zq11 vol 4 | 2014
The Science of Seeing The Utility of Awe
From these and other studies, Keltner and his colleagues conclude that awe has the capacity for creating greater openness, generosity, a willingness to connect, to help others, to collaborate. Writer Duncan summed up the positive influence of awe on human behavior like this: “I believe some people live in a state of constant wonder,” he declared. “I believe they’re the best people on Earth.” • On late Saturday afternoons in mid-winter, I like to hike into the interior of a desert mountain behind my house to a place called Pima Canyon. One south-facing slope hosts a particularly fine example of what’s known as a devil’s garden. These places are so-named for the spiny cholla cactus that tend to congregate in dense stands. Chollas are infamous for their sausage-shaped joints that can be easily dislodged from the plant but not from the fingers or ankles of hikers who become impaled when accidentally brushing up against them. Dead joints the color of dark chocolate adhere along the length of their stalks which can grow to five feet tall. Live plant parts sprout in bristled masses from the crowns of the cactus like matted braids of bleached-blond dreadlocks. In his book When the Rains Come, the biologist and desert writer John Alcock observes that the thatch of spines that covers each plant joint is so good at reflecting sunlight that the outer skins of chollas heat up to only fourteen degrees F above ambient air temperatures in the desert’s searing heat whereas the cuticles of less spiny cactus can soar to forty degrees F. In laboratory tests, scientists made an even more startling discovery: when they slowly turned up
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Author: Adelheid Fischer
the heat, cholla cactus made biochemical adjustments that enabled them to survive 138 degrees F. I love these elite thermal athletes, but not just for their extraordinary capacities. In winter the low angle of the setting sun runs through the devil’s garden like a wildfire, illuminating each blond spine until the whole hillside glows. Someday, I would like to take a couple neuroscientists into the field, have them string up my head with electrodes and and watch their monitor burst into flame when the sunset takes a match to the hillside—and to my heart. “Happens every time,” I’ll tell them. This is your brain on awe. For those of us who study and practice biomimicry, awe is regarded as a fringe benefit, albeit a much-valued pleasure. New insights from the academic literature in psychology, however, might offer another, far more serious perspective. I’ll wager that the experience of awe drew us to the discipline of biomimicry in the first place. Each one of us could likely point to our own treasured organisms that, like the cholla cactus, inspire with their ingenuity and seduce with their beauty, organisms that we visit time and again in the wild to restore a sense of magnificence to our lives. I might go one step further, however, to say that the experience of awe not only makes us revisit nature time and again but that it also helps us persist in our search for the secrets to survival and puts us in a frame of mind to make the most of what we find. Positive emotions such as awe actually create the conditions conducive to innovation. I believe this for the reasons that Keltner and his colleagues have proposed: that awe has