The Power of Awe... and Where to Find it
This episode explores how religious faith provides comfort and happiness, then delves into finding secular awe. Dr. Laurie Santos, with Dacher Keltner (UC Berkeley) and Mike Menzel (James Webb Space Telescope), shows how everyday wonder reduces stress, fosters connection, and offers perspective.
Deep Dive Analysis
15 Topic Outline
Tony Hale on Faith and its Happiness Benefits
The Host's Atheism and Search for Spiritual Perks
Introducing Awe: Definition and Characteristics
Scientific Study of Awe and its Bodily Signs
Awe's Impact on Stress and Self-Perception
The Yosemite Experiments: Awe's Effect on Self-Size and Community Connection
Debunking Misconceptions About Finding Awe
The Eight Wonders of Life: Sources of Awe
Everyday Awe: Intentional Walks and Frequent Experiences
The James Webb Space Telescope: A Personal Source of Awe
JWST as a Time Machine and its Incredible Scale
Engineering Challenges and Risks of JWST Deployment
The Emotional Impact of JWST's First Images
Mike Menzel's Childhood Awe and Sharing Astronomy
The Universal Power of Awe to Connect and Transform
5 Key Concepts
Awe
Awe is the emotion we feel when we encounter vast mysteries that we can't make sense of with our current knowledge structures. It feels pleasurable but also threatening and scary, can cause goosebumps, and makes one feel tiny and connected to larger things.
Default Mode Network
This refers to regions of our brain where we ruminate about the past and fret about the future. Experiencing awe seems to deactivate this network, shutting off self-oriented worrying and allowing a sense of 'just being'.
Inclusion of Community in Self-Test
A psychological test that uses a series of overlapping circles to measure a person's perceived connection between themselves and their community. People with a greater sense of connection tend to choose pairs of circles that overlap the most.
The Eight Wonders of Life
These are eight different kinds of experiences identified through a worldwide survey as the most common sources of awe. They include religious experiences, nature, music, art, the moral beauty of other people, epiphanies, collective effervescence, and moments of birth and death.
Time Machine (Telescope)
Any optical device, including the human eye, that sees the universe not as it is in the present, but as it was in the past. This is because light takes time to travel, so the farther an object is, the further back in time one is observing it.
7 Questions Answered
Studies show that people who practice religious faith are significantly happier, report lower stress and depression, recover faster from illnesses, live longer, and feel more supported and less lonely, irrespective of the specific religion.
Awe is the emotion experienced when encountering vast mysteries beyond current understanding; it feels pleasurable but also threatening or scary, often causing goosebumps and a sense of being wordless or destabilized.
Awe reduces stress, deactivates the brain's default mode network (which handles rumination), and causes the self to dissolve, leading to a feeling of being tiny and intertwined with larger things, fostering a greater sense of community connection.
Awe can be sought out intentionally; a worldwide survey found that people experience awe 2-3 times a week, and simple practices like 'awe walks' can significantly increase its occurrence and associated happiness and stress reduction.
The most common sources of awe, according to a global survey, are the moral beauty of other people (kindness, courage), followed by religious experiences, nature, music, art, epiphanies, collective effervescence, and moments of birth and death.
The James Webb Space Telescope acts as a time machine by collecting light from extremely distant objects, some nearly 13 billion light-years away, allowing us to see the universe as it was shortly after the Big Bang.
The JWST had to be designed to fold up like origami to fit into a rocket and then perform 178 complex, non-deterministic deployments in zero-gravity over 14 days, a process made even more challenging by its unrepairable distance from Earth.
13 Actionable Insights
1. Practice Religious Faith
Consider practicing a religious faith and attending religious services, as studies indicate this can lead to significantly higher happiness, lower stress and depression, faster recovery from illness, longer life, and increased feelings of support and less loneliness.
2. Cultivate Awe Regularly
Intentionally seek out experiences that evoke awe, as this powerful emotion can make you feel less stressed, less self-absorbed, more connected to others, and ultimately happier by destabilizing you in positive ways.
3. Practice Mindful Observation of Thoughts
Become an observer of your thoughts and feelings, taking a seat and not identifying with them so much. This practice can help you feel more in the driver’s seat of your emotional life and less drowned by internal struggles.
4. Embrace Healthy Dependence
Challenge the societal praise of extreme independence and recognize that healthy dependence on something, like a spiritual belief or a supportive relationship, is acceptable and can provide significant comfort.
5. Take Regular Awe Walks
Once a week, go for a walk somewhere new or unusual with the specific intention of looking for awe-inspiring things. These simple walks have been shown to significantly increase experiences of awe, happiness, and reduce stress.
6. Find Awe in the Everyday
Open your eyes to the vast and mysterious aspects of ordinary objects and daily experiences, such as the remarkable nature of a common item or the origin of your food. People report experiencing everyday awe multiple times a week just by being observant.
7. Lean Into Personal Passions for Awe
Identify and pursue sources of awe that align with your personal interests and passions, whether it’s science, art, or music. Focusing on what genuinely excites you can be a reliable way to experience wonder.
8. Engage with Nature
Regularly visit breathtaking natural places like mountains, forests, or the night sky to experience awe. Being in nature can reduce stress, deactivate self-oriented worrying, and put daily concerns into perspective.
9. Immerse in Art and Music
Seek out sublime cultural experiences such as viewing great paintings, reading profound literature, or attending live music concerts. These can trigger powerful moments of transcendence, epiphanies, and collective effervescence.
10. Recognize Moral Beauty in Others
Actively look for instances of kindness, courage, and resilience in other people, as observing their moral beauty is the most common and powerful source of awe, often found by simply stopping to talk to more people.
11. Seek Profound Learning
Pursue new knowledge and understanding that can reshape your worldview, as moments of profound learning or ’epiphanies’ are a significant source of awe.
12. Participate in Collective Experiences
Engage in shared group experiences like attending music festivals, clubs, or protest rallies where people move in unison and share attention. This can create a transcendent feeling of collective effervescence and connection.
13. Share Awe with Others
Share your awe-inspiring discoveries and experiences with other people. Sharing wonder can cut through social barriers and foster connection, leading to unexpected positive social interactions.
8 Key Quotes
I can honestly say that I felt like I was a victim to my thoughts and my feelings. I was so drowning in my thoughts and my feelings. And when I became more of an observer of them and took a seat and didn't identify with them so much, you're never going to be fully in the driver's seat, but it felt like I was a little more in the driver's seat.
Tony Hale
My faith is everything to me. My faith is really what, for me, centers me and is a cornerstone for me.
Tony Hale
People have said, before, which I get, they'll say, well, they see faith as a crutch. And the truth is, I'll take two. I'll take two crutches because life is hard.
Tony Hale
Awe is the emotion we feel when we encounter vast mysteries that we can't make sense of with our current knowledge structures.
Dacher Keltner
The self tends to dissolve, and importantly, and this is less well understood, what forms of consciousness does it open us up to? And one of the things that we've documented is the sense that you are actually intertwined with larger things.
Dacher Keltner
You never, ever build anything that has to be deployed in outer space. That was the very first rule I learned in 1981 for satellite design. Well, James Webb breaks that rule in spades.
Mike Menzel
And one by one, they saw that planet and how beautiful it looked. They were amazed. The awe and the beauty of what they saw just cut through all the nonsense, cut through all the hard guy attitudes or even the drugs they were on.
Mike Menzel
I started this episode with the assumption that an atheist like me might have to miss out on the sort of awe that many people experience through faith. I worried that it'd be tough to find transcendent experiences on a regular basis in the absence of religion. But talking with today's guest has made me realize that goosebump moments are there for all of us. We just need to be a bit more intentional in seeking out something awesome.
Dr. Laurie Santos
1 Protocols
Awe Walk
Dacher Keltner- Go somewhere weird or new.
- Actively look for awe-inspiring things.