 When historian Jonathan Glover surveyed the narratives of the battlefields of the 20th century He made a remarkable discovery, which is that when adversaries encountered each other face-to-face They often collapsed in sympathy breakthroughs encounters with our humanity with other people short circuit our aggressive tendencies sympathy Gratitude and awe were mysteries for evolutionary science and often explained away as cultural constructs or Creations of God but not so for Charles Darwin Darwin argued that sympathy and compassion are our strongest Instincts and the communities that cultivate the most sympathy will survive and flourish We now know why our primate relatives infants like this little bonobo are born very independent early in life can navigate space on Their own by contrast human babies are born hyper vulnerable Taking seven to 49 years to reach the age of independence This raw fact of evolution gave rise to what we call the compassionate nervous system or the sympathetic nervous system What I'm showing you is a picture of the vagus nerve which wanders through your body helps you digest helps your immune system It's also activated by experiences of compassion Our Berkeley lab has shown when we are kind to others we thrive in our health My Berkeley lab is sought to understand the deep origins of compassion in the human voice our great ape Relatives when an infant dies the mothers as you see in this photo often grieve and Friends nearby emit vocal burst at signs of compassion that they care for their friend So now I'm gonna get some vocal burst from this audience when I point to the work the name of the emotion I want you guys to give a vocal burst a sound of the emotion. We'll see how well you do so anger Thank you Listen up Matthew sympathy Very nice When we capture these sounds and we present them to human participants worldwide even in the remote reaches of Bhutan They're very readily able to judge what emotion is being communicated by these brief bursts of sound The dotted line is chance guessing you can see with a rich vocabulary of emotion in the human voice Including sympathy sympathy is a deep human universal Gratitude the feeling of reverence for things that are given to you is also critical to human societies in Non-human primates they use touch to convey gratitude So when a chimpanzee will share food with one chimp it will express its appreciation in grooming behavior as a way to cement that friendship So in my Berkeley lab we asked the question Can you convey gratitude and compassion by touching a stranger in the arm just for a second? They touched each other in the arm and indeed we found you could detect gratitude with a half-second touch When women communicated anger to men they had got nothing right and did not know what she was doing and when men Communicated compassion to women. She had no idea what he was trying to communicate a Final emotion that holds societies together is awe the feeling of being around vast things that transcend your Understanding here's one of my favorite quotes on all by by Ralph Waldo Emerson out in nature. We return to reason and faith There's nothing that can befall me all mean egotism vanishes so at Berkeley Paul Piff and I took undergraduates out for one minute They looked up at a science building or in another condition They looked out into this beautiful stand of eucalyptus trees tallest trees in northern California in terms of eucalyptus species And what we found is one minute of being outdoors led people to feel less entitled less Narcissistic they needed less money to do this study and in this figure right here They actually helped a stranger pick up some pens that they had dropped. They became more altruistic awe promotes generosity So in my lab, we've been interested in the health benefits of on what we find is that regular experiences of awe and wonder and reverence Quiet the body's inflammation response pictured here. It's produced by the cytokine system. It produces flu-like symptoms It's a pathway to heart disease and diabetes when chronically activated awe Quiets that response and that's why with environmentalists in the United States like the Sierra Club We've been taking kids raised in poverty and veterans outdoors as you see in this picture for a day of it of the awe As much as we experience it here and what we find is both for our teenagers and our veterans drops in stress and anxiety 30% drop in PTSD symptoms for our veterans just by a little experience of nature There are a lot of threats to compassion sympathy and on today's society from mass incarceration to racism to inequality to climate change And I think the challenge of the world economic forum and all of us here is to create societies that promote more awe sympathy and compassion. Thank you