Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life with Dacher Keltner

In this compelling evening with Dacher Keltner, you will learn how to cultivate awe in your everyday life and how doing so can put you in touch with the most humane aspects of our human nature. Eye-opening science and Dacher’s appropriate sense of wonder add up to an enlightening take on the importance and potency of awe that’s relevant today.

Dacher lays out a scientific overview of awe.

He presents a radical investigation and deeply personal inquiry into the meaning of this elusive emotion. Dacher will take us on a tour of new research—how awe can transform our brains and bodies, alongside examinations of the meaning and influence of awe across history, culture, and within his own life during a period of grief after losing his brother.

He contends that awe is a “basic human need” that’s good for one’s well-being and produces a transcendent sense of dissolving boundaries between the self and the wider world.

Pondering why awe sometimes produces tears, Keltner suggests that adults might tear up as a learned reaction from childhood when one cried while feeling “small and lacking agency,” an emotion similar to the overwhelming sensation that accompanies awe. The feeling has practical applications, detailing scientific studies that found awe to be associated with lower levels of inflammation and capable of mitigating perceptions of political polarization.

Dacher outlines the “eight wonders of life” that are most likely to induce awe: moral beauty (e.g., courage in battle), collective effervescence (e.g., participating in a political rally), nature, music, visual art, spirituality, mortality, and epiphanies. Their power stems from their likelihood to remind the beholder that “we are part of many things that are much larger than the self.”