Awe

Dacher Keltner runs a lab at Berkeley that has spent years studying awe, the specific emotion you feel when you encounter something vast that briefly makes your sense of self smaller. Awe pulls together the research his lab and others have done, organized around what he calls the eight wonders of life.

The wonders include moral beauty, collective effervescence, music, art, the spiritual, the natural world, big ideas, and life and death itself. Each gets a chapter built around studies, personal stories, and Keltner’s own experience after the death of his brother.

The science is real and well-cited. The personal sections give the book emotional weight.

Readers who liked Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis or Susan Cain’s Bittersweet will find a related sensibility. Keltner is a more academic writer than either, but the prose stays accessible.