This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

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 Tintanabi.

At one point, he describes the effect of the landscape on his psychological state.

He writes,

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.

Would the Romantics on to something?

This week on Hidden Brain, in the final episode of our series, Happiness 2.0,

we look at what happens when we stop, really stop, to smell the roses.

For centuries, one of the central challenges and human behaviour 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 Dacar Keltner found himself in a world of suffering.

He was in his early thirties and had just moved from California to Wisconsin.

What happened to me, Shankar, is I lived a life largely in California,

in the hills and the mountains and the oceans and the culture and so forth.

And it went two thousand miles away and it was flat.

And there were storms and there was snow.

And people rooted for the packers and they ate broadwurst.

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