A review of the scientific literature: As Gottschall points out in The Storytelling Animal. Also see Jonathan Shedler, “The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy,” American Psychologist 65, no. 2 (2010): 98–109.
Even making smaller story edits: For more on what the University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson has called “story-editing,” see Timothy Wilson, Redirect: Changing the Stories We Live By (New York: Back Bay Books, 2015).
Adam Grant and Jane Dutton: Adam Grant and Jane Dutton, “Beneficiary or Benefactor: Are People More Prosocial When They Reflect on Receiving or Giving?” Psychological Science 23, no. 9 (2012): 1033–39.
“When seeing themselves as benefactors”: Email from Jane Dutton on January 28, 2016.
In research published in 2010: Laura J. Kray, Linda G. George, Katie A. Liljenquist, Adam D. Galinsky, Philip E. Tetlock, and Neal J. Roese, “From What Might Have Been to What Must Have Been: Counterfactual Thinking Creates Meaning,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98, no. 1 (2010): 106–18. I focus on counter-factual reasoning with respect to positive events in my summary of this paper, but the researchers also probed into negative events.
Carlos Eire, that moment was: Information from Carlos’s story from Carlos Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004); and author interview on October 9, 2015.
The University of Missouri’s Laura King: Information about King’s work comes from Laura A. King and Joshua A. Hicks, “Whatever Happened to ‘What Might Have Been’? Regrets, Happiness, and Maturity,” American Psychologist 62, no. 7 (2007): 625–36; Laura A. King, “The Hard Road to the Good Life: The Happy, Mature Person,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 41, no. 1 (2001): 51–72; and author interview on April 2, 2014.
two years after they responded: For divorced women, King writes, “lost possible self elaboration related to current ego development in interaction with time since the divorce.” King and Hicks, “Whatever Happened to ‘What Might Have Been’?” 630.
the novel Life of Pi: Yann Martel, Life of Pi (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, 2001).
fiction can help people: Don Kuiken and Ruby Sharma, “Effects of Loss and Trauma on Sublime Disquietude during Literary Reading,” Scientific Study of Literature 3, no. 2 (2013): 240–65.
In a study published in 2002: David S. Miall and Don Kuiken, “A Feeling for Fiction: Becoming What We Behold,” Poetics 30, no. 4 (2002): 221–41.
“levitate the room”: Burns, The Moth, xiii.
5: Transcendence
McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis: I traveled to the McDonald Observatory twice for this section. The opening description of my journey to the observatory and the interview with William Cochran were from a trip I took March 18 and 19, 2013, where I also interviewed the director of the observatory, Tom Barnes. The star party is from the second trip—July 29, 2014.
early horses and the first elephants: “The Oligocene Period,” University of California Museum of Paleontology, retrieved online: ucmp.berkeley.edu/tertiary/oligocene.php.
the discovery of around 1,000 exoplanets: If you’re interested in contributing to this enterprise, you, too, can examine stellar light data for evidence of planetary transits. The citizen science website planethunters.org allows volunteers to comb through data provided by the Kepler Space Telescope for signs of exoplanets.
In Buddhism, transcendence is: According to Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, 1987), 175–76.
Many people have had: George H. Gallup Jr., “Religious Awakenings Bolster Americans’ Faith,” January 14, 2003, gallup.com/poll/7582/religious-awakenings-bolster-americans-faith.aspx.
among the most meaningful and important: See Roland R. Griffiths, William A. Richards, Una McCann, and Robert Jesse, “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance,” Psychopharmacology 187, no. 3 (2006): 268–83; Roland R. Griffiths, William A. Richards, Matthew W. Johnson, Una D. McCann, and Robert Jesse, “Mystical-Type Experiences Occasioned by Psilocybin Mediate the Attribution of Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance 14 Months Later,” Journal of Psychopharmacology 22, no. 6 (2008): 621–32; and Rick Doblin, “Pahnke’s ‘Good Friday Experiment’: A Long-Term Follow-Up and Methodological Critique,” The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 23, no. 1 (1991): 1–28.
with William James: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1905), retrieved online from Google Books; and Dmitri Tymoczko, “The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher,” The Atlantic, May 1996. Though James claims in Varieties that his “constitution shuts” him out from enjoying mystical states “almost entirely,” and that he “can speak of them only at second hand” (379), the experiences on nitrous oxide seem to be an exception. A few paragraphs later, he ascribes to them a “metaphysical significance” (388).
often for our entire lives: Doblin, “Pahnke’s ‘Good Friday Experiment.’ ”
According to psychologist David Yaden: David B. Yaden, Jonathan Haidt, Ralph W. Hood, David R. Vago, and Andrew B. Newberg (under review), “The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience.”
which they refer to as awe: Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, “Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion,” Cognition and Emotion 17, no. 2 (2003): 297–314.
Adam Smith wrote, awe occurs: Quoted in Jesse Prinz, “How Wonder Works,” Aeon, June 21, 2013.
how awe affects our sense: Michelle N. Shiota, Dacher Keltner, and Amanda Mossman, “The Nature of Awe: Elicitors, Appraisals, and Effects on Self-Concept,” Cognition and Emotion 21, no. 5 (2007): 944–63.
“a sense of timelessness and infinity”: Quoted in Andrew Newberg and Eugene d’Aquili, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002), 2.
“I possessed God so fully”: Quoted in Newberg and d’Aquili, Why God Won’t Go Away, 7.
Cory Muscara has been there, too: Author interview on September 2, 2015.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, has put it: Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are (New York: Hyperion, 1994), 4.
practitioners of Tibetan Buddhist meditation: Andrew Newberg, Abass Alavi, Michael Baime, Michael Pourdehnad, Jill Santanna, and Eugene d’Aquili, “The Measurement of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow during the Complex Cognitive Task of Meditation: A Preliminary SPECT Study,” Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging 106, no. 2 (2001): 113–22. See also Andrew Newberg, Michael Pourdehnad, Abass Alavi, and Eugene d’Aquili, “Cerebral Blood Flow during Meditative Prayer: Preliminary Findings and Methodological Issues,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 97, no. 2 (2003): 625–30. Material from this section also comes from an author interview with Newberg on April 25, 2013.
minds of meditating Sufi mystics: Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman, How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain: The New Science of Transformation (New York: Avery, 2016).
former astronaut Jeff Ashby: Author interview on July 17, 2014.
Within a decade of Shepard’s flight: Information about the early history of space exploration came via NASA’s website and my conversation with Ashby.
Archibald MacLeish wrote: James H. Billington (preface), Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations: Compiled by the Library of Congress (New York: Dover Publications, 2010), 328.
Their values, according to one: Peter Suedfeld, Katya Legkaia, and Jelena Brcic, “Changes in the Hierarchy of Value References Associated with Flying in Space,” Journal of Personality 78, no. 5 (2010): 1411–36. See also David B. Yaden, Jonathan Iwry, Kelley J. Slack, Johannes C. Eiechstaedt, Yukun Zhao, George E. Vaillant, and Andrew Newberg, “The Overview Effect: Awe and Self-Transcendent Experience in Space Flight,” Psychology of Consciousness (in press).
“You develop...‘son of a bitch’ ”: “Edgar Mitchell’s Strange Voyage,” People, vol. 1, no. 6, April 8, 1974.
Ron Garan, for example: Ron Gara
n, The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture from a Journey of 71 Million Miles (Oakland, California: Berrett-Koehler, 2015).
Edgar Mitchell: “Edgar Mitchell’s Strange Voyage.”
“You cannot view...preservation”: This quote appears in his biography on the website for Mosaic Renewables.
John Muir, the nineteenth-century naturalist: Muir’s biographical information comes from Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), retrieved from Google Books.
was influenced by Transcendentalism: James Brannon, “Radical Transcendentalism: Emerson, Muir and the Experience of Nature,” John Muir Newsletter, vol. 16, no. 1 (Winter 2006), retrieved online at the Sierra Club website.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay “Nature”: David Mikics (editor), The Annotated Emerson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2012).
“all nature is leaden...light”: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes (editors), Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson with Annotations: 1824–1832 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 381.
“If this is mysticism,” as Emerson’s: Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 228.
an awe-inspiring encounter: Paul Piff, Pia Dietze, Matthew Feinberg, Daniel M. Stancato, and Dacher Keltner, “Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 108, no. 6 (2015): 883–99, study 5.
writes the psychologist Mark Leary: Mark Leary, The Curse of the Self: Self-Awareness, Egotism, and the Quality of Human Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 86.
Take the case of Janeen Delaney: Author interview, June 18, 2014.
Since ancient times: Peter T. Furst, Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual Use of Hallucinogens (Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1990).
Roland Griffiths, the principal investigator: Much of the information in the paragraphs that follow came from an author interview with Griffiths on February 28, 2013. See also Roland R. Griffiths and Charles S. Grob, “Hallucinogens as Medicine,” Scientific American 303, no. 6 (2010): 76–79.
“bad trip”: Hallucinogenic trips are not the only transcendent experiences that can go wrong. Meditation can plunge people into terror, too. See Tomas Rocha, “The Dark Knight of the Soul,” The Atlantic, June 25, 2014.
Leary, an academic psychologist at Harvard: Information about Leary from Timothy Leary, Flashbacks: A Personal and Cultural History of an Era (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1990); and Robert Greenfield, Timothy Leary: A Biography (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, 2006).
Nixon called Leary: Quoted in Laura Mansnerus, “Timothy Leary, Pied Piper of Psychedelic 60’s, Dies at 75,” New York Times, June 1, 1996.
studies have looked at the effects: The research on religious leaders has yet to be published, but for findings on the other three groups, see Griffiths et al., “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance”; Charles S. Grob, Alicia L. Danforth, Gurpreet S. Chopra, Marycie Hagerty, Charles R. McKay, Adam L. Halberstadt, and George R. Greer, “Pilot Study of Psilocybin Treatment for Anxiety in Patients with Advanced-Stage Cancer,” Archives of General Psychiatry 68, no. 1 (2011): 71–78; and Matthew W. Johnson, Albert Garcia-Romeu, Mary P. Cosimano, and Roland R. Griffiths, “Pilot Study of the 5-HT2AR Agonist Psilocybin in the Treatment of Tobacco Addiction,” Journal of Psychopharmacology 28, no. 11 (2014): 983–92.
cancer patients Griffiths has studied: At the time of this writing, Griffiths and his colleagues were preparing to submit the study in which Janeen participated to journals to be published. They have already published one study on the effects of a psilocybin-induced mystical experience on terminal cancer patients, showing that it reduces anxiety: Grob et al., “Pilot Study of Psilocybin Treatment for Anxiety in Patients with Advanced-Stage Cancer.”
“Sooner or later,” writes the Buddhist: Thich Nhat Hanh, No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life (New York: Riverhead Books, 2002), 25.
6: Growth
Welcome to The Dinner Party: I attended a Dinner Party with Sarah, Raúl, Christine, and Sandy on October 19, 2014. The attendants asked that I maintain anonymity by giving them different names and, in some cases, changing identifying details of their lives. Information about The Dinner Party as a movement and organization, and its founding, from an interview with Lennon Flowers and Dara Kosberg on May 7, 2014.
For most of us, there is: “Researchers estimate that about 75 percent of people will experience a traumatic event in their lifetime,” writes Jim Rendon in Upside: The New Science of Post-Traumatic Growth (New York: Touchstone, 2015), 27.
shatter our fundamental assumptions: Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma (New York: Free Press, 1992).
can also push us to grow: Good overviews of this research are Rendon, Upside; and Stephen Joseph, What Doesn’t Kill Us: The New Psychology of Posttraumatic Growth (New York: Basic Books, 2011).
new idea in mainstream psychology: Joseph, What Doesn’t Kill Us. Joseph mentions some exceptions that prove the rule in his book, like the work of Viktor Frankl (whom I cover in the conclusion). See also chapter 1 of Richard G. Tedeschi, Crystal L. Park, and Lawrence G. Calhoun (editors), Posttraumatic Growth: Positive Changes in the Aftermath of Crisis (Mahwah, New Jersey: Routledge, 1998).
added post-traumatic stress disorder: Matthew J. Friedman, “PTSD History and Overview” at the Veterans Administration website, ptsd.va.gov/professional/PTSD-overview/ptsd-overview.asp.
The story of Bob Curry: Author interviews on May 30, 2014, and January 27, 2015.
Robert Jay Lifton: Robert Jay Lifton, “Americans as Survivors,” New England Journal of Medicine 352, no. 22 (2005): 2263–65.
others don’t have to go through: This tendency has also been called “altruism born of suffering,” as Kelly McGonigal points out in The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It (New York: Avery, 2015).
Survivors of sexual assault: Examples of survivor mission from Lifton, “Americans as Survivors,” and Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Elizabeth P. Shulman, and Angela L. Duckworth, “Survivor Mission: Do Those Who Survive Have a Drive to Thrive at Work?” The Journal of Positive Psychology 9, no. 3 (2014): 209–18.
less depression...and meaning in life: McGonigal reviews this body of research in chapter 5 of The Upside of Stress.
most people will experience some: Rendon, Upside.
half to two-thirds of trauma survivors: Based on his research and knowledge of the field, psychologist Richard Tedeschi provided this figure in an email to me on January 27, 2015.
small percentage suffer: According to the American Psychological Association, “almost 8% of adult Americans will experience PTSD at some point in their lives”: apa.org/research/action/ptsd.aspx.
Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun: The information about post-traumatic growth came chiefly from an author interview with Richard Tedeschi on January 28, 2015. See also Richard G. Tedeschi and Lawrence G. Calhoun, “Posttraumatic Growth: Conceptual Foundations and Empirical Evidence,” Psychological Inquiry 15, no. 1 (2004): 1–18.
“We’d been working”: Quoted in Shelley Levitt, “The Science of Post-Traumatic Growth,” Live Happy, February 24, 2014.
“are the most important things”: Shelley E. Taylor, “Adjustment to Threatening Events: A Theory of Cognitive Adaptation,” American Psychologist 38, no. 11 (1983): 1161–73.
“I’ve become more empathetic”: Tedeschi and Calhoun, “Posttraumatic Growth: Conceptual Foundations and Empirical Evidence,” 6.
oncology nurse: Lawrence G. Calhoun and Richard G. Tedeschi, The Handbook of Posttraumatic Growth: Research and Practice (New York: Psychology Press, 2006).
“vulnerable yet stronger”: Ibid., 5.
rape survivor who admi
tted: Janoff-Bulman, Shattered Assumptions.
survivor of an airplane crash: Ibid.
Trauma shatters those assumptions: Ibid.
“It is not the actual trauma”: Suzanne Danhauer of Wake Forest School of Medicine, quoted in Rendon, Upside, 77.
James Pennebaker: Information about expressive writing and Pennebaker’s work from author interview, December 22, 2014; Anna Graybeal, Janel D. Sexton, and James W. Pennebaker, “The Role of Story-Making in Disclosure Writing: The Psychometrics of Narrative,” Psychology and Health 17, no. 5 (2002): 571–81; James W. Pennebaker and Janel D. Seagal, “Forming a Story: The Health Benefits of Narrative,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 55, no. 10 (1999): 1243–54; and James W. Pennebaker, Writing to Heal: A Guided Journal for Recovering from Trauma and Emotional Upheaval (Oakland, California: New Harbinger Publisher, 2004).
less depressed and report higher well-being: Vicki S. Helgeson, Kerry A. Reynolds, and Patricia L. Tomich, “A Meta-analytic Review of Benefit Finding and Growth,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 74, no. 5 (2006): 797.
Viktor Frankl tells about consoling: Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 113.
through dance didn’t benefit: Anne M. Krantz and James W. Pennebaker, “Expressive Dance, Writing, Trauma, and Health: When Words Have a Body,” in Ilene Serlin (editor), Whole Person Healthcare, Volume 3 (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2007), 201–29.
One of those people is Shibvon: Shibvon’s story, and all of the quotes from it, appear in chapter 2 of Gina O’Connell Higgins, Resilient Adults: Overcoming a Cruel Past (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994), 25–43. To protect her privacy, Higgins used a pseudonym, “Shibvon,” and changed the identifying details of individuals in the story. The other aspects of the story, Higgins explains, are rendered factually.
psychological and physical scars: For a good review of the research on the psychological and physical effects of childhood adversity, see Donna Jackson Nakazawa, Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal (New York: Atria Books, 2015).
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