there was surprisingly little scientific investigation of awe, despite
the fact that it’s considered one of the core positive emotions, along
with joy, contentment, compassion, pride, love and amusement.
“Basically, awe is something that blows your mind,” Paul Piff, a
psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, told me. There are
degrees of awe, he explained, from the momentary amazement of
watching weird dancing-toddler videos on Facebook to seeing
Northern Lights for the first time, which can reconfigure your view of
the universe. A deeply powerful, awe-inspiring experience can change
someone’s perspective for a long time, even permanently.
Roland Griffiths is a psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins who
studies the sometimes profound, awe-filled experiences of terminally
ill patients who ingest psychedelic substances. It’s not unusual for
them to hallucinate they are leaving their bodies, flying over
landscapes and encountering divine beings. Griffiths told journalist
Michael Pollan he considers these mind-trips a kind of “inverse
P.T.S.D.”—“a discrete event that produces persisting positive changes
in attitudes, moods, and behavior, and presumably in the brain.” This
is how entranced astronauts describe the “overview effect” when
viewing the earth from space. Awe-triggering, life-shifting jolts are
also recounted by survivors of near-death experiences and by more
prosaic mountain climbers, surfers, watchers of eclipses and people
who swim with dolphins, among others. When they are vast, nature
scenes and events can connect us to deeper forces in the world. At the
very least, these types of experiences appear to alter us temporarily.
To find out how, Piff, Dacher Keltner at UC Berkeley and two
other colleagues conducted some unusual experiments. Keltner had
already posited that awe is a unique emotion that turns us away from
narrow self-focus and toward the interests of our collective group. To
see if awe makes us more generous to each other, the researchers
asked 1,500 people how much awe (and other emotions) they
experienced on a regular basis. Then they gave some participants ten