University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley, is presented as more than an institutional backdrop: it is a place where the book’s questions about consciousness and human connection take concrete form. Alison Gopnik’s thinking about the child’s mind and Dacher Keltner’s experiments on awe both connect Berkeley to the broader argument that altered or expansive states of attention can unsettle habitual self-focus.

A setting for work on consciousness

The narrator identifies Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist and philosopher, as a colleague at Berkeley. Her work offers a different route into the study of consciousness from the psychedelic research of Robin Carhart-Harris: rather than approaching ordinary consciousness through an altered state produced by a drug, Gopnik asks readers to consider the young child’s mind as another kind of altered state. Their exchange culminated in April 2016, when they met for the first time on a panel at a consciousness conference in Tucson. Berkeley thus enters the account through Gopnik’s intellectual home and the work she brings into conversation with psychedelic neuroscience.

Gopnik argues that theories of consciousness can be limited by the restricted range of consciousness their authors know firsthand. She calls the familiar academic mode professor consciousness, a phrase that points to the risks of treating one narrow mode of attention as the measure of mind as a whole. Berkeley is the setting associated with this challenge to intellectual habit: a scholar based there helps widen the inquiry beyond the adult, focused mind.

Keltner’s research on awe

Berkeley is also the home of psychologist Dacher Keltner’s laboratory, whose research helps explain how awe might change behavior. Peter Hendricks, studying psilocybin as a treatment for cocaine addiction, proposes that awe can loosen the addict’s consuming focus on the self and the behavior that organizes daily life. Keltner’s work gives this proposal an experimental dimension: awe may direct attention away from private concerns and toward other people or a larger whole.

One Berkeley campus experiment took place in a eucalyptus grove. Volunteers spent a minute looking either at the soaring trees or at the façade of a nearby building. A confederate then approached and stumbled, scattering 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 contrast made the idea of awe measurable through a small, observable act of assistance: attention to nature was associated with greater readiness to respond to another person.

In a separate experiment, Keltner’s lab asked people to draw themselves before and after viewing images of awe-inspiring nature. The drawings made after the images took up considerably less space on the page. The reduction gives visual form to the idea of the small self: an experience of something larger can diminish the felt centrality of the individual.

Place and significance

Together, these strands make Berkeley a point of connection between theories of consciousness and evidence about social behavior. Gopnik’s work asks whether adult assumptions have mistaken one familiar mode of mind for consciousness itself; Keltner’s experiments examine how attention to trees or images of nature can alter a person’s relation to others. One line of inquiry broadens the range of minds considered, while the other traces a shift from self-concern toward assistance and affiliation.

The campus setting matters especially in the eucalyptus-grove experiment, where awe is not treated only as a private feeling or an abstract spiritual claim. Participants look at trees, encounter a person who has dropped pens, and either help or do not. Berkeley’s role in the account is therefore grounded in a specific research practice: using controlled comparisons to investigate whether experiences of a wider world can change how people act within it.