Dacher Keltner is on a mission to fill our lives with more awe.
He has spent the last two decades studying awe, which he says is distinct from joy or fear, and how experiencing it can positively affect our bodies, our relationships with others and how we see and interact with the world around us.
Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and the director of the Greater Good Science Center recently chatted with us — Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, hosts of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast — about his work, specifically why we should try to inject more awe into our lives, and what will happen if we do.
Listen to the episode by clicking the play button:
“It’s amazing! It tells us so much about the evolution of the human nervous system,” Keltner, the author of “Awe: The New Science Of Everyday Wonder And How It Can Transform Your Life,” told us. “One region of the brain is deactivated [when we experience awe] — the default mode network. That is where all the self-representational processes take place: I’m thinking about myself, my time, my goals, my strivings, my checklist. That quiets down during awe.”
Awe activates our vagus nerve. That’s “the big bundle of nerves starting in the top of your spinal cord that helps you look at people and vocalize,” Keltner explained, and it also “slows our heart rate, helps with digestion and opens up our bodies to things bigger than us.”
“Awe also cools down the inflammation process,” Keltner said his studies have shown. “It’s part of your immune system that attacks diseases, and we want it to be cooler and not always hot.”
So how do we experience more awe? Keltner, who served as the scientific adviser behind Pixar’s “Inside Out,” said it can be as simple as taking what he calls an “awe walk.”
He and several of his colleagues studied that experience to learn more about awe and what happens when we feel it.
″[The study involved] people…
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