Superposition Vol 1.3

Every few months for the past couple years, Rebecca (my creative director) and I pick a book together, then talk about it over breakfast: a 2-person book club with a syllabus that has ranged from Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act to Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence. This week, we got to surprise ourselves with just how much bubbled up to think and talk about after reading Gretchen Rubin’s Life in Five Senses. Being intentional about paying attention to all our senses (not just sight on auto-pilot) means more chances to be inspired, find comfort, or experience awe.

I’m now working on a “senses self-portrait,” and jotting down one thing I remember from each of my five senses each day, in an attempt to notice more deeply. My most neglected sense is smell, which also happens to be the one most closely connected to our brain’s memory center, so I’m also on the hunt for a bit of olfactory nostalgia.

In that vein, close your eyes and imagine: a crackling campfire, the tickle of smoke in the back of your nose, bare toes in the grass, the aftertaste of crispy marshmallow, eyes trained towards the stars…

-Shanna

One night last fall, I found myself lying on my back staring up at one of the most extraordinary skies I’ve ever seen. I was at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of west Texas, part of our Penrose gathering that brought together scientists, researchers, entrepreneurs, and others deeply invested in our science ecosystem. 

The company was exceptional, and the folks at the McDonald Observatory wonderful and insightful hosts as we peered through their world-class telescopes at comets and planets and even deeper galaxies. But what struck me the most was simply looking up into the incredible richness of the dark skies, aglow with an unfathomable river of light. 

It was the same sky that’s always there, of course, but somehow I’d forgotten just how amazing it is. Blame the city lights that usually drown my view upward, or just the endless run of day-to-day life that makes me forget to stop and look up. 

I’d been to observatories before, camped under splendidly remote skies, and admit that I hadn’t been particularly expectant of anything transcendent in attending the McDonald Observatory’s star party. Maybe it was that lack of expectation that made the shock of night sky so powerful to me, or perhaps it was just my opening up the space in my mind to be amazed, or maybe it was the communal experience. 

Whatever allowed the experience, it was a moment filled with awe. 

The experience sent me down a rabbit hole to better understand exactly why that moment hit me so hard. There’s been a lot of science focused on understanding awe over the past couple of decades, led by Dacher Keltner, psychology professor at UC-Berkeley and founder of the Greater Good Science Center. Awe presents an interesting confluence of psychology, neuroscience, health, and even aesthetics, and we’re only beginning to understand what is happening in our brains and our bodies when we experience it.

In his 2023 book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life, Keltner posits “Eight Wonders of Life” that his research concluded inspired awe. Nature was of course high on the list, along with “Life & Death,” but most intriguing were the more accessible things in our lives that can inspire awe - examples such as music and visual design. And then there are spiritual inspirations, and metaphysical and scientific epiphanies. The top two Wonders that he found precipitated moments of awe in cultures around the world though, were stories of “other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming,” and “collective effervescence,” the feeling and energy of belonging to a greater group or cause. 

But the most compelling thing to me was how awe impacts us, and how this experience can transform how we see, understand, and relate to the world. To take that idea one step further, it made me wonder: how can we communicate and share those experiences in a way that can extend their impact?

In some ways, it seems that today we can see the most extraordinary things any time we like. We have social feeds filled with vistas of ridiculously beautiful and remote places. We have incredible images of deep space from the James Web Space Telescope. We can see the most fundamental elements of our DNA inside us. 

And yet access to all of these astounding things hasn’t seemed to really expand our collective sense of wonder or bring us more together. Maybe it’s just human nature that we should take these things for granted, but I think about the promise and inspiration of the Earthrise photo and how that helped catalyze Stewart Brand’s vision of the Whole Earth Catalog. Humanity was forced to stop and collectively marvel. For a moment, we could all see ourselves together, and imagine how fragile and beautiful our unique little circumstance of the universe is. Earthrise was an artifact that showed us something new, and helped expand the overview effect that previously only astronauts had experienced to the rest of us. 

Maybe awe by its very nature is something that must be transient, something we cannot live in precisely because it is meant to shake us out of our everyday lives. It is a confrontation with a vastness, even when experienced in something small. And at that edge of our understanding, we confront the recognition that so much of the world is beyond our control. That we as humans (and we as egos) are not the center of the universe. If awe is something of a death of the ego, then it would make sense our minds cannot permanently exist in that space.

Importantly, there is also a researched effect of awe that can open generosity, and expand our sense of belonging with each other - something that we seem in dire need of these days. But if those moments and their impact are inherently fleeting, how can we harness them for lasting impact? And should we even try?

Imagined Futures

A friend of mine teaches a course at the University of Wisconsin on American Protest Literature. She was surprised to hear from her students at the end of last semester that their favorite section of the syllabus was the exploration of utopian visions, of writers and activists imagining better futures. Some of these were grand social rethinkings, but others were more personal moments of reframing like Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Gate A4” or Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders.

Her students told her that the readings were so meaningful because most of their lives had been barraged by only negative views of the future. Global warming, economic anxiety, world conflicts, and the expectation that the world will be ravaged by weather, disease, and scarcity. As she and I discussed this feedback, it was a heartbreaking revelation, even though we feel the same anxieties about the future. 

As a science communicator, I couldn’t help but feel this as something of a failure in how we’ve been doing our jobs. We live in an exceptional time of science, and we’ve seen things, experienced things, that previous generations would never even have imagined. Our future generations will likewise feel the same way. And yet it seems the general public is rarely awed by science these days. 

If awe is connected to inspiring curiosity, and breaking us out of our everyday thinking, then I wonder if the science community as a whole may be narrowing the scope of imagination too much, ignoring science’s inherent mandate to ask more questions. We have been dictating to the public rather than bringing them along for the ride. Few folks had actually heard of mRNA technology before the COVID-19 vaccines, and even the science community had scoffed at Katalin Karikó’s work. We have to admit that as an overall community, scientists shut down inquiries and questions from the public with a particular disdain, and often even eschew research that may be outside of the mainstream.

Even in art, it seems our visions of the future are disaster-ridden, and have been for a long time. They’re overwhelmed by post-apocalyptic worlds, humanity turned brutal. The discourse around climate change has been catastrophic in framing, with solutions focused on mitigating rather than transforming. Not to downplay the existential crisis of it all, but works like Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock paint a bold vision of not just confrontation with the realities of climate change, but rethinking what is possible in and for our world. And these are visions built upon work that exists today, if science dares to be bold and inspirational. 

The story science is telling these days isn’t particularly hopeful. It’s not pointing to possibilities, but rather to a world that will be worse– just maybe not as bad as the worst we can imagine. Of course, we do need those grounded voices and perspectives, but we can certainly use more inspiration. While I admire the necessary storytelling frame in works like Kate Marvel’s “Slaying the Climate Dragon,” I think we can do even better in providing inspiration while still facing reality.

So we need to tell better stories, not just in our art, but in our communications of what is actually happening in science. I remember visiting the Kennedy Space Center a few years ago, and the vibe was incredibly different than when I had been there only a decade earlier. Instead of merely celebrating our history, the primary focus had changed to an excitement about returning to the Moon, and even exploring Mars. There was a galvanizing mission, and it was communicated with excitement and possibility, and something that we all were a part of together. 

We have the opportunity to inspire excitement and possibility behind our incredible breakthroughs in science and technology. We can bring the public along for the adventure, and instead of falling victim to the pessimism of problems, we can tell a story with the excitement of solving them. We need less discarding of ideas because “that will never work” and more exploration of “But what if it does!” We can imagine better futures. 

More than that, we owe ourselves that awe. Science is under assault, in ways big and small. Those of us who have dedicated our lives to pursuits of credibility, rigorous investigation, evidenced-based expertise, and teaching are having their work dismissed, derided, and deprioritized. While we confront those political and cultural realities, we’ll also need to sustain ourselves with these moments of awe, the inspirations that have led us to these pursuits in the first place. 

Keltner’s Eight Wonders might be a valuable guidebook in this moment, for inspiring both ourselves and others. It’s imperative that we keep ourselves open to awe and even seek it out, whether in following the drive of curiosity or forcing ourselves into the (sometimes uncomfortable) space to have our world shaken. It doesn’t have to be epic-scale. It’s taking a moment to stop, and look up at the sky or down at the earth with new eyes, see things in new ways and let ourselves marvel for a moment in wonder. 

And more than just cultivating awe, we should strive to remember that feeling and share it with others. We have to dare to blast it out into the world, Double Rainbow style. The stories we’re building need as much emotion as they do knowledge, curiosity as much as understanding, and imagination as much as scientific rigor. 

As for me, I’m heading to Fairbanks next week to experience the Northern Lights, which I’ve never seen before. I’m going in search of awe, and I’ll try to bring some back to share. 

Can microdosing awe help our mental and physical health?

If we know there are positive mental, physical, and even social effects for experiencing awe, then how can we utilize that for potential treatments of trauma or anxiety? Florence Williams seeks to answer this question (and others) as she and Dr. Michael Amster go in search of awe.

We enjoyed the range of responses to our “science person of the year” question. A few of our (and your) favorites below:

FlyWire Consortium (AI/Bio)
Jonah Rosner (Human Performance)
Es Devlin (Stage Design)
Dario Amodei (AI)
Nathan Myhrvold (Food)

Reminder to submit your answer to our current question: what is one of the most interesting books you’ve recently read?

New JDI Masterclass: Telling Stories That Shape Tomorrow

At JDI we believe a good story well-told can shape the world. So we’re thrilled to invite folks into our office for an all-day immersive storytelling masterclass in a few weeks.

We’ve been wanting to host workshops like this for a long time, and it’s finally happening. The day will be led by our founder and CEO, Josh Jones-Dilworth, and our VP of Creative, Rebecca Ewing. It will be in-person only at our HQ in Austin.

If you or someone you know might be interested in joining, we’d love to have you! You can find more information and sign up here.

Next time on Superposition: The Book of Books!

Superposition is a production of JDI, designed and written by Shanna Gerlach and Doug Freeman