Lee
[00:00:00] I'm Lee C. Camp, and this is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
Dacher
Awe. Awe is the feeling we have when we encounter vast, mysterious things.
Lee
That's Dacher Keltner, psychologist at the University of UC Berkeley. He's talking about awe. That's A-W-E, awe. An emotion which he has spent a large part of his career studying.
Dacher
Brief doses of awe help your heart, your immune system, they help your stress, they help your reasoning, they help you with your relationships.
Lee
Today, what is awe? What does it do for us and how can we live lives in which we encounter it regularly?
Dacher
Awe is so urgently needed for this moment. It leads to wonderful actions, you know, for the most part, of sharing and cooperation, and pretty good news for our times today.
Lee
All coming right up.[00:01:00]
I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
If you're a regular listener, you know I'm a college professor for my day job, teaching theology and ethics, and I'm always fascinated when substantially different disciplines of study point us toward common practices.
Various faith traditions would point us, for example, toward practices of compassion. It turns out that research in the social sciences, as well as biological and evolutionary science, also point us toward the importance of compassion.
Today's episode provides another instance of such cross disciplinary findings. It's quite expected, really, that various theological traditions point us toward awe - A-W-E, awe. And our guest today, Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at UC Berkeley, has spent much of his life studying emotions, with a large part of that work focusing upon the emotion of awe.
You'll hear him define [00:02:00] awe as the feeling of being in the presence of something vast, that transcends one's current understanding of the world. We will dive into the fascinating new scientific research around awe, which includes a vast taxonomy of all kinds of emotional experience, and Dacher will share with us a helpful framework to cultivate awe in one's own life, the benefits of which he claims are enormous.
Here's our interview.
Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, the faculty director of UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center. He's a renowned expert in the science of human emotion, and studies compassion and awe, how we express emotion, and how emotions guide our moral identities and search for meaning.
His research interests also expand to issues of power, status, inequality, and social class. He's the author of The Power Paradox, and the best selling book, Born to be Good, and the co-editor of The Compassionate Instinct. His latest book, which we're discussing today, Awe, [00:03:00] is a national bestseller.
Welcome, Dacher.
Dacher
It's good to be with you, Lee.
Lee
It's great to be with you. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long while and grateful for you taking, taking time to be with us.
But you, you say in the introduction to Awe that you've taught happiness to hundreds of thousands of people. And yet at the same time, you acknowledge that you've been pretty anxious for much of your life.
Talk, talk to us about that.
Dacher
[Laughs] You get right to it.
There are so many ironies in our careers. And one of them is that I teach happiness online to tens of thousands of people, teach it at Berkeley, teach it in various contexts. And, um, people think it's easy for me, but it's actually very hard.
And that's because genetically, there's enormous amounts of anxiety running through my mom's side of her family. It hit me at different stages of development, when I was 13 and then when I was 30 and moved from my first job and had more panic attacks than, you know, a sample of 100 Americans. [00:04:00]
And so, yeah, it's this... it makes it all the more gratifying and a form of inquiry to teach happiness, because sometimes what I teach feels like a mystery to me, you know, personally.
Lee
Dacher
And so it touches me. And I feel its effects too, to really go into the deep inquiry of what it means to have a meaningful life.
Lee
Yeah.
I relate to that very much. As I think I've told you, I've been teaching a class for undergrads called "Joy and the Good Life" that started out of a consultation at Yale with Miroslav Volf a number of years ago.
But part of that for me has been precisely kind of the same reason of-- I remember I got treated for-- my first treatment for anxiety was an ulcer when I was like in seventh grade. And so I, you know, I'm, I'm wired very seriously for the anxiety. And I tell my students I've been wired for anxiety, and similarly for me on my mother's side, and that it's not easy for me either.
And, um... but it's fascinating that so much research that's being done in the kind of work that you're doing and others that are doing in the social sciences and the sciences, hard sciences, is just so fascinating.
So [00:05:00] anyway, thank you for that. And thank for your willingness to kind of be open about the relevance of that to you.
Dacher
Lee
Yeah.
So you say, "I've taught people about finding the good life," and we'll talk about awe then for much of our time together, but I'm wondering if you could talk more about what has been central to you in your teaching on helping people find what you're calling 'a good life.'
Dacher
Yeah, well, I'm teaching it right now.
You know, I look at the field of well being, and there are different theoretical frameworks, Carol Ryff's, Martin Seligman's... you know, that drill it down to five to seven kind of core themes to find happiness and meaning and good health.
And for me, I really reduce it to a few things.
One is what 18th century philosophers called 'the moral sentiments,' our virtues, our, you know, our intuitions. Just these deep intuitions that so many contemplative traditions like Taoism, Buddhism, Romanticism taught us to go in search of. You know, compassion, awe, gratitude, [00:06:00] a feeling of common humanity and empathy, love, you know, a sense of wonder.
And so that's the first part of how I approach it, is to get people to really trust their bodies, their feelings, these ancient crafted by evolution intuitions about how I can be a good human being.
The second is sociality, is just cultivate an ethics of connection and a sense of cooperation with people, of, of friendship, of common cause. You know, 40 percent of Americans feel lonely right now. They don't have enough connection. And so there are actionable ways to do that.
And then the third is how do you handle stress? You know, how do you... you know, practice meditation techniques and tell stories and look at visual art and music in ways that, like you and I feeling a lot of stress early in life, how can we make sense of it? How can we grow out of it? How can we take the hardships and turn them into wisdom?
And so-- and it's really dynamic. It's, all [00:07:00] the approaches don't work for everybody. You got to find your particular menu, in a way, to go after meaning.
Lee
Yeah. Yeah, that's one of the things I found so interesting in a lot of the scientific studies around this is that... the multifaceted nature. And it's kind of like what you all keep doing for us is giving us a sort of tool, and I'll describe it this way to my students - you get this kind of rich toolkit and you get to explore and see which of these works best for you and it'll work differently for different people.
Dacher
Yeah, such an important lesson too, right, you know, just to find-- you may be a body person and love yoga. You may be a sacred text person and love big ideas, you know? And--
Lee
Dacher
And that's the challenge.
Lee
You've also done, as I understand it, a lot of study about shame and embarrassment.
Dacher
Lee
Talk to us about how that fits into your larger project.
Dacher
Yeah, you know, this all began, in some sense... you know, I studied a lot of negative emotions like anger and fear and shame and embarrassment from the perspective that these emotions are what fold us into [00:08:00] healthy relationships and, and community.
You know, so you take an emotion like embarrassment, it feels painful in the moment, but what it functions as, and this traces back in our, our primate evolution, which I always look at things from an evolutionary perspective, what it does is it's a way of acknowledging you've made a mistake, you're, you're apologizing for it, other people forgive you. So it serves this vital function of bringing us back into the fold when we've violated social conventions.
Shame is deeper and gets more problematic. You know, it's about moments, times of life when we don't live up to the ideals and the aspirations we hold dear, right? And you're like, "this is the kind of person I want to be, and look what I've done," and I feel ashamed.
And in the right context with the right people around you, you can move out of it and grow and learn, right. But unfortunately, shame very quickly is used against people and built into [00:09:00] social structures, you know, like racism.
And so these emotions, all of them-- and Aristotle wrote about this. In the right way and in the right place to the right end, they keep us part of healthy communities, right? Romantic partnerships, friendships, groups.
And there, there are a lot of new data just showing, like, if we can kind of master and navigate with all of these emotions, in the right way, like Aristotle said, we'll, we'll be okay. You know, we'll, we'll find what we care about.
Lee
Yeah.
This was kind of implicit in what you said, but I would like to hear you kind of comment on this quickly.
There seems to be... maybe the first person I heard use this phrase was, um, Anna Lembke, but uses the phrase "prosocial shame" and, pointing to the fact that there's also a sort of toxic shame or a non social shame.
But kind of, how would you see the, the difference between shame that is serving a fruitful, constructive end and that which doesn't?
Dacher
Yeah. What a-- man, what a deep question.
You know, I did a lot of work in forgiveness and restorative justice in [00:10:00] prisons and elsewhere. And there, you create a social context, drawing upon our very deep capacity to forgive, uh, drawing upon mammalian tendencies to reconcile in the face of conflict and harm, wherein, you know, this expression of shame triggers in others the sense that you are apologizing, you are filled with regret, and it brings about a reconciliation.
And that takes a lot of work, right? You have to have open dialogue and true apologies and the person who you're directing shame towards sort of being open to change. And that's the, the upside to shame, when it leads to prosocial ends, uh, both people feel better.
But obviously, bullies shame others chronically, and that becomes toxic. So you could think about the, how chronic the shame is, as a indicator of toxicity. You could think about, you know, abuse of power dynamics at work, for example, where somebody chronically feels ashamed. And [00:11:00] then, you know, you look at the, kind of the ossified, you know, social structures that produce shame - gender, race, class - you know, the shame, uh, in a culture like the U. S., where the poor are often denigrated, and there you've got toxic shame. We've learned a lot about how problematic it is for people's well being.
Lee
Yeah.
Mapping emotions with science. You, you say that this is kind of a cutting edge, I suppose, in many ways, that this has been something that's only been done, what, in the last couple of decades that this has begun?
Dacher
Yeah. You know, by mapping-- I love this quote from Virginia Woolf, like, you know, "The, the drivers of London have their maps, but we don't have a map of the heart or the passions."
And in some sense, the field of emotion that we've been talking about was dominated by a very narrow framework of Paul Ekman, who's well known and did the facial expression research and really got us to think about anger and fear and sadness and surprise and, and disgust [00:12:00] and, and joy.
And then we started to think about shame as a field in the '80s and '90s. But we know there's so much more to our subjective lives than that, right? And, and the narrow, antiquated approach that that led to was just thinking about just those six emotions, and thinking that that's what constituted our emotional life.
And I had the privilege of working with a young guy named Alan Cowen, who had new statistical approaches, new methods. And we went out and we just had people listen to 2,000 pieces of music or watch 2,000 short GIFs or-- you know, and on and on. And with new approaches, we came up with a much richer map of emotion.
And our listeners should go to alancowen.com and check it out, 'cause, you know, 27 kinds of experience, like admiration and awe and adoration and amusement and absorption, are all really close to each other, but distinct, right? You can pull them apart. Fear, terror, [00:13:00] horror, which you ordinarily would just gloss over with one term, are actually really distinct subjective states.
And so I think his work, it's only been published in the last few years, is really moving the field into a much richer view of our interior life.
Lee
Yeah.
And then, you know, that those are distinct subjective experiences or realities. And does, does, does this also show as distinct in a sort of a neuroscience perspective as well?
Dacher
Yeah. You know, so our discoveries of how many emotions we can communicate with a voice, which is about 25, you know, I can go-- [several vocal expressions indicating various emotions] you know, really advanced with this new understanding of the richness of emotion.
And then, we have worked with a Japanese team and other people were doing this. Once you have this richer way to elicit emotion and have people report on it, instead of just six emotions, maybe 30, [00:14:00] right? Yeah, the patterning of emotions in the brain reveals their 30 distinct patterns. And there'll probably be more for all these-- you know, states like interest and beauty and love and calm and contentment and mystery, right? They all have these distinct profiles. And it's just a, a next chapter in how we'll understand the brain and emotion.
Lee
Yeah.
This is a very brief question, but just so that I can kind of get some clarity here. So, is the way the methodology works is that you're, you're asking people to report on their experience, and you're finding a word that people will use to map on to that kind of experience, and you find consistency on these subjective reports, and then you're correlating when people are in that state with what you see happening in the brain?
Dacher
Yeah, the-- it's important to get to the methods, you know? A typical study, in the past, of emotion in the brain might have [00:15:00] you think about a time you were angry or sad or disgusted, or show you slides that make you feel those emotions. And then you look for the patterning in different regions of the brain.
And this new approach, that's much more rich, what we call high dimensional approach, has an individual spend a long time in the scanner, look at 2,000 videos, right, that we have found elicit 27 distinct states. And then in the scanner, they report on how they feel. And you map that to, with much more fine grained measurement tools, what are the patterns of activation in the brain?
And there we see 2,830 distinct emotion specific patterns, right? And it starts to tell us that, yeah, I might differentiate love from admiration, subjectively and conceptually, in how I look at the world, and that registers in distinct patterns in the brain too, which probably should make sense.
Lee
Yeah. That's fascinating.[00:16:00]
You're listening to No Small Endeavor and our conversation with Dacher Keltner.
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Coming up, Dacher and I discuss his most recent book, Awe. We'll talk about what he exactly means by awe, where one might experience it, and why it is more than a mere transitory passing experience or sentimental [00:17:00] emotion.
So now you say, in this most recent book, that you've turned more recently to the study of awe. So give us kind of a big picture of some of the main things that you've learned in the study of awe.
Dacher
Oh, it's been astonishing.
You know, I, as I, you know, did my scientific career, I kept thinking like, God, we haven't studied why people, you know, are moved to tears by music that well, or spirituality, or the extraordinary changes that I've experienced backpacking with my daughter, right, in nature. And all of those experiences felt like awe to me.
10, 15 years ago, 15 years ago, my lab, you know, big lab of 10 grad students and postdocs working away. We got some nice grants and I just said, let's go study awe, you know, whatever way you [00:18:00] can. Out in nature, in the lab, with physiology, you know, with veterans rafting... whatever you, whatever inspires you, go find it. Listening to music...
And, and I think there are a few real highlights.
Lee
Given that we're about to spend so much time talking with Dacher about awe, I thought it important to pause to let Dacher tell us what exactly he means by the emotion of awe.
Dacher
Awe is the feeling we have when we encounter vast, mysterious things, for the most part.
First thing is, we feel awe in response to what I call the eight wonders of life, which is the moral beauty of people, nature, collective moving in unison or effervescence, art, music, spiritual contemplation. And then big ideas, right? Like, God, you know, quantum physics. And then, really interestingly, life and death, you know, the cycle of life.
Lee
These [00:19:00] categories are so central to Dacher's work on awe that they bear repeating.
Moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spirituality and religion, life and death, and the one he did not mention there, epiphany.
Dacher
So we have eight wonders that lead us to feel awe.
We can measure awe. You know, a lot of people didn't think you could measure it. It's, you know, goosebumps and tears and warmth in your chest and, you know, the sense of being humble and small. Well, these are all very-- you know, vocalizations? Around the world. [Vocalized "woaa" sound] you know, so we can measure it. It's not beyond science.
Third thing is what I called everyday awe in the book, Lee.
You know, it really caught me off guard that we would study people every day and see if they'd had an experience of awe, in different parts of the world. And people are feeling awe two to three times a week on average, you know, it's around us.
And then, you know, why I really, why I wrote the book is [00:20:00] um, it's so good for you. You know, it is... these brief doses of awe help your heart, your immune system, you know, they help your stress They help your reasoning, you become a sharper reasoner. They help you with your relationships, experiences of awe.
And so, you know, part of the spirit of the book is like, let's look at this mysterious emotion together, but let's put more of it into our life.
Lee
That's fascinating. Yeah, so I want to dig into a lot of those kind of things. But let's dig in just briefly to the very last one you did.
Expound just a bit more on kind of the health and well being manifestation or aspects.
Dacher
I'll start with two findings, recently, from our lab.
You know, we took veterans out rafting, awesome trip, for a day, half a day. And what we find is a week later, because of awe, through this rafting, they have a 32 percent drop in PTSD, which is a very hard condition.
Just [00:21:00] recently, we published a paper where, you know, medical doctors, nurses, during the peak pandemic, chaos in the hospitals, 30 percent understaffed, a million people dying without their families... you know, I did a lot of work with health care providers and it was, it was like combat. And we just had them find a moment of awe each day. You know, just like pause, open your mind to something big that you're part of, just reflect on it, breathe. And they had reductions in depression and anxiety and loneliness over 30 days, right?
So that tells us, just a minute or two of this is good for us. In the body, we know awe activates the vagus nerve, which is this large bundle of nerves in your body, slows your heart, helps you vocalize, helps you orient to people, helps you connect, right? Awe activates that. Awe reduces inflammation. You know, this work that your immune system does, it heats up your [00:22:00] body to kill pathogens. If you're chronically inflamed, it is so hard on your body, right? And awe cools down the inflammation response at a chronic level. So that just tells us, man, it's good for your body.
And then, you know, I think the big story psychologically is there's-- Jean Twenge and others have made the case that all of this self focus of our era, of ruminating about the self, taking photos of the self, comparing me to other people online, that really plagues our young people today... awe takes us out of the self.
You know, it quiets down the self, even at the neurological level. And it prompts you to think, like, what am I part of that's, that's bigger than me? you know, that spiritual systems have done a good job of getting us to think about, but awe does this as well. Like, wow, I'm moved by this music. Why? Like what themes of life does this speak to me about?
And awe does that work for us, in [00:23:00] the moment.
Lee
So let me ask about this. And you, you talk about these, I think it was eight ways that people experience awe.
I was especially moved by your description of the way in which our observation of moral beauty can move us towards awe. That seeing other people's courage, kindness, strength, or their overcoming can move us towards that.
What are ways that you, you have seen that, either personally, or what are ways that you saw that in your, have seen that in your research?
Dacher
Oh, my goodness.
You know, the finding on moral beauty caught us off guard in the lab, you know?
We studied 26 countries. We asked people to write stories of awe - just their own experience, not a scientist telling them what to say, but their own experience in countries from Mexico to India.
And, you know, I was expecting nature and spirituality. And in came the findings that what we call moral beauty, you know, that other people's-- everyday people, you know, there's... how they give, how they sacrifice, how [00:24:00] they stand up to abuses of power, how they risk their lives courageously, how they overcome obstacles.
I remember this incredible story of a son writing about his dad, and his dad grew up in poverty, parents died young, he married this wonderful woman. She, they had a bunch of kids. She died young. He worked until he was 90, just to get all the kids to a stable life. And the son was at his birthday party for the dad and he just was blown away by his dad's sacrifice.
We know that it's one of the deepest ways in which we can find the meaningful life, is to surround ourselves with other people's moral beauty. To read about it, read about Gandhi, to look for it in the streets and you see how kind young kids are, to think about your mentors in life, you know, or even a spiritual figure.
What that does, is it leads us through this pattern of awe, of like, man, this is what I really care about, then. It moves my body, it moves my mind [00:25:00] to think about ways to emulate the virtuous acts I've seen.
And, you know, once that finding started to come in, I started to think, and I hope our audience is about... where do I find my experiences with moral beauty? And for me, in part, it was this work I did in prisons through restorative justice.
I'd be inside the prison with 180 prisoners, just me and a handful of volunteers. We're there all day. These are guys who've had the hardest lives, you know. Many of them have killed people. And watching them try to seek forgiveness and redemption and better their lives, and the humanity of it all... every time I was in there, I was just filled with tears and goosebumps.
And I was like, why is that? What is this? You know? And it's moral beauty. Just the, the urge for these prisoners to overcome their past and seek forgiveness. [00:26:00] So that's one example.
And suddenly, you know, it's a great exercise to think about where else have I found this? How have I found this in literature?
You know, when I first read The Brothers Karamazov and I encountered Alyosha Karamazov, you know, kind of a Christ-like figure, I was like, this guy is like... it was one of-- my first encounter with a saint in a way. So, you know, it's a great exercise for us all, personally, to think about where do we get moved to tears by other people?
Lee
You're mentioning of the saints... you know, there's that old line, it's at least attributed to St. Francis, but it points to your point here, where he said, you know, "Preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary, use words." And so it's that sort of, you're pointing us to kind of the moral exemplar as kind of perhaps being more significant in moral formation than texts, which of course, those of us in academics, we, we love our texts, and for, and for good reason, we love our texts, right?
But there's this sort of sense [00:27:00] of, I hear you saying maybe that's not the primary way that most people get formed, their moral compass gets formed.
Dacher
It's such a bold hypothesis, Lee, but I, and I think that, you know, I wish we had empirical data on it, but this new movement of moral exemplarism, like you're saying, that the real way in which we define our signature moral concerns and how we discover our signature virtues, maybe through just being with other people, you know. It was interesting to me as I was reflecting, writing this book, like, God, why do I love working with people impacted by the justice system, you know, and, and former prisoners?
And then I was like, oh yeah, I remember my mom coming back when I was a kid. And she had taught English writing in a Folsom prison close by. And she showed me this photo of the faces of the guys she taught. And I was just like... that was as vivid as any, you know, key passage in Lao Tzu or Buddhism.
So I think it's worth thinking about very broadly. Like, maybe that's the [00:28:00] key to kind of guiding us morally, is to be around people of beauty.
Lee
In this, I think it's in this, a similar section where you talk about everyday reverence, and you have this line where you say, "Subtle is everyday reverence."
Let me just read this passage, because I think it's beautiful and very helpful.
"Subtle is everyday reverence. How we shift our speech with compliments, solicitous questions, and indirectness to show respect for others. We momentarily shrink the size of our bodies in a subtle head bow or slouch to the shoulder to convey reverential deference. With a simple warm clasp of another person's arm, we can express gratitude and appreciation, activating oxytocin release in the vagus nerve in the recipient of our touch."
So I love that. So tell us a little bit more about politeness, social kindness, respect, these kind of so called soft skills, and how that works into your research.
Dacher
Thank you, Lee.
Thanks for noticing that. You know, I, I've [00:29:00] devoted a lot of time to thinking about that, and it doesn't, you know, it's just... because it's so subtle and nonverbal and hard to describe, it doesn't have the reach in my field as, you know, practicing gratitude by writing your blessings or so forth, which feels, like, textual and strong.
Yeah, you know... it is a human universal, in language and then how we comport ourselves around other people, by which we show deference and respect and reverence for other people, right? We show it in our tone of voice. We show it in linguistic constructions by which we acknowledge other people's perspectives and the, and the intelligence of their perspectives.
We show it in, what I've studied, grateful patterns of touch. Just the pat on the back, right? Um, we show it in our posture of, you know, all-- it's so interesting, when you look at, you know, images of the Buddha or other saints, you know, or saints, they often have a very modest demeanor, you know, humble [00:30:00] demeanor, which recruits these same processes of like smallness, self effacement, orienting towards other people.
All of that, from the spoken word to the touch, to the bodily expression of reverence, are foundational to trusting relationships, you know? And they're often, um, you know, critiqued. You know, oh you don't want to be modest. You lose if you're modest, self effacement's bad, who would care about humility. But thankfully, it's coming back, I think.
And it has such deep roots, and it's a way that you can always embody these ethical principles, right, of like... I love the idea of respect. Well, what do I do when I go to work? Well, here are a set of things to be thinking about to orient with reverence.
Thanks for calling it out. It took me, I really thought about that for a long time and I'm glad it reached one person.[00:31:00]
Lee
You're listening to No Small Endeavor and our episode with Dacher Keltner.
If you missed a portion of this interview or would like to have access to the complete unabridged version, you can follow our podcast wherever you listen.
We're going to take a short break, but coming right up, more places to find and experience awe, and why we, in our cultural moment, could use more of it in our lives.
We could also talk about-- you alluded to this, I think, briefly, that collective effervescence is another kind of place that people experience awe. So, first define that, and I guess that comes from Durkheim, right?
Dacher
Lee
But define that for folks who are unfamiliar with it, and then what you've learned about that.
Dacher
Yeah, thank you.
It's, it's one of my favorites, you know. Collective effervescence is a... you know, Emile Durkheim is this French sociologist who is studying religion in different parts of the [00:32:00] world. And he really felt that the core was feeling, much like Emerson and William James did, that this was the core.
And in particular, the feeling that arises when you start moving in unison with other people, you start making sounds in unison with other people, you start sharing attention and awareness, you're sort of all looking at the same thing. And then, certain kinds of symbolic thought and ideation emerge in collective effervescence.
But the feeling of it is this electric bubbling feeling of like, wow, we're all together and we're excited and awestruck. And I think everybody's had experiences of that.
And so, what we were lucky to discover in our study of 26 countries, you know, as people wrote these stories of awe, is collective effervescence has some classic forms. You know, rituals and religious practice.
Singing together is-- you know, people started coming to me from choirs, like, oh we just start singing together and we're crying and it feels like a [00:33:00] spiritual moment... you may have had, Lee.
Dance. You know, there's a whole new science of dance of how, you know, just moving your bodies together, suddenly you feel this deeper sense of common humanity.
And then, very interestingly, sports. You know, gathering for sports, cheering teams on, playing them, getting lost in the moment. And when you try in any way to get a group of say, a hundred people to share awareness and get on the same page and feel together, it's hard.
Lee
Dacher
And here's-- you know, sport and singing together and moving together through dance or whatever the case may be, does it really quickly. And it's powerful. You know, it has this wonderful effect on us.
Lee
I think it's wonderful too. And as you were talking, I mean, you know, I'm flashing back because I come from a Christian tradition that traditionally practiced acapella singing.
And so, you've got people practicing four part harmony singing. [00:34:00] And so, I remember as a child, you know, I'm five years old, but being taken up in a moment where you've got 150, 200 people who are pretty decent at doing four part acapella singing. And it's just amazing, you know, and it kind of can catch one up in that.
And then, getting to do our live shows in Nashville, we, we have these incredible Nashville musicians. And to watch the sort of effervescence that happens among them and then people watching them and listening to them... it's just, it's an amazing, it's amazing sort of experience.
Dacher
You know, I was just teaching about this, and, you know, a couple of observations... like, to produce sound when you sing, every human vocal apparatus produces a unique signature of sound. So it's your identity, but then it goes out and merges with everybody else's identities, you know.
It's almost like Hinduism and Atman and Brahman and the merging of my soul with collective soul. And then this, this mom talked about, you know, she's like, I'm embarrassed to say that my daughter had this extra ticket and I got to go see [00:35:00] Taylor Swift.
And I mean, it's one of the great moments of collective effervescence, where 50,000 people, 70,000 people are going, they get to sing a special song with Taylor Swift. They're all together. They're sharing these bands. It's a transformative moment, you know? And, uh, in my view, a good thing to, to have this.
Lee
Yeah, that's the other place I flashback to, was I grew up in Alabama and my father was a graduate-- my grandfather was a graduate of the University of Alabama. So when I was a kid, we would go to the Alabama games. At that time they were still playing in Birmingham.
Dacher
Lee
And you talk about collective effervescence, you know, and especially on a-- when you've got, you know, 80,000 people shouting "roll tide roll" as, during the kickoff, you know, it's amazing.
And then going to Notre Dame as a grad student, and the sort of football experience, again, this collective effervescence is just--
Dacher
Yeah, and we shouldn't, you know, we often sort of think they're lesser forms of, of transcendence, but I think the science of awe tells us, like, those are, you know, those collective effervescent experiences at sports date back to the ball court [00:36:00] games and Mayan traditions, the Olympics.
I mean, this is a deep tendency that's worth bringing into our lives.
Lee
Yeah.
Another place you talk about people experiencing awe is in nature and music. Any quick commentaries on either or both of those?
Dacher
Yeah, you know, and these are the most intuitive in some sense for a lot of Western Europeans, you know? Like, the thing about nature is, you know, people are like, yeah, you know, I, wow, the Grand Canyon or the Rockies, um, the big stuff, but it's also the everyday nature. The gardening, the watching flowers, the looking at clouds, pausing and slowing down.
And, and the, the, I think there are a couple of things that are really remarkable from, from my perspective.
One is the power of nature. You know, Ming Kuo has a new review out - 21 pathways by which nature is good for your nervous system, for your cells, and your brain, and your vagus nerve, and your immune system. So--
Lee
Who is that again?[00:37:00]
Dacher
Ming Kuo. K-U-O. I think 2015.
So the power of nature really needs to be appreciated.
And then the other thing-- and, you know, like Dr. Yuria Celidwen's been writing about this in her thinking about ecological belonging, that we are part of nature. In some sense, Emerson and his writings on, you know, on nature got to this as well, where he was saying, as does Dr. Yuria Celidwen, like, we're a part of nature. Our minds are nature. And Emerson wrote a lot about, like, our best ideas come out of observing and being in the natural world. Ideas like impermanence and cycles, right? And that we're part of things. So, let's just remember how good it is for our minds and bodies.
And I think that, you know, in writing Awe, the big mystery to me, I think, I don't know if we'll ever figure out, is music, you know? And, and I think we may have to leave it to the philosophers in some sense, because music's pretty tough to study, but--
Well, give me an example of, like, a moment of [00:38:00] transcendent awe in music for you.
Lee
Oh, so many.
I'm immediately flashing to a scene in a show we did last November in the Ryman Auditorium here in downtown Nashville, where Brian Sutton, who's maybe one of the most celebrated acoustic guitarists of our generation, and Tammy Rogers, a very well respected fiddle player here in town, where he, he performs on guitar, uh, this fantastic classical piece.
The piece is Schumann's Nachtstücke, which Schumann composed in response to the imminent death of his brother.
And so Brian is playing this song, and the fiddle player's coming in. It's just the two of them on stage. And it was this sort of, you know, everybody's holding their breath with them, and there's something, there's something about... how can grief be communicated through music that [00:39:00] way, but it is. And it's just this incredible, you know, shared moment of beauty and awe and, and grief in that.
And I don't know how, I don't know how that works, but it does. It's just amazing.
Dacher
Thank you. What an incredible example. And that's exactly... to me, the mystery of music and awe and transcendence and the sublime is.
Like, if I get with a big group of people, I see Taylor Swift, I'm rocking in unison, I start getting goosebumps, collective effervescence, sharing it. But the deeper question, in some sense, is how music, through sounds, conveys these existential themes like loss, grief, love, war, triumph, power, right? Which it does.
And Susanne Langer, the great philosopher, wrote about that very convincingly. But [00:40:00] to me, how that happens is almost beyond science and rational description, right? That I, you know, I was grieving the loss of my brother, and I went to interview this cellist, Yumi Kendall, and she was performing a John Adams piece, who's a great American composer, kind of a modern contemporary composer, Scheherazade.2. And I was listening to it and I was just deep in the loss of my younger brother, Rolf, and really not understanding it.
And somehow, toward the end of this symphony or whatever it was called, the violin was sort of this soft sound that was abating, and there were these loud sounds coming out. And I started to understand that, that the softer forms were, were sort of fading into non existence. Like, well, that's kind of the life cycle too, that there's this big process we're part of that quiets us. And I had this new insight into losing my brother.
How that happens, you know... [00:41:00] I mean, it's astonishing that sound waves can yield some of the biggest insights about the meaning of life. It happens all the time.
Your example, it's, it's one of the great mysteries of awe that remains, is how that works.
Lee
Yeah. Thanks for that, Dacher.
You point to the way in which your study of emotion... I hear you saying, you wouldn't want us to reduce this to a study of simply ephemeral passing states, but that this is significant because emotion is and or can be linked up with action and how we are in the world. So talk to us about that.
Dacher
Yeah. You know, John Paul Sartre wrote about, you know, in his little book on emotions, he said they produce these magical [00:42:00] transformations.
And then William James, you know, and more recently Mark Solms. Feeling is consciousness. You know, it's our mind. It's who we think we are. And I think, I think those are right.
And so that tells us, like-- and Aristotle wrote about this, like, we need to cultivate the right feelings, because, and we've done work on this, they really guide how we look at the world in terms of its moral nature and its meaning. And then they animate actions, you know, they point us in directions. If I feel compassion, I am going to tend to need, I will give things away, and well documented.
And so, awe is so... I think it's urgently needed for this moment, you know? It gets us out of the self and it, it makes us see the systems around us that I'm part of, which produces awe, and I, and then I can work on those systems.
Oh my God, you know, look at the political system I'm part of, or, or this,-- you know, in your case, Lee, like this history of music that's a system, and what are you giving to [00:43:00] it, right? Or the ecosystem around it. So it gets us to really notice, like you said earlier, like, this is what my life's about. This is the things that it's part of.
And then it leads to wonderful actions, you know, for the most part, of sharing and cooperation and collaboration. So, pretty good news for our times today.
Lee
Yeah. That reminds me, um, or prompts a question.
I've seen, kind of in doing therapy work or talking to other people who are in therapy work or recovery, that there's this sort of push against those who will say, you ought not feel that way. There's a sort of stigmatizing of feeling a certain way.
And I think that, at one level, that's a helpful pushback, you know, for us not to be so instructive about what other people are feeling. But at the same time, you're suggesting that it's crucial that we do take some responsibility for the kinds of feelings that we cultivate.
Is that a helpful way to say that?
Dacher
[Laughs] You, you're asking such nuanced, complicated questions. You know, [00:44:00] I think it's the, in some sense, the central challenge of this view of, of happiness that we find it in feeling, like gratitude and compassion, joy, love, amusement, and so forth.
The challenge is this, which is these feelings are ancient, almost involuntary reactions. Like, whoa, I felt awe, you know, uh, looking at the, the clouds or the active generosity of these two five-year-olds. But, so, how do I, you know, if it's out of my control, how do I build it into a part of my life? And that's the challenge, you know?
And what I, with respect to awe, what I write about in the book is like, you know, basically like, hey, here's an awe mindset, you know? Pause and think about big things, try to connect to vast things around you, choose a wonder to immerse yourself in for five minutes a day, like music. So, yeah, it's, it's just [laughs] the awe science and certain extensions of it, like conversions in, you know, the study of conversions in religion and, and the spirit medicine psychedelic literature, gives you the feeling like [00:45:00] you just need one and then life works out. And that's not true. You know, you gotta continually be practicing this. And, and the science points the way.
Lee
Any closing encouragement or exposition on, a bit more on cultivating everyday forms of awe for us?
Dacher
Yeah, I'll just say a couple things.
First of all, what I love about awe is this kind of conversationally, you know, it's just so rich to, you know, people of different spiritual orientations, and the like, really finding common language for what's beyond human understanding and divine mystery in some sense.
I wrote this book when I was grieving the loss of my younger brother, which was a devastating experience. I was knocked off the rails. And, and as I write in the book, I was like, oh God, I do this science of awe, I'm gonna go find it, you know? And it changed my life.
And finding it is, you know, just take a moment every day, slow it down, put away your usual labels and [00:46:00] expectations, and, and then observe, and, and breathe, and be open to big, vast things, you know? And you can do that... you know, I'm looking at a cactus right now and feeling it. You can look at the sky, listen to music, look at somebody's eyes, you know, watch children play. Whatever it is. Just the awe mindset's about slowing down, quieting the voice of the self, and opening up to think about those systems you're part of, or how you would define it.
Lee
Dacher
And then the second thing is, you know, those eight wonders are... those are great ways we can find it. Music, nature, spiritual practice, prayer, you know, big ideas, looking at visual things, and just make it part of your day for a few minutes. And it changed my life. So, I hope our listeners will take a look at it and think about moments of awe for their lives.
Lee
I've been talking to Dacher Keltner, professor at UC Berkeley, author most recently of the book, Awe, a national [00:47:00] bestseller.
Dacher, thanks so much for your time. It's been rich and, uh, really appreciate your generosity and all that you've shared with us. Thanks so much.
Dacher
Thank you, Lee. It's been a, a wonderful conversation.
Lee
You've been listening to No Small Endeavor and our interview with Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, and author of the bestselling book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated, a private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion.
And the support of the John Templeton Foundation, whose vision is to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing.[00:48:00]
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Sophie Byard, Tom Anderson, Kate Hays, Mary Eveleen Brown, Cariad Harmon, Jason Sheesley, Ellis Osburn, and Tim Lauer. And special thanks to Brian Sutton and Tammy Rogers, featured in that gorgeous performance of Schumann's Nachtstücke.
And you'll forgive me, I trust. I do know my German's terrible.
Thanks for listening, and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life, together. No Small Endeavor is a production of PRX, Tokens Media, LLC, and Great Feeling Studios.