How Experiencing Awe Affects the Brain & Body | Dr. Dacher Keltner & Dr. Andrew Huberman

Added: 2026-04-28

[00:00:00]I think for a lot of people, including myself, we assume that awe is this kind of forgetting of our self. Like getting outside of ourselves.

[00:00:11]But I'm starting to to think based on the way you're describing it that it's about being tethered to the larger picture. That it's not a Yes, it's getting out of our heads, quote unquote, but it's actually very much an embodied experience. It's very It's almost like full body.

[00:00:29]Yeah. And so now I'll answer your question.

[00:00:32]Uh this is usually where people start putting in the comments like you talk too much, let your your guest talk. But I try and folks, he asked me.

[00:00:38]>> And twice. So you ask me a question, I'm going to answer it. Anyone that knows me, you know, if I Okay, so I've thought about this this relationship between visual aperture and a time perception for a long time. This is my my deepest obsession and it gets a little bit into the book I'm writing, but it but it it's probably reserved for after there's some experiments. And and I um to the fear of my podcast crew, I I actually am considering going back into the lab to do the this experiment. So we know what What do we know for certain?

[00:01:09]We know for certain that when your visual aperture is small, like looking through a soda straw view or watch um maker type aperture, or um you're in a let's just say a could be a pleasant or unpleasant text communication going back and forth, that your perception of time is different. You're fine slicing. Exactly.

[00:01:28]Those dot dot dots coming through.

[00:01:29]>> Yeah. It's just like this.

[00:01:31]>> like an eternity. Yeah. And it's bidirectional with your let's just call it level of alertness. It doesn't even have to be stressed, but sympathetic nervous system, right? So if I'm in line at the store and and I I have some place to be, my visual aperture shrinks and then it feels like the person in front of me is taking forever.

[00:01:48]>> Yeah, cuz you're in these little micro Yeah.

[00:01:49]>> relaxed, it feels like I'm slicing time differently. Okay, when we see a horizon and and our aperture opens up as I mentioned, then we relax, but we also are taking fewer time bit snapshots. So people might think oh fewer, you're in slow motion cuz they were No, you're you're it's the opposite, right? Slow motion is high frame rate. With this thing by video where you can catch slow motion, you need a high frame rate. This is why when people experience like a car crash, they'll often say that things felt like they were slowing down. More snapshots.

[00:02:20]>> That's cool. So when I think about this relationship between visual aperture and time, and it also exists in the auditory domain. So if I'm listening to a specific conversation at a party, I'm fine slicing my perception of auditory space.

[00:02:35]Our friend Irv Hafter taught me this.

[00:02:37]When I listen to everything and I take it in as a whole, it's it's a more relaxed experience, but okay. Cool.

[00:02:44]>> So a long time ago, I was because I was experiencing stress, I started reading about meditation types and different things and and I I came up with this meditation. It's but it's not meditation at all. And some of my listeners will be familiar with it. I decided to call it for lack of a better term, space-time bridging. The meditation is very simple.

[00:03:04]You close your eyes and you do three breaths thinking about your skin inward.

[00:03:09]So interoception. You open your eyes and you look at your hand. You take three breaths. But you're creating a visual tether between you and your hand. Then you look some distance, maybe 8 or 10 feet away, you do the same. Then you find a horizon. And then you think about the sort of pale blue dot phenomenon.

[00:03:24]Like you're just on a planet floating in space and like every single one of these things is a form of meditation or a meme or or whatever. And then you get right back to yourself. And so what the idea here is that it helped me a lot because I noticed that meditations where I was completely focused inward made me more focused inward. Going for a run, I could get outside my head, but it and I started to play with the idea that maybe it's not about having a small aperture or a big aperture per se, but it's the like every great thing in biology or psychology, it's the process. It's not an event. It's the process of going from one aperture to the next.

[00:03:59]>> And that's kind of what life is about.

[00:04:01]>> Yeah, absolutely.

[00:04:02]>> Like when this too shall pass is really about taking a broader time snapshot. Like eventually this thing >> visual as well.

[00:04:09]>> Which is visual. And so this is a long answer to your question, but It's really interesting.

[00:04:14]>> this is why it's so important for me to see a horizon if I can in the morning.

[00:04:18]Um but it's also very important to go indoors and just like focus on what I'm working on. Like there is no place or event in a day or in life that that's actually the right way to live. Like you can go to Big Sur, and if you're lucky enough to go to Esalen, like you're like this is it. But it's only it because you came from your office, in my opinion.

[00:04:37]And then you go back again.

[00:04:39]>> Yeah. You figure this out. Like you The title of this paper, which you're the senior author, is a balanced mind off fosters equanimity via temporal distancing.

[00:04:50]Yeah, no, it's So it's So it's about time, not about space.

[00:04:54]>> It is. That's fascinating.

[00:04:55]>> So that's that's how I think about this.

[00:04:56]Now maybe you can tell us about this paper because I'm getting embarrassed that I've been going way too long.

[00:05:01]>> This is why we're in conversation, Andrew, which is, you know, you studied the visual system and and we need more of that knowledge in the science of awe. And I will just make one parenthetical note, which is I was interviewing Matthias Tarnopolsky, who was at Berkeley and then went to the Philadelphia Symphony. I was a music director there and he said I was like and he was he studies the great and he's a conductor of symphonies. And I was like what's the Music's hard to understand scientifically. It is complicated. I was like what's the why awe and music? Why do we cry?

[00:05:35]Why do we get goosebumps? Why do I mean, profound. And he's like time.

[00:05:40]It's all about what it does to our sense of time. And so I think there's a hypothesis there to explore.

[00:05:47]What awe does to the self, and I'm putting together a couple of your comments, is and Jane Goodall got it most right. And and it's, you know, it's so great to study things with science and then you see someone you really revere say something. And she was she felt that chimpanzees feel awe. I do too. Believe that. So It's a controversial issue.

[00:06:13]Uh chimps show and Frans de Waal alerted me to this, who recently passed away and I just want to pay reverence to him or homage to him. Um the great primatologist. So he said you got to look at Jane Goodall and writing about chimps and the waterfall display they show when they are around vast nature.

[00:06:33]They sit quietly like around rivers, like that waterfall in Berkeley.

[00:06:38]They They look at things, they get goosebumps, they touch things like we would out in nature.

[00:06:44]Uh they rock and they Jane Goodall said why wouldn't they feel awe uh or the beginnings of spirituality, which is really being amazed at things outside of the self.

[00:06:58]So with awe we We have a sense of self, interoception and the like, and then we connect to vast things out there.

[00:07:05]And that's what our research documented as kind of a central mechanism of awe or transformation is like when you're at Yosemite or when you are standing next to that T-Rex skeleton or when you've you know, when you've thought about the passage of time that happens with life, right? And there are new meditations around that.

[00:07:28]You're like wow, I am part of something vast. I'm part of evolution. I'm part of nature. I'm part of an ecosystem. Uh and it changes your whole mind, right? It changes the neurophysiology of the mind.

[00:07:44]Default mode network starts to quiet down. Activates vagal tone. And you do feel like you're tethered as you said to like music or a culture or political movement or the team you love, right? And it's transcendent.

[00:08:01]Um and if you look at where we are today, we need more of that. You know, we need to to get our young people to be connecting to big things.

[00:08:09]>> [music] [music]