 All right, it's 12 o'clock. So great to be amongst Cal Bears. Just talked to Anthony, a friend of mine, who got his degree here, now a professor. I hate to even say it, but down at Stanford University, making sure that university stays on the right course. We're working on well-being in young people today across universities because there are some crises going on, as you know. And so it's good to see Anthony. And his son has come to Berkeley, so freshman, so we're proud of that. And he's already given him a hard time calling in an imperialist and all the good things that Berkeley people do. So, are you? Oh, man. Thank you, Dr. Keltner. Hello, everyone. I just want to welcome you. My name is Shaka Tillem. I'm the UC Berkeley student body president or ASUC president, depending on how you like to call it. I'm a senior here at Cal studying political economy, with minors in race and law and public policy. And before we get into this amazing lecture, I first just want to thank every one of you here today for coming out, showing support, helping build, you know, the Berkeley Pride as we know it. And a special thanks to our donors who help make events like this happen, as well as keep our university afloat. So with that being said, I would like to introduce Dr. Keltner, who is the founding director of the Greater Good Science Center, GGSC, and a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Keltner is the host of the GGSC's award-winning podcast, The Science of Happiness, as well as the co-instructor of the GGSC's popular online course with the same name. He is also the best-selling author of the Power Paradox, How We Gain and Lose Influence, and Born to Be Good. He is also the co-editor of the Compassionate Instinct. Please welcome Dr. Keltner. Gives me faith. Knowing young people coming out of Berkeley are heading into the world. Thank you. So what I'd like to talk about today is all, and all the mysteries that the emotion holds for us, and tell you a story that's a very Berkeley story. It's a human nature story. It's a worldwide story. I hope as you go around, and I'll give you a little clues, there are so many awe spots at UC Berkeley, from Sproul Plaza to Youth of the Grove. So many good things began here that really began in the spirit of awe. It is, in many ways, UC awe, if you will. So I'd like to start with a story. In 2010, I was working in my office in Pullman Hall before it was raised to the ground because of earthquake hazards. And I got a call from that guy, Pete Doctor, who I'd known socially. He's a director at Pixar. Had just finished up Up, which is a terrific movie about loss and living a life of having loved somebody. And he called me up, and he said, the following question, he said, you know, hey, I'm making a movie about emotions. And I know you teach emotions at UC Berkeley. I've listened to your class. I'm thinking about making a movie about the emotions. And I swear to God, for one instant, I thought, Pete's going to use my voice in this movie at Pixar. And man, did I get that wrong. And he said, I'd just like you to come by and talk to our Pixar team that's making this movie. And it would eventually become Inside Out. And Inside Out 2 is coming out in a couple of years. And as you know, Berkeley figures very prominently in many different Pixar movies. And I remember the first question that Pete asked when I gathered with his team is, what are the emotions? Right, emotions are so hard to pin down. They're hard to measure. It's a very young science that you'll learn about today. And I described what the emotions are. And that would become the main characters of the emotions who are pictured here. And that was kind of the status quo of the scientific field, joy, and fear, and anger, and disgust, and sadness, who is the hero of the story. And then Pete asked this question. He said, if you could add, we're thinking about five emotions. And if you could add one emotion to this story, this film, what would it be? And I just reflexively said awe. Awe, the feeling of wonder that we have about the mysteries of life. All the great things that come out of awe. Albert Einstein saying that awe and mystery are really the fount for the origins of science and art. Just human imagination comes out of awe. And he's like, what are you talking about, Dachar? And I'm like, I mean, imagine she's 11 years old and she goes out in backpacks and goes to a concert, dances, falls in love with Justin Bieber. All this stuff. And they looked at me like, this is a typical Berkeley answer. But regrettably, awe did not feature prominently in that movie. But I think it's part of the lesson of today's talk is I do believe awe is the deepest human emotion and maybe are defining human emotion. And in studying it for 15 years, I really think there's, it's urgently needed for our times. Lancet is now publishing data that about 30% of the world is depressed and anxious coming out of COVID. We're remarkably stressed out because of climate crises, white supremacy, a lot of the forces today that are unraveling, awe is an antidote to those times. So important to cultivate. So I'm going to tell you four or five different stories about awe. I will leave 10 minutes of time for Q&A. And if you have questions along the way, make sure you let me know. So awe is the feeling, and this comes out of different philosophical traditions that I'll talk about when you encounter something vast and mysterious that transcends your current frame of reference. We all walk around with a sense of reality of what's true, what's in front of us perceptually. And awe is when things don't make sense given that current frame of reference. Most typically it's big things, big things physically or semantically or conceptually. Who's had an experience of awe today? What was it? Yeah, so many incredible trees on this campus. We're very proud of our trees. Another experience of awe today or recently, yeah. Yeah, just like excitement that faculty have about knowledge or the lecturers. And yeah, we also have their hand up over here. Yeah. Yeah. And Berkeley professor Patrick Gonzalez who gives me awe, who runs our Institute of Parks reminds me of all the good things Californians are due to reduce our carbon emissions and usage and the like. A lot of good things happening. So prevalent around us. I really think every emotion as philosophers like to remind us has a kind of a core meaning to it. Anger is about justice. At its core, the free speech protests are about injustice and the animating force of anger there. And I think awe points us to what matters most in life. It's individual, it's cultural, and it's like a compass that says this is what you really care about and what you should devote your life to. As a scientist and in particular, as a somebody who works in an evolutionary tradition beginning with Charles Darwin, I am struck by the question of why would humans in the course of our evolution, six, seven million years since we branched off from our chimpanzee relatives, why would we have this emotion of awe? And I hope that we give you some quick answers to that. So what I want to do is talk about what we've learned about awe in just, you know, an incredible team of students, undergrads, graduate students now, professors at different universities, and then kind of spreading the awe science. And then I'm going to get to kind of the role of awe in our sense of morality, our relationship to nature, a little bit on music. I'll do a little digression into psychedelics and that will dominate the Q and A, such as life, and then we'll open it up. So first some awe facts, just to orient us to the deeper inquiry into this amazing emotion. And I just want to kind of ground us, you know, it's very interesting. We got to be suspicious of words. Words have historical legacies. And when we began this work, there was the word awe, and people would often think like, isn't that kind of like fear? And today in the 21st century, awe is nothing like fear. And I can bore you with all the computational data that we've done on that. The reason why is awe traces back etymologically to Norse and Old English in the eighth and ninth century, Ege and Age, when awe, it really meant fear, dread, horror. But if you just think back to what life was like in the eighth or ninth century, people lived to about the age of 40. About 20% of infants died. There was tremendous violence and torture and sexual violence. It was a really different time. And today, we've done studies, 26 different countries. awe feels really good. And that's really interesting that when we encounter vast mysteries, the human mind feels agentic and empowered to figure things out. And then I've given some other basic findings here. This surprised us. We started to ask people in China and Japan and Brazil, we've done 10 different countries, Barcelona like, hey, at the end of the day, just did you feel awe today? Did you feel the sense of wonder at vast mysteries? And people feel awe two to three times a week. There's everyday awe. Who's got an experience of everyday awe they've had recently? They're just sort of, yeah, that's a great Berkeley experience of awe, which is like, it's amazing, but now I'm going to critique the system, right? Okay, fair enough. Another experience of everyday awe, yeah. Another Berkeley form of awe, right? Pete's Coffee 1964, Arman Pete brought coffee to the United States. And coffee, of course, is a source of awe. There's a lot of awe out there. And you'll see this through the studies. And this is why I say, and I was very happy that our surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, has a whole chapter on awe in his kind of call to health for the United States. There's almost nothing that is better for your nervous system and your mind than finding the little everyday awe to stop for a moment and say, man, these figs are amazing or this coffee is amazing. These are just some of the data, brief moments of awe, as you'll see, less self focus, more humble, more intellectually curious, more intellectually humble, greater scientific reasoning, elevated vagal tone, the vagus nerve gets activated, very good for your body, reduced inflammation from your immune system. It's a pathway to 21st century disease. Most people who died of COVID of the million people in the United States had inflammation issues going into the encounter with the virus. Awe quiets that down and then a lot of stress and well being benefits. So let me tell you our first story of awe, which is it's history. Every emotion has a history. I just taught my Berkeley students the Javanese emotion of perna. It's amazing. Perna is the sense of safe place. Young people really want that today. It's such a resonant idea. Maybe that will start its own history here in the United States. Awe has this amazing history. First of all, we are on sacred grounds of the Olone people. Awe goes deep in indigenous traditions. They all write about awe. That is a sand painting from the Weachole people in Mexico. If you study, as Rebecca Stone has, a lot of the cultural dimensions to indigenous cultures, a lot of it is about cultivating awe. The designs, the patterns in the ceramics and the like, very rich traditions of awe. In the United States, in Western European culture, it's dominated until 1770 by religious writers. Julian of Norwich, whom I'll profile, very important figure. Saint Paul of Assisi, if you go to the East Asian traditions of the great Bhagavad Gita and the story of Arjun encountering gods, it's about awe. The written record largely is religious with respect to our understanding of awe. Great spiritual traditions. Then what happens, and I've given you some examples here, is the age of enlightenment in the 18th century, and then what is called romanticism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others. Science starts happening, industry. People start exploring nature. People ascend Montblanc in Switzerland in 1750 or so. People start finding awe outside of the religious context. And I'm profiling, if you're interested, people like Edmund Burke, a great philosopher, Irish philosopher, awe is about power and obscurity, the romanticists that followed. And you should really read about Alex von Humboldt, who was an incredible scientist who gave us the idea of the ecosystem. And he taught Western Europeans what indigenous people already knew, which is that we are part of these big ecosystems. And that starts to take hold in culture. Awe moves out of religion in the churches and starts to move out into our everyday experience, everyday awe. And today in the United States, sociologists find about 40% of Americans find spiritual awe in their religious practice. About 40% of Americans find it in other things. Music, choir, nature, how many of you feel you've encountered the divine in nature? A lot of people will like backpacking like I do with my daughter and you see the peaks and you want to feel like it's spirit. It's the animating force of life. Pretty remarkable. So now to the science. We started this, you know, like you guys, like awe, well what is it? Right? And one of the things we've learned in social science is a humbling that, you know, you can't just ask college students. Imagine that, you know, if you ask Berkeley students, it's, you know, Marx and synthetic biology and gene editing and coffee and, you know, computational data science and, you know, you're like, you know, you're missing the point. And our coffee. So we surveyed, you know, it was actually somebody I'm very proud of, Maria Monroy, who's a first generation Berkeley student, did her PhD at Berkeley, will become a professor for her parents who are from Mexico. She said, we can go survey people around the world. So we surveyed people from 26 countries, from Brazil to China to parts of Africa to Japan to Northern Europe, really radically different countries. And just ask them the right stories of awe. And that's the sources of awe that we've classified, that really sort of have this universal structure to them of other people, which I'll talk about, nature, art, music, collective movement, right? And I'll give you a neat example of that. Big ideas. What's a big idea that's giving you awe? The web, right? The telescope, yeah. How about those shots of the universe? Those are mind blowing, right? What's another big idea that's giving you awe? Probably, what's that? AI? Like, what is it? You know, is it going to ruin the world or not? Big ideas give us awe, spiritual practice, and then encountering the life cycle, right? We're all born. And as I started to give talks to audiences, a lot of people talk about the end of life, watching someone pass as a deep source of wonder and mystery and awe. Very interesting. So let me tell you four or five stories of what we've done in this work. It is really striking, and this caught us off guard, you know, when you ask people about awe, they'll say, you know, Grand Canyon, you know, the Cal football play where they beat Stanford, that great multilateral, I still every now and then check in on that one to find awe, you know, being in the front row of a concert, you know, et cetera. And remarkably, around the world, the central source of awe is other people, right? How we are astounded by people's moral courage, their character, their kindness, right? You'll be walking down the street and you'll see somebody do something. I remember seeing this skateboarder, this tree was stuck in the tree, this cat was stuck in the tree. We're all looking at it like, what do we do? And this old woman was like, that's my cat, you know, and the skateboarder skates up, oh cool, climbs the tree, gets the cat, you know, brings it down, skates off, and we're all like weeping, you know, it was hugging, you know, unbelievable. It's all around us and I've given you some examples of Ella Baker really doing the work to get the civil rights movement off the ground. Jane Adams, who started the first house for the poor, Mahatma Gandhi, is all awe, you know, it's all just transforming history through nonviolence, that we really respond to other people with a sense of wonder or what Thomas Jefferson called elevation. Really interesting and I asked my Berkeley undergrads this, really, and I take a little moment, who's somebody of moral beauty to you? And it's good to get young people to ask that question, right? Like, who do you, you know, talking to Anthony with his son here at Berkeley, it's an intense place, really intense undergrad place, like, look for, it's a great age to be finding people who are like, you know, and one of mine is Hari Srinivasan, who graduated last year from Berkeley, now doing PhD work, non-speaking autistic individual who's brilliant. I see someone nodding when you're around Hari and he's already advising Obama and so he had to advise Obama on the lives of autistic individuals. Who's a person of moral beauty for you? Yeah, Helen Keller, like, why? Yeah, you're like, wow, no sight, no sound, and look what she's doing, you know, that's incredible. Who else? Yeah, amazing. From the back, anybody? One more? Yeah, yeah, yeah, and it's, and it's so interesting that humans have this capacity just to encounter examples of courage or kindness and suddenly that your life has changed, right? And how powerful an intuition that is. Let me read you a couple of these stories, and I broke my glasses as I, I'm good at like, just so, no laughing. These were a couple of the stories we got when we surveyed people around the world. This is a woman from Ireland when watching my daughter who was born with bilateral clubfoot dance in a ballet recital for the first time I was filled with awe as in the audience with my mother and my little girl was dancing on stage. While watching I felt the beginning of tears. My heart felt like it was going to burst. That's the vagus nerve. Tears is also hooked up. There's an ancient tradition of studying tears, the feeling of tears associated with the sacred. I was awestruck at how far she'd come. I love this one. It's from a guy writing about his dad. He was from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 1973 at my cousin's restaurant. My father worked there. I was with my best friend from high school. He's black. I'm white. I hadn't seen him in five years, so we embraced. Somebody told the dad, how could you let that and use the n-word in? And my dad threw the guy out of the bar. I'd never been more proud of my dad. My father was 59 years old. Really interesting is, and this is just some of the science, you can just let people read these stories or encounter figures of moral beauty, or get them to think about someone of moral beauty. At the greater Good Science Center, we're starting a whole awe-based curriculum in partnership with a lot of great partners, and one of the exercises is get young kids. Who's morally beautiful for me? What a deep reflective exercise it is. What it does is it has a lot of physiological benefits, chills, tears, vagal tone, part of your brain called the orbital frontal cortex, which helps you make ethical decisions, and people really become more cooperative and share more, which is a central outcome. Second stop is nature, and this one will be obvious to Californians perhaps. Such good work going on at Berkeley, the Institute of the Parks, is making sure they're fighting the fight so that 30% of California will be protected lands, which is good news. They're working on mechanisms to make sure everybody is 10 minutes from a green space in California. So a lot of greening going on in the world, which is exciting. The idea that awe brings us nature immediately gets us to indigenous philosophies, indigenous people, thousands of different cultures, 500 million people around the world. And across these different traditions, people like Dr. Yuria Selidwin at the United Nations and Piro T have argued, it is just part of how they view life that you are connected to other parts of nature. You are part of an ecosystem, which is true. Our bodies are connected to the sense and sounds out there, and we are indeed part of an ecosystem, that everything is connected. We are collaborating with other species. There's some animating life force to all living beings. These are a couple of my favorite quotes. This is when they summited Mont Blanc first. The soul ascends, the vision of the spirit expands, and in the midst of this majestic silence, one seems to hear the voice of nature and to become certain of its secret operations. When they first ascended Mont Blanc in 1770 or 80, it was a mystical experience for them. And I love this one because it has a Berkeley feel or a California feel and all of our fascination with fungi, but it actually comes from Russia. Probably not a lot of all out there these days. Five years ago, collecting mushrooms in the forest, I bumped into an uncommon hole in the ground, and around it all the trees stood as if gazing into the hole. And I love how suddenly in awe everything seems to have consciousness, right? And they're what we call panpsychism. The trees have consciousness, which they do. This is a very famous quote in American, American cultural history of awe. This is Ralph Waldo Emerson, very important figure in the 19th century, kind of a strange, wild guy. He was out on a very cold day in a commons in Massachusetts, and he had this experience of awe. And I love the phrasing, in the woods we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life. No disgrace, no calamity, which nature cannot prepare. Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. This kind of nagging voice of the ego or the self, which a lot of people feel is at the heart of some of our mental health crises today, seems to vanish in nature. In his book from 1836, or his essay, the longer version of it, Emerson had this idea, and it's fascinating, and I think there's a lot of truth to it. I'll just allude to it really quickly. He really felt that a lot of the best operations of our mind were in how the mind relates to nature, that we start to see fractal patterns in mountains, and the succession of mountains, and understand the mathematics behind that, that we see part-hole relations. You never know what's going to happen at Berkeley. If you get to ethical traditions, try to ignore that loud drum beating out there. I love this quote from Lao Tzu and Taoism. Highest good is like water, because water excels in benefiting the myriad creatures without contending with them, and settles where none would like to be. It comes to chase them away. It comes close to the way. A lot of different ethical spiritual traditions find our deep sources of meaning in relationships to nature. Taoism was a naturalistic philosophy that took inspiration from that. I think we're up against Oskie the Bear and everything. We've done a lot of studies of nature. There's a remarkable science of the health benefits of nature. John Jarvis, who's at UC Berkeley, running the Institute of Parks did a big initiative to get medical doctors to start to prescribe nature as a source of health. What we did at UC Berkeley here is we took students up and looked up into the trees, those beautiful eucalyptus trees, so many beautiful trees on campus, or they looked up at the science building right next door. Same exact place, not quite as awe-inspiring. What we found is just a little moment of awe, looking into these trees, taking in the light of the eucalyptus, made those students feel less self-important, they felt less entitled, they needed less money to do the study. We staged a little drama where somebody walking by who was part of the study dropped a bunch of pens, and our students feeling awe were more likely to help the individual pick up some pens. They picked up more pens. This is a finding worth reflecting on. There's a lot of social science. Why are young people more anxious and depressed today than they were 30 years ago? I saw it in my own children who went to UC Berkeley, and part of their problem is their too self-focused, right? They're thinking too much about the self, taking too many pictures of the self, etc., and losing the big things around them that are what they should be connecting to. You guys know this at your stage of development, but it is in some sense we are at this crisis of narcissism that people have been writing about for a few decades, and awe is the quickest way to bump out of that crisis. All right. Third wonder is collective effervescence. How many of you are going to the football game today? Isn't it amazing? You go to the game. Cal hopefully will play well. This may not be a good example. It's just a game. They're on the field. They score the winning touchdown. You're cheering. You're singing the song. You're doing the chance. There's Oski the bear, and you're looking around, and you're tearing up, and you're hugging people. You're high five, and you're like, this is the most moral moment of my life, right? Watching a football game. And that speaks to this third source of awe that the great sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote about, which is our capacity to fold into what he called collective effervescence. There's an amazing new science of effervescence or sharing feeling, in particular, ecstatic feeling. You can, and I'll just give you some of the findings that I've encountered in the literature, little babies, nine months old, if they hear music and other people kind of dancing, they start dancing with other people, right? And you're sort of folding into this rhythm. If you are listening to music, your brain synchronized. If you are around people, your heart rate and your hormones will start to synchronize with others. Really different from our non-human primate relatives. We have this deep tendency to become collective, to move from a sense of individual self to collective self. So many sources of this collective feeling, dance. How many of you have found some awe in dance? It's amazing, isn't it, right? You can be doing like my mom loves folk dance, and you're doing these, you know, these Croatian moves, and next to you you're like, God, we're all one, you know, it's just, we're just this, you know, collective. Politics, of course, sporting events, recreational activities, public spaces. There's this amazing new study by physicists who were interested in the collective effervescence at punk rock shows or metalhead shows. It's so striking, these punks go to music, they think they're like defying the society, and they fold into two big collective patterns of movement. One is the mosh pit inside, which is these kind of pinball-like motions, but then everybody around the mosh pit, this symbol of chaos, they all start moving together to protect the people in the mosh pit. They're sort of moving in this collective unit. Remarkable counterintuitive tendency towards collective feeling and sharing. One of my favorites, and I hope when you walk by Spral Plaza, you just remember the free speech movement, and if you're interested in it, you should read Subversives. A terrific book on how important that movement is historically to, in combination with, you know, the civil rights movement, Black Panthers, just to start to build a new awareness of free speech and anti-war, which I count to be one of our great achievements. All right, so for those of you who find awe in sports and any Warriors fans here, I was pretty awe-inspiring this last, you know, it's amazing to find transcendent meaning from sports. Well, you're not alone, and it's just so great to see what this science gets us, which is Emile Durkheim, this French sociologist, studied who's after what the core of our spiritual lives is, right? It's kind of a classic question. And he wrote about awe and collective effervescence and folding into the rituals of spiritual practice, the chanting, the feeling, the symbols, the iconography, the beautiful stained glass windows, the church cathedrals, which look like forests, right? They're designed very often to have the structure of forests. And he said, that's the core of our spiritual commitments is this feeling of collective effervescence. And this wonderful sociologist made the case, and you guys can debate this at the game later on today, that you can also find that feeling in sort of spiritual transcendence. That's athletic events. And so this sociologist, Cottingham, hung around Pittsburgh Steeler fans, who are voted as the most impassioned fans in the United States. They're fanatical. They get married in Pittsburgh Steeler colors. They get, they, when they get buried, a lot of them get buried with their Pittsburgh Steeler, you know, picnic chair. It's just this major source of devotion. And the sociologist who did, wasn't a football fan, hung around them, and they're like, they have this structure of collective spiritual feeling. They have exalted feelings when Pittsburgh scores a touchdown. They're all raising their hands and crying and hugging. They have this sense of shared attention, which is part of the mystical experience of what's happening on the field. They have symbolic objects like the Pittsburgh, the terrible towel, which is this towel that they all swing around at when Pittsburgh does really well and gives you this sense of kind of shifting your awareness. And then they really have a sense of shared identity. This gets to lofty realms as well. And I want to profile a story of awe from Belinda Campos, who her parent, she's from Mexico, got her PhD at UC Berkeley, had awe issues throughout, lots of family struggles and the like. Her parents were janitors. And got her PhD. And now I'm proud to say is a professor at UC Irvine, one of the first Latinx, Latina professors of psychology in the UC, we're very proud of her. And when she found out about awe, she sent me this story. This occurred at Berkeley, it was the day of my graduation. My father had stopped his formal education at fifth grade when his father's death forced him to start working to help support his family. And as I was looking for my family coming out of the Greek theater, an amazing place of awe. And older Latina, someone who looked like it was there as a grandparent, stopped me. And she said, if I spoke Spanish, and I said, claro, senora. She went on to tell me in Spanish how much it means to her that someone like me is getting a PhD. And then Belinda says, there were so many, it led her, it led her into this awe flight of fancy, where she said, there's so many sacrifices, individual and collective, that made it possible for someone like me to be on this stage. The chain of life and sacrifice seemed to stretch for generations. I always feel that being around people like you and what we do. So we have done a lot of work on collective effervescence. One was a laboratory through the Sierra Club on the American River. And we took under-resourced teenagers from Richmond and Oakland, who had never been camping, and veterans. Veterans have twice the rate of depression as average Americans or typical Americans. They rafted for a day. We followed how they were doing. What's fascinating is their physiology started to converge with each other on the raft, their cortisol levels. They all started to kind of feel one. There's a lot of shared vocalizations on the raft. And I'll show you one finding, which is that for veterans, 30% drop in PTSD by a half day on a river. 30% drop. PTSD is hard to move around. That is an intractable psychological struggle. And here, and the Sierra Club gets tens of thousands of, hundreds of thousands of Americans, thousands of veterans outdoors. And I love this quote from one of our veterans who said, looking up at the star-spattered sky, I thought about the universe and how infinite it is. It makes what I do feel less important, humility, but the opportunity of what I could do more powerful and lightweight. So interesting how these feelings feel light. You feel free and empowered. I'd never seen how so many stars are in the sky like I did tonight. Okay. Well, it's good to talk about music with some music going on outside. Two final stories. Music, mysticism, and then we'll have five or 10 minutes for drum-enhanced Q&A. You know, the science of music is, it's remarkable. And it gives me all to think about how deep music is in the DNA of our species and just who we are. I'm giving you some of the just basic facts. The estimates are that music is 80 to 100,000 years old, just formal drums and flutes being made out of different things in the environment. There's a recent study just published in Science by Samuel Merer at Harvard. Around the world, parents start using musical sounds with their babies, right? That social practice is probably millions of years old, where you have sing-song voice, you know, little songs and lullabies that we sing to our children. You're probably saying lullabies to your kids. My children, once they learned about this, asked for like two hours of lullabies a night, you know, just these recycled tunes got kind of exhausting. But there's something deep to the fact that we share minds through music. As I said, little nine-month-olds will start synchronizing with people to music. There's studies showing, there's some collective effervescence, there are studies showing if I'm a year-old child and a stranger comes in and sings the music of my culture, I will move closer to that person and trust them. If it's the music of another culture, I remain a little wary, right? Music is identity, culture and through all. Such amazing science going on. All right, no brainer. Who's had a moment of transcendence listening to music? Describe a couple. Who's got one for us? Any kind of experience. Yeah, that's amazing. And it's just, you know, when you get down to the reductionistic tendencies of this, it's like music is sound waves, comes into your, produces stuff in the brain and somehow it has all of the transcendence that you just described. Who's got another experience of music? Yeah. For those of you who have been a grateful and it's very fitting, there you are with your tie-dye shirt and it's amazing. One more, musical experience of all. Yeah. Being in front row, Elton John concert, 17 years old, saw things I've never seen before. I mean it's incredible when you think about sound waves coming in and you're with other physical beings. And then within 10 minutes, as a Berkeley undergrad told me in my class two days ago, people are just starting to study this, like I had this idea that I love human beings, right? What a great ethical notion to come out of sound waves and the like, so much to cultivate. So I want to, my final story of awe is mysticism and obviously for our work on, we've got a lot of work going on on music and for this book, I interviewed a lot of musicians and about the depths of awe from that. But the final one is mysticism and one of the wonderful things about awe is it allows us to talk about the deep human tendency, which Berkeley sociologist Robert Bella, one of my favorite writers, Robert Wright, who used to write for the New Republic, have called just this universal tendency of humanity to have a sense of spirit or divine, however we would define it, right? And I like the fact that awe allows people to talk about the many different sources of divinity and spirit. You, many of you, like me almost, you go out into the Sierras or what have you, you garden, you watch flowers bloom, you look at trees and you feel like there's something beyond mundane imagination that is there, an animating life force we might call the divine. So, I'll give you a little bit of history or one piece of history and then talk briefly about psychedelics, which I think to be a very small part of mysticism. William James is the founding figure of psychology, very interesting guy, very influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who's his godfather, grew up in an experimental schools, had suffered from profound OCD and anxiety, just rattled to the core by anxiety and the like struggled in his life. I teach him to my Berkeley undergrads because he, like Charles Darwin, failed at his first couple of careers. Darwin wanted to be a medical doctor, failed. So, you got to wander, you got to find what really moves you and then James of all things took a little whiff of nitrous oxide one day and nitrous oxide is the laughing gas that they give you for dental procedures and he falls to the floor and he's like, oh my god, he has this mystical experience on nitrous oxide which tells you how he was and he's just, oh my god, he's like, I see the fundamental cosmic it, you know, and he goes in search of it and what he does, which is important to all of us, here's this founding figure of psychology in American philosophy. He interviews a lot of people about their transcendent experiences and writes about it, right, from Tolstoy to ministers to Hindus to, you know, Walt Whitman, one of the great mystics and he says that awe is the core to religion, that it's this, everybody feels it in different ways, in different places, grateful dead, backpacking, cow game, prayer, meditation and it has this structure to it that he starts to detail through his analysis of these stories that in fact it has these elements of, you know, you really feel like things are true, like, oh, this really is true, things aren't describable, you feel united, the world is united in systems and there's something about your experience that everything is alive, right, and animated by life forces. So that, of course, you find a lot in the deep roots of mystical experience in psychedelic experiences in indigenous cultures. I'd recommend Jessica Hollenbach for a great book and then just a minute, you guys probably have been hearing about Berkeley Center for Scientist Psychedelics and Michael Paul and a Berkeley professor really changing the world's view of psychedelics in many ways, they're, you know, and I'm giving you some facts just to think about early work, you know, two out of three people when you take psilocybin in a controlled setting or LSE, it is one of the five most spiritual experiences of their lives. About 13 to 20 percent feel real terror and fear and so one of the things that we're all grappling with is, you know, watch out and who's vulnerable for that and the like. The very exciting thing about this, there's an interesting neuroscience, this is the stuff, the regions of your cortex that I color, MPFC, PCC is what's called the default mode network, big chunks of your brain that are about the ego, right, stay on task, succeed, do well, maximize your time, keep moving forward, psychedelics quiet that down. But so does all, every study of all shows that part of your brain just starts to become calm and it opens you up to other possibilities. And what I'm most excited about, I worry about the hype right now, but what I am excited about, there are some psychological conditions that are very hard to move. Veterans with PTSD, right, that is a hard one. And veterans, and I'm working with a lot of veterans, talk therapy for a lot of veterans just isn't how they view approach life, right, they want to get out and do awesome things, right. People with OCD, which runs in my family, that's a hard, deep condition. There's work coming out of Yale showing a psychedelic experience, all the obsessive patterns of OCD kind of soften, right, and dissipate. So I'm very worried about some of the exploitation of this movement, happy to talk about that, you know, the colonization of indigenous knowledge and tradition, etc. But it will be great for certain populations who really struggle with certain conditions of life. And then I hope I do a lot of work in prisons, you know, 30% of our prisoners are in there for drugs that I should have been thrown in prison for when I was younger, and they shouldn't be in there. And I think that this movement will get us to rethink what drugs are if it goes in the right direction. And it's a risky thing. Timothy Lurie, who let us down the wrong path, got his PhD at Berkeley. And so we don't want to reinvent the mistakes of the past. So we'll see, I'm hopeful. So why all? As I said, there's almost nothing better to do for your state of mind and body than go find some all. We've seen it so many different ways we do it. I am really excited at the Greater Good Science Center. We've launched this education program. We have a lot of stuff on all, all practices, GGI.GIA.Berkeley.edu, 700,000 people use. But our education, for those of you like Anthony, who had a child get into Berkeley, that is not an awe-inspiring passage, you know. It is so stressed out on our young people today. So narrowing and so structured. And I think one antidote is to open it up again with some awe. And we have an education program working with oceanographers at National Geographic, Patrick Gonzalez in our Institute of Parks to build awe back into the curriculum, because knowledge is awe. So I'm very excited about that. And then I have to do this. That's coming out in January. And you can get it now if you want. Go to my website. As Shaka said earlier, thank you for your support of Berkeley, for those of you who do. And thank you for being from Berkeley and spreading the word. We were rated number one in the world by Forbes last year. I don't mean to say that. And, you know, anyway, it's an amazing place. And keep being part of it. Thank you so much. We got time for some questions. I haven't had a personal experience with Ayahuasca. People speak very highly of it. You know, it's interesting, like, I, anyway, I'm allowed to, anyway, some people hesitate on this. I don't. Because psychedelic use is up 50% in the United States. It has, it's this revolution. And so we have to be honest about it. I like the data, how it's looking. And so, you know, I haven't had any experience with that. But I've had other experiences. I write about a psychedelic experience I had with my brother who went to Berkeley. And some of them changed my life. And I think the veterans I work with are using Ayahuasca because it's full on. And they come in. One of the veterans that my collaborator worked with, you know, if you've killed people, it's some of the deepest trauma. And he worked through some of the profound trauma of that through Ayahuasca. So it's a time to see what it does for you. Other questions. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. And it's one of the great findings that, that brief doses of awe, this is an experiment by Rudd and all in 2012. You feel like you have more time. And time expands. And that's a classic psychedelic experience of like, that was six minutes. I thought I was here for a day and a half, you know, and you're just like, whoa. And then the whole thing. So time, we have a clock in our mind that keeps track of time. That's probably part of the default mode network. And all are quiet to sit down and suddenly it's like, you feel like you have more time. Yeah. And the mind, you know, time is subjective. And the mind stretches it out on awe, which is a lot of people would very much like to have more sense of more time in their day. So other questions or reflections? Yeah. Yeah, we, you know, that's going to be, this is such a young science, the key publications for only 10 years old, the Yale work, the OCD is coming out of Yale soon to be published. And so we can't answer questions like, what's the best age, right? You should be worried about any intervention for teenagers. Because that's such a dynamic time for the nervous system. Why, I would much rather have teenagers struggling backpack, right, or meditate than obviously these pharmaceutical interventions. So we don't know. But OCD tends to start to really hit in middle late childhood. So we've got to be thinking about various interventions. And not, by the way, tons of opportunity for being misinterpreted. I didn't just say, oh, Professor Kelton wants to give psychedelics to kids in middle childhood. That's not what I said. We are, we'll figure this out. Yeah, yeah, you know, one of my favorite findings is psychedelics helps people with nicotine addiction. Nicotine is very hard to beat. And psychedelics 80% drop. I don't know that finding. So, you know, I always, these wilder things, when I teach happiness, it's always the stuff without interventions, which work really well. But boy, if you're struggling in some of these spaces of addiction, deep trauma, OCD, good to, good to think of alternatives. I see one more question. Yeah. How do you feel about TMS? Do you know much about that? I think it's really cool, right? Trans the stimulating the surface of the yeah, big magnet, Joel parts of your brain, shift electrical waves. You know, there were rich ivories working on it at UC Berkeley, others, very interesting, right? Some of the, like OCD, the thinking is there's a neural circuit that just always cycles and doesn't break out of that pattern. And maybe external stimulation would disrupt that circuit, right? And so interesting, interesting thing to experiment on. Enjoy the day. Enjoy the game. Go Bears. Thank you very much.