A 2018 study found that participants who reported experiencing awe more often in their daily lives were deemed more humble by their friends. In pulling us away from our usual self-referential states, awe can increase “ prosocial behaviour”, which broadly means being more generous and cooperative. This has been shown to help in recovering from PTSD. In psychological fields, being made to feel small is known as self-diminishment. ![]() It isn’t just about grand edifices.” It’s true: I realise that I experience awe staring at the small galaxies of fur on my dog’s chest or watching geese land on a pond. Like, I can’t believe how that little girl can rock climb or, I can’t believe how kind that guy was, and you get teary. “In our research, people report feeling awe twice a week – and they’re not all flying to the Grand Canyon. “When you hear ‘awe’, one image often comes to mind: the Grand Canyon,” says Keltner. Awe may even expand our perception of time and, as another study suggests, make us feel less impatient. A 2021 study argued that experiencing awe “awakens self-transcendence”, helping people get closer to their “authentic” selves. In 2018 a white paper by the Greater Good Science Center and the Philadelphia-based John Templeton Foundation found that awe experiences are linked with a decrease in markers for chronic inflammation (associated with cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and bowel diseases) and reduced rumination associated with depression. In the words of psychology professor Dacher Keltner, co-founder of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, awe “ sharpens our brains”. The physiological experience of awe – goosebumps, dropped jaws, caught breath – is wonderful in itself, but research suggests that regularly feeling wonder can have a range of benefits for our physical and mental wellbeing as well as increasing our compassion, generosity and critical thinking ability. ![]() In our research, people report feeling awe twice a week – and they’re not all flying to the Grand Canyon Dacher Keltnerĭespite centuries of philosophical fascination, awe has only been studied properly in the past 20 years. Burke believed awe was something felt not just during religious ceremonies (as once previously thought) but also in everyday experiences: music, patterns of light or a crack of thunder. ![]() In 1757 the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke revolutionised our understanding of awe with his text A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Also referred to as the sublime, awe is felt, according to the Romantics, when our inner, subjective world collides with the objective natural world and overwhelms us.
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