Dacher Keltner (3:22)

It's good to be with you, Dan, as always.

Dan Harris (3:24)

It's always great to have you on the show. You've talked about this before here. But just to set the table for this series of discussions we're going to have, can you define awe?

Dacher Keltner (3:35)

Yeah. Awe is an emotion. So it's a brief state that we feel when we encounter things that are vast and that we don't understand, that are mysterious. And then awe initiates a cascade of things that are part of the experience. You start wondering about things, you feel small, you want to do things that are good for the world, act altruistically and the like. So awe is an emotion that we feel when we encounter vast mysteries.

Dan Harris (4:05)

Sorry, just to pick up on something you said there that doesn't necessarily make logical sense, at least initially to me. I get that you stare. No, this is not a skeptical question. This is a curious question. You stare up at the night sky and you feel small in a nice way. It's vast. It provokes thoughts of wonder. But then you said it makes you altruistic.

Dacher Keltner (4:33)

Yeah.

Dan Harris (4:33)

So how does that work?

Dacher Keltner (4:35)

Yeah, and we did a lot of work on that. And it's interesting because awe gives you this sense that you're part of something larger than yourself. Right. It might be the ecosystem or patterns of life in nature or other people around you or cultural group. Right. When you're awestruck by music. And one of the things that we need to do that awe initiates is to cooperate and to share resources and to orient towards other people's interests as part of being part of something larger than the self. And so we have a lot of research showing if I feel awe out in the trees, or I feel awe watching BBC Earth, or I feel awe listening to beautiful music, you share more, you cooperate, you sync up with other people better. And that's just part of one of its primary functions, which is to kind of integrate the individual and all of our interests into collectives that we're part of. Social groups, ecosystems, cultural ideas and the like.

Dan Harris (5:33)

So from an evolutionary standpoint, the natural selection used, to the extent that natural selection has any agency, but natural selection used awe to get humans to cohere, to work together so that we could, you know, propagate the species.

Dacher Keltner (5:52)

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the major shifts in evolutionary thinking that you're making contact with. Group selection theory. David Sloan Wilson Elliot, Sober man. We are this tribal species, hypersocial. We do everything together from raising offspring to sharing food to defending ourselves. All fundamental evolutionary activities, right, related to survival. So we need mechanisms that help us cooperate and collaborate and sync up. And awe is one of the primary ones. It just, you know, it's fascinating, Dan. You can be in a lab by yourself and watch BBC Earth and be awestruck and share more resources with a stranger, right? It just hits that primal switch of moving from self interest to thinking about other people, which is vital to our survival.

Dan Harris (6:37)

So nature has come up a bunch in this conversation, in this young conversation, but nature has already come up a bunch. What is the connection, just to put a fine point on it, between nature and awe?

Dacher Keltner (6:50)

It's profound. And, you know, we surveyed people, 26 different countries, got stories of awe. And these are countries, you know, a lot of people in cities. India, Mexico, Japan, China, Poland, Germany, us, New Zealand, all over the place. Right. And the second most common source of awe around the world is nature. And what strikes me initially is it could be mountains in Switzerland, it could be the plains in Iowa, you know, and the storms that roll off the plains. It could be the desert. The kind of nature really varied, but people felt kind of this deep sense of awe in relation to nature. And, you know, the thinking now is that it is adaptive for us to understand our relationship to nature, to find ecosystems that are beautiful and awesome in terms of the resources they provide. And so awe is a fundamental part of our relationship to nature, just in terms of remembering we are part of ecosystems, we have relationships to different parts of nature, and awe reveals that to us.

Dan Harris (7:59)

You said it was the number two source of awe. What's the number one source of awe?

Dacher Keltner (8:03)

Yeah, this one struck me. It's moral beauty. It's, you know, you just pause for a moment and think about the people who have changed your life through their kindness or courage or resilience. And that was the most common source of awe. You know what I call moral beauty of thinking about your grandmother who worked so hard for the family and took care of so many people. Or thinking about Nelson Mandela, you know, being in prison 29 years and coming out and changing a culture, everyday acts of generosity in the streets. So that one is just as interesting to me as well, which is that we are wired up to be transformed in simply seeing other people's selflessness and their courage and kindness.

Dan Harris (8:46)

And it's not unrelated to awe, given what we talked about, that awe can provoke prosocial behavior.

Dacher Keltner (8:51)

Yeah, it's all part of, you know, awe and it's sources, nature and moral beauty, how it affects us is all part of this big shift. You know, 30 years ago we wrote about the selfish gene. People talked about selfish gene 40, 50 years ago. Now people are really interested in the biological foundations of selflessness that we so readily give to other people. Kids, 18 month olds help other strangers. And awe is a fundamental part of this self transcendence and emotion that helps us fold into groups.

Dan Harris (9:24)

A few paragraphs ago you said something about how we were talking about the relationship between nature and awe, that one of the functions of awe vis a vis nature is that it helps you feel connected to these ecosystems in which we live. And so it just gets me thinking, given that we are in an ecological and climate crisis right now, that awe could play a beneficial role in helping us, you know, get through this.

Dacher Keltner (9:52)

Yeah, fundamentally. And you know, you're anticipating the science, Dan. I've been really influenced by indigenous scholarship on this. Dr. Yuria Solidwin at the United nations writing about this concept of ecological belonging, that we really are a life form, we're part of ecosystems. And when you think about the knowledge that indigenous peoples had about the migration patterns of species and weather systems and fires and seasons and the like, it was part of their survival, how they adapted to life. Right. Just to know about nature. And awe really surfaces that knowledge and a state of reverence for the natural world. You're overwhelmed by its beauty and, you know, the purity of water, the, you know, for me, walking by the redwood trees every day to work, it's just like, God, this is so sacred in some sense. And there's work to your point, Dan, coming out in a lot of different places of, you know, China, just awe interventions, just cultivating awe helps people engage in more environmentally friendly behavior. Eating less red meat, walking more. Right. There is work in a lot of different cities, you know, Singapore and London and schools now where you're rewilding spaces where you build nature back in and people again become more environmentally friendly. It helps with biodiversity and Awe is part of that transformation in a way. So I think it's an important emotion for our times.

Dan Harris (11:28)

On a selfish level, what do we know from the science about the psychological and physiological benefits of getting exposed to nature?

Dacher Keltner (11:36)

On the regular, Emerson has this great quote, he has this epiphany out on a cold day in a winter in Massachusetts. And you know, he's like, you know, out in nature, standing on the bare ground, my head is bathed by this bly there and uplifted into infinite space. And he has this awe experience, you know, just like we all do. And as part of that quote, he says, there's nothing that nature cannot repair. And when you hear that word repair, and I ask people, does that strike accord with you? They raise their hands immediately like, yeah, just gardening and getting out in the woods and watching that sunset or looking at clouds, listening to the rain, I feel better. And the science astounds me, which is the self serving benefits of nature. You know, Mark Berman's work, you concentrate better, you attend to things better. It's almost like meditation, which you've talked about. It just sharpens your attention. You get elevated vagal tone, you know, the vagus nerve, this big bundle of nerves that helps our cardiovascular function. Your immune system looks better, cortisol is lower, you feel happier, depression's lower. I remember talking to this veteran who's in my book, Aw, Stacy Bear, who was in a crisis coming out of the Iraq war, which, you know, you covered. And he was in a deep crisis and a friend said, you gotta get outdoors. And it saved his life. And I think nature is healthcare in many ways.

Dan Harris (13:10)

I like that. Nature is healthcare. I'm writing that down. So let's just go deeper into this because I think it's so interesting you mentioned the Mark Berman study about how nature can strengthen cognition and memory. What's the mechanism for that?

Dacher Keltner (13:23)

What we know is if attention is a limited resource, what do I attend to in my environment? And what I attend to helps with my intellectual performance. How kids do in school, what they're likely to remember, will they read a novel with greater sort of imagination? And what we know mechanistically is that experiences of awe in nature calm the stress response. They deactivate this region of the brain called the default mode network, which is kind of always checking yourself and tracking things and making sure you're doing well and kind of gets in the way of attending to things with an open, curious mind. And so awe starts to calm the mind down. And as a result, and this probably, you know, fits Your subjective experience, Dan, is like, you just feel like you take in more of the world around you, you see things more clearly and there are good data showing both nature and awe. And in combination, think more rigorously, evaluate evidence more carefully, have better ideas scientifically. Mark Berman's work. Remember more, attend to things with greater veracity or clarity. So it makes me wonder so much because, you know, we pressure students in, I'm a teacher and they're just so task focused today and probably we should be giving them five minutes, an hour to have a little awe and get outside and you know, look at some clouds because the intellectual benefits are many.

Dan Harris (14:58)

I really see this with my son. He's nine now. We raised him for the first four, nearly five years of his life in the city. And he kept telling us through his behavior and through his words that he is a nature kid. And then we finally moved in the pandemic to. My wife calls it the country, but it's really the suburbs or sort of the remote suburbs. And I remember the first day we got here, he got out of the pool and was going to get himself something and he said under his breath, this is the best day of my life. And I was like, oh shit, we're never going back.

Dacher Keltner (15:31)

That's so nice. That is so nice. And this is, I think, the future, Dan, when we scale up and think about this work of nature and awe helping our minds and our kids academic performance and stress levels. There's a lot of wilding of cities going on right now, you know, building parks, building little patches of green spaces, rewilding schools. Really effective. And it benefits kids, you know, just a little ten by ten plot in a school playground that used to be asphalt and cement and they just have all the native species there and they start gardening and it is having similar benefits. So your son was talking about the best day of life that a lot of kids could have, a lot of us could have if we turn to nature.

Dan Harris (16:16)

I want to put a pin in the rewilding part because as I mentioned in the introduction, this is the first of a series of three episodes that we inveigled you into. And the first one is really about the benefits of nature and the second is like, how do you derive the benefits of nature when you're, when you don't live in nature? And so I want to go deep on that in a minute. But let's just assume for the purposes of this mini episode that people do have access to it. And just going back to you, my question about the mechanism by which nature can do this thing that doesn't seem quite obvious initially that it can strengthen our cognition and make us focus. I think what I'm hearing you say is essentially it calms the nervous system which quiets self talk and inexorably and quite logically that would lead to improved focus.

Dacher Keltner (17:07)

Yeah, And I love your question, Dan, you know, and thank you for thinking in such comprehensive or sophisticated way. Right. Let's think about all the ways, mechanisms by which natural awe can benefit our minds. And in fact, Maria Monroe and I have published a paper on that, which is it calms your body. Right. And we know cortisol and elevated heart rate and blood pressure narrow your attention. Focusing on threats. Right. And you don't have the open mind to take in a lot of novel information. We know that natural awe quiets the self talk, like you're saying, quiets the self criticism quiets the sense, the concern that am I getting enough attention or rewards? Right. So you're no longer so self focused. You're better able to think about knowledge and information out in the world. We know that awe, this one's interesting, makes you more interested in other people and more interested in the things they may have to say to you that are interesting. Right. And you're not so defensive. Well, one of the great sources of knowledge is other people. And awe strengthens that. And then awe has this direct effect on our attention, which is it kind of expands our field of consciousness and it makes us more aware of kind of the systems of knowledge around us, the systems that are part of a little ecosystem, a tide pool you may look at or a piece of music. That's all good news for knowledge, Right. And now people are showing Dante Dixon, former student of mine out at Michigan State, poor kids in under resourced schools who feel awe are more curious about their school and their schoolwork. Right. And you talk to a teacher, what are they really interested in? Sparking curiosity. Right. And awe gets us there. And that's why we're doing a lot of work in schools at the Greater Good Science center, is to figure out ways to give kids a little minute or two of awe, like your son had that moment, and hopefully see some benefits.

Dan Harris (19:06)

One other area of benefit I'm curious about, and this would seem to flow logically from everything you just said, is sleep. What do we know about the impact of nature on sleep?

Dacher Keltner (19:16)

Oh my God. We know that a certain amount of exposure to light, people say 20 minutes a day, but you know, just getting the sun on your skin and letting the skin do its magical work with that helps with your circadian rhythm. That clock that is in actually all of your cells of your body, every cell has a clock in it. So just being exposed to light helps you. We know that regular walking in nature, you know, and this is research I think coming out of Germany, just studies of elderly people when sleep is more disrupted. Getting out in nature. There's something about not only the walking but being in nature that helps with sleep. And then indirectly we know that a lot of the sort of sources of nature, be it listening to the sound of water or getting out and doing gardening, just being immersed in nature calms the body, calms cortisol. So indirectly that's likely to benefit your sleep pattern. So it's a big link and it's why doctors knowing Matt Walker's work, like how important sleep is for our physical and mental health. And now we know that getting out in nature is good for us. With respect to sleep, doctors are starting to tell their patients, like get outdoors, get into the woods or go garden. And I think for good reason.

Dan Harris (20:39)

This may be outside of your area, but I'll ask it anyway. There's been a lot of focus in recent years on first thing in the morning you gotta get outside and get direct sunlight. And that is crucial in order to get enough sleep. What's your take on that from a scientific standpoint?

Dacher Keltner (20:55)

I have looked a little bit of the data when I wrote awe, I looked at all the different ways in which elements of nature, colors of flowers, the specific chemicals that come off of flowers, the sound of water, and it all affects our nervous system in pretty remarkable ways. You know, people who write in this space think of the body as almost like an antenna, you know, and you just take in all this information from nature and you know, when you think about sun hitting the skin and the skin is this multi billion cell brain that's around, you know, taking it in and your immune system has cells in the skin. There's probably spectacular processes that are happening triggered by warm light on the skin and cool light. And so we know it benefits people. You know, in terms of calming down a bit, we need a certain kind of science to get to the really cool mechanistic account of that which you've been pressing on. And I wouldn't be surprised if it exists.

Dan Harris (21:57)

One other thing I wanted to ask you from a scientific standpoint is, you know, as I'm looking here at our list of the benefits of nature, and one of them, and we talk, we touched on this a little bit, is one of the benefits is that it can promote trust and bonding and improve social relationships. And it just gets me thinking that if I'm in a leadership position, and I guess I am, I'm the boss of a very small business. But this could be true if you're a middle manager in a business and you have a team, or it could be true if you're in a family, or it could be true if you're part of a social group or a volunteer group. Any type of leadership, holistically or capaciously understood, might benefit from dragging people outside and doing something together. Would you agree with that?

Dacher Keltner (22:40)

Oh, yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting you think about the leadership experiences where people go camping together or they go on mountain trips together as a way to solidify the team through awe, through the sense of shared wonder together, which we feel and has been documented systematically. You know, I teach a lot of medical doctors. It's one of the great privileges of my career. And when we get to the nature science, you know, those doctors work hard, and they're every minute is accounted for. They're inside. Hospitals are tough places in terms of what you see and hear and even smell. And a lot of them talk about, you know, I always go for a walk with somebody I'm mentoring or who I'm leading, You know, building nature into the experience. Yeah, I think it's a great tool in the toolkit of leadership to rely on nature as a way to bring out the best of teams.

Dan Harris (23:40)

Marching through my questions about the science here, the next category I wanted to hit is the benefits of experiencing wildlife in nature. So actually seeing animals out there, let's keep mosquitoes out of this. But more like the charismatic megafauna, which is one of my favorite terms I learned when I used to cover wildlife in Africa back when I was an ABC news reporter. Well, let me shut up and ask you the question. What are the benefits of seeing animals in nature?

Dacher Keltner (24:08)

Well, I'll give you one finding which is really interesting. What I do know is, and there are nonprofit organizations of people encountering grizzly bears and, you know, lions and bears in the backpacking trails of the Sierras and the like. And it is awesome. And so we would be safe to say, knowing what we know about awe and natural awe, that it's going to make you humble, it's going to make you revere things. It's going to put you into this state of reverence for the power of nature in different species. I would go one step further, and I'll tell you A little experience. It was a remarkable experience I had. This is no joke. I was reading William James, Varieties of Religious Experience in the High Sierras, and I was lost reading that book, which is a spectacular book, at this little table, and I look up and there's a bear right across the table from me. And I was like, what? And the remarkable thing is, I was told, when you encounter these bears in the High Sierras, you shout at them and you pretend that you're bigger than them. But before I did that, Dan, I looked at it in the eye and it looked at me, and we had this moment of eye contact, and then I chased it off, and I felt spectacular, right? But there's. There are Japanese scientists, and this study blows my mind. It's one of my favorite studies I've read the last year or two. These Japanese scientists have dogs and their companions. Humans look at each other in the eye, and both the dog and the human experience rises in oxytocin levels. Oxytocin is this neuropeptide of trust and communion and connection. That blows my mind, that you can look into eyes of other species and feel this sense of common spirit. And that's what happened to me. And I think, you know, not only the awe and the reverence of powerful things. Edmund Burke, the great Irish philosopher, you know, one of his favorite examples of awe is just being blown away by bulls. You know, here he was in Ireland and England, like, wow, look at the giant bull. Whoa. He feels awe. And I think that's part of it, is we have this emotion that reveres great sources of strength. Clearly, that happens out in the wildlife. And then I would add, being from Berkeley and loving agape, that we also feel this deep humanity or fellow feeling for the big animals out there that I felt with that bear and Japanese scientists are showing. Well, you may get a little burst of oxytocin in your bloodstream, in your brain. And that felt to be true.

Dan Harris (26:43)

Every time I look my cats in the eye, they're only communicating one sentiment. Feed me, motherfucker. I mean, it's like there's no. There's no oxytocin. There's. I gotta get up and open a.

Dacher Keltner (26:55)

Can, you know, I don't want to offend a lot of cat companions out there, owners, whatever you say. But Frans de Waal, may he rest in peace, one of the great promoters of the morality and gentleness and kindness of other species, he charts all these great processes that help us connect to other people. You know, consolation, sympathy, sharing, forgiveness, et CETERA and a lot of species have these tendencies, except he said the domesticated cat, so. And I'm going to get a lot of hate mail in my email address from Kat Lo. I disagree, but so. But there you go.

Dan Harris (27:36)

I kind of disagree. But I'm going to put your email in the show notes so that people can send you texts or whatever before we finish this episode. And again, this is the first in a triumvirate, a trio, a troika of episodes. Let's get practical for a second. I'm sure a lot of people have listened to this and thought, okay, I'm sold. Dacher makes a good case. I disagree with him on cats, but everything else, I'm sold. So how do I go get all of these benefits of nature? What practical advice do you have?

Dacher Keltner (28:04)

Yeah, Dan, you and I have worked on this a lot, right? That, like, how do we take these deep ideas that trace back to indigenous traditions as I cited earlier, you know, Dr. Yuri Sliedman and others, and Buddhist traditions you've translated. And then we make it practical for today's complicated life. Right? And I think the first thing that is important is awareness is just, oh, I get it. Nature in my relationship to nature is deep and it's a form of contemplation. It's a way to approach life and being in the world. And then the second thing is to get actionable and practical, right? And so, you know, there's a lot of research in our lab and other labs on walking in nature and pausing and looking at trees and the sky and clouds and timing it and ritualizing the walk. There is a pretty robust literature on gardening coming out of Germany and South Korea and other places of raking and gardening and, you know, enjoying the benefits of close relationship to the things that you garden. It's striking. The technologies are often hard with respect to contemplation, but in the case of nature, a lot of our research have people look at beautiful images, photos of nature, have people look at BBC Earth, which is remarkable, all the Richard Attenborough films. And that benefits people. And then, you know, Dan, you and I, I mean, so many of the contemplative practices that are really spreading, you know, thanks to work like yours and elsewhere, is just opening your senses, right? And so I once or twice a week stop somewhere in nature. And I live in a city, you know, and this is. It's a park with traffic and an unhoused person shouting and so forth. But I stop and I open my senses to nature. You know, I listen to the wind or water, rain. I look around at colors. I see if I can smell things. We know that chemical compounds come off of flowers and activate lower levels of cortisol. So, you know, I think walking, intentionally, reflecting, intentionally, doing some work around gardens and so forth, is very good for us, which are spreading these days, you know, and then making sure as part of your day, you're just stopping and pausing and opening the senses to nature. I have my undergrads at Berkeley. It's one of my favorite exercises. I say, go out today, and I want you to look at the sky at a time that might be interesting and take a photo and send it to me and tell me what your state of consciousness was like. They go out, they look at the sky like, oh, my God, you know, there's fog and there are clouds and it's colorful, you know, so just open your senses to it. And this science of awe in nature tells us we're wired. Just like we're wired to take care of things. We're wired to relate to nature in powerful ways and just build a few minutes of it into your day.

Dan Harris (31:14)

I really like that. Just look at the sky intentionally. That's not an onerous ask that doesn't require buying fancy equipment or setting aside a bunch of time. Just look at the sky or doing.

Dacher Keltner (31:28)

Ab crunches or strengthening your calves. You know, it's just like. And, you know, I walk to work 25 minutes, and I make sure there's some little moment, 30 seconds, where I'm like, I'm going to look at these flowers. That's it. And then we know from the science that activates a lot of goodness in the. The human nervous system.

Dan Harris (31:47)

One last question on this tip. The national parks, anything to say about the national parks as a resource we can all access?

Dacher Keltner (31:55)

Thank you. 467 national parks. I think there are national parks and cities. They're in every state. I think there are 360 million visits to the national parks each year cost 20 bucks. I mean, it is the American experience in some way. And I am working, beginning work with the national parks based on the science of all we've been talking about, Dan, to make national parks, given the science, a more contemplative practice. And that's highfalutin language for simply saying, when you go to the park, pause and think about a nature practice or two, looking at something, listening to water, smelling the trees, doing a walk through a national park and all walk or a nature walk. And I have faith that, you know, as we work with the national parks, the national park idea started at UC Berkeley. We're very proud of that. It can become what it was meant to be. Theodore Roosevelt wrote about the national parks as if they're almost like churches or temples, Right? They're places of sacred contemplation. And I think with a little bit of guiding, they can become that for a lot of people. For 20 bucks a visit, it's a great reminder.

Dan Harris (33:15)

Decker, it's always so great to talk to you. And the good news is you're going to be back next week to talk specifically about how we can get the benefits of nature if we live in the city and don't have access to what we might traditionally consider to be, you know, wild spaces, such as a national park. Although, just to note as a tease, as Dacher just said, there are national parks in cities. So we're going to get really practical on all of that in the next episode. Dakar, thank you again. See you soon.

Dacher Keltner (33:47)

It's great to be with you, Dan.

Dan Harris (33:51)

Thanks again to Dacher. Keltner. Don't forget to tune in next week and the week after that as we continue our series on the benefits of nature. Before I I want to take a moment to thank our sponsor, once again, Columbia Sportswear, for supporting today's episode and, in fact, this whole series, their commitment to getting people outside to connect with nature, something I very much resonate with, especially after talking to Dacher. Finding the right gear can make all the difference in helping you make the most of your time outdoors. Columbia Sportswear's Omni Heat Infinity jackets have amazing technology designed to keep you active without compromising comfort. I can speak personally on this one. They've done a very good job on that jacket. It's the kind of gear that can turn a good outdoor adventure into a great one. Head over to Columbia.com to see how they can keep you prepared for any temperature. One final thing to say before I really let you go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great people over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the Van Islands wrote our theme.