Tami Simon: Welcome to Insights at the Edge produced by Sounds True. My name’s Tami Simon, I’m the founder of Sounds True. I’d love to take a moment to introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation. The goal of the Sounds True Foundation is to provide access and eliminate financial barriers to transformational education and resources such as teachings and trainings on mindfulness, emotional awareness and self-compassion. If you’d like to learn more and join with us in our efforts, please visit SoundsTrueFoundation.org.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Dacher Keltner. Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and the founding director of the university’s Greater Good Science Center, a research center committed to the scientific understanding of positive emotions.
He’s the author of Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life and also the book The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence as well as a new book coming out in January of 2023 on Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.
With Sounds True, Dacher Keltner has created a new online training partnering with his colleague at The Greater Good Science Center, Dr. Eve Ekman. The training is called The Greater Good Training for Health Professionals: Science Based Skills for Emotional Resilience and Wellbeing. It’s a program that’s designed to help health professionals who are under so much stress at this time avail themselves to science-based research that enables rejuvenation and renewal. You can learn more at SoundsTrue.com.
Now, here’s my conversation with someone who really inspires me, Dr. Keltner.
To begin, Dacher, tell me a little bit about you and how you came to be a psychology professor and the focus that you’ve had on emotion. Why that focus for you?
Dacher Keltner: Wow.
TS: Just a little bit.
DK: Yes. Well, thank you, Tami. It’s nice to be in conversation with you again. I was lucky to be raised by an artist. My mom was a professor at Cal State Sacramento and taught women’s literature and poetry—Virginia Wolf. From a very early time in my life, my parents were getting me to think about the arts and the humanities and psychology. They gave me books by Alan Watts and Carl Gustav Jung and Carlos Castaneda when I was in high school. So, I was long interested in passion from my parents, my mom’s teachings and romanticism and then painting. My dad loved Goya. So, I just loved emotion. Thought it was, like a lot of people, it’s the very essence of the soul and consciousness.
I was good at science and math and headed toward more quantitative, statistically oriented psychological science for graduate work. At the time—and I’ll just close out here—the field (this is the mid-80s) was really in what’s called the cognitive science revolution: the mind is a computer, the process is information, there are algorithms. That’s how we make sense of the world. I really felt that emotion was missing in our conceptualization of the mind and the body.
There were two critical events that happened to me. The first is my grad advisor, Phoebe Ellsworth—who’s a brilliant scientist. I did a project showing that with little brief changes in emotion, if you feel sad, for example, you just look at the world differently. It’s like this lens upon reality. And then the second big transformative experience, thanks to Phoebe, was she enabled me to get a postdoc after my PhD at Stanford with Paul Ekman. I learned from Ekman the brilliance of Darwin and just the incredible wonders of how we express emotion in the body and in the face and in the voice. That defined my career for the next 33 years.
TS: Dacher, in your book Born to be Good, you have this sentence at the beginning of the book: “I’ve been led to the idea that emotion is the source of the meaningful life.” I thought, “I have to talk to Dacher about that, because I think a lot of people think, ‘Actually emotion is the source of my problems and happiness comes and goes. But, no, the source of a meaningful life is something else. It can’t be emotion.’”
DK: Yes. Thank you for asking that question. You know, really, there are a couple of observations there. Why would I write in Born to Be Good that emotion is the source of the meaningful life? The first is the emotions that I started to study. The field had locked in the six emotions: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, and happiness. That was it. People weren’t thinking about compassion or gratitude or embarrassment or ecstasy or envy or what you and I have talked about before: awe. Darwin and Ekman laid out an approach to those emotions.
Early in my career, 25 years ago, I started to study those emotions: amusement, laughter, mirth, joy, awe. That was the first thing, is like, once you think about what compassion gives us in terms of ethical understandings and a sense of meaning in the world, as Karen Armstrong, a religious historian, has argued, compassion points us in the direction of caring for others.
Awe, which I’ve been studying for 10 years, 15 years, people’s experiences of awe in music or nature or spirituality or contemplation, it points into this is what you care about. Those emotions just empirically started to reveal evidence for that claim, that emotions are the source of what we find meaningful or a higher purpose, if you will.
And then alongside that, Tami, the field really started to change in the emotion revolution. There were people like Jonathan Haidt who argued that our sense of morality, freedom, justice, caring, equality, those are ancient emotional tendencies that you see in non-human primates.
My work on these emotions, which are pro-social, changes in the field. People like Jonathan Haidt saying our sense of meaning and purpose and right and wrong comes out of the gut and our feeling. And then neuroscience. There’s new thinking by Solms and colleagues that our sense of self and meaning really is not in the cortex where we think about things, it’s really in the subcortex down by the brain stem, in the periaqueductal gray, where that attaches the sense of meaning to what we see in the world, and it’s rooted in feeling. So, I think it stood the test of time and even expanded that thesis.
TS: Dacher, maybe you could address this personally as well, because you’re such a generative person. You’ve created so much good work in the world. I wonder when you feel into your own sense of having a meaningful life, what emotions are fueling that for you?
DK: Yes, thank you. Forgive me for always launching into science.
TS: No, I like science too, but—
DK: Yes, I know.
TS: —I’m very experiential inside-out as well, so I’d like to bring them both together here.
DK: Yes, thank goodness. I think that in some sense that’s the question we have to be asking today as we try to come out of the pandemic and January 6th and the like. I certainly see it in my Berkeley undergrads. We are now in this transformative period. What do we care about? What is meaningful to us? What gives us the chills?
For me personally, it definitely was this sense that I just return to since being a kid, thanks to my parents who were alternative and artists and social activists in some sense—I really care about people who are left behind in society. So, I would say, the most meaningful experience I’ve had in the last ten years is volunteering in San Quentin and writing a brief against solitary confinement; it came out of my academic interests. But then, when I was in there with the people and I realized our social systems and mass incarceration are really perverse and brutal, that gave me this meaning that anytime I think about it, it makes me want to do work on that.
It’s interesting, Tami, my science gives me meaning. I’ve spent 30 years studying the face and the voice and human touch. It suddenly opened my eyes to what Soren Kierkegaard called the significance of insignificant things in our social lives. That is, we move through our day, we have these conversations, we see strangers in the street, and we embrace a friend. Just studying human emotion, I’m like, “God, humans are doing such good work.” So, that’s been meaningful.
Raising kids changed my life, and it continues to do so. At UC Berkeley we have a lot of poor students, a lot of students coming from traumatic backgrounds, lots of Mexican American students, Latino-Latina. To watch them go on to great lives, great careers, I tear up when I think about it. There’s a lot, personally.
TS: What I notice is that your work but also who you are and what you embody inspires me and I think it inspires others to live a more meaningful life. I just want to say that, Dacher, because I really found that to be true as I was engaging in your body of work.
I wanted to ask you this question about the meaningful science that you’ve done. It’s another thing you write about in Born to be Good about, perhaps, survival of the kindest is truer than survival of the fittest, and that perhaps this Darwinian idea of survival of the fittest is actually outdated. I thought, is this actually now scientifically accepted?
DK: I used that phrase in Born to be Good, “survival of the kindest.” It was one of the most striking discoveries in writing that book. I reread everything that Darwin had written about expression and then Descent of Man. For personal reasons, he watched his daughter. He loved his kids. He played with them and cared for them a lot. One of his daughters died really young, I think at age ten or 12, Annie, and it devastated him, like the death of a child does.
As Adam Gopnik writes, that changed Darwin’s thinking. He observed, just like you had me observe, “How do I feel about this?” He just felt profound compassion. He’s like, “Wow, this urge to care is deep, it’s mammalian.” He wrote that sympathy is our strongest instinct. Those communities with the most sympathetic members will flourish and raise the greatest number of offsprings. They win in the game of evolution.
To your most focused question, that thesis, we have moved from 30 years ago thinking humans were selfish and greedy and want to compete and gain over others to different traditions showing if I’m given resources around the world, I share 40 percent with a stranger. We share. If I make that decision quickly, I share more. It’s intuitive to share.
Compassion is rooted in ancient parts of the nervous system, like the vagus nerve, which I studied. It’s mammalian. Finally, people who share and care and feel compassion, they do a little bit better in life, they live longer. It’s good for their bodies to provide care.
There’s a lot of evidence for the thesis, even more so than when I wrote Born to be Good, for sympathy being a very strong instinct in the human repertoire of tendencies.
TS: Dacher, how do you make sense—and I’m sure you’ve been asked this many times—by the very obvious examples of people who are jerks and seem to have lots of power and seem to be doing brilliantly in terms of wealth, influence, et cetera?
DK: First one is what scientists always talk about, which is there are many things that are part of our human nature. If you look at the evolutionary approach to the human psyche, we’re both caring and brutal. We are genocidal and we’ll sacrifice ourselves. So, we’re many things—as Walt Whitman said.
But the more interesting question that you’re posing, Tami, is to reflect on our society today. Why do we have so much profound economic inequality in the United States? Why are there 600,000 unhoused people on the streets?
When I wrote my second book, The Power Paradox, one of the things that I thought about was the changing nature of power. In hunter-gatherer societies, there is more sharing and caring because of the nature of their social systems and smaller groups, et cetera. With the emergence of agriculture and stored resources and certain kinds of religion, we moved to much more hierarchical cultures that allowed jerks to prevail. They didn’t have accountability, et cetera. I think we’re trying to come out of that with women’s rights and sexual rights and civil rights, et cetera. So, you got to look into the social systems that allow jerks to prosper. There are many, which is outrageous. Politics being one.
TS: In terms of somebody taking this into their own life and saying, “I want to believe that the kind person finishes well, I really want to believe that, and I want to live that way, but I have mixed evidence around me. How can you give me confidence that that’s where I’m going to invest my energy?”
DK: Well, I think it’s good to put aside our cultural conceptions and look at empirical evidence. What we do know pretty robustly is kindness is good for your life expectancy. That matters for a lot of people, obviously. Especially Americans who love health outcomes. If I practice kindness, I handle my inflammation profiles better, my vagal tone is stronger, or my reactions to threats don’t activate the amygdala as much, there are a few studies showing benefits to life expectancy. So, that’s one.
The second is, in most work contexts, if you practice kindness, you will do better. You’re going to get screwed over, and that’s the thing you got to really watch out for. There are Machiavellians everywhere. They pick up on the kind person and will try to exploit them personally or professionally, so you got to figure out a strategy for that.
I think the third thing is to, and I’ll give an interesting personal example, is to speak truth to power. I worked with women leaders in Kaiser Permanente 15 years ago. We are on a weekend retreat. These are women who have such complicated jobs, way bigger budgets than I would ever possibly get near to, people’s lives on the line. They really adopted this rule, a commitment to kinder culture in medicine—can’t shout at people, can’t swear at people, treat people with respect. That’s a form of speaking truth to older forms of power. And then you have to see how it stacks up and works for you, like everything we do.
Academia is a very adversarial peer review-based process. I take a lot of beating in the work I do. It gives me a lot of doubt, Tami. Like, “Wow, I tried to be kind and not go out and undermine other people’s work,” but that happens to me. How do I keep close to this philosophy of kindness? It’s a continuing work in progress.
TS: It does seem to me too that, just in terms of our inner experience of fulfillment in our lives, it has its own reward regardless of how it positions us in society.
DK: Yes, when I teach happiness to Berkeley undergrads and larger audiences, it’s replicated in 46 countries. Your happiness has this curve where it starts high and toward the middle of life it drops because you’re just doing all the work we have to do, and then it rises until you’re about 75. When you look at people who are 65 or 70, one of the things they say is, to use your word, it’s about meaning, what life is. It’s about loving. It’s about service. They are speaking about compassion. You’re right—why not orient towards that earlier?
Karen Armstrong, the great religious historian, in The Great Transformation, which is an amazing book, says that all cultures that she studied, Judeo Christian cultures in particular, 2500 years ago, ethically and spiritually committed to kindness as the core principle. That’s where you start.
I think, to your point, personally and subjectively, when I really feel I’m living life right is when I’m being kinder. I’m like, “Hey, give a little money to the unhoused person,” or “That colleague’s frustrating me. Be patient.”
Just one final example I gave to my undergrads. I do these saunas at this climbing gym, and there’s this elderly gentleman; he’s Russian and he learned the ethics of saunas in Siberia. He always lectures us when we’re in there taking our saunas. He’s, “Here’s how you pour the water. Are you using cold water? That’s inappropriate.” I’m like, “Yes, I’m just doing my best.” He kind of frustrates me.
I went in one time, and I was like, “Man, I need this sauna.” I’m sitting there, and it’s just me and this guy. “I’m going to do a little lovingkindness exercise.” I did a little breathing and lovingkindness, which you promote at Sounds True like nobody else. Suddenly I was open to this guy. I found out this fascinating stuff about his history in Siberia. I learned about his son. So, it was my own lesson of stay close to it even in tough circumstances.
TS: Dacher, one of the things I want to talk to you about is your work with The Greater Good Science Center and the focus on health professionals. To begin, why did The Greater Good Science Center decide “We want to take all of this research we’ve done on what will help build a meaningful life, what will help bring happiness and bring this to health professionals?”
DK: Thank you. You know, 20 years ago, 21 years ago, we started The Greater Good Science Center, thanks to a gift from Tom and Ruth Ann Hornaday who have done a lot of work in cancer, and that’s probably because their daughter died of cancer at 26, I think. So, we were always thinking about physical health.
As you know, Tami, we started to promote this new science of compassion and gratitude and awe, cooperation, forgiveness, et cetera. I was really struck by who just had a hunger for this, and one was schoolteachers. They were looking at their kids, they were teaching, and they were like, “These kids are way too stressed out, too much pressure. How do we build things in?” And so, we’ve taken 20 years to build an education program.
Then the other group that immediately reached out with hunger and interest was healthcare. To this day probably most of my partnering and speaking is to healthcare groups, the Permanente Medical Group, Kaiser Permanente Summit here out in California and elsewhere. The reason is, one, they see the mind-body dynamics in action in healthcare. You get a guy coming into an emergency room who’s having a panic attack, who’s got all these health symptoms and is inflamed physically. How do we work with this person? Right?
They also, healthcare providers, feel it personally. They are fried. They are overworked, many are underpaid—12-hour days. More dynamic, hard work, seeing suffering than you could imagine. I did a lot of work with healthcare providers during COVID. That was horrifying. The stories I heard were like combat. People dying in plastic bags with nobody around.
We at The Greater Good Science Center felt like here’s a group of people [that we can help]. What I love about healthcare providers is they love science, they love proof. If it works, let’s do it. If it works for me to show a little gratitude to my patient and that makes the interaction stronger, I’ll do that. We have built many different partnerships with healthcare providers grounded in this science and actionable practice that you’ve promoted at Sounds True.
Frankly, you asked me what gives me meaning, Tami. The last two years during COVID, I’ve spent 100 hours working with healthcare providers. Just two-hour, three-hour meetings of how we handle this trauma personally and with our patients. What do we build into the fabric of the provision of healthcare? Compassion, a little awe break, a breathing exercise. It’s been the most meaningful work I’ve done in a decade, frankly. Just to be part of responding to the pandemic. So, a lot of good reasons why we did the work.
TS: Let me ask you a question about the need, Dacher, which is when you use words like “a combat zone” and you use words like “fried.” You’re bringing in techniques we can use like practicing gratitude. I notice there’s a part of me that’s like, “Wow, I’m enraged. I’m enraged to be in this situation as somebody who has a profession to be a healer.”
How do you break through that to even begin to start practicing some of these pro-social emotions?
DK: I’ve given talks to healthcare providers about The Greater Good Science Center and what we do, grounded in neuroscience, et cetera, for 20 years. It took a breakthrough. But the first thing is, the data are clear that one of the most stressed out, most burned-out sectors of work is healthcare.
If you hang around a hospital—and, regrettably, my brother, as you know, Tami, passed away from colon cancer, and it was years of me being in the healthcare—it is just a hard environment. People know that who are in the healthcare field. They are working really hard; the paperwork is hard; they’re watching people die—a million people in the US from COVID. And so, part of the breakthrough is to ground it in their experience and to surface that.
One of the things I do with healthcare providers that I work with is, let’s all name the stress that’s happening today in your work. Be it on Zoom, in chat, or conversation personally, stuff surfaces. Worrying about vaccinations in a patient who’s too poor to get the right medicine, et cetera. There’s a lot there. And so, to ground it in healthcare provider’s own experience.
The second thing I think that really was a breakthrough was that healthcare providers are trained in neurophysiology and anatomy. When you tell them about inflammation being reduced by awe or compassion, that it promotes the vagus nerve, activates a stronger vagal tone, this bundle of nerves in your body, or lovingkindness reduces the amygdala reactivity—some audiences I speak to don’t care about that. People in healthcare care a lot about that.
The third is actionable knowledge, which is… I remember I was working with residents at Kaiser Permanente, and I had this young resident. Man, residents work hard. They work harder than I’ve ever worked in my life. They’re working 100 hours a week. Tami, this young resident, young guy said to me, “You know, what I love about this…” We did some breathing and some kindness stuff. He’s like, “What I love about this is that if I’m on an elevator and I can get to my next patient, or I’m thinking about this elderly woman I’m talking to about her cancer, I just need 30 seconds of setting a good intention and finding some peace.”
I think we’ve done that at The Greater Good Science Centers, is work on being really practical to actionable knowledge. I think that’s an audience who really, in healthcare, they receive it well.
TS: Let’s hear more about that. You mentioned how compassion will increase vagal tone. I know, as you mentioned, that studying the vagus nerve is something that’s been central in your work and that you’ve even studied people who you call vagal superstars. I wanted to know what makes someone a vagal superstar and how does practicing compassion help attune my vagus nerve and make it work well. Help me understand all this.
DK: I appreciate how deeply you’re reading all the obscure scholarship we’ve done, Tami. So, thank you. As we started, sympathy is our strongest instinct but so too is gratitude and awe and reverence and empathy, et cetera. There is a lot there that Darwin wrote about, and David Hume, the Scottish philosopher and others as well.
The field and the world started to get convinced by things like the oxytocin, the neuropeptide that’s produced in your hypothalamus that makes you cooperate with other people. “Whoa, there’s a chemical that helps us with love and cooperation.”
Certain regions of the brain, they got a lot of attention. Then the vagus nerve. The autonomic nervous system is a couple dozen bundles of neurons that come out of your spinal cord that go to different regions of your body, that project into your brain. One of them, it’s a cranial nerve that comes out of the top of your spinal cord. It’s a bundle of nerves called the vagus nerve. It’s the largest bundle of nerves in the mammalian nervous system.
Steve Porges first made this argument that our audience probably has heard of: this is a really interesting bundle of nerves anatomically because it activates, it intersects with vocal muscles, facial muscles; it deepens your breathing; slows your heart rate; communicates with digestive organs and projects into your gut and takes in information from the flora and fauna in your gut, the microbiome. Anatomically, Porges said this looks like it helps people care for others. The vagus nerve supports shifts in the body that help us care.
Our lab has found that if I feel compassion in the moment, elevated vagus nerve activation. If I feel awe, being connected to meaningful things in life, vagus nerve activation. Other laboratories, if I have high vagal tone, I handle stress better, trauma better, I get along better with other people around me. It feels like it’s about cooperation, connection, caring and openness very broadly.
The vagal superstars idea was there’s individual variation in everything. Every human trait, as Darwin wrote about, is subject to variation, lots of variation. We started to wonder about these people who have extreme levels of vagal tone, vagal superstars. They’re very interesting. They share more, they respond to other people suffering more intensively.
Regrettably, when it gets too extreme, they become too connected to other people. They don’t protect themselves. They will connect to dangerous people and strangers that they shouldn’t connect to. But on balance, you want to cultivate vagal tone through compassion and breathing and yoga, et cetera, nature, but not get too extreme.
TS: “High vagal tone,” that’s the right way to language that? What does that mean exactly?
DK: We measure the vagus nerve by looking at the covariation, your heart rate rhythm and then your slower rhythm of your respiratory system, your breathing, inhalation exhalation. You look at those two rhythms mathematically and look at their linkage as a way to make a measure of vagal tone. The stronger the linkage, in particular as we exhale, how that’s linked to shifts in heart rate, is indicative of more vagus nerve activation.
On balance, the greater the linkage of respiration and cardiovascular cycling indexes greater vagal tone, and that predicts a lot of these benefits we’ve talked about of just handling stress better, feeling more optimistic, feeling like you’re more connected to people around you, feeling happier, having a better health profile all replicated in studies. So, it’s good news. It’s measured by looking at the covariation of the heart and breathing.
TS: Right. You said an interesting thing in everyday language—yes, it’s wonderful to care but not over care. That’s my language, “over care.” How does that apply to the health professional? When did they find themselves “over caring,” it’s their job to care?
DK: Yes, that’s one of the… You just gave me tingles thinking about this. We talk about compassion, burnout in the healthcare industry, and I really experienced this personally. My brother—you and I’ve talked about this, Tami—I was as close to him as any human being, just given the nature of our childhood; he was one year younger than me. He got colon cancer and it was two years of just horror. As any healthcare provider out there will know, man, if colon cancer goes wrong, it’s a mess. You lose a ton of weight. You can’t eat. It’s really painful. It’s in the abdomen. It’s a mess, as is a lot of end-of-life stuff.
I had that experience too where here was this guy, he and I had done everything together, from basketball to traveling to Mexico. Just the closest of brothers. Watching him really succumb, I was fried because of too much compassion. Every instant of the day, I was like, “How can I help?” Watching his body—he was 205 pounds. At one point I went up to this little hospital he was in. He was in the emergency room. He was 147 pounds. It was so much for me to handle.
Then I read Roshi Joan Halifax’s Being with Dying—and I teach this to healthcare providers, which is, this is part of life, watching others suffer. Make sure you name their suffering as their suffering. It’s not your suffering. Take a deep breath and recognize you are different. Remember that those people want you to be happy. They’re dying, or they have colon cancer, or they’re suffering physically, but they want you to be strong.
In fact, in one of my last moments with my brother, he said, “You know, Dacher, you will be happy.” He knew this was overwhelming me through too much compassion. When he said that, it reminded me, like Roshi Joan Halifax, what they want from you is to be giving and to be strong.
And so, I think there are these principles for healthcare providers about watch out for too much pure empathic distress, taking in other people’s suffering. Remember why you’re here. Name it, separate it, and find agency in that awareness. I felt that it transformed me to read Roshi Joan’s writings on that, who works with healthcare providers through her hospice work, apply it to my own profound experience of compassion, watching someone die, and then teach it and ground it in neuroscience.
TS: It’s very profound to hear you say that. I think this notion of caring deeply but not over caring, just to use that language, applies in a lot of different situations. I mean, someone offered that to me in my business leadership and said, “One of your problems, Tami, in interacting with your staff is that you over care. Let people take responsibility. That’s their stuff. It’s not your stuff. You’ve got your stuff. Work on that. Let them deal with theirs.”
I started having to see where the boundary is, which does bring up this question. It seems that a lot of people who are finding themselves burned out are asking, “Do I have the right boundaries?” What’s your thought about that?
DK: It’s the challenge of our times. In this work with the Permanente Medical Group in Kaiser Permanente during the pandemic, one of the exercises that we all did, and this is with thousands of healthcare providers, is “What’s the stress right now?” “Boundaries” was in the top two. Outside of the vaccination complexities and watching people die, boundaries, work-life balance. I think that the new technologies have just dissolved our boundaries, “Oh, I can work on Sunday when I’m in the park and with my kids.” That’s probably not good, as people are doing.
I think your example illustrates exactly the germinal nugget of wisdom we need, which is people in positions of power or leadership are providing care. Healthcare providers have enormous power. They may not feel like it, but they shape the lives of many human beings. It’s to remember what the other person’s set of concerns is, what are mine and how can I care for those concerns, and to start to be mindful of those boundaries.
I think that that points us in a good direction, and it becomes this principle that we have to start thinking about collectively about this new digital workspace that we’ve entered into as an experiment. We didn’t intentionally sign up for this, the new digital platforms. They have been inserted into our workplace. We didn’t decide to change our work with the pandemic, but we need to be thinking about boundaries. That’s going to be an interesting frontier for innovation.
TS: You know, Dacher, sometimes when people talk about emotional resilience for health professionals, there’s this sense of the responsibilities on the individual. They’re going to practice gratitude, awe, forgiveness, self-care; but it’s the system that’s broken, and we need to change the system.
When you think about that, Dacher, and if you think, “Well, if I could enact change in the healthcare system,” what would be the biggest places you would go to get the most leverage?
DK: So much to do. I’ve done a lot of research in my work on power and hierarchies on inequality. We got to just take a very cold-eyed look at economic inequality within healthcare. Are we paying our physician assistants enough, and nurses, et cetera? Period. Because we know economic inequality degrades the trusting kind fabric of social systems. And so, that’s number one. That’s a structural issue. I think we have to think hard about the hours people work.
I am really struck in being parts of these conversations with think tanks and the like, of thinking about how we extend the principles of The Greater Good Science Center in a more community-based health. Community-based health is huge. Schools of public health, like at Berkeley—how do I take this knowledge and put it into a neighborhood so that the individual having the panic attack isn’t rushed to the emergency room. That’s a really costly event that involves a lot of people when it could be community based.
When I started to talk to Kaiser Permanente a lot about The Greater Good Science Center offerings that you’re now extending to a broad audience—thank you, Tami—I heard the word “frequent flyer,” which is the individual who’s got all the health problems: inflammation, diabetes, drug issues. 600,000 unhoused people in the US, somewhere around that, they come to the hospital a lot, frequent flyers, because they’re using a lot of our services.
We used to have million beds in the United States for people’s psychiatric issues. Now we have 300,000. And so, we’ve moved those issues into emergency rooms and the police officers. That’s a structural issue we have to fix. We should have places where peoples’ mental suffering is dealt with and their housing. So, I look to those things.
TS: I know, Dacher, your next book is going to be on awe. What brought you to focus on awe?
DK: Thank you, Tami. Awe is the feeling of encountering vast mysteries that you don’t understand. I had a lot of complexity in my childhood. I grew up in a, for much of my life, very poor rural area, and it was hard. Kids didn’t go to college, et cetera. But I was raised to experience awe. My parents, backpacking and studying poetry, going to museums and festivals as a kid. I grew up in Laurel Canyon till I was ten. Wild place. It was like, “Wow, this is this amazing experience,” and it has changed my life, Tami.
Speaking of kindness, in 2001 I was lucky enough to be in the presence of his holiness, the Dalai Lama up in Canada. I was getting to be in conversation with him in front of 2000 people. I was like here’s the Western view of kindness, and we struggle with it—“Is altruism real?” He’s like, “Kindness and compassion is the fundamental truth.” I just had this awe moment—like wow, here’s this great tradition revealing what Darwin had said. So, it has changed my life.
I think anyone who’s listening out there would start to, as you reflect on awe—when I think about something mysterious I don’t understand and it makes me get tears and I get the chills, I come out of that, and I’m like, I now know what my life should be about in a broad sense. It should be about helping people care, for me, or providing a center, like The Greater Good Science Center that empowers care.
I was raised to study awe, and then I got really lucky because in the scientific literature, no one had studied awe. Philosophers were interested in it, the sublime. People thought you can’t study it. In fact, you can study it pretty easily, and it has all these amazing qualities to it.
TS: How do you study awe? How did you study it? What does science tell us about awe? We all have our own inner experiences, we want more of it, we can talk about ways to even evoke it, but what does the science tell us?
DK: We study awe, we’ve gathered narratives of awe from around the world, we have studied people at Yosemite. If you bring people into the lab and they play a really meaningful piece of music for them, they might tear up. Or you show them astounding video imagery. We’ve studied people looking out at big views. Now, people are studying people at festivals and music and dance. There’s a really rich science of awe. Very innovative.
I distill it to a few things. It’s little moments of awe, five minutes. It’s hard to find something that is as good for your body as that. Going out and looking for awe when you walk, or doing some gardening, or listening to some African music like Sona Jobarteh who gives me awe, it lowers inflammation, elevates vagal tone, reduces stress reactivity in your amygdala. It’s incredible how powerful awe is for your body. As Emerson said, it repairs.
Awe makes you serve more. It makes you like, “OK, I feel inspired. What is the thing I want to create that’s broader than me?” Maybe it’s a group that really thinks about innovation in this part of healthcare I’m working in, or maybe it’s this volunteer group, et cetera.
The third thing that’s really interesting is awe really gives muscle to your thinking. We have studies showing awe makes us more rigorous and more holistic in our thought, deeper theoretically, more scientific in terms of thinking about proof. So, good health, finding what things you can do to bring you a sense of meaning, which you asked me about earlier, and then it just is good for your thinking.
TS: How is it good for your thinking? What’s the connection there?
DK: Well, I think what it does is… Michael Pollan wrote about this in his book How to Change Your Mind, which is psychedelics—which, by the way, 70 percent of that story I think is about awe. He made this argument that psychedelics—and we have the data on awe—reduces this nagging, neurotic voice in your mind, which is, “Are you staying focused on your task? Are you abiding by social conventions?” It opens up your mind to other processes like systems thinking, which cognitive scientists are interested in.
When Darwin felt awe and suddenly discovered all the ecosystems that are collaborating in evolution, that was what awe does. It gives you this big picture, it makes you open up, it makes you creative, it makes you think outside of the box, everything we need in doing good work.
TS: OK, Dacher, I’m going to try something on you here. There’s no science behind this, all right? This is coming from my inner laboratory, and it has to do with being. My experience is that, when I’m being, there’s a kind of low-level awe, sometimes a high-level awe, but it’s just being. That, somehow, being feels more meaningful to me than any of all the purposeful doings that I do out there don’t really fill me up in the same way as being. I’m wondering how you see that from your perspective.
DK: I love conversations like this because I talk to wise people and they point to an idea that, I’m like, “We should study that.” That’s a spectacular question. I agree, we need to be purposeful, we need to be doing things. I think our culture is too purposeful today. Americans work harder today than they did 30, 40 years ago. That’s a fact, and it’s too much. Healthcare providers are probably working too hard, and we’ve got to figure out how to do that.
You said something that was really interesting, which is being, awareness, consciousness has this quality of awe and wonder to it, wonder being different from awe. Wonder is “I want to imagine how to understand what I’m contemplating right now.”
Experientially, Tami, when I have had those moments of real being, like meditating or yoga or playing basketball, I’m like, “This is it. This is my being.” It has had that layer of awe and wonder to it.
Rebecca Solnit, the brilliant writer who I revere, has this amazing book on walking. In some ways, walking is this deep form of being. She talks about walking has this consciousness where she very much, like you described, like, “God, I just am wondering about this.”
I think you’ve just proposed a Tami hypothesis about consciousness which is fundamentally consciousness is about wonder, openness. The other cognitive processes were purposeful or confused don’t have this quality of awe and wonder. So, I agree experientially. Consciousness and being are very hot right now.
TS: Oh, that’s good. That’s good. I’m really happy to know that being is hot. All right.
DK: Well, I think your comment is a rightful critique, like maybe this whole purpose-driven life… Of course, we need purpose. Yes, when societies deprive people of purpose, that’s terrible. But when I look at my 20-year-olds that I teach today, they’re too purposeful. They need more being. They need to sit for ten minutes, like, “What is this? What is the world? What am I?”
I think you’ve just offered a novel hypothesis on being, which is its wonder. I’ll go get the data for you. That’s my response.
TS: Whoo! All right. Now, in reading about some of your studies with awe, you talk about the power that can come from being with a tree even for just a minute. I wanted our listeners to hear about this because this is, to me, one of the great, easily available, awe-inducing experiences we can avail ourselves too.
DK: Yes. One of the amazing things, one of the big findings in our work on awe—and this is Yang Bai—people feel it about two to three times a week. It’s around us. You don’t need to hop on a plane and go to a resort near Fiji or whatever. It’s around us, especially in nature and, I would also argue, other people. Once you open yourself up to awe and you walk around, you’re like, there’s a lot of amazing stuff that people are doing regularly—and there is a lot of problematic stuff too.
We started getting interested in this. Then Paul Piff, who’s at UC Irvine, who’s in my lab and also doing work on this—he’s so creative. We had these eucalyptus trees on the Berkeley campus that are some of the tallest blue gum eucalyptus trees in North America and there’s this stand to them. When you go in them, it’s like being in a temple, and a lot of temples or churches were built to mimic the patterns of forests. You’re like, “Man, this is awesome.” Light, smell, eucalyptus bark, et cetera.
So, Paul took undergrads there. For one minute they stood looking up at these trees or he just turned their bodies and they looked up at this concrete building. That little one minute of being near trees and contemplating trees, they felt less entitled, they felt less narcissistic, they were more helpful to a stranger who dropped some pens as part of the experiment. It brought out their better angels of their nature.
People love trees. Trees are remarkable. Suzanne Simard—there’s this whole new tree science of how they collaborate and signal to each other, communicate with their roots, and fungal networks, and how beautiful they are and how metaphorical they are. You just get this sense like I’m around something deep here.
One of Darwin’s two central images for his thinking was the tree of life, that trees have this metaphorical wisdom to them. That inspired a bunch of our research. Just get near nature, go rafting. We did that with veterans and poor teenagers. Take in a view for a moment, look at the sky, watch clouds. All little moments of awe.
TS: Dacher, as we’re coming to a conclusion, as I mentioned at the very beginning, The Greater Good Science Center and Sounds True have collaborated to release an online training. It’s called The Greater Good Training for Health Professionals: Science-Based Skills for Emotional Resilience and Wellbeing. To conclude, what do you hope people will get, the people who engage in this online learning experience, what do you hope they’ll get from it?
DK: You know, Tami, I was with healthcare providers during COVID, as we’ve talked about, for 100 hours. It was some of my most concentrated work, just having the kind of conversations we’re having right now of how we find this.
Coming out of the science, first of all, I will say, I express my reverence for the work they do. I’m humbled by what they face, the challenges, the suffering, the bureaucratic and structural difficulties. I’m humbled by their work. Out of that, Ekman and I, and then guided by Jason Marsh and our team at The Greater Good Science Center, we’re like, what can we give to healthcare providers with you, Sounds True, that can distill all the science of happiness, science and practice that we’ve taught, into a format that’s tailored to healthcare providers and their unique lives that’s really different than an educator or somebody in a leadership position like you, et cetera.
What I hope that they get from this is what I hope that the healthcare providers I’ve taught these 20 years have gotten. What I’ve gotten from this material is two to five minutes a day, where you can build this into your life, where you can find out what’s meaningful to you, what works for you. A lot of this stuff doesn’t work for everybody. It may not be a breathing practice. It may be that you have to be outside. It may have to be that you have to be in your garden, or it may be that you have to be with other people, or dancing. Find those two to five minutes a day, practice, and give it to yourself because you can fit that into your schedule.
Second, and related, is think about how in this complex, multifaceted interactions with the people you care for, how do you give a little bit to them? It’s just 30 seconds of, “OK, I’m going in, I’m talking to this grandmother who’s in the end of life, she’s got her family around. How do I orient towards that with kindness or separating myself from them?”
A couple of minutes a day for yourself, find out what works. We give a lot of offerings. And then think about translating that to other people. It may be as simple as something like, “Oh, I’ve got a little menu of questions that I’ll ask my patients that are caring, that just change the interaction. That’s it. And then an opportunity with The Greater Good as background and Sounds True as background, if I want to go deeper, I’ve got pathways to pursue things.
TS: I just have a final question for you, Dacher. I know how to feel awe being by myself, being out in nature with the trees. I don’t know as much how to access it with other human beings. What might you suggest so that I could just be awe-filled in the presence of a human?
DK: Well, I think the first thing is to think about and make this a deeper form of inquiry. Who are the people whose lives have really moved you? When I think about Jane Goodall, I’m just like, “Wow, her science and her observations and environmentalism.” So, that’s one.
I think about what I hope people reading my new book Awe, coming out January 2023, there’s a lot of goodness out in the world that will surprise you. Just take a moment to reflect on that. Study people’s lives who inspire you, look to the everyday forms of awe around you, and then think about the deeper things that those two pathways of observation, what do they reveal to you?
I, for various reasons, get really awe-inspired by people who overcome obstacles. When I work with prisoners or veterans who have PTSD, I’m just astounded by their strength. And so, just to think about the themes of those people who inspire you and the everyday strength you see around you, what it reveals to you, and then hope that it brings some awe to you.
Also, to remember people get it in different ways. Some people it’s all music, some people it’s just nature, other people it’s the social stuff and that’s OK. That’s, by design, meant to vary in really fascinating ways.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Dacher Keltner along with Eve Ekman. They’ve partnered together through The Greater Good Science Center with Sounds True to create The Greater Good Training for Health Professionals: Science-Based Skills for Emotional Resilience and Wellbeing. You can learn more at SoundsTrue.com. Thanks, Dacher. It’s great to be with you. I always learn from you.
DK: It’s always great to be with you again.
TS: Thank you.
DK: Thank you.
TS: Thanks for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at Resources.Soundstrue.com/Podcast. That’s Resources.Soundstrue.com/Podcast. If you’re interested, hit the Subscribe button in your podcast app. And if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review. I absolutely love getting your feedback and being connected. Sounds True: waking up the world.
