Awe

~~ Fyi, I made it about halfway before abandoning this book, so take this "review" with that in mind ~~

The emotion of awe is an interesting area to research, and the book had some cool insights into why we feel it as well as other fun psychology tidbits. The best part, though - the author's synthesis of thousands of awe-inducing experiences collected from around the world and the 8 common themes they boiled these down to, termed the "8 wonders of life" - came right at the beginning and I gradually lost interest from there. There seemed to me to be relatively frequent inconsistencies or stretches-of-the-truth in the interpretation of some of the studies' results, and other parts were just less rigorous than I'd hoped - it's definitely less so than something similar like The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. Much of the book is filled with short excerpts of the thousands of stories, which can be enjoyable to read in their own right (and some indeed left me awed at times, too), but I was kind of hoping for a more theoretical treatment of the topic throughout, and this felt a little more like "feel good science" that's dumbed itself down a tad too much in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience and sacrificed its integrity in the process.

It's hard to write a book about awe, I think, that's...well, awesome.

Dacher Keltner gives it a go in his new book, Awe. He shares what he and a collaborator discovered from collecting stories of awe from people in twenty-six countries, what he calls the Eight Wonders of Life. So what most commonly led people around the world to feel awe?

(1) Other people's courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming.
(2) Collective effervescence. A term created by French sociologist Émile Durkheim that describes the feeling of buzzing and crackling with life force that merges people into a collective self, a tribe.
(3) Nature.
(4) Music.
(5) Visual design.
(6) Spiritual and religious awe.
(7) Stories of life and death.
(8) Epiphanies.

Keltner offers more details from his study of stories of awe, and then he tells stories of awe that he has heard.

All in on awe and this book. At first I was a bit hesitative as the author is a hippie-offspring from California hiking Joshua Tree and trying ayahuasca, using his brother's death as a red string throughout the book, but, in the end, I loved it.

The chills, the tingles, the amazement, that causes our body to release oxytocin and dopamine, that causes us to be open, to connect, to explore. Biology wants us to be amazed by the vastness and beauty of life, in order to be better humans.

He structures awe experiences into 8 main groups:

• moral beauty


• collective effervescence


• nature


• religious experiences


• art


• music


• birth


• death