The third section shifts to a treatment of how culture archives awe in different forms. We will consider the place of awe in music (chapter 7), visual art (chapter 8), and religion and spirituality (chapter 9). These are large tasks indeed but illuminating once we narrow in on the place of awe in these creative forms of culture.
The last section of the book returns to how awe helps us grow when we face loss and trauma, and more generally when we face the unknowns and uncertainties of life. It was striking for me to learn how central awe is in how we grapple with life and death and their ever-repeating, species-shaping cycle (chapter 10). And how across the eight wonders of life, awe reveals big insights to us about the point of our lives in our continual search for meaning (chapter 11).
In teaching happiness for more than twenty years, I have seen how much health and well-being we gain by being amazed at things outside ourselves. By finding awe. From our first breath to our last, awe moves us to deepen our relations with the wonders of life and to marvel at the vast mysteries that are part of our fleeting time here, guided by this most human of emotions.
SECTION I
• • • A Science of Awe
ONE EIGHT WONDERS OF LIFE An Awe Movement Begins
The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted.
• VIRGINIA WOOLF
The last time the word “awe” hit me with the force of personal epiphany, I was twenty-seven years old. I was in Paul Ekman’s living room, having just interviewed for a fellowship in his lab to study emotion. Ekman is well-known for his study of facial expression, and a founding figure in the new science of emotion. At the conclusion of his querying, we moved to the deck off his home in the San Francisco hills. We were embraced by a view of the city. Thick fog moved through the streets toward the Bay Bridge and eventually across the bay to Berkeley.
Stretching for conversation, I asked Paul what a young scholar might study. His answer was one word:
Awe.
At that time—1988—we knew very little scientifically about emotions: what they are, how they influence our minds and bodies, and why we experience them in the first place.
Psychological science was firmly entrenched in a “cognitive revolution.” Within this framework, every human experience, from moral condemnation to prejudice against people of color, originates in how our minds, like computer programs, process units of information in passionless ways. What was missing from this understanding of human nature was emotion. Passion. Gut feeling. What Scottish philosopher David Hume famously called the “master of reason,” and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, termed “System 1” thinking.
Emotions have long been viewed as “lower” and animalistic, disruptive of lofty reason, which is often considered humanity’s highest achievement. Emotions, so fleeting and subjective, others observed, cannot be measured in the lab. Our passions were still very much uncharted some seventy years after Virginia Woolf’s musing.
Ekman, though, would soon publish a paper—now the most widely cited in the field—that would push the scientific pendulum firmly toward emotion. In this essay, a field guide really, he detailed the what of emotions: They are brief feeling states accompanied by distinct thoughts, expressions, and physiology. Emotions are fleeting, shorter-lived than moods, like feeling blue, and emotional disorders, such as depression. He outlined how emotions work: they shift our thought and action to enable us to adapt to our present circumstances. To approach the why of emotions, Ekman took a cue from Charles Darwin: Emotions enable us to accomplish “fundamental life tasks,” such as fleeing peril, avoiding toxins, and finding nutritious food. Emotions are central to our individual survival and our evolution as a species.
A young science had a field guide, and scholars promptly went exploring. First, scientists mapped anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, and joy, the emotions whose facial expressions Ekman had documented in the hills of New Guinea in the early 1960s. Next to appear in the lab were the self-conscious emotions—embarrassment, shame, and guilt. Studies charted how these states arise when we make social mistakes, and how blushes, head bows, awkward appeasing smiles, and apologies restore our standing in the eyes of others. Sensing that there is more to the mind, brain, and body than negative emotions, and more to the delights of life than “joy,” young scientists then turned to studies of states like amusement, gratitude, love, and pride. My own lab got into the act with studies of laughter, gratitude, love, desire, and sympathy.
An emotion revolution in reaction to the cognitive revolution was underway, moving psychological science beyond its dry and cool cognitivist account of the mind and inattention to the body. Neuroscientists were mapping “the emotional brain.” Studies alerted those interested in the secrets of love to the finding that marriages dissolve when partners express contempt to one another. Our culture wars over abortion, race, class, and climate crises could be traced back to gut feelings about the moral issues of our times. For faring well in life, emotion scientists determined that we are better served by cultivating our “emotional intelligence,” or EQ, than our IQ. Today we are still in the midst of “an age of emotion” in science, one that shapes every corner of our lives.
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One emotion, though, would not get the call for this revolution, an emotion that is the provenance of so much that is human—music, art, religion, science, politics, and transformative insights about life. That would be awe. The reasons are in part methodological. Awe seems to resist precise definition and measurement, the bedrock of science. In fact, how would a scientist study awe in a lab? How could scientists lead people to feel it on cue and measure its near-ineffable qualities, or document how awe transforms our lives, if, indeed, it does?
There were theoretical barriers as well. As the science of emotion got off the ground, it did so in a theoretical zeitgeist that held that emotions are about self-preservation, oriented toward minimizing peril and advancing competitive gains for the individual. Awe, by contrast, seems to orient us to devote ourselves to things outside of our individual selves. To sacrifice and serve. To sense that the boundaries between our individual selves and others readily dissolve, that our true nature is collective. These qualities did not fit neatly within the hyperindividualistic, materialistic, survival-of-the-selfish-genes view of human nature so prominent at the time.
One cannot help but suspect that personal hesitations were at play as well. When people talk about experiences of awe, they often mention things like finding their soul, or discovering what is sacred, or being moved by spirit—phenomena that many believe to be beyond measurement and the scientific view of human nature.
Emotion science had a field guide, though, a road map for charting the what, how, and why of awe. What awe needed first was a definition, the place where all good scientific stories begin. What is awe?