The Reset Button

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. 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 Above 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. For 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 Dacre 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 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 bratwurst. And, you know, there was no Mexican food. And and the weather and the cold. The cold rattled me. I felt like Camus' stranger in a way, like I am in a strange land that I just physically, temperature wise, climate wise, people wise, I felt like a fish out of water, even though I look like somebody from Wisconsin. I'm, you know, of Northern European heritage. Daker, who was just starting his career as a professor, started to experience extreme bouts of anxiety. I come from a family on my mom's side that has a lot of anxiety. And I started to have profound panic attacks, really beginning with the day that I departed to drive across the country to Wisconsin. I had probably, I would say, 70 or 80 a year, really Technicolor, full blown panic attacks when I was teaching, when I would go see full blown panic attacks when I was teaching, when I would go see a movie to try to relax, when I would fly on an airplane to go to a conference, when I would hear from a colleague. And it really caught me off …