Cultivating Awe & Emotional Connection in Daily Life | Dr. Dacher Keltner
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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 and there’s so much science on it that I just now I think medical doctors are starting to think like, I’m going to prescribe nature, I’ll prescribe music through awe, right? Um as a mechanism.
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science [music] and science-based tools for everyday life. >> [music] >> 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. Good to be with you, Andrew. Awe. Yeah, we all intuitively know what it is, and yet we also don’t know how to articulate it.
Yeah. 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. Maybe we could explore that and your thoughts about that.
But what got you into awe? Yeah, and I and I love the word lift. That’s really interesting. Um yeah, I was uh a young scholar in the science of emotion that really Paul Ekman was a pioneer in, you know, and and that field in the, you know, ’90s and early 2000s was uh really focused on negative emotions, you know, and and you know this science, right? Anger, fear, fight or flight physiology, amygdala, cortisol, uh disgust, you know, Paul Rozin and John Haidt.
Um And thinking about emotions from that lens and and it as a young scientist uh and given the powerful tools of emotion science of Darwin and Ekman and how to just observe phenomena, uh it didn’t make contact with my life in 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 uh you know, and beauty and I was raised by a dad who’s a visual artist and my mom taught romanticism and Virginia Woolf and awe and the mind and 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 awe, you know?
” And so that got me going. If we could maybe we could talk about the faces for a moment. You know, I think every psychology and neuroscience student >> Yeah. sees these faces of disgust, of of pleasure. Uh Darwin talked about this.
Yeah. 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 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 sort of hardwired facial emotions? And what are the revisions to that story that I I’m probably not aware of?
Yeah, thank you for asking that. Um you know, I’ve spent 30 years working on that very problem. Um Paul Ekman came in and you know, as as you’ve suggested, right? He did this revolutionary work in New Guinea. You know, showed photos of six emotions, static photographs of anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, and a smile.
They kind of interpreted the faces like you or I would, uh naming it, using the right words to describe those faces. And that you know, and this is how science occasionally works, which is just by accident that became the field. And there are a lot of debates about how reliable those faces are, how universal are they in different cultures. Uh Ekman really positive, sort of a strong universality. That’s been contested by Jim Russell, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and others.
Um but since then, there are controversies around how wire hardwired they are. Do they occur reliably in a child’s development? Yes and no, you know, young children show disgust expressions uh like social mammals do. They wince at bad smells just like you or I would. Uh anger is a little bit trickier to pin down developmentally.
But then, our lab and several labs around the world, you know, Jess Tracy at UB British Columbia, Disa Sauter, uh and I want to talk about this computational work uh started to expand uh the vocabulary of faces. And now, we there’s a lot of data that suggests there are 20 different facial expressions. Laughter, love, compassion, awe, you know, whoa. Uh embarrassment, shame, pain, uh you know, and that uh in some sense has broadened the taxonomy of emotions. We used to think of six, now there are probably 20 distinct states in the mind.
And that’s where the field is heading is to really start to think about physiological patterns, brain patterns of of these distinct states. And and I’ll tell you um the hardwiring question, I mean, it’s hard science to do, right? Just to imagine videotaping people from five different countries, getting their emotional expressions, and then making sense of them. Uh it used to take 1 hour to code the facial muscle movements of one of 1 minute, right? So, this is slow science.
And I would really encourage listeners and viewers to go to Alan Cowan. com. And I had a grad student at Berkeley, Alan Cowan, who you know, >> [laughter] >> he’s a computational genius and he looked at our old science and said, “We can use AI to code the face. ” And he did it with Google engineers. He coded 144 2 million videos from 144 cultures and 16 facial expressions.
Uh 75% overlap across cultures in how we show awe at fireworks, concentration on a test, you know, laugh at friends. So, right now I would say 50 to 60% is hardwired. It’s part of who we are in our evolutionary history. And then the rest is subject to variation in interesting ways. I would like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Juve.
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