Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

So I turned to images, on the supposition that awe may more uniformly be triggered by the visual modality. Small groups of undergraduates watched images of endlessly unfolding fractals on a forty-eight-inch screen for half an hour, on the assumption that this experience would lead to expansive, communal conversations afterward. When I looked in on the experiment from my lab’s control room (from which you can watch, via video feed, participants in rooms nearby), I saw my honors student running the study, clearly just back from Burning Man, with glitter speckling her cheekbones. Groups of what appeared to be electrical engineering and molecular and cell biology students sat, bemused, watching the fractals, deriving mathematical functions that would explain such organic forms. I swear I heard someone mumble, “Didn’t Timothy Leary get his PhD from Berkeley?” (He did.)

But the science of awe, notwithstanding these initial missteps, is inching forward. Let’s start with where William James started: The autonomic nervous system. In one study we asked people to describe physical sensations that accompanied different positive emotions, including awe. We found that goose bumps are fairly unique to awe.

 

Goose bumps—most typical of awe.

 

Goose bumps is the colloquial term for piloerection, the activation of minute muscles that surround hair follicles distributed throughout the body but in particular in the back of the neck and back. Piloerection is one action of the fight/flight, sympathetic autonomic nervous system. In our primate relatives—the great apes—piloerection is resorted to in adversarial encounters; primates piloerect to expand their size (with hair standing on end) to threaten and display physical dominance and power. In humans, piloerection shifted in its use, coming to occur regularly when we ourselves feel expanded beyond the boundaries of our skin, and feel connected to other group members. We feel goose bumps when listening to an elevating symphony, when chanting in common cause at a political rally, when hearing a brilliant, mind-expanding lecture, because our self is expanding beyond our physical boundaries to fold into a collective. Piloerection shifted from an association with adversarial defense to connection to the collective.

Alongside piloerection, in the depths of awe people report an expansive, warm swelling in the chest, no doubt a representation of the activation of the vagus nerve. Chris Oveis has found that the vagus nerve does indeed fire during the experience of elevation at others’ moral goodness, a close relative of awe. When participants viewed a film about Mother Teresa’s works with the poor and starving in Calcutta, their vagus nerve was activated. Awe in the body, then, reflects a confluence of two physiological processes fitting for our evolutionist claims about this transcendent emotion: the expansion of the self in goose bumps, and the opening of the chest to social connection.

This physiological state of awe is accompanied by profound shifts in the sense of the individual’s place in the world. In one study, Lani Shiota and I had participants recall transformative experiences in nature, for example when listening to the waves of the Pacific Ocean or walking through the light of a eucalyptus grove. The defining realizations that accompanied these recollections, although lacking the poetic metaphor of Muir or Emerson, were: “I felt small or insignificant,” “I felt the presence of something greater than myself,” “I felt connected with the world around me,” “I was unaware of my day-today concerns.” Awe diminishes the press of self-interest and reorients the mind to interconnection and design.

Of course, these findings are retrospective, and may just reflect people’s theories about what awe does to the mind, rather than what awe actually does to the way that we look at the world. This led Lani to an imaginative study of in vivo awe. In this experiment participants arrived at our lab but were told they were to complete the experiment in a different building on campus. They walked for about five minutes across some rolling lawns and a bridge over Strawberry Creek, which winds its way through the Berkeley campus, and arrived at the neoclassical Valley Life Sciences building. They proceeded into the main foyer of the building, where they were asked to sit, not coincidentally, next to a full-sized replica of a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton. The skeleton is about twelve feet high at the hip, about twenty-five feet long, and weighs approximately five tons—a source of awe for evolutionists and creationists alike (and in fact, when we stopped other students walking by the T. rex and asked them how it made them feel, they put their cell phones aside and consistently uttered “awe”).