Support for the Radio West podcast comes from Harmon's Grocery, committed to excellent service and friendly smiles.

Your food is our passion.

Dacker Keltner is a psychologist who runs Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center. And about 15 years ago,

he and his students started to find awe in a laboratory. That's how he puts it in his latest book.

It's called awe the book. And he explains how he and other scientists started tracking this emotion.

They did these experiments with tears and with that sensation of feeling the chills. And they also collected stories.

They had people keep journals and make notes and they did a lot of interviews. And here's

one of the questions they would ask in this, you know, this clinical setting.

What is an experience of awe that you have had when you encountered a vast mystery that transcends your understanding of the world?

Because it turns out everyone has an awe story.

And Keltner says these narratives revealed really important things for their research.

These images and metaphors that came up, you couldn't really get that in other experiments.

And he has his own awe story about his brother, Rolf.

You know, he was a remarkable brother.

And we had a remarkable brotherhood of, you know, being born in Mexico and growing up in the wild Laurel Canyon period of the late 60s, and then moving to the country and, you know, fishing in our pond and building a tree for it and just wandering the hills.

It was like this storybook type brotherhood. and building a tree for it and just wandering the hills.

It was like this storybook-type brotherhood.

And we were close all the way through life.

You know, we traveled together,

and we were best men at each other's weddings and taught together and backpack together and the like.

And then he got colon cancer.

It is brutal and really painful. The abdomen is very painful and wild. So that was about two

...