IN JANUARY 2019, when Dacher Keltner was present at his younger brother Rolf’s bedside during the last moments of his life, he felt many things. Perhaps the most surprising was awe: “I felt small. Quiet. Humble. Pure. The boundaries that separated me from the outside world faded.”
Awe is something that Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has now considered extensively. In 1988, when he asked his mentor Paul Ekman …