The pride slides—images of Berkeley landmarks—activated the rostral medial prefrontal cortex. This region of the frontal lobes has been consistently found to light up when people think about themselves—a perfectly sensible finding, given the self-referential core of pride.
The images of harm and suffering activated bundles of neurons that tell a coherent story about where compassion is in the brain. These images activated the amygdala. These slides also activated a portion of the frontal lobes known as the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in empathy and taking the perspective of another. Compassion integrates the sense of harm and the appreciation of the other’s experience.
Finally, awe. The awe slides activated the left orbitofrontal cortex. This region lights up when we are physically touched, and when we anticipate rewards. It is centrally involved in approach and goal-directed action. It is activated in instances in which people reflect upon their own internal experience, from a broader perspective. There are many forms of happiness in the brain; not everything reduces to self-interested pleasure.
A Darwinian study of awe is documenting the physiological underpinnings of our capacity to devote ourselves to the collective. It involves the bodily manifestation of expanding beyond ourselves (goose bumps) and connection (the vagus nerve). It transforms self-representation from that which separates to that which unites. It activates regions of the brain associated with goal-directed behavior and approach, a perspective upon the self, and pleasure. In its ultimate origins in evolution, the sacred is social. Our capacity for wonder and reverence is rooted in the body.
WIRED FOR JEN
The experience of awe is about finding your place in the larger scheme of things. It is about quieting the press of self-interest. It is about folding into social collectives. It is about feeling reverential toward participating in some expansive process that unites us all and that ennobles our life’s endeavors.
For Charles Darwin, it was his trip on the Beagle, and transcendent experiences in the Andes, in the Galápagos, around the cape, and with the hunter-gatherer people he saw during his five-year voyage. After wandering through a forest in the Amazon, he mused: “It creates a feeling of wonder that so much beauty should be apparently created for such little purpose.” The forest was “a temple filled with varied productions of the God of Nature.” In his observations of flowers, and beetles, and flatworms, and armadillos and trees, he began to discern some force—natural selection—that united them all. Humans were, in the words of Darwin biographer Janet Browne, “just a small part of a much larger interlocking system of life on earth.”
For cell biologist Ursula Goodenough, the biochemical processes that make up life and living are sacred. How life-forms emerged in the hot mud of billions of years ago, how two sex cells combine to develop into the human, how DNA evolved over time—these questions stirred her soul. Her understanding of these biological processes is filled with the sense of design, beauty, and vastness that stirred Muir’s feelings about the Sierras.
In my short scientific life, my feelings of wonder and reverence began one moment in a lab as a post-doc, a late afternoon when I first began applying the tools of the Facial Action Coding System. These tools allowed me to freeze human action in the millisecond frame of a videotape and take a Darwinian journey, tracing our positive emotions as they manifest today back in evolutionary time to the social dynamics that gave rise to such forms. The emotions that I have been so fortunate to capture in my lab, just for a fragile, fleeting instant, have their evolutionary provenance in a reverence and respect for others, and “identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.” A teenager’s blush triggers a forgiving smile from parents, and conflict and tension subside. A deferential smile and “thank you” between bag boy and elderly woman in the checkout line spread respect and enhance our faith in the human endeavor, if only for a moment or two. Parents, pushing infants on swings, fill a space with smiles, coos, and laughs, creating a warm environment of trust and goodwill. Songs of laughter ripple through couples, friends, families, auditoriums, linking minds in cooperative, lighthearted play. With the subtle turn of a phrase or use of the voice, spouses and siblings and parents and their children transform thorny conflicts into playful banter. Kind embraces spread from child to friend to grandparent. We have neuropeptides that enable trust and devotion, and a branch of nerves that connects the brain, the voice, and the heart that enables caretaking. Our capacity for awe has given us art, a sense of the sacred. We have genes, neurotransmitters, and regions of the brain that serve these emotions as we serve others. These emotions are the substance of jen. Evolution has produced a mind that evolves toward an appreciation of the vastness of our collective design, and emotions that enable us to enact these loftier notions. We are wired for good.
NOTES
JEN SCIENCE
in honor of the Confucian concept of jen: For an excellent summary of Confucius’s life, times, and philosophy, see Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation (New York: Anchor, 2006), 240–51.
Jen is the central idea in: Wing-Tsit Chan, trans., A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), chap. 6. Below are some other quotes from Wing-Tsit Chan’s translation of the analects of Confucius that provide an understanding of jen:
1:2 Few of those who are filial sons and respectful brothers will show disrespect to superiors, and there has never been a man who is not disrespectful to superiors and yet creates disorder. A superior man is devoted to the fundamentals (the root). When the root is firmly established, the moral law (Tao) will grow. Filial piety and brotherly respect are the root of humanity (jen).
1:3 A man with clever words and an ingratiating appearance is seldom a man of humanity.
1:6 Young men should be filial when at home and respectful to their elders when away from home. They should be earnest and faithful. They should love all extensively and be intimate with men of humanity. When they have any energy to spare after the performance of moral duties, they should use it to study literature and the arts.
3:3 If a man is not humane (jen), what has he to do with ceremonies (li)? If he is not humane, what has he to do with music?
4:2 One who is not a man of humanity cannot endure adversity for long, nor can he enjoy prosperity for long. The man of humanity is naturally at ease with humanity. The man of wisdom cultivates humanity for its advantage.
4:3 Only the man of humanity knows how to love people and hate people.
4:4 If you set your mind on humanity, you will be free from evil.
4:5 Confucius said, “Wealth and honor are what every man desires. But if they have been obtained in violation of moral principles, they must not be kept. Poverty and humble station are what every man dislikes. But if they can be avoided only in violation of moral principles, they must not be avoided. If a superior man departs from humanity, how can he fulfill that name? A superior man never abandons humanity even for the lapse of a single meal. In moments of haste, he acts according to it. In times of difficulty or confusion, he acts according to it.”