Study: Experiencing awe affects the way you treat people | Hacker News Reader

Study: Experiencing awe affects the way you treat people

qz.com

20 pointsdpflan6 comments

This is extremely interesting, because the effect which is proven in this study is (only) 1 of the many beneficial aspects from the experience you live through when you ingest the substance LSD: Handled the right way, you can experience the most awe inspiring moment of your life, you can not just see beauty, but live it, be immersed by it and be a part of it. You're likely to ask yourself over and over "why was this hidden from me all those years?".

This is why it's completely wrong for humanity to keep this substance illegal. This substance can lead to a whole new appreciation for our Planet, the Universe and for the human beings around us.

(Of course, "follow the money" seems to apply here as well, when I think how this molecule seems to be able to replace heavy side-effect ridden anti-depressant therapies which are of course one gigantic cash cow for the pharma industry.)

Note: It is absolutely mandatory to educate oneself about the substance as much as possible and to prepare one's experience by respecting all the rules that apply (and: there are a couple of medical conditions which make the substance very risky for you, should you suffer from one of them knowingly or unknowingly).

Drug-aided experiences of awe are interesting; however, it would be very useful to understand the experience of awe sober. I think right now it is known that drug-aided experiences can have powerful psychological effects that can undermine powerful negative psychological experiences like PTSD or depression. Certainly research should continue in both directions as part of the search for the underlying natural causes for the negative and the positive psychological experiences.

After all the talk about reproducibility problems in psychological studies, and especially after reading examples such as the following from [1]:

> A while ago, Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg published a famous priming study showing that people who spend a few minutes before an exam thinking about brilliant professors will get better grades; conversely, people who spend a few minutes thinking about moronic soccer hooligans will get worse ones. They did four related experiments, and all strongly confirmed their thesis. A few years later, Shanks et al tried to replicate the effect and couldn’t. They did the same four experiments, and none of them replicated at all.

My natural reaction is to take any such study with a grain of salt.

[1] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/05/if-you-cant-make-predic...

I think what is potentially very interesting here is how human perceive vastness, and how humans first experienced vastness: Viewing the horizon such that it appears infinite, floating in a body of water so large that you can see only water in all directions as the horizon curves, staring into the deep blue sky, staring into the dark, star-filled sky.

Understanding how humans experience or understand the infinite (or perceived infinite) would be a fun research topic. Do any HNers have experience with such research or know of people involved or good reading about this?

Shouldn't the same feelings of smallness be imparted by staring at a sufficiently large building? So the sensation of awe fades as you become accustomed to seeing the object in question?

You're arguing for the possibility of desensitization occurring which I agree would make sense for any stimulus.

I cannot truly discuss the difference between awe-inspiring man-made objects and nature-made objects, but perhaps there is an implicit understanding of vastness with regard to nature that includes something intangible related to true complexity of nature: when viewing the Grand Canyon with more context you can try to experience the vastness in many variables: how long the canyon has existed, how long it took be carved out of the earth, how much water there once was flowing through it, etc. For a man-made object perhaps the context is more shallow.

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