UC Berkeley

UC Berkeley enters the book through two related lines of inquiry: Alison Gopnik’s account of children’s expansive consciousness and Dacher Keltner’s research into awe and altruism. The university is more than a professional label in these passages. It is where the book locates researchers and, in one experiment, the eucalyptus grove that turns an abstract claim about awe into an observed act of assistance. Together, those connections make UC Berkeley a point of contact between theories of consciousness and evidence about how people attend to, and act toward, one another.

Academic setting and consciousness

Gopnik is presented as a Berkeley professor whose work crosses the humanities and sciences. At a 2016 conference on consciousness in Tucson, she shared a panel with Robin Carhart-Harris, whose psychedelic research approached ordinary consciousness by studying altered states. Gopnik proposed a complementary comparison: a young child’s mind, too, could be understood as an altered state. Their meeting took place at the conference, not at UC Berkeley; the university’s relevance is instead bound up with Gopnik’s academic identity and the intellectual perspective she brought to that discussion.

Gopnik challenged the tendency to treat the consciousness familiar to adults as the whole of consciousness. She described the narrow, goal-directed experience common among academics as “professor consciousness,” and contrasted adult “spotlight consciousness” with children’s “lantern consciousness.” In her account, the adult spotlight concentrates attention on a particular goal, while a child’s more diffusely directed attention can take in information from across a wider field. The contrast changes the terms of comparison: children are not simply adults with less-developed focus, but may be more open to what lies around them.

Her remarks also connected this account to development. Children’s brains have more neural connections and greater plasticity; adolescence brings pruning and a movement toward a more efficient, goal-oriented mode. Gopnik linked that narrowing to the suppression of entropy and the emergence of the default mode network. The book places her Berkeley-based academic persona within a wider argument about how different forms of consciousness can illuminate one another, rather than treating adult concentration as the sole standard.

Awe in the campus landscape

UC Berkeley is also the setting for experiments from Keltner’s laboratory. Peter Hendricks, a psychologist studying psilocybin treatment for cocaine addiction, brought Keltner’s work on awe into a discussion of why psychedelic experiences might change entrenched behavior. Keltner, a Berkeley psychologist and Hendricks’s close friend, treats awe as an emotion that can orient people toward something larger than themselves. That larger frame might be a social group, nature, or a spirit world; in each case, the individual’s immediate interests become less dominant.

One experiment made that proposed shift observable on campus. Volunteers spent a minute looking either at soaring eucalyptus trees in a grove or at the façade of a nearby building. A confederate then approached, stumbled, and scattered pens on the ground. Those who had looked at the trees were more likely to help her than those who had looked at the building. The comparison gave the setting a precise role: the grove was not merely a scenic backdrop but the source of the brief experience being tested, while the building provided a contrasting visual focus.

A second experiment examined how awe affected people’s depiction of themselves. After viewing awe-inspiring images of nature, participants drew self-portraits that occupied considerably less space on the page than portraits made before the images. The finding offered a visual counterpart to the helping experiment: awe was associated both with greater readiness to assist another person and with representing the self as smaller. The book presents these results as evidence that even a modest encounter with nature can loosen the usual scale of self-concern.

From the smaller self to social change

Hendricks connected Keltner’s account of awe to addiction, which he described as involving harm to health, careers, and social well-being while often leaving the addict insufficiently aware of the damage done to others. If addiction organizes a person’s identity and daily life around the behavior, then treatment must somehow widen attention beyond that consuming self-interest. Awe, in Hendricks’s view, could help make that widening possible by creating a felt connection to people and concerns beyond the self.

The campus experiments support that proposal without claiming that a moment of awe alone cures addiction. Looking at trees was followed by greater assistance in a staged encounter; images of nature were followed by smaller self-portraits. Hendricks’s therapeutic interpretation extends from those findings: a psychedelic experience capable of occasioning profound awe might help someone recognize harm to loved ones and recover a sense of connection and responsibility. UC Berkeley’s significance in this account lies in the meeting of place and argument—the grove supplies a small, concrete test of how attention shifts, while the research gives that shift possible relevance to behavior and change.