Cultivating Awe & Emotional Connection in Daily Life | Dr. Dacher Keltner
In a Nutshell
Dr. Dacher Keltner explains awe as a shift from small-scale to vast perception (e.g., horizons, music, nature), reducing inflammation, boosting vagal tone, alleviating long COVID, and fostering emotional bonds via elevated kindness and collective consciousness. Practical tools include weekly "awe walks" (slow walks seeking surprises, scaling from details to expanses) and communal activities like concerts, sports, campfires, or teasing in friendships to counter self-focus, narcissism, and online isolation. Awe quiets the default mode network, promotes equanimity through temporal distancing, and is essential for health, rebuilding community amid tech-driven fragmentation.
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Awe reduces inflammation, elevates vagal tone, reduces long COVID symptoms. People with long COVID: just one minute of awe a day reduces symptoms. Medical doctors starting to prescribe nature and music as mechanisms.
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast discussing science and science-based tools for everyday life. Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Guest: Dr. Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology and co-director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Expert in science of emotions and their role in social dynamics and bonding.
Science of emotions: role of teasing in social bonding, embarrassment in social bonding, science of awe and things that lead to awe. Awe happens when shifting perception from small scale to large scale or back, e.g., suddenly reaching a new horizon or visual vista. Practical and conceptual conversation on creating awe in everyday life, human bonding in groups, what establishes and inhibits deep human bonds.
Dacher Keltner known for rigor and creativity in studying emotions, offers public ways to feel better and get more out of life.
Podcast separate from Stanford teaching/research, brings zero-cost science information to public. Episode includes sponsors.
Everyone intuitively knows awe but hard to articulate. Words: overwhelm, excited, physical sensation of a lift. No one collapses into turtle position upon hearing 'awe'.
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