When life feels overwhelming, Berkeley professor Dacher Keltner turns to one emotion he believes can transform everything: Awe.

Through his research into vocal bursts, Keltner discovered that awe even sounds the same across cultures, including in some of the most remote regions of the world. He and his team collected stories of awe from 26 countries, identifying eight universal sources of this emotion shared across humanity, from moral beauty to collective effervescence. Even one minute of awe per day, he explains, can help us heal loneliness, grief, and even physical ailments. 

At A Night of Awe & Wonder, hosted by Big Think and the John Templeton Foundation, Keltner invites all of us to rediscover awe, a force for connection and healing in our modern lives.

DACHER KELTNER: About 15 years ago, I was approached by this guy, Pete Docter, who's a director at Pixar. He had just won the Academy Award for his film Up. That montage of Carl and Ellie still brings tears to my eyes as a representation of love.

Pete asked me, he said, “We're thinking about making a movie about the emotions in a young girl's mind. She's 11 years old, going through a crisis. You teach emotion at UC Berkeley, I've been listening to your podcast and so forth — what emotion would you add to a young girl's mind to really fill out her character?”

And in some sense, that’s the question we’re asking tonight: What emotions do we add to our imaginations, our schools, and our public life?

Without missing a beat, I said: awe.

Awe is, by most people’s accounting, one of the fundamental experiences in our lives. Albert Einstein said the beautiful experience of the mystery is the cradle of art and science. Out of awe comes creativity, science, films, and the great stories that make us a rich culture.

Rachel Carson, the great environmentalist, as she was fighting cancer and raising her nephew whose mother had died of cancer, said, “We have to teach our children to wonder. It will be an unfailing antidote to the alienation of our times.”

For those of you raising or working with children, you know — we have a lot of awe work to do. We are not serving our children in terms of teaching them wonder.

Well, I lost that battle. Awe didn’t make it into the film — regrettably. And I’ll tell you, I actually thought when they invited me to Pixar that they wanted to use my voice as a character. They had better people for that. They invited me back for Inside Out 2; I made my pitch again — lost that one too. So I’m here for revenge.

So what is awe?

Awe is an emotion you feel in the spine tingling, the lump in the throat, the warmth in the chest — when we encounter vast mysteries we don’t understand. Wonder follows those big experiences of awe. It’s an epistemological state that animates exploration, curiosity, and discovery.

When the great thinkers Newton and Descartes pondered rainbows, their awe experience led them to wonder — to figure out how in the world light bending through water produces color. They did color theory, physics, and math to figure that out.

I’ll tell you a few different stories of awe tonight. The first is evolution.

I do a lot of evolutionary work and wonder — is this state of awe something you can trace in mammalian evolution? Jane Goodall, one of the Templeton Prize winners, observed that when chimpanzees encounter vast forces in nature — thunderstorms, rivers, big winds, lightning bolts — they show what looks like awe and wonder. They fluff up their fur (the equivalent of our goosebumps), they stare, they touch rocks and hold them as they feel awe.

Many of us have sacred objects that come from awe experiences — things we want to hold or touch. Jane Goodall said, “I couldn’t help feeling that this waterfall dance is triggered by feelings of wonder and awe. Why wouldn’t they also have feelings of spirituality?”

I study the evolution of awe and other emotions by studying the vocal apparatus — one of the most complicated communication systems in the history of life. We study little sounds called “vocal bursts” by which we communicate emotion.

I’m going to test this room of writers and filmmakers. I’ll say a word, count to three, and you make the sound. Ready?

Interest — one, two, three. (Audience responds.)

Triumph.

Anger. 

Sympathy — “awww.”

And awe — “awww.”

Isn’t that nice? Around the world, in dozens of countries, people recognize these same sounds. It’s a universal language, deep in our evolution — predating language and symbolic thought.

Awe is the origin of culture — of great stories, poems, fables, fairy tales, and films. The elicitation of awe and wonder is a great animating force in creating art. In Mesoamerican cultures, their textiles, pyramids, and carvings are among the best the world has ever seen — designed to elicit awe.

Awe is the fabric of culture.

I became interested in where we find awe. We gathered stories of awe from 26 countries — as far reaching as Mexico, India, Russia, China, Poland, Argentina, Germany, and more. We found eight wonders of awe:

We find awe in spiritual experience — in encountering the divine, in yoga, in sacred texts, or out in nature (41% of Americans say this).

We find awe in moral beauty — the kindness, courage, justice, and humility of others. Sharing stories of moral beauty can make you tear up even when you don’t know the people — it’s such a powerful force in our culture.

We find awe in the life cycle — birth, growth, decay, death, and renewal. Watching a child be born or someone pass away transforms us.

We find awe in collective movement — singing, dancing, chanting together — what Émile Durkheim called “collective effervescence.”

We find awe in big ideas — dark matter, whale communication, music, visual patterns, nature.

My lab has found that there’s almost nothing better for a human being than a moment of awe. It makes us more altruistic. It combats loneliness. Even if you find awe alone — gardening, reading poetry, watching a great film — you’ll feel more connected. It makes us humble and curious about others. It even decreases ideological polarization around the hot issues of our time.

We need more awe.

We’ve found that even a minute or two of awe is good for your body — reducing inflammation, elevating vagal tone, even helping reduce long COVID symptoms. One minute of awe a day.

Let me end with a personal story.

I was blessed to have the greatest brother — my younger brother Rolf. We grew up in Laurel Canyon in the late ’60s. Then we moved to a rural town of 300 people when my mom got a teaching job.

Years later, Rolf fought colon cancer. Six months after chemo, he passed away. I was right there, holding his shoulder. I’m used to statistics and neurons — but I saw space change. In the grief that followed, I heard his voice, I felt his hand on my back — twice. It changed how I saw the world. It was an experience of awe.

But our culture is in crises — depression, anxiety, loneliness, assaults on knowledge and democracy. I was feeling that too. So I went to find awe.

I went to Gandhi’s ashram in India and pondered how, from a small table, he wrote words that led to the Salt March, to decolonization, to Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, to Berkeley’s free speech movement. From one humble man came massive social change.

I volunteered in prisons. Darnell Washington, who feeds the homeless right here in L.A., taught me that if they can find awe in San Quentin, we can find it anywhere.

I looked to nature — immersing myself in it. We now know the sounds and sensations of nature activate healing systems in our bodies. Emerson said, “When we return to the woods, we return to reason and faith.” There’s nothing in life that nature cannot repair.

Out of this, I learned that awe brings out the good in us. It brings out the good in everyone around us. It leads to transformation and growth — as I found while grieving my brother.

So the question for us now is: how do we build communities of awe? How do we get this emotion into the stories you work on, the schools, museums, public spaces, and parks — into our public life and our shared commitment to each other?

We have a lot of work to do — and a very good guide: awe.

Thank you.