Me. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast. episode 284. Oh, What's that 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.

What is a song that you remember stopped you?

Took you by surprise and didn't generate that stank face

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. 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, I don't know, make sense of things a little bit.

This is A-W-E-A-A-A-E-A-A-A-A- 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 A. The new science of everyday wonder and how it can transform your life.

A is an experience that can change lives, set 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 since 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,

the 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

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