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Comment by magneticnorth | Hacker News Reader

To summarize, because the introduction ends clickbait-style with "'I had to expand my consciousness,' she says. And she did it by intentionally cultivating a particular emotion." followed by 3 long sections of exposition before they elaborate on the "particular emotion":

Cultivate awe - meaning "reconnect[ing] with the vast natural world, with the universe beyond my professional and personal responsibilities, and beyond this moment in time". In particular, they recommend an "awe walk" where you focus on things around you and small details and look for things that are unexpected and delightful.

Kind of sounds to me like "get out of your own head", which I think is advice I could use more often.

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Huh I just think about how incredibly complex and amazing human infrastructure is and get this feeling. I think about the complexity of the professor in my phone and how many millions of human hours were involved in the creation of it.

One thing that really gets me is thinking that every two years, humankind experiences the equivalent collective time that a being who had lived since the beginning of the universe would have experienced.

It’s all kinda weird stuff but I think it makes me feel a sense of awe similar to what is being talked about here.

>> One thing that really gets me is thinking that every two years, humankind experiences the equivalent collective time that a being who had lived since the beginning of the universe would have experienced.

When I got my head round that, it exploded. I love it.

Wow yeah, 7.9 billion people sounds like a lot of people, but compared to the universe we always seemed so small. A quick search brought up an estimate that 117 billion people have ever lived. We've all together experienced the age of the universe hundreds of times! What an amazing thought.

An easy one for me, that I sort of do automatically, is I'll see a man-made object around the house and be like, "How'd someone come up with that?"

For example, the lawnmower. What a fun way to do something that was probably not very fun to do before. Everyone was bending over and using scythes or some shit to cut their grass, and then lawnmower guy was like "What if I had a wheel full of of scythes that spin around, and I could push it?" And then he had one, because he built one, and it worked. Wish come true, good for him.

I had this exact thought earlier, watching a movie and I realised mankind has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and the technology we have now was pretty much inconceivable even a century ago, even the average person lives better than past emperors (heating, electric, tv, worldwide food on demand etc).

For eons we had no technology and now like a little blip here we are. What a time to be alive.

Gratitude and awe were just the two examples they used to demonstrate the underlying point, which was (paraphrasing) "if you practice being happy on a regular basis [by doing things that elicit positive feelings], even if just for a short period of time everyday, your brain will be more accustomed to associating 'happy' as a feeling that's 'in the rotation', so to speak, making it easier to feel happy in other situations and in general." Probably the most accessible metaphor in the article was that of learning a piano chord: do it a little every day and eventually it becomes second-nature.

So, in other words, if you want to be happier, try being happy more often.

The 'new' science they refer to (the actual premise of the article) is in this paragraph:

> But according to the latest research, the human body probably works the other way around, Seth says. "The brain registers a grizzly bear, and that perception sets in train all the physiological responses." You get an adrenaline rush. Your heart rate goes up. You start breathing faster. Blood rushes to your muscles. And then the emotion comes.

However the idea is not so new:

> The James–Lange theory is a hypothesis on the origin and nature of emotions and is one of the earliest theories of emotion within modern psychology. [..] The basic premise of the theory is that physiological arousal instigates the experience of emotion.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James%E2%80%93Lange_theory

The sited author Lisa Barrett has come up with some pretty new and solidly basd on experimental and neurological experiments models of emotions. There's a great interview of her by Sean Carroll on his podcast: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/11/16/123-...

It's not just that the physiological precedes the emotions, it's also that there's not really any universal human emotions, but each person and each culture kind of buckets these "predict how much energy my brain and body will need" responses into common buckets for discussion purposes. And we now have a lot of cross-cultural studies and neuronal activation timing studies to put some heft into what is rather sensible.

Thanks for sharing, that sounds interesting. I'll give it a listen

Edit: Related summary on wiki page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constructed_emotion

A similar concept in some cultures is Mindfullness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness

I really came to appreciate this when I got a camera during the pandemic and started walking around looking for things to photograph. I recommend it. Even better maybe if you dispense with the instagram account and the idea of trying to show it to people.

Awe is an interesting one to me. I think it could possibly be broken down into types of awe for more leverage. Similar to the way others have attempted to enumerate additional human sense capabilities.

It'd be cool to generate some "awe practices" which would be more like frameworks with which to generate awe. I imagine the more subjectively-open, the better. One person's Carl Sagan Cosmos-style Awe, for example, is probably another person's nightmare (I can share from personal experience in relating my own awe to others).

Awe is probably one of the biggest sensations one gets from psychedelics. I wonder if this may help to explain some of the antidepressant effects that are currently being explored.

That's a really interesting thought. I also wonder if there are relational or organizational aspects that may suppress or stimulate a sense of awe.

IOW, you may be able to find/design an awe-group or awe-place of your own. Or at least, it may help adjust expectations as to where and when awe can be reliably captured for therapeutic or other moderating capacity.

Having visited a lot of places that are considered holy, I'm pretty sure that reading how a place is considered holy and has been the site of traveling by pilgrims for hundreds or thousands of years, and then going and seeing the pilgrims now act with reverences, it has a tendency to open your own ability to experience sacredness by following along in the footsteps of the predecessors and moving in the ancient rituals. Anecdata tho.

I hear you there. Funny, too...I personally stepped away from organized religion after years of devout leadership and missionary service, and this has dramatically changed my experience with such sites. Similarly anecdotal of course...but I like that subjective choice could be made paramount in any such determination.

I thought exactly the same thing.

I've not taken any psychedelics for decades but those experiences still provide a vivid reminder of how awe-inspiring anything can become if you pay close enough attention.

There are so many photons bouncing around you right now, that a 1mm circle captures more than enough perpendicular to its surface in a fraction of a second, to recapitulate the entire scene - for that disk placed at any location, at any angle.

I kinda agree but at some points I strongly believe being in awe and looking to be in awe can turn into escapism.

What I mean to say: if you have more serious underlying mental health problems then looking to be in awe will be a temporary relief.

Thanks much for the summary.

I really wanted to find the payload, but the reams of gobbledegook were just too much. You've made the world a little bit better place.

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