There’s another way in which the digital respite we get in nature could enhance our creativity. The time we spend scrutinizing our small screens leads us to think small, even as it enlarges and aggrandizes our sense of self. Nature’s vastness—the unfathomable scale of the ocean, of the mountains, of the night sky—has the opposite effect. It makes us feel tiny, even as it opens wide our sense of the possible. It does all this through an emotion that we confront most commonly in nature: awe. Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has led much of the
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