AI Summary
5 min readThe Reset Button
In July 1798, William Wordsworth stood on the banks of the River Wye and wrote about feeling "a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused." Two centuries later, psychologist Dacher Keltner found himself in a Wisconsin winter, far from his California home, suffering from spectacular panic attacks—70 to 80 a year, full-blown episodes that convinced him he was dying. His career was stalling, his grants and papers were being rejected, and he felt like a stranger in a flat, frozen land where people rooted for the Packers and ate bratwurst.
Keltner tried to escape his anxiety through basketball, forming a team of professors and graduate students called "The Laughing Amygdala" that improbably won campus championships. He drove to Milwaukee to see Iggy Pop in concert, got swept into a mosh pit, and later wrote the musician a letter. Six months later, Iggy Pop wrote back. Keltner still gets goosebumps remembering it. He and his wife sat on their front porch as a tornado warning blared, watching a storm roll in. These experiences felt radically different from each other, but Keltner eventually recognized a common thread: in each case, he was losing himself, getting outside his own anxious preoccupations.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:01) **Introduction: The Romantic Roots of Awe** - Shankar Vedantam opens with William Wordsworth's poem "Tintern Abbey" as a historical touchpoint for the feeling of being overwhelmed by nature.
- 2 (03:28) **Host's Personal Crisis: Anxiety and Isolation** - Psychologist Dacher Keltner describes his move from California to Wisconsin, which triggered severe panic attacks and a sense of estrangement.
- 3 (07:04) **First Clues: Basketball, Music, and a Storm** - Keltner recounts three disparate experiences that helped him escape his anxiety: playing on a championship basketball team, attending an Iggy Pop concert, and watching a tornado approach with his wife.
- 4 (13:27) **The Common Thread: Awe Defined** - Keltner realized these experiences all activated the emotion of awe, which he defines as encountering "vast mysteries" that require a mental "need for accommodation."
- 5 (16:18) **Personal Origins of Awe** - Keltner's parents (a painter father and a literature professor mother) exposed him to awe through art, poetry, and music from a young age.
- 6 (19:18) **The Scientific Definition of Awe** - Keltner and Jonathan Haidt defined awe as the emotion we feel when we encounter "vast mysteries" that require a "need for accommodation."
- 7 (23:14) **Sources of Awe: Moral Beauty and Epiphany** - Awe is also triggered by the "moral beauty" of other people's kindness and by sudden epiphanies that reveal a larger truth.
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Show Notes
Many of us rush through our days, weeks, and lives, chasing goals and just trying to get everything done. But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy that’s all around us. This week, we revisit a favorite conversation with psychologist Dacher Keltner, who describes what happens when we stop to savor nature, art, or simply the moral courage of those around us. Then, in our segment "Your Questions Answered," Mary Helen Immordino-Yang returns to answer listeners' questions about learning and how to keep students engaged in school.
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