The Reset Button

Many of us rush through our days, weeks, and lives, chasing goals and just trying to get everything done. But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy that’s all around us. This week, we revisit a favorite conversation with psychologist Dacher Keltner, who describes what happens when we stop to savor nature, art, or simply the moral courage of those around us. Then, in our segment "Your Questions Answered," Mary Helen Immordino-Yang returns to answer listeners' questions about learning and how to keep students engaged in school.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In July 1798, an English poet visited the countryside on the banks of the River Y. On seeing the natural beauty of the area, William Wordsworth composed a poem. It's titled "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintan Abbey." At one point, he describes the effect of the landscape on his psychological state. He writes, "And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the living air and the blue sky and in the mind of man,

• 0:45Shankar Vedantam?

  a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things."

• 0:57Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, the Romantic poets were sometimes given to literary excess. They felt things deeply, and they wrote effusively. But more than two centuries after Wordsworth composed his poem, some scientists today are asking an unusual question. Were the Romantics on to something?

• 1:21Shankar Vedantam?

  This week on Hidden Brain, we look at what happens when we stop,

• 1:26Shankar Vedantam?

  really stop, to smell the roses.

• 1:46Shankar Vedantam?

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• 2:17Speaker 01

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• 2:47Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:20Speaker 02

  For centuries, one of the central challenges in human behavior has been the problem of suffering. We all have aches and ailments, setbacks at work, and conflicts in personal relationships. Many years ago, the psychologist Dacher Keltner found himself in a world of suffering. He was in his early 30s and had just moved from California to Wisconsin. What happened to me, Shankar, is I lived a life largely in California, in the hills, in the mountains, in the oceans, in the culture and so forth. And I went 2,000 miles away, and it was flat, and there were storms, and there was snow, and people rooted for the Packers, and they ate bratwurst, and there was no

• 4:03Speaker 02

  Mexican food, and the weather, and the cold. The cold rattled me. I felt like Camus' stranger in a way, like I am in a strange land that I just physically, temperature-wise, climate-wise, people-wise, I felt like a fish out of water, even though I look like somebody from Wisconsin. I'm of Northern European heritage.

• 4:30Shankar Vedantam?

  Dakar, who was just starting his career as a professor, started to experience extreme bouts of anxiety.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  I come from a family on my mom's side that has a lot of anxiety. And I started to have profound panic attacks, really beginning with the day that I departed to drive across the country to Wisconsin. I had probably, I would say, 70 or 80 a year, really technicolor, full-blown panic attacks when I was teaching, when I would go see a movie to try to relax, when I would fly on an airplane to go to a conference, when I would hear from a colleague. And it really caught me off guard, Shankar. Like, wow, why am I feeling so estranged and anxious all the time?

• 5:22Shankar Vedantam?

  Everything around Dakar seemed to remind him of his isolation. Everywhere he went, he experienced vulnerability. He felt that his life was about to end.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  My god, you know, for those people out in the audience who've had real panic attacks, they are spectacular. And they hit you. And you've, literally, the brain says you're dying. And your body is telling you, you, Dakar Keltner, are dying. And you're about to die right here. It felt really solitary. And I remember there was this book about weird stories from Wisconsin about how anxious people ended up dying in Wisconsin because they would go out and start tilling the earth on their farm at 2:00 in the morning, you know? And everything was frozen. And the guy froze to death. And I was like, this is going to happen to me? And it was happening to me.

• 6:15Shankar Vedantam?

  Dakar had moved across the country to join the University of Wisconsin. But his work provided no solace.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  I was getting rejected for grants. Papers were getting rejected. There was a conference on the social nature of emotion, which is what I was writing about and defined my career on. I got rejected from. I started to dream about people broadcasting all the rejections of my papers and ideas and the like. You know, I got a very mediocre to bad mid-career review. I, it was a real struggle, to be quite honest, and a lot of suffering.

• 6:51Shankar Vedantam?

  So like many of us who've been through something similar, you tried to do a number of things to make yourself feel better. At one point, you and some fellow academics banded together to form a basketball team. Tell me about that. Why did you do that and how did it go?

• 7:05Speaker 02

  We formed this team that we named the Laughing Amygdala.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Because the amygdala was all the rage at the time. It was Joe Ledoux, the amygdala, the threat center, et cetera. And what was great about our team, Shankar, is we were all professors and three graduate students. And we had this really unlikely team and we won championships on the campus. We beat the football team, the fraternities. And people were just stunned, you know? And so it was this magical run. And Shankar, from the solitary life of 3 a.m., I would go to the gym and play. And basketball is five people flowing in motion in a sense of, you know, just we're all connected, doing things together.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  And when I'd walk to the gym, it felt like a sanctuary, that I would go there and leave behind the anxiety.

• 8:08Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to play a clip of music here, Dhakkar. It's from Raw Power, the 1973 album by Iggy Pop and the Stooges.

• 8:29Shankar Vedantam?

  Dhakkar, what memories does this music hold for you?

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Shankar, I think one of the deepest mysteries in science right now, in the social sciences, is why does music speak to us? And why does it speak to our soul? And when I was in Madison, Wisconsin, I was really, you know, fighting with anxiety and, you know, trying to find my way in life. And at that time, I'd probably seen Iggy Pop, kind of a godfather of punk rock, about six to eight times. And he played, I think it was in Milwaukee, and I took some friends to the show. And it was just like basketball, like I was leaving behind the heat of anxiety of my academic life, my young career.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  And I go to the show, and I get up close, and we're in this throbbing mosh pit that scientists now study. And he comes out, and he sings all his great songs, you know, "Raw Power," you know, "Less for Life," and "Passenger." I know them, I'm singing.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  You know, at one point, he dives out into the crowd, and I'm right there, and I hold him, you know? And he's aloft on all of our hands. And Shankar, I touch his skin, and his skin feels like God. You know, I'm just like, I can't believe I'm holding Iggy Pop's bicep.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  So when I leave an Iggy Pop show, I'm drenched in sweat. I don't know who I am. I'm embracing strangers, and I feel alive and pure. So I go back to Wisconsin, and I look at his CD, and it says, "If you feel like writing me, drop me a line, here's my address." So I write him. You know, and I tell him about all my stories, you know, of seeing him and how important he's been to me as a young professor, handling my struggles. Six months later, I get a letter back, in this little shaky scrawl, and he's like, he says, "Thanks for all of your stories, I really appreciate them. Good luck getting access to the Young Skulls at UW.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  I dig teachers, Iggy Pop." And I like, I'm getting goosebumps talking about this now. Like, I held the letter, and I'm like, "My life's okay. I have courage and strength." And when I'd bounce up on the stage and teach my 300 students, getting my mediocre reviews and making mistakes here and there, I felt more strong and alive.

• 11:06Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. You were touched by the hand of God here, Decker.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  The godfather of punk rock.

• 11:29Shankar Vedantam?

  Another time, Dhakkar, you and your wife were outside watching a summer storm approach. Tornado warnings were going off. Describe for me what was happening and tell me what you both did next.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  My wife, Molly, grew up in San Francisco. You know, we both were adapting to the weather and the climate and the landscape. And this storm starts rolling in and you could see it from afar. And those clouds looked horrifying and they looked strong and dangerous. And then there was some kind of warning that said, get into your basement, a tornado warning. And I think tornadoes did land that day. And for whatever reason, we said, let's feel it. Let's get out in the storm. Let's see what the mystery is. And let's just, you know, we couldn't really explain it, but we sat out on our swing, on

• 12:23Speaker 02

  our front porch, as this wild storm ripped through, you know, Madison for half an hour or whatever it was, and rain and lightning and massive winds. And again, it felt, I just felt so alive and free of the shackles of my anxiety at the time. So it was a striking experience.

• 12:46Shankar Vedantam?

  So these all seem like very different experiences, enjoying teamwork in a basketball game, being part of a crowd at a music concert, watching a storm approach. Is there a common thread that connects these experiences, Dhakkar?

• 13:00Speaker 02

  You know, it was really interesting, Shankar, because I was really struggling in these four years. And I, you know, I was chronically anxious, tons of panic attacks, struggling career-wise, really feeling away from home. And I didn't know how to find happiness, which has been a life's...

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Puzzle for me in many ways. And I think what I was doing in these experiences is I was getting outside of myself on the basketball court. It's just the motion and the physicality and you're playing with five people. I was losing myself and I lost myself right up front, like in a mosh pit. And you're seeing Iggy Pop and feeling the music. And I lost myself in the storm. And I was just like, I was throwing myself into things where I could lose myself.

• 14:01Shankar Vedantam?

  Like William Wordsworth two centuries ago, Dacre had begun to discover ways out of his narrow preoccupations.

• 14:09Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, the connections between these different experiences and the science behind a mind-expanding emotion.

• 14:19Shankar Vedantam?

  You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 14:25Shankar Vedantam?

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• 15:04Shankar Vedantam?

  than 1.6% of global GDP and the partner of choice for 86% of Forbes AI 50 companies that have monetized to date. Learn how you can power any business model at stripe.com/billing.

• 15:21Shankar Vedantam?

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• 15:53Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. University of California, Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner studies what he calls prosocial emotions, feelings like love, compassion, and gratitude. Earlier in his life, he tried to get himself through a difficult time by immersing himself in sports, in music, and in the beauties of the natural world. In time, he realized there was a common connection between these activities. They all activated a feeling of being awestruck. Now at the University of California, Berkeley, Dacher has spent years studying the science of awe. Dacher, I want to talk about your scientific explorations of awe, but so much of your

• 16:35Shankar Vedantam?

  intellectual journey starts with your personal journey. Both your parents were attuned to the world of art. Can you tell me about them?

• 16:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, it's funny. I really lived a life that really is, in some sense, from my first moments of being born in Mexico, a life as an experiment in awe. Formative years in Laurel Canyon, California, in the late 60s, so much music going on, Joni Mitchell adores. My dad was a painter, and he loved awe-inspiring, horrifying work. Goya Velazquez, Francis Bacon, and others, right? Just as a kid, I was just seeing images all the time. And then my mom loved awe in literature, and it was getting her PhD, eventually taught at Cal State Sacramento, and loved, you know, Virginia Woolf and her awesome portrayals

• 17:27Speaker 02

  of the mind, and the Romanticism, and Wordsworth, and Blake. And I would hear quotes of Blake, and she told me about the prelude of Wordsworth, and, you know, and then also D.H. Lawrence and others. And so, my parents were pointing me at an early age, from like, five and six, like, here are quotes about awe, here are paintings of awe, here is music. You know, I remember listening to Sergeant Pepper's when it came out, The Beatles, together as a family, like, life's about awe, go do it.

• 18:09Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that your family moved to a rural community in the foothills of the Sierras and you and your brother Rolfe spent many days roaming outside in nature.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  You know, it was incredible. My parents, you know, it was 1970. My mom had just gotten this job at Cal State Sacramento as an English professor, teaching Romanticism and the like. And they did what a lot of people did in that era is they moved to the country where it was cheaper.

• 18:35Shankar Vedantam?

  Mm hmm.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  And we got an old, beat-up Victorian, five acres. And there were streams and creeks and ponds and railroad tracks we could follow, you know. And we just wandered after school. We didn't do any homework. And then as we got older, what we started to do, Shankar, is go to the rivers, you know, rafting. And then in particular to the Yuba River, which is this wild river, and jump into it. And so I had this incredible childhood of biking and walking out in the country. We lived on a dirt road where when I'd go walk home from the school dance, it was pitch black. And I'd see this giant sky of stars, shooting stars. We slept outside, you know. So it

• 19:19Speaker 02

  was about wild awe.

• 19:21Shankar Vedantam?

  So that brings me to a question that I've been pondering for a bit in this conversation, which is that awe in general seems like an ineffable emotion. It feels like it's very hard to wrap your arms around what exactly it is. And if you're going to study it scientifically, you have to know what it is that you're studying.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:39Shankar Vedantam?

  So about 20 years ago, I understand that you and a collaborator came up with a working definition of awe. Can you tell me how that came about?

• 19:46Speaker 02

  Awe presents paradoxes, right? It's, it seems ineffable and beyond words, but yet people really want to talk about it. It's mysterious and numinous and we probably can measure it. And that's one of the tasks of science. So Jonathan Haidt, who is an early collaborator in my career and brilliant mind, we got invited to write a paper for a special issue on pleasure. And John and I had been talking about awe. And we said awe, really the key elements are when we encounter vast mysteries that we can't understand with our current knowledge. Or what we said was awe requires what we called the need

• 20:31Speaker 02

  for accommodation. You have to Rearrange your knowledge structures just to make sense of what you've encountered. But I think for our conversation today, it's really awe's encountering vast mysteries that we don't understand.

• 20:50Shankar Vedantam?

  So, nature is very often a common source of awe for many people. I want to play for you an audio clip. This is from a video made by a man named Paul Vasquez. His nickname is Bear. He saw something outside his home in Yosemite.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  Whoa, oh my God, oh my God. Oh, oh my God. Woo. Oh, wow. Oh my God, it's full on, double rainbow all the way across the sky. Oh my God.

• 21:31Shankar Vedantam?

  So, Dakar, you've seen this video, I believe?

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:34Shankar Vedantam?

  As a scientist, would you care to hazard a guess at what's happening inside Paul Vasquez's mind at that moment?

• 21:41Speaker 02

  This video is really what mystical experiences are like for people. They laugh, they use language that is expansive and beyond the usual kinds of terms we use. It's full on, it's, oh my God. We cry, we are moved outside of ourselves.

• 22:03Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, I want to play you a clip from the end of the same video, Dakar, because it brings up something that I want to ask you about.

• 22:10Speaker 03

  Oh my God, what does it mean? How mean?

• 22:24Speaker 03

  Too much, that's what it means.

• 22:30Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, it's interesting. Paul is almost uncomfortable by the intensity of the experience. He's struggling to understand what it means. And I think when most people think about awe, they think about, OK, I'm seeing something beautiful. I see a beautiful sight. But I think we're getting into deeper waters here where awe can actually make us uncomfortable.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, awe destabilizes. It introduces profound uncertainty about our understanding of the world. It can be filled with threat. You know, when I sat amidst a storm, you know, I felt threatened. Just recently, I was backpacking with my daughter Natalie High Sierras, and we got caught in a lightning storm. And it was awe inspiring and threatening. And that is true, I believe, with Vasquez's experience, the double rainbow experience. It, you know, when we no longer can make sense of reality, which is a theme of awe, it's that mystery, it's the need for finding new understandings of the world, often we

• 23:27Speaker 02

  feel adrift, we feel anxious, we feel threatened, and we feel destabilized.

• 23:35Shankar Vedantam?

  You found that another realm of experience that tends to inspire awe involves other people who do amazing things. Tell me about the idea of moral beauty, Dacher.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  You know, moral beauty is the idea that other people's kindness and courage and overcoming obstacles and their virtuosity and their discipline can inspire us morally, where we see in them what we want to be as good human beings. And it astonished us, Shankar, at the Berkeley Lab, that, you know, we sent out these requests to 26 countries, all these stories of awe come rolling in. And the most universal and the most common was the goodness or moral beauty of other people right around them. And I'm not talking about Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  It is like neighbors and strangers and grandmothers and the like, and roommates that almost on a weekly basis are triggering us to feel like, God, people are good, and I could be inspired by that.

• 24:49Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that you once had a powerful experience with a spiritual leader that also inspired a feeling of awe. Tell me about your encounter with the Dalai Lama.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  Hmm, it makes me humble to talk about it. You know, I've been on two panels with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, and I'm like, man, I'm on a stage with the Dalai Lama, and there are 2,500 people out in the audience. Before we go on, I greet His Holiness. It's a profound moment. When he looks you in the eye, man, you feel like he is really looking me in the eye. And we hugged, and he kind of tickled me. And I was, and I literally, I was one giant goosebump, you know? I was like, wow, I've just hugged and been tickled by the Dalai Lama. Then we go onstage, and you know, and I'm asking him these dumb questions, and you

• 25:40Speaker 02

  know, the narrow scientist, and he's so engaged and interested and curious, you know, because he's training his mind in a way, he's working harder on his mind than I've ever worked on anything. And at one moment in this conversation, I'm asking him about compassion, and he says, compassion is the natural state of the mind. And I, you know, coming out of my Western scientific homo economicus mindset, I was just, it was, it was an epiphany. And epiphanies are a very subtle source of awe, where suddenly we grasp that there are big ideas that really make sense of a lot of things in reality. You might find epiphanies in the idea of free markets, or evolution, or that capitalism

• 26:24Speaker 02

  is bad for the planet, or big data, or the idea of quantum physics, right? And it's surprisingly common around the world, and has this structure to seeing, suddenly being revealed to big ideas that help you make sense of the mysteries that concern you. And it was an awe moment, right? I was like, wait a minute. Compassion is the deepest structure in the human mind, down in the midbrain, all these structures that have been part of mammalian evolution. And that animated a lot of research I did on compassion, and changed how I teach, and it changed how I thought about humanity, you know, that there is this deep goodness in us that's part of our evolutionary story.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  That's one of the most interesting parts of our evolutionary story, how good we are. And it blew my mind.

• 27:13Shankar Vedantam?

  You talked about going to see Iggy Pop and then feeling like you could go onstage and talk to 300 students with newfound confidence. Did you find the same thing happened after meeting the Dalai Lama? Did your life feel different in the days and weeks that followed?

• 27:30Speaker 02

  After that experience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, I felt like I had a deeper sense of purpose and meaning. And so, I'm on an airplane and I had profound flight anxiety. Every little bump felt like the end of my life. I'd have images of losing my life and my children and so forth. And I noticed that I wasn't anxious on the flight. I didn't need to power down a whiskey to make it home. And then I got there and I was at the carousel and of course, my luggage was lost. And I literally laughed it off. And I think I said, "Good. It's time to shed all that stuff."

• 28:10Speaker 02

  I truly felt, and this is true of the science of awe, which is the mundane things don't get to you as much, and I felt above them and strong.

• 28:21Shankar Vedantam?

  So I think all of us have had these experiences where we have that warm glow we get from an encounter with an awe-inspiring person or an experience. Is there any risk, Taker, that this can act like a kind of drug? That we get a high from feeling awestruck and inspired and then this can lead us to be complacent or even oblivious to the sorrows or horrors of the world?

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there are many risks of awe. This is a destabilizing emotion. It leads you to look for new knowledge to make sense of the world. It leads you to abandon past knowledge structures, perhaps, or assumptions. And a parent might think of, "Well, that's what happened to my daughter when she joined a cult, is this cult leader suddenly persuaded her to abandon life and follow this new awe-inspiring figure." There's a new concern in the psychedelic movement of... For certain people who find too much destabilizing search for new meaning in psychedelic experiences that can get them into trouble.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  You could go on. Pierre Carlo Valdissolo has nice studies showing that certain kinds of awe make us see patterns where there aren't patterns, and so we can believe things. Maybe a QAnon supporter feels goosebumps and awe at these stories that are absolute nonsense. They don't have a sense of boundaries. They enter into dangerous situations. So, yeah, there are risks here that we should be attentive to, as there are, Shankar, with every human passion.

• 29:59Shankar Vedantam?

  So you've become increasingly interested in the evolutionary origins of awe.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:06Shankar Vedantam?

  Why is it that we would have an emotion like this? It's possible that other species also experience awe, but of course, we don't typically see a line of cats sitting and watching a sunset together, right? It just doesn't happen. So is there something that might explain our predisposition to awe from an evolutionary perspective?

• 30:25Speaker 02

  You know, this is where the science of awe gets really interesting, which is how far back in our primate mammalian evolution can we trace this, right? If it is a basic emotion, and we have a lot of data that suggests awe is as basic to humanity and the human species as anger or fear, and we have a lot of data on the expression of awe and what it does to our social behavior and sense of self, that awe is this pretty deep, human, universal emotion. And I think that it does two things that are vital to our evolution. And the first is it connects the individual to collectives.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  And time and time again, when people experience awe, they say things like, "I felt small," and "I felt like I was part of something larger than myself." And this is fundamental to our survival. And then the other thing that I think is really important, Shankar, is that awe helps us see the systems around us and understand them. One of the sets of operations of our mind is to be very narrow and focus on the self and individual actions and cause and effect relationships. The other is to look at the world holistically and systemically. That's an ecosystem. This is a social hierarchy. That is a musical structure. And awe pops those systems out to our awareness.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  So it really is the animator of a systems view of life. And that's really important for scientific understanding, for social understanding, for knowing where to find resources in my environment, right, to understand my ecology. And awe is the great engine of a systems view of the world.

• 32:14Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, so much of it begins with the feeling that awe can produce in us, of making us feel small. I remember visiting Alaska once and feeling like I was a very small creature on a very, very big planet. And you've done studies looking at the same idea. You ran an interesting study in Yosemite, exploring this idea that awe changes our sense of our own scale.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  You know, the self takes up a lot of area in the brain and our consciousness. We're always thinking, especially in this modern world, about my goals, my status, my aspirations, what I'm doing, my desires, my interests. And evolutionists have really talked about the problem of self-interest. How do we get people to orient to other people, to societies and collectives? And we started to have this idea that awe does that by creating the small self. In a lot of writings about awe, religious writings from centuries ago, nature writings, Ralph Waldo Emerson, his big epiphany, I am nothing, right? Psychedelic writings, all these writings are speaking to this, but we had to get it empirically.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  So my collaborator, Yang Bai, from China, went to Yosemite, stopped travelers from 42 countries at this particular outlook on a road where you first get to see Yosemite Valley and El Capitan and the great granite slabs and this incredible valley that's just awe inspiring.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  And what Yang Bai did is she did a really simple task. She had people, at that moment, draw themselves and write me. And in that context, those drawings of the self were really small. They wrote their sense of me really small compared to the right kind of control conditions. And we have other data and really different kinds of data, even neuroscientific data showing awe quiets this egoistic, self-focused sense of personal identity and opens you up to the big things that you're connected to.

• 34:27Shankar Vedantam?

  You and your collaborator, Lani Shioda, also once had people stand in front of an enormous T-Rex skeleton. Tell me about that experiment, Dacher.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  On the Berkeley campus, we have this incredible replica of a T-Rex skeleton, and it's in our Museum of Paleontology. And you stand next to it. And we did the pilot testing. People say, I feel awe, man, this is amazing. It's huge. Imagine being chased by that thing. Wow, those things existed 70 million years ago? It's awesome. So Lani and our team stood Berkeley undergraduates by this T-Rex, or they stood in the opposite direction looking down a hallway. And there's this classic measure of your own self or identity, which is you are given the stem, I am, and next to it is a blank line, and you just fill it in 20 different times. And typically, people

• 35:21Speaker 02

  living in the West will say things like, I am, you know, extroverted, and I am ambitious, and I am interested in this, and I have. And when they stood next to that T-Rex and took it in and felt awe, their sense of self expanded and themes of common humanity emerged.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  I am a human. I am a mammal. I am a part of California. I am of this ethnic variety. And so this collective communal self emerged. And that's the power of awe. A little moment, 30 seconds of it, you shift from self-focus, very narrow, to, wow, I'm part of something really large.

• 36:02Shankar Vedantam?

  And some of this translates not just to how we think about ourselves in our own minds, but how we're acting towards other people. You also ran another experiment on the Berkeley campus, this time involving a grove of eucalyptus trees. Tell me about that study, Ducker.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, one of the beauties of awe, and to understand it, it brings out the best of our imagination, you know. And my lab started to get interested in awe, and we were throwing around all these ideas and doing these crazy studies. And the very imaginative Paul Piff, now a professor at UC Irvine, did a study in which he took undergrads to a eucalyptus grove. And they're blue gum eucalyptus trees. They're some of the tallest in North America. When you look up into them, their light and the colors and the leaves and their fragrances are just astonishing. That grove, when you stand in the middle

• 36:58Speaker 02

  of them, embraces you. It makes you feel like you're a part of them. And in the control condition, people were in the same place, but they looked at the science building. And lo and behold, you know, Shankar, this is a minute or two of just, for no reason, looking up into these trees. In one to two minutes, our students reported feeling less narcissistic, less entitled. They needed less money to do the study when we offered to pay them. And then Paul staged this accident where a student was walking by, and they dropped some pens. And the people feeling awe picked up more pens, right? And we replicated

• 37:43Speaker 02

  that in tightly controlled laboratory studies. You just share more when you're feeling awe. You cooperate more. You give more, just with a minute or two of looking up at some trees.

• 37:53Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, very much like you described about your own experiences in Wisconsin.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:00Shankar Vedantam?

  You and Jonathan Haidt have said that an experience of awe can press a reset button in the mind. What do you mean by that, Ducker?

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Reset buttons are really interesting. And actually, Sylvan Tompkins wrote about when you're startled by a loud clap of thunder or the appearance of an old friend or bumping into a friend in the street. It kind of restarts your mind. It resets it to look at things anew and fresh. And contempt of people might say with a beginner's mind. And that's what awe does for a Shankar.

• 38:43Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, how to bring more awe into our lives. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  This podcast is supported by Nurtac ODT, Remedy Pant. We know you didn't ask for an interruption, but migraine doesn't wait for the right moment to interrupt either. It just barges in, takes your time, and throws everything off. So when migraine takes your time, take Nurtac. It's for the acute treatment of migraine with or without aura in adults. Nurtac can provide pain relief in two hours, which can last up to two days. Ask your healthcare provider if Nurtac is right for you because your time is for you, not migraine. Don't take if allergic to Nurtac ODT. Allergic reactions can occur even days after use. Get help right away for trouble breathing, rash, swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or throat. High blood pressure and Raynaud's syndrome can occur. Get help for high blood pressure, numbness, coolness, pain, or color changes in fingers

• 39:46Speaker 04

  and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4-NUR-TAC or visit nurtec.com. All right, back to your podcast, playlist, or whatever's keeping you going today.

• 40:00Speaker 05

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• 40:32Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. At UC Berkeley, psychologist Dacher Keltner studies the benevolent emotions, including the emotion of awe. He's the author of the book, "Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life." Dacher, you recently studied the effects of awe on disadvantaged students and military veterans. Neither felt much awe in their regular lives. What did you do? What did the study involve?

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, there's a growing interest in our culture and scientifically about how the institutional, structural traumas of life, if you're impoverished and you don't have parks nearby and the like, or you have a career, like veterans who go see combat and see people die, their profiles look traumatized. They are depressed and vigilant, anxious very often, twice the rates of American citizens, elevated levels of cortisol and inflammation and the like. And I became friends with Stacy Behr, who's a veteran, and we started talking about this. And he leads veterans into outdoors programs.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  And so what we decided to do in this study is we got veterans and high school students who were in really tough impoverished schools in parts of the East Bay in California. And it's, you know, where there are bars and police cars and no gardens, et cetera. And these kids hadn't, you know, been outside in parks. They hadn't gone camping. Many of them had not really seen a night sky of stars. So we took them rafting.

• 42:22Speaker 02

  Our veterans and then our high schoolers down the American River on a stretch. And it's beautiful and you you wind through these rapids and you look at the water and you see fish and it's amazing. And what we found, we measured their emotions and and stress and trauma and sense of connection at the start of the study, a week later. And as the study unfolded, we measured their sense of wonder and awe and connection to their peers and cortisol and emotions. And what we found is our high schoolers, a week later, felt less stress, more happiness. They felt more connected to their community and family.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  And our veterans felt 30% less PTSD. One high schooler said, I'm so struck by the rolling hills and the smoke. And it was smoky at the time because of wildfires and the water. And then a veteran said, and I love this quote, where, you know, the star splattered sky made me realize that my worries are not as important as I thought they are, but what I could do in the world is more important. And so it was this nice study, and there's a lot of science on this of different varieties, that nature immersion and finding awe, gardening, walking, getting out into the woods, standing

• 43:47Speaker 02

  near a tree is good for your nervous system and your your mind.

• 43:54Shankar Vedantam?

  Is there any evidence that awe has physiological effects on us?

• 43:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are, you know, there's this thing called the vagus nerve, largest bundle of nerves in your body. It slows heart rate, deepens breathing, regulates digestion, helps with your gut and the microbiome. In general, people who have a nice functioning vagus nerve that is responsive and has elevated levels do better in life. And we found, thanks to Amy Gordon and Jenny Steller, you know, that

• 44:27Speaker 02

  Little, brief experiences of awe, seeing an inspiring image, hearing about moral beauty, elevates your vagus nerve activation. And then, just as impressively, you know, when your immune system, the cytokine system, more specifically, cranks out these proteins that attack pathogens, and that's the inflammation response that makes you feel feverish and sluggish and overheated. It's good when you're fighting a virus. It's not good if you're chronically inflamed. And it's one of the central threats to health in the United States. And Jenny Steller and Nihal John Henderson went out and found, in our lab,

• 45:08Speaker 02

  that feeling a lot of awe, of all the positive emotions, quiets down the inflammation response. So it tells us, you know, Emerson, when he had this big epiphany of awe out on a cold day in Massachusetts, he said, "There is nothing that nature cannot repair." And I think he was feeling these changes in the body, a vagal tone and inflammation, reduced inflammation, that awe gives us.

• 45:39Shankar Vedantam?

  So, Dr. You've described many ways in which awe is good for us, but you've also said that our society is becoming awe-deprived. What do you mean by that?

• 45:51Speaker 02

  The deeper structural conditions of our lives are, in some ways, especially for young people today, working against awe. And I really sense this, teaching thousands of students a year at a big university like Berkeley. They are awe-deprived because too much is structured, and they are not allowed to wander, like I did as a kid, wandering around the neighborhoods and out in the foothills. They are awe-deprived because of the new technologies, which frankly, just get us too focused on the self. The more we're focused on the self, the narrower parts of the self, the less awe we feel. They're awe-deprived because of all the competitive self-comparisons that have arisen today.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  So, are people getting enough of it? No. We need more awe right now. You know, Lancet publication... Recently showed that the pandemic has led to rises in depression and anxiety by 20% to 30%. We've all felt this, our young people in particular. But there is everyday awe. And if we just take a little moment to get out and look for it, it's there to find.

• 47:04Shankar Vedantam?

  So, so Dakar, in one recent study, you had volunteers take an awe walk. What is an awe walk?

• 47:13Speaker 02

  One of the easiest ways to find awe is to, in an unbounded way, go out and walk. We have been doing this as humans for a long time in this spiritual contemplative traditions. Getting out into nature and doing awe walks is just part of those traditions. And what we decided to do is test its benefits scientifically. And so I wrote up these instructions for an awe walk. And what you do is you take your ordinary walk that a lot of people do. And in fact, during the pandemic, there were historic levels of walking. And you not only go out to do it vigorously and to help your heart, but you go with a childlike

• 47:57Speaker 02

  sense of wonder and you just stop and reflect on what is really interesting in the small things around you, the flowers and patterns of shadows and like, and also look up past the horizon and look up to the vast things, right? And do it in a way where you go places that you're curious about. And in this study, what we did is our participants were all 75 years old or older. That is an age where because we have a sense that death is coming and we see people die, we're a little bit more anxious at that stage of life. And so one group of our participants did an awe walk once a week for eight weeks.

• 48:40Speaker 02

  The other group of participants, tight control, did a vigorous walk once a week. Each time they did a walk, they took a picture of themselves. And then we gathered a bunch of self-reports, like how are they doing on a daily basis? How is their levels of anxiety and so forth? And we found just a couple of things. One, the more you do the awe walk, the more awe-inspiring it becomes. Awe doesn't diminish with experience. It gets richer and deeper. By the end of the eight weeks, our awe walk participants were feeling a lot of awe. Two, more changes in the self. There are pictures of themselves, and I love this finding.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  The self gets smaller over time, and it starts to drift off to the side. And they're including, you know, the rocks and sunsets of their awe walk. And then third, really importantly, on a daily basis, they just felt less distress. You know, they felt less anxiety about life.

• 49:48Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, in many ways in this conversation, Dacher, we've spent a lot of time talking about awe in the beautiful and the majestic. But you've written that so much of life is awesome, including the parts that are not great. Tell me about your relationship with your brother, Rolf. You were very close to him, right?

• 50:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, just hearing you say his name brings goosebumps and tears to me. He was born one year after me, so he was younger. And we did everything together. We played Little League together. We played basketball teams together, wandered together, went to Mexico together. We're best men in each other's weddings. We both became social sciences teacher types. And frankly, he taught me how to be kinder and how to be courageous. I don't think I was endowed with those tendencies early. He taught me. He was my example in many ways of moral beauty.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  So I was profoundly close to him through the ebbs and flows of brotherhood, but he was my core.

• 50:55Shankar Vedantam?

  So I understand a few years ago, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Tell me about that, Dacher.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  Anyone out listening, you know, who's been close to colon cancer, it's a horror show. And for my brother, for two years, I watched him, you know, go from being a 210-pound, very strong man, 147 pounds, bone thin, passing out. There's a lot of pain, but there are certain kinds of pain that that just wipe out consciousness, breakthrough pain. And abdominal pain is like that. He got it all. Chemotherapy, and I was just there all the time. And then he decided to take a cocktail when he knew the cancer had returned and headed into his gut.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  And we all went up there in January and we watched him, you know, slowly leave this world. And Shankar, I had gone through the most horrifying two years of my life, watching my companion in awe, my brother Rolf, fade physically. But in that moment of seeing him calmer, heading into the, where he was going after losing his body, we were all around him, we touched him, the light felt different, we were quiet, we bowed our heads, and we were all in reverence of my brother Rolf and what he meant.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  And watching him go, I was filled with astonishment and awe.

• 52:36Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that you took a trip to honor your brother's memory after he, after he died. Where did you go, Dacher?

• 52:46Speaker 02

  After he died, and then I returned to my life in Berkeley and was blown off the map. And it's really the state that Joan Didion describes, you know, in her writing about grief. I was, couldn't sleep and anxious and confused and was just really struggling.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  And this voice came to me and it was find awe. And my brother and I, we always went to the mountains. You know, we grew up in the mountains, near the Sierras. And I went up into the high Sierras and Ducks Lake, where he and I had hiked, and Mammoth, in the east side of the Sierras. When I saw the ridgeline that he and I had seen, I felt him there. I heard his voice. I saw the trees that he and I had seen, these trees flicker in the wind, the aspen trees. And I just felt him there, Shankar. I was like, in these mountains, my brother is with me.

• 53:57Shankar Vedantam?

  Dacher Keltner is a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. He's the author of "Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life." Dacher, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 54:11Speaker 02

  Shankar, it is a privilege to be in conversation with you. Thank you.

• 54:20Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, your questions answered. Mary Helen Immordino Yang responds to listeners' thoughts and stories about learning and what she calls transcendent thinking. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 54:55Speaker 04

  This podcast is supported by Nurtac ODT, Remedy Pant. We know you didn't ask for an interruption, but migraine doesn't wait for the right moment to interrupt either. It just barges in, takes your time, and throws everything off. So when migraine takes your time, take Nurtac. It's for the acute treatment of migraine with or without aura in adults. Nurtac can provide pain relief in two hours, which can last up to two days. Ask your healthcare provider if Nurtac is right for you, because your time is for you, not migraine. Don't take if allergic to Nurtac ODT. Allergic reactions can occur even days after use. Get help right away for trouble breathing, rash, swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or throat. High blood pressure and Raynaud's syndrome can occur. Get help for high blood pressure, numbness, coolness, pain, or color changes in fingers

• 55:41Speaker 04

  and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4-NURTC or visit nurtc.com. All right, back to your podcast, playlist, or whatever's keeping you going today.

• 55:55Speaker 05

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• 56:29Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. There's more than one way to learn how to read and write. But if you grew up in the US in the 1950s, your classes may have unfolded something like this.

• 56:41Speaker 06

  As part of the reading readiness program, children are trained to look from left to right.

• 56:49Shankar Vedantam?

  This is from a documentary released in 1956. Children are sitting in rows of desks. They are staring up at their teacher. She walks them through reading and writing techniques.

• 57:00Speaker 06

  Phonics and the alphabet help children learn to spell. Patty is arranging words in alphabetical order. Danny is dividing them into syllables. Kenneth is placing the accent marks.

• 57:14Shankar Vedantam?

  Knowledge flows in one direction, from teacher to students. There's an emphasis on rules and memorization.

• 57:21Speaker 06

  Deanna and Wilder know they must practice, just as their parents and grandparents did, to memorize the number of facts.

• 57:29Shankar Vedantam?

  This kind of teaching was the standard for a long time, in the US and elsewhere, and continues in many classrooms today.

• 57:39Shankar Vedantam?

  But in more recent years, many educators and schools have embraced alternative approaches to learning. Experiential learning, problem-based learning, project-based learning, flipped classrooms, whole-child education. All of these approaches attempt to upend the traditional model of teaching.

• 58:02Shankar Vedantam?

  At the University of Southern California, psychologist and neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino Yang says any educational approach should start not with the material being taught. It should start with the student. Mary Helen was a guest on a recent episode of Hidden Brain titled "How Our Brains Learn." Today, we bring her back on the show to answer your questions about the science of learning. Mary Helen Immordino Yang, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

• 58:30Speaker 07

  Thank you for having me back.

• 58:32Shankar Vedantam?

  Mary Helen, I'd like to start with a message we received from a listener named Rashid. It had to do with the learning experience that resonated with him for all the wrong reasons.

• 58:42Speaker 08

  In sixth grade, my mom signed me up for swimming lessons because I didn't know how to swim. And until then, I'd always been a straight A student. So I figured with a little hard work, a little application, I would get another A. But I struggled the whole time and ended up not knowing how to swim even at the end of the class. And so the teacher gave me an F and then even shrugged and said, "Well, you didn't learn how to swim." And I have to admit that that hit me a little hard because it was my first F, first non-A. And my mom didn't really pay him to grade me. She paid him to teach me. And it really made me question the whole system, right?

• 59:23Shankar Vedantam?

  So, learning how to swim is not the same as learning how to read or do multiplication. But what I'm struck by here is that the teacher told Rashid, "You didn't learn how to swim." In other words, the fault was with Rashid. Now, we don't know all the particulars of this particular case, Mary Helen, but how could this teacher have approached the situation differently?

• 59:43Speaker 07

  Well, first, I'm so sorry, Rashid. I feel your pain. I think too many of us have had experiences like this in settings that are meant to be developmental, that are meant to be enriching and enjoyable and opportunities to really learn something new that's a useful skill that you are wanting to have, that's a new and for you, sounds like something a risk you've never done before, right? Something new. And then, you know, you were sort of judged by someone else as having been a failure, right? Like, literally, F. So I think the teacher came to it with the idea that the purpose of swimming lessons is for you to be able to swim on the last day, which is,

• 1:00:25Speaker 07

  in a sense, true. But the question is not just what's the output, it's what's the process? And there, I think the teacher has totally missed the point.

• 1:00:36Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, Rashid's question is making me reflect on the fact, Mary Helen, that throughout the educational system, you know, teachers teach students, but then they grade students. And of course, at some level, this seems intuitively obvious. This is what teachers do. You grade the student to see if the student has mastered the material. But at some level, every one of these interactions is a little bit like what Rashid was talking about, which is that at the end of the day, the teacher is asking, have you learned the material? As opposed to asking, have I managed to engage you with the material, successfully bring you in into the process of learning?

• 1:01:09Speaker 07

  Yeah. And I would say even more than that, the most immediate question the teacher's asking, or should be asking, is how have you been engaging with this material as I've been facilitating your invitation into it, right? What has the thought process been like for you? And how can I shape the context that we're in together in a way that will invite you to make the most productive, enjoyable use of this opportunity possible?

• 1:01:37Shankar Vedantam?

  So the central idea that we talked about in our earlier discussion, Mary Helen, was a concept that you call transcendent thinking. For listeners who missed the earlier conversation or have forgotten the details, what is transcendent thinking?

• 1:01:50Speaker 07

  Yeah. So we're calling this thing transcendent thinking because it's our natural proclivity to start to make deeper meaning out of the things we're witnessing, to try to understand and grapple with the why, the how come, the how else, that what is the history of this? What's the story behind it? What are the hidden intentions? What are the beliefs? What are the values that motivate this? How does it connect? To the identities that those in the situation bring. How does it foretell possible different kinds of futures as we play it out over time? So that ability to sort of move beyond the immediate current details of the things you can directly discern and witness and infer from a situation and to grapple with

• 1:02:34Speaker 07

  how those connect to bigger ideas and powerful values and beliefs and stories and concepts, that's what we're calling transcendent thinking.

• 1:02:44Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, I want to go back to Rashid's question a second ago about learning to swim. And I think I empathize with Rashid because I didn't learn to swim until I was an adult myself. But I have become something of a student of swimming in recent years. And when I think about swimming now, I'm thinking about, you know, hydrodynamics. I'm thinking about balance. I'm thinking about friction. I'm thinking of all the ways in which we propel ourselves through the water. But I'm also thinking about all the ways in which people have unequal access to swimming facilities, unequal access to coaching and learning, and how that manifests itself. And then who learns to swim and who does not? And in some ways, would all of these be examples of transcendent thinking, which is you have the activity itself, but the activity then becomes a springboard into thinking about these bigger questions?

• 1:03:29Speaker 07

  Absolutely. I think that's a beautiful example, right? And then swimming and the ways in which it's enabled people to engage in particular kinds of sports or particular kinds of historical activities over time. And all of that, that you now, as a mature adult thinker, bring to this one concrete activity, that is your capacity to think transcendentally about concrete, action-oriented goals. So in your example, Shankar, you've learned to swim, but you've also understood the act of learning to swim in this much broader way that connects to other people and to broader issues of sociality and societal access. That's the highlight of a really thoughtful way of learning about something. How do we support young people in engaging in that kind of thinking routinely in school?

• 1:04:14Shankar Vedantam?

  You say that one of the major changes we need to make in education is that rather than focus first on the material, we should focus first on the development of each student. Why is that philosophical reframe important?

• 1:04:27Speaker 07

  I think what we're learning is that the ability to grow yourself and to learn in meaningful ways goes far beyond just simply storing away, stashing away in your brain like a file door, little pieces of information that you then retrieve on cue. That the most important, sort of central aspect of the learning process that enables you to have information, to recall that information, and to utilize it adventantly, effectively, in the world moving forward, comes through the connection of this information into our subjective experience of being in the space as a learner and feeling the opportunity to learn.

• 1:05:11Speaker 07

  The emotional thought processes that we engage in as we think our way through learning opportunities become the kind of hat stand on which all the information is hooked. And so to get back into that information, you re-experience the whole of the enterprise. And it really points us to a new view of what's central and what the starting point is in education. Rather than thinking about how do I get this person to this endpoint, you think, who is this person? How can I facilitate them experiencing this opportunity to think about this new content in a way that they will grow themselves into someone for whom this content is part of who they are and how they understand the world?

• 1:05:54Shankar Vedantam?

  In our last conversation, Mary Helen, you cited the astonishing example of a teacher who was trying to communicate some math concepts to her students. But rather than simply communicate the math concepts, she helped them see how these math concepts applied to people who lived in their community. Can you tell me that story one more time?

• 1:06:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'd be happy to. So this amazing teacher, Talania Norfar, had been working with her Algebra II class on exponential growth and quadratic equations. And she knew that in order to make the learning really relevant for the kids and to make them deeply committed to learning it and deeply engaged with the process of understanding how it applies and what it's for, that to build that lesson into some kind of civic opportunity to help in the community is deeply motivating to kids. It both helps them to learn the math and helps them situate the math in a broader life skill and learning opportunity to develop themselves socially, too. And so what she did in her lesson,

• 1:07:01Speaker 07

  which is brilliant, is she taught the kids, you know, how to calculate quadratic equations, how to use exponential growth. And then they applied it in a project where they became financial advisors to families from their communities who, you know, were struggling to figure out, how do I pay for my children's college? How might I purchase a home someday? How do I organize my finances and think about how I should plan? And so the kids actually worked between the technical knowledge of the classroom and the more layperson applied ways of explaining things to families in their communities and then helped their family to figure out how to plan

• 1:07:45Speaker 07

  for the future that they wanted. And when you watch the young people, her students, in this activity, it's just amazing to see the serious demeanor, the engagement, the deep focus they bring to their math because they know this math is a useful, important way for me to help contribute to my community. And it's really important that I do it right and that I'm actually putting in in a way that will move other people's lives in a positive direction. Just that inner sense of satisfaction that comes from deeply engaging in a job well done that really changed you as a person, that helped you deeply learn in a way

• 1:08:30Speaker 07

  that makes you understand your own role differently in the world and integrates, in this case, mathematical thinking into that role, that's enough. That is what kids live for. It's what we all live for.

• 1:08:44Shankar Vedantam?

  The word transcendence makes me think of concepts like awe, the feeling we get when we see a shooting star or visit a place like the Grand Canyon. We've talked in the past on the show about feelings of awe and why they might be beneficial to us. We received a question that's somewhat related from a teacher named Rose. Here she is.

• 1:09:02Speaker 09

  I'm just wondering, after listening to your podcast on how our brains learn, if there's any more that could also be said about the impact of things that are beautiful, or you seem to like, start to talk about the concept of wonder and how that relates to a student's learning and desire to learn more and to have specific interests. But I'm also just interested in how it kind of touches on other things, too. And in particular, I'm just very interested in the concept of letting students hear beautiful music, or see beautiful things, or

• 1:09:46Speaker 09

  create beautiful projects, and what that does to a student's learning and progress.

• 1:09:55Shankar Vedantam?

  How is the concept of transcendent thinking connected to beauty and feelings of awe, Mary Helen?

• 1:10:01Speaker 07

  I think this is just an amazing connection you make, Rose, because if you try to think about what is it that actually enables us as human beings to appreciate beauty, to experience an emotion like awe, to wonder, what we're really saying is, we are looking for the deeper, bigger meaning, the emotional reason why things happen the way they do, or could happen. And that taps into a fundamental connection that we found in our work between transcendent thinking and emotion.

• 1:10:38Speaker 07

  Samir Zeki, for example, at University College London, has a beautiful study from some years ago with mathematicians, in which they showed mathematicians equations that are quote-unquote "beautiful" and equations that are quote-unquote "awkward" or "ugly." And just the fact that experts in math knew what you mean by this already tells you what it actually means to be an expert in math. To be an expert means I can see an equation and imagine in my mind all the powerful ways it could be used to explain phenomena in the world that matter. That ability to extrapolate and apply in many contexts

• 1:11:22Speaker 07

  is the essence of transcendence again. So, yes, transcendence can apply to things that are aesthetic and beautiful, but the wonderful thing is that the act of being able to begin to grapple transcendently with concepts can help us to imbue those concepts with beauty, even when those concepts are things that people who are not experts may not think of as quote-unquote "beautiful," like a math equation.

• 1:11:52Shankar Vedantam?

  Feeling excitement and awe while learning something new is a wonderful experience. But is it possible to consistently cultivate transcendent thinking in our educational systems? When we come back, the teacher's perspective. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:12:26Speaker 04

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• 1:13:08Speaker 04

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• 1:13:25Speaker 05

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• 1:14:01Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Picture in your mind the best teacher you ever had. What was it that made this person memorable? Did they make you excited about ideas you hadn't cared about? Did they help you overcome a hurdle in learning how to read or explain a math concept in a way that made it understandable? Did they spot a learning disability that no one else had noticed? Or see how problems at home were affecting your ability to concentrate? Great teachers profoundly shape the trajectory of their students' lives. But the pressure and expectations we put on teachers to inspire, to nurture, to master

• 1:14:42Shankar Vedantam?

  complex curricular requirements, to serve as de facto social workers, it can all be overwhelming. We heard from a number of teachers living this reality in response to our earlier conversation with Mary Helen Immordino Yang. She's a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Southern California and author of Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience.

• 1:15:12Shankar Vedantam?

  Mary Helen, I'd like to focus in this segment on the perspective of teachers. We received an email from a teacher named Eileen, who writes, "We are at the mercy of unrealistic pacing guides, scripted curriculums, state standards in every subject that allow for little deviation for students to pursue individual interests, unrealistic demands on teachers to cover too many content areas, and the meteoric rise in chronic absenteeism." Does your guest have any meaningful, realistic solutions for implementing the ideas in these contexts? Engagement is key, along with building relationships with children and their families, but it isn't enough to solve education's problems. I suggest your guest advocate at a state and national level for the overhaul of pre-K

• 1:15:57Shankar Vedantam?

  through 12th grade education instead of putting the onus solely on teachers. The message rarely gets from professors or neuroscientists in the ivory tower to the woefully uninformed politicians who are making decisions about curriculum. Teachers, unfortunately, are not calling the shots about curriculum. So, Mary Helen, I think I can hear both Eileen's critique, but also the place of hurt and frustration that this is coming from. How would you respond to her?

• 1:16:25Speaker 07

  Oh, Eileen, you are absolutely 100% right. And we are working very hard, ourselves at USC and many of my colleagues, to overhaul the education system. So what we've done to design schools to improve outcomes and achievement levels, which, by the way, are also at historic lows, is to buckle down on basics, to narrow things, to script things, to standardize. And at one level, that could make sense. Unfortunately, it is completely contrary to the ways that human beings actually grow and learn. We grow and learn through the active experiencing,

• 1:17:09Speaker 07

  the subjective emotional experiencing of content. This leaves teachers like yourself, Eileen, in a really difficult place because you know what your children need is not what you are required to give them. What we really need to do is step back. And for teachers, remind yourselves that ultimately the children are under your care and the care of your principals and administrators. And we need to protect our teachers and our administrators who are working on behalf of children by helping them to have the autonomy they need to build into their curricula the kinds of structures that will enable young people to thrive as best as we can while also working to change the system.

• 1:17:54Speaker 07

  But what we can do to the best of our ability is to mitigate their harms by interpreting them in a way for young people and for our practice that puts them in a less prominent place in the classroom context. So that kids and families understand that they can exhale, they can settle in, they can start to engage with ideas that are in that curriculum. They are in that standardized curriculum. And they can start to build out ways to work and move through it. But I am 100% with you, Eileen. We really need to rethink the norms and the aims of our education system in light of the developmental needs of our young people. And let me be very clear.

• 1:18:36Speaker 07

  This is not code speak for lowering standards or making less content available to kids. This means we teach and we learn in a fundamentally different orientation. We start with the human being at the center, their experience of the process. And we think not about the learning as the outcome, but the learning as the means, the outcome as the human development.

• 1:19:03Shankar Vedantam?

  A teacher named Charles called in with a concern about how to realistically implement transcendent thinking at scale.

• 1:19:11Speaker 10

  Hi. I've been a teacher for over 25 years. During this time, I've worked really hard to create classroom environments very much like the ones described in the episode. The issue has always been scalability. I've been told countless times that the way that I do things is unique to me. In fact, I have just stepped out of the classroom for the first time in over 25 years to start a nonprofit to try to dispel that issue. And ironically, as I've left the classroom, the courses that I've created that have given students more real-world experience, more autonomy in their learning are gone. The school was unable to sustain them without my presence,

• 1:19:56Speaker 10

  despite my many attempts over the years to create an environment which other teachers learned and became involved. And the materials that I used in the class were well-developed and organized, and I had offered support. So my question, I guess, is around scalability. How scalable are these ideas in classrooms to create environments that I think are so desperately needed for students?

• 1:20:25Shankar Vedantam?

  So Mary Helen, Charles is clearly on the same page as you in many ways, but is asking, I think, a practical question. Does this simply rely on the individual brilliant teacher, or can this be scaled?

• 1:20:38Speaker 07

  Well, Charles, thank you for your service to kids and for your hard work now in a nonprofit. And sadly, your story is not a unique one. I hear this kind of story a lot, where there's one unique sort of unicorn teacher who has designed all these amazing experiences for kids. And as soon as they step away from it, others can't sustain it and it peters out. And/or they are told, this can't scale. This is something special and unique. What we really need to do is go back and change the ways in which we train and support our teachers, and then the ways in which we assess our young people in our classrooms.

• 1:21:19Speaker 07

  You can't scale what you don't understand. And the ultimate problem, I think, and the reason maybe why your amazing lessons were lost after you moved to a different career line, is that your colleagues around you could appreciate the amazing things you were doing, but they didn't actually have the skill to understand why and how you developed it that way. What we really need to do is help teachers to understand that the nature of their work is to be like scientists in the classroom, developmental scientists. You move through your class as an observer. You're inquiring, you're wondering, you're trying to figure out,

• 1:22:02Speaker 07

  how are young people thinking and feeling here? How are they understanding things? How are they experiencing the learning process? And how might I, given what I'm witnessing, working together with them, build out inviting opportunities for them to experience things in a way that both promotes high-level thinking and learning and enables them to own it in the way your lessons had?

• 1:22:29Shankar Vedantam?

  There's been a lot of discussion in the past few years about screens, particularly cell phones, and how they affect children's ability to focus and learn. Another technology that's also generated a lot of concern among educators over the last couple of years is artificial intelligence. Here's listener Sangita with a question on that front.

• 1:22:48Speaker 11

  For over 13 years, I've worked in the nonprofit sector, developing parent education programs and supporting families and children. Over this time, I've seen firsthand how the rapidly evolving digital and now AI-driven landscape is reshaping childhood, adolescence, and parenting. Many parents, particularly those from formal backgrounds, feel overwhelmed and underprepared to guide their children through these changes. I was therefore hoping to ask Dr. Immordino Yang that as AI continues to transform education, much of the research and innovation focuses on supporting teachers and schools. But parents, especially those from lower-income, low literacy, or migrant backgrounds, are often left behind.

• 1:23:34Speaker 11

  What advice or insights would she offer to educators like me, who are working to bridge this gap and help parents better support their children in an AI-driven world?

• 1:23:44Shankar Vedantam?

  What do you think, Mary Helen? How does transcendent thinking intersect with the world of artificial intelligence?

• 1:23:51Speaker 07

  Well, again, Sangita, I'll say you are not the first person to notice this, and you are absolutely right to say this. I think there are many people who are concerned about it. And there's also, like you say, a huge push toward bringing AI into the classroom. And the main work in that direction has been on how to help teachers learn how to leverage these technologies effectively. That's important. But what is even more important and even more pressing, which is, I think, the essence of your question, is how are these opportunities shaping the way our young people think and feel, conceptualize a sense of self, build engagement and motivation? What does it mean to think with these technological mediators

• 1:24:34Speaker 07

  as compared to in ways that we did without these mediators? And how might that be changing the nature of our development as human beings? We don't know the answers to those questions. But here's what I would say in terms of the second half of your question, which is, how should you support the parents and families and children that you're working with? I think you need to trust and help parents trust that they know what it means to be a human being, and they know how to love and care for their children. They need, in this space more than ever, to stay deeply connected with their children and with their children's ways of thinking and engaging with their schoolwork, and to reflect with those kids about the experiences they have

• 1:25:19Speaker 07

  in thinking through these things, to work with them on their work, to notice what kinds of changes are happening in their kids as they're engaging in these technologies, and think about how, what do we want for our children? Which kinds of uses are appropriate and effective and are making us more efficient? And which kinds may be interfering with aspects of the learning or developmental process that kids want and need to grapple with in order to really build for themselves the experience of being an efficacious agentic learner? And when we are concretizing and...

• 1:25:55Speaker 07

  Reducing the aims of our educational experiences in school to the output of particular kinds of skills that may be quote unquote "relevant" to the world today. Oftentimes, what we're forgetting is how does the learning of that skill change the development of the person? And those are the questions we need to be asking ourselves. The example I use to explain this is that giving kids AI to learn to do something basic that, you know, they that they before would have needed to know, but now AI can do it. So why bother teaching them? It's kind of the same thing as telling parents of eight-month-olds, "Oh, don't bother encouraging your child to crawl. You're never going to use that skill again in your real..." Who crawls? Unless you lose something under the couch,

• 1:26:39Speaker 07

  you're never going to need to do this, right? Just get right up on a bicycle. Start riding, start running, right? Of course, infants don't crawl because crawling is a useful life skill forever. They crawl because the act of crawling enables certain kind of positionality in the world, which helps them to develop themselves neurologically, psychologically, over time. And crawling is engaging networks for motion, for thinking, for reflection, for planning, for movement, that then become the basis for healthy kinds of behavior that don't involve crawling later. We need really to return to that logic when we're asking ourselves what we want for our children. We need, again, to put on those scientific hats, those thoughtful hats.

• 1:27:23Speaker 07

  We need to engage with our young people and think about, how are they using the technology? How are they experiencing this? Are they engaging with the big ideas I want them to engage with, but they're doing it in a different format that I'm not used to? Because I wasn't an AI native the way they are? Or are they actually circumventing developmental processes that we value for them? And is that leading to certain kinds of holes or differences in their development which are problematic? And I would argue that instances of both are existing in our use of AI right now. And we need really to get to the bottom of how we want our young children to develop in today's world. And that should be the driving north star

• 1:28:05Speaker 07

  toward which we point our designs that are going to leverage AI.

• 1:28:10Shankar Vedantam?

  And in some ways, this speaks to what you said at the start of our conversation, which is you're focusing on the person and not on the learning. So I think right now, many educators and parents are worried. If my kid basically turns in an essay instead of actually writing the essay himself, perhaps he's not learning how to write the essay. And that's true, but what you're saying is actually the deeper point. What does it mean that this person hasn't learned this developmental skill? Is it possible this is a step that we could just skip over and go past? In which case, it's fine? Or what if this turns out to be an essential step in something that is really important to this person two years, five years, 20 years down the road?

• 1:28:46Speaker 07

  That's exactly right. So we really need to think back and look and say, what is the goal of this learning exercise, actually? Is it to move your pencil on the paper? Sometimes it actually may be when you're five or you're six years old, right? And that you're actually learning motor skill and planning skill by learning to handwrite. It doesn't matter if you can type later. The act of learning to move your hand in these planful ways turns out to have important developmental affordances for the brain. Or is this a skill that we really don't need anymore? That modern society can skip over because it's something that doesn't seem to actually develop dispositions or propensities of mind that are going to be useful later and we can drop it and let it go?

• 1:29:33Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, Mary Helen Immordino Yang answers questions from parents. And we consider how the ideas we're talking about today apply not just to young people in classrooms, but to everyone. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:30:03Speaker 04

  This podcast is supported by Nurtec ODT, Remedy Pant. We know you didn't ask for an interruption, but migraine doesn't wait for the right moment to interrupt either. It just barges in, takes your time, and throws everything off. So when migraine takes your time, take Nurtec. It's for the acute treatment of migraine with or without aura in adults. Nurtec can provide pain relief in two hours, which can last up to two days. Ask your healthcare provider if Nurtec is right for you because your time is for you, not migraine. Don't take if allergic to NerTec ODT. Allergic reactions can occur even days after use. Get help right away for trouble breathing, rash, swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or throat. High blood pressure and Raynaud's syndrome can occur. Get help for high blood pressure, numbness, coolness, pain, or color changes in fingers

• 1:30:48Speaker 04

  and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4-NER-TAC or visit ner-tac.com. All right, back to your podcast, playlist, or whatever's keeping you going today.

• 1:31:01Speaker 05

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• 1:32:06Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. At the University of Southern California, Mary Helen Imordino Yang researches how we teach our children and what really works to help them become critical thinkers and creative problem solvers. Mary Helen joins us today for our latest installment of Your Questions Answer, featuring listeners' questions about her research. So Mary Helen, we heard from many parents who saw connections between your ideas and other well-known pedagogical approaches. Here's Chris.

• 1:32:36Speaker 13

  I really enjoyed this episode because what she said, to me, felt very intuitive and obvious. My question is, what she described sounds a lot like the Montessori system. So how is what she's describing different, or is it different at all? Thank you.

• 1:32:57Shankar Vedantam?

  So the Montessori method is a self-directed approach where students decide where their interests lie and pursue learning around those interests. How do your findings compare with that idea, Mary Helen?

• 1:33:09Speaker 07

  Yes, well, Chris, you're absolutely right, that these ideas that I'm bringing forth now echo and build from and incorporate many kinds of pedagogical approaches that have been developed over ages. And so whereas I won't speak to any specific educational approach like Montessori versus others, these approaches vary in that they are focusing young people on the opportunities to make choices and to agentically move through the learning opportunity. The ways in which those learning opportunities are set up will have very important implications for the ways in which young people learn.

• 1:33:47Speaker 07

  For example, together with a young scientist named Solange De Niro, who is in Geneva, Switzerland, we did some studies of the effect of Montessori classroom experience versus traditional classroom experience. And we wanted to understand whether those experiences of learning the math would actually shape the way the kids processed math in real time in an MRI scanner. So what we did, Solange had eight- to 12-year-old math students from Montessori schools and traditional schools in Geneva come to her lab and solve math problems in the scanner, among other things, while we were scanning their brain.

• 1:34:31Speaker 07

  And the first thing that we found was that the Montessori-schooled kids in this context and the traditionally schooled kids got the same number of math problems right. That's wonderful, because that means now both groups of kids are learning a lot of math content and can solve problems. Fantastic. You could stop there, and traditional education would stop there, saying, "Okay, so both school systems are effective at teaching kids math. We're done." But you would be missing something very important, and I suspect that this is what Chris was getting at. When we looked again, we could see that whereas the two groups of kids got the same number of problems right, the Montessori kids got far more wrong. That's because they didn't skip the things they weren't sure of.

• 1:35:14Speaker 07

  They took a whirl and just tried, and when they got it wrong, they engaged brain networks that showed that they were trying to make sense of what had happened and were actively grappling with the mathematical content. And then, the next time they saw a problem like that one, they were more likely to get it right. The traditionally schooled kids, by contrast, when they saw something that they got right, their brains showed activity patterns that suggested they were trying to remember that. It's as if they were saying like, "Oh, that's right. Quick, store that to memory, so you can do it again just the same way." When they got something wrong, we didn't see this kind of active grappling, and in turn, we saw a longer pause, as if they were sort of freaking out a little bit, and then when

• 1:35:57Speaker 07

  they saw the same kind of problem again, they were not more likely to get it right. They got it wrong over and over again. When you feel like the goal of math class is to solve a problem, and someone else knows the answer, and I give it to them, and then they tell me, that is a certain way of privileging and emoting about the process. You have emotions about correct and incorrect answers, right? In the Montessori case, kids' emotions weren't about the right and wrong answers. They actually didn't show different emotional patterns, if they got it right or got it wrong. Instead, when they got things wrong, they were actually using that as an opportunity to get information and to learn something new.

• 1:36:37Speaker 07

  The act of thinking through the math problem felt like a fundamentally different process to them. And in fact, it was, even though their "level" of math knowledge was the same.

• 1:36:51Shankar Vedantam?

  And you can see how this leads eventually not just to doing well in school or not doing well in school, but to human development writ large. Because of course, once students graduate from school or college, and they enter the real world, and they're dealing with relationships, and they're dealing with jobs, and they're dealing with setbacks, what you want is people to actually embrace problems and say, oh, that's an interesting problem, I don't know how to solve it, let me engage with it, as opposed to asking, what's the right answer? What's the right answer? Did I get the right answer?

• 1:37:18Speaker 07

  Absolutely. I mean, amen to that, right? And take a look at the state of the world right now. When we move through the world expecting that there is one correct answer, and that someone, somewhere knows it, and that we want that answer, and anyone who has a different answer, or a different way of thinking about it, is wrong. And when we aren't dispositionally curious to engage with many ways of understanding the complexities of situations, where does that leave us as citizens? In effect, the rethinking of school around the development of the people inside the school is exactly for what you're saying.

• 1:37:57Speaker 07

  It is to prepare young people with the dispositions of mind to solve complex, real-world problems that do not have one concrete answer, that may represent a very complex problem space that's fraught, that we need to grapple with together. And the most important problems that are facing humanity and the planet today are 201 of that sort. They are complex, they are fraught, there are many kinds of legitimate perspectives, there are many ways of experiencing the implications. How do we set up our young people so that they are dispositionally curious to engage with that complexity, and to wrestle with it together in humane, respectful ways that

• 1:38:41Speaker 07

  enable us to settle into conversations that are civically oriented, that are productive, that are pushing us in beneficial directions as a society, as a community, and as individuals? And that is essentially the ultimate purpose of school. Applying all of our knowledge in those developmentally rich ways.

• 1:39:04Shankar Vedantam?

  We got a very interesting question from a listener named Taylor. She's 33 years old, and your research resonated with her based on where she's at in her career. Here's Taylor.

• 1:39:14Speaker 14

  So I was wondering, based on your research on student engagement in educational settings, what insights or strategies could be effectively applied to enhance employee engagement and motivation in the professional environment? Specifically, how might these findings help individuals like me who are feeling disengaged or unfulfilled in their own careers?

• 1:39:36Shankar Vedantam?

  What do you think, Mary Helen?

• 1:39:39Speaker 07

  Yes, well, Taylor, there is a whole field of research that focuses on exactly that question. But I'll quickly say here that because people in the workplace are, first and foremost, people, these same principles hold. And really effective leaders and managers manage well because they tap into the developmental capacities and potentials of the people that are working with them and enable those people to invent, just in time, ways of doing things and understanding things that feel empowering to them and that actually contribute to the productivity of the whole group while growing the people themselves.

• 1:40:24Speaker 07

  So I think what you're noticing, Taylor, is exactly right. We need to really be focusing on the ways in which people in their careers feel themselves growing, feel themselves interacting with others, contributing to a communal way of understanding their problem and doing their work. And that is what is powerful. That's what makes us productive, and that's what helps us to grow ourselves and to do our best work.

• 1:40:46Shankar Vedantam?

  I'd like to end by hearing about an interesting educational experience from a listener named Molly.

• 1:40:52Speaker 15

  I went to a very non-traditional elementary school in the mid-'70s, and this school's approach was very close to what Dr. Immordino talked about. Students were encouraged to come up with their own projects and learning ideas. One time, we wondered if, for newly established Earth Day, we could have a celebration that would create zero trash.

• 1:41:26Speaker 15

  And so the students went about working on ways to have some kind of a celebration, uh, using totally edible, um, tableware, et cetera. Um, the school also traditionally outscored the other elementary schools on the standardized testing. It was a fabulous experience and I felt like I loved going to school. When I had to transfer into junior high, I remember our teacher in the math class early in the year was giving a, um, test to see what we knew in the math class.

• 1:42:04Speaker 15

  And, uh, it was the first time I'd, uh, sat in rows and faced forward instead of at tables where I could talk to my classmates. So when I got to a problem I wasn't sure about, I began to scoop my desk across the empty space between the aisles to talk to my friend who also went to the same elementary school. And the teacher was stupefied, why would I do that on a test? And I was equally stupefied, why wouldn't I consult somebody else so that we could work on this together? Anyway, it's why I became a teacher.

• 1:42:45Speaker 15

  It's what I try to keep alive in my classroom today is that sense of wonder and how does what we're doing connect with the students' lives and their experiences.

• 1:43:03Shankar Vedantam?

  So I feel in some ways Molly is a textbook example of what it is that you're talking about here, Mary Helen.

• 1:43:10Speaker 07

  I agree with you, Shankar. I mean, I think Molly, first of all, you're very lucky. And, and secondly, I think you've, you've exactly nailed it with that example of scooching your desk over where your goal was to understand the math and be able to figure it out or whatever was on your test. I forget what the test was about. Where the teacher's goal was to have you do that math in a very prescriptive way by yourself, because that's what we have defined as the test of whether or not you know it. Both things have value in different ways, but we need to be much clearer about why we have decided so overprivileged:

• 1:43:55Speaker 07

  independent knowledge, working alone, working under time pressure, not consulting, not collaborating. And then we wonder why, in the workplace later, our young people don't know how to think in these ways.

• 1:44:16Shankar Vedantam?

  Mary Helen Immordino Yang is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience. Mary Helen, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 1:44:33Speaker 07

  It was an immense pleasure. Thank you, Shaker.

• 1:44:41Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Burns, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

• 1:45:03Shankar Vedantam?

  If you enjoyed today's conversation and find Hidden Brain to be useful or thought-provoking, please consider joining Hidden Brain Plus. It's our subscriber-only podcast feed where we bring you ideas and conversations you will not hear anywhere else. Plus, you'll be helping to provide the fuel for the research, writing, fact-checking, and sound design that is involved in every episode of the show. To subscribe, go to support.hiddenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, you can sign up at apple.co/hiddenbrain. Again, those sites are support.hiddenbrain.org and apple.co/hiddenbrain.

• 1:45:44Shankar Vedantam?

  This December, Hidden Brain is proud to join Pods Fight Poverty. We're teaming up with other podcasts to raise funds to lift three villages in Rwanda out of extreme poverty. Your donation goes directly, no strings, no middlemen, to the families who know best what they need. Visit givedirectly.org/hiddenbrain to make a difference for someone who needs it most. That's givedirectly.org/hiddenbrain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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