 Thank you for joining us here at the Mechanics Institute. I'm Laura Sheppard, Director of Events. And we're very pleased to welcome you in the new year for our program with Dr. Dr. Dacker Keltner, who's the author of All, The New Science of Every Didn't Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, and Dr. X-Pranther, who's the author of The Sleep Prescription. This, of course, is our second annual program for New Year Renewal and Wellness, and we're so glad to see you here tonight. For those of you who are new to the Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854, and we're one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers here in the heart of downtown San Francisco. We feature our General Interest Library and International Chest Club and our ongoing author events, panel discussions and literary programs, and our Friday Art Cinema Lift Film series. So please see our website at milibrary.org and also pick up flyers at the front table. And I'll also make mention of some of those events coming up at the end of our program. So today we're going to explore ways to open up our capacity for physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual welfare gene, and to learn how to optimize this in everyday life. During a time of political, environmental, social distress, it's a perfect antidote. So I'd like to first introduce our guest today. Dr. Daggard Helper is Professor of Psychology at the University of California Berkeley and the Faculty Director of UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center, a renowned expert in the biological and evolutionary origins of human emotion. Dr. Helper studies the science of compassion, all love and beauty, and how emotions shape our moral intuition. His research interests also expand the issues of power and status, inequality, and social class. He is the author of the best-selling book Born to Be Good, the Science of a Meaningful Life and the Compassionate Instinct. And Dr. Eric Prather is Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California San Francisco. He directs the UCSF Aging Metabolism and Emotion Center and is the Interim Director of the UCSF Center for Health and Community, and serves as clinician at the UCSF Insomniac Clinic. Eric's research program focuses on the causes and consequences of insufficient sleep with particular interest on how poor sleep impairs mental and physical health, including immunity and heart health. So we're really gonna cover a lot tonight, so I'd like to turn it over to our guests, Dr. Helden and Dr. Prather. Yeah, okay, thank you for the honor of being here, and I will, Eric and I will talk for about 15 minutes each on awe and sleep. Did you see Berkeley's undergrad? So, I'll get you over. And I will be bringing you with me. So, I have been fascinated by the field of emotion, really, since I was a child, and part of the reason I wrote this book is personal. I was raised in, by a digital artist, my dad, and by a mom taught romanticism and literature, and sexism at the State University, and I'm very proud of that, and I'm very proud of that, and I'm very proud of that, and I'm proud of that, and I'm a State University, and I really grew up in an awe-filled context. I was just filled with a lot of paintings in our living room, poetry, and I grew up as a child in the late 60s, moral canyons, and all the wildness there, and so in some sense, I was meant to study awe scientifically, and it's interesting, it took a long time for people to get to awe in the field of emotion, and I wrote the expression of emotion in Man and Animals in 1872, laid out a blueprint to study human emotion, and we only scratched the surface of it in the first 30 years of the science, inspired by the following, all that we've been trying to do is try to figure out the character, and we had a real singular focus on anger and fear and negative emotions, and I would really tackle awe scientifically about 15 years ago, and I'd like to tell you three or four stories to try to understand this and serious emotion that really comprises the book of this book that I wrote. Awe is the emotion you feel when you encounter vaccines that build into our bodies and our minds ways of approaching mystery and making sense of complexity and uncertainty and the next one we get into what Einstein felt was that he felt that awe construed the cradle of art and science, and I think awe did is the fundamental emotion we get and it's interesting that it arises out of times like today, uncertainty and complexity and the trauma and crisis, our minds turn to awe to make sense of things. That is something that the great writer wrote about how he did that through awe. So I tell four stories in this book to understand this remarkable emotion of awe the feeling we have when we encounter death mysteries. The first is an evolutionary story I approach all psychological phenomena like most biological scientists would do the evolutionary lens and what it does for us functionally in terms of adaptation and we look when we try to understand the evolution of an emotion to neurophysiology which in part neuro studies which are studies of sleep and awe has a fascinating neurophysiology when you feel awe at in response to music or visual art or the grandeur of the buildings outside or a political idea or a person's moral beauty you don't talk about that your body transforms you it shuts down the self-focused regions of your brain called the default network get you out of yourself it activates the release of tears which is it's a fascinating physiological response that is very sympathetic so it's about this calm and opening branch or nervous system leads to the release in one study of oxycosins a little chemical that helps you connect and be open and empathize with other people it activates the vagus nerve which is this fungal nerve that again opens you to others and then it produces the fast part of awe which is the chills who's had the recent experience of the chills it's like this problem what was it? it's like those moments of oh I gotta do something like something that you remember to do and you sort of jolt yourself and shiver sort of opening up towards exploration and doing things who has a recent experience of the goosebumps of the chills of men that was a little bit of a hot stream of wind chimes when we were there we were listening to the different wind chimes and you could really hear that these things should have some softness amazing so the chills are fascinating the physiological response there are actually a couple of different kinds of chills there's a shutter of horror and then there's the goosebumps the tingling sensation that go up your back on your arms they're a different kind that really trap universally the experience of awe it's a fascinating physiological response of the contractions of muscles around peripolicles throughout your body it gives you this sensation a really cool line of research of evolutionary implication it shows that social mammals pile around which is the basis of the chills they plop up their fur that's our children's response we just lost our fur and it gives you the sensation and careful analyses of how social mammals show the chills is when they get closer to their friends and their community to face peril interesting the deep evolutionary structure in social mammals to awe is this merging with others connecting with others when you face peril Jane Goodall, one of my heroes said that she observed awe in her chimpanzees that she observed and said including the chills they show awe around waterfalls and loud winds and big storms and thunder and suddenly together starts a pile or extra show which she called a waterfall display very much like our ritualized behavior during awe she said isn't it interesting that they show the beginnings of awe or spirituality and really what it boils down to is being amazed at things outside of yourself the big shift in social mammals to not be solely self-interested to focus on others and not be getting the second story I tell is cultural every emotion is always changing evolving from one culture to the next from a historical period to the next awe has definitely evolved culturally if you trace it back to indigenous societies from their oral traditions and scholars like Dr. Geary believe when you realize awe is everywhere in indigenous cultures just down in the Mayan cultures there are ceremonies and rituals textiles, the clothes they wear the the plant medicines, etc cultures built with awe into the design of your culture awe in the west is largely a religious emotion happy to talk about that and you think about and also these Asian traditions Hinduism, the Bhagavad Gita, Taoism and seven experiences at the Korra Law and then it transforms in the age of enlightenment thanks to Edmund Burke this Irish philosopher 27 years old he wrote this very influential book about awe or the sublime and beauty and what he does for all of us is he secularizes awe it's a radical move you can't imagine how important it is and it's in the feelings it's not only about divinity it's about perceptual experiences music and you know looking at non-human species and looking at the sky awe is everywhere he would inspire romanticism would inspire Ralph Aldo Emerson and William James and the democratization of awe we are all San Francisco is an awesome city people find awe in every imaginable way as we will learn and we should thank Edmund Burke this very unusual Irish philosopher who really secularized it and William James really got it right and said then this is American transcendentalism we all find it in our own way and this amazing emotion teaches us the pluralism of transcendentalism we all can find it in equally neatly individualized ways and we remember that the third story I tell is the science of awe that we have done that other labs have done it was kind of funny we started the science and we failed miserably I remember our first study of awe was this perfectly undergrad like you who I think she had just come back from Burning Man and she was wearing all these stepples and glitter and stuff I came in the lab and I was like what are you doing here we were showing these engineering students we cracked all of them just didn't go that well but we did figure it out eventually and I'm really proud of the science of awe it's making its way into the world and I'll just give you some highlights awe is everywhere awe is everywhere we study people in 10 different countries not in the report on their subject of lives every day for 2 weeks 2 to 3 times a week people feel awe in the most extraordinary of ordinary things right looking at the kindness that you will see in the streets on a regular basis I was just in Berkeley I was walking out of the drugstore a burp at her get comes walking out and there's an unhoused individual she just gives them 30 bucks and I just felt like that's the last money she has in her checkbook and she gave it away awe is everywhere and that is interesting it's a challenge for us because it's got to pause put away her devices secondly where does awe come from we survey 30 different countries have stories of awe in the spirit of living games to rely on stories and not self-reporting others to understand a complicated phenomenon and we classify them with speakers of 20 different languages at DC Berkeley this was surveyed in 26 different cultures and we find awe in moral beauty courage of others we find awe in nature obviously we find awe in collective movement who's had an awe-inspiring experience in collective movement what was it what was it political process collective movement then we get to the sources of awe that are really cultural which is music who can describe the experience of awe of music what was it I saw a symphony pretty recently and just the pianist and just the speed of his hands just to be involved yeah first I'm hearing a bit of music what did you think what did you think so cultural stuff wonders are digital design music, spirituality 81% of Americans are spiritual they believe in supernatural divine forces half of those people find spirituality in nature thanks to Edwin Burke again and Raquel Emerson awe is a spiritual emotion we should be talking about spiritual well-being and then the final sources of awe are big ideas massively transformative ideas who has the source who has a big idea that it raises them all it's a little bit harder to access but then once you think about it yeah I remember when my daughter when she was 11 or 10 like infinity what it just ends in a wall but who has a big idea I've never heard that but go ahead where there is a primordial use where there is not really a shift all that much in time it's a fun book to read because it's very interesting yeah if you start to study the history of science and the history of art most great scientific discoveries come from awe Darwin had almost a hallucination in Chile where he looked at what he called the Tangled Bank and he was like oh I have seen evolution with all these species in one moment a big idea and then finally life and death the life cycle brings us all bird, growth, decay, death sources of all finally and I'm almost done is you know Eric and I are slightly in the business of you know promoting health and well-being we need it there is a mental health crisis and awe is good for you it is so good for you it benefits your sense of time it reduces stress it reduces depression it helps with PTSD one of our studies it's good for your immune system it helps with art I think it's coming in healthcare in terms of awe and intervention to life so go finds it all the final story is a personal one and it has to do and it just had to be this way into the book which was the passing of my younger brother and I was an awe scientist here amassing all these findings my brother got colon cancer he and I had this incredible early life of all colon cancer is a horror show it was horrible and then on the moment he was passing away that night I sat next to him and we have stories of this from around the world and I have a transcendent experience of awe where I sensed his soul I felt there was a space around him that he was merging into people being close to others outside of life reviews and a sense of transcendence and I felt awe and I felt great comfort that this is a universal human tendency we see it in every culture we study when you are close to the end of a life to be cherished it opens up all the mysteries and what happened to me just to close out is and I would read Joan's Indians A Berkeley undergrad so she's brilliant it's a brilliant book it does put you into a state of psychosis I was in that state it couldn't make sense of things and I run in search of all and I listen to music that I don't understand I went hiking in mountains around Los Angeles it was very important I went to India for this incredible spiritual retreat and I did it in a search for this emotion and it changed my life it was the first person experience of this emotion evolving our culture needs it we need to build it in schools and read practices which has happened I close the book by saying isn't it amazing we have all these incredible systems of the body and these remarkable systems out in the world that bring us all from music and culture and it's always a mystery that's unfolded those are the four stories of the book and Joan's turn I should have gone first you know what I think I think sleep's awesome we're going to transition to sleep as a scientist I have a very specific perspective and how we can impact health in a really powerful way and I think about sleep it's kind of the glue that holds our life together and so all of us can kind of imagine or have experience at night really bad because we got the participation who had a really bad night of sleep last night I was doing this today so I did not sleep all that bad then it was going to happen and it changes how we feel right? it's like our lab does a lot of work on things that disrupt our sleep and then what happens when it's disrupted and what we find kind of time again is that when people don't get to sleep they need to do things that happen during the day feeling big things it really impacts our ability to cope effectively with the stress of the world the things that we can control we also find interesting things and when people don't get to sleep they need to actually select into different stressors so we know this from studies of police officers studies of lots of folks that routinely get little sleep were more likely to get into conflicts with people your force with Andy Gordon who is with us as well who's at the University of Michigan has this really beautiful work looking at the impact within a couple when one of those individuals isn't sleeping and the interesting findings I think are one that when one of the couple isn't sleeping well no one's sleeping well I think we can all understand that and then in the context of a laboratory task and when they were there was a conflict and then they had to resolve it and the individual, if they were the one that didn't sleep well it was really hard for them to have empathy for the other person it's really hard to kind of see someone else's perspective because sleep is such an fundamental part of our being it's built into our genetic code that when you don't have it you're kind of on high alert you need to take care of number one and that's what happens because it's shifted it's just so important for us to live well so sleep is also really dynamic because why we need it and what we can do about it there's three quick part of things we can get to the computation and the Q&A but so sleep is not just one thing we're not like laptops, we close them and wake up and we're like back in the world it's actually really dynamic so if anyone has sleep study we measure sleep generally like the most practical way we use a hundred pieces we use kind of electros on your scalp and we kind of look at brain activity and recycle throughout the night so we actually move from so sleep scientists aren't very creative in our meetings so we have REM sleep so rapid eye sleep then we also have non-REM sleep non-REM sleep and then within non-REM sleep there are these three stages that we just named N1, 2 and 3 so and they move so non-REM sleep which is kind of the bulk of our night we move from kind of lightest to deepest so N1 is important N2 has kind of specific signatures in the electrical brain waves so we think, see kind of this burst of neural activity called K-complexes and spindles and they're really important for learning and N3 is that deep, restorative sleep that slow wave sleep that we see it seems to be so important for our health and our restoration in fact in our laboratory, another laboratory we bring people in, you know, they follow us here and we say, oh well tonight you're not sleeping you're randomized to the not-sleep group and so they're deprived of sleep all night they have to do their whatever, their homework or their games or what have you and then when we let them sleep like the following day they drop immediately into slow wave sleep and what you think of this is it's the body trying to compensate that it prioritizes that over all other parts of sleep because it's so important to our kind of survival and then there's REM sleep this is rabbiotic sleep that I think is a good link to all because this is where we sleep and I'll admit as a sleep scientist and clinician we don't really understand dreams I think we could have a whole discussion about our most wildest dream and try to piece it apart figure it out but we do know it plays a lot of really other important roles so it's really important for emotional memory it seems to be linked to creativity but it also is just kind of one of these mysteries like awe it seems to be it's essentially evolutionarily conserved it's conserved across all species that we look at over millennia but unlike awe it's well it could be a discussion point sleep does a lot of things it's not just one thing so REM is one of those pieces of sleep that we're still trying to work on and in fact for all the time we've been studying sleep we still have a lot of way to go and there's more discoveries that are happening all the time and so sleep has these stages and it cycles across the night in the first half of the night it's disproportionately non-REM sleep and particularly slow wave sleep so again getting back to this kind of prioritizing it in the first half of the night second half of the night is disproportionately just REM sleep this is why if you wake up kind of in the early morning hours you're more likely to remember a dream than if it's like REM when you go to sleep you're more likely to be coming out of REM sleep but we wake up all the time it's our sleep cycle cycle about every 90 minutes and so we kind of go in an hour and a bunch of the time we don't even notice we just kind of snuffle and roll back over you know whatever but it also changes over time so obviously none of us I hope sleep like infants anymore you've taken up most of the day sleeping broken up and it changes into adolescence where we have this shift in our circadian rhythm where we end up being a little over the blade like going to bed later getting up later this is like school start crying and then as we change into kind of mid-life into older adulthood like in the 6, 7, 8 decade of life sleep tends to be a little bit more fragmented and we're still trying to understand that but that seems to be kind of consistent across populations and so but it's really important to prioritize this sleep because it does so much so we know that it's really tightly linked to movement when people don't get enough sleep there's lots of good research to stress that we're at increased risk for psychiatric conditions in particular depression insomnia seems to be a strong predictor of that it's really important for performance if your attention is not there it's a lot of difficulty in work finding and there's growing and growing more and more data to suggest that there may be this link between disrupted sleep and increased risk for things like neurodegenerative diseases that is far from conclusive in my perspective and then a lot of the work that we do in our lab is focused on how sleep attacks the immune system so pandemic obviously it became very relevant to the type of work that we do and we had done I just want to talk about one study and I'll talk about what we can do to work on it so we were really interested in how does the extent that sleep played an important role in someone's susceptibility to infectious illness right so we what we did was we basically brought again all of this and exposed everyone to live rhinovirus so we kind of shied into their nose and again they volunteered to take them and and then they were quarantined over the course of about kind of five days prior to that we had measured their sleep so we had given everyone basically of poorly designed less flashy but research trained kind of wristwatch and just kind of measured activity but we had algorithms to estimate sleep so we did that for a week got people's kind of average habitual amount of sleep that they were getting and so we had them all exposed to the virus and then we had to know who was getting sick and we could ask people we didn't want to rely on people's self-report and so instead we did two things we documented infection so we drew some blood and looked for neutralizing antibodies that developed it as a consequence of infection as well as had people kind of wash out their nose every day and then we cultured it up to see if the virus was replicating it so that was evidence of infection and then we wanted to know of people who got infected who actually got sick and there were like a series of these studies that have been done so there's like criteria but basically we looked at mucus production and we looked at congestion and so for mucus production what we did was we had everyone kind of keep their tissues that they could sell them and then we had like a pregnancy or underage not a birth underage they would but they collected them and put them in a bag and then we would kind of zero out the weight of the bag and the tissue and weight it and then we had an estimate of objective mucus production and then for the nasal congestion every single day we had a person put their head back and we would kind of shoe a diet to their nose and then we would time how long it took to get to the back of their throat and the longer it took the more congested they would have and so we have these measures of like enough of these things and so if they were infected and they met the criteria and basically we did all of this just to get this kind of yes or no answer did you get the answer and what we found was that to my knowledge the most conclusive data that we have is that people who slept fewer than 6 hours a night on average were about 4 times more likely to get safe than people who slept the recommended amount which is 7 hours a night and a good thing that we'll do it every time is that everyone got the virus like the same amount and this made a difference and this is about specifically accounting for all of these other things that we think are important with age, someone's you know, just you know, biological sex their income all these things have been shown to predict kind of susceptible to infection so that's kind of a key piece of this okay so it turns out that you know, maybe it was our sleeping net great population data suggests that at least 30% of the population is not getting the recommended for adults, it's not getting the recommended at least 7 hours sleep per night and 30% of the population reports insomnia symptoms so that's difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep or waking up too early and kind of feeling bad during this not feeling rested or you know other symptoms of daytime dysfunction and why I get so excited about sleep you know what we know how to it is something that we ought to do and it's all based in sleep science in the biology of sleep and so I hope for the clinic at UCSF that treats people with insomnia as well as other sleep disorders things you know, people have like shits but mostly insomnia and what we do is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia and most people probably haven't heard of it even if they've had insomnia, even if they've seen a physician but it turns out that it's the number it's the first line treatment recommended by every medical board that people should do before taking medication is it doesn't treat the problem it treats the symptoms and know they can be effective wow, are they psychologically cause, start psychologically people begin to worry that they can't sleep without it and then once that happens, once that takes hold it can be really challenging and so this book basically distills cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia and I wanted to do it because there are not enough people that run clinics like this and it is something that has been shown time and time again that can be implemented on its own it's just like getting the knowledge and so I will, I just want to kind of mention the first two things that I tell people if they want to get their sleep back on track first, well before that first two things if it seems like it's something other than insomnia like you're a big snore right? it's not something that this book will accept and it's something that you can check out and it's very much under that but there's good treatment for it but if it does seem like that's not the case and you want to try to get your sleep working better for you the number one thing that people should do and it's really simple is to stabilize your wake-up time seven days a week right? oh seven days a week what about the weekend? I get it, I get it I hear a lot and that's fine you know, we do know a little bit about when people do these like flip-flops and not getting enough sleep during the week and that's called social jet lag and there's more and more data because that might not be good for you but if it's something that you want to kind of work on you know, new year, new you like this is where you start and it's really kind of simple but it's based in the fact that we know a lot about how sleep works so sleep is regulated by two things I think for the next time I'm just going to talk about this then we'll do that sleep is regulated by two things it's regulated by our circadian rhythm which is our internal rhythm and by stabilizing your wake-time it actually helps set in time kind of view your day and your night our body, our brain is really sensitive to environmental cues particularly sunlight so our circadian clock lives in the supratismatic nucleus of the hypothalamus in our brain it gets that signal and knows what's supposed to happen next our brain is really like a predicting machine and it's trying to take in all this environmental information and it kind of keeps alive like what's going to happen next and the more predictable you can make it kind of the better their predict the easier job it is, more efficient it can be and so by keeping a stable wake-up time it helps set in line the day and your night the second thing is that it's regulated sleep it's something called our homeostatic sleep drive and this is like a really simple concept it's like the longer you're awake the sleepier you get like we need sleep we can't stay up indefinitely and so I think that it's like a balloon like wake up in the morning and your balloon is flat and then it fills up with sleepiness as you go through the day and you use energy and then when it gets to like a big optimal amount you feel those sleepy cues and you go to bed and it fills up with sleepiness throughout the night and then you start again and so by stabilizing your wake time you're not just regulating your circadian rhythm but you're making sure that your balloon is going up at the same time every day this is the same reason why napping if you're trying to work on your sleep it's not like a great idea for most of us because it steals someone that's sleeping it's not a balloon now you need to wake up longer for it to get bigger okay that's where I'm going to start so I'm going to stop there yeah there you go I mean maybe what we should do is ask each other a question but I think the audience is going to because I see a lot of people who used to see hands like you know so oh yeah I can do it more I mean online so I do one question and then we'll open it up to you guys and we'll have other questions and again amazing work and really paradigm shifting work and I just love to hear your thinking well I guess I have two questions you know can we really study dream but then secondly is you talked about the restorative properties of sleep that I think we've all built up and I'd love to hear I know you work on the immune system but I'd love to hear your thinking about what is going on in the body yeah those are both really great and weighty questions right like a whole lifetime of many people's work to try to figure that out so to the day after can we study dreams that's a really hard one you know it dates back well before us in trying to do that I mean I think it's hard to do in a systematic way though I could imagine you know so people have kind of done things like because you can track people on their dream you know you can wake them up and try to figure out what's going on or you can look at populations where you know there's chronic nightmares so PTSD many people with PTSD will have recurring nightmares but they'll also have fragments in the rent and so maybe there's something to that there I mean I never discount technology in these things I could imagine in some future world that's probably 2026 the way things are going yeah maybe we could do that and then with respect to the restoration you know it's really interesting so we're learning more and more about the biological underpinnings of sleep and what happens during sleep and certainly there is some evidence that there are these repair processes that help clear out metabolize the most finding in the last five years in sleep that when people are sleeping more fluid conveyed the brain changes in ventricle structure that allows more fluid to then discover what's called the lymphatic system the lymphatic system and so that might be a mechanism in the brain we can see these changes and I've been really interested in and this is something I've been trying to get going at UCSF kind of the role of mitochondrial functioning within the cell it does lots of things but when we look at patients that have mitochondrial disorders they have a genetic mutation they have all of these other symptoms one of their big symptoms is sleep problems and fatigue and so I think there are lots of cool areas that we can explore alright now a question about awe so I mean you raised this a little bit with respect to all interventions in the context of health and I would love to hear if you kind of gave a little teaser what would that be? looking at grand candy pictures? thank you yeah, it's funny I I I'll give you a couple of studies I'll give you the context I have been working with Kaiser for many years and they bring me in and you know they bring people like a parent that I know I'm a little bit more unusual and you know I talk to other patients and so forth and they call it alternative pathways or lifestyle health and in point of fact all of the great sources of awe are profoundly good for your body and your mind so you know we are starting to learn there's a new study out Listing of music is as good for chronic pain as the standard barn pseudophiles and you probably all had that experience like if I have a good diet of music which most of us it's easy to do but it's like sleep alterations that affects we are learning particular neurophysiological pathways that are good for your body nature immersion which brings us off maybe 12 or another work undergrad has the definitive review 2015 I mean nature immersion is good for your body it's anything and there are big data sources showing that you know if you're near parts if you go to parks, if you garden if you go to the sky, if you take it and should do the changing seasons etc it benefits inflammation vagus nerve, brain function so the point of this is these kinds of findings tell us we should be giving people doses of awe as medicine and so we did a study UCSF it's a major concern you get older people to do awe walks once a week everybody's walking you have to just add a little bit of awe my favorite part of the study it's not like I did all this my favorite part of the study is they took selfies I don't know if you heard about this study they took selfies each week and they control conditions like perfectly arranged, selfie, click you know they are conditionally the person is drifting off to the side floating in the space the context is getting bigger but it made the elderly individuals feel less pain over the course of the week second one, you can do it here is with, we just published this this is with healthcare providers doctors, nurses, physicians, assistants all we did is say this is during the pandemic during the pandemic we were providing healthcare we were watching people die there were 30% under staff there were massive controversies about vaccines it was chaos so once a day we gave them one minute of awe where we said great time to be here put away your devices and just think about what's the best in your part of it right now right 60 people I can see their eyes their used language I wrote a letter 30 years ago to the professor I can't believe this time is passing, I'm bruised and they felt awe and it made them feel less depression anxiety over the course of 16 weeks so it's coming a certain general servant is interested in it it's very interesting the kind of science we do in a certain general servant they should not go to bars listen to music in an intentional way think about someone of moral beauty to you who is, Mark Twain was in a facility Mark Twain is spectacular what a figure so I think it's coming much like gratitude it's probably going to be as big as it sounds well why don't we do 25 minutes before books so let's get you guys involved we have a microphone and I'm going to pass it around I also want to say what an incredible team we have so I want to say yay and we had yes we took all and also the sleep description are going to be on sale after this program and we want to make sure they long get a book and have it signed afterwards anyway let's go to our first question right here hi for the sleep man sleep man university man does science have anything positive to say to people whose occupation demands that their wake up time be different and revolve around the clock each day yeah I get this question a lot because there's so many so many folks that have kind of this shift work you know it's really challenging on the body most people can't keep it up for an extended period of time but I do need people to do and the people that do they do seem to potentially be a little bit dialogically so the challenge is that you have to stay up during the night which we can do you can do it but it's sleeping during the day that is the big challenge because you have this balloon that's so big honestly but your circadian rhythm doesn't change it's still like wake up so we behaviorally we try to be really protective about the sunlight that you're exposed to scheduling naff right before your shift at night trying to make the room as perfect as it can be we can get if people are really diligent about it we can get people getting the rest they need this is one of the few places though I'm a psychologist I'm not a psychiatrist or a physician I don't actually target the circadian system I've been shown to have incredible efficacy in shift work because we live in a society that requires this type of job but we weren't built for this type of job most people were not built for that type of job and so I think it just requires being as diligent as possible and for people that have shift work if in any way they can keep it even if you have to work at night and sleep during the day it's the best thing but it's a really challenging question over here great talk by both of the speakers I wondered on the topic of sleep and REM sleep is it possible to increase the number of hours you're in REM sleep by wearing a sleep mask that allows you to blink inside the mask because I've read that it goes back to craters for our days when we had to wake up to look around for sabertube fibers for self-preservation that we still do this and it interferes if there's any kind of light in the room or little electronic lights is there a way do you think to prolong the amount of deep REM sleep and restorative non-REM sleep that you're referring to by wearing a sleep mask? yeah so for many people if they can acclimate to sleep masks and some people just don't like them but they can provide kind of the blackest blackout that you can have and so that can be helpful particularly we all sleep I would say that sleep is universal but also really personal things that work for some people don't necessarily work for others and so that can surely help people where their sleep would have been disrupted otherwise with respect to increasing those aspects of sleep that's something that we're like everything that's like the million dollar question like how do we get all that sleep but aren't we going to sleep that long? how do we increase the depths of our sleep but currently the only behavioral strategy the two behavioral strategies for increasing deep sleep has been shown to be high intensity exercise has been shown to increase deep sleep and the idea is that probably everybody needs it because you're going to high intensity exercise and sleep deprivation actually so and hope for technology okay question back here we have to try to ask this so it makes some sense Dr. David Eagleman in Stanford has done a lot of work on the brain he had a show on PBS and I heard him speak recently and he had a hypothesis that much like when someone loses their senses smell or their eyesight other parts of the brain take over for it and become more I guess exaggerated he said that people sleep that part of the brain that controls sleep does that so that other parts of the brain in effect don't take over that space vision vision as an example vision that it's almost a protective mechanism so that it doesn't lose vision in particular doesn't lose that space because your eyes are moving and engaged I'd be curious to what your thoughts are that's not a very good explanation but that's a big picture that's like a really interesting theory I can't have a huge opinion on the neurobiological underpinnings and function of sleep in that context but I mean we're still trying to figure it out I do know certainly the wake sleep system is pretty deep in the brain it's like part of the old brain system and so it certainly has kind of very clear kind of function but in that context I'm not sure that's really interesting we're going to go from the back and then we'll watch the front soon so I have an odd question I have to say I'm not a Birkin undergraduate so please keep the answers civil I'm just taking pride I can see the rule of law and religion and I wonder if the rule is different in the context of a cult than it is in the context of religion or is that just the same in terms of how law functions? That's a really deep question there's a lot of central to spiritual religious experience that was really self-evident and that was really William Jane's enterprise who was trying to figure out what's the core of religion and he said it's elims feeling transcendence the mystical religious feeling and then he went on an interview with a bunch of people from Walt and you know gathered narratives, stories people need to say to make the case about spiritual feeling and awe is right in the heart of it it gets really interesting when you push the boundaries because you say the mystical feeling for example that's at the same where William Jane's enterprise is like odds you feel like you're part of something fast your boundaries are dissolving you sense the presence of a sort of spirit or anatomy and force to everything Jane's wrote about the same dependencies of mystical feeling you just want to be good for the world which has been documented in the literature and that probably characterizes cults as well to your question we don't know empirically making sense of the devotees of Charles Hansen or Jim Jones in San Francisco probably or Oscar I think that's really interesting Emile Burkine the sociologist said all of these awesome processes probably predate religion like moving in unison and chanting visual imagery and legends of the divine and deities are stuff that we just do naturally and you can not only find those awesome processes in religion you can find them in cults you can find them in almost political movements think about the supporters of Trump they have a sort of religious-like relationship with him and there's even a paper on how fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers are almost religious devotees and they gather they have some sacred acts that they do and they're special clothing and they want to be buried in the garden and they see their players they start to use the language of divinity when they describe their life it gets very close to religion so awe is smart it just starts to push things around this is why the contemporary science of psychic elders is finding you do these little alterations in serotonin we don't know what it is but it's one notion yes, there's spirit through awe it starts to push the boundaries of the mystical images what we should be doing I have a question regarding to impact of environment on sleep so I sleep better in the mountains versus sleeping in the city with neighbors around making noise maybe throughout all hours and I've introduced a white noise example to different types of white noise examples from headphones to having a white noise machine actually the example that uses an airplane cabin pressurized airplane cabin that helps me but the impact of environment in this environment versus going up to the mountains I don't have to wear anything and I find my sleep comes a lot easier yeah, I didn't break this up but one of the things that I'm most interested in in the context of sleep is how sleep is not evenly distributed across populations and is often driven by socio-economic forces environmental factors that change opportunity for certain groups and not others and we know from population level data that marginalized populations people that live in areas where there's noise and high crime or light pollution or what not have experienced significant judgments in sleep compared to other populations so there is a lot of social justice around sleep opportunity because it's such a biological imperative and so it's absolutely true there are these environmental things that can contribute to sleeplessness sleep what sleep really requires is for someone to feel safe right it's to let go right and in certain environmental circumstances that's not the right plan right I mean even just in kind of like our contemporary kind of like who sleeps perfect when they go to a hotel for the first time the first night like there's a couple and those people are really subscribed and they're like escaping something but for most of us it's like wow I thought it would be great because you sleep with one eye open right and that's part of that system that is really adaptive but in not in that circumstance but there are yeah so sleeping in the mountain sleeping in a place that's in isolation where you don't have to have all of that other outside stuff absolutely could put you in a place for sleeping better we try to mimic that with things like white boys or what have you that you kind of feel these hacks that can kind of help you kind of drift off yeah I'm interested in the connection between grief and awe and I'm just wondering in terms of hospice movements have you a sense of what might help the grieving process yeah thank you yeah the and that's been one of the most vibrant conversations in the book is pretty small I wrote it in a period of and then you know learned a lot from and it's really interesting to me that our our greatest human tendencies in many ways compassion emerges out of our recognition of suffering and so when you see people suffer it activates this deep universal emotion gratitude the appreciation of things that are given and the urge to give evolutionarily comes out of food scarcity and sharing food so scarcity drives gratitude awe comes out of our reckoning with vastness and often trauma and our quest for peace is a very nice new literature by a Tedescian colleague on post-traumatic growth 50 to 80 percent of all of us will really encounter our trauma in life this isn't just this literature on children we this is the first novel through the buddhism you're going to get a lot of stuff and that literature and some of our work is finding that with trauma you'll have these little glimpses of awe and astonishment and wonder and start to construct a new reality to find new means in the light and it's just a a simple thesis that you start it's starting to happen and that's what animates art and music that creates or represents art out of form community and so what I'm really excited about is B.J. Miller who sees San Francisco his group has a whole re-curriculum we sent over a lot of our law practices Kaiser Permanente is now using awe narratives to help bereavement groups tell a story of your partner who just left talk about something that's beautiful in that as one example we have missed conceptualized death and grief in the United States as most of us would agree and awe is actually a vibrant part of both it's a part of time near-death experiences are a fall off and there's a nice robust literature reviewed from the University of Virginia on that not all law but a lot of law so we need to return it we need to return to sleep awe is fundamental and it's great it's an email very important Eric and I were talking about you know when you write about people email you now you know and we get a lot of emails in regard to draft work you get all kinds of emails but the most inspiring kind of email is I lost so in Senate and if you're right awe was part of creating a new reality and I had two emails from people who lost rather strong I'll try to combine both awe and sleep it's all we try and duel it out on who answers but fifth at Dreaming is that something that we do have research or look into is it possible to train someone to live a dream and then what might be the benefits of living dreaming both in the context of awe and questions for the sleep man you know is it yes I think it's absolutely training for it because people report that they can do it better you know it's not well researched and to say really it dreams our whole research but it's unclear what the kind of benefit is for other aspects of your life beyond that experience it is certainly the experience of but it's certainly not something we do clinically it's a wonderful question because I think awe in the context of awe science gives us a framework we know I had very good dreams of my brother after the past just like transcendent and it changed how I was almost everything and we know one of the sources of awe is to provide coherence to destabilize the sleep system you see things that you can't make sense of awe animates a lot of creativity and creativity to go now I understand this Newton and Descartes when they first saw rainbows were awestruck they were like what the hell is that and how does that work and it's remarkable and they did a lot of physics and math and color theory to figure out how in life and through water it turns into a spectrum and I think that's part one hypothesis we would venture about lose the greenings is during certain moments of destabilization how do we destruct your sleep system I mean what we do is a great kind of adjacent example is when people have chronic nightmares there are behavioral like reversal treatments to help people undo those nightmares and we do it in this one and it's every time in life there's no way this is going to work but like it works every single time it's imaging reversal therapy and it's because they have never over and over walk through it and reimagine another their outcome and people do it and they practice and they practice and they kind of build up these kind of you know dreads in your brain when it happens you know what has to go down and it's incredible and every time it happens good question question about we seem to imply that it was something that brought people together and so my question is for the future because we're entering the age of AI and I want to know some of your thoughts about and virtual reality but the reality has sense or AI induced because it's not quote-unquote natural I mean any things that we forgot about the natural world you know when I we gather these narratives stories of all and no one mentioned your smartphone Google search Instagram or virtual reality and one of my righteous moments of life was I did 2.0 which is all these tech excuses I'm like any virtual reality sense and I do it, it's not going to produce all you know we just think about it, one of the miracles of this moment and a lot of our experiences share consciousness and I can see your eyes and I can see all the synchronization going on here and I start to realize oh we are all representing something about this night as part of expanding out of itself into something big virtual reality we put on headsets and you can't see anybody and you're taking your Star Wars slashing it through your living room great thing they're doing over there so and yeah I think it'll be awe inspiring in some ways I'd love to see them build an evolutionary history of the haunted species but no I think the data are clear about technology not only that but you know going to your smartphone to deliver certain sources of all of it you've got to return to natural ones that are and what we have been evolving for 10 million years this set of capacities that technology has to get away from same with social interaction there are certain kinds of social interactions that are online but for the most part they are pale interactions good luck reproducing and I think the tech people that I'm around they know that and it's a challenge and so I think it's time to hold them accountable and be critical the birth surgeon general he just released a warning like technologies go over kids and the kids and I think one of the central problems it takes us away from sleep 60% of kids sleep with their smartphones because I found that in the surgery recently and it's taken us away from hunger sorry if you're a virtual reality take on I won't be any more exposed to people just feel like yes I can solve the issues and I don't need for somebody new who regularly gets less than 6 hours and wakes up at the same time every morning but then has to therefore nap all is good for sleep for stress we have experiments a little immersion walk outside think about some of you as stars who morally need to feel less stress we have nice naturalistic data veterans who go on a rafting trip they feel less PTSD 32% drop of PTSD of course it will be that's the counterpart and you know is it a purely linear function or is there maybe too much all of it that you stress or do you reach a plateau we haven't found that either it tends to keep replenishing questions on that is there like a sweet spot for sleep like a second wind issue I hear this a lot it often is a little bit more complex about kind of what people like the structures that govern their kind of evening and wind down and kind of obligations that often might become kind of ingrained in habits to produce a second wind biologically there is specifically the sort of data that it doesn't have like a there might be like a little uptake in the evening but not that late but you know it depends on I mean I would just need more information about your things but you know there might be environmental things that could be done to address that and then the other really big question was oh yeah the naps oh yeah the naps so you know like people kind of break up their sleep in a lot of different ways sleep you can only think so much and so you know there was a time before in writing that I have a story where they might have been like too sleep that people have because you know they would have been a bit dark because of the way the sleep structure would have been done a lot later because you couldn't possibly sleep the time that the sun would move down like there's a dark camp down here and so I think the question would be for your husband is you know again about the night time like is there a way to push that nap into the night time and that would just take a little bit so a lot of the work that we do in trying to help people sleep is very data driven like we you know keep sleep diaries in track and kind of that way we can manipulate one thing and see how it impacts it and so it really just requires like you know monitoring and then seeing how we might be able to change it but I mean you know also maybe the naps are amazing and it's just like yeah but there's hope I guess there's hope thank you thank you thank you both you know my work is I'm a clinical psychologist and my work is centered on the transition to parenting so I have a lot of interesting questions and issues we deal with with sleep and sleep regressions and getting everyone to sleep in the house my question is actually about the awe with regards to the trajectory of awe from the life span and I'm really thinking about Daniel Stern's work and he's a psychoanalyst who has this beautiful rendition of describing an infant experiencing sunlight pre-verbal and so you know you talked Professor Kiltner about narratives that you've collected from people who can actually articulate their experiences but we think about babies and about toddlers the development of language that is so clearly linked to experience and cognition and emotion so there's that question I have is what do we know about the trajectory of awe and are there regressions along the way like when we actually don't experience mystery so much anymore and it's certainly as we become parents we see our son vocalizing I mean he is now very verbal but the real authentic expression of awe and in response to things that we all just know what we know about that what we learn from babies and then related to the work that I do which is helping primarily parents come out of depression during those early years is there such a thing as vicarious awe when we think about vicarious trauma is there another side of that they can experience their children experiencing that awe and have a mental health in that awe those are terrific questions the yeah awe is contagious and vicarious so you can feel it of other people around you and it would be interesting in the context of thinking about critical ways to empathize with your child very interesting question you know this is why Eric and I do science which is it helps us really figure out human beings it's a lens we know nothing about the developmental unfolding of awe in children we did one of the first papers on awe in children just published last year we don't know that infants the conceptualization if you look at most accounts of the emotional record for our infants awe is not mentioned not theorized about and yet anecdotally and in our own experience awe is everywhere in infants pre-language pre-symbol-based conceptualization when I in all these great people are always going to see these videos you know you know but that's my favorite of this list and you can go do this in awe is the series of videos there are a bunch of different videos there are maybe 80s and tunnels and 80s in a car seat and a lot of parents of illness and they go into a tunnel and it's black and they think they're dead and life's over and then they're still filming them and when they come out of the tunnel and existence begins again you know and it just says you know you know this concept you see it in direct experience and so I think we'll learn a lot about you know awe the emotion people are so ridiculous so like fear is the fundamental emotion disgust is the fundamental emotion and then anger and awe is a made up emotion tertiary emotion full it's there early it's in non-human primates it's got nerve physiologists genetically coded and I'll bet I'm sorry this is a basic state of consciousness right and in this probably kind of statement so if you need that sign we should do it this is our last question about that hi I saw your flyer in the elevator about a month ago and I was thrilled that you were both going to be here and I love the connection between the two subjects along the lines of I think what you said was that you need to feel safe to sleep do you also need to feel safe to recognize awe and I think that the last question and what you were just saying about infants and tunnels maybe awe is all around us but maybe safety opens our eyes more I'm not sure I'd love to hear what you would have to say yeah I mean I think in some logical sense if the threat system is hyper activated and enabler cortisol you know heart rate etc it's going to be hard to do awe but what I will tell you and I was talking to a Ph.D. student at Berkeley in some of the Tokyo schools he's like it's all awe and moral union they're just and that aligns with some of our findings all depth nationally representative sample you feel more awe the poorer you are and we replicated that in other studies in context of deprivation you feel more awe and create structure and meaning so that we can transcend those forms of deprivation so I think it's going to be a complicated relationship trauma and shutdown the lack of safety capacities for awe but more broadly the classic notions of impoverishment of growing up in an environment which I did before my life it actually was a greater pathway at all well I'd like to thank Dr. Kilder and Eric Frazer for a really engaging evening I think it's been awesome I'll stick around and give you a sleaky time to have a look I'd like to encourage everyone to take a look at the books that are on sale the sleep prescriptions and also awe the new signs of everyday wonder and how it can transform your life both books are on sale on the back and are offered over here to sign for you I also want to make mention of another important program for well-being it's an informational session with awe law for older adults and for caregivers and awe law is a community-based organization in San Francisco that offers programs to help seniors stay healthy, active and social connected that program will be on January 26th at 3 o'clock so please join us for that and come back for our other programs and once again thank you so much for such a great program for those who would like a tour of the Haddick's Institute Alyssa Stone our senior at the program if you are new you can join us we'll be here for you thank you