Acknowledgments
I feel such warmth when thinking about my vast network of collaborators in the science of awe: Craig Anderson, Yang Bai, Belinda Campos, Serena Chen, Daniel Cordaro, Rebecca Corona, Alan Cowen, Dante Dixson, Amie Gordon, Sara Gottlieb, Kristophe Green, Jon Haidt, Oliver John, Neha John-Henderson, Michael Kraus, Daniel Loew, Laura Maruskin, Galen McNeil, Maria Monroy, Joseph Ocampo, Chris Oveis, Paul Piff, Disa Sauter, Lani Shiota, Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Eftychia Stamkou, Daniel Stancato, Jennifer Stellar, Todd Thrash, Jessica Tracy, Ozge Ugurlu, Everett Wetchler, David Yaden, Felicia Zerwas, and Jia Wei Zhang. This science was enabled in profound ways by the bold support of Christopher Stawski and the John Templeton Foundation. For the awe pioneers who shared their time and stories of awe with me, I bow my head in appreciation here. For careful readings of my writing, I am grateful to Barry Boyce, Yuria Celidwen, Natalie Keltner-McNeil, Mollie McNeil, Michael Pollan, and Andrew Tix. I found such joy in talking about awe with Chris Boas, Nathan Brostrom, Danielle Krettek Cobb, Chip Conley, Claire Ferrari, Roshi Joan Halifax, Jeff Hamaoui, Serafina Keltner-McNeil, Casper ter Kuile, Michael Lewis, Evan Sharp, Dan Siegel, Jason Silva, Matias Tarnopolsky, Jon Tigar, and Nick U’Ren. Thank you, Jason Marsh, for creating so many conversations about awe at the Greater Good Science Center. I had deep hesitations about writing this book, and upon starting had no idea what form it would take. My agent, Tina Bennett, guided me in finding the structure and soul of the book; she pointed me in regular missives to currents of awe in history, literature, and culture and challenged me in different drafts. Thinking of this brings a current of goose bumps to me now. To work on this book with my editor, Ann Godoff—all I can say is wow. What a humbling and mind-opening experience it has been. Thank you, Ann, for your interest in the transcendent, for guiding my writing with lightning-bolt epiphanies about this mysterious emotion, and for pushing me toward an understanding of the essence of awe beyond the data and figures and hypotheses.
Credits
1: Map of emotional experiences evoked by video, copyright © Alan S. Cowen, 2017.
2: Research materials and findings from study of vanishing sense of awe, courtesy of Yang Bai.
3: Selfies from participants in the “awe walk” study, courtesy of Virginia E. Sturm.
4: The sculpture of the skinless man, from Galerie de Paléontologie et D’anatomie Comparée, courtesy of the author.
5: Participants in a study of wild awe, courtesy of Craig Anderson and Maria Monroy.
6: Participants in a study of study, photos courtesy of Paul Piff.
7: The pull between attachment and release from The Topography of Tears © Rose-Lynn Fisher, published by Bellevue Literary Press 2017, blpress.org.
8: Berlin street art, courtesy of the author.
9: “Transmigración del moderno Maya-Pipil” (1997) mix media on blueprint paper. Artist Leda Ramos. Leda Ramos Collection, Central American Memoria Histórica Archive, Special Collections and Archives, Cal State LA University Library.
Notes
“From wonder into wonder”: Tzu, Lao. Tao Te Ching. Translated by Witter Bynner. New York: Perigee, 1944.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Introduction
I ached physically: For an explanation of how the pain of loss activates different branches of the nervous system, see Eisenberger, Naomi I., and Matthew D. Lieberman. “Why Rejection Hurts: A Common Neural Alarm System for Physical and Social Pain.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (2004): 294–300.
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hallucinations that Joan Didion describes: For a compelling account of how grief can lead to altered patterns of thought and perception, bordering, at least in experience, on the hallucinatory, see Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. New York: Vintage Books, 2007.
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Our minds are relational: Andersen, Susan, and Serena Chen. “The Relational Self: An Interpersonal Social-Cognitive Theory.” Psychological Review 109 (2002): 619–45.
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vastest mystery I had encountered: In his book A Brief History of Death, historian W. M. Spellman charts how death is the instigator of great thought and cultural forms. Across history, Spellman observes, cultures resort to one of three broad systems of beliefs to make sense of death. For the strict reductionists, the death of the body is it; it is the end of the individual. The agnostics throw up their hands, or keep open their minds, to the possibility that there is something beyond life, but they are noncommittal. And then there is most of humanity, which tells stories about some kind of afterlife, in different religious traditions. Spellman, W. M. A Brief History of Death. London: Reaktion Books, 2014. For more on the cultural history of how we approach death, see: Kerrigan, Michael. The History of Death. London: Amber Books, 2017.
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Chapter 1: Eight Wonders of Life
“our passions are uncharted”: Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room. London: Hogarth Press, 1922, 105.
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every human experience: I was a graduate student at Stanford University, an epicenter of this cognitive revolution. My classmates Rich Gonzalez and Dale Griffin and I carried around the books just coming out by our faculty advisers about judgment and decision-making. There was buzz that someday this work, so challenging to accounts in economics of rational choice theory, would win Nobel Prizes, which proved to be the case for Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler. This work would make its way some thirty years later to popular books like: Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and my friend Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project from 2016. In the mid-1980s, our bibles were: Kahneman, Daniel, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky. Heuristics and Biases: Judgments under Uncertainty. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Nisbett, Richard, and Lee Ross. Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980.
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termed “System 1” thinking: Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2011.
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Ekman, though, would soon publish: Early in the science of emotion, Paul Ekman and, across the Atlantic in Switzerland, Klaus Scherer oriented the field to these elements of emotions: the quality of their experience, their expression, how they influence thought and action, and their neurophysiological patterning. These arguments underlie many of the studies that examine how awe differs from states like fear, interest, the feeling of beauty, and surprise. Ekman, Paul. “An Argument for Basic Emotions.” Cognition and Emotion 6, no. 3–4 (1992): 169–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699939208411068. Scherer, Klaus R. “The Dynamic Architecture of Emotion: Evidence for the Component Process Model.” Cognition & Emotion 23, no. 7 (2009): 1307–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930902928969.