Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

We then had our participants complete a well-used measure of the self-concept, known as the twenty statements test (TST). In this exercise, participants completed twenty statements beginning with: “I am __________.” Control participants completed the same measure, sitting in the same climate-controlled, naturally lit room. Instead of having the T. rex looming in their visual field, though, they sat oriented away from it, looking down a hallway. Lani then coded how people described themselves, identifying physical references (“I am redheaded,” “I am covered in moles”), trait-based references (“I am gregarious,” “I am fragile”), relationship-based references (“I am a nephew,” “I am Sherman’s main squeeze”), and, a category rarely mentioned but of theoretical interest, an oceanic universal category, where the individual completes the prompt with references to membership in large, social collectives (“I am an organic form,” “I am an inhabitant of the Earth,” “I am part of the human species”). People feeling awe—that is, those describing themselves while looking at the skeleton of the T. rex—were three times more likely to describe themselves in terms of these oceanic, collective categories than those individuals standing in the same exact spot but looking away from the awe-inspiring T. rex. Awe shifts the sense of self away from characteristics that separate and delineate—idiosyncratic traits and preferences—to facets that unite and highlight common humanity.

Buoyed by these findings, Emiliana Simon-Thomas and I have sought to locate awe in the brain. The conventional neuroscience wisdom is that there is one reward circuit in the brain, which is activated in response to any kind of pleasure, be it money, a massage, a milkshake, hearing an aria, a raise at work, seeing your smiling infant, the touch of a friend, a smooch from a romantic partner, or a view of mountains. All forms of happiness reduce to a single kind of self-interested pleasure. We, of course, would suggest a different hypothesis, one that argues for distinct regions of the brain engaged in different kinds of pleasure and satisfaction. We would expect evolution to have built into the brain different neural circuits that enable the individual to engage in different kinds of positive emotion, be it about taste and smell, or the strength of the self, or about being good to others, or in the presence of that which is vast and beyond our current understanding.

To test this hypothesis, we first culled databases to find slides that elicit sensory pleasure, pride, compassion, and awe. We then had participants view series of these slides while having images of their brains taken in an fMRI scanner. The results strongly suggest that awe, compassion, and pride are not reducible to sensory pleasure; that there is more to good feeling and pleasure than self-interested rewards.

The images of sensory pleasure—hammocks on tropical beaches, pictures of steaming pizza—did just what you would expect from the neuroscience literature: They activated the nucleus accumbens, a region of the brain implicated in anticipation and registration of rewarding stimuli, including food and money. The images of sensory pleasure also activated the left dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex and hippocampus—involved in memory and reflective thought (clearly our participants were reflecting, perhaps longingly, upon past sensory pleasures).

The pride slides—images of Berkeley landmarks—activated the rostral medial prefrontal cortex. This region of the frontal lobes has been consistently found to light up when people think about themselves—a perfectly sensible finding, given the self-referential core of pride.

The images of harm and suffering activated bundles of neurons that tell a coherent story about where compassion is in the brain. These images activated the amygdala. These slides also activated a portion of the frontal lobes known as the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in empathy and taking the perspective of another. Compassion integrates the sense of harm and the appreciation of the other’s experience.

Finally, awe. The awe slides activated the left orbitofrontal cortex. This region lights up when we are physically touched, and when we anticipate rewards. It is centrally involved in approach and goal-directed action. It is activated in instances in which people reflect upon their own internal experience, from a broader perspective. There are many forms of happiness in the brain; not everything reduces to self-interested pleasure.