Description
There is something faintly paradoxical about a scientist cataloguing wonder. The enterprise of taxonomy — eight wonders here, four types of tears there, two distinct varieties of chill — has a way of domesticating the very experiences it sets out to describe. Dacher Keltner knows this. He writes about it near the start of Awe, then proceeds to catalogue anyway.
The book is Keltner’s attempt to do three things at once: report the science of awe, a research program he helped found at UC Berkeley; archive the cultural and personal shapes awe has taken across human history and around the world; and work through the death of his younger brother, Rolf, who took a medically assisted dying cocktail in January 2019. These three projects are uneven partners. The grief narrative is moving. The cross-cultural material is often surprising. The science is real, but thinner than Keltner tends to let on.
Keltner defines awe as “the emotion we experience when we encounter vast mysteries that we don’t understand.” That definition does a lot of work — perhaps too much. Anything from a pharmaceutical-sorting machine to the Holy Spirit to a John Coltrane concert qualifies, and Keltner means this expansiveness seriously. His twenty-six-country study solicited first-person awe stories from people across cultures, and the responses range from childbirth in Indonesia to a graduation in California to a CIA analyst discovering pacifism while watching the Euphrates flow past Abu Ghraib. Keltner bins these into eight categories — “wonders of life”: moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spiritual experience, the life-death cycle, and epiphany.
This periodic table of awe is useful for orientation. But it accumulates rather than argues. Reading through it, I couldn’t easily explain why “collective effervescence” and “music” are separate categories when dancing at a concert activates both, or what mechanism might link the chills of a string quartet with those of a restorative justice circle in San Quentin. The framework has the shape of a map without a clear theory of why the territory has those particular borders.
The science follows a familiar popular-science pattern: a study with a relatively small or convenience-sampled population; a finding presented as discovery; a confident claim about the evolutionary origins of that finding. Keltner and a collaborator exposed participants to 2,100 emotionally evocative GIFs and used computational mapping to show that awe occupies a distinct region of emotional experience — separate from fear, closer to admiration and interest. That is a real result. What it cannot tell us is whether that GIF-evoked awe is anything like watching your brother breathe his last, or standing inside a cathedral, or the chills Keltner finds in Nabokov’s description of reading Dickens: “the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades.” GIF research and Nabokov may be pointing at the same thing. The book doesn’t do the argumentative work of bridging them — it places them in sequence and trusts the accumulation.
The evolutionary story Keltner tells about the bodily origins of awe is, on its own terms, worth having. The piloerection argument — that goose bumps evolved as a social signal in cold-threatened mammals, prompting huddling, and that our experiences of awe repurpose that ancient wiring toward social bonding — is elegant and plausible. The distinction between cold shivers, which accompany dread and isolation, and warm goose bumps, which accompany connection, sharpens something most of us have felt but never examined. Here, the science earns its place. Reading this in a drafty room once, I felt a shiver that seemed to migrate from discomfort into something unaccountably warm — which is precisely the trajectory Keltner is describing, and one of the few moments I believed both the data and the phenomenology simultaneously.
What wears on me is the book’s consistent confidence that it has found not just a positive emotion but a prescription for living. The promotional quality bleeds into the analysis. What gets less airtime: the evidence that collective effervescence can generate conformity and the suppression of individual thought — something Keltner acknowledges in a footnote and doesn’t revisit. The “small self” experience awe produces, where the ego quiets and we feel part of something larger, is treated throughout as unambiguously good. But that same dissolution of self makes people susceptible to crowds, leaders, and ideologies that exploit the openness awe creates. The book doesn’t square this, and the silence is its most telling weakness.
The Rolf sections earn a different register entirely. The description of Keltner holding his dying brother’s shoulder “the way I would the smooth granite stones we used to find near the rivers we swam in as young brothers” doesn’t read like science or self-help. It reads like grief finding its form. Those passages carry the weight the rest of the book keeps promising.
Keltner ends his final chapter with an Opinel knife — his brother’s last gift — and the thought that those we love remain in the cells of our skin. Science doesn’t quite get you there. That the book reaches for it anyway, and sometimes arrives, is its most honest quality.
If you’d like to read the full book in EPUB or MOBI format, feel free to send me an email—I’d be happy to share a free copy with you. Please reach me at: thenovaleaf@gmail.com
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