Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

In our hominid predecessors awe first began to occur in the emotional dynamics of collective action—for example in collective defense, in coordinated hunting, in the rapid response to storms, in the mobilization required at the sound of a herd. In these kinds of collective actions, early hominids felt surges of physical power and connection to their kith and kin. Their body movements became synchronized with others, giving rise to the percept that some force coordinates the many, a sense of unifying common purpose, and a fading of the awareness of boundaries between self and other.

These experiences laid down a readiness to respond to all that unites the members of a group, an attunement as potent as our sensitivity to threat or harm or to the vulnerability of a child. The early hominid mind was ready to respond with awe to individuals who unite the collective—highly ornate leaders, dead family members, neonates. The same came to be true for ideas and objects that bring people together in common feeling or action: mythological stories about the origins of people, chant, celebratory dance, the appreciation of cave paintings. Awash in this experience, our hominid predecessors felt small, a sense of restraint, and a sense of commonality and unity with other group members. This capacity for awe, to be moved by that which unites us into collectives, was to be wired into our minds and bodies. It was to become a dynamic force in culture—source of religion, art, sport, and political movements. The scientific study of awe was to do only modest justice to these claims.

FRACTALS, GOOSE BUMPS, AND T. REX

 

Some emotions are absurdly easy to study in the lab. Embarrassment is one: The minute an individual walks into a lab, aware of being analyzed, experimented upon, videotaped, coded by teams of undergraduates working late into the night, and turned into data, that blush begins to wash over the face.

Other emotions are not so easy. At the top of that list is awe, a humbling object of inquiry. Awe requires vast objects—vistas, encounters with famous people, charismatic leaders, 1,000-foot-tall skyscrapers, cathedrals, supernatural events—that don’t fit well in the fluorescent-lighted 9' × 12' space of a lab room. Awe requires unexpected, extraordinarily rare events that exceed our current understanding of the world—the birth of a child, the death of a parent, that one time you were in the hotel lobby near Mick Jagger, that freak tornado that ripped down your street during a summer storm, the first time you went to a rock concert, political rally, saw mountain peaks, had sex, ate chocolate ice cream, drank wine in a Parisian café.

The scientific study of awe represents a Zen-like challenge—measuring that which might transcend measurement, planning what can only be unexpected, capturing what is beyond description. But this didn’t prevent my students from producing an outpouring of ideas about how to study awe at a weekly lab meeting devoted to the topic. Capture people’s stream of consciousness as they stand at the lip of the Grand Canyon, which William James found to be like one animated organism unified in design. Have participants play a cooperation game with the Dalai Lama or, barring that, the seven-foot center for the basketball team. Bring the world’s biggest ball of string into the lab and have participants sit next to it. Fill a bus with participants and drive five hours from Berkeley to the Humboldt Redwoods State Park, where the subjects could walk amid the tallest redwoods in the world. Record the instant the oarsmen of the Berkeley crew are so in sync that their selves dissolve and they let out an exultant roar (an experience of awe recounted to me by their coach, Steve Gladstone). We thought of staging epiphanies in the lab, to capture James Joyce’s notion of “the significance of trivial things.” Have a participant fall into a conversation with a stranger (actually a confederate) in which they discover that two of their parents almost married, and they almost became siblings. Stage a supernatural event—a voice that sounds like their mother, a vision of a ghost, ooze coming out of the walls. As word spread that we were trying to study awe, I was approached by an all-night dance society—a drug-free raver community—about a possible study of the state they descended into during their parties, which they held in an old church.

Recognizing the impracticalities of these studies, I started with words and images, experiences that, having been raised by a literature professor and a painter, are near and dear to my heart. One student, a devotee of haiku, had undergraduates fill their minds for half an hour with the best of that poetry—flesh-tingling and inspiring for him—and look at whether the experience filled them with a sense of unity and common humanity. No such effect. The students weren’t quite sure why they were reading this obscure poetry in a windowless psychology lab.