“Awe is about our relation to the vast mysteries of life,” writes Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor, researcher, and founding director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Amidst the positive psychology-led study of various emotions, awe—that expansive feeling we get from watching a baby take their first steps, or singing with a choir, or gazing into a dark sky rich with stars—was long ignored, until Keltner began investigating its significance. What he has learned over the last nearly two decades, and what he shares in this book, is vital to the science of human flourishing. “How does awe transform us? By quieting the nagging, self-critical, overbearing, status-conscious voice of our self, or ego, and empowering us to collaborate, to open our minds to wonders, and to see the deep patterns of life.” Awe itself represents one such pattern: Through collecting “awe stories” from 2,600 people around the world, his research team found that we all share similar sources of awe (e.g. nature, moral goodness, birth and death), regardless of factors like culture and language.

Keltner’s book explores awe from four perspectives: the scientific, the personal, the cultural, and “the growth that awe can bring us when we face hardship, uncertainty, loss, and the unknown.” Awe is self-transcendent, reducing activity in the brain region that perceives ourselves as separate and self-interested. If we were instead more in touch with our “small self,” the self that exists within a wondrous universe, how would our orientation to purpose change? Our sense of love and belonging? What societal transformation would be within reach? Keltner takes us through all these and more possibilities in this book that is not only scientifically rigorous, but heartfelt and thoroughly inspiring.

I have only praise for this book that investigates the oft-neglected experience of awe. I feel my mind has been expanded just by knowing even the categories of awe! Funny enough, I was introduced to an awe exercise before I read this which involved contemplating the atoms in my own brain stem. Yep, odd. But I am in awe of my unique creation. A bold swing to get us to recapture and appreciate that which our ancestors felt more easily.