How Experiencing Awe Affects the Brain & Body | Dr. Dacher Keltner & Dr. Andrew Huberman

0:00 I think for a lot of people, including myself,

0:04 we assume that awe is this kind of forgetting of our self.

0:09 Like getting outside of ourselves.

0:11 But I'm starting to to think based on the way you're

0:14 describing it that it's about being tethered to the larger picture.

0:18 That it's not a Yes, it's getting out of our heads,

0:22 quote unquote, but it's actually very much an embodied experience.

0:26 It's very It's almost like full body.

0:29 Yeah.

0:29 And so now I'll answer your question.

0:32 Uh this is usually where people start putting

0:33 in the comments like you talk too much, let your your guest talk.

0:36 But I try and folks, he asked me.

0:38 And twice.

0:39 So you ask me a question, I'm going to answer it.

0:40 Anyone that knows me, you know, if I Okay,

0:42 so I've thought about this this relationship between visual

0:46 aperture and a time perception for a long time.

0:49 This is my my deepest obsession and it

0:52 gets a little bit into the book I'm writing,

0:54 but it but it it's probably reserved for after there's some experiments.

0:58 And and I um to the fear of my podcast crew,

1:02 I I actually am considering going back into the lab to do the this experiment.

1:06 So we know what What do we know for certain?

1:09 We know for certain that when your visual aperture is small,

1:11 like looking through a soda straw view or watch um maker type aperture,

1:16 or um you're in a let's just say a could

1:20 be a pleasant or unpleasant text communication going back and forth,

1:24 that your perception of time is different.

1:26 You're fine slicing.

1:28 Exactly.

1:28 Those dot dot dots coming through.

1:29 Yeah.

1:30 It's just like this.

1:31 like an eternity.

1:31 Yeah.

1:32 And it's bidirectional with your let's just call it level of alertness.

1:36 It doesn't even have to be stressed, but sympathetic nervous system, right?

1:39 So if I'm in line at the store and and I I have some place to be,

1:43 my visual aperture shrinks and then it feels like

1:46 the person in front of me is taking forever.

1:48 Yeah, cuz you're in these little micro Yeah.

1:50 relaxed, it feels like I'm slicing time differently.

1:53 Okay, when we see a horizon and and our aperture opens up as I mentioned,

1:57 then we relax, but we also are taking fewer time bit snapshots.

2:03 So people might think oh fewer,

2:05 you're in slow motion cuz they were No, you're you're it's the opposite, right?

2:08 Slow motion is high frame rate.

2:10 With this thing by video where you can catch slow motion,

2:12 you need a high frame rate.

2:14 This is why when people experience like a car crash,

2:16 they'll often say that things felt like they were slowing down.

2:19 More snapshots.

2:20 That's cool.

2:21 So when I think about this relationship between visual aperture and time,

2:26 and it also exists in the auditory domain.

2:28 So if I'm listening to a specific conversation at a party,

2:31 I'm fine slicing my perception of auditory space.

2:35 Our friend Irv Hafter taught me this.

2:37 When I listen to everything and I take it in as a whole,

2:41 it's it's a more relaxed experience, but okay.

2:44 Cool.

2:45 So a long time ago, I was because I was experiencing stress,

2:50 I started reading about meditation types and different things

2:52 and and I I came up with this meditation.

2:55 It's but it's not meditation at all.

2:57 And some of my listeners will be familiar with it.

2:59 I decided to call it for lack of a better term, space-time bridging.

3:02 The meditation is very simple.

3:04 You close your eyes and you do three breaths thinking about your skin inward.

3:09 So interoception.

3:10 You open your eyes and you look at your hand.

3:12 You take three breaths.

3:14 But you're creating a visual tether between you and your hand.

3:17 Then you look some distance, maybe 8 or 10 feet away, you do the same.

3:20 Then you find a horizon.

3:21 And then you think about the sort of pale blue dot phenomenon.

3:24 Like you're just on a planet floating in space and like every single one

3:28 of these things is a form of meditation or a meme or or whatever.

3:31 And then you get right back to yourself.

3:33 And so what the idea here is that it helped me a lot because

3:37 I noticed that meditations where I was

3:38 completely focused inward made me more focused inward.

3:41 Going for a run, I could get outside my head,

3:43 but it and I started to play with the idea that maybe

3:47 it's not about having a small aperture or a big aperture per se,

3:51 but it's the like every great thing in biology or psychology, it's the process.

3:56 It's not an event.

3:56 It's the process of going from one aperture to the next.

3:59 And that's kind of what life is about.

4:01 Yeah, absolutely.

4:02 Like when this too shall pass is really about taking a broader time snapshot.

4:07 Like eventually this thing visual as well.

4:09 Which is visual.

4:10 And so this is a long answer to your question, but It's really interesting.

4:14 this is why it's so important for me to see a horizon if I can in the morning.

4:18 Um but it's also very important to go indoors

4:20 and just like focus on what I'm working on.

4:22 Like there is no place or event in a day

4:26 or in life that that's actually the right way to live.

4:29 Like you can go to Big Sur,

4:30 and if you're lucky enough to go to Esalen, like you're like this is it.

4:34 But it's only it because you came from your office, in my opinion.

4:37 And then you go back again.

4:39 Yeah.

4:39 You figure this out.

4:41 Like you The title of this paper, which you're the senior author,

4:45 is a balanced mind off fosters equanimity via temporal distancing.

4:50 Yeah, no, it's So it's So it's about time, not about space.

4:54 It is.

4:54 That's fascinating.

4:55 So that's that's how I think about this.

4:56 Now maybe you can tell us about this paper because

4:59 I'm getting embarrassed that I've been going way too long.

5:01 This is why we're in conversation, Andrew, which is, you know,

5:03 you studied the visual system and and we need

5:07 more of that knowledge in the science of awe.

5:09 And I will just make one parenthetical note,

5:11 which is I was interviewing Matthias Tarnopolsky,

5:14 who was at Berkeley and then went to the Philadelphia Symphony.

5:18 I was a music director there and he said I was like

5:21 and he was he studies the great and he's a conductor of symphonies.

5:26 And I was like what's the Music's hard to understand scientifically.

5:30 It is complicated.

5:32 I was like what's the why awe and music?

5:34 Why do we cry?

5:35 Why do we get goosebumps?

5:36 Why do I mean, profound.

5:38 And he's like time.

5:40 It's all about what it does to our sense of time.

5:43 And so I think there's a hypothesis there to explore.

5:47 What awe does to the self, and I'm putting together a couple of your comments,

5:51 is and Jane Goodall got it most right.

5:56 And and it's, you know, it's so great to study things with science

6:00 and then you see someone you really revere say something.

6:04 And she was she felt that chimpanzees feel awe.

6:08 I do too.

6:09 Believe that.

6:09 So It's a controversial issue.

6:13 Uh chimps show and Frans de Waal alerted me to this, who recently passed

6:18 away and I just want to pay reverence to him or homage to him.

6:22 Um the great primatologist.

6:23 So he said you got to look at Jane Goodall and writing about

6:27 chimps and the waterfall display they show when they are around vast nature.

6:33 They sit quietly like around rivers, like that waterfall in Berkeley.

6:38 They They look at things, they get goosebumps,

6:41 they touch things like we would out in nature.

6:44 Uh they rock and they Jane Goodall said why

6:48 wouldn't they feel awe uh or the beginnings of spirituality,

6:53 which is really being amazed at things outside of the self.

6:58 So with awe we We have a sense of self,

7:01 interoception and the like, and then we connect to vast things out there.

7:05 And that's what our research documented as kind

7:08 of a central mechanism of awe or transformation is like

7:13 when you're at Yosemite or when you are standing

7:16 next to that T-Rex skeleton or when you've you know,

7:20 when you've thought about the passage of time that happens with life, right?

7:25 And there are new meditations around that.

7:28 You're like wow, I am part of something vast.

7:31 I'm part of evolution.

7:32 I'm part of nature.

7:34 I'm part of an ecosystem.

7:36 Uh and it changes your whole mind, right?

7:40 It changes the neurophysiology of the mind.

7:44 Default mode network starts to quiet down.

7:46 Activates vagal tone.

7:48 And you do feel like you're tethered as you said to like

7:53 music or a culture or political movement or the team you love, right?

7:59 And it's transcendent.

8:01 Um and if you look at where we are today, we need more of that.

8:04 You know, we need to to get our young people to be connecting to big things.

8:10 [music] [music]