体验“心灵震撼”的好处
如果发现自己陷入焦虑和消极情绪，不妨试着畅想浩瀚的宇宙，或是体验大自然的震撼魅力。体验令人惊叹的事物对大脑产生真正深远的影响——增强人的记忆力和创造力，激励我们对周围的人与物更加无私。
震撼对心理健康产生深远的影响，让我们正确看待焦虑。
Awe: The 'little earthquake' that could free your mind
Whenever Ethan Kross finds himself in a mental rut of worrying and negative self-talk, he walks five blocks to his local arboretum and contemplates one of the magnificent trees in front of him, and the astonishing power of nature.
每当伊桑·克罗斯（Ethan Kross）发现自己陷入焦虑消极的情绪时，他就走五个街区，到当地植物园，凝视一棵宏伟的大树，体会大自然惊人的力量。
If he can’t get to the arboretum, he spends a few moments thinking about the astonishing possibilities of aeroplanes and spacecraft. “I think about how we went from struggling to start fires, just a few thousand years ago, to being able to land safely on another planet,” he says.
如果去不了植物园，他就会花一些时间思考飞机和宇宙飞船的伟大。他说，“如果想到几千年前，人类钻木取火，如今却已经能在另一个星球上安全着陆。”
The aim, in each case, is to evoke awe – which he defines as “the wonder that we feel when we encounter something that we can’t easily explain”.
这些都唤起了内心的崇敬与敬畏，人在遇到难以解释的事物时，内心感受到奇迹的力量。
Kross’s habits are founded in scientific evidence. As a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, he knows feelings of awe can have a truly profound influence on the mind – enhancing our memory and creativity as well as inspiring us to act more altruistically to the people around us. It can also have a profound impact on our mental health, by allowing us to put our anxieties into perspective.
克罗斯是密歇根大学（University of Michigan）一名心理学教授，他说体验震撼这个习惯是有科学依据的。体验令人惊叹的事物，会对大脑产生真正深远的影响——增强我们的记忆力和创造力，并激励我们对周围的人更加无私。它对我们的心理健康产生深远的影响，让我们正确看待自己的焦虑。
Because most of us only experience awe sporadically, we remain unaware of its benefits. When we’re feeling down, we may be more likely to look for light relief in a comedy, for instance – seeking feelings of amusement that are not nearly so powerful. Yet generating awe can trigger a great mental shift, making it a potentially essential tool to improve our health and wellbeing. And there are many ways for us to cultivate the emotion in our daily lives.
因为大多数人只是偶尔体验敬畏，所以没有意识到它的好处。当我们情绪低落的时候，我们更可能在喜剧中寻找放松，寻找娱乐的感觉，但这没有那么强大。
产生敬畏，可以引发巨大的心理转变，成为改善人健康和幸福的必要工具。在日常生活中，我们有很多方法来培养敬畏之情。
Little earthquakes
震撼心灵
Michelle Shiota, a professor of social psychology at Arizona State University, US, was one of the early pioneers to discover the benefits of awe. She has a particular interest in the ways it can remove our “mental filters” to encourage more flexible thinking.
美国亚利桑那州立大学（Arizona State University）社会心理学教授米歇尔·施塔（Michelle Shiota）最早发现敬畏益处。她特别感兴趣的是，敬畏可以消除我们的“心理过滤器”，可以鼓励更灵活的思维。
Consider memory. If someone tells us a story, we typically remember what we think we should have heard, rather than the specific details of the event. This can mean that we miss unexpected or unusual elements that add much-needed clarity and specificity to what happened. We may even form false memories for events that did not happen, but which we assume are likely to have occurred in that kind of situation.
如果有人讲一个故事，我们通常会记住我们认为应该听到的内容，而不是整个事件的具体细节。这可能意味着我们错过了意想不到的或不寻常的元素，而这些元素又加强了事情的清晰度和特异性。我们甚至可能对没有发生过的事情形成错误的记忆，但我们认为这些事情很可能发生过。
A few years ago, Shiota decided to test whether eliciting a feeling of awe could prevent this from occurring. She first asked the participants to view one of three videos: an awe-inspiring science film that took viewers on a journey from the outer cosmos to sub-atomic particles; a heart-warming film about a figure skater winning an Olympic gold medal; or a neutral film about the building of a cinder-block wall.
几年前施塔决定测试敬畏感，是否能防止错误记忆的发生。她首先要求参与者观看三个视频中的一个：一个令人敬畏的科学电影，带领观众观察外宇宙到亚原子粒子的旅程；一部关于花样滑冰运动员赢得奥运金牌的暖心电影；或一个关于建筑的中性片。
Participants then listened to a five-minute story describing a couple going out for a romantic dinner and answered questions about what they had heard. Some of these questions concerned the things you would typically expect at any meal – “Did the waiter pour the wine?” – while others concerned atypical information, such as whether the waiter wore glasses. As Shiota had hypothesised, the participants who had seen the science film were more accurate at remembering the details of what they had heard than those who had seen the heart-warming or neutral films.
然后参与者听一个五分钟的故事，描述一对情侣外出吃浪漫晚餐，然后回答问题。这些问题中有一些是你在任何一顿饭上都能想到的——“服务员倒酒了吗？”。
而另一些人则关注不寻常的信息，比如服务员是否戴眼镜。正如施塔所假设的那样，看过科幻片的参与者比看过暖心片或中性片的参与者，更能准确地记住细节。
Why would this be? Shiota points out the brain is constantly forming predictions of what will happen next; it uses its experiences to form mental stimulations that guide our perception, attention and behaviour. Awe-inspiring experiences – with their sense of grandeur, wonder and amazement – may confound those expectations, creating a “little earthquake” in the mind that causes the brain to reassess its assumptions and to pay more attention to what is actually in front of it.
为什么会这样呢？施塔指出，大脑不断地对将要发生的事情做出预测：利用自己的经历形成心理刺激，引导我们的感知、注意力和行为。
令人敬畏的经历——带有宏伟、惊奇和感叹的感觉，可能会打破这些期望，在头脑中制造一个“小地震”，使大脑重新评估其假设，并更多地关注实际发生在眼前的事情。
“The mind dials back its ‘predictive coding’ to just look around and gather information,” she says. Besides boosting our memories for details, this can improve critical thinking, she points out – as people pay more attention to the specific nuances of an argument, rather than relying on their intuitions about whether it feels persuasive or not.
“大脑会调整它的‘预测编码’，变为环顾四周，收集信息。” 除了增强我们对细节的记忆之外，还可以提高批判性思维。因为人们变得更关注一项论点的具体细微差别，而不是依靠他们的直觉，判断它是否有说服力。
This capacity to drop our assumptions and see the world and its problems afresh might also explain why the emotion contributes to greater creativity. Take a study by Alice Chirico and colleagues at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, Italy, published in 2018. Participants who took a walk through a virtual reality forest scored higher on tests of original thinking than those who viewed a more mundane video of hens wandering in the grass. The awe-inspired participants were more innovative when asked how to improve a child’s toy, for example.
这种重新看待世界及其问题的能力，或许解释了为什么情绪有助于激发更大的创造力。
以意大利米兰圣心天主教大学（Catholic University of the Sacred Heart）的爱丽丝·基里科（Alice Chirico）认为，受到敬畏激励的参与者，更有创造力。
The Attenborough Effect
“艾登堡效应”
Awe’s most transformative effects may concern the way we view ourselves. When we feel wonder at something truly incredible and grand, “we perceive ourselves as smaller and less significant in relation to the rest of the world”, says Shiota. One consequence of this is greater altruism. “When I am less focused on myself, on my own goals and needs and the thoughts in my head, I have more bandwidth to notice you and what you may be experiencing.”
敬畏产生的影响，最具变革性的可能与我们看待自己的方式有关。
当我们对一些真正不可思议和伟大的事情感到惊讶时，我们会觉得自己相对于世界，显得渺小和不那么重要。这样做的后果就是更大的利他主义。
“ 当我不那么关注自己，不那么关注自己的目标、需求和脑海中的想法时，我就有更多的空间去关注他人可能正在经历的事情。”
The feelings of awe produced a significant change in their generosity, increasing the number of tickets that the participants shared with their partners. Through subsequent statistical analyses, the researchers were able to show that this came through the changes to the sense of self. The smaller the participants felt, the more generous they were.
敬畏的感觉使他们的慷慨程度发生了显著变化。这是人自我意识的改变。参与者感觉自己越渺小，他们就越慷慨。
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