic, the design industry, like most of us, has changed. The past two and a half years, which havean increasingly pressing climate crisis, have formed a solemn backdrop. In March 2020, almost at once, in the locked-down lives of many, the notion of “home” a
The concept of the Golden Age was first introduced by the ancient Greek philosopher Hesiod, around 700 B.C., in a refereDesign Miami Basel (June 14–19), taking place at the Swiss city’s Messeplatz. Organized around the theme “The Golden Age: Rooted in the Pa
In her new book, Generation Dread, author and researcher Britt Wray delves into the psychological consequences of the climate crisis. Combining scientifi
May’s colors, textures, and sense of renewal seem to be essential ingredients in Paris-based artist Alexandre Benjamin Navet’s exuberant work. A self-described “spring and summer boy,” his expressive drawings—often made in watercolor or oil pas
How do the generation of Black Americans who grew up in the past 25 years reckon with the tragedies that play out in theThe Trayvon Generation (Grand Central Publishing), poet, educator, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander—who currently serves as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest humanities philanthropy in the UnEp. 52 of our Time Sensitive podcast)—explores these questions, and others, by meditating on race, class, trauma, justice, and memory, and their influences
In 1938, two years after completing one of his first realized public artworks, “History Mexico,” a sculptural, colored chis namesake museum in Long Island City, Queens, which he founded in 1985).
In the early 1860s, an advertisement in The New York Times offered $10,000 to anyone who could invent a new material for billiard balls. At the time, elephant ivory was the matercamphor, a waxy substance found in the wood of the camphor laurel tree. Though celluloid would later prove to be less than idea
Think about the last time you felt a sense of awe about the world. Perhaps you were hiking among trees in a lush forest,
Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs (one-of-a-kind digital assets created using blockchain technology), have divided the art woEp. 59 of our Time Sensitive podcast), see them as pathways to a promising future, while others express concern around the sky-high price points and carbon emissions they generate.
A sobering 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization laid out the striking impacts industrial animal agriculture has
At 35, Maggie Doyne is the mother of more than 50 children. One is her biological child, who lives with Doyne, her husbaBetween the Mountain and the Sky: A Mother’s Story of Hope and Love (Harper Horizon), out last month. Through telling her extraordinary story, she demonstrates the life-altering power of
For most of the 20th century, breaking a sweat was seen as unladylike. Popular opinion considered working out dangerous
One afternoon in February of 1966, Stewart Brand took half a tab of LSD, sat on a rooftop in San Francisco’s North Beach
Eating ramen is a multisensory experience: the fragrant steam coming off of the broth, the slurping sound of enjoying thThe Art of the Ramen Bowl” (March 18–July 5) that’s on view at the Los Angeles location of Japan House, an initiative with additional hubs in Londonburi, the porcelain receptacles in which ramen is traditionally served, and renge, the compact, teardrop-shaped spoons that often accompany them, made by 30 leading artists, architects, and designers.
Anicka Yi’s intoxicatingly sensory installations don’t just surround the viewer—many of them literally permeate the body, their sEp. 14 of our At a Distance podcast), in which three industrial steel tanks saturate the air with an aroma concocted by fusing secretions from carpenter an
Integrative nutritionist Daphne Javitch helps people develop their versions of a healthy life—a potentially daunting tasDoing Well, Javitch, a former womenswear consultant at Theory and Uniqlo, offers private health and career coaching as well as groEp. 46 of our At a Distance podcast.)
Born in Grandin, North Dakota, in 1904, the artist Clyfford Still was among the first generation of Abstract Expressioni
In a single word, how does the future make you feel? A towering sculpture by architect Suchi Reddy, founder of the New Y
Darrin Alfred, the curator of architecture and design at the Denver Art Museum (DAM), has wrangled subjects as mesmerizi
Thick, wobbly lines branch out across a wall of Pace Gallery’s global headquarters in New York. Follow each stroke to itwomen, grandpas, and singers craning toward the ceiling, and donuts, hairs, and holes reaching into the ground. Part absurdist diagram, part heart-melting poem, and part consciousness-shifting artwork, thiDavid Byrne: How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic” (on view Feb. 2–March 19), a restorative survey of drawings the musician has made over the past two decades.
With their audacious, gravity-defying forms, skyscrapers have captured the public’s imagination for more than a century.Skyscraper Page, a zany website with a skyscraper discussion forum that has spread to some 100,000 threads. But what’s the point of obs