1margd
Finding Awe Amid Everyday Splendor
A new field of psychology has begun to quantify an age-old intuition: Feeling awe is good for us.
Henry Wismayer | January 5, 2023
"Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life" (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/622175/awe-by-dacher-keltner/)
by Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley
...Awe is universal, as familiar to a devout Hindu in India as an atheist in Switzerland. The narratives also pointed to a phenomenology, one in which cultures archived awe, primarily in religion, but also in other “elaborated forms”: song, architecture, sport, ritual.
Subsequent studies would hint at a deeper heritage, one that predated language. Experiments conducted by Keltner and others into whether people of disparate cultures recognize each other’s common “vocal bursts” — think of the “ow” of pain or the “mmm” of pleasure — suggested that “woah” or “wow” or “aaaah,” the vocal bursts associated with awe, is the most universal in the world.
Indeed, awe may not necessarily be the preserve of Homo sapiens. As Keltner notes in “Awe,” the primatologist Jane Goodall observed members of a chimpanzee society in Tanzania approaching a rushing cataract in a forest clearing. Goodall found that the apes fell into a swaying dance, threw rocks and swung across the waterfall’s spray on lianas. Afterward, some would sit on a boulder to watch the rushing water, seemingly in a state of deep contemplation...
...Over the course of Keltner’s research, one recurring motif — and the facet of awe that best unlocks the question of what the emotion is for, and why it might be good for us — is that it precipitates “ego death,” the dissolution of the self.
In one experiment, a Berkeley postdoctoral researcher, Yang Bai, spent several days with research assistants in Yosemite Valley, persuading more than 1,100 visitors to draw themselves while standing at a viewpoint overlooking the valley. Another group were asked to do the same from the more urban vantage of Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. In the resulting pencil sketches, the urban set filled the page with their self-image. The Yosemite subjects, by contrast, tended to draw themselves small, often dwarfed by the valley’s splendor. Being in a monumental natural environment apparently shaped the participants’ self-image. The individual diminished. The surroundings came to the fore.
The data from this and other similar experiments lent some empirical scaffolding to an assumption that shamans, spiritualists and romantics have toyed with through the ages. In the 1836 essay “Nature,” one of the seminal texts of Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes: “The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.”
“If awe feels good, and it usually does, it’s because it is an essential mechanism for collective survival.”
This phenomenon is best understood not as a fracturing of some brittle self-conception but as a form of sublimation. In awe, the self-image becomes diffuse, intermingling not just with other people, but common humanity, the biosphere and everything. Keltner uses the word “merging.”
In his earlier book, Born To Be Good Keltner lamented the ascent of Homo economicus, the supposedly rational model of human behavior that evolved alongside laissez-faire economic doctrines and was later augmented by Richard Dawkins’ influential “Selfish Gene” theory. Keltner was dismayed by the way obsessive self-focus, supercharged by digital technologies, impacted his daughters’ teenage years. It’s a narcissistic, high-stress mindset he continues to encounter among his students in the pressure-cooker atmosphere at Berkeley.
Keltner became convinced that awe could be a counteragent to these immiserating modern neuroses. Notably, not a single respondent in Berkeley’s 26-culture study cited consumer purchases as the source of their awe-story. In “Awe,” Keltner writes: “Awe occurs in a realm separate from the mundane world of materialism, money, acquisition and status signaling — a realm beyond the profane that many call the sacred.”
...Berkeley’s eucalyptus grove was the setting for one of Keltner’s most illuminating experiments. A group of students took turns standing on the edge of the copse and staring into the trunks and branches for one minute. Another group stood in a similar spot but faced the opposite direction, towards the southern façade of Weill Hall, an austere natural sciences building.
Immediately afterward, participants completed a questionnaire. The results demonstrated a clear divergence between the two groups. Team Eucalyptus scored lower on the psychological entitlement scale, which measures egocentricity. Upon being asked to imagine how much they should be paid for their participation in the study, they asked for significantly less money. Finally, in response to a staged accident in which the experimenter dropped some pens, the eucalyptus group were observed to react more helpfully. A short burst of awe seemed to leave participants feeling more altruistic, more collaborative and less entitled.
Keltner says that these “saintly tendencies” are a gateway to understanding awe’s evolutionary purpose. Further clues are found in physiology — in the bodily responses people experience when awe takes hold.
...Keltner believes that the tears and chills that often follow awe are, at root, signaling strategies designed to transmit unspoken messages to other members of a social group. Tears, or welling up, signal that a person is upset, provoking compassion in others. Horripilation, better known as goosebumps, induces cognitive associations of coldness and a mammalian urge to huddle — to comingle into a cohesive whole. This strength-in-numbers impulse, Keltner hypothesizes, binds social groups in common purpose. If awe feels good, and it usually does, it’s because it is an essential mechanism for collective survival.
...Arguably the greatest impediment Keltner faces in convincing a wider public about the far-reaching benefits of awe is a vein of modern cynicism, a sense that awe has been co-opted by a vapid culture of self-improvement and new-age psychobabble.
Often, it can be difficult to employ the language of positive psychology without sounding gauzy or grandiose...
Wonder, of course, is synonymous with innocence. It can seem antithetical to the imperatives of sober, rational adulthood...
Another strain of resistance comes from the gatekeepers of religion.
...studies led by Jennifer Stellar of the University of Toronto sought to establish whether the relationship held in the other direction. What effect do positive emotions have on the cytokine system? Stellar’s team concluded that several positive emotions, including joy and love, did indeed appear to predict lower levels of the cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6), a reliable index of inflammation levels. But the biggest predictor by far — as much as three times more than joy — was awe.
...Other studies have suggested that awe — alongside another self-transcendent emotion, compassion — is the emotion most likely to activate the vagus nerve. ... Though this science is still young, the prevailing hypothesis is that an active vagus nerve, or “healthy vagal tone,” helps to relieve depression and anxiety as well as inflammatory autoimmune conditions such as arthritis and Crohn’s disease.
...whitewater rafting trips on the American River. ... The participants on the expeditions included victims of tough circumstances: teenagers from deprived backgrounds from high schools in Richmond and Oakland, military veterans who were in treatment for a variety of combat-related psychological conditions.
Prior to launch and again a week later, Berkeley psychologists asked them a range of questions to assess their state of mind. They also took before-and-after samples of saliva, from which they were able to measure levels of cortisol, a stress hormone. At the end of a day’s rafting, the cortisol level of each participant had converged with their crewmates — “merging” happening in real-time.
In the days that followed, every participant reported an upsurge in well-being and social connection. The veterans, many of whom were terrorized by flashbacks of the horrors they’d witnessed in conflict, reported a 32% drop in symptoms associated with PTSD. Subsequent analysis revealed that the subjects associated these benefits not with joy or exhilaration, but with awe...
...opportunities to feel awe are all around us — in our surroundings, our relationships, our daily lives. In Keltner’s surveys, subjects reported feeling awe an average of around twice a week. Moreover, awe is regenerative. “That was one of our most surprising discoveries — that the more you feel awe, the more it becomes omnipresent,” he said. “That runs counter to an assumption about human pleasure — that the more we eat ice cream, the less we like it. Awe is different. But you have to put the work in."
..."Many of the best and most spiritually nourishing things in life are all too often rendered invisible by the tyrannies of time, money and force of habit.”
https://www.noemamag.com/finding-awe-amid-everday-splendor/
A new field of psychology has begun to quantify an age-old intuition: Feeling awe is good for us.
Henry Wismayer | January 5, 2023
"Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life" (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/622175/awe-by-dacher-keltner/)
by Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley
...Awe is universal, as familiar to a devout Hindu in India as an atheist in Switzerland. The narratives also pointed to a phenomenology, one in which cultures archived awe, primarily in religion, but also in other “elaborated forms”: song, architecture, sport, ritual.
Subsequent studies would hint at a deeper heritage, one that predated language. Experiments conducted by Keltner and others into whether people of disparate cultures recognize each other’s common “vocal bursts” — think of the “ow” of pain or the “mmm” of pleasure — suggested that “woah” or “wow” or “aaaah,” the vocal bursts associated with awe, is the most universal in the world.
Indeed, awe may not necessarily be the preserve of Homo sapiens. As Keltner notes in “Awe,” the primatologist Jane Goodall observed members of a chimpanzee society in Tanzania approaching a rushing cataract in a forest clearing. Goodall found that the apes fell into a swaying dance, threw rocks and swung across the waterfall’s spray on lianas. Afterward, some would sit on a boulder to watch the rushing water, seemingly in a state of deep contemplation...
...Over the course of Keltner’s research, one recurring motif — and the facet of awe that best unlocks the question of what the emotion is for, and why it might be good for us — is that it precipitates “ego death,” the dissolution of the self.
In one experiment, a Berkeley postdoctoral researcher, Yang Bai, spent several days with research assistants in Yosemite Valley, persuading more than 1,100 visitors to draw themselves while standing at a viewpoint overlooking the valley. Another group were asked to do the same from the more urban vantage of Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. In the resulting pencil sketches, the urban set filled the page with their self-image. The Yosemite subjects, by contrast, tended to draw themselves small, often dwarfed by the valley’s splendor. Being in a monumental natural environment apparently shaped the participants’ self-image. The individual diminished. The surroundings came to the fore.
The data from this and other similar experiments lent some empirical scaffolding to an assumption that shamans, spiritualists and romantics have toyed with through the ages. In the 1836 essay “Nature,” one of the seminal texts of Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes: “The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.”
“If awe feels good, and it usually does, it’s because it is an essential mechanism for collective survival.”
This phenomenon is best understood not as a fracturing of some brittle self-conception but as a form of sublimation. In awe, the self-image becomes diffuse, intermingling not just with other people, but common humanity, the biosphere and everything. Keltner uses the word “merging.”
In his earlier book, Born To Be Good Keltner lamented the ascent of Homo economicus, the supposedly rational model of human behavior that evolved alongside laissez-faire economic doctrines and was later augmented by Richard Dawkins’ influential “Selfish Gene” theory. Keltner was dismayed by the way obsessive self-focus, supercharged by digital technologies, impacted his daughters’ teenage years. It’s a narcissistic, high-stress mindset he continues to encounter among his students in the pressure-cooker atmosphere at Berkeley.
Keltner became convinced that awe could be a counteragent to these immiserating modern neuroses. Notably, not a single respondent in Berkeley’s 26-culture study cited consumer purchases as the source of their awe-story. In “Awe,” Keltner writes: “Awe occurs in a realm separate from the mundane world of materialism, money, acquisition and status signaling — a realm beyond the profane that many call the sacred.”
...Berkeley’s eucalyptus grove was the setting for one of Keltner’s most illuminating experiments. A group of students took turns standing on the edge of the copse and staring into the trunks and branches for one minute. Another group stood in a similar spot but faced the opposite direction, towards the southern façade of Weill Hall, an austere natural sciences building.
Immediately afterward, participants completed a questionnaire. The results demonstrated a clear divergence between the two groups. Team Eucalyptus scored lower on the psychological entitlement scale, which measures egocentricity. Upon being asked to imagine how much they should be paid for their participation in the study, they asked for significantly less money. Finally, in response to a staged accident in which the experimenter dropped some pens, the eucalyptus group were observed to react more helpfully. A short burst of awe seemed to leave participants feeling more altruistic, more collaborative and less entitled.
Keltner says that these “saintly tendencies” are a gateway to understanding awe’s evolutionary purpose. Further clues are found in physiology — in the bodily responses people experience when awe takes hold.
...Keltner believes that the tears and chills that often follow awe are, at root, signaling strategies designed to transmit unspoken messages to other members of a social group. Tears, or welling up, signal that a person is upset, provoking compassion in others. Horripilation, better known as goosebumps, induces cognitive associations of coldness and a mammalian urge to huddle — to comingle into a cohesive whole. This strength-in-numbers impulse, Keltner hypothesizes, binds social groups in common purpose. If awe feels good, and it usually does, it’s because it is an essential mechanism for collective survival.
...Arguably the greatest impediment Keltner faces in convincing a wider public about the far-reaching benefits of awe is a vein of modern cynicism, a sense that awe has been co-opted by a vapid culture of self-improvement and new-age psychobabble.
Often, it can be difficult to employ the language of positive psychology without sounding gauzy or grandiose...
Wonder, of course, is synonymous with innocence. It can seem antithetical to the imperatives of sober, rational adulthood...
Another strain of resistance comes from the gatekeepers of religion.
...studies led by Jennifer Stellar of the University of Toronto sought to establish whether the relationship held in the other direction. What effect do positive emotions have on the cytokine system? Stellar’s team concluded that several positive emotions, including joy and love, did indeed appear to predict lower levels of the cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6), a reliable index of inflammation levels. But the biggest predictor by far — as much as three times more than joy — was awe.
...Other studies have suggested that awe — alongside another self-transcendent emotion, compassion — is the emotion most likely to activate the vagus nerve. ... Though this science is still young, the prevailing hypothesis is that an active vagus nerve, or “healthy vagal tone,” helps to relieve depression and anxiety as well as inflammatory autoimmune conditions such as arthritis and Crohn’s disease.
...whitewater rafting trips on the American River. ... The participants on the expeditions included victims of tough circumstances: teenagers from deprived backgrounds from high schools in Richmond and Oakland, military veterans who were in treatment for a variety of combat-related psychological conditions.
Prior to launch and again a week later, Berkeley psychologists asked them a range of questions to assess their state of mind. They also took before-and-after samples of saliva, from which they were able to measure levels of cortisol, a stress hormone. At the end of a day’s rafting, the cortisol level of each participant had converged with their crewmates — “merging” happening in real-time.
In the days that followed, every participant reported an upsurge in well-being and social connection. The veterans, many of whom were terrorized by flashbacks of the horrors they’d witnessed in conflict, reported a 32% drop in symptoms associated with PTSD. Subsequent analysis revealed that the subjects associated these benefits not with joy or exhilaration, but with awe...
...opportunities to feel awe are all around us — in our surroundings, our relationships, our daily lives. In Keltner’s surveys, subjects reported feeling awe an average of around twice a week. Moreover, awe is regenerative. “That was one of our most surprising discoveries — that the more you feel awe, the more it becomes omnipresent,” he said. “That runs counter to an assumption about human pleasure — that the more we eat ice cream, the less we like it. Awe is different. But you have to put the work in."
..."Many of the best and most spiritually nourishing things in life are all too often rendered invisible by the tyrannies of time, money and force of habit.”
https://www.noemamag.com/finding-awe-amid-everday-splendor/
3margd
On anniversary of NASA's Webb telescope reaching destination, here are the most striking images so far
The telescope is currently orbiting more than 1 million miles from Earth.
Mary Kekatos | January 24, 2023
1:21
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/anniversary-nasas-webb-telescope-reaching-dest...
The telescope is currently orbiting more than 1 million miles from Earth.
Mary Kekatos | January 24, 2023
1:21
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/anniversary-nasas-webb-telescope-reaching-dest...
