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, a motion and a spirit

that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things.

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 onto something?

This week on Hidden Brain, we look at what happens when we stop, really stop, to smell the roses.

For centuries, one of the 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 Dachar 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 Bratworths and, you know, there was no Mexican food and the weather.

...