Cultivating Awe & Emotional Connection in Daily Life | Dr. Dacher Keltner

April 6, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Dr. Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, has spent decades studying emotions that the standard science of the 1990s could not capture. Raised in Laurel Canyon during its musical golden age, he felt that the field’s focus on anger, fear, and disgust had nothing to say about music, dance, collective movement, or why Martin Luther King Jr. makes him cry. Paul Ekman told him to study awe, and he did. The result is a body of work that redefines awe as a measurable, trainable, and medically relevant experience—not an elusive spiritual luxury but a daily resource for health and connection.

What Awe Is and How to Measure It

Keltner’s lab moved beyond static photographs of six emotions. Using AI to analyze 2 million videos from 144 cultures, his former graduate student Alan Cowan found that 16 distinct facial expressions—including awe, love, compassion, and embarrassment—show about 75% overlap across cultures. The awe expression is unmistakable: wide eyes, lifted eyebrows, a dropped jaw, and the vocalization “whoa.” Physiologically, awe activates the vagus nerve, lowers inflammation, reduces pain, and even improves long COVID symptoms with just a minute of daily exposure. “It’s good news,” Keltner says, and medical doctors are beginning to prescribe nature and music through awe as a mechanism.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **What is Awe & Why It Matters** - Dr. Keltner introduces awe's health benefits: reduced inflammation, elevated vagal tone, and reduced long COVID symptoms from just a minute of awe daily.
2 (02:27) **Defining Awe: The "Lift" and Expanding the Emotion Canon** - Keltner describes awe as a feeling of "lift" and explains how the science of emotions has grown from six basic emotions to twenty distinct states.
3 (11:32) **The Triad of Emotion: Motor, Language, and Feeling** - Keltner breaks down emotion into three streams: motor patterns (facial/body movements), language, and the conscious feeling, noting they often correlate only weakly.
4 (19:56) **Measuring Awe: From the Lab to the Field** - Keltner describes his favorite methods for studying awe, including measuring vocalizations ("whoa"), facial expressions, goosebumps, and vagal tone, often outside the lab.
5 (26:36) **The "Small to Vast" Mechanism of Awe** - A fundamental driver of awe is shifting perception from a narrow, focused view to a vast, expansive one, a transition that is both visual and metaphorical.
6 (30:00) **The Awe Walk Protocol: A Practical Tool** - Keltner details the simple "awe walk" protocol used in his studies, which involves slowing down, deepening breath, and consciously shifting attention from small details to the vast whole.
7 (35:00) **Space-Time Bridging & The Balanced Mind** - Andrew Huberman connects the "small to vast" visual shift to time perception, proposing that awe is not a static state but the *process* of moving between apertures.

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Guests on this episode

Dr. Dacher Keltner

Show Notes

Dr. Dacher Keltner, PhD, is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leading expert on the science of emotions and human connection. We discuss the science of awe—what evokes it and how to access it. Dr. Keltner explains how awe helps us frame our experience of life and who we are both as individuals and collectively. We also discuss the role of humor in social bonding, dispel common myths about the biology of emotions and review the lesser-known factors that strengthen or inhibit relationships and communities.

Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com.

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) Dr Dachner Keltner

(00:01:55) Emotions, Awe; Facial Expressions & Culture

(00:08:11) Sponsors: Joovv & Helix Sleep

(00:11:05) Emotion, Motor Movement & Language