The Deeply Personal Can Reveal the Universal Patterns that Empower Us to Act: Curiosity & the Transformative Power of Awe

I so enjoy writing and reading about subjects and experiences that are deeply personal, or that bring me greater insight, more than ones about hate and inhumanity. And I don’t think this is just me; it feels clearly true for most of us. When there’s so much in the news about DT and his fear and hate-filled executive orders and pointless cruelty, I need to also discover and support what feeds my sense of love and demand for justice and humanity. But it’s an awareness of the deeply personal that strengthens this sense of ourselves, this sense of connection with others and this world of ours. And it’s this awareness that fuels our ability to face what is most difficult to face.

 

One experience and emotion that particularly feeds and strengthens this deeply personal strength in ourselves is awe. Awe brings together a need to feel and preserve our sense of beauty, love, and wonder so we can face the destructive and horrible around us, to face realistically our fear of hardship and death.

 

Our brains are hardwired to worry, to perceive negatives, threats first. And according to research from the Greater Good Science Center, there are good reasons for that. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had to be aware of any danger that might emerge from the world around them and prioritized this awareness. But to do that, they had to be ready, open to search beyond themselves, so they could discover ever more about themselves and the world. They had to let go of what they thought they knew to accurately perceive what they hadn’t known. In other words, they had to be curious.

 

And part of curiosity is that feeling we have before a discovery, that sense of not-knowing, worry, anxiety, and possibly fear of what might be there. Science has shown that our reward centers of the brain, and dopamine, our happiness and reward neurotransmitter, is released not only when we get the pleasure, the goal, but when we seek it. And when we feel wonder, awe at what we notice, the memories of and ability to be curious, is strengthened.

 

What is awe? Dacher Keltner, researcher and Professor of Psychology, writes about this in his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. One definition of awe that he gives us is “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding.” It can transport us back in time or to a sound or aroma, or an epiphany that de-stabilizes our past understanding; that takes us out of our sense of being separate from everyone and everything else, and reveals the vastness around us, reveals an awareness of the mysteries of life.

 

Everything, every experience, says Keltner, originates in how our minds process information. Our emotions are those feeling states accompanied by thoughts, expressions, physiological responses which enable and direct our actions. When we’re locked into emotions about self-preservation or being selfish, feeling totally separate, this undermines our ability to adapt to present circumstances. Awe does the opposite. The sense of vastness, of something beyond ourselves integrates our scattered beliefs, and all the unknowns we experience, so we can create a thesis about the world, a deepened understanding of whatever we need to face….

 

*Please go to The Good Men Project and read the whole article.

The Power of the Reading Brain: Reading or Speaking a Word Can Connect Us to the Entire Universe

I’ve begun reading a book called Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, by Maryanne Wolf. Right from the beginning, the book confirmed suppositions I’ve had since I started reading and startled me into wonderful new realizations and connections.

 

Proust, the novelist named in the title, thought of reading as a sanctuary where humans could access realities they could never experience otherwise. The author uses him as a metaphor for ⎼ metaphor, literature, communication, art, creation. The squid is used in the title as an analogy for the squid-like appearance of neurons, as well as the study of neuroscience. The complexity of neurons enables our brains to learn, repair themselves, make and change billions of connections, and change ourselves. The book explains how the brain makes reading possible. Knowing how we’re able to read enhances the sense of wonder that we can read.

 

Wolf describes a discovery by cognitive scientist David Swinney, that when we read a word, even a simple one like bug, we activate in our brain not just one simple meaning but a whole host of associations. It utilizes a vast network of neurons, not just the language areas of the brain and the visual cortex, but areas for emotion, reasoning, memory, etc.

 

When we read the word bug, we can think of a crawling insect, as being bugged by a spy or an intrusive neighbor, a glitch in software, maybe even imagining ourselves in a Volkswagen Beetle. And since our minds can stray when we read, and we empathize with characters and situations we read about, those associations can connect us to incalculable other meanings and locations. It can lead to new ideas. It can, for example, connect to the vegetation or location where we’ve seen a bug, been bitten or graced by them. We bring the story of our lives into each word we read.

 

This richness of associations depends on the richness of what we’ve previously stored away. This informs us of the need for children to have a rich upbringing, to meet a variety of people, stimuli, and experiences. For them to be read to, and for them to begin reading a wide variety of literature once they’re able to read. When I was 4 or so my father read literature to me, like the romantic play Cyrano de Bergerac. This instilled in me a love for the possible intimacy of words and storytelling that has lasted throughout my life.

 

All children, and parents, need to have the economic resources to make this richness of upbringing possible⎼ to have good health care, good schools, and a society that appreciates and supports children, parents, literature, and education. As the word bug is connected to our whole lives, the child is interconnected with all of society. We all benefit from a well-cared for and educated younger generation.

 

Also, the more indirect and complex the semantical structure of the written sentence, the more vivid the experience of the reader. Wolf quotes the poet Emily Dickinson as saying, “Tell the truth, but tell it slant.” Tell it with echoes. When told indirectly, more risk is involved, and we take in more of the unexpected. Our imagination and empathy are stimulated, and we have more opportunity to encounter and make connections with ourselves and others….

 

 

*To read the whole article, please click on the following link to The Good Men Project.