Speaker 1: The human mind can take trauma of the worst kind
Speaker 1: and find deep meaning. And for me it was that period,
Speaker 1: and coming out of it, I am a different human being,
Speaker 1: you know. I feel more open to the world, more loving,
Speaker 1: more interested in mysteries than answers.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today we welcome
Speaker 2: doctor Doctor Keltner on the show. Doctor Keltner is one
Speaker 2: of the world's foremost emotion scientists. He's a professor of
Speaker 2: psychology at UC Berkeley and the director of the Greater
Speaker 2: Good Science Center. Fun fact, he was the scientific advisor
Speaker 2: behind the beloved Pixar movie Inside Out. He's over two
Speaker 2: hundred scientific publications and six books, including Born to Be Good,
Speaker 2: The Compassionate Instinct, and The Power Paradox. His latest book,
Speaker 2: which is the subject of our conversation today, is called
Speaker 2: All the New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It
Speaker 2: Can trans Form your Life. In this episode, I talked
Speaker 2: to docr about the New Science of awe. Emotions like
Speaker 2: fear and disgust have been extensively researched because of their
Speaker 2: roles in human survival, but doctor Keltner argues that all
Speaker 2: is also essential for well being and community. Music, art,
Speaker 2: and nature are some of the antecedents that can induce
Speaker 2: a sense of wonder, inspiring us to be better by
Speaker 2: recognizing that we're parts of a greater whole. We also
Speaker 2: touch on the topics of transcendence, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and creativity.
Speaker 2: It's always great fun chatting with docer. I really respect
Speaker 2: his work so much, and every time I talk to him,
Speaker 2: I just feel so much joy. He's one of the
Speaker 2: world's leading experts on the science of happiness and all
Speaker 2: and it's been honor for me to publish some work
Speaker 2: with him on this topic. But also it was an
Speaker 2: honor to have this conversation with him and get the
Speaker 2: chance to discuss his new book. Is awesome. All right, So,
Speaker 2: without further ado, I bring you, doctor, doctor Keltner.
Speaker 1: Doctor.
Speaker 2: So great to have you on the Psychology podcast again
Speaker 2: after all these years.
Speaker 1: I know it's good to be with you, Scott and
Speaker 1: to have a conversation about transcendence.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, I'm sure we've both grown a lot since
Speaker 2: our last chat on this show. Yeah, six seven years
Speaker 2: ago or so. My gosh, time fly is. I love
Speaker 2: this topic a huge Congrats on the publication of your
Speaker 2: new book. I know you've been working on this research
Speaker 2: for at least fifteen years. Take me back to the
Speaker 2: beginning of this research where you're like, you know what,
Speaker 2: I'm going to try to scientifically tackle a topic that,
Speaker 2: perhaps to a lot of other psychologists may have seemed
Speaker 2: out of reach from measurement.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks for asking that question. That is the big question,
Speaker 1: you know. John Heyde and I wrote a paper on
Speaker 1: I think two thousand and one or two thousand and three,
Speaker 1: and it took a while to get the science going,
Speaker 1: and I think there were a couple of problems, and
Speaker 1: thanks for asking the scientific question. You know. One was
Speaker 1: like how do you get people feel it? You know,
Speaker 1: and in a lab, you know, which often looks like
Speaker 1: a little impoverished office. You know, we struggled with that
Speaker 1: and early failures. And then the second question is really
Speaker 1: your question, which is measurement. You know, how do you
Speaker 1: if this is an ineffable emotion with mystery at the
Speaker 1: heart of it, people claim, like William James, it's beyond words.
Speaker 1: A lot of people have felt that what do we do?
Speaker 1: And you know, I have to say, I mean, one
Speaker 1: of the most exciting things about writing the book, Scott
Speaker 1: is like you can now measure awe with a lot
Speaker 1: of richness, you know, with words like awe, wonder, amazement,
Speaker 1: with vocalizations, whoa, with facial behavior, with goosebumps. There's really
Speaker 1: nice work on the chills now by good Thrash, even
Speaker 1: with physiology, you know, default mode network. So ironically, and
Speaker 1: this kind of struck me at the end of the book,
Speaker 1: you know, thinking about this the measurement issue. You know,
Speaker 1: I've taught emotion for twenty five thirty years, and ah,
Speaker 1: maybe one of the more coherent emotions to measure, you know,
Speaker 1: it's we can get it. So so I think that's
Speaker 1: why the AWE science has really grown pretty prolifically recently.
Speaker 1: Is people realize, like, Wow, this mysterious emotion, you can
Speaker 1: measure it. You can find it in different life contexts
Speaker 1: and with laboratory paradigm. So it's been exciting to see.
Speaker 2: It's definitely been exciting to see and to be a
Speaker 2: part of somewhat. We have we have a co authored
Speaker 2: paper on the measurement on the measurement of all the
Speaker 2: all scale, that is.
Speaker 1: The key scale in the whole field. That's right with
Speaker 1: David Yats, transformative. I love it.
Speaker 2: I love that you said that. Better you saying that
Speaker 2: than me saying that. Yeah, it is very exciting, and
Speaker 2: I'm trying to think of where all should be placed
Speaker 2: within the whole emotions framework, because never really liked the
Speaker 2: distinction between positive and negative emotions. It seems so.
Speaker 1: It is. I agree.
Speaker 2: I don't think all is like perfectly fits within either,
Speaker 2: Like it seems like a hybrid model.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah it is. It's well, it's a complicated mixture
Speaker 1: of as a bit of fear in it, sometimes horror,
Speaker 1: sometimes terror, but awe the feeling of vast mystery. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I you know your question, and thank you for asking it.
Speaker 1: Of all the interviews I've done on AWE in the
Speaker 1: past six weeks, no one has asked that question, And
Speaker 1: yet it's the question. This defined Yeah, a lot of
Speaker 1: our works. So you know, I'm a nerd, you know,
Speaker 1: I know, and and you know there are some embedded
Speaker 1: questions here, like how different is awe from fear? Right?
Speaker 1: The etymology of the word all traces back to the
Speaker 1: eighth and ninth century fear and dread? Is that really
Speaker 1: true today? How is awe different from beauty? Like when
Speaker 1: you just start blown or just move by a landscape painting,
Speaker 1: and so I would encourage our audience to go to
Speaker 1: Alancowen dot com. And Alan is this brilliant computational scientists,
Speaker 1: and he and I have done like eight to ten
Speaker 1: large scale studies where people rate their emotional responses to
Speaker 1: thousands of stimuli gifts, pieces of music, paintings, vocalizations, samples
Speaker 1: of prosity, facial expressions, photographs, and what you find with
Speaker 1: the really cool statistical techniques that he's figured out is
Speaker 1: there are about twenty emotions in this complicated space. There's
Speaker 1: a good deal of cross cultural overlap. And AWE is
Speaker 1: very much in your sweet spot, Scott, which is it's
Speaker 1: in these self transcendent emotions of emotions that take you
Speaker 1: away from the self like deep love and admiration and
Speaker 1: absorption into a stimulus and beauty. But all is its
Speaker 1: own distinct state, with its own subjective quality of your feelings.
Speaker 1: And importantly, in almost every way that we see study AWE,
Speaker 1: from self report to facial expression, the vocalization, it's really
Speaker 1: different from fear. You know, fear is like what you know,
Speaker 1: and AWE sounds different whoa It has a different physiological profile.
Speaker 1: So that work part of the question is add just
Speaker 1: a kind of part of fear a version of love,
Speaker 1: and no, it's its own thing. And I, you know,
Speaker 1: Descartes Einstein others were like, this feeling of mystery is
Speaker 1: foundational to the mind. And I think those data attest
Speaker 1: to that.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I do. I do think so as well.
Speaker 2: But just thinking about like, okay, if that's our new
Speaker 2: classification schemes self transcendent emotions and then then that changes
Speaker 2: the whole classification schemes, then you have then you have
Speaker 2: non trans self tressented emotions. So I'm trying to think, like,
Speaker 2: is happiness a non self transcendent emotion? I'm trying to think,
Speaker 2: and that I was trying to think in my head, well,
Speaker 2: which ones really are clearly non self transented emotions? Shame?
Speaker 2: But I don't know. Maybe would you say shames of
Speaker 2: non self trescentdent emotion?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, And you're rightly calling into question these
Speaker 1: groupings and they always encounter problems. But self transcendent states
Speaker 1: you know, you know them well, you know Scott like
Speaker 1: Awe bliss, joy, gratitude, gratitude, compassion, inspiration, inspiration. I actually
Speaker 1: and I love certain forms of humor, like the sense
Speaker 1: of the absurd, like yeah, yeah, my life's absurd. You know,
Speaker 1: me too, me too, And then they're self conscious emotions shame, embarrassment, guil, pride.
Speaker 1: I think they are attachment related emotions love, desire, the
Speaker 1: filial love, sympathy, and then you get into the fight
Speaker 1: or flight negative emotions. So yeah, you could question it,
Speaker 1: but it does pose this interesting question of you know
Speaker 1: that we have to grapple with, like what are the
Speaker 1: kind of the cognitive appraisal processes that produce states like bliss,
Speaker 1: joy off? And I think self transcendence is part of
Speaker 1: the story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I definitely agree, and I do like putting it
Speaker 2: in the grouping of self transcendent emotions.
Speaker 1: You did, what do you think the problem are that category? No?
Speaker 2: I like that category and I don't get ae problems
Speaker 2: with it, but it just made me think, well, that
Speaker 2: means then there are non self transcendent emotions. That's the
Speaker 2: one thing that like kind of like trip me up
Speaker 2: for a second, because I was like, yeah, what would
Speaker 2: a trully, non self transentdent emotion look like? Because we're
Speaker 2: such a social species, right, even things like you know,
Speaker 2: shame seems to me like it's partly influenced, of course
Speaker 2: by others evaluations of us, so, but it is still
Speaker 2: focused so much on the self. So that is true.
Speaker 2: That is true.
Speaker 1: Yeah, anyway, nice questioning.
Speaker 2: Yeah you so, what have you found are some of
Speaker 2: the biggest triggers of all?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, you know, we did a bunch of work
Speaker 1: defining on fast miss. You know, it's when we encounter
Speaker 1: kind of vast stimuli or really beyond your typical frame
Speaker 1: of reference or scale of perception that are hard to
Speaker 1: understand or colloquially might we might say mysterious. And then
Speaker 1: we did a bunch of work on triggers of awe.
Speaker 1: And one kind of study that I write about in
Speaker 1: the book is in the spirit of William James. We
Speaker 1: got these stories of awe from twenty six countries as
Speaker 1: diverse as Mexico and India, you know, Poland and Germany, US, Canada, Japan,
Speaker 1: et cetera. And then the others. We did daily diary
Speaker 1: studies where you know, we would ask people in different
Speaker 1: countries every night tell us if you felt some aw
Speaker 1: during the day, and both of those data converge on
Speaker 1: the idea, and it really caught a soft guard that
Speaker 1: it's really you know, what we called moral beauty. The
Speaker 1: triggers awe amazing. You know, people's kindness, their overcoming of obstacles,
Speaker 1: their courage and standing up to the abuse of power amazing,
Speaker 1: and that kind of that was surprising, you know that
Speaker 1: it is. Yeah, nature is common as a source of
Speaker 1: awe spirituality, but man, just the wonders of people, their
Speaker 1: ordinary goodness really moves us to awe.
Speaker 2: I love it. And you briefly just passed by I.
Speaker 2: But you mentioned default mode network. YEA said that now
Speaker 2: that happens to be like my favorite brain network that
Speaker 2: I that I study in the context of creative creativity
Speaker 2: and creative thinking and educational neuroscience and work I've done
Speaker 2: with Mary Helen Emordino Yang and she she has shown
Speaker 2: in her own research independentomy, that that default mode network
Speaker 2: is active when we are witnessing examples of moral elevation,
Speaker 2: but not examples of like visual spatial rotation or like
Speaker 2: non human processing. There's something very unique about watching inspiring
Speaker 2: examples of our fellow humans that activates this brain network.
Speaker 2: Whereas the you know, the dorslateral prefi on the cortex
Speaker 2: is like the robotic part of our brain and like.
Speaker 1: It down.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think that that ties in really nicely
Speaker 2: with the all like experience. I mean, what's your read
Speaker 2: of the literature. I mean, obviously, no single brain network
Speaker 2: is going to explain everything. What have you found is
Speaker 2: the whole terrain of the neuroscience of all and physiology
Speaker 2: of all. Where are we at with that?
Speaker 1: I think we've made really interesting progress. But you know so,
Speaker 1: but man are their big mysteries. Right, So there's work
Speaker 1: and I can't remember the specifics of Helen immunor Yang's studies,
Speaker 1: but from Japan and halland showing all tends to diminish
Speaker 1: default mode network activation, sort of the quieting of the self.
Speaker 1: That's a pretty robust finding in psychedelics that Michael Polland
Speaker 1: reported upon and that others have replicated. But the big
Speaker 1: mystery to me, and this is why OZ really interesting
Speaker 1: for emotion neuroscience, is it is Yeah, okay, the self
Speaker 1: gets quiet, but all has all these fascinating subjective qualities
Speaker 1: to it of believing in human beings and wanting to
Speaker 1: serve if your mind is really creative, so that you
Speaker 1: have some hypotheses.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because what I was saying was the exact opposite
Speaker 2: of yeah, you're saying yeah, and what I'm saying, yeah, Well, you.
Speaker 1: Know, has these different in these different sometimes people study
Speaker 1: it with in response to nature or other people's goodness
Speaker 1: or memories of experiences, So there's going to be inconsistencies,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: That's it. That's the key, that's the key to this mystery.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like it's almost like no surprise that like
Speaker 2: default motive active when you're social processing, but when it's
Speaker 2: a nature obviously you know, other things are going to
Speaker 2: come online and be Yeah. No, that's that's that's the
Speaker 2: key to this mystery. Is that all kind of transcends
Speaker 2: any particular brain network.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I think that you know, when I look
Speaker 1: at the subjective qualities of AWE, like really feeling like
Speaker 1: you've encountered what's meaningful to you, Feeling a sense of
Speaker 1: communal interconnectivity, having a sense that you're part of some
Speaker 1: really vast you know, those are uncharted territories in large
Speaker 1: part in this this realm of the self transcendent brain.
Speaker 1: And I think you and David Jayden and Helen and
Speaker 1: Mordino Yang and others are going to get to their
Speaker 1: those answers and they're fascinating questions right about why did
Speaker 1: we have all this emotion? There's a lot of good
Speaker 1: work on the chills in all certain kinds of chills
Speaker 1: at a company, all the goose tingles, and then you
Speaker 1: know our works our lab's done a bit on bagel tone.
Speaker 1: All elevates bagel tone. So we're getting there and and
Speaker 1: it poses really interesting questions about the emotional body and brain.
Speaker 2: Were douse all activate bagel toon or do is vagel
Speaker 2: tone activate all?
Speaker 1: Well, everything goes in every direction.
Speaker 2: I love it. I love it. That's the right answer
Speaker 2: or options. See you know the reason why I ask.
Speaker 2: It's like I could see, you know, be watching something
Speaker 2: all I could actually activate the calm and connect system
Speaker 2: as like I know refraction. Fredrickson calls it that the
Speaker 2: Calman connect system, and you could certainly see that being
Speaker 2: the case. I also think it can be the case,
Speaker 2: right that where you have active in the Calman connect
Speaker 2: system in some other way and that like unlocks your
Speaker 2: potential for all. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1: Oh my god? Is that a profound need in our
Speaker 1: empirical study of AWE. You know, we get so we
Speaker 1: get so locked in in the emotion world of gratitude
Speaker 1: and compassion and awe and amusement and pride and shame,
Speaker 1: treating those emotions as the independent variable, right, like all
Speaker 1: does this? And that's all of the studies of all.
Speaker 1: All makes you creative, It makes you less polarized, it
Speaker 1: reduces stress. But what about the other direction? Right? What
Speaker 1: about what is the you know, does certain kinds of
Speaker 1: do certain kinds of meditation make you more prone to awe?
Speaker 1: Do visits to the woods make you more prone to awe?
Speaker 1: And so does a high vagel tone profile make you
Speaker 1: more open awe? No? And those are key, key questions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, key questions.
Speaker 1: Young researchers out there, go get it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I hope you are your friend to me? Am
Speaker 2: I young? Yes, the back creaks these days, but I'll
Speaker 2: take it. Okay, Well, what do you see as the
Speaker 2: main features of all? I mean, this could have been
Speaker 2: one of my first questions. Yeah, it'd be better late
Speaker 2: than ever. Yeah, you know, what do you see as
Speaker 2: some of the essential features?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a terrific question. And that took a lot
Speaker 1: of work, and I drew upon a couple of different
Speaker 1: sources in writing Awe. Right. The first was the empirical science,
Speaker 1: and I'll just briefly touch upon that lab studies. But
Speaker 1: the second was the long standing narrative traditions of expressive
Speaker 1: writing about awe, spiritual writing, nature writing like Emerson and
Speaker 1: Margaret Fuller, psychedelic writing, you know, near death experience writing.
Speaker 1: Lots of people really write a lot about awe, and
Speaker 1: you can start to find this essential structure to it
Speaker 1: or features like you say, you encounter vast mysteries, You
Speaker 1: feel the sense of awe, and then it really makes
Speaker 1: the self small and quiet and humble. It opens your mind,
Speaker 1: you know, people in a state of awe open up
Speaker 1: into wonder like wow, how in the world do clouds
Speaker 1: produce lightning? You know? Or how could that skateboarder skate
Speaker 1: on that railing? So you're like whoa. So you're open
Speaker 1: and you're searching for ideas. And then what William James
Speaker 1: called Saint lie tenancy is that you know that it
Speaker 1: is fascinating. These big experiences of all kind of make
Speaker 1: you want to be good for other people. You know
Speaker 1: that you come out of it like whatever I make
Speaker 1: of that, I just want to be good, you know,
Speaker 1: I want to be a kind neighbor, good you know friend,
Speaker 1: So that is those are sort of the essential features,
Speaker 1: and then we it's interesting Scott. You know, I've taught
Speaker 1: all for ten years and people will come to me
Speaker 1: and they'll say, I'm not sure I've had an experience
Speaker 1: of all. You know, Okay, tell me, like, when did
Speaker 1: you see something fast and mysterious? Well, I was, you know,
Speaker 1: riding in my friend's plane. Now I accidentally fell out
Speaker 1: and I've landed a hasty It was amazing, And I'm like, okay,
Speaker 1: did you feel quiet? Did you kind of tear up
Speaker 1: at the event? Did you feel some goosebumps? You know?
Speaker 1: So we know these subjective qualities to awe as well.
Speaker 1: So that's sort of a catalog of the essential features
Speaker 1: of all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is this is on brand for you, sir.
Speaker 2: You know you you've spent a lot of your career
Speaker 2: trying to focus on the good and make the case
Speaker 2: that we're wired for good as a species. And it
Speaker 2: makes you a very unique figure, not within the positive
Speaker 2: psychology movement, but within the evolutionary psychology. That puts you
Speaker 2: quite interesting because you could have easily when you started
Speaker 2: studying the evolutionar psychologists like just gravitate towards you know,
Speaker 2: like aggression and meeting, poaching, dark stalking, you know David
Speaker 2: Buss stuff that he loves that shit. But you carved
Speaker 2: your own unique pathway again within evolutionary psychology. Obviously you
Speaker 2: did within positives like that's obvious, but within evolutionary I
Speaker 2: just want to call that out. There's not a lot
Speaker 2: of people focusing on that. I do want to give
Speaker 2: a shout out to my colleague Glenn Gear who recently
Speaker 2: published the book Positive Evolutionary Psychology, which I wrote the
Speaker 2: forward too. But yeah, where he tempted to try to
Speaker 2: reorient the field of evolutionary psychology in that direction. But
Speaker 2: you've been you know, doing that for ages, so this
Speaker 2: is in another way, this is carrying on from that tradition, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, thank you for making that observation. And
Speaker 1: I hadn't really thought about that, but you know, I
Speaker 1: was captivated by an evolutionary approach to the human psyche
Speaker 1: and social behavior. And it is true, like the the
Speaker 1: prevailing evolutionary science that really took hold on jealousy and
Speaker 1: mate selection and violence and families violence, et cetera. All
Speaker 1: the big headline findings rape really fit this kind of
Speaker 1: bloody and tooth and claw view of human nature, and
Speaker 1: that frustrated me, you know, and I remember hearing France
Speaker 1: DEVALSI that offered this really interesting observation. He was a
Speaker 1: big inspiration for me. You know that book Good Natured
Speaker 1: where he's like, hey, chimps have have been wired by
Speaker 1: evolution to feel guilt and empathy, and you know, they
Speaker 1: co operate and assist others. And he said, you know,
Speaker 1: it's interesting. American evolutionists looked at a group of non
Speaker 1: human primates and all they wrote about was competition of violence.
Speaker 1: Japanese evolutionary scientists looked at this roughly the same group
Speaker 1: of non human primates, and they looked, they discerned, and looked,
Speaker 1: observed all this cooperation. And so I have really took
Speaker 1: taken a more of a pro social lens, like look
Speaker 1: at all the cooperation, and that emerges early the sharing
Speaker 1: that people like David Rand have documented the capacity the
Speaker 1: compassion in particular, you know that work showing we have
Speaker 1: evolved to take care of harm in others, and those
Speaker 1: started to be portals into a broader view of how
Speaker 1: we are this social species. We do a lot of
Speaker 1: horrible things in the name of our social sociology. But
Speaker 1: we do a lot of good that's worth profiling.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, technically, we evolved. I mean you know
Speaker 2: this obviously, but we evolved for survival or reproduction, and
Speaker 2: evolution doesn't particularly care about our happiness. Yeah, a long
Speaker 2: term well being of the organism. Anything that propagates the
Speaker 2: genes is a wind comes up. Yeah, but so one
Speaker 2: based on that, I mean, I believe some evolutions psychologists
Speaker 2: infer from that a lot of things that they tend
Speaker 2: to make us very cynical about the true motives of humans,
Speaker 2: because you could say, like, well, what looks like altruism, yeah,
Speaker 2: or night you know, yeah, okay, yeah, guys are nice.
Speaker 2: But look, let's be honest, they're really nice to get
Speaker 2: laid right. I feel like you're kind of this like pure,
Speaker 2: like joyful human in this field who's like not cynical. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I know, do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Though? And it aggravates some people, and I can't help it,
Speaker 1: you know, Yeah.
Speaker 2: I love it. I love you, man, I love that
Speaker 2: about you.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, you know, and I actually think, you know,
Speaker 1: I didn't do the work that really I was. I
Speaker 1: was probably on the outside or kind of the various
Speaker 1: empirical findings that now supported a much more favorable view
Speaker 1: of human nature, you know, and I'm thinking about just
Speaker 1: Joseph Henrick, the default tendency to show resources, David rand
Speaker 1: intuitive sharing, although that's a controversial finding. You know, some
Speaker 1: of the work on Thomas Cello on the early emergence
Speaker 1: in humans of assistance and providing help, and then you
Speaker 1: build that into the nervous system, right that these are
Speaker 1: all processes enabled by vagual tone and oxytocin and a liken.
Speaker 1: That just feels robust to me, that you know that
Speaker 1: there is this deeply pro social tendency to humans, and
Speaker 1: so much so I hear Richard Dawkins said he would
Speaker 1: rename his book the Cooperative Gene knowing no way, Yeah,
Speaker 1: knowing what he knows about the evolution of properation now
Speaker 1: from the selfish gene, So yeah, you know. And then
Speaker 1: the debates about motives like all right, I share all
Speaker 1: my resources, I give you everything. You know, am I
Speaker 1: really secretly trying to be more attractive to other romantic partners?
Speaker 1: Who knows? You know? What I care about? As Dan
Speaker 1: Batson really convincingly argued, and Fronst of all is the
Speaker 1: proximal determinis of behave, you know, and there's a lot
Speaker 1: of goodness in there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I agree, I agree. I like you. I
Speaker 2: like that. I like that a lot. You you know,
Speaker 2: you personally have been through things, and you know, thanks
Speaker 2: for your vulnerability in your book, you know, writing about it.
Speaker 2: Your brother Rolf Believe passed away from cancer. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: that really changed your understanding of all and and if
Speaker 2: I'm right and motivated you to write this book, is
Speaker 2: that right?
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks for asking, Gott. You know, I was moving
Speaker 1: along with the awe science. I felt like I was
Speaker 1: four or five years away from really starting to put
Speaker 1: it into a book. And then my brother Ralph and
Speaker 1: he and I he's one year younger. We had kind
Speaker 1: of an experimental childhood. You know. We were born in Mexico,
Speaker 1: counterculture parents lived in the late sixties and Laurel Canyon
Speaker 1: kind of this wild place and had a wild upbringing.
Speaker 1: You know. Eventually moved to the country and swam and
Speaker 1: rivers and we did everything together, and he got colon cancer.
Speaker 1: And colon cancer is horrifying. It's really one of the
Speaker 1: bad ones. You know. It is just like it is combat,
Speaker 1: you know, it just brushes the body, and that was brutal.
Speaker 1: That was two years of total brutality of you know,
Speaker 1: just chemo and stomach surgeries and so forth, and really horrifying.
Speaker 1: And then on the night he took a cocktail to
Speaker 1: end his life, we were all there and and I
Speaker 1: was like, you know, really activated. I had no idea
Speaker 1: what it all meant. I was in a really like
Speaker 1: we all were, just intense state. And when I saw him,
Speaker 1: you know, as he was drifting into his the afterlife
Speaker 1: wherever he goes, you know, he was calm, and you know,
Speaker 1: he looked different facially, he was smiling, his breathing really
Speaker 1: responded to us. We would say things and his breathing
Speaker 1: would slow down. And the amazing thing, Scott, I don't
Speaker 1: know if this has ever happened to you, because you
Speaker 1: study transcendence, you know, from a scientific, academic perspective, is
Speaker 1: I started to It was this profoundly reverential moment where
Speaker 1: we were all sitting around him, touching him, and I
Speaker 1: started to almost hallucinate where you know, like I started,
Speaker 1: the light around him was really vibrating and pulsating, and
Speaker 1: I really felt like there was a soul in him
Speaker 1: that was moving into that space and then we were there,
Speaker 1: and like often in cases like this, he waited to
Speaker 1: die until we were all gone. And it was a
Speaker 1: transcendent experience of awe to watch him die. And it
Speaker 1: is a universal human experience of awe to watch people
Speaker 1: he loved go. It can be horrifying and terrifying as well.
Speaker 1: And then what happened to me to your latter part
Speaker 1: of your question is I was blown off the map.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm like, I was not sleeping and really
Speaker 1: eat it in my inflammation system and confused and hallucinating.
Speaker 1: And you know, Joan Diddon writes about awe the awe
Speaker 1: of grief almost like a or the grief is like
Speaker 1: a psychotic state. And I felt like that. I really
Speaker 1: was like, man, I could barely make sense of things.
Speaker 1: And I just decided, you know, I got to go
Speaker 1: find AWE, you know, because I felt totally out of
Speaker 1: touch with what brought me all in life. And that
Speaker 1: led to the book. And my first part of the
Speaker 1: book writing was, you know, I grabbed a bunch of
Speaker 1: books that meant a lot to me. I just started
Speaker 1: writing about AWE and my brother, you know, just like
Speaker 1: where we found it as kids and what it meant
Speaker 1: to us, and it started to take shape. And then
Speaker 1: the voice that I really heard that I think is
Speaker 1: important for our day coming out of the pandemic and
Speaker 1: all the depression out there and our kids, is like,
Speaker 1: find awe. Man, like get you know, I don't know
Speaker 1: if you know you me, Kendall, You probably do from.
Speaker 2: The of course, yes, I mean you have the same
Speaker 2: chair in the Florida Orchestra that my grandfather had in
Speaker 2: the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Speaker 1: Are you serious?
Speaker 2: Yes, there's the same chair. Third chat, Yeah, I mean
Speaker 2: maybe because of you, Scott. But she calls me up
Speaker 2: and she's like, I'm all about AWE. You know, music
Speaker 2: is aw So I.
Speaker 1: Went and I heard her play and had this transformative
Speaker 1: experience of music. So and I think the lesson there
Speaker 1: and I know you've thought a lot about this is
Speaker 1: like the human mind can take trauma of the worst
Speaker 1: kind and find deep meaning. And for me it was
Speaker 1: that period and coming out of it, I am a
Speaker 1: different human being, you know. I feel more open to
Speaker 1: the world, more loving, more interested in mysteries than answers.
Speaker 1: So it was a life.
Speaker 2: That gave me goose bumps. Oh more mysteries than answers.
Speaker 2: I'm wringing that down. No, that just gave me goose bumps. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean music for me. For me, cell music is
Speaker 2: so self transcendent. When I listened to Gilliam, there's there
Speaker 2: are particular pieces that I could share with you that
Speaker 2: just bring me such a sense of awe.
Speaker 1: What does it do for you? Like, how does it
Speaker 1: wash over you? Or what does it bring to your mind?
Speaker 2: There's something so transcendent, timeless about some of this music.
Speaker 2: You know, there's no words, it's not like there's a
Speaker 2: given you any sort of ideology. Yeah, there's something that
Speaker 2: just you listen. I feel bittersweetness to some of this.
Speaker 2: I find, particularly the key of E minor really the
Speaker 2: most self transcendent key.
Speaker 1: I'm going to look into that. Why do you think
Speaker 1: that is? That's really curious.
Speaker 2: It's the most bittersweet key. Yeah, it's like so close
Speaker 2: to E which is bright, but it's not. It's E
Speaker 2: minor E major, you know it's so bright, but no,
Speaker 2: it's E minor. I don't know, it's uh or you
Speaker 2: know C is so bright bright? You know, see see
Speaker 2: it feels happiness, not transcendent, self transcendent. I don't know.
Speaker 2: There's something about e Minor. It's uh, there's just like
Speaker 2: a a real reflection from above that state that it
Speaker 2: puts me in as opposed to feeling from within. It's
Speaker 2: just kind of like a more above reflection. That amazing
Speaker 2: emotional too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, and that's one of the
Speaker 1: mysteries in this book is like you can people feel
Speaker 1: a lot of awe in response to music and they
Speaker 1: cry and get teary, do they get goose bumps, they hug,
Speaker 1: they feel transformed as I did listening to this piece
Speaker 1: by John Adams. But how sounds do that? Like you're
Speaker 1: providing a hypothesis about e Minor blows my mind that
Speaker 1: a pattern of sound can make you feel like things
Speaker 1: above connect to you. That's amazing. I hope science gets there.
Speaker 2: I hope so too. It is absolutely amazing. Well, you
Speaker 2: talk about other domains in this book, and we already talked, hint,
Speaker 2: hinted a little bit about nature. Yeah, what does the
Speaker 2: research show about nature?
Speaker 1: I mean Ralph Waldo Emerson, you know, he was a
Speaker 1: naturalist in the sense of finding awe in the divine
Speaker 1: in nature. Forty percent of Americans feel nature is animated
Speaker 1: by a transcendent spirit. I kind of feel that way
Speaker 1: when I go backpacking. And the research on this is
Speaker 1: just astonishing and it is one of the real success
Speaker 1: stories of all research thus far, a lot of it
Speaker 1: coming out of South Korea Japan, where they really are
Speaker 1: interested in forest bathing and rituals in nature as a
Speaker 1: healthcare solution, and people go out in nature and they
Speaker 1: just start having this different kind of experience of like, God,
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm naked in the woods and boundaries
Speaker 1: are dissolving, and the sounds are and the light is
Speaker 1: so bright. And the studies are finding those sounds of
Speaker 1: water activate parts of your nervous system that are related
Speaker 1: to AWE. There are certain chemicals in nature that open
Speaker 1: up your mind to temporal vastness and memory that the
Speaker 1: imagery itself obviously the sense of interconnectivity. And you know,
Speaker 1: there's a ton of data nicely reviewed. I ming Quo
Speaker 1: in I think twenty sixteen or twenty fifteen, and it's
Speaker 1: it's just it's hard to beat in terms of lifting
Speaker 1: is out of it is you know, so you know
Speaker 1: it and it does it through calming our attention and
Speaker 1: awe and just the physical soothing on your body, you know,
Speaker 1: probably the influence on the microbiome. So it's incredible and really,
Speaker 1: you know, it's interesting Scott thirty years ago like, oh,
Speaker 1: it would feel sort of corny to study nature and emotion,
Speaker 1: and today it's a massively important field, you know, with
Speaker 1: a lot of real world relevance. So it's it's a
Speaker 1: good good news.
Speaker 2: I love that it keeps coming back to like connection. Yeah,
Speaker 2: when you're in nature, when you feel connected to nature,
Speaker 2: does that make you tend to be more connected to
Speaker 2: I fear fell humans, yell? Do those things go together?
Speaker 1: They? Well, what we do know? And this is a
Speaker 1: you're you're asking such key questions, which is you know.
Speaker 2: I was always in trouble in school for those teachers
Speaker 2: are like Scott, you're asking too many.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to teach for a multiple choice here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know. One of the really surprising findings that you
Speaker 1: were the first to bring up is this, which is
Speaker 1: you can produce awe in the lab by having people
Speaker 1: look at you know, film from BBC Earth or really
Speaker 1: cool images of the northern lights, and you feel awe.
Speaker 1: And then our studies show even though it's nature, that
Speaker 1: awe makes you feel more connected to your fellow human beings.
Speaker 1: You know, in one of our studies, we had individuals
Speaker 1: draw social network with little circles that are individuals, and
Speaker 1: then connect all the circles and when you feel AWE,
Speaker 1: you have a richer social community produced by nature. And
Speaker 1: that tells us. It raises this fascinating question of like,
Speaker 1: how in the world could I go to Yosemite and
Speaker 1: look at a giant wall of rock and come out
Speaker 1: of it feeling like I love of my fellow human beings.
Speaker 1: It's kind of mysterious, right, And I think the what
Speaker 1: AWE does is it shifts us out of this sense
Speaker 1: of self as separate from others to a sense of
Speaker 1: self as interconnected, no matter what the source. And we
Speaker 1: need more work on that.
Speaker 2: We do, but the work that has already been done
Speaker 2: on it, as you mentioned, is so groundbreaking and important.
Speaker 2: Do you think that there's an all deprivation going on
Speaker 2: in the lives of children today with a cutting of
Speaker 2: music classes, art classes. Do you have a problem here, Yeah?
Speaker 1: I do. I was really lucky, Scott. You know, I
Speaker 1: was raised by these counterculture parents and they just like,
Speaker 1: let my brother and I find AWE. You know, nature
Speaker 1: and dms and the things that we were curious about.
Speaker 1: You know, I love dinosaurs, and my brother loved magic tricks,
Speaker 1: you know, and so we just went our ways and
Speaker 1: developed this sense of awe. And then, you know, in
Speaker 1: raising my two daughters, now Ly and Sarafina twenty five
Speaker 1: and twenty three, they did grade in school, and they're
Speaker 1: wonderful human beings. But when I looked at what a
Speaker 1: young person does in many parts of the globalized world.
Speaker 1: In school, you know, schools oriented, you know, like you said,
Speaker 1: like the humanities have less of a roll, Art has
Speaker 1: less of a roll, music less of a roll, oriented
Speaker 1: to or code, and certain kinds of math, et cetera,
Speaker 1: which is great. But and then more importantly, like what
Speaker 1: do you do after school? We were scheduled out of
Speaker 1: your mind and you you're doing you know, hip hop
Speaker 1: dance class and then the you know, the Spanish class,
Speaker 1: and and you get home at seven, and then you
Speaker 1: do your homework, and there was no awe. You know,
Speaker 1: my kids, my daughters, who are both fierce and love awe,
Speaker 1: had to like force awe into their lives through going
Speaker 1: to wild dances and traveling by themselves in South America
Speaker 1: and and you know, living on farms and and we
Speaker 1: had take our cultures, taken it largely away from them,
Speaker 1: you know, as have digital things. Yeah. So it's but
Speaker 1: we're designing all curricula at the Greater Good Science Center,
Speaker 1: and I think there's an AWE movement in education coming
Speaker 1: that will correct some of these these problems.
Speaker 2: These are some heavy themes today. I can't well, you know,
Speaker 2: there's two ends of this. There's death and then there's life. Now. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we found in our own paper that we published that
Speaker 2: one of the biggest triggers of all on our six
Speaker 2: factor all scale was the other category and the biggest
Speaker 2: thing in the all category was childbirth. Yea, yeah, that's
Speaker 2: the other cycle.
Speaker 1: That's the other end it is, you know what I'm
Speaker 1: saying it is And you know, anyone who's watched or
Speaker 1: had a child, most people feel awe, you know, And
Speaker 1: I think that there's this deeper lesson there. Like I've
Speaker 1: thought about when spring arrives, we often feel awe. We're
Speaker 1: just electrified by the emergence of life. And it got
Speaker 1: me onto this hypothesis that somehow AWE is a life detector.
Speaker 1: You know, anytime there's elements evidence of life you're like, wow,
Speaker 1: it's emerging and it is vast and mysterious. How what
Speaker 1: life is. But yeah, childbirth is a serious one. And
Speaker 1: I love the stories we gathered because people would say
Speaker 1: like this, I think, as this woman from Japan, like
Speaker 1: the minute I had a child, I thought about all
Speaker 1: the generations I'm part of. Now I'm the new generation,
Speaker 1: and I think about my parents and grandparents right this
Speaker 1: intergenerational vastness. It's an amazing experience. When my daughter Natalie
Speaker 1: was born, she came out of my wife's womb, and
Speaker 1: the first thing that was funny is she had this
Speaker 1: little dark hair, which all babies tend to have, and
Speaker 1: I have blonde hair. My wife is blonde. And I
Speaker 1: was like, oh my god, you know, I'm not the dad,
Speaker 1: you know. And then I got over that quickly. But
Speaker 1: I looked at her face, Scott. I still can remember
Speaker 1: this to this day, and her face I could just
Speaker 1: because I the human face. It had all the features
Speaker 1: of uncles and aunts and grandmothers put into this genetic miracle.
Speaker 1: And I was like, wow, you know, this is what
Speaker 1: reproduction is is taking all of our family members, mixing
Speaker 1: it up and bringing a life into the world. So
Speaker 1: it was mind blowing, credible, and it's cool because now
Speaker 1: there are movements like I profile in the book, like
Speaker 1: Mindful of Birthing, where you really you don't you get
Speaker 1: techniques to figure out the pain and then you focus
Speaker 1: on that wonder of life and bringing it into the world.
Speaker 2: I love that. I didn't know that was a like
Speaker 2: a thing. Yeah, but primarily probably in California, we.
Speaker 1: Are a little susceptible to this kind of thing.
Speaker 2: It sounds very California, but I love it. I love it.
Speaker 2: What about like creativity? Do you what is the research
Speaker 2: show in that connections between all on creativity?
Speaker 1: It's good. And you know when people ask me like, well, god, ah,
Speaker 1: what do you mean, Like is that good for you?
Speaker 1: Because I have an image of like encountering a judgmental
Speaker 1: God and that's not what I don't know if that'd
Speaker 1: be good for me. But aw is good for your body,
Speaker 1: it's good for your stress, and it's good for your mind.
Speaker 1: And you know, we have done work and that shows
Speaker 1: you know that a little bit of awe makes you
Speaker 1: more creative on classic creativity tasks like the remote association's
Speaker 1: task or thinking of novel associations or relations between objects.
Speaker 1: It's related to more curiosity for kids in school, which
Speaker 1: I think is important. It's related to, you know, there's
Speaker 1: mounting work that you're you're sharper in your reasoning, right
Speaker 1: you you analyze evidence a little bit more carefully. That's
Speaker 1: worked by Lannie Shioda. You're better at science and scientific
Speaker 1: reasoning tangentially related finding as you make you're less polarized
Speaker 1: and looking at conflicts. It's not the US them stereotype.
Speaker 1: It's like, well there's a complicated issue, right so I
Speaker 1: you know, and you would have guessed this obviously, but
Speaker 1: you know, we needed to do their work like a
Speaker 1: little dose of AWE is good news for your curiosity
Speaker 1: and creativity. And I think most people feel that they know.
Speaker 1: Like man, when I feel a little burst of a
Speaker 1: suddenly I come up, I go walking in the garden
Speaker 1: or the forest, and I get a new idea about
Speaker 1: my work. You know, So it's good. It's good news.
Speaker 2: Yeah, good fodder for inspiration. Yeah. As you know, there's
Speaker 2: there's this table of character strengths, uses, and excesses. Every
Speaker 2: single character strength has the excesses category? Is there a
Speaker 2: dark side to all of too much?
Speaker 1: All?
Speaker 2: Like the whole book is like basically one big endorsement
Speaker 2: for all.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But but is there anything you can say critical at
Speaker 2: all you know about this thing?
Speaker 1: Yeah, most definitely. And the dark side of AWE is
Speaker 1: is really interesting if you know. One source of it
Speaker 1: is if you build threat into the experience of awe. Right,
Speaker 1: So let's say your experience of AWE in a religious
Speaker 1: context has this threatening structure to it, or judgmental God,
Speaker 1: or you know, a charisme course of leader who is
Speaker 1: really threatening but onspiring that will have it won't have
Speaker 1: the benefits that we've talked about and will close your
Speaker 1: mind more and make you feel stressed. So that's one
Speaker 1: you know, pure Carlo that Valdosolo had cool data showing
Speaker 1: AWE can make you see patterns that aren't there. Right,
Speaker 1: it's just a pattern making emotion apopinia. Is that seeing
Speaker 1: patterns that aren't there? Wow? Yeah?
Speaker 2: O over yeah yeah yeah, that's the technical technical term.
Speaker 1: And you know, when you think about writing it down,
Speaker 1: when you think about people indoors QAnon or conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: or you know, it's worrisome that that this AWE can
Speaker 1: do that, you know, the dark side of all for
Speaker 1: us as individuals like you nicely said, like, man, if
Speaker 1: you're out on that end of the AWE continuum and
Speaker 1: you're feeling it all the time, you're probably bordering on mania.
Speaker 1: You know, h too expansive, too, everything's too vast, So
Speaker 1: i'd watch out for that. And then I think people
Speaker 1: have written about the political abuses of AWE, that the
Speaker 1: Trump rallies, you know, stirring up this collective efforvescence are worrisome.
Speaker 1: And so you know, you can you can get people
Speaker 1: revved up on just moving in syncrony and you know,
Speaker 1: getting exhilarated about an idea, and it can it can
Speaker 1: lead to problems. So I think there are a huge
Speaker 1: dark side stall.
Speaker 2: Cool, thank you for addressing that. How could people train
Speaker 2: themselves to find more all in their daily lives? Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, you know this.
Speaker 1: This is both a you know, thinking about this, and
Speaker 1: there are hints at practices in the book, you know,
Speaker 1: and also when you think about the experiments that have
Speaker 1: been run. But it's interesting to me because I believe
Speaker 1: that there is an AWE mindset that is like mind
Speaker 1: that is a has the same power as a mindfulness mindset.
Speaker 1: So mindfulness is the non judgmental awareness of the contents
Speaker 1: of my mind and my context. Right, I'm just over
Speaker 1: aware of things. Owez. Mindset is I feel in an
Speaker 1: open way to be in relation to something vast, Right,
Speaker 1: I'm part of something vast And that's the mindset to
Speaker 1: cultivate with all Like how am I part of this ecosystem?
Speaker 1: How do my emotions fit this back cello? Can you
Speaker 1: know peace? How does my dream life fit this painting
Speaker 1: by A Kandinski? Or or? And how am I part
Speaker 1: of this massive people who are dancing at a concert? Oz.
Speaker 1: Mindset is being in relation to what's fast, and you
Speaker 1: can cultivate that, you know. You We did an aw
Speaker 1: walk study where people just go out and walk and
Speaker 1: we asked them to think about fast things that you're
Speaker 1: related to, and it helped their physical pain. So so
Speaker 1: part of cultivating is the mindset and part is just
Speaker 1: to find those domains they give it to you, you know,
Speaker 1: and just pause and listen to music for AWE, think
Speaker 1: about it. Somebody who's inspired you morally, move with other people,
Speaker 1: get out in nature. It's actually pretty easy to cultivate,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of work now people are really
Speaker 1: realizing this. Like, as an example, I was doing a
Speaker 1: workshop on AWE and this guy who runs the grief
Speaker 1: programs at Kaiser Permanente, we have this exercise one way
Speaker 1: to feel ODZ to tell an AWE story. You know. Oh,
Speaker 1: I was out, you know, backpacking. I saw this electrical
Speaker 1: storm almost got here. It was amazing. And so with
Speaker 1: people who are grieving, he has them tell AWE stories
Speaker 1: about the people they've lost, right, which in some sense
Speaker 1: is what my book is. It's an AWE story about
Speaker 1: my brother. And that is a very simple thing to
Speaker 1: do in one of life's most challenging moments. It's good
Speaker 1: for us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean you do make clear that even a
Speaker 2: couple of minutes a day can really influence your whole life. Yeah,
Speaker 2: at least influence the rest of the day.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm just thinking about linkages between this and James Pennebaker's
Speaker 2: great work on motion promotional processing of trauma through journaling.
Speaker 2: Could we have an all workbook, and I don't mean
Speaker 2: like an all notebook. Could we have an all notebook
Speaker 2: where even just writing down some of the most all
Speaker 2: like experiences before you go to bed maybe influences your
Speaker 2: next day. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that's coming. You know, we have some AWE
Speaker 1: practices a greater good. And there are wonder books now
Speaker 1: very much in the spirit and AWE books. I think
Speaker 1: they're coming, you know too, And I love your idea
Speaker 1: so nuanced of before you go to bed, write a
Speaker 1: story of awe right at a heart. I do this
Speaker 1: when I was teaching healthcare providers during the pandemic, a
Speaker 1: top thousands of people remotely, I would have them tell
Speaker 1: AWE stories about their work, right like peterful, Yeah, and
Speaker 1: they were just like, it's the hardest time in their careers.
Speaker 1: But there was a lot of reverential content.
Speaker 2: Beautiful. How can all be an antidote to social polarization?
Speaker 2: Can I help with different political persuasions? Get along?
Speaker 1: Yeah? You know, Daniel Stancato, you know we did that
Speaker 1: paper and you know, you find there are classic ways
Speaker 1: to measure polarization. Do I think you know that disputes
Speaker 1: over police brutality or woke education, or gender identity or
Speaker 1: incarceration are they polarized? Do they have just adversarial enemies
Speaker 1: on side? And that's it? And in a lot of
Speaker 1: people we have become more polarized. It's a big problem
Speaker 1: in the political sphere. But AWE reduces the tendency to polarize,
Speaker 1: and you we've little experiences of all nature. And then
Speaker 1: you judge the adversaries in ideological disputes and you think
Speaker 1: they're they have more common ground, right, they're not fanatical enemies.
Speaker 1: I think that's you know, I love your question because
Speaker 1: it just points to ways in which we can shift
Speaker 1: the discourse of our times and move away from this
Speaker 1: like Trump versus you know, Bernie or whatever, and move
Speaker 1: a little bit more toward kind of what are the
Speaker 1: common grounds in different ideological persuasions? Where can we make progress?
Speaker 1: So thanks for asking. It was a paper I'm proud of.
Speaker 2: Of course, all this stuff is related to each other,
Speaker 2: like your idea of collective effervescence, you know, moving in
Speaker 2: unison and ritual dance, religion put. I mean when you
Speaker 2: go to these political you look at the Trump political rallies,
Speaker 2: there's collective effervescence there, you know, but it's not necessarily one.
Speaker 2: That's again, there's a dark side, all right, Like it's
Speaker 2: not like a collective effervescence necessarily leads you to uh
Speaker 2: love your outgroup.
Speaker 1: Yeah no, not at all. And you you and in fact,
Speaker 1: it's probably the opposite, and there's a little bit of
Speaker 1: work on that that collective movement can lead us to
Speaker 1: polarized groups. You know, when you like, I remember reading
Speaker 1: about the massacres in Rwanda and the Hutu's, it was
Speaker 1: so much collective stuff like dance and chanting and drugs
Speaker 1: and you know, weaponry and just moving through villages. And
Speaker 1: I think that the collective effervescence of it just unleashed
Speaker 1: the violence of that in some exponential way. So yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, our task is to rely on reason to
Speaker 1: make sense of whether these emotions are benefiting the greater good,
Speaker 1: and to do it on a podcast like this.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right. Oh boy, how is all cumulative?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you know, we that's one of the deeper
Speaker 1: questions about these self transcendent emotions more generally compassion, gratitude,
Speaker 1: bliss is people have this sense. There's a little bit
Speaker 1: of work on this in gratitude work, And then we
Speaker 1: have one study on awe. You know, when you have
Speaker 1: an our experience like you you know, you go to
Speaker 1: a concert with friends, or you go to a political
Speaker 1: march and you feel transformed, or you go backpacking, you
Speaker 1: come out of it and for the next week, you're like, God,
Speaker 1: I'm feeling like things are different, you know, I feel
Speaker 1: different about my life. And that suggests that that experience
Speaker 1: is cumulative. It builds on itself in some interesting way.
Speaker 1: We have one study that shows indeed, the more we
Speaker 1: practice aw once a week, the greater the awe with
Speaker 1: the practice. How is you know which I see smiling? Like,
Speaker 1: that's the question, And I think part of it is,
Speaker 1: like you notice more aw right, Like, oh, after backpacking,
Speaker 1: got it, I'm looking at the sky a little bit more.
Speaker 1: You are reflecting on bigger systems that you're part of.
Speaker 1: You go to a political rally and you're moved by
Speaker 1: Bernie Sanders and sudden you're like, wow, I should be
Speaker 1: thinking about how this tax critique applies to education or
Speaker 1: prison systems. So it has as it builds, but we
Speaker 1: just don't know much about it. And I think it's
Speaker 1: one of the greatest questions in the field, the field
Speaker 1: of psychedelics. This is one of the big questions. Is
Speaker 1: you know, people feel like it changes them for a
Speaker 1: long time.
Speaker 2: How you know?
Speaker 1: And we'll hopefully figure out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can't wait to know the answer to this.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, let's end this interview talking about this
Speaker 2: last chapter of your book, which is so interesting. It's
Speaker 2: on the fundamental unifying purpose of all. Yeah, let's bring
Speaker 2: all these threads together today and tell me a little
Speaker 2: bit about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That was a hard one to really to write,
Speaker 1: Like what's all really about? And I think that there
Speaker 1: are two answers. One we've touched upon is you know
Speaker 1: that AWE folds us into collectives and a ton of
Speaker 1: data on that thesis, and that makes sense. It's in
Speaker 1: you know, you nicely asked about new evolutionary approaches to
Speaker 1: the human psyche, and it is this group selection. I
Speaker 1: got to be part of a collective and ALL does
Speaker 1: that in a lot of different ways in terms of
Speaker 1: action and feeling and self representation. But I, you know,
Speaker 1: I was really interested in the kind of the phenomenological
Speaker 1: coherence to AWE. What is it about? And it really
Speaker 1: I was searching for it. And you know, what does
Speaker 1: encountering somebody who moves you morally due to you or
Speaker 1: feeling being out of nature? And the thing that it
Speaker 1: does is, in my views, it really makes you realize
Speaker 1: the systems you're part of, and you shift out of
Speaker 1: this very narrow self focus of specific actions within a context,
Speaker 1: and you go deeper and it reveals that life is
Speaker 1: made up of all these systems, right, the system a
Speaker 1: social system of your neighborhood, a system of ideas and
Speaker 1: a discipline, systems of sounds like you hinted out in music,
Speaker 1: and all reveals that to you and then invites you
Speaker 1: to be part of those systems. And what's interesting about
Speaker 1: that to me, Scott is you know, you and I
Speaker 1: have thought a lot about meaning, like young people finding meaning,
Speaker 1: you and I finding meaning, finding meaning after your brother dies,
Speaker 1: and meaning in some sense is about locating your individual
Speaker 1: identity in broad systems. Is it a spiritual system that
Speaker 1: really gives you strength or sense that you're part of
Speaker 1: nature or a social movement? And that is the core
Speaker 1: of all. And it took you know, some investigation to
Speaker 1: get there, but I think it's a big deal. I
Speaker 1: think that too. Like we've talked about young people, they
Speaker 1: aren't thinking quite as much about these broad systems that
Speaker 1: you can be part of and all it is a
Speaker 1: very important pathway to that realization.
Speaker 2: Beautiful, I love it, and I love I love how
Speaker 2: just how far one so one one construct can take us.
Speaker 2: I mean, we're it all pivoted around all today and
Speaker 2: we're talking about large scale social dynamics and systems and
Speaker 2: fundamentally remapping society. I love it. Not every construct can
Speaker 2: do that in psychology, right construct?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 2: So yeah, all is a good one. All is a
Speaker 2: good one. Yeah, Doctor Keltner, thank you so much for
Speaker 2: the chat today, and I wish you all the best
Speaker 2: and the rest of your book tour.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Thanks, Scott, It's always good to be with you.
Speaker 2: Likewise, thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 2: If you'd like to react in some way to something
Speaker 2: you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion
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Speaker 2: time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.