82 AUSTRALIAN SKY & TELESCOPE APRIL 2016The importance of awe
Can kids today still experience the “11th emotion,” the key to loving astronomy?
W
hile struggling in abject poverty
in the 1870s, future astronomer
Edward Emerson Barnard
received a Bible from his Sunday school
teacher. He kept it his entire life, but apart
from inscribing his name, he underlined
but one passage (Job 38:31–32):Canst thou bind the sweet influences of
Pleiades,orloosethebandsofOrion?
Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his
season,or...guideArcturusandhissons?When Barnard was a boy, it was still
possibletoseetheMilkyWayfromhis
home town, and the sight of it filled
himwithawe.Today,fewchildrenin
industrialised societies live in areas
where views of the night sky are similar
to those Barnard enjoyed. Would Barnard
have felt the same sense of awe under
thenightskythatmotivatedhimtounderscore those verses of Job, and
that inspired him to a passionate life of
studying and observing the sky, if he had
lived under light-polluted skies?
Awe, the emotion that lies at the heart
of what motivates us to do astronomy,
is only recently getting its due from
psychologists. Less familiar than the ‘big
ten’ (love, fear, sadness, etc.), it has been
called the11th emotion. Humans may be
the only species that can feel it, and some
people may never experience it. Others,
however, are intimately familiar with it
and know well the accompanying tingling
of the spine.
Neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall
has defined awe as an “overwhelming
and bewildering sense of connection
with a startling universe that is usually
far beyond the narrow band of our
consciousness”. No doubt many readers
can date the beginnings of their interestto a specific occasion of awe, perhaps the
sight of a total eclipse or a majestic comet.
Do youth today still experience awe?
Increasingly, the visible universe is in
full retreat. Of course, virtual substitutes
abound: Cassini views of Saturn’s rings,
Hubble Space Telescope images of distant
galaxies, and so on. Stunning as they
are, do they arouse the same profound,
potentially life-changing emotion that a
direct sense of connection to the universe
supplies? How long does it take for them
to go from ‘awe-some!’ to ‘bor-ing’?
Perhaps Barnard, if he had lived
today, instead of gazing in solitude at
the nearby planets through his small
telescope, would have invested his time in
Facebook. Maybe then he would have had
more self-esteem, for recent studies have
shown that use of social media increases
narcissism (self-love).
Awe, on the other hand, leads to a
sense of a small self, says psychologist
Paul Piff (University of California,
Irvine), and it encourages those who feel
it to exhibit more pro-social tendencies.
They are more generous, empathic, and
caring about others than their less awe-
inspired peers.
This is an argument, in my view,
for making astronomy — and exposure
to other aspects of ‘wilderness’ —
central to schemes of child development
and to educational core curricula. If
we encourage awe, astronomy’s core
emotion, we will not only invite children
to a lifelong passion to investigate
the universe but encourage them to
embrace kinder, more caring communities
on Earth. ✦William Sheehan, whose biography of E.
E. Barnard, The Immortal Fire Within,
came out in 199, recently retired after three
CATHY GENDRON decades as a psychiatrist.
Focal Point William Sheehan