Chapter 1: What insights does Dacher Keltner share about finding joy in everyday life?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In July 1798, an English poet visited the countryside on the banks of the River Wye. On seeing the natural beauty of the area, William Wordsworth composed a poem. It's titled, Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey. At one point, he describes the effect of the landscape on his psychological state. He writes,
a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky and in the mind of man, a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things. Now, the romantic poets were sometimes given to literary excess.
They felt things deeply, and they wrote effusively. But more than two centuries after Wordsworth composed his poem, some scientists today are asking an unusual question. Were the romantics on to something? This week on Hidden Brain, we look at what happens when we stop writing. Really stop to smell the roses.
For centuries, one of the central challenges in human behavior has been the problem of suffering. We all have aches and ailments, setbacks at work, and conflicts in personal relationships. Many years ago, the psychologist Dacher Keltner found himself in a world of suffering. He was in his early 30s and had just moved from California to Wisconsin.
What happened to me, Shankar, is I lived a life largely in California and in the hills and the mountains and the oceans and the culture and so forth. And I went 2,000 miles away and it was flat and there were storms and there was snow and people rooted for the Packers and they ate bratwurst and, you know, there was no Mexican food and the weather and the cold. The cold rattled me.
I felt like Camus' stranger in a way. Like, I am in a strange land that I just physically, temperature-wise, climate-wise, people-wise, I felt like a fish out of water, even though I look like somebody from Wisconsin. I'm, you know, of Northern European heritage. Dacher, who was just starting his career as a professor, started to experience extreme bouts of anxiety.
I come from a family on my mom's side that has a lot of anxiety, and I started to have profound panic attacks, really beginning with the day that I departed to drive across the country to Wisconsin. I had probably, I would say, 70 or 80 a year really technicolor, full-blown panic attacks
When I was teaching, when I would go see a movie to try to relax, when I would fly on an airplane to go to a conference, when I would hear from a colleague. And it really caught me off guard, Shankar, like, wow, why am I feeling so estranged and anxious all the time? Everything around Dakar seemed to remind him of his isolation. Everywhere he went, he experienced vulnerability.
He felt that his life was about to end. My God, you know, for those people out in the audience who've had real panic attacks, they are spectacular and they hit you. And you literally, the brain says you're dying. And your body is telling you, you, Dacher Keltner, are dying. And you're about to die right here. It felt really solitary.
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Chapter 2: How did Dacher Keltner's move impact his mental health?
We couldn't really explain it, but we sat out on our swing, on our front porch, as this wild storm ripped through Madison for half an hour or whatever it was, and rain and lightning and massive winds. And again, I just felt so alive and free of the shackles of my anxiety at the time. So it was a striking experience.
So these all seem like very different experiences, enjoying teamwork in a basketball game, being part of a crowd at a music concert, watching a storm approach. Is there a common thread that connects these experiences, Dakar? You know, it was really interesting, Shankar, because I was really struggling in these four years.
And I was chronically anxious, tons of panic attacks, struggling career-wise, really feeling away from home. And I didn't know how to find happiness, which has been a life's puzzle for me in many ways. And I think what I was doing in these experiences is I was getting outside of myself on the basketball court. It's just the motion and the physicality and you're playing with five people.
I was losing myself and I lost myself right up front like in a mosh pit and you're seeing Iggy Pop and feeling the music. And I lost myself in the storm. I was throwing myself into things where I could lose myself. Like William Wordsworth two centuries ago, Dakar had begun to discover ways out of his narrow preoccupations.
When we come back, the connections between these different experiences and the science behind a mind-expanding emotion. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. University of California Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner studies what he calls prosocial emotions, feelings like love, compassion, and gratitude.
Earlier in his life, he tried to get himself through a difficult time by immersing himself in sports, in music, and in the beauties of the natural world. In time, he realized there was a common connection between these activities. They all activated a feeling of being awestruck. Now at the University of California, Berkeley, Dacher has spent years studying the science of awe.
Dacher, I want to talk about your scientific explorations of awe, but so much of your intellectual journey starts with your personal journey. Both your parents were attuned to the world of art. Can you tell me about them? Yeah, you know, it's funny. I really lived a life that really is, in some sense, from my first moments of being born in Mexico, a life as an experiment in awe.
Formative years in Laurel Canyon, California, in the late 60s, so much music going on, Joni Mitchell, The Doors. My dad was a painter. And he loved awe-inspiring, horrifying work. Goya, Velazquez, Francis Bacon and others, right? Just as a kid, I was just seeing images all the time.
And then my mom loved awe in literature and was getting her PhD, eventually taught at Cal State Sacramento and loved, you know, Virginia Woolf and her awesome portrayals of the mind and the romanticism and Wordsworth and Blake. And I would hear quotes of Blake and she told me about the prelude of Wordsworth. You know, and then also D.H. Lawrence and others.
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Chapter 3: What role does nature play in enhancing our well-being?
Tell me about the idea of moral beauty, Dakar. Moral beauty is the idea that other people's kindness and courage and overcoming obstacles and their virtuosity and their discipline can inspire us morally, where we see in them what we want to be as good human beings.
And it astonished us, Shankar, at the Berkeley Lab that, you know, we sent out these requests, 26 countries, all these stories of awe come rolling in. And the most universal and the most common was the goodness or moral beauty of other people right around them. And I'm not talking about... Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa.
It is like neighbors and strangers and grandmothers and the like and roommates that almost on a weekly basis are triggering us to feel like, God, people are good, and I could be inspired by that. I understand that you once had a powerful experience with a spiritual leader that also inspired a feeling of awe. Tell me about your encounter with the Dalai Lama. Hmm.
It makes me humble to talk about it. You know, I've been on two panels with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and I'm like, man, I'm on a stage with the Dalai Lama, and there are 2,500 people out in the audience. Before we go on, I greet His Holiness. It's a profound moment. When he looks you in the eye, man, you feel like he is really looking me in the eye. And we hugged and he kind of tickled me.
And I was and I literally I was one giant goose bump. You know, I was like, wow. I've just hugged and been tickled by the Dalai Lama. Then we go on stage and, you know, and I'm asking him these dumb questions and, you know, the narrow scientist. And he's so engaged and interested and curious, you know, because he's training his mind in a way.
He's working harder on his mind than I've ever worked on anything. And at one moment in this conversation, I'm asking him about compassion. And he says, compassion is the natural state of the mind. And coming out of my Western scientific homo economicus mindset, I was just... It was an epiphany.
And epiphanies are a very subtle source of awe where suddenly we grasp that there are big ideas that really make sense of a lot of things in reality. You might find epiphanies in the idea of free markets or evolution or that capitalism is bad for the planet or big data or the idea of quantum physics, right? And it's surprisingly common.
around the world and has this structure to seeing suddenly being revealed to big ideas that help you make sense of the mysteries that concern you. And it was an awe moment, right? I was like, wait a minute. Compassion is the deepest structure in the human mind down in the midbrain. All these structures that have been part of mammalian evolution.
And that animated a lot of research I did on compassion and changed how I teach. And it changed how I thought about humanity, you know, that there is this deep goodness in us that's part of our evolutionary story. That's one of the most interesting parts of our evolutionary story, how good we are. And it blew my mind.
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Chapter 4: How can teamwork in sports help alleviate anxiety?
And time and time again, when people experience awe, they see things like I felt small and I felt like I was part of something larger than myself. And this is fundamental to our survival. And then the other thing that I think is really important, Shankar, is that awe helps us see the systems around us and understand them.
One of these sets of operations of our mind is to be very narrow and focus on the self and individual actions and cause and effect relationships. The other is to look at the world holistically and systemically. That's an ecosystem. This is a social hierarchy. That is a musical structure. And awe pops those systems out to our awareness. So it really is the animator of a system's view of life.
And that's really important for scientific understanding, for social understanding, for knowing where to find resources in my environment, right, to understand my ecology. And awe is the great engine of a system's view of the world. You know, and so much of it begins with the feeling that awe can produce in us of making us feel small.
I remember visiting Alaska once and feeling like I was a very small creature on a very, very big planet. And you've done studies looking at the same idea. You ran an interesting study in Yosemite exploring this idea that awe changes our sense of our own scale. You know, the self takes up a lot of area in the brain and in our consciousness.
We're always thinking, especially in this modern world, about my goals, my status, my aspirations, what I'm doing, my desires, my interests. And evolutionists have really talked about the problem of self-interest. How do we get people to orient to other people, to societies and collectives? And we started to have this idea that awe does that by creating the small self.
In a lot of writings about awe, religious writings from centuries ago, nature writings, Ralph Waldo Emerson, his big epiphany, I am nothing, right? Psychedelic writings, all these writings are speaking to this, but we had to get it empirically.
So my collaborator, Yang Bai from China, went to Yosemite, stopped travelers from 42 countries at this particular outlook on a road where you first get to see Yosemite Valley and El Capitan and the great granite slabs and this incredible valley that's just awe-inspiring. And what Yang Bai did is she did a really simple task. She had people at that moment draw themselves and write me.
And in that context, those drawings of the self were really small. They wrote their sense of me really small compared to the right kind of control conditions. And we have other data and really different kinds of data, even neuroscientific data showing that. Awe quiets this egoistic, self-focused sense of personal identity and opens you up to the big things that you're connected to.
You and your collaborator Lani Shioda also once had people stand in front of an enormous T-Rex skeleton. Tell me about that experiment, Ducker. On the Berkeley campus, we have this incredible replica of a T-Rex skeleton, and it's in our Museum of Paleontology, and you stand next to it. And we did the pilot testing. People say, I feel awe, man. This is amazing. It's huge.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of music in our emotional experiences?
And contemplative people might say with a beginner's mind. And that's what awe does for a Shankar. When we come back, how to bring more awe into our lives. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. At UC Berkeley, psychologist Dacher Keltner studies the benevolent emotions, including the emotion of awe.
He's the author of the book, Awe, The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. Dacher, you recently studied the effects of awe on disadvantaged students and military veterans. Neither felt much awe in their regular lives. What did you do? What did the study involve?
Yeah, you know, there's a growing interest in our culture and scientifically about how the institutional structural traumas of life, if you're impoverished and you don't have parks nearby and the like, or you have a career like veterans who go see combat and see people die. Their profiles look traumatized.
They are depressed and vigilant, anxious very often, twice the rates of American citizens, elevated levels of cortisol and inflammation and the like. And I became friends with Stacy Bear, who's a veteran, and we started talking about this. And he leads veterans into outdoors programs.
And so what we decided to do in this study is we got veterans and high school students who were in really tough, impoverished schools in parts of the East Bay in California. And it's where there are bars and police cars and no gardens, et cetera. And these kids hadn't... you know, been outside in parks. They hadn't gone camping. Many of them had not really seen a night sky of stars.
So we took them rafting, our veterans and then our high schoolers, down the American River On a stretch, and it's beautiful, and you wind through these rapids, and you look at the water, and you see fish, and it's amazing. And what we found, we measured their emotions and stress and trauma and sense of connection at the start of the study, a week later.
And as the study unfolded, we measured their sense of wonder and awe and connection to their peers and cortisol and emotions. And what we found is our high schoolers a week later felt less stress, more happiness. They felt more connected to their community and family. And our veterans felt 30% less PTSD.
One high schooler said, I'm so struck by the rolling hills and the smoke, and it was smoky at the time because of wildfires, and the water. And then a veteran said, And I love this quote where, you know, the star-splatted sky made me realize that my worries are not as important as I thought they are, but what I could do in the world is more important.
And so it was this nice study, and there's a lot of science on this of different varieties, that nature immersion and finding awe, gardening, walking, getting out into the woods, standing near a tree is good for your nervous system and your mind. Is there any evidence that awe has physiological effects on us? Yeah, there are.
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Chapter 6: How does Dacher Keltner define awe and its effects?
And they know how to love and care for their children.
They need in this space more than ever to stay deeply connected with their children and with their children's ways of thinking and engaging with their schoolwork and to reflect with those kids about the experiences they have in thinking through these things, to work with them on their work, to notice what kinds of changes are happening in their kids as they're engaging in these technologies and think about
What do we want for our children? Which kinds of uses are appropriate and effective and are making us more efficient? And which kinds may be interfering with aspects of the learning or developmental process that kids want and need to grapple with in order to really build for themselves the experience of being an efficacious, agentic learner?
And when we are concretizing and reducing the aims of our educational experiences in school to the output of particular kinds of skills that may be quote unquote relevant to the world today, Oftentimes, what we're forgetting is how does the learning of that skill change the development of the person? And those are the questions we need to be asking ourselves.
The example I use to explain this is that giving kids AI to learn to do something basic that they before would have needed to know, but now AI can do it, so why bother teaching them? is kind of the same thing as telling parents of eight-month-olds, oh, don't bother encouraging your child to crawl. You're never going to use that skill again in your real life. Who crawls?
Unless you lose something under the couch, you're never going to need to do this, right? Just get right up on a bicycle. Start riding. Start running, right? Of course, infants don't crawl because crawling is a useful life skill forever.
They crawl because the act of crawling enables certain kind of positionality in the world which helps them to develop themselves neurologically, psychologically over time. And crawling is engaging networks for motion, for thinking, for reflection, for planning, for movement that then become the basis for healthy kinds of behavior that don't involve crawling later.
We need really to return to that logic when we're asking ourselves what we want for our children. We need again to put on those scientific hats, those thoughtful hats. We need to engage with our young people and think about how are they using the technology? How are they experiencing this?
Are they engaging with the big ideas I want them to engage with, but they're doing it in a different format that I'm not used to because I wasn't an AI native the way they are? Or are they actually circumventing developmental processes that we value for them? And is that leading to to certain kinds of holes or differences in their development, which are problematic.
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