Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 546: This Scientist Says One Emotion Might Be the Key to Happiness. Can You Guess What It Is? | Dacher Keltner

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

Our guest today is one of the most prominent happiness researchers in the world, and he has come to the conclusion that living the good life boils down to one thing: finding awe. We’re going to learn what awe does to your body, how it changes your sense of self and your relationship to the world, and why we evolved to feel awe. We’re also going to get eight simple strategies for mainlining awe into our everyday lives. Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the faculty director of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. His new book is called, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.In this conversation we talk about:What awe is exactlyHow awe is different from other primal emotions like fear and appreciation of beautyWhy we are awe-starved in our culture right nowThe connection between awe and moralityHow to get something called “moral beauty” into our lives as an alternative to the outrage served up by social mediaThe importance of something called “collective effervescence”How to use nature, music, and even death as sources of awe How to understand epiphaniesAnd how awe has the potential to get us into trouble sometimesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/dacher-keltner-546See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Okay, greetings, my fellow suffering beings. My guest today is one of the most prominent happiness researchers on planet Earth, and he has concluded that living the good life boils down to one thing. And that one thing is finding awe, A-W-E-R. In this episode, we're going to learn what awe does to your body, how it changes your sense of self and your relationship to the world,

and why we evolved to feel awe, including through physiological reactions such as goosebumps. We're also going to get eight simple strategies for mainlining awe in our everyday lives. My guest is Dacker Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California Berkeley and the faculty director of UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center. His new book is called, awe, the new science of everyday wonder, and how it can transform your life. In this conversation, we talk about what awe is exactly,

how it's different from other primal emotions, such as fear, why we are awe-starved in our culture right now, the connection between awe and morality, how to get something called moral beauty into our lives, as an alternative to the outrage, so regularly served up to us via social media. The importance of something called collective effervescence, a term I love, how to use nature music and even death as sources of awe. In fact, he's going to share a very personal story on that front, how to understand epiphanies,

and how awe has the potential to sometimes get us into trouble. We'll get started with Decker-Keltoner after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do?

What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our Healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelli McGonical and The Great Med meditation teacher Alexis Santos To access the course just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm all One word spelled out Okay on with the show Hey y'all it's your girl Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress singer and entrepreneur on my new podcast

Baby this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends family family, and experts the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Dacker Keltter, welcome back to the show. Good to be with you, Dan. You've been very influential in my thinking about many things, so I'm really happy to have

you on the show. And I want to congratulate you on your new book. Thank you. Thank you. And it gives me a few goosebumps to be continuing our conversation that's been going on for many years. Well, over a decade for sure. Yeah.

So why awe? Yeah, I mean, we can answer that question why awe in a few different ways. One is why do humans have such a profound capacity to wonder at the vast mysteries of life? And that's kind of the evolutionary question about why do we have this emotion? I think we can ask the question and answer the question Dan, you know why all right now, 21st century people's mental health has really struggled through the pandemic and they are struggling

with the political climate, the economic climate and why all in the proximal sense of what is a give us? And I think that I went after those questions, why do we have this emotion and what good is it for us in writing this book? It was a kind of a deep set of questions. I'm going to get you to answer all of the questions you posed in response to my question, but I'm going to actually pose a fresh question before we get to any of that, which is why do you care about all what's your history with this Oh my god drove you to write a whole book about it Yeah, thank you just personally I was raised in kind of a

Awfield childhood. I was really lucky that my my dad's an artist. He got me looking at art early my mom Taught the romantics of wordsworth and Blake, and Shelley, and Virginian Wolf later. I grew up in a really wild place, Laurel Canyon in the late 60s. So it was just a, I had kind of a childhood of awe. And I was an uptight little nervous kid. All of the awe around me opened me up. It made me connect to nature and find my moral compass.

So part of why I wrote this book was to express what I learned in that childhood. Part of it was the science of Audien, the science of human emotion that figures so prominently in happiness had really ignored Audien. And about 10, 15 years ago our lab got into the act and really started to think about what Audien does for us, and spiritually, and physiologically. And part of it was personal. I lost my younger brother, Ralph, to colon cancer three years ago, and it just blew me off the map.

He was 14 months younger than me. In writing this book, I realized like almost every awe inspiring thing I'd done in life, from dancing to traveling in Europe, to being in traveling in Europe, to being in the Louvre, to cheering on sports teams, to river-afting, I'd done with my brother. And to the present, to the moment he left, and losing him, I became allless. I had no, I just lost my capacity for awe and loving life. And so I went in search of awe in writing this book.

I want to come back to Ralph, your brother, because in the book you lay out eight strategies for people to access this emotion, and your brother will fit into that part of the discussion. But you talked about being a kid in Laurel Canyon, and you access to nature help you find your moral compass. What is the connection between awe and morality? Yeah. Well, there's thinking in the literature that we have these emotions that evolved socially in our hominid evolution and that they really help us do the moral tasks of social living

that were required of a very hyper-social primate, which is what we are. Sympathy and compassion, when you and I have talked about this, it really helps us take our vulnerable individuals around us, in particular, vulnerable offspring. And so there's a centrality of compassion and sympathy to our moral lives. It makes us reduce harm. Gratitude, so central to the science of happiness, is about sharing and appreciating and expressing reverence for people who give you things. And that's central

to our moral lives. Adam Smith, the duties of gratitude are the most important and beneficent in our social living. And then awe is with respect to morality, connects us to collectives, right? It makes us realize that we're not just an individual self with our own desires and strivings, but it makes us realize we're part of something larger, meaningful groups, ecosystems, tribes, political parties, musical societies, if you will. And so our studies, time and, if you will. And so our studies time and time again find

awe, quiet selfishness, it quits egoism, it quits the sense of entitlement, you take young people out into the trees, have them feel awe for a second, and they no longer feel like entitled, right? They feel connected to some larger purpose. And so routinely, people in our studies report, wow, when I feel awe, even if it's nature or music, it makes me realize, like, this is the bigger thing I'm part of, the bigger group, the bigger moral cause. And that's foundational to morality as our sense of collective and we. How abiding and impact is there when it comes to awe and morality? Just to say for myself, I move to the suburbs,

or my wife prefers to say we move to the country during the pandemic. And we have a lot of nature around us and that I find that I am touching base with awe way more frequently, not only through nature, but lots of other modalities that we can talk about later in the discussion. But my capacity to be a schmuck remains firmly intact nonetheless. I was going to bring that up. It is in fact a source of all in and of itself.

It is in fact a source of all in and of itself. For many people. So you mentioned sports. Many people watch sports and that could be a source of all, but many people are also assholes and many people are also totally stuck in tribal silos. I'm just wondering, yes, you can put some kids in a stand of trees and do a study on them and they may be more pro-social and the medium aftermath, but how robust a finding is this really? Yeah, well, I think you're raising two different questions, Dan.

The pro-social benefits of awe, how robust is that? And then how do we think about it more broadly in terms of the moral direction or compass of our culture, right? It's robust. There are a lot of studies that show that all potentiates, activates our better angels of our nature. A couple of them to think about, we do a lot of lab studies, you feel awe, you watch BBC Earth, I share more with people,

I share more with strangers. That's good news on balance. There's research showing if I live in urban environments that have more awe and more beauty and wonder, I'm more civil and more cooperative with people around me. So it enables this kind of social fabric of moral considerateness. There's work coming out of festivals and psychedelic experiences, burning man and the like that that Molly Crockett and her team has, you know, if I feel awe at a festival, right, a music festival, a religious festival, her work is showing those altruistic benefits or tendencies remain with us for a year.

So that's good news, right? That if we're interested in people being a little bit kinder, a little bit more civil, a little bit more cooperative, less hostile and us versus them, all does good work. It's robust. The other question you're raising and it's so hard is you're like, great, so we sacrifice, we give, we, we subordinate our self interest to the group. Well, what happened in the

Rwandan genocide, those Hutus felt ecstatic and awestruck and killed 800,000 tutsis, right? So all can be put to really problematic uses by those assholes out there, those sociopaths. And that's always a challenge when we think about our emotion is the many directions it can take society. I am actually, I want to be clear. I am not, I'm asking some skeptical questions, but I'm not skeptical.

I probably should have started with this, but I just went along with the stream of the conversation. But let me ask a foundational question, which is what is all and how is it different from, I don't know, fear or appreciation of beauty or other sort of primal emotions? Yeah, thank you. It took our lab 20 years to really get good answers to that question dance. So it's foundational. All is the feeling we experience. So it's an emotion. When we encounter vast mysteries, right? Extremely large trees, people whose generosity blows our minds, incredible music, extraordinary experiences.

So we encounter vast mysteries. It produces this emotion called awe, which also has the quality, It produces this emotion called awe, which also has the quality, not only of vast mysteries, but you just don't understand it. Your current knowledge can't make sense of what you're perceiving. A lot of spiritual experiences or spiritual convictions begin in these extraordinary experiences, right? So it's vast mysteries we can't make sense with our current knowledge. There are two central questions that you very astutely raised. Is it different from fear? The etymology of awe goes back to eighth and ninth century Norerson Old English where it really translates to fear and dread

and horror. And our research, a lot of different research that I review in this book, awe, And our research, a lot of different research that I review in this book, awe, says that about three quarters of our experiences of awe have nothing to do with fear. They feel good, we feel excited, we feel enthusiastic. They're based in the reward circuits of the brain, they activate the vagus nerve. So it's this more positive emotion, different from fear. And then the harder one that we're finally cracking is beauty. Emanuel Kant, but more importantly, Edmund Burke, this Irish philosopher, really made in the 18th century, really tried to pull apart beauty, which feels warm and affectionate and loving from all,

which is more astonishing and mind blowing. And we've done a lot of work with people like Alan Cowan now, you know, with very sophisticated, kind of scientific studies, differentiating beauty from awe. And so I think that we've made the case to answer your question, awe is an emotion, it's different from fear, animals, every way, and beauty.

Think about how we vocalize awe, right? We go, whoa, think how you vocalize fear. Really different sounds and it's different from beauty so it's this great state that we can study but also cultivate in our lives. But looking at our 10 provoked. Oh yeah and I would really recommend our audience look at Alan Cowan's maps of emotion at Hume AI, his new lab that he's built. When you think about the images that make us feel all, they tend to be really astounding and trippy, right?

Fast trees, fast clouds, vast storms. The images in art that makes us feel beauty are more kind of pleasing landscapes, pretty faces, Renoir like scenes and paintings. They're really different. And we've got the goods on that, which is good news for this distinction. You touch on this a little bit, but the physiology of all, you mentioned the Vegas nerve. Maybe you can, for the uninitiated describe what the Vegas nerve is and other physiological manifestations of this emotion. You know, Dan, I mean, we're making so much progress in understanding the body and neurophysiology

and people like William James and Charles Darwin and early students of all have been interested in the physiology of the emotion. When we ask people, like, tell us what it's like to feel awe. And they would say, God, I was at this festival of Guadalupe in Mexico City, or I was seeing the Grand Canyon or these big trees, and my chest felt warm. And I kind of felt like I was tearing up.

And I got this big rush of goosebumps, right? And those are three physiological parts of awe. So it's not only about recognizing, wow, this is vast and mysterious and I feel kind, but it's in our bodies. So part of the Warren chest is the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is the largest bundle of nerves in the mammalian nervous system.

Really complicated. It starts at the top of your spinal cord, wanders through your throat, your chest, influences breathing and heart rate and digestion, projects into your intestinal wall, gets all the information from your gut. And Dan, I think you and I have talked about the vagus nerve. It blows my mind. It really is, it emerged in mammalian evolution to help us connect and be open to other people, right? And it's correlated with feeling open to others, empathy,

kindness, and in our studies, awe. When we see incredible imagery of nature, like BBC Earth, people have elevated vagal tone, and that's really good news for how you function in the world. The tears of awe are come out of the lacrimal gland behind your cornea. It's again part of this more sort of prosocial kindness-oriented regions of your nervous system, the parasympathetic branch, and you tear up when we see young people perform on stage, or somebody you're walking through the streets of a city, and you see somebody help another stranger. We tear up at these moments of people being communal and kind. And the goosebumps are amazing. The rushes of goose bumps up the back of your neck

and your back of your arms. And those are little muscles around your hair follicles. They contract and they tend to signal in the mammalian world like it's time to be together and to face mysteries together. They're a sign of togetherness and leaning into each other. And they've been distinguished from another physiological sensation associated with horror, which was when we shudder, right? We sort of, we see the images of the concentration camps and we just shudder and shake. That's, that really is the shuttering response, which is different from goosebumps that tracks horror. It's just a quick final note, Dan. It's so interesting. In so many spiritual traditions, people write about the shuttering when you face the judgmental God, right? And then they write about these goosebumps in different kind of oceanic experiences of mystical feeling, like in yoga,

when you feel this spiritual force moving through your body. So one of my favorite quotes in writing about awe was Walt Whitman who said, if the soul is not in the body, then what is the soul? And we're starting to make sense of like, wow, the vagus nerve, the tears, the chills, Whitman was on to something that our feeling of our compass our sense of goodness and what's primary in life. Aw, is in the body. Would you call it a soul or is it just utterly material? Well, that's the hardest question Dan, you can't ask me that.

Yeah, it's the same thing, so fascinating. 41% of Americans find the divine or what is part of their soul in nature. And they go out and they look at a mountain river or a sunset or clouds or a forest and they're like, God, that is the divine. And so that challenges us to ask the question for each of us individually, when we feel these deep experiences of awe, how do we interpret them? And for some people, it's about divinity and it's God and I have a soul. For me personally, I am like E.O. Wilson, you know, the evolutionary biologist who's like, isn't it incredible that evolution

working for billions of years, billions of adaptations, natural selection produced nature and ecosystems in our mind that can appreciate it. It blows my mind. I feel awestruck. So, it's a very personal and complicated question. What's your answer? Well, I'll definitely the latter, but the latter approach, I think, properly held, in my opinion, doesn't rule out.

Like, I can't say for sure, there's no God. My intuition is there isn't one, at least the way God was envisioned in the Bronze Age books that have been handed down to us to the generation. So that's just my intuition. But what the hell do I know? So I feel like I'm definitely in the latter cap with some healthy agnosticism. And Dan, what I love about these conversations around awe, right, feeling wonder about the vast mysteries of life and trying to figure it out is it gets us to these kinds of conversations when I teach all to

undergrad and the public and so forth. It does get to these questions about just like you asked me like, wow, I have an intuition about what a soul might be or why we use that word and Oz one way to think about the question. What do I care most about in life that I think I'll give my life for that's primary and good? And is that compass that allows us to think about it? So I could set my priorities based on the stuff in the world that provokes awe for me. Yeah, when I lost my brother and you talk about these eight strategies or what I call the eight wonders of life where we find awe. I was blown off the map and like unhealthy Americans today. I was not sleeping well.

I was agitated, super anxious, gasping, and my body was inflamed. That's the inflammation response of your immune system that all calms down. So I was in this terrible state, and I did just what you said, like, how do I design this time period of grief to find wonders again? And so what our science finds is it can give you a roadmap. You can find awe in the moral beauty of other people and nature and collective stuff like sports or dance and music and art and contemplation or spiritual practice. And then big ideas we care about and thinking about life and death. Those are eight realms we can find it. And I, like a hope readers of this book, will start to think like, okay, where

do I find 10 minutes of this a day, given this kind of landscape of the eight wonders of life? It's very practical. Before we get to the eight wonders, let me ask you a few more sort of foundational questions here. One of them is you make up quite a bold statement right at the beginning of the book. you say that you've come to the conclusion that happiness, and just for the listeners, this is a guy who studied happiness for several decades. Happiness comes down to one thing, you say. Finding awe.

Oh no. You say, how can we live a good life, find awe? So that's a big statement guy. I'd love to have you unpack it. Yeah, well, you know, the happiness literature, as you well know Dan, and thank you for your work, there are sensory pleasures and the that we can go get. We can enjoy our our burrito, our pizza, our beer, wine, our chocolate, etc. And then there are the positive social states of gratitude and ways to handle stress.

And then there's this thing called meaning, eudimonia flourishing, but meaning that really crystal park and others have started as surfaces. Like, this is the big challenge in the happiness literature. And in our life is, why are we here? What? Given my life history, genetics, and moment in history, what am I supposed to do?

I believe the young people today, and especially with the pandemic, rising depression rates, there's a little bit of a crisis of meaning in our culture of what are we here to do, given climate crises and various pressures. And awe, Dan, is the fast track to meaning. And when people feel awe in the right context, what surfaces in them is this deep story, and people talk about just like, oh, I am here to bring more beauty to the world, right, in the work that I do. Or I am really here to help elderly individuals feel less lonely. It really, it all has this quality of what you call no SS or knowing, the no edic quality of this is what I really care about. This is true. I have to do more for the environment. And why I made that case is like this is, in some sense,

the organizing principle of happiness is, man, once you get meaning right, right? This is my defining set of purposes in life. Then you know where to find pleasures. You know how to get along with people. Things don't stress you out as much, right? So all gets us to meaning our deeper purpose. This, I think, explains why you use the word compass

so often right off the bat here. Yeah, absolutely. And I would encourage our listeners it's such an interesting exercise to do a couple things. Like, think about a big experience of awe and then what it taught you. And then the other one that's really interesting that I ask a lot of people that I speak to about awe is what are some of your first experiences and it'll start to surface like wow this is

what my life's about what my parents are trying to teach me that it's all about art or service or nature or whatever. Stacy Barrow is a veteran who is a awe hero in my book. He served in Iraq. He came back from Iraq, just like a lot of veterans. They have twice the depression rate as the American public. He really was struggling, depressed, anxious, gotten to drugs, was almost suicidal. And he's a brother now. And a friend of his took him out rock climbing. And he had this awe experience rock climbing on these big slabs of stone and Colorado, and he just had these two words come to him that were get outdoors, get outside. And so he just devoted himself to backpacking and rock climbing and rafting, and he started these outdoors programs at the Sierra Club, got tens of thousands of people And so he just devoted himself to backpacking and rock climbing and rafting.

And he started these outdoors programs at the Sierra Club, got tens of thousands of people outdoors, right? And that came out of an experience of awe as a form of a compass for his life. Coming up, Dacker Keltner on Nature as a source of awe, and a way to calm your nervous system, why we intuitively like to share morally inspiring content, and we talk about collective effervescence, the buzz we get from being part of group activities. After this.

Life is short, and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is Short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions, like, what is the meaning of life?

I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs. And sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times. But if I'm being

honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like, if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering App. You make the case in the book that we are as a culture, are deprived, and you do lay out these sort of eight pathways to getting more awe. We've referenced that a couple times in the course of this conversation. So let's dive into that.

First of the eight is moral beauty. What is that? Yeah, this caught us off guard, Dan. We gathered stories of awe from about 30 countries around the world, every kind of religious system and economic system, et cetera. And the most common source of awe is other people. And they, and their beauty, their moral beauty, are their courage, like Stacey Barra, their kindness, that they've overcome obstacles, like being born with physical conditions and ending

up being world-class dancers and then virtuosos, the great mathematician or musician or dancer. And we are awestruck by moral beauty. And for our listeners, he just think for a moment about who's somebody that gave you the goose bumps or made you tear up a little and they'll start to, oh my goodness, you know, that MLK speech or this person in my neighborhood who their volunteer activity or Helen Keller, I mean, these stories come out quickly. And that around the world, people told stories of moral beauty. And you know, in today's times of angry algorithms,

gaming what we see in the digital media, it's a partner, remember, we have a very deep intuition about the goodness of others that we need to bring into our lives. How do we do that? How do we operationalize this advice? Yeah, when I teach this, I challenge people to think about who are examples of moral beauty for you.

And people will start to talk about his holiness, the Dalai Lama, or Mother Teresa, or Mahatma Skandhi, or their grandmother, the grandmother very prominent figure in Mexican-American communities. And why? And you start to think, oh, yeah, it was that math teacher, that geometry teacher who went out of her way to tell me like I had something and that everyday act of kindness, how powerful

it is. So one is to reflect in your own life in a contemplative way. And then I think that another is to think about culture and how deeply they provide us with great stories of moral beauty and the legends that are important in spiritual traditions. It's all around us. And we've been misled, sorry, to editorialize here, but the digital technologies, they love getting us enraged. And I think that we should be asking for different content for our minds of all the good that people do, which is out there. And even if we can't control what captains of industry, media, serve up to us, we can

Captains of industry media serve up to us. We can curate a more carefree. Absolutely. And it's interesting. Jonah Berger at Wharton really admires work. He's found what we intuitively like to share in terms of podcasts and New York Times stories is morally inspiring content. We love those stories. We love the gifts and we do have that agency in this digital space. Let's talk about another strategy for mainlining all of those who are interested. I suspect that's everybody if they're with us. And it is this term, a delightful term, collective effervescence. This one is, this was fun science.

Collective effervescence is the great French sociologist at Mule Durkheim talking about the buzz and electricity and sort of group mind that we feel when we're around collectives. And we start to share an experience together of music or movement or cheering or political protest. And the simple lesson is this is a deep instinct, little baby starts synchronizing with other people and like them more when they synchronize

through music or physical motion or dance, right? Dancing is very deep in our human repertoire and it does bring about a lot of all religions to a lot of synchronization, obviously, right? We're bowing together and touching our chests together and chanting together and moving into the space together and moving out. There's a lot of collective effervescence for those of us who don't go to church, like me, the challenge is to find it today.

And so, but I think that we're doing it. We find it at sporting events. We find it in yoga, tens of millions of people do yoga in the United States. It's a central part of people's spiritual lives. And part of that is collective stuff. We find it in surprising ways. And I love this quote from the very grouchy Danish philosopher

Soran Kirkegaard who wrote about dread and anxiety, who's like, he loved walking out in public. And the chance contacts with other people that had brought to him. And what he called the significance of insignificant things. And during COVID, people went out walking in public spaces at historic levels. And I think what they were finding was this collective effervescence of like, hey, we're all doing this. Look at us. We share something. I'm looking at people's eyes. I'm laughing. I'm saying high. And that collective feeling becomes this sense of common cause. And today's younger generation is doing a lot of this.

They're returning to festivals, their game nights, they play collective games more. So it's a very powerful tendency to find all in collective movement. Where's the line between collective effervescence and collective malice? I'm thinking of those Nazi rallies with a Lenny rifle in Stahl films

and were people marching through Charlottesville. It seems like anything, something powerful and human can be turned toward the dark side. Yeah, and this is always the challenge. You can't get too carried away when you think that emotions are your moral compass, right? Where we began to and gratitude and compassion on all these incredible emotions that we've evolved because

they can lead us into trouble. You think about sporting events and analyses of the violence that can arise out of a football game. It's a game, right? It's a form of play. It's suddenly very routinely. People hurt each other. And this is the challenge of all of our tendencies, like you said, is just what we do as humans, more so than our primate relatives is collectively come together through reason and discourse and say, what does this bring us? What does this discourse or this collective discourse around emotion bring us? And is it good for the greater good? And hopefully we arrive at good solutions.

So yeah, I can lead, all can lead to all kinds of abuses, to problems, to exploitations, to colonialism, et cetera, to genocide. And we've got to kind of step back from it and see what it's doing for us. So it's a, the compass needs not only the heart, but the head. Yeah, and you know, it's interesting, like if you look at the evolution of the moral emotions, and I chart that a bit in this book, Jane Goodall really sought chimpanzees.

It's an incredible observation of hers that they called the waterfall display. One of my heroes, Jane Goodall, where she sought chimps look reverential around waterfalls and they would stop and study it and dance a little and sway like we would. They actually fluffed up their fur, pylorection goose bumps, and she said, wow, here's early awe of being amazed at things outside of ourself. That's the beginning, but what we do as human is we share our ideas about it, right?

And I think there's real worry right now, like all this collective sharing of content on Twitter, what's it doing? It's awe-inspiring. I can say something that 20,000 people can follow, but what's it bringing to us? Third avenue for awe, we've discussed at length, but I think it's worth,

I'm gonna steal this expression from the venture capitalists. I know it's worth double-clicking on this nature. Nature. So say more, if there is more to be said. Yeah, you know, nature in many ways, it's very deep in the indigenous traditions. They have this idea of traditional ecological knowledge that we are part of ecosystems. We are. There's no denying it. We've lost sight of that. So that's the first thing we should always remember is this is deep in the human mind to think about our relationship to nature that we

have lost sight of with the lights that dim the stars and the sky and the burning of the Amazon. So that's point one. Emerson really thought it's a it's so brilliant, Dan, when you read as Essay Nature, you dig into the longer version of it. Like, our minds, best operations are most sophisticated mathematical operations, metaphorical operations come in observing nature. We start to figure out fractals and fragments and et cetera. So that's point one, point two is, again, most of our audience

will probably be like, oh yeah, the sunset or the storm system or those trees or the forest brought me on. That's good news. But the other striking set of findings to me is the health benefits. And this is work in Japan and South Korea. Just getting out in nature, calms your immune system, calms cortisol, calms stress-related regions of your

brain, like the amygdala, benefits life expectancy, helps kids with their physical robustness and their mental robustness. And what I'm excited about, Dan, is all the movements that come out of natural awe, right? The greening of London, which may be the greenest city, people starting to build parks back into urban areas and farmers markets and local gardens. So there's big natural awe that we can all identify with. But there's also the application of that to like, how do I build more green into every place? And I think it'll be important for our future to think hard about that. Agreed. Fourth strategy for awe is one that I can relate to if I think back at some of my earliest experiences of having goosebumps

or sort of full body pleasant vibration, it was always around music. Can you hold forth about how we can use music in this way? Well, Dan, I have to ask you to tell a Dan Harris story of all. Like, what, tell me about a musical experience that brought you all. I don't know if I can crystallize the exact moment, but I have these vague, repeated memories of being a child and feeling either when singing in a chorus or teaching myself how to play drums or listening to a song, getting this very physical reaction as extremely pleasant. And I still, music

is a huge part of my life, my son and I play drums together, I listen to music when I work out. So it's, and we play it around the house a lot. So yeah, for me, it's not just one big experience. It's just a continuous IV drip. Yeah. But, you know, people ask me like, okay, oh, you're the all guy. You're the all scientists. I'm like, well, I'm a little bit more than that, but anyway, go ahead. And, you know, they're like, how do I find it? I'm like, man, music, it's everywhere. Like, just listen to a few minutes a day of music.

And it is a source of all. And there are two layers to this, Dan. One is what we're learning about the incredible science of music, why it evolved for 100,000 years, how it unites us, how listening to music unites brains. They become synchronized when we listen to music together. It unites people into a sense of group or we. It gives people this sense of like meaning.

But what I'm really intrigued by, and it's back to one of our themes today is compass and meaning, which is when we surveyed people, we found these stories of music. And it's just like your story, Dan, they realized like, this is about who I am. It's not just feeling good, it's not just dancing with people and having fun or revelry or finding people I'm attracted to.

The music I care most about that brings me tears and goosebumps, it's about my identity. And what I will say what's interesting scientifically, Dan and I love that you mentioned chorus is the one of the things about music that brings us all chanting and choral features and a wreath of Franklin's voice and bono's expanding sounds, et cetera, is it sounds like awe. And it registers in our body and we're like, I'm there. I feel it.

So it was really fun to write that chapter because of this science, which I think is really interesting. And frankly, because I didn't know a lot about music and I didn't really, I got kicked out of my seventh grade band playing the clarinet. And just to like to talk to somebody like Yumi Kendall who plays the cello

for the Philadelphia symphony and what how she finds awe playing the cello and box cello suites how just it makes your body connect to the audience. I was like wow what a great technology of all we have. So listeners go go to Spotify or whatever it is, and do that IV drip of music. I challenge you to listen to music that brings you all for one song a day. Yes, but also listen to this podcast. And this podcast.

Yeah. The fifth entry surprised me a little bit, the fifth entry on the list of eight. Visual design. So is that different from art or is this one in the same? Well, it's deeper than art, or not deeper, but it's broader than art, right? So visual design is the best examples

in a lot of Mesoamerican art, and also what we would call craft, where they're pottery and they're ceramics, which have patterns. And the art that the visual stuff that brings us all has these complicated, vast, interconnected, astonishing patterns to them, right? And so it might be the visual design

of the chichen-eats-a-parameter that gives us all, or the visual design, people sense in Paris with the housemen and the people who design Paris, those avenues and buildings, I mean, it blows your mind, right? And then, and the visual design of machines, I had one person go, he's a watch fanatic. And he talked about the mechanics of the watch, but he's 30, 40,000 dollars Swiss watches. And he got Tari mechanics of the watch, these $30,000, $40,000 Swiss watches,

and he got Terry I, and he's like, I can't, he's an engineer, I can't believe this. Some people find on the visual design of a car. So it is this, there are these patterns out there that make beautiful objects, and all happens when suddenly you notice it all comes together, and you're like, oh my God, I am in front of Nultodom in Paris

and I get it, like look at all this stuff coming together. And you realize it. And for me, it's been really important in my life because my dad, it was, is a visual artist, had me looking at paintings as a little kid and it still amazes me what the visual world can bring us for all. Coming up, Dacker talks about his personal experience of awe after the death of his brother, Rolf,

the practice of awe walking, and we talk about how to understand epiphanies. Right after this. Number six on the list is stories of spiritual and religious awe. Yeah, that's a no brainer in a way. And when people hear I study awe and I think part of the reason scientists didn't study it until really just 12 years ago is people thought it was a religious emotion, right?

They're like, oh, well, that means you got to study religion. And Dan, it's interesting around the world. And we study people in really religious countries, right? Like India, parts of the Middle East. Religion was not as common a source of awe as other people's moral beauty and nature. And so it's not a religious emotion, which is an interesting history in its own right. But to me, what's really interesting about this

is the William James thesis. William James, so important to our country. And Emerson, Ralph Aldo Emerson, American Transcendentalism. And it really begins with Emerson giving a little speech to the Harvard Divinity School. There are only six or seven faculty members there, but basically he said spiritual awe, the feeling of encountering the vast mysteries of the divine, what you think is primary and

good and part of life enhancing. You can't find it in religions. You got to go find it in your own experience, right? And that's a big idea that Emerson promoted, comes out of different European traditions, etc. It's found in a lot of places. And then William James really pushed it in his varieties of religious experience. And the big thing he said is, you can find mystical awe where you feel to be dissolving and you feel connected to the truth, and you feel you're recognizing your soul, and you feel like, I understand the big point of existence. James said you can find it in any kind of experience, in any religion, in meditation, in yoga, in beauty,

in nature, he found it taking nitrous oxide, which is laughing gas. It's like, oh my God, I can't believe this. So for me, yeah, we find mystical, awe's part of religion. St. Paul on the road to Damascus, right? In Hinduism, it's very important, et cetera. The Buddha's story, but for all of us,

it's a challenge to like, well, where do you feel like you really find what is fundamentally primary and good about life? And then as I said earlier, a lot of Americans find it in nature. Well, then why? A lot of Americans find it in nature. Well then why? A lot of people find it in choral singing. When I started to study awe, routinely any audience would be, I sing in a chorus.

Have you studied people in choruses? Because it's transcendent. I found it almost in grieving my brother's loss. You know, I was like, what is life about? Why did this person, so foundational to my identity, have to go when he was 55? It led me to ask these big questions about life. And so that's mystical. Oh, it's so important to be open to it. Well, you brought up Ralph again. And number seven on your list is stories of life and

death. And we've talked a little bit about him. You'll correct me if I'm wrong, that in the immediate aftermath of his death, you were all lists. You were dried out and anxious and sleepless. And, but if memory serves, you were able to go back to his death and the events that preceded it and generate awe from that.

You know, Dan, you and I are friends and I appreciate you and I having this conversation, like we've had other conversations over the years. Yeah, you know, I am a agnostic at best. I didn't, wasn't raised in a religious spiritual tradition. I am a evolutionist, I believe in evolution and physiology. And that's who we are. And I marvel at it. I do think our soul is in the body, like what we have been said. And when my brother, Ralph, passed away of colon cancer leading into it was horrifying. And my solemn respect goes out to people

who've watched that. It's just a tough way to go, very hard in his case. And then in the moment of his passing, it was all, it was just, there was this sacred quality to that moment. Everybody was there, the light, all of us reflecting on his extraordinary character. And then in the aftermath, the honoring of his life was so profoundly filled with awe of just the day and thinking about what he brought to the world. And that's what happens with a lot of people, as I learned in this research, like a lot of people talk about watching a relative go or a friend and being awe-inspiring.

And we in the United States don't have the great rituals of grieving that you find in Tibet or Mexico or many parts of the world. We don't have ways of collectively reflecting over time, rituals, and so I was left to drift, all of us, and just like with this, rough-sized hole in my life, and literally things that I always talked to him about, just he wasn't there. And I did go back on these journeys that for people who face grief, I really advise it, where you reflect on the person. He and I hiked a lot in the mountains, and we grew up after the Laurel Canyon in the foothills of this year.

And we just spent a lot of time outdoors on wild rivers. And I just, I went to places that he and I had hiked and just got overwhelmed by his presence and it was painful and hard, but it brought his life into my present existence, right? Like he will always in some way be there. I listened to music that he and I loved, talking heads and radio head and E and I were in Paris as 15, 16 year olds and I went to places, streets where I remember him and just kept him alive. And so it was a really essential journey that I went on to keep him in me

and how I make sense of it. God, it was filled with extraordinary moments, Dan. I heard his voice like a lot of people do when they lose people they love. In winds, I felt his voice in the sky or I felt him in the sky. When I would see trees backpacking, I would feel him there. I almost saw him a couple times. I felt his hand on my back a couple times.

And what those, they're almost mystical experiences. What they told me is, yeah, I'm not just dacker, I'm dacker and roth. I always will be, as well as part of other relations and ease around. You mentioned earlier that you did a lot of spiritual retreats in this period of time. Peak maccuriosity, what kind of retreats did you go on? Yeah, Dan, I am like you. I'm in this happiness literature and I teach Contemplative secular contemplative exercises to lots of people and medical doctors and students and the kind of offerings that you offer So nicely with your work and they've done a lot for me and then you know and just like writing this book and then also in the context of like losing

this companion in awe of Ralph, my brother, I opened up and so I opened up to music in ways we've talked about but also to spiritual retreats. One was yoga. I've done yoga for 40 years. It's one of the great contemplative traditions and it was transcendent, just what had brought me. But the other was this retreat in India, and it was mind-blowing, where I was lucky to be invited by Nipun Mehta, who runs service space, a totally volunteer, Gandhi-oriented,

digital community, altruistic community, and he said, hey, heard about your brother, why don't you come to Ahmedabad in India, we have this retreat, we go where we go to Gandhi's ashram, you sit in his little room where he wrote, you go to the square where he meditated. Gandhi is important to me for a lot of reasons. He inspired Martin Luther King. He inspired the free speech protests at Berkeley that I rever and I've long studied Hinduism. And then we did every day we would in this William James, the pluralistic way.

We would chant a little meditate, compassion, the Buddha, all the different spiritual traditions. We did some walking meditations. The grounds that this retreat took place at Environmental Sanitary Institute were founded by a fellow who was raised by the women who caught Gandhi when he was assassinated. And it was all about promoting the environment through different means. So it was just a great experience, Dan, as a skeptic, just to like, just feel spirituality and see what I make of it. And it brought me a lot.

So is it knocked you off of your materialist scientific corridor or just made you a little bit more open without any making any claims based on said openness? So you know, on one of the experiences, it was almost a culmination. It was about like a year post-loss. Takes a year to just to get out like when you really lose somebody you deeply care for Takes a couple of years just to find your feet again And I was starting to find my feet I go on this retreat And it was part of this journey that you know It has different pieces in it that you read about in awe of

volunteering in prisons and hiking around Mumblong and so forth But on this last day of this retreat in India We do this walking meditation. And in the Buddhist tradition, you're silent, you take four steps, you then put your head forehead to the ground, get up, take four steps. And I had done research on the all walk. So I've done a lot of all walking. And this one felt very deep.

Then you come around, you meet all the volunteers, and these are people, Dan, like Trupti and Suara, these two sisters who volunteer in these orphanages near Gandhi's ashram, doing just incredible work for abandoned children. And you get down really low and you see them in the eyes. And after that I was sitting in meditation. And in this period of grief evolving, I felt my brother in the sky. And I just felt him part of some force of life that is kind, which I believe as did Charles Darwin. And I was like, well, what, you know, if I explain that through quantum physics or whatever, I don't understand, I'm open to it was, I think we should be open to it. Kind of brings us nicely to the last entry on your list of eight, which is epiphanies.

Yeah, this one's rare. You know, epiphanies, sudden realizations, or your default expectations about the world, or your life, or society can't really account for what you're seeing or thinking about, and you come to a more fundamental truth. And they usually have to do with big ideas about life on the world. In that chapter, being the kind of scientist I am,

I profile Charles Darwin's epiphany. It's mind-blowing. He was on five and a half years of voyaging on the beagle. One of the greatest voyages in human history, thinking about it, seasick every day, going all over the world. And he was lying by this river in Chile and you awoke from a dream dream and he looked at this bank and he called it the Tangled Bank.

It's like, wow, there are birds and insects and earthworms and flora and fauna and ferns and they're all cooperating. It's an ecosystem. It's natural selection. And that's what epiphanies are. They are where you start to see the systems of life, right? Family system or economic, a free market or religious system, where I'd have you. And for me, I think in writing this book about, oh, I realized this emotion, I've been trying to make sense of with goosebumps

and vagus nerve and makes us kind and we love it in nature and stuff. It opens our minds to the compass or big idea that we care about as individuals, right? And for Darwin, it was evolution and for Adam Smith, it was free markets and cooperation and for other people. It takes on different meanings. And for me, it's how important this emotion is to our lives. I don't know if what I'm about to say counts as an epiphany, but it is a contemplation that I have laid

have been doing that does provoke some awe for me, which is thinking about what the Buddhists might call cause and effect, that everything that's happening right now is the culmination of an incalculable rolling gumbo of previous events dating back to the Big Bang and perhaps beyond. And if you look at life through that lens, anything that happens, no matter how mundane, has a kind of magical quality. Thank you for, you just gave me goosebumps. I mean, thank you for bringing that up.

This idea that we are a small part, our consciousness or our identity or our strivings, our small parts of really complicated systems, right? Families and neighborhoods and societies and histories and evolutionary histories and genetic histories, big bang histories. It's an indigenous thinking all over the place, system thinking. It's in Hinduism. I love Eo Wilson who at the end of his life, the great

biologist was like, I just can't believe that billions of adaptations in the evolution of life created this. And Dan, I hadn't made the connection to the Buddhist thinking of causality and thank you. And yeah, it is that realization that our idea of, oh, I've got these goals and I'm striving for them as an individual. It's kind of an illusion. And then once you really feel that and grasp that, it's humbling, isn't it? And when you gave your analysis, I kind of stopped and, I hate to say it, but I teared up a little.

It's like, that's true. Our lives are parts of vast webs of these forces. And once you feel, you appreciate that. You feel humbled and free and empowered in funny ways. And so, yeah, that's the core of that chapter. And I wish I had talked to you earlier because I would have woven in the Buddhist conceptions of causality and events arising. Because, but it's so we lose sight of, and this was part of my inquiry in writing the book, it's like, I'm just, my brother and I are part

of this moment, we had a family, and it was fragmented like a lot of American families, but it's still around, and we're part of a cultural moment, and that's what my life is. This journey is part of a much broader system of forces. It was beautiful. And I'm still really sorry about what happened with Ralph. So, well, thank you.

Thank you. I feel lucky to talk to you about it. Is there anything I should have asked, but didn't? Well, one of the reasons that I wrote this book is our cultural moment. And I do feel that, simplistically, we're to self-focused, narrow definition of the self. Dan, I've been teaching young people for 30 some odd years. And a lot of the data show, like, just the pressure on them, the competitiveness,

the digital technologies, the selfies, the Instagrams, the zooms, et cetera, it's made them too self-focused. And I feel it in the young people I'm around, I feel it in having raised kids or raising kids. And I see it in the data that our young people are too self-focused, sometimes narcissistic. And it's costing them. And it's costing our world. They more depression, more anxiety, more self-harm, eating issues. And awe frees us of that. It makes the self-small that deactivates the default mode network, the regions of the brain that are involved in the ego, right? And people say that, Emerson, in one of his big experiences said,

all mean ego-tism vanishes. And that kept returning to me when I wrote this book, is yeah, our culture needs this. We need to take breaks breaks get out into nature we need to get off of the envious social comparisons of Instagram and move towards those gifts of moral beauty we need a bit of all to counter this trend in our times and I think it'll this thinking and conversation around all will tilt that a little. So one of the reasons I wrote the book Odd word to use on my part for a

conversation between two self-described agnostics if not atheists, but a man I completely agree in closing would you Please just remind everybody of the name of the book of any other resources you've put out into the world that you would recommend we access. Well, so the book is all the new science of everyday wonder and how it can transform your life. And it did the pursuit of everyday wonder, did transform my life. I'm very excited at the Greater Good Science Center and our podcast, which Dan has appeared on,

the Science of Happiness, we're promoting awe in terms of practices, the awe walks to get out in nature and awe stories and little mini awe exercises. And then we also promote that at ggi.berkeley.edu. And Dan, what I'm really excited about is we are promoting it in schools to at gi.berkeley.edu. This is all part of the Greater Good Science Center

where the idea being, what are simple ways through those eight wonders that we can cultivate a few minutes of all right, walking in nature, listening to music, telling stories with friends, I do a lot of work with healthcare providers and I have medical doctors share stories of all from their work right they can tear up it's incredible for them. So we do that through greatergood.berkeley.edu. And then the book is very simply called awe. And he's got some previous books in particular. I've always enjoyed born to be good. And we did an interview around born to be good. We'll post a link to that previous interview with Dacker in the show notes will also post the links to his new book and to those resources he mentioned from the from greater good. So go ahead and into the show notes and you can get much more from Dacker.

And the meantime, Dacker, thank you very much for coming on. Always a an immense pleasure and congratulations on the new book again. Thank you,. I got a little Russia goose bumps just thinking about the now rather enduring time that you and I have had conversations and how grateful I am for them. It's really, it's wonderful. Yes, me too. Thanks again to Dacker. Thanks to you for listening. Thanks as well to the folks who work incredibly hard on this show. 10% happierier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine Davie and Lauren Smith. Our senior producer is Marissa Schneiderman.

Kimi Regler is our managing producer and our executive producer is Jen Poient. We get our scoring and mixing from Peter Baudaventure over at Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you on Wednesday for a brand new episode. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-replus in Apple podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey

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