The Power of Wonder: The Extraordinary Emotion That Will Change the Way You Live, Learn, and Lead
400
The Power of Wonder: The Extraordinary Emotion That Will Change the Way You Live, Learn, and Lead
400Hardcover
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Overview
An eye-opening journey through the magical, yet surprisingly little-understood, human emotion that is wonder.
From the first tickle of curiosity to an unexpected shift in how we perceive the world, there isn’t a person who hasn’t experienced wonder, and yet the why and how of this profoundly beneficial emotion is only just beginning to be scientifically examined. This inspiring book from thought leader Monica Parker explores the power of wonder to transform the way we learn, develop new ideas, drive social change, and ultimately become better humans.
The Power of Wonder takes readers on a multidisciplinary journey through psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, literature, and business to share some of the surprising secrets behind the mechanics of wonder and guides readers in bringing more of it into their lives. From art and architecture, to love and sex, to sleep and psychedelics, you will learn about the elements and elicitors of wonder, and how it can transform our bodies and brains. Whether it’s taking a daily “wonder walk” or discovering a new absorbing intellectual pursuit, this book shows us how to become more wonderprone and reconnect with a reverence for the world and all the magic in it.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780593419366 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 02/21/2023 |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Sales rank: | 343,520 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.60(d) |
About the Author
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This is the story of a very unlikely friendship.
Born into a family of intellectual elites in the mid-nineteenth century, William James was the first person to teach a university psychology course in America, joking that the first psychology course he attended was the one he taught. Now considered the father of American psychology, James spent twelve years penning his twelve-hundred-page masterwork, The Principles of Psychology, and his writings are foundational to the field. Young William's life was a peripatetic one. His father believed he and his siblings (including authors Alice and Henry) would benefit from a global education, so he moved the family from the United States to Europe and back again several times, with James having lived in eighteen different homes (and even more if including hotels) before age sixteen. James begrudgingly attended Harvard University Medical School (he wanted to be a painter), but in the end, he discovered he was interested in the inner workings of the mind and soul, not the body. A contemporary of great thinkers like his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bertrand Russell, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and W. E. B. Du Bois, it was the latter, Du Bois, who introduced James to his young friend.
Helen Adams Keller was born a healthy baby girl in Tuscumbia, Alabama, on June 27, 1880. When Helen was about a year and a half, a fever, perhaps caused by rubella, left her blind and deaf, completely cut off from the world she had known. She would later describe that time in her life as being "at sea in a dense fog." For years following, she descended into a semi-feral state of headstrong chaos until a kindly Alexander Graham Bell took a shine to young Helen and arranged for a recent Perkins Institution for the Blind graduate, Anne Sullivan, to teach her. Sullivan transformed the child's life (Helen referred to the day she met Sullivan as "her soul's birthday"), and their relationship-and Helen's transformation-became lore.
And so it was in Boston, where James and his brilliant radical friend and classmate Du Bois, having taken a short journey from Cambridge to Roxbury, met the then eleven-year-old Keller at the Perkins Institution for the Blind. James brought her a gift that she was deeply moved by, and years later, she still recalled their first meeting vividly. "When I was a little girl he came to see Miss Sullivan and me at the Perkins Institution for the Blind in South Boston. He brought me a beautiful ostrich feather. 'I thought,' he said, 'you would like the feather, it is soft and light and caressing.' We talked about my sense perceptions and he wove a magic web into his discourse." This poignant and perceptive gift was the beginning of a friendship that would last for the best part of two decades until James's death in 1910.
W. E. B. Du Bois also maintained a friendship with Keller. Despite being deaf, Keller had a voice, and it was one she used in support of several issues of the day, including civil rights. "Perhaps because she was blind to color differences in this world, I became intensely interested in her, and all through my life I have followed her career." Du Bois, who went on to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, nurtured Keller's activism, and he remarked on her maturation from child to racial equality advocate (and eventual cofounder of the American Civil Liberties Union), "So it was proven, as I knew it would be, that this woman who sits in darkness has a spiritual insight clearer than that of many wide-eyed people who stare uncomprehendingly at this prejudiced world."
Throughout their friendship, James and Keller often spoke of the ideas of perception and consciousness. James felt strongly that many humans develop their external senses at the expense of their internal ones, and he was in awe of Keller's exceptional aptitude in deploying her interior senses. "You have escaped from your prison-house," he wrote in one of his many letters to Keller. "Most of us are still beating about in the dark round the walls of our prison, and we seldom find the secret door of exit." Du Bois, James, and Keller, each in their own way, were exploring the meaning of watching and openness. Of sight and vision. People can be invisible, and people can be seen-sometimes not for who they are but for who they are perceived to be. People can be sighted, wide-eyed, looking but not seeing. And we can be without the physical faculty of sight but, like Keller, blessed with insight. James described this sort of aspirational, open awareness as "the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents absorbed by what is given... the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception."
What say we open ourselves to the life-current of pure sensorial perception?
The first element: openness
Watching-openness to experience-is the first element of wonder. The watcher is open and present, always mentally seeking, searching, and seeing, examining the familiar with new eyes to find undiscovered details and delights. Openness to experience is a personality trait associated with a number of characteristics like cognitive flexibility, intellectual curiosity, unconventional thinking, and absorption, and researchers have consistently found people high in openness to be naturally energetic, inventive, and compassionate. And because of these characteristics, and the broader nature of the experiences open people typically seek out and encounter, people high in openness frequently live nonconforming, less traditional lives.
By the time we're about twenty years old, a lot of who we are is fairly fixed, as our elemental qualities as humans-our personality traits-have pretty much settled into place. How we react to or approach any given situation will be based on both our traits-our deeply ingrained personality features-and our states-our temporal and variable emotional reactions to a given situation. Attributes like our propensity for happiness, our political views, and the jobs we might like are all heavily influenced by our personality.
Analyzing personality traits en masse began in World War I when the United States military had soldiers fill out personality questionnaires to assess their preparedness for war. Since then, similar questionnaires have steadily grown in popularity, especially in the corporate sphere. Today, there is a proliferation of what are erroneously called "personality tests" on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, where you can find out who your life partner should be based on the length of your middle toe or what your perfect job is based on your Harry Potter house. (Before social networks, these "tests" were all the rage. Those of a certain age may remember the saucy questionnaires in the back of women's magazines that promised to help libertine ladies determine which sex position was right for their personality type.) One would hope it goes without saying that such tests are "for recreational purposes only." Arguably, though, many people also consider the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) or the Enneagram valid personality tests.
While tools like the MBTI can be beneficial as a reference point for discussion and self-awareness, the reality is that for all the years the MBTI has been used, it is still viewed as scientifically dubious. Loosely based on the theories of Jungian psychology, the MBTI has been called "bogus," "corporate astrology," and "shockingly bad" by scientists, but despite this, it is still taken online 1.5 million times a year. There are, however, several validated personality inventories, the most commonly cited being the Five-Factor Model of Personality, or the "Big Five," which comprises the personality traits openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (also called OCEAN or CANOE).
Part of what makes the Big Five an improvement over other ways of analyzing personality is that it looks at traits across a continuum rather than in discrete and oppositional categories, meaning someone can be high, medium, or low on agreeableness, but not outright disagreeable (although your significant other might like to differ). This continuum model allows for more nuance than the MBTI, which forces respondents to identify with one quality or another when, in actuality, those who straddle two qualities and may be a little of each depending on the day, mood, or context.
But the most fundamental difference in the Big Five, as opposed to these other tools, is that it is predictive. (And not predictive in a dystopian Minority Report sort of way, but simply consistently indicative of certain life outcomes.) Presumably, we want to use a personality inventory to support our understanding of ourselves and our decision-making. If a tool isn't predictive, the result is only a few steps removed from a fortune cookie. It can give us some food for thought, but we can't confidently apply the result to our lives. However, in an overwhelming number of studies, across cultures, demographics, and eras, the Big Five has been demonstrated to predict everything from life, job, and relationship satisfaction to work and school performance, physical health, longevity, and more. And this is consistent across all manner of variables, including intelligence and socioeconomic status.
Among the Big Five personality traits, the one linked to the most positive life outcomes is openness to experience. Open people are more likely to live more creative lives, have greater imagination, and be more innovative and intellectual, and they are highly perceptive and insightful. Another outcome this trait is predictive of? Wonder! People high in openness are more wonderprone.
These attributes might be the result of open people literally seeing the world differently. In 2016, a team of researchers from the University of Melbourne wanted to explore the connection between openness and a visual quirk known as binocular rivalry, a phenomenon that occurs when the left eye is shown one image and the right eye a different one. "Because the brain cannot extract a coherent picture from these incompatible percepts, the two images seem to flip back and forth in our mind's eye, each image rivaling the other for dominance," explains study author Luke Smillie. "But sometimes both images do breakthrough into conscious perception as a scrambled mash-up." The study showed that open people could hold the mash-up image in their heads for longer. This "permeability of consciousness" appears to make open people more comfortable with complex emotional experiences. "It is as though the gates of perception are agape, allowing more visual information to flow into consciousness for open people."
It's worth clarifying that when we talk of openness, it's not the interpersonal openness we might see in an outgoing extrovert. In fact, openness to experience doesn't necessarily correlate to extroversion, but rather is an experiential and intellectual receptivity to different, unfamiliar, and even uncomfortable things, experiences, and ideas. "People high in openness to experience enjoy aesthetic experiences, live more creative lives, and pursue and support the arts," says Paul Silvia, professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "People low in openness to experience, in contrast, are more conventional, practical, and down-to-earth." And it likely won't come as a surprise that being down-to-earth is not so conducive to wonder.
Nature versus nurture
Whenever the topic of personality traits comes up, the concept of nature versus nurture is soon to follow. An intriguing way to explore this connection is to study identical twins separated at birth. We've all seen the TV shows in which separated twins are reunited and they turn out to have strikingly similar jobs, haircuts, or taste in partners, and these similarities are typically the result of the genetic personality traits they share. Several studies looking at twins separated at birth have shown that personality traits are almost equally influenced by genetic heredity and one's environment, with the percentage influenced by the environment typically stable by adulthood. Whether we can change our personality is a hotly debated topic, but there is mounting evidence that our brain isn't entirely as immutable as some think and can shift when presented with a compelling enough reason. The question is, how compelling is compelling enough?
Psychologist Carol Dweck from Stanford University believes that while our personality is set by adulthood, there are "in-between" parts of our personality that are more malleable. Features like our overarching belief systems, self-belief, goal-setting behavior, and coping strategies are all changeable with self-awareness and practice, and these also significantly impact the way we view the world and the decisions we make. Dweck believes these adaptable features can underpin the ways we "grow and learn, sustain satisfying relationships, achieve well in school and careers, be caring toward others [and] recover from setbacks" potentially as much as our personality.
In one study of Dweck's, a group of junior high school students undertook an eight-week study skills course. Those in the control group were given no prompt, whereas those in the experimental group were told that intelligence isn't innate but instead is like a muscle that simply needs to be exercised. Those told that intelligence is mutable performed better. These "in-between" elements impact not only our intelligence, but our sense of self. If a person is congratulated for doing well because they are intelligent (i.e., a set trait), their self-esteem suffers, whereas if someone is lauded for their work (i.e., their effort, which is variable), they are more eager to learn and more resilient in setbacks.
This is just to say that we shouldn't feel constrained by our personality-we still have free will-but understanding our personality, and the tendencies and proclivities our personality engenders, helps us create strategies to harness or mitigate those tendencies. Don't worry if you believe you are on the lower end of the scale in some of these wonderprone attributes. First, no one is devoid of a particular element of the Big Five. We all have some openness, for example. Second, there is more evidence that over time we can shift the needle on these traits (somewhat), although doing so takes concerted effort or a life-changing experience. Last, we can always build other in-between skills around our personality to enhance, support, and counterbalance our existing traits, and we'll learn some of the ways to do just that throughout the book.
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