The Reset Button

What It Covers

Psychologist Dacher Keltner explores the science of awe, examining how experiences of vastness and wonder reduce anxiety, expand perspective, quiet self-focus, and activate prosocial behavior, while Mary Helen Imordino-Yang discusses transcendent thinking in education and student development.

Key Questions Answered

• •Awe's Physical Effects: Experiencing awe activates the vagus nerve, slowing heart rate and deepening breathing, while reducing inflammatory cytokines by significant margins. Regular awe experiences correlate with lower cortisol levels and decreased chronic inflammation, addressing major health threats in modern society through simple exposure to vast natural phenomena.
• •The Small Self Phenomenon: When people view awe-inspiring sights like Yosemite Valley or stand beside a T-rex skeleton, they draw themselves smaller and shift self-descriptions from individual traits to collective identities. This reduction in ego-focused thinking increases prosocial behaviors like helping strangers pick up dropped items within minutes of exposure.
• •Awe Walks for Mental Health: Adults over seventy-five who took weekly awe walks for eight weeks, focusing on wonder and looking beyond the horizon, reported measurably less daily anxiety and distress. Their self-portraits progressively shrank while including more environmental elements, demonstrating sustained perspective shifts from brief regular practice.
• •Learning Through Montessori Methods: Students from Montessori schools solving math problems show different brain patterns than traditionally-schooled peers. When encountering wrong answers, Montessori students engage problem-solving networks and improve on subsequent attempts, while traditional students show memory-storage patterns and repeat mistakes, despite equal overall accuracy rates.
• •Transcendent Thinking in Education: Teaching algebra through real community applications, like helping families calculate mortgage payments and college savings using exponential growth equations, creates deeper engagement than abstract instruction. Students develop serious focus and integrate mathematical thinking into their identity when content connects to meaningful civic contribution.