Cultivating Awe & Emotional Connection in Daily Life | Dr. Dacher Keltner

**Dacher Keltner** (0:00)
Awe is good for reduced inflammation, elevated vagal tone, reduced long COVID symptoms. We have people with long COVID, just a minute of awe a day, reduce long COVID symptoms. It's good news, right? And there's so much science on it that I just, now I think medical doctors are starting to think like, I'm gonna prescribe nature, I'll prescribe music, through awe, right, as a mechanism.

**Andrew Huberman** (0:27)
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Dacher Keltner. Dr. Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology and the co-director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Dacher is an expert in the science of emotions and their role in social dynamics and bonding. Today we discuss his fascinating work on the science of emotions, including the role of teasing in social bonding, the role of embarrassment in social bonding, and his fascinating work on awe and the things that lead to awe. As he describes, awe is not elusive. It happens when we shift our perception from a very small scale to a very large scale or back again, such as when we suddenly reach a new horizon or visual vista. Today, you'll understand what all of that really means, and more importantly, how you can create this incredible thing that we call awe in everyday life. We also talk about the critical aspect of human bonding in groups and the things that both establish and inhibit deep human bonds. So today is a very practical as well as conceptual conversation that no doubt will change the way that you think about your life every day and think about opportunities for awe every day. As you'll soon see, Dacher Keltner is a truly special scientist known for his incredible rigor and creativity in the study of emotions, but also continually offering you, the public, ways to be and feel genuinely better and to get more out of life. It was a true honor and pleasure to host him. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Dacher Keltner. Dr. Dacher Keltner, welcome.

**Dacher Keltner** (2:25)
Good to be with you, Andrew.

**Andrew Huberman** (2:27)
Awe.

**Dacher Keltner** (2:28)
Yeah.

**Andrew Huberman** (2:29)
We all intuitively know what it is, and yet we also don't know how to articulate it. I want to say the words overwhelm, excited. I get the physical sensation of a lift. I don't think anyone ever said the word awe and then collapsed into a turtle position.

**Dacher Keltner** (2:46)
That's right.

**Andrew Huberman** (2:47)
Maybe we could explore that and your thoughts about that. But what got you into awe?

**Dacher Keltner** (2:52)
Yeah, and I love the word lift. That's really interesting. Yeah, I was a young scholar in the science of emotion that really Paul Ekman was a pioneer in, and that field in the 90s and early 2000s was really focused on negative emotions. And you know the science, right?
Anger, fear, fight or flight physiology, amygdala, cortisol, disgust, you know, Paul Ross and John Hype. And thinking about emotions from that lens, and it, as a young scientist and given the powerful tools of emotion science of Darwin and Ekman and how to just observe phenomena, it didn't make contact with my life and my own experience, you know. I was raised as a wild child in the late 60s in Laurel Canyon and, you know, it was like music and social change and protest and, you know, and beauty. And I was raised by a dad who's a visual artist. And my mom taught romanticism in Virginia Woolf and awe and the mind and I was like, wow, there's all this stuff that our science, my science can't speak to music and visual patterns and dance and collective movement and, you know, someone like Martin Luther King and why he makes me cry, you know. And I remember feeling this and asking Paul Ekman. I was like, you know, what should I do with my career? And he's like, study all, you know. And so that got me going.

**Andrew Huberman** (4:31)
If we could, maybe we could talk about the faces for a moment. You know, I think every psychology and neuroscience student sees these faces of disgust, of pleasure. Darwin talked about this. Babies are often presented in parallel with those pictures of adults where they'll show a baby like, you know, recoiling from something or, you know, wide-eyed and leaning in. You know, there's always seems to be a motor component to this that maybe isn't as captured in those two-dimensional photographs. But what's the story about hard-wired facial emotions? And what are the revisions to that story that I'm probably not aware of?