The Reset Button
12/22/20251 hr 37 min
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.
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First 90 secondsShankar Vedantam· Host0:00
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In July 1798, an English poet visited the countryside on the banks of the River Wye. On seeing the natural beauty of the area, William Wordsworth composed a poem. It's titled Lines Written A Few Miles About Tintern 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.