In AWE, The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, Dasher Keltner, PhD, foremost expert on the science of emotions, and host of the award-winning podcast, The Science of Happiness, presents a groundbreaking and essential exploration into the history, science, and greater understanding of the elusive feeling of awe.
Dr. Keltner summarizes the latest science of awe, and how it can transform the health of our minds and bodies. He takes the reader on a tour of the deep cultural history of awe, from Indigenous traditions to William James, and details what is known about the evolutionary history of awe. The book covers 15 years of basic lab science that has discovered how we can find awe (in the eight wonders of life -- moral beauty, collective effervescence, visual art, music, nature, the life cycle, big ideas and spirituality), how it transforms our sense of self and view of the world, and how it benefits health and well-being.
In AWE Dr. Keltner shows us how cultivating awe in our everyday lives leads us to appreciate what is most humane in our human nature.
Bios:
Dacher Keltner, PhD (dacherkeltner.com) is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center (greatergood.berkeley.edu) and host of its award-winning podcast, The Science of Happiness. Dr. Keltner’s research focuses on the biological and cultural evolution of compassion, awe, love, beauty, and humility, as well as power, social class, and inequality.
Dr. Keltner is the author of about 300 scientific articles (that have been cited over 100,000 times) and several best-selling books, including Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence, and AWE: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life.
Dr. Keltner has won many research, teaching, mentoring, and service awards, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has consulted for Apple, Pinterest, Google, the Sierra Club, Carnegie Hall, the National Parks, and the National Gallery, and was a scientific consultant for Pixar’s Inside Out, Soul, and Inside Out 2, and for the Center for Constitutional Rights in its work to outlaw solitary confinement.
Helena Hansen, an MD, PhD psychiatrist-anthropologist, is Professor and Interim Chair of Psychiatry and Interim Director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. She is an internationally recognized leader in social medicine, and in biosocial research that illuminates the mechanisms by which social environment drives mental health outcomes. She is the author of over 100 articles in leading clinical and social science journals, and of three books: Addicted to Christ: Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Drug Ministries; Structural Competency in Medicine and Mental Health: A Case-Based Approach to Treating the Social Determinants of Health (with Jonathan Metzl); and Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America (with Jules Netherland and David Herzberg), which won the 2023 New Millennium Book Award from the American Anthropological Association and the 2024 Rachel Carson Prize from the Society for the Social Study of Science. She has received numerous other awards, including an honorary doctorate from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and election to the National Academy of Medicine.
Currently she is co-founder and director of the Ecological Medicine and Psychedelic Studies Initiative, an international trans-disciplinary network of researchers and practitioners that is developing the clinical field of Ecological Medicine to remedy disconnection among humans, non-human species, and the natural environment.