In this talk, Dacher Keltner will chart the new science of awe. He will consider its deep mammalian origins and how it manifests in cultural processes such as music, visual design, and spirituality and conceptions of the divine. Based on this understanding, Dacher Keltner will consider what has been learned about awe’s influences on self-representation, cognition, and physiology. Bringing these lines of evidence together, he will argue that awe is a self-transcendent emotion that emerged in human evolution to enable individuals to integrate into social collectives and to see the systems of which they are a part.
Online Lecture November 30th with Dacher Keltner, University of California: “The Science of Awe: Evolution, Culture, and Self-Transcendence”
