I reviewed Dacher Keltner’s Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder for the TLS:

Over the centuries, the word awe and its derivatives have suffered what linguists call semantic bleaching: overuse has weakened their intensity. The Old English awe meant a feeling of terror or dread. From this kind of awe-full derived awful, an adjective attached to anything deemed unpleasant or abysmal from the late 18th century onwards. From the early fifteenth century, the terror and dread associated with awe came to be mixed with reverence or wonder, usually inspired by the divine. Awesome meant arousing this kind of awe, until it came to mean merely breathtaking, and finally turned into a vague term of approval, meaning “cool”. The other day, a student on one of my courses sweetly exclaimed “awesome!” when I gave him a copy of the module handbook.

Dacher Keltner wants to revive the old sense of awe as an intense, life-altering feeling, but not its earliest associations with terror or dread. Nor does he subscribe to the common belief that awe can be so overpowering as to deprive us of our critical faculties, leaving us prey to dogma and demagoguery. Keltner, a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has conducted experiments which suggest that, in a state of awe, our thought is more probing, rigorous and energised. Awe, he writes, “awakens the better angels of our nature”.

Keltner defines awe as “the emotion we experience when we encounter vast mysteries that we don’t understand”. His book begins with a moving account of watching his brother Rolf die. As Rolf, terminally ill with colon cancer, took opiates to end his life, Keltner sensed “a force around his body pulling him away”. Watching life leave another person is an awe-inducing experience. It makes us aware of the great mystery and preciousness of being alive and the dignity and solidarity of death, and connects us with forces much larger than us.

Keltner’s work forms part of ongoing efforts in academic psychology, from the early 1990s onwards, to take emotions seriously. A long tradition in Western thought, running from Plato to Descartes and beyond, has seen emotions as base, bestial and sinful. Humanity’s highest achievement, in this tradition, is the intellect, which supposedly transcends and survives our animal, bodily selves. This newish sub-field of psychology suggests, to the contrary, that emotions are a crucial influence on our thoughts. They are the lens through which we perceive the world. Keltner’s research shows that awe, like other emotions, is grounded in bodily responses – not just the obvious phenomena like tears, goose bumps and hairs standing on end, but an autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), which is when your spine literally tingles, along with the shoulders, neck and head.

Awe has less visible bodily effects. It triggers the release of oxytocin, the “love” hormone that helps us to trust and bond with others. And it activates the vagus nerve – a cluster of neurons running from the brain to the abdomen that regulate bodily functions, slowing our heart rate, aiding digestion and deepening breathing. Awe also reduces inflammation in the body, associated with depression, heart problems, cancer and autoimmune diseases. Awe, in other words, confirms Walt Whitman’s hunch that the soul follows “the beautiful laws of physiology”.

By concretising the experience of awe, Keltner’s book offers a valuable corrective to our hyper-individualist culture. Much of our current understanding of how human life and society operate is dominated by rational choice theory. This theory holds that people act mainly as self-interested individuals, and that they pursue this self-interest efficiently with the aim of maximising the utility of any outcome. Rational choice theorists focus on what psychologists call the default self: the self that considers itself a free agent, discrete and distinct from others and geared towards competitive advantage. The dominance of rational choice theory encourages us to see life and human relations instrumentally, in terms of clear, measurable and self-maximising outcomes. As Keltner says, this is why schools cut art, drama and music classes, and why creative approaches to pedagogy are replaced by teaching to the test.

But our default self is not all that we are. Awe quiets this self-maximising part of us, Keltner argues, and invites us “to collaborate, to open our minds to wonders, and to see the deep patterns of life”. A common prompt for feeling awe is witnessing what he calls “moral beauty”: other people’s courage, kindness or capacity for overcoming adversity. Awe puts our lives in perspective, making us feel small but still significant, a tiny piece of patchwork in a vast tapestry of existence. When we are awestruck, our life’s work seems “both less important than our default self makes it out to be and yet promising in purpose and possibility”.

I think I understand what Keltner means by awe, then, but I am not convinced that his research subjects have the same understanding of it as he does. With his Berkeley colleague, Yang Bai, Keltner collected 2600 stories of experiencing awe from people in 26 countries. He also interviewed people from many walks of life: basketball players, San Quentin prisoners, cellists, clerics. They and Keltner come up with such wildly disparate examples of awe that you wonder if they are talking about the same thing. These examples include watching a seven-year-old daughter play the tin whistle in front of 200 people, listening to lullabies, Mexican waves at football games, mosh pits, the Burning Man festival, the Cirque du Soleil, surfers riding 50-foot waves and, for one Swedish woman, witnessing her husband’s strength when moving furniture around the house. Keltner makes a point of saying that, in these stories of awe, “no one mentioned their laptop, Facebook, Apple Watch, or smartphone”. But many people do view the latest tech with something approaching awe, and I don’t see how different this is from the other examples he cites.

One problem here is that the word awe has been so semantically bleached. Keltner notes that Google Trends reveals a sharp rise in the use of the word since 1990. Such sharp rises are rarely accompanied by definitional precision. A second problem is that awe tends to evoke only a pre-verbal language of so-called vocal bursts, like “ooh” and “whoa”, that evolved in Homo sapiens prior to the emergence of words. When Keltner asks his subjects to describe their experiences, they fall back on boilerplate phrases like “it gives me the chills”.

This wouldn’t matter if Keltner were a precise enough writer to convey some sense of the ineffable. Instead, his prose style is garrulous and gushy, heavily italicised for emphasis and with browbeating paragraphs consisting of single, all-caps sentences such as “GET OUTDOORS”. There are awkward thumbnail sketches of the people he interviews: “Over Indian food, Frank ate sparsely, like the competitive miler he was at Harvard.” Kierkegaard is introduced as “the dour Danish philosopher”, which isn’t the descriptive adjective I would have chosen.

Like most books aimed at occupying the bookseller’s genre of “smart thinking”, this book is reducible to a single lesson that can be snappily summarised and serialised. Keltner’s single lesson unites a huge range of material, from the teachings of Julian of Norwich to anecdotes about being seated at a dinner next to Steven Spielberg, who tells Keltner that “we are all equal in awe”. The stories Keltner relates – of epiphanic moments experienced by doctors, army veterans, hospice workers and midwives – are not as powerful as they might be, because they come so thick and fast and are shoehorned into a somewhat artificial taxonomy of awe based on eight “wonders of life”, from nature (“wild awe”) to music.

There is lots of signposting and recapping, of the “to answer this question, we will …” and “we are nearing an end to our first section” kind. All this hand-holding can make it seem as if there is nothing to learn that Keltner doesn’t already know. “Twenty years into teaching happiness,” he writes on the second page, “I have an answer: FIND AWE.” This spoiler means that the book’s whole argument is baited and primed from the start. That isn’t to decry the two decades’ worth of work that Keltner has done on this subject, and his generous-spirited and carefully-argued use of it. But awe is about embracing the mystery, and there was no mystery to this book at all.