The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

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 recent research on awe; he calls it an emotion “in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear.” One of the pleasurably fearsome things about awe is the radically new perspective it introduces. Our everyday experience does not prepare us to assimilate the gaping hugeness of the Grand Canyon or the crashing grandeur of Niagara Falls. We have no response at the ready; our usual frames of reference don’t fit, and we must work to accommodate the new information that is streaming in from the environment. Consider the physical behavior that accompanies awe: we stop, we pause, we stare with eyes wide and features slack, as if to let in more of the scene that has so astonished us. The experience of awe, Keltner and other researchers have found, prompts a predictable series of psychological changes. We become less reliant on preconceived notions and stereotypes. We become more curious and open-minded. And we become more willing to revise and update our mental “schemas”: the templates we use to understand ourselves and the world. The experience of awe has been called “a reset button” for the human brain. But we can’t generate a feeling of awe, and its associated processes, all on our own; we have to venture out into the world, and find something bigger than ourselves, in order to expe...