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Today's clip is from episode 340 of the podcast with Dr Dhaka Keltner, professor of psychology and author of the book The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder.
Now Dhaka has spent decades studying the science of happiness.
And in this clip he shares how experiencing awe can transform our physical and mental well-being and why one of the ways we can access this best is through something called collective effervescence.
If I think about the common problems that exist medically, a lot of them are related to inflammation, the immune system stress, the amygdala, the threat response part of the brain, being overactive right.
And you have just beautifully explained that awe can buffer us against.
Those can be an antidote to many of the problems and things that we're suffering from in the modern world.
So I agree with you, right?
Awe is critical.
Every time I teach a large group of people about happiness, I'll have a mom come to me, especially post pandemic.
And they're like, you know, my 17 year old son is in real deep distress and what do I do?
And I turn to the science of happiness and I say man, find some social connections, get them outdoors, you know, give them a way to find meaning or reflect on life.
And now awe, you know awe.
It helps your immune system reducing inflammation, helps your cardiovascular system activates vagal tone, reduces activation in the amygdala, a threat-related region in the brain, helps you think more clearly and more creatively, makes you feel like you have less stress in life.
For 75 years old and older, it makes you feel less physical pain, right?
I could go on.
I mean, these are all studies where five minutes of awe, five minutes, gives you that suite of benefits that I think are comparable to anything you can do.
No kidding.
And we didn't know that.
And now it's starting to spread, right?
Just to be thinking about where are those five minutes of awe?
Yeah.
You've really broadened out my perception of what awe is.
Yeah.
Honestly, like if someone had said to me before reading your book, when do you experience awe?
I probably would have said in nature.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
But one of my favorite chances was the one on collective effervescence.
One of my favorite terms.
I discovered it a couple of years ago.
There's a New York Times article on collective effervescence.
Yeah.
I thought, wow, what a cool term.
I'd never heard of that before.
And then when I open up your book and it's like, oh, you've written a chapter on this, right?
So it's one of those categories of awe, right?
What is it?
How can people experience it?
And why is it so beneficial?
Thank you for calling attention to that.
It was something that emerged in our studies very hard to study scientifically collective effervescence, but it emerged as just a surprising way to find awe.
That is a term that the French sociologist Emile Durkheim coined when he was trying to figure out, like William James did and others, what is the core subjective feeling of religion, and he called it collective effervescence.
And it's when you start moving in unison or you're synchronizing your movements think of a ritual in a church clapping, cheering at a football game, dancing together, doing rituals before a basketball game collective movement.
Then you start to realize collective movement makes you have a shared consciousness, So you're all thinking about the same thing.
The religious figure leading the ritual, the football players on the pitch, the movements at a concert, the band singing and you're all cheering a political speech right.
And then emotion starts taking over where people are like, I got this rush of chills.
I was crying.
I was almost ecstatic.
I was feeling like I was one with everybody around me.
And that's collective effervescence, which is movement attention, shared attention, and then this electric feeling that moves over you, that makes you feel like you're united.
One of the amazing things about thinking about these as contexts of awe which they are is this allows us to find the deeper meaning in these wonderful venues like There are studies that suggest that your football team is almost on par with a church.
It gives you that much meaning and sense of community and sense of history, right?
Following music and going to musical venues.
I love the work on spontaneous forms of collective effervescence that people observe, like pedestrians moving through streets and being at festivals or farmer's markets.
I was just with my daughter Natalie, at a farmer's market and it felt There was collective effervescence.
We were all moving together, getting the street Indian food, sharing it in a park, right?
That was awesome.
And so this framework of awe starts to allow us to see the richness of these common venues of awe that we can enjoy.
A couple of examples that have come to me in doing this work.
One is singing together.
There are all these singing groups out there.
And when I give talks on all, someone always comes up with tears in their eyes like you've got to study choirs because it's all collective effervescence, right.
And it's interesting, a lot of the informal help your body movements like yoga.
20 million people practice yoga in the United States.
And a lot of it's collective effervescence.
You're doing motions together.
Your attention is shared and you start to feel this joy.
Yeah.
I really appreciate you sharing that.
One of the things that I've been, I guess, concerned with a little bit for a while.
You know, a lot of people are struggling to find that sense of community.
And one of the things I said literally a few days ago at one of my talks was look, What do you like doing?
Okay, someone said yoga.
I said, okay, you like yoga.
One of the big problems over the last years is that, because of some of the restrictions, a lot of this stuff has gone online right.
So let's take yoga as an example.
For many people, a phenomenal practice that helps them physically mentally, emotionally And a lot of people.
Now, in our bid to save time and be more efficient, we go on the Zoom class.
We do a 10, 15 minute YouTube video.
And again, that can have a role.
But I say, listen, if that's you, sign up for a class as well.
Do 10 minutes a day on YouTube.
Sure.
That's great.
But make sure once a week you sign up and you go to the class, because That's one of the tips I give people who are struggling with loneliness is what hobby do you have?
What passion do you like?
Is there a local class?
Go there, you'll meet other people like you.
So it's a very clear message throughout your book that one of the powerful qualities of awe is that it takes us outside of ourselves to something much bigger and greater.
Wow.
You've just spoken to a very important empirical question.
Does solitary activity on Zoom compare to collective activity of the same thing?
We know in the education world, it does not.
And Zoom classrooms for most people are a disaster.
You need the collective mind and so forth.
Yeah, I love your recommendation, Rangan.
Jane Goodall, awe, she saw it in chimpanzees.
It is the beginning of our sense of spirit, because it get.
It allows us to be amazed at things outside of ourself, and the central challenge of the mental health crises of today is too much self-focus.
Yeah, and we're not going to find awe with zoom and smartphones where we, you know, we got to get with other people.
You can pray by yourself, but there's something about praying with people who are praying with you together.
He said and there's a lot of spiritual traditions around that playing ping pong with other groups of people, doing dance together, doing yoga together.
There is no substitute.
And the answer for that is awe, that it makes you realize your collective, like Jane Goodall said, and you said I'm amazed at things outside of myself.
But what I will take note of Rangan is a lot of our 20-year-olds and 25-year-olds and 30-year-olds feel that viscerally right.
And a lot of collective things are starting to emerge again.
And game nights are really popular, where you play with actual games, with people physically present, listening to vinyl albums, right.
Where you get back to that ritual of listening to music together.
So it's too strong to take out of our experience and I think it's coming back.
But critical for us to think about.
But one of the really exciting things about awe is it's easy to practice.
It may not sound like it, but it is.
So when I teach healthcare providers which I do a lot of One of the things they do is they say I only have 20 minutes for lunch because, as you know, they work very hard and they're busy, but I'll go sit in the garden.
I'll go on a walk with my colleagues when I have this next conversation, or we will share all stories in a huddle.
And you can do this anywhere, right?
These are little three to five minute shifts in how we do things, be it eating or sharing a nice quote or an all story from work that are easy to do and bring us some of the benefits of awe.
You've done some studies, I think, on something called an awe walk.
Yeah.
So tell us about that.
And there are thousands of people leading awe walks around the world right now, which makes me really grateful.
Yeah, that study begins actually with the great British tradition of walking, and the Brits walk in spectacular ways.
And then Rebecca Solnit, a brilliant writer, did this book on wandering and just how much we derive meaning from walking.
And she called it, she really talked about it in terms of awe.
Like when you walk.
Your body is moving through space, but you feel like you're part of the environment, a path, et cetera, and a tradition.
And so in our study we had people who are 75 years old or older, which is an age in the United States where people start to feel more anxious and depressed because people are dying around them.
And so we just once a week they went out and did an all walk.
And I love this because it's really simple.
Go to someplace that's a little mysterious and look at small things like this rock on your table and vast things like your whole studio, right?
That's all they did.
And they did it once a week for eight weeks.
We had a nice control condition, a vigorous walk condition.
And our 75 years old participants in the all walk felt less distress They felt more awe over time.
And we had them take selfies out on the walk.
And their selfies the self gets smaller and starts to fade off to the side and they're taking in more of the environment.
So they're just aware of what's, they're amazed at things outside of themselves.
And so you put that together with a lot of the data on just walking outside to find awe is so good for you.
And it's easy to do anywhere.
Yeah.
It again speaks to this kind of through line, which is it takes us outside of ourselves.
It connects us to something much greater than our individualistic, potentially ego-driven existence.
Yeah.
All seems to be the perfect antidote to everything we're struggling with today.
Yeah.
Which a lot of it is simply inward focus, me, me, me.
I think it actually really helps us connect with life, connect with something bigger.
Yeah, remind us of our insignificance really, in this kind of ego-focused world where there appears to be more and more people exhibiting narcissistic traits.
Yeah.
This is the power of awe, wherever you experience it, isn't it?
That actually it takes you out of yourself, you know, Thank you for that summary, Rangan.
One of the things you can take from this book is there are these eight wonders that hint to us that there are big things to be part of music and life and death and moral beauty.
And just when you feel awe, just ask yourself, what am I part of here?
And it usually points you towards um, it makes you realize like i'm just a small thing.
That actually is okay, that's actually true, but i'm part of something really large, like fellow humans, you know, an ecosystem or something about culture and and, and we need that today.
You know, like you said earlier, a lot of the health challenges come out of this.
This internal individual focus that has just blown up today and awe moves us towards the things that are amazing outside of ourselves.
And I think, if you look at the broad trends that we've been noting in our largely globalized Western European cultures and now increasingly throughout the world, it's self-focused, it's individualistic, it's more materialistic.
We forget the systems of people we're part of, the families and the culture.
And it's awe-inspiring to reflect on that.
It really is.
And of course, nature is a really good way to access that.
What is it?
The definition you put in the book was awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.
Yeah, yeah.
And I don't know what your experience has been going around the world talking about this, but you show that yes, nature is one way to experience awe, but there's eight ways that you've defined.
So I came to the conclusion that, oh, wow, awe is...
Around me every single day and possibly every single interaction, if I can train myself to see it.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, you know, thank you for bringing into focus.
I think, the two Biggest surprises that blew my mind.
You know we, I too, like Oz nature.
You know we're Western European.
Then I thought ah, I know the spiritual traditions, Oz spirituality and mysticism.
And so we, we gather these stories from 26 countries all over the world, and And awe comes to us through eight paths, which I call the eight wonders.
And I'll just quickly, the moral beauty of people, their kindness and courage.
I teach medical doctors.
And once they think about this, they think, wow, I just gave a patient a terminal diagnosis.
And they held my hand and said, thank you for what you do.
That's moral courage and beauty.
Nature. collective movement, you know?
And what I love about this is like sports fans, like Arsenal fans or you know they're like I love.
Sports are almost spiritual, and that's because of awe.
And then you get to the culture ones, which are music, visual design, and spirituality.
And then the two Rangan that really caught me off guard epiphanies, big ideas, like you know.
Wow, the web of life.
That's the central idea in evolution, right?
That Darwin was blown off the map by.
We're all part of this, what he called a tangled bank of life.
We're all interacting different species.
And then the final one, life and death.
Rangan.
When I started teaching awe eight, 10 years ago to audiences with people over the age of 55, there would always be a hand that would raise and the person would say I felt awe holding my sister's hand when she died.
And just looking at that mystery, feeling it, and so lo and behold, around the world, we really get into a state of awe, thinking about life and death.
We all have our pathways to awe and i think the eight wonders are useful and we can all understand other people's pathways when cast within this broader framework of what humans find in awe, one of the questions i had yeah, around all daca is like, let's say, the grand canyon?
Right yeah, You could put 10 different people in the Grand Canyon.
And yes, you would hope that everyone would feel awe, but some people possibly wouldn't, right?
So it's not the environment that is creating the awe.
It's our approach to that environment, right?
Yeah, that's so important, Rangan, to bring this into our focus here.
And I think there are wonderful insights to be gleaned from those eight wonders of life we talked about.
You know we started to find.
If you ask people like, where do you tear up and get the goosebumps and cry and feel awe and wonder?
And humans are remarkably varying.
It's just a fundamental truth about who we are.
And for some people, it's busy cities and the stream of pedestrians.
And other people, it is sitting by trees by themselves in the quiet.
And for some people, it's classical music.
And for other people, Michael Pollan, just you know, when he interviewed me he's like I was just at a Pussy Riot show and I felt awe.
You know punk rock.
For some people, it's wild art.
For other people, it's still lives, right?
We're all varying.
And music's a great case study of that.
And I think our audience should be asking this question of themselves, which is, think of a time when you last got goosebumps and teared up at a piece of music.
And most people have had that kind of experience and that will bring you benefits.
And that's one of the mysteries to me of awe, is we find it in such unique ways, but also universal ways, right?
And I would encourage our listeners, you know, Awe sounds sublime and ineffable or hard to find.
It's very easy to find.
There's everyday awe and wonder.
Just go get it.
Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip.
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And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest.
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