Dacher Keltner

Dacher Keltner is a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work on awe helps frame one possible reason psychedelic experiences can alter deeply rooted behavior. In the book, his research bridges laboratory observations and a clinical question: whether an experience that makes a person feel part of something larger can loosen the narrow self-interest associated with addiction. His role is not as a psychedelic therapist or trial investigator, but as a researcher whose account of awe offers a way to interpret what psychedelic treatment may make possible.

Identity and Introduction

Keltner enters the discussion through Peter Hendricks, a psychologist at the University of Alabama conducting a trial of psilocybin for cocaine addiction. Hendricks, who is described as Keltner’s close friend, suggests that awe may help explain the power of psychedelics to change entrenched patterns of behavior. Keltner’s research gives that suggestion a psychological and behavioral basis: awe is treated not merely as a private feeling of wonder, but as an emotion that can redirect attention away from the individual and toward a wider human or natural context.

The account gives no broader biography of Keltner; it establishes him through this specific intellectual contribution. His work matters here because it makes a connection between an intense subjective experience and an observable change in how people relate to others. That connection allows the discussion to move from the felt scale of a psychedelic experience to the practical question of whether a person might become more responsive to other people’s needs.

Awe and the Small Self

Keltner’s account proposes that awe is a fundamental human emotion that evolved partly because it promotes altruistic behavior. People may feel it in the presence of a social collective, nature, or a spirit world: different sources, but each capable of making the individual feel small in relation to something larger. In this model, awe shifts attention from the isolated self toward a group or greater good. The diminishment of the self is not presented as humiliation or harm; it is a change in perspective that may make connection and responsibility more salient.

Experiments from Keltner’s laboratory give this account concrete form. In one study on the University of California, Berkeley campus, volunteers spent a minute looking either at soaring eucalyptus trees or at the façade of a nearby building. A confederate then approached, stumbled, and scattered pens. Participants who had looked at the trees were more likely to help pick them up than those who had looked at the building. The comparison matters because the reported effect followed even a brief, relatively modest encounter with awe-inspiring nature, rather than an extraordinary or drug-induced event.

A separate experiment approached the change in perspective through self-portraits. After viewing images of nature intended to inspire awe, participants drew themselves taking up considerably less space on the page than before. The smaller figures give a visible counterpart to the proposed small self: the experience appears to reduce the prominence of the individual in the participant’s representation of themselves. Together, the experiments associate awe with both greater willingness to assist another person and a less expansive representation of the self. They do not, by themselves, establish that awe is the sole cause of lasting behavioral change; the account uses them to support a plausible psychological link.

Awe and Addiction Treatment

Hendricks applies this perspective to addiction, which he describes as involving a consuming self-interest in the addictive behavior. A person may already know that the behavior damages health, career, and social well-being, yet fail to take in the harm done to others. In that context, the significance of awe is not simply that it feels powerful. By directing attention toward a wider reality, it may interrupt a perspective organized around the addiction and make the person’s relationships more visible again.

Hendricks proposes that a profound experience of awe occasioned by a drug could help someone feel connected to other people and to the network of family and social relations that addiction frays. Recognition of harm to loved ones may then become a source of motivation to change. The proposed sequence runs from a changed sense of scale, to renewed attention to others, to a stronger sense of connection and responsibility. The account presents this as a therapeutic possibility, not as a guaranteed outcome for every person or a result proved by Keltner’s laboratory experiments.

Significance in the Discussion of Psychedelics

Keltner’s research helps connect several experiences considered in the book: mystical experience, the overview effect, self-transcendence, a richer inner life, and the formation of new meanings. Awe may be a cause of some of these mental changes, an effect of them, or both; the relationship is left unresolved. Its interpretive importance lies in its capacity to unsettle habitual frames of thought. An experience that resists familiar categories can make a different understanding of the self and its obligations possible.

This account also gives psychedelic therapy a social dimension. The possible value of an experience is not confined to what it reveals inwardly; it may be reflected in whether attention returns to other people with greater care. Keltner’s contribution is therefore a framework for understanding how a shift in perspective might matter beyond the session itself. By joining a small behavioral experiment, a changed self-portrait, and Hendricks’s clinical hypothesis, the narrative presents awe as a promising link between extraordinary experience and ordinary acts of regard.