Awe is perhaps our most overlooked and undervalued emotion. It is what we feel when we encounter something vast, wondrous, or beyond our ordinary frame of reference. It is the feeling that washes over us when we hear a beautiful song, watch a flock of geese fly south, or see images from the new NASA telescope.
Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley who has spent two decades studying this emotion, describes three ways you might know you are experiencing awe: tears, chills, and “whoa.” For example:
- Think of a moment when you watched your child do something beautiful, and your eyes got misty (tears).
- Think of a time you heard a song or a story on the radio, or read a passage of text, that gave you goosebumps (chills).
- Think of a time when you saw a stunning sunset or vista that prompted you to utter, “Wow!” (whoa).
For kids, especially, I would add this: wide eyes. I love seeing a young child’s eyes pop with amazement when they encounter something brand new—like a chicken hatching out of an egg, an ocean wave, a parade, a street performer, or a baking-soda-and-vinegar volcano. As Keltner writes, we can all find “the extraordinary in the ordinary . . . the wonders of life are so often nearby.”
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None of this research would surprise Fred Rogers, for whom wonder was pedagogy. He knew that curiosity is what primes children’s brains for learning. He also had this incredible capacity to communicate his own wonder through the screen—particularly his fascination with his young viewers.
I reached out to Gregg Behr and Ryan Rydzewski, coauthors of When You Wonder, You’re Learning: Mister Rogers’ Enduring Lessons for Raising Creative, Curious, Caring Kids, to hear more about what they learned from studying Rogers’s work. They told me:
When Fred Rogers sang the words, When you wonder, you’re learning, he wasn’t kidding. In a very real sense, he was right. We know from modern science that when we’re in a state of wonder, something switches on in the brain. We start to absorb all kinds of information. And the more curiosity we feel, the more likely we are to retain that information. . . That’s why some scientists think that curiosity may be just as important as intelligence when it comes to children’s success in school.