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If you’ve gotten goosebumps when hearing a story about a stranger’s selfless heroism, or you’ve felt your chest swell at a concert, when the audience’s voice and the musician’s instruments align, you have felt awe. And, according to professor Dacher Keltner, who has spent his life studying it, it’s one of humankind’s most unifying traits:
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15 years ago, I was approached by this guy, who is Pete Docter, who's a director at Pixar
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and he had just won the Academy Award for his film Up, and that montage of Carl and
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Ellie still brings tears to my eyes as a representation of love
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And Pete asked me, he said, you know, we're thinking about making a movie about the emotions
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in a young girl's mind. She's 11 years old, going through a crisis. You teach emotion at UC Berkeley
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I've been listening to your podcast and so forth. What emotion would you add to a young girl's mind
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to really fill out her character? And in some sense, that's the question we're asking tonight
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What emotions do we add to our imaginations and schools and public life? And without missing a
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beat, I said, awe. So awe is, by most people's accounting, one of the fundamental experiences
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in our lives. Albert Einstein said, the beautiful experience of mystery is the cradle of art
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and science. Out of awe comes creativity and science and films and great stories and the
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things that make us a rich culture. Rachel Carson, the great environmentalist, as she was fighting
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cancer and raising her nephew, whose mom, her sister, had died of cancer, she said
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we have to teach our children to wonder. So indestructible, it'll be an unfailing antidote
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to the alienation of our times. And for those of you who track the well-being of children or who
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are raising children know we have a lot of all work to do we are not serving our children in
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terms of teaching them wonder well I lost that battle odd didn't make it into the film regrettably
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and I will tell you I actually thought when they invited me to go to Pixar that they wanted to use
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my voice as a character they have better people to do that work they invited me back for inside
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out too. I made my pitch again, lost that one as well, so I'm here for revenge. So what is awe
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Awe is an emotion that you feel, spine tingling, tearing up, lump in the throat
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right, warm chest. When we encounter vast mysteries that we don't understand
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wonder follows these big experiences of awe. It is what we might call an epistemological state
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that animates exploration. You'll hear a lot about that tonight in Curiosity and Discovery
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When the great thinkers Newton and Descartes pondered rainbows, the awe experience of perceiving rainbows
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led them to a state of wonder to figure out how in the world
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when light bends through water and produces a color spectrum, would that happen
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And they did wonderful color theory, physics, and math to figure that out. I'm going to tell you a few different stories of awe tonight
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I hope you're thinking about your own awe stories. The first is evolution
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I do a lot of evolutionary work and really ponder, is this state of wonder and awe, are
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they really something that you can trace in mammalian evolution? Jane Goodall, one of the Templeton Prize winners
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in observing her chimpanzees noted when chimpanzees encounter vast forces in nature thunderstorms rivers big winds lightning bolts
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they show what looks like awe and wonder that we show. They fluff up their fur, which is the equivalent of goosebumps
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They ponder, they look at things, they touch rocks and hold them as they're feeling awe
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How many of you have sacred objects that come out of experiences of awe? Right
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You want to hold and touch things. Very fascinating. And it led Jane Goodall to say, I couldn't help the feeling that this waterfall display
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or dance, because they rock back and forth, is triggered by feelings of wonder and awe
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we feel. Why wouldn't they also have some kind of feelings of spirituality, which is really one of my
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favorite quotes about awe? being amazed at things outside of your cell phone
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I mean, yourself. So I study the evolution of awe and other emotions
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by studying this remarkable communication system known as your vocal apparatus. It is a spectacular physiological system
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And I won't bore you with it, but it's probably the most complicated communication system
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in the history of life. and we study these little sounds called vocal bursts
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by which we communicate different emotions. And there are a few, I'm very proud to say
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in the Inside Out film that I feel proud of. So I'm going to test this room of writers and filmmakers
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and thespians and people and just see how good you guys are down here in L.A. at producing these sounds
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I'm going to say a word and I'm going to count to three and see how good you guys are at producing the sound
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Okay. Interest. One, two, three. Very good. Triumph. Anger. That was a little Marge Simpson in there. Anger. You're way too mad. I better watch. You're working on it. I can tell
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So how about sympathy? Did that hit you in the body? And awe
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Isn't that nice? Around the world, when we take those sounds, we've done this in dozens of countries
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the remote Himalayas of eastern Bhutan, they know what emotion that is
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It's this universal language that is very deep in our evolution. Those sounds predate language, symbolic thought, and the like
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So they are very deep in our evolution as a very social mammal
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Oh, well, let's go ahead. No, I won't do ecstasy. All right, ecstasy
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There we go, over there. Awe is the origin of culture, of great stories and poems and fables
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and fairy tales and novels and films that some of you may work on
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A lot of interesting work going on on that. We've done a little bit of it. that the elicitation of the experience of awe and wonder
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is a great animating force of creating art. It's well-known in Mesoamerican cultures
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that there are textiles and pyramids and carvings, some of the best the world's ever seen
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and this Wyshkara painting are about eliciting the experience of awe in the people who enjoy them
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Awe is the fabric of culture. I got interested in where do we find awe So we gathered stories of awe from 26 countries People wrote what their experience was with the vast and the mysterious countries
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as far-reaching as Mexico and India and Russia and China and Poland and Argentina and Germany and the like
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Really diverse countries in terms of religion, political structure, economic situation and the like
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And what we discovered is what I call the eight wonders of awe
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Remarkable sources to think about. We find awe around the world in spiritual experience, in encountering the divine
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be it in a yoga class or reading a sacred text, or 41% of Americans out in nature
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Spirit is a source of awe. We find awe, and this was the most universal source of awe, and it caught me off guard
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likewise our investigators, in what we would call moral beauty. The kindness and courage and overcoming and justice and humility of our fellow human beings
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It is remarkable to start sharing stories of moral beauty, because you can hear a stranger's account of the courage of somebody facing cancer
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or the kindness of the grandmother always cooking, and you start to tear up
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You don't know people. Such a powerful force in our culture. We find awe really remarkably, and I'll return to this, in the life cycle
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that everything in life begins, grows, asymptotes, plateaus, starts to decay, and dies, and returns
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That life cycle, from the first moments of life, so many of us find awe seeing children be born
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to the last moments of life, when we see it change into something else
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produces awe around the world. The stories were remarkable testimony to this
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We find awe in, and this is remarkable, just moving together and singing together
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and vocalizing together, collective effervescence. We find awe in big ideas, and you'll hear a lot about them tonight
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from dark matter to do whales communicate and what is their language like
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and music and visual patterns and nature and the like. Wonderful sources of awe
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My lab has found that there is almost nothing better for a human being to experience
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than a moment of awe. It makes us more altruistic. We have a loneliness epidemic
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and if you find awe gardening, reading poetry, watching a great film
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listening to music, even by yourself, you'll feel more connected to other people
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It makes us humble and interested in others, countering the narcissism of our times
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It actually, our lab show, decreases ideological polarization around the hot issues of our times
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We need more awe. We've gone on to show a minute or two of awe is as good for your body as anything you can imagine
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It reduces inflammation, elevates vagal tone. And it helps reduce long COVID symptoms in people suffering from that very difficult condition
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One minute of awe a day. So let me end with a personal story that I had to write about as I wrote this book
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I was blessed to have the greatest brother, and I hope you all had the greatest brother
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who was my younger brother Rolf And this was we grew up in Laurel Canyon in the late 60s as you can imagine Thank you for laughing at that
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And then we moved to this rural town of 300 people when my mom got a job teaching
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And that's right after a haircut for our first day of school, as you might imagine
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I don't know why I wore that headband throughout middle school, but there it is
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And that's my brother, after he had gone through chemotherapy fighting colon cancer
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For those of you who've been around colon cancer, it's combat and it's chaos, and his was
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Six months later, he'd pass away. I was right there holding his shoulder
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and I'm used to statistics and neurons and cells and that kind of thing, and I saw space change
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I saw something in his body. In the period of grief that followed, I heard his voice
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I felt his hand on my back two different times, really on my back
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It changed how I saw the world. It was an experience of all
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But our culture is in crises of depression and anxiety and bodily crises and assaults
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on knowledge and freedom and democracy and loneliness. And that was how I was feeling
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where I do this science, I was like, I gotta go find all
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And so what I did is I went to find moral beauty
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And I went to Gandhi's ashram and just pondered how on a small table in Amdabhad, India
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he wrote words that led to the salt march and the overthrow of colonial rule
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that inspired Martin Luther King and the civil rights and the free speech protests that Berkeley
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a nice place in and dramatic social change from a very small place out of a humble man
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I volunteered and do a lot of work in prisons. Darnell Washington, who's feeding the homeless
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and went right here in one of the parks in LA, taught me that we can find awe and lift our souls
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anywhere if they can find it in San Quentin prison. I looked at nature, as I'd all encourage
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you to do in different ways, long studies of nature, immersing myself in the power of
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nature. We now know we have multiple receptors in our skin and our sense of smell and beauty
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and hearing water activates parts of the nervous system that are good for healing in our bodies
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Ralph Waldo Emerson knew that. When we return to the woods, we return to reason and faith
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There is nothing in life that nature cannot repair. Out of this I learned, awe brings out the good in us
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it brings out the good in everybody around us. It leads to real transformation and growth, as I found
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as I grieved the loss of my brother. And now I think really the question for us is, together in this moment
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How do we build communities of awe? How do we get this emotion into the stories you work on
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the schools that I consult with, the museums I work with, the public spaces
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the national parks, our public life, our shared commitment to each other
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We have a lot of work to do and we have a very good guide
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which is awe. Thank you
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