Awesome

The award-winning social psychologist Dacher Keltner believes he’s found the answer to happiness: finding awe. In his new book, Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder, he shows how this elusive, but powerful, emotion can have physical and psychological effects, impacting our bodies and brains.

Anna Lapwood is an organist and conductor, and currently the Director of Music at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She is also a great believer in the transformative power of music. She regularly plays the Royal Albert Hall’s organ – described as ‘the voice of Jupiter’ – and believes listeners can feel the wonder vibrating through the music.

Looking up at the night sky and contemplating galaxies far away is often seen as a sure way to elicit wonder, but the physicist Felix Flicker argues that it can be found much smaller and much closer to home. In The Magick of Matter he shows how truly inspiring crystalline specks of dust can be, and when they're combined the sky’s the limit.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Image: Anna Lapwood - Leeds Town Hall (Credit Tom Arber)