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

A is good for reduced inflammation, elevated veagal 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 all right um as a mechanism. 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 opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Dher Kelner. Dr. Dher Kelner is a professor of psychology and the co-director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Der 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, Decker Kelner 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. Dhacker Kelner. Dr. Dher Kelner, 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. That's right. 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 Ecman 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 you know this science right anger fear fight orflight physiology amydala cortisol uh disgust you know Paul Ros and John he hype um and thinking about emotions from that lens hands and and it as a young scientist uh and given the powerful tools of emotion science of Darwin and Ecman and how to just observe phenomena uh 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 uh you know and beauty and I was raised I a dad who's a visual artist and my mom taught romanticism in Virginia Wolf 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 asking Paul Ecman 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 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 of pleasure uh 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 wideeyed 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 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 Ecman 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 Ecman really posited sort of a strong universality that's been contested by Jim Russell L le 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 wse 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, Disus Sauer, uh, and I want to talk about this computational work 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 hard wiring 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 one hour to code the facial muscle movements of of one minute. Right? So this is slow science and I would really encourage listeners uh and viewers to go to alencowan.com and I had a grad student at Berkeley Alan Cowan who you know 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 two 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 as 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, JWVE. JWVE makes medical grade red light therapy devices. Now, if there's one thing that I have consistently emphasized on this podcast, is the incredible impact that light can have on our biology and our health. Now, in addition to sunlight, which I've talked about a lot on this podcast, red light, near infrared, and infrared light have been specifically shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellular and organ health. These include faster muscle recovery, improved skin health, wound healing, improvements in acne, reduced pain and inflammation, improved mitochondrial function, and even improvements in vision. Nowadays, there are a lot of red light devices out there. 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But can we imagine somebody, let's just like hypothetical person who can keep their body very still while they're angry and be very articulate. That includes not moving their hands. We'd probably think perhaps that person's like sociopathic, but that's not the picture I'm trying to paint. Then on the other extreme can imagine somebody who um is very angry and is just sticulating a lot and moving like we can immediately go yeah that make that makes sense and we could do this for any emotion y right so how should we think about emotion as an experience and how it's expressed along these three axes right which is motor language and then the emotion itself yeah I feel like without um conceptualizing that I as a true novice of this, right? This isn't my area of of of understanding or expertise, I can't really understand what an emotion is, but if I understand how those are linked, may maybe that's a a portal into that. Yeah. I know. I mean, it's a profound question, Andrew, and and it's central to our field, which is, you know, that and and I appreciate it coming out of your scientific background of studying other mammals and other species and and and there are these motor patterns that you see in emotion around the world. When you sue a child that's crying, right, you're going to bring it in close and caress and touch and have emotion. When you're, you know, when you're uh fighting a rival or when you're you see rotten food, you're going to that motor pattern will be there, you know, and that's part of our research that 75% of that is this motor pattern of facial musculature and body and skeletal muscles and how we respond to the emotional events of life. And then we have this massively complicated, you know, conceptual system that puts words to experience. And that's mainly what we study in psychological science is just that, oh, I'm feeling angry or ashamed or embarrassed or love or compassion. And we know and and your question points to this like very often they're disconnected, right? the motor pattern and the language we use and how I would interpret it in another person. Uh on balance they correlate point two. So they're just weakly they're kind of these streams of behavior that are just part of who we are, right? Our motor patterns and language. And there are a lot of ways to think about it. You could think about cultures that value being calm like a lot of East Asian cultures. Be calm. Don't disrupt things. don't blurt out, don't protest, right? And and you'll see this disconnect. Um you can think about certain people who they just are more authentic and their motor patterns come out in expressions and they will tell you how they feel. Uh so it's a central problem that we grapple with. And then I love your your third part of this equation of emotion science which is the feeling, the emotion. Michael Pollen is right. you know this new book on consciousness, the conscious feeling of something, we think we can get it to it with words. I don't think so. You probably wouldn't either, right? Studying the other species you've studied, right? Uh it's some weird mixture of everything that's happening in your body. And ironically, the emotion or the feeling is still one of the uncharted territories of our field. Is why as these complicated motor patterns take unfold and words are unfolding in images and memories and visual things that you study. How does that all come together in my feeling of compassion or awe? And we barely know, you know, we just we don't know. Every once in a while, I'll try and think about a concept from way outside of standard science like the chakras or something. And it's kind of interesting, right? I mean even if just if one looks at it just purely as a western scientist this idea that maybe there's a confluence of of nerves and of vascule and stuff that makes you feel kind of like rooted at like and calm right versus like up in your head. Uh I've been um watching this really interesting Instagram channel. It's a woman who does voices for cartoons and she has the most incredible understanding of voice and she's commenting a lot of the time on people in shows that I don't watch, but they have little excerpts of where like I guess there's this doctor on the this it's like an ER type show. It's like a revisiting of the the show er but she talks about how as he's matured from season to season in his role on the show and he's mentoring how she literally talks about how um his larynx and fairings are how he's controlling those differently as he matures and then when he has a breakdown how the the voice moves further up into his head and what what that's about and so I was thinking about this I'm like you know here's somebody that's a very unique you know window into all of this but we sort of know this intuitively like when we're excited like there's this kind of rising from the bottom and when we're relaxed everything just kind of sinks down to a the diaphragmatic breathing and things as a scientist who studies emotion. How do you sort of decide what what uh which lens to look at things through? Um because a lot of the stuff I'm talking about might sound a little esoteric, but it's actually the stuff that's easiest to measure. Yeah, presumably you can quantitatively measure like breaths per minute when somebody's looking at an awe inspiring image versus like a trivial image. I love your reference to chakras and you know the older I get, you know, I've been doing emotion science for 34 years or 5 years. It's good to think about the other traditions. You know, we wouldn't have thought about the breath, the power of the breath, uh, without the contemplative meditation traditions that you've impart Ted and Richie Davidson and others. And lo and behold, the breath, deep exhalation, activates the vagus nerve, calms us down. That activation of the vagus nerve gives people a sense of warmth in your chest, which kind of sounds like the heart chakra. And all the speculation around how your soul is in your heart. Well, there's a neurohysiological coralate of that. Uh, I love the paintings of Alex Gray, the psychedelic artist. Like, if you want an image of what our neurohysiology is, is it synchronizes in love. You could, it's pretty close or it's interesting, right? So, it's good to find inspiration in that. One of the great things about the science of emotion and and I brought these tools into the study of awe, you know, which is we have learned a lot about how to measure emotion, you know, you can measure it with facial muscles and gaze patterns and coloration of the face and breath patterns and, you know, different measures of veagal tone uh and immune system activation and activation in the gut and of course brain activation and the voice which is one of my favorite modalities. I learned this in some sense from Darwin. Darwin's expression of emotion in man and animals is in my view and we're just publishing a paper on this uh on everything that he said about human emotion. 53 emotions annotated with eight modalities of expressive behavior. I wrote it with Darwin scholar Frank Sulloway who knows everything about Darwin. And I choose how to study an emotion based on what's what's happening out in our lives in our the phenomena out there. Right? So if you're studying awe, you should get people around big trees or in musical concerts or in museums, right? Uh if you're I studied embarrassment early in my career and modesty and I'm like I got to study young men teasing each other because we embarrass each other, you know, intentionally. Oh my goodness. We have to hear about that that that work again. It's become very relevant nowadays because of the because of the uh I'll just call it what it is. It's not dreaded. It's the dreadful manosphere, you know, which people use very broadly, but I think now it's being, you know, allocated to the the the worst of the worst. But then there is this phenomenon among males where they'll riv each other, you know, and there's there's a healthy version of males interacting too, right? you know uh so we'll get back to that. I base it on what's the phenomenon of interest right that that speaks to humanity and then what are our best measures that we can go after it these days if you want to measure awe what's your favorite awe stimulus first stop and thank you for asking about measurement like it's interesting like people are like oh you can't study awe you know you don't know how to measure it it's it's ineffable it's mysterious it's spiritual we can measure awe really well you know the vocalization Oh, you know the facial expression uh activation part parts of the brain are deactivated uh veagal tone the goosebumps is a good uh part of the awe response as we started to study awe. We did two things and one is typical west, you know, science which is get your most cool awe videos, show them to people, you know, and I had some mis missteps in this science. I had a woman who was an honor student at Berkeley who was coming back from Burning Man and you know, she's like, I'm going to show engineers fractal imagery and you know, and the engineers are like, who is this woman? I mean, there is the the I've never been to Burning Man, but there's the the post Burning Man glow that people come back with that is for understandable reasons hard for most people to enter with them. It's like a kid coming back from summer camp. There's great visual imagery. You know, BBC Earth is awesome and it's it uh makes people feel aw slow motion guys. I don't know if you know these guys. They film wild things in slow motion like you know dropping a wine glass and it's this spectacular photography and just you know you're like so it opens you up to We'll put a link to that. I I love super slow-mo. Yeah. Um and that fits our definition which is like you don't understand what's happening. It's vast. this mysterious. But what I'm really proud of, Andrew, is the work we did out in the field. Right. So, one of our first studies on the Berkeley campus that you frequented and got your master's degree at and headed into neuroscience was uh in our paleontology museum. There's a replica of a T-Rex skeleton when I was 5 years old and and I learned about dinosaurs. It changed my life. It was just in the LA Natural History Museum. Like, wow. So, we studied people standing near the T-Rex skeleton and they became expansive and collective. We studied people near giant eucalyptus trees. We studied people at Yeuseite. You know, Yang by a student in my lab stopped hundreds of travelers from all over the world right when you see. And she said, "How do you feel about yourself right now?" And they're like, "I feel small and quiet, but part of something really large." Right? uh subsequent to that there are scientists who are studying mosh pits at concerts and you know surfers and you know rock climb I mean it's you know backpackers and you know we studied one of my favorite studies later with Stacy Bear who's a veteran who ran that who's amazing human being an awe pioneer we studied people rafting down the American river you know veterans just like whoa we've studied people in art museums carne Hall, you know. So, it's it, you know, one of the joys is when science, you know, just in the spirit of your questions, it's like, well, what should I really do here, right? I could stay in the lab, but it's like, no, you know, we got to go do stuff, you know, that that uh my dream study was to like have a participant come in and and engage a conversation. The other participant is Shaquille O'Neal, right? And it's like 7 foot2, 350 pounds. You'd be like, whoa. But couldn't do that. So, uh, so there it's been fun. It's been a wild ride. And so many thoughts. Uh, first one, um, I'm lucky I didn't rotate through your lab because I, uh, would have never become a neuroscientist, but I'm unlucky. We're glad you, you missed that opportunity, but I'm but I'm unlucky because it would have been so much fun to cuz I, while I loved the the wet lab, as they call it, getting into these experiments would just be incredible. Couple things. uh the Shaquille O'Neal thing. I um you I think we're all moved by these uh I guess they used to call them Make a Wish Foundation things where a kid who sadly is dying gets some last wish and it's a tragic circumstance but then you get to observe these kids and most importantly they get to experience something that they never could have imagined happening like like a Shaquille O'Neal walking in. I feel like that's probably happened or something. And I think what we're witnessing in those moments has to be awe like they can't believe that this human or this event, whatever it is that they they wish for is happening there. And so it's sort of layers upon layers of there's like a grief component for those of us watching. Well, but a huge aspect of the of just how touching it is is the fact that like for those moments they're not thinking about their mortality and no kid should have to think about their mortality, right? I mean, even as I talk about it, it's like Yeah. Profound. Yeah. It's just it's like there's an overwhelming in the opposite direction, right? That's an a particularly uh complicated and and interesting uh case where you've got two things colliding, right? Because I feel like awe is so life affirming. Yeah, it is. And uh anyway, that's just an obs an observation. But horizons are something that fascinated me for a long time as a vision scientist because when we see a horizon, our visual um angle widens. That's cool. We become more parasympathetic. There's a whole coming off the accelerator of the sympathetic nervous system. So, we relax by virtue of coming off the the focusing component. When we focus in through a tunnel, we it's quite the opposite. Nice. But I feel like there's something unique to this experience of being in a tunnel thinking about Yuseite or in a bunch of trees or height and then the horizon opens up. Yeah. there's this transformation of visual space and those moments at least for me are the moments. So I mean I can hike along a ridge line for a long time like this is amazing but there's something distinctly bigger in the experience of going from confinement to openness. It could be brought to the lab. But do you think that's what's going on in in Yusede or the Grand Canyon? Do people who work in Yusede in the Grand Canyon do they attenuate? They're like, "Oh, yeah, like another horizon." I don't know. You know, I'm working with rangers right now, and they I think I think the big expansive forms of awe that those places provide is attenuated, but they're still finding it uh in subtler ways. Yeah, that's really interesting. And you know, it's it is interesting. I was um I've been privileged to know Pete Doctor at Pixar for 15 years and worked on some of his films, Inside Out and Inside Out 2. And so, you played a big role in that. Yeah. And through this science of emotion and I was like you in one of our conversations I was like tell me about some techniques for producing awe in children's films animated films and and he described first just what you said like you know the film is narrow like a certain kind of attention you know sort of sympathetic fearful checking things and then it comes it suddenly you see the vastness of something and it's true it is all inspiring when you Think about it neuroscientifically as a very basic form of awe is shifting from small to vast in terms of vision and perception and then it becomes metaphorical right it's like god I'm thinking about like I love one of the wonders of life that uh that makes us feel awe is big ideas and epiphies and very often people be like god I've been working so hard at this you know I'm working on a a paper something in technology or some part of my life and then you suddenly realize It's part of something large, right? One of the musicians that I interviewed, Yumi Kendall, in the book in the chapter on musical a said, you know, she's a chist for the Philadelphia Symphony said, you know, I I practice for five hours a day. It's hard, man, and it's small and narrow and where's my finger? And then when I'm on stage and I and I feel the notes go out into this space, the vastness you're talking about, I feel like I'm part of history, right? and I tear up and cry. Um, so I think you're I think I I you got to send me those papers, Andrew, because I think it's fundamental, which is from small to vast. And in fact, we did this really cool study with Virginia Sturm at UC San Francisco, brain health, old people go out on an awok once a week for eight weeks, 75 years old or older, and all we asked them to do was to go from small to vast and how they looked at things. you know, look at a tree, look at a leaf, go out to the pattern of leaves. It brought them all and less physical pain uh over eight weeks and now we're finding six years later better brain health. Right. So small to vast is a big part of it. I'm um struck by the by the awe walk um and and I know this comes up in your book and elsewhere and you've done a lot of research on this. For those listening um what would an awe look like and um what are some of the health benefits? You just mentioned a few that that have been observed both in the short and the long term. Yeah, thank you. You know, uh we we are a walking species. You know, it is just in our DNA to walk. We meandered from Africa all the to all the continents. A lot of people, Rebecca Snet writes about this, like walking is almost sacred. It's a kind of consciousness like you're saying like whoa I'm I'm picking up a vaster view of what's around me and I uh decided to just create this allw walk you know and I did it for a meditation group the or mindful magazine you just slow down you a lot of people walk hundreds of you know tens of millions of people have regular walks in the United States uh it's good for you you know so we just add it all like on your regular walk once a week in our study. Uh go somewhere you wouldn't ordinarily go, go someplace that may surprise you. Uh I walk around Berkeley a lot and I was like, well, I'm going to go past the little playground that my daughters played at when they were young and just feel that, you know, Cordes Park. Yeah. With the rock slide and the tunnel. Exactly. I love that place. Near the rose. And there's a secret. Should we give this away? Yeah. There's a secret hiking trail through it's actually through a private property's backyard and they allow you to go through if you are quiet and you pick up your trash and there's an incredible waterfall and place to stand at the top. There's a beam there. You've been there, I'm sure. Where you can look out over this what is kind of like a trench of tree. It's it's a total transformation of one space to the next if you look for it properly. I'm sure now it's on the internet. Uh it's in kind of swinging gate. It's not locked. And uh so hard to find. And there's a little monastery maybe nearby. And um and you might and you might see me a couple years ago, you would have seen me me and my dog, but you might see me uh eating a slice of pizza from the cheeseboard sitting on that log. I spent a lot of time there. I'm getting goosebumps, Henry. That is just pure Berkeley. Thank you. So yeah, so in this study, all walk go on your walk. Find a place that's going to be a little surprising where it may make you feel a little bit of childlike wonder. And it's interesting, no one's asked me this question, you know, your observation about small to vast. And we just said, slow down, deepen your breathing, sync it up with your your walking, which you've studied empirically, the breath, and then um go from small to vast. You know, look at clouds. Look at the whole pattern of clouds. Just slow it down. Look at trees. Look at the light on the trees and look at points of light and then patterns of light. Look at, you know, I love walking past playgrounds. It's one of my favorite sources of awe. Listen to one laugh and then listen to the whole symphony of laughter of kids, right? That's all. And they walk through uh they do that for half an hour. And what we find in that study is is they become more vast in their consciousness. They're more aware in the photographs that they provided of what's around them. They feel more kindness over the eight weeks. They feel more awe over an 8week period. It rises. And then the the finding that was, you know, important for people who are elderly is less physical pain. You know, your body starts to ache when you're 75, you know, or earlier. and and awe I think through the inflammation process you know and reducing it caused less pain you know this dovetales with other health benefits a is good for reduced inflammation elevated veagal tone reduced long COVID symptoms we have people with long COVID just a minute of awe a day reduced long COVID symptoms it's good news right and and there's so much science on it that I 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. I have a lot of thoughts about um this going from uh small to large. Yeah, I'd love to hear them. But before I I do um I have another question. I have another question. I think for a lot of people um including myself, we assume that awe is this kind of forgetting of our self. like getting outside of ourselves. But I'm starting to think based on the way you're describing it that it's about being tethered to the larger picture that it's not a a yes, it's getting out of our heads, quote unquote, but it's actually very much an embodied experience. It's very it's almost like full body. And so now I'll answer your question. This is usually where people start putting in the comments like you talk too much. Let your your guest talk. trying folks. He asked me twice. So you ask me a question, I'm going to answer it. Anyone that knows me, you know, if I had Okay, so I've thought about this this relationship between visual aperture and a time perception for a long time. This is my my deepest obsession and it uh gets a little bit into the book I'm writing, but it but it it's probably reserved for after there's some experiments and and I um to the fear of my podcast crew, I actually am considering going back into the lab to do the this experiment. So, we know what do we know for certain? We know for certain that when your visual aperture is small like looking through a soda straw view or watch um maker type aperture or um you're in a let's just say it could be a pleasant or unpleasant text communication that's going back and forth that your perception of time is different. You're fine slicing those dot dot dots coming through. Yeah. It's just like this. It feels like an eternity. And it's birectional with your let's just call it level of alertness. It doesn't even have to be stress but sympathetic nervous system. Right. So, if I'm in line at the store and and I I have someplace to be, my visual aperture shrinks and then it feels like the person in front of me is taking forever. Yeah. Cuz you're in these little migraines. When I'm relaxed, it feels like I'm I'm slicing time differently. Okay. When we see a horizon and and our aperture opens up, as I mentioned, then we relax. But we also are taking fewer time bit snapshots. So people might think, "Oh, fewer, you're in slow motion because the No, you're it's the opposite, right? Slow motion is high frame rate." This thing about video where you can catch slow motion, you need high frame rate. This is why when people experience uh like a car crash, they'll often say that things felt like they were slowing down, more snapshots. So when I think about this relationship between visual aperture and time, and it also exists in the auditory domain. So if I'm listening to a specific conversation at a party, I'm fine slicing my perception of auditory space. Our friend Irv Hafter taught me this. When I listen to everything and I take it in as a whole, it's it's a more relaxed experience. But okay, cool. So a long time ago, I was because I was experiencing stress, I started reading about meditation types and different things and and I I came up with this meditation. It's but it's not meditation at all. And some of my listeners will be familiar with it. I decided to call it, for lack of a better term, spacetime bridging. The meditation is very simple. You um close your eyes and you do three breaths. Thinking about your skin inward. So interosception. You open your eyes and you look at your hand. You take three breaths, but you're creating a visual tether between you and your hand. Then you look some distance, maybe eight or 10 feet away. You do the same. Then you find a horizon. And then you think about the sort of pale blue dot phenomenon like you're just on a planet. it's floating in space and like every single one of these things is a form of meditation or a meme or or whatever and then you get right back to yourself. And so what the the idea here is that it helped me a lot because I noticed that meditations where I was completely focused inward made me more focused inward. Going for a run I could get outside my head but it and I started to play with the idea that maybe it's not about having a small aperture or a big aperture per se but it's the like every great thing in biology or psychology. It's the process. It's not an event. It's the process of going from one aperture to the next. Cool. And that's kind of what life is about. Yeah. Absolutely. like when this two shall pass is really about taking a broader time snapshot like eventually this is visual which is visual and so there's a long answer to your question but um this is why it's so important for me to see a horizon if I can in the morning um but it's also very important to go indoors and just like focus on what I'm working on like there is no place or event in a day or in life that that's actually the right way to live like you can go to big su and if you're lucky enough to go to Eselin like you're like this is it but it's only it because you came from your office in my opinion and then you go back again you figure this out like you the title of this paper for which you're the senior author is a balanced mind all fosters equinimity via temporal distancing so it's so it's about time not about space it is that's fascinating so that's that's how I think about this now maybe you can tell us about this paper because I'm getting embarrassed that I've been going way too This is why we're in conversation, Andrew, which is, you know, you've studied the visual system and and uh we need more of that knowledge in the science of awe. And I will just make one parenthetical note, which is I was interviewing Matias Tonopovski who was at Berkeley, ran and then went to the Philadelphia Symphony and was a music director there and he said I was like and he was he studies the great and he's a conductor of symphonies and I was like what's the secret? Music's hard to understand scientifically. It is complicated. I was like, "What's the why awe and music? Why do we cry? Why do we get goosebumps? Why do I mean profound?" And he's like, "Time. It's all about what it does to our sense of time." And so I think there's a hypothesis there to explore what awe does to the self. And I'm putting together a couple of your comments is and Jane Goodall got it most right. and and it's you know it's so great to study things with science and then you see someone you really re revere say something and she was she felt that chimpanzees feel awe I do too believe that so comp it's a controversial issue uh chimps show and France Dval alerted me to this who recently passed away and I just want to pay reverence to him or homage to him um the great pimeathologist so he said you got to look at Jane Goodall and writing about chimps and the waterfall display they show when they are around vast nature. They sit quietly like around rivers like that waterfall in Berkeley. They they look at things, they get goosebumps, they touch things like we would out in nature. Uh they rock uh and they Jane Goodall said why wouldn't they feel awe? uh or be the beginnings of spirituality which is really being amazed at things outside of the self. So with awe we we have a sense of self interception and the like and then we connect to vast things out there and that's what our research documented as kind of a central mechanism of awe or transformation is like when you're at euseity or when you are standing next to that T-Rex skeleton or when you've you know when you've thought about the passage of time that happens with life right and there new meditations around that you're like, "Wow, I am part of something vast. I'm part of evolution. I'm part of nature. I'm part of an ecosystem." Uh, and it changes your whole mind, right? It changes the neurohysiology of the mind. default mode network starts to quiet down, activates veagal tone, and you do feel like you're tethered, as you said, to like music or a culture or political movement or the team you love, right? And it's transcendent. Um, and if you look at where we are today, we need more of that. You know, we need to to get our young people to be connecting to big things. As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 for nearly 15 years now. I discovered it way back in 2012, long before I ever had a podcast, and I've been taking it every day since. The reason I started taking it, and the reason I still take it, is because AG1 is, to my knowledge, the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market. It combines vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, probiotics, and adaptogens into a single scoop that's easy to drink, and it tastes great. It's designed to support things like gut health, immune health, and overall energy. And it does so by helping to fill any gaps you might have in your daily nutrition. Now, of course, everyone should strive to eat nutritious whole foods. I certainly do that every day. But I'm often asked, if you could take just one supplement, what would that supplement be? And my answer is always AG1 because it has just been oh so critical to supporting all aspects of my physical health, mental health, and performance. I know this from my own experience with AG1 and I continually hear this from other people who use AG1 daily. If you would like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a special offer. For a limited time, AG1 is giving away six free travel packs of AG1 and a bottle of vitamin D3 K2 with your subscription. Again, that's drink AG1 with the numeral one.com/huberman to get six free travel packs and a bottle of vitamin D3 K2 with your subscription. I didn't expect that we would uh land here, at least not so early in the conversation, but there, you know, we we've had Kristoff Caulk on this uh podcast talking about consciousness, you know, incredible neuroscientist and really thinker. I mean, I've watched his career evolve over the years and and he's continued to evolve his concepts of how to think about consciousness and um you know, we'll hear nowadays about, oh, like maybe consciousness is outside the brain. I think if nothing else, our brains are important components in it. Maybe not. I don't know. I don't want to do the experiment on myself to find out. Like if I was disbibrated or something, which basically means having your cortex remove folks. Sorry for the nerd speak. But the idea is connecting through time like in our own lives is a very unique form of awe. So like if I hear a song and it reminds me when I was like 15 and then all of a sudden all the the the ma as I call it like the magic library come that's how the brain works right it's like it's like a Harry Potter like you take out a book you see a subject and then all of a sudden the library the books around it change and so I'm thinking about the time we did this and the time we did that and everyone has these notions but it's very much linked to them. That's one form of linking up through time. Well put. And then there's this other one where you feel something with someone else. You know you're connected in that moment, but there's this idea, forgive me for getting squishy on here, but there's this idea that maybe your past, present, and future is connected to their past and present and future. And then you if you let yourself go there, no drugs required. If you let yourself go there, you're like, "Oh, we're part of this together." and that we're sort of moving more now as as a as a a conscious fleet than as individuals. I think that's a very real experience even for people that are like very resistant to kind of the like even the language of of collective consciousness and things like that. And I think concerts are where we generally feel that because we're it requires a sort of shared perceptual experience or emotional experience. Y and so when you say getting young people connected that way Yeah. It's very different than like node to node. It's it's sort of like it's an openness that comes first you have to connect to your your past, present, and future and then you're kind of open to it. I feel like then that that window opens and then if there's one person there or a thousand people standing there like it's on. Yeah. But if not, and you're just in your like your experience, you're the person at the party wondering whether or not um you have something between your teeth, which is the lamest way to be at a party, but we've all been there, right? Anyway, I'm getting a little outside the box here, but what are your thoughts? What are your thoughts about individual awe experiences like on the awe walk versus a couple on an awok versus connecting to a whole mess of people, some of whom you've never met? I mean you've highlighted you know this this temporal this dynamic that you're pointing to u with respect to awe and the experience of awe and we're so limited in how we measure experience and I uh I think you're right I think that you know your first sense of like one of the most awesome qualities of awe is connecting in your mind through the layers of consciousness and experience that shifts out of the micro to this expansive narrative about your mind, right? And so I grew up around the UCLA campus because my mom got her PhD there at UCLA at UCLA in the late 60s and there were eucalyptus trees and and then I went to Northern California where there were not as many eucalyptus trees and I first day I was at UC Santa Barbara as an undergrad. I smelled the eucalyptus and I it was awe. It was just like ah all of these experiences through the alactory process. Yeah. I was aruck by that smell, right? And that's through the connecting through time. I am very persuaded by the new literature on brain synchronization. Uh that we are and I talk about this a bit in awe and and there's just new science coming out. We're always syncing up with other people. You know, when a nine-month-old listens to music, they are syncing up to the sounds and rhythms of their cultures music and they're synced up physiologically with whomever is in their midst. when we go to a concert or we watch a sporting event, you know, if you're if you like sports, your heart rate is sinking up, your brains are synchronizing that it's and and that in some sense is the materialistic account of collective consciousness. We're all sharing brain patterns and awareness. Um, and I think that it's it's part of some of our deepest forms of awe, you know, and music now, the current science of music is like it is very hard to get people to think collectively in the same way. You know, when you teach a classroom, it's impossible. But music does it within milliseconds, right? When you talk to people who've been to Taylor Swift shows who are Swifties, it's serious, right? They are instantly bonded. That's that's the united in like a moral cause almost or identity cause. So that's profound. That's very hard work to do. And when Jonathan Height and I wrote about awe early in our careers, um, you know, we were like, we need these emotions to make us be part of collectives because we are a very collective species. It was one of our signature strengths is to fold into groups and to cooperate and share. It's hard work. It's vulnerable to exploitation. And awe is one of the fastest pathways through as through what you're talking about through physical dancing together, chanting together, sporting events together, what Emil Durkheim called collective effrovescence, right? Music, just sinkering, syncing up with each other, feeling like we're part of this vast group, sharing a sense of humanity, a sense that we all suffer in the same way or exalt in the same way. And it's profound. You know, I don't think we'll ever get this with science, but I love, you know, you know, I've had all these conversations about awe and and musical awe. I'm like, when's a time, and I could ask you this question, when being at a concert has changed your life? Oh, I mean, they're some of the most important, not just memorable, but important experiences of my entire life. So, tell me about one or two. My sister listened to The Grateful Dead and Cat Stevens and all that kind of stuff. And from the first time I heard, people will immediately think bullet bullet belts and mohawks, but I was a punk rock kid. I mean, I'll never forget like uh my friend who's now well known in the skateboard community, Jim Thibo. I know Jim. You know Jim? He's a close friend of mine. I text with Jim. Do you? I texted with him this morning. We text each other every morning. The great Jim Thibo. He basically runs skateboard. He's the dean of skateboarding. quiet. Good friends with Tommy Guerrero. Good friends with Tommy Guerrero. Uh Jim gave me my first cup of black coffee. He was the person who inspired me to uh to start journaling when I was 14. I I was put on out of sympathy onto uh Thunder Trucks and he at the time he was around the the factory which at that time was over in Third Street where all the uh Hunter Point um on Yuseite. But anyway, Jim gave me a tape cuz back then it was tapes of a band called Crimp Shrine which is from Berkeley. Um and uh they were on Lookout Records which eventually were first releases of Green Day. I wasn't so much forgive me I like those guys. Um I know some of them but I was super I heard that tape was like this is amazing. Like this is amazing. Like I've never heard anything quite like it. Yeah. It was super raw. It was um and then I I was like I need more of this. It was like it was like a drug. I was like I need more of this whatever this is. And so he gave me a Stiff Little Fingers tape and that was just it. And then it was Stiff Little Fingers, Operation Ivy, Rancid. I mean I could easily like do a whole literally a thesis on that whole kind of era and genre of punk rock. I'm a huge Joe Strummer fan. Yeah. um messeros and uh biggest ransom fan there ever was. I'm blessed to be good friends with Tim Armstrong these days, but I only met him later in life and that still freaks me out because we're close friends. But whenever I see him, it's still I'm like that's Tim Armstrong because there's the for talk about time travel. That's the 14 15year-old version of me. Those guys are a bit older. They were like gods in the Bay Area for our scene, you know, and then when they made it, you know, and they're just still so good. Yeah. The show that changed everything for me was this would be somewhere between 93 and 94. Uh a little club. It was either called the stage house or the stage coach in Santa Barbara that was near the railroad tracks downtown. And it was um Rancid playing with Sick of It All which was a East Coast hardcore band which you know and and my now good friend Toby Moors was there and I remember going there and being kind of scared. I I mean I I'm kind of like my way around. Um it was just like those guys were older. It was it had a kind of violent feel. Yeah. They were from Albany and West Oakland and some of some of some of there was an edge there and I remember thinking this is exciting. I feel very much a part of this. I love the music. I know every lyric and I'm a little bit frightened and I love it. And I think it was just, you know, the I just got the adrenaline back and there's a little bit of you don't know what it is going to happen and it feels a little dangerous, but it's mostly benevolent and um it's an irreplaceable feeling and and I think about sometime uh I think about a lot of the time. Yeah. And you know, thank you. And I you know when I was writing this book on awe some forms of awe you know there are eight wonders that give us awe you know some are you kind of understand them nature is pretty straightforward spirituality medit meditation you know and music and your description of it exactly exactly captures how rich it is and complicated which is there is something about that sound and the acoustic patterns patterns that come through your eardrums and head into your auditory cortex and you give it meaning and suddenly you're remembering things and bonding with people and insta friends like you said for life you know brothers and sisters almost that and you're like this is what life's about and Susan Langanger uh a philosopher really got it right she's like music is this tonal language of emotion and identity and awe in music very fitting with our conversation is when those sounds come into you, move you and connect you to something that is what you care about in life. You know, I remember I grew up I was very lucky to grow up in Laurel Canyon in the late 60s and there was more music there than I almost anywhere in human history. You know, from you know the Mamas and Papas and Frank Zappa Jim Morrison was out there. Jim Morrison was living there and the doors and the, you know, Bob Dylan was passing through and the birds. It was a joke, you know, it was everywhere. And that's wild just to think about how much incredible music was being created. Oh, man. You know, the Beach Boys were, you know, at I mean, weren't Fleetwood Mac back in in Topanga? Yeah. I mean, it was like and I was eight and nine and just to, you know, to grow up on Bob Dylan and when I saw Bob the recent film with Timothy Shalom, I started crying, you I was just like this is life you know. Yeah. And so that's why we study awe you know it it and and you know music is one of our great technologies. Uh there's now research showing it's good for chronic pain. I think it's a frontier in healthcare and you know just giving people contemplative meditative approaches to music and and and awe is part of the answer. And you and I shared yet another thing, Andrew. You know, when I uh grew up in the foothills of the Sierra as a teenager, Ted Nan and you know, was poor, you know, area, Ted Nan, AC/DC, and that's all fine. And when I first heard the Sex Pistols in I was lucky to be in England when Never Mind the Bollocks came out and I was in a working class fighting town and I heard that I was like that's it. And then that led me to Iggy Pop who's one of my moral heroes. So you know he's really into Chiong apparently. I heard him like years ago on the radio and and someone was asking him like how does he stay in such good shape and he's just tons of chiong breathing. Wild wild. You know, it's interesting because a lot of music has lyrics and a lot doesn't but there's something that feels kind of um divorced from language about the experience that we're talking about even though there's lyrics tied in there. And and what brings that to mind is there's a a really good book, one that I like anyway, um called A Fighter's Heart by a guy named Sam Sheridan. His wife actually wrote that movie Monster with Charlies Thuron, I think is the actress that played her. And um and I don't know Sam, but but there's this description of all these different martial arts forms and he explores them all and um there's this great line in there because I've done a little bit of boxing um and and sparred a bit. I don't recommend as a neuroscientist. How can I recommend it? Right. Get hit. Well, I was and that I was actually in my 30s, but anyway, I was working some stuff out, but I do not recommend uh the sport. Yeah, the training. Yeah. But you don't want to get hit in the head. Not good for your brain whatsoever. But he talks about how um fighting with someone, sparring or fighting with someone is uh he said it's like a it's one of the most bonding experiences that you'll ever have because you're in this primitive non-language state. I mean, he actually likens it to a one night stand. He says something like, "Oh, you know, you're sharing bodily fluids with somebody that you barely know, but you you feel connected, you know." So, I don't know if that's the best. It's certainly not the most politically correct uh way to put it, but but I understand what he's talking about, right? You're you're in this moment of you're both vulnerable. In the case of the fighting, you're both vulnerable. You're trying to hurt each other. You're also obeying some rules, right? It's not not anything goes. And he talks about how it transcends language. And that creates a forever bond. And it's true. Yeah. Right. I didn't do a ton of sparring, but you have a respect. Yep. You went through something hard together, even if it's only three three minute rounds. Like that's a it's real, but it's separate from language. And earlier we were talking about the exper the experience of emotion as this kind of triad of the feeling, the motor component to it and language. But I do think that maybe the language piece can go. I'm with you in some sense. Darwin wrote about the motor components got a lot of it right. William James was about the body you know and the physiology and you know language is what we rely on as social scientists but it I think it's as William James said when he tried to describe his experience of transcendence uh when he took laughing gas and it led him down the path to understand spirituality. He's like words are tattered fragments. They they barely touch the real thing. Um, yeah. And and I just want to dwell for a moment, you know, part of awe and I learned this like talking to veterans, you know, and I I did work with Stacy Bearer and we did this Sierra Club research getting veterans out on the rivers and he's one of my heroes in the book of getting tens of thousands of veterans to find their awe in nature, you know, and these are guys who've lost limbs and they're rock climbing, you know, and it's just like like there's a lot of awe when you're right at the edge of life and there's violence. violence and and there's a lot of horror, carnage, etc., but there's awe. Uh, and I love your idea and and I think any teacher of of the martial arts would say that's the point is that we can transcend death or or violence by martial arts by performing them and and uh and putting them into uh a contemplative form for the body. One of my favorite movies, if not my favorite movie, is Raging Bull, man. And Martin Scorsesei, like Jake Lamada and Sugar Ray have these epic battles and they look at each other, you know, one of the great scenes and they're just like, we're united. This is we're way beyond the fight, you know? I think you're right. I think it's part of this transcendent moment that of people crashing into each other. Mosh pits are one of my favorite objects of study in awe and mosh pits have a law a set of laws to them. Yeah. People have studied like the sort of the physics of Yeah. No, it's like and you think you're crash and you are you're bruising yourself, you know, but there's something transcendent there about what we find. I could be wrong, but I think um Raging Bull, I think that the soundtrack was Clash inspired. There's something about it in the documentary, which I highly recommend, uh called The Future Is Unwritten, which is the Joe Strummer thing where some there's some link up between the Clash. I think Scorsese says, you know, the Clash inspired the soundtrack to Raging Bull or something like that. Really? Anyway, he's a big Clash fan. So, um or Yeah. All right, Andrew, I get to ask you one more question. Yeah. Yeah. So, why is Joe Strummer a person of moral beauty to you? One of the sources of awe is we're amazed by people's courage and strength and kindness and justice. So why Joe Strummer man? All right, I'm going to try and keep this brief. Um I mean just to give you a sense of how what an impact he's had on me. I mean I've always worn these button-down black shirts even before I was public facing. Um cuz I saw him do a show um Mascalero show. I wasn't there, but he and by the way, Joe Strummer and the Meascaleros I actually think is better than the Clash. Clash was a short run. It was only five years. Only five years pretty much. And then they're done. So 101, Clash, and then and then he came back with the Muscalos and just incredible. I mean, they're masterpieces. Produced in part by my friend Tim Armstrong. He went Hellcat Records. He went to a small label. Um he also sang songs with Johnny Cash for where with Rick Rubin. actually know the story of that because I'm friends with Rick and I insisted on him telling me the story. So sometime I tell you that but I mean masterpieces late in life and there was a show that that Strummer played where he was wearing his black button-down soaking in sweat like soaked in sweat and he just wouldn't take the thing off. I think he might have rolled up like one cuff and I was like that's punk as [ __ ] I was like that guy is so rad. And he was in he died at 50 where the I'm 50 now. Died at 50. Yeah, I go see the mural of him right off um it's right off Tommpkins Square Park uh in Alphabet City every time I'm in New York. Just go like see it. The Aviator says future is unwritten. You can go there, pay your respects. I've talked to Rick about this a lot. Like what was it about him? Yeah, because they were close friends. I never met Strummer, but I think there's three reasons. one is um he had that Bob Dylan like ability to write lyrics that you're not especially with mealos where you're not really sure what the song's about but it makes sense not just because it's beautiful but you feel like he's tapping into something more fundamental than what the lyrics are actually saying beyond language talk a great song um for instance would be like on the road to rock and roll like it that could be about being on tour or something but it transcends something obvious Nice. The other thing is is the way he he uh used his breath was um like there was a his inonation is like unparalleled. And then Rick was the one who really helped me understand cuz during the summer I go hang out with Rick whenever I can and winter too. Um and we watch documentaries including Clash documentaries and I asked him I was like what was it like? Why does he have this thing? because he says these incredible things, you know, he would say things like, you know, you got to bring humanity back into the center of the and those are really beautiful quotes, but like a lot of people will give beautiful quotes. And Rick in very Rick Rubin style said everything he said, he brought his whole life experience into those statements. And I was like, just the statements like the quotes, you know, like the, you know, we got to bring the humanity back into the room. And he goes, no, everything he said, it was like you got the sense that he was bringing all of himself to it, even if he was being kind of quiet. And I go, okay, so this is clearly on a plane of understanding that I can't put language to, right? What does that even mean? That's like half the things Rick says. It's like a riddle mixed up in a poem, you know, put out there as, you know, as like a as a principle, and you're just like, "What the hell does that mean?" But but it feels true. And I think that, you know, and and Rick's superpower is that Rick knows what a true feeling feels like. And he knows what a false feeling feels like and he's only interested in truths. Period. And that's the challenge of the science that I'm part of is exactly that. It's like there are all these layers of meaning and representation and you know and we try to figure out true moments of awe with all of our measures and and it is this like it's all coming together as a uh a package that tells us it's happened. So we can think about things that promote awe. The awe walk, going small to large aperture, maybe back again, you know, like I guess we shouldn't assume that it's a unidirectional, you know, coming back into our home after something big is there's nothing like that, right? The dog, the kids, the the spouse, the whatever, you know, like those little the plants, you know, the the you know, so it runs both ways. It's no fun. But we should probably talk about some of the inhibitors of awe because as I step back from what we're talking about today and I think okay language it can be part of it but it can also in uh molecular biology or genetics we call it a dominant negative. It's like a gene that basically suppresses a set of functions a ton of stuff. There's a joke around molecular labs in neuroscience labs that you'd be like that person's a dominant negative I now have a new phrase I can use. Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to be called a dominant negative. I call people that in my head a lot online. I go, "Oh man, that person's dominant negative. They're not contributing to the greater good." They're just like, so there's, you know, language can be that um or be neutral or be positive, but can definitely be that. And then there's something about being overidentified with self, you know. I so on the recommendation of Tim Armstrong, someone you wouldn't associate with the Grateful Dead, he was like, "You got to listen to The Grateful Dead." And I was like, "What?" And what this Tim the Tim Armstrong transplants, Rancid, Operation Ivy, telling me I should listen to The Grateful Dead. He's a big He's a huge music fan of all sorts of things. I said, "Why?" And he said, "Uh," he said, "they're punk rockers." And I said, "What are you talking about?" out and he said he said yeah they they played a different show every night. That's how they're I'm not going to keep doing his I can do a pretty decent Tim for that. Uh but apparently their the the people that followed them that was a big part of it. It was all all all new, Every show was unique. Started getting really into listening to the Grateful Dead in the last couple years. And then I started listening to documentaries, biographies of them. And there's this amazing moment in one of them, I can't remember which, where somebody says, "What killed it? What killed the collective of music?" Like, that feeling and uh the answer someone gave was cocaine. And then the question was, "Why cocaine?" and someone said, "Cuz cocaine's all about me. It's the me drug." Yeah. So I was like, whoa, I'm a neuroscientist, so I can tack that to you're talking about dopamine and adrenaline and it's when dopamine and adrenaline are elevated that it's a very I mean amphetamines especially, but it's it becomes a me thing. Every idea that's mine is the thing that needs to happen. It's the important thing. If not out there, it needs to happen. Like that's the only thing that matters. very different than cannabis, very different than psychedelics, very different than just the sober experience. Word's kind of a downer, but then the non- intoxicated experience of just being with the music, no substances. So, I'd love your thoughts on how certain chemical states and but more broadly how meanness, self-interested states are a dominant negative for a entrance into that question I've ever encountered. You know, it's amazing, Andrew. You know, I grew up for three years, formative years in Laurel Canyon, 68 to 70, and then we moved to the foothills of the Sierras in Northern California, and it was peak Laurel Canyon, Joanie Mitchell and the Birds and the Beach Boys, and you know, it was just jealous. envious in a positive way. when my brother passed away and he it was my brother of awe you know 14 months younger and I was in this reflective period I started reading a lot about Laurel Canyon and they made the same point which is kind of things shifted after we you know in the early 70s and the historian said it's cocaine that it moved from you know marijuana and mushrooms and psychedelics a bit but really you know people playing music you know Jonie Mitchell or Graham Nash or whomever it is and then suddenly cocaine comes and the the whole spirit changed. Yeah. I think the great enemy of awe is meanness is what Ralph Aldo Emerson who was one of our great writers of awe. You know he has this moment out in nature cold day in Massachusetts sees this forest and he you know he's like standing on the bare ground my head bathed by lie there and uplifted into infinite space. There's that uplift that you described earlier of awe. uh all mean egotism vanishes and that's all you know awe quiets the self and when you look at where we are you know gene twangi you know longitudinal data we're more self-focused you know we're taking a quarter of the pictures that we take are of the self it's a it's preposterous it's pretty crazy it's half of the photos we take are of the self or the self with another person or Another thing it's perverse you know uh the world has become more narcissistic. We're led by narcissists. It's been you know it's just taken as a default and it's not a default. It's a it's a corruption of of our minds because the mind, as you described earlier, is very good at looking at other people, at making eye contact, at seeing their beauty, at hearing their words, at looking at collectives, discerning patterns of nature, collectives, and all of that works against awe, right? That you know, if I uh am focused on myself, I'll feel less awe. If I uh am worried about my striving in society or my bottom line in my bank account, you know, or thinking about money, it counterveils awe. So, yeah, I I think, you know, that's why awe is important for our times. We are in this for various reasons this period of too much self-focus. Uh it's costing young people. It makes them anxious, you know, and they gota they gota they got to go dance. They got to hear some music. They got to share stuff and go backpacking or whatever it is, you know, and just to get out of the self. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Function. 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And while I've been doing it for years, it's always been overly complicated and expensive. But now with Function, it's extremely easy and affordable. To learn more, visit functionhealth.com/huberman and use the code hubman for a $50 credit towards your membership. The example you gave of sports earlier, I think is is an important one. Um, only because I think some people, not me, but some people will like, all right, I don't really want to go camping or backpacking. I do. I spend as much time in as I can. The dancing concert, you know, maybe that's not for them. I do think I'm not a big professional sports fan. Um, I like a few things, but but it is kind of interesting to put this lens on like when I see a game. one of our members of our podcast team that's not here today is like just obsessively excited about professional football and uh Seattle Seahawks. So, this was a big year for him. And I have to believe that when he goes to see his favorite team play in the Super Bowl and win the Super Bowl that it's not just about his relationship to the team, it's about it's about being a kid and and everyone else there in a Seahawks jersey is like they have they must feel a connection. totally because they presumably the super fans know that the other super fans know the history. They know how important this is. They know all the trials and tribulations of the team and on and on and so it's um gosh it's so different. I'm just realizing like it's the it's the furthest thing from like doing a PhD in the sciences. Folks, doing a PhD in the sciences is a lot of fun. It's a hell of a lot of work and there's nothing else quite like it. I it's irreplaceable. I would I wouldn't redo it for any other way. But it is a very like you're it's a very solitary thing. It is like you you don't even cross you cross the finish line. Your advisors there, your family comes, but it's it's like it is a tunnel like this big. Going to the Super Bowl to watch your favorite team play is you're going through that the tunnel with you know millions of people. One of the joys of awe science. You know, we gathered stories of awe from 26 countries and it's one of my favorite parts of this research and this is like India and Brazil and Poland and Chile and Mexico and Japan and Korea and South Korea and Russia. I mean everybody we brought them in got these stories and you know like what is vast and mysterious? What gives you goosebumps? What's amazing or awesome to you? And when you get stories from Brazil or Argentina, they're going to write about they're going to tell you about football, you know, and you know, when you get stories from parts of the United States, they're going to talk about, you know, American football and baseball. You get stories from Boston, it's there's going to be a Red Sox story. And we have not studied sports in my emotion science because most emotion scientists are not good athletes. They're picked last in grammar school. They're grouchy about sports and yet it's super emotional. And I will tell you a story that has science and uh personal wisdom. Uh as I I gathered these stories like God, you know, part of collective effrovescence just like Taylor Swift or being in a punk mosh pit is also sports and and just like uh it is awesome to follow a sports team and be there live. And there's this great obscure sociology paper that said being a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers is like being in a religion because you have your rituals. They have these towels they they sing around you think of yourself as the Steeler Nation. They talk about godlike experiences on the field. They have these spiritual moments where in freezing days they'll take off their clothes and cheer and cry together. Uh, and I was teaching this recently and there are two Steeler fans in the audience and they're like that's exactly it. But I'll tell you more. Like everywhere you go, if you're a fan, a Steeler fan, there are Steeler bars that you can go to. And when the Steelers play, they're going to be Steelers fans. And if you're a kid and the Steelers lose, somebody who's old will tell you, "I remember when we lost in 1983, and we'll recover. we'll, you know, we'll have this expansion of time. It was so rich to me, you know, it was like, we love sports. You know, sports, the Olympics are old. They're 3,000 years old. The ball court games and the Maya, you know, in the Mayan traditions are were amazing ways to gather community and and become collective, right? So, you know, uh it was really eye opening for me just to sense the awesomeness of sports. And one of my great joys of writing the book was to talk with Steve Kerr who was coaching the Warriors at the time. He's a righteous guy, you know, uh he is a person of truth and just getting his sense of like how awesome it is to I mean for him to coach a game and the Warriors were in this amazing period and look up into the stands and 10,000 people are dancing because of your coaching you know. I was like that's pretty good. So he's really tapped in, isn't he? He's a meditator and wildlife experience and um and trauma early, you know, losing his dad and and that orienting him to what really matters. I'm thinking about the things that inhibit awe, but I'm also thinking about solutions. You know, it sprang to mind that, you know, uh it's it's funny. Sometimes I get tacked to like ice baths for some Look, folks, that was whim, right? I mean, that was whim. I mean, sure, I've done some cold plunges. I like I do the cold. Yeah, it's fun. I mean, you know, it it's psychologically painful and you feel better afterwards and um it'll make you it'll make you anyone mentally stronger because cold is a universal stressor. Um but, you know, it it gets kind of a bad rap because mostly because people don't like doing it. Everyone loves the sauna. It's kind of funny. Everyone's cool with sauna and the fins love the sauna and it's a social thing for them. And one thing I think has been overlooked and it just sprang to mind now um so I overlooked it as well is that you know there's this thing that's wonderful about experiences that we can have with other people but that we can also do on our own and when we do them on our own we we are know other people are doing it on their own too. And so it's kind of a it's a different version of what we've been talking about. And you know, the quoteunquote health and wellness community, they take some heat. Like people, oh, it's all about supplements or all about cold plunges, you know, and I've got a like a like a particular finger I hold up when I hear that. But it's not about that. There's this deeper layer that's much more important that's formed over the last I would say 5 to 10 years because it used to be meditation, breath work, Eselin, great. Love Eselin amazing, incredible place, historic. And many important things actually happened there that people don't even realize in terms of shifting world politics and world peace that maybe they brought the Russians in there for in for example to to end the cold war. Yeah, I mean garbage. I know. Yeah. Incredible, right? But you know, so it used to be these isolated pockets, but now you know people get together to sauna. People get together to do breath work. People get together to coal plunge. And of course, for thousands of years, humans have been doing this. This is not a new thing. And people look at that and they go, "This is wacky. It's about the marketing of this." Actually, I I think that there's a connection that's formed among people who want to take good care of their health. They want to have some control over their state. Um because otherwise the world will take control of it for you. and meditating is a very solitary experience for most people. So there's something pretty nice about going to a ba I love banyas Russian banyas. And then also doing the sauna on your own or co-plunch on your own. And I think that what it builds is a community that is linked on social media. So from now on when I see people doing things that I go oh cool like I like a bit of that. I don't maybe do it every day or I do that every day too. Get see my morning sunlight. the the notion that there's a community being built that was the original intention of social media and so I think social media can have this dominant negative effect on awe and day-to-day experience. So a question is are there ways surely there are but how how could we build more of a sense of of like this communal feeling leveraging what people are already doing they're already on their phones and scrolling hopefully they're also doing things to benefit their health to make them feel less isolated because as Jonathan hate and others have pointed out quite correctly it can really fracture us into the the the me the ego version where it's but it's kind of the perfect venue to connect people also. Good. So, I don't expect you to come up with any answers right on the on the fly, but I feel like it's not going anywhere. So, h how could we build or glean a more sense of a community through things that we're doing actually doing in our daily lives is I think a question that's worth exploring. It's profoundly important. You know, um the you know, and the preceding question is like what are the enemies of awe? what gets in the way or the the barriers and and you just nailed a couple is you know online life you know and I think Jonathan height is right that it's not only anxiety producing but we don't think about the opportunity costs of like it deprivives me of awe you know and in our study of 2600 people around the world what makes them feel awe no one ever said being on Meta or Facebook or you know or uh you know or Instagram Instagram. There are a couple reason worries I have about online life and I'm kind of working on this…

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