Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

What's a musical experience that you just felt like you figured out life? You know the point of life.

That is the voice of Berkeley Psychologist Dacker Keltner, one of the world's leading experts on the science of emotion.

And let me ask you that same question he just asked me, and please feel free to pause the show and really try to answer it.

What is a song that you remember stopped you, took you by surprise, and didn't generate that stank phase when something really slaps but made the world disappear for a while.

A song that brought tears to your eyes or that made you sit down or filled you with a sense of mystery that you were connecting to something bigger than yourself.

A piece of music that made you feel like you were part of something, that you were a member of something.

It's a music that made you feel like you understood the human condition just a little bit better for a moment.

It's a fun question. Please ask it the next time you're around other people as well and see what they say and then share the responses back and forth so you can make sense of things a little bit.

This is AW, AW, and that's one of the questions that Keltner likes to ask in his research and in his new book he outlines his years of work in this field and a lot more.

That book is titled AW, the new science of everyday wonder and how it can transform your life.

AW is an experience that can change lives, sets you down a new path, commit you to a career or a relationship.

A whole life can be built on a moment of true awe.

It is that sense you get in the presence of a mountain or a symphony or a tragedy or triumph or a scientific discovery or pondering the size of a star or a microscopic organism.

They're feeling that there is something vast and mysterious and beyond your understanding that is so much larger than yourself or more complex than your day to day experience that it makes you feel like you're merely a moat of dust in the grand scheme of things.

It's one of the most powerful human emotions yet one of the least understood by psychology and neuroscience.

In fact, the scientific study of human emotional states, what triggers them, how they affect our cognition and behavior, how they spread through our social networks, all of it is very new by comparison to say the study of comments or tree fox which can generate the feeling of awe.

Even in the sciences that study the brain, body, mind and culture, human emotions are one of the least explored areas.

So just about all the research is recent and though Darwin and Freud and Wilhelm Wnt all had plenty to say about human emotion, it was mostly conjecture that we're coming up with ideas for later scientists to explore and the true empirical quantified and vetted and done in academic departments devoted to such research experiments research really got going in the 1960s and 70s.

And within that area of research, awe is one of the newest areas of interest.

We have learned incredible things about the human psyche thanks to this 30 year old science of emotion.

You know, we've learned that our moral judgments are driven as John Hight has shown by passions like anger and disgust and rage.

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