Peter Hendricks

Peter Hendricks is a psychologist at the University of Alabama whose research on Psilocybin treatment for cocaine addiction led him to propose awe as a psychological key to the power of psychedelics. His contribution is a bridge between the intensity of a visionary experience and a practical question of behavior: how might a person caught in self-destructive patterns become able to care again about the people around them?

Research and the Problem of Addiction

Hendricks was conducting a trial using Psilocybin to treat cocaine addiction when he suggested that awe might help explain how psychedelic experiences alter deeply rooted behavior. He framed addiction not only as harm to the person using the drug, but also as a narrowing of attention. People with addiction may understand that their behavior damages their health, careers, and social lives, yet fail to register its effects on others. The addictive pattern can consume identity and organize daily life around itself, making the treatment challenge one of perspective as well as behavior.

Awe and the Small Self

Hendricks drew on the work of Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at UC Berkeley and his close friend. Keltner’s account treats awe as a fundamental human emotion with an evolutionary role: it can encourage altruistic behavior by making a person feel part of something larger, whether a social group, nature, or a spiritual world. In this account, awe produces a “small self,” shifting attention away from individual interests toward the group and its welfare.

Experiments from Keltner’s lab gave Hendricks’s proposal a behavioral dimension. In one study, participants spent a minute looking either at soaring eucalyptus trees or at a nearby building. A confederate then stumbled and scattered pens; those who had looked at the trees were more likely to help. In another experiment, people who drew themselves after viewing awe-inspiring images of nature made themselves considerably smaller on the page than in drawings made before the images. These findings suggested that even modest encounters with awe could coincide with less self-focus and greater willingness to assist others.

A Route Toward Change

Hendricks applied this idea to the social damage of addiction. A profound experience of awe, he argued, could offer someone absorbed in addiction the felt relief of belonging to something larger and reconnecting with other people. That shift might bring into view the harm done to loved ones and renew a sense of connection and responsibility. In his account, motivation to change can emerge not simply from recognizing personal damage, but from seeing oneself in relation to others again.

The book presents awe as a possible link among several features of psychedelic consciousness: mystical experience, the overview effect, self-transcendence, a richer inner life, and the formation of new meanings. It does not settle whether awe causes the mental changes associated with psychedelics or follows from them. Hendricks’s proposal is significant precisely as a connecting explanation: because awe can unsettle familiar ways of interpreting experience, it may help make a change in perspective—and, potentially, a change in conduct—possible.