Awe, and the Scientific Proof that the Outdoors is Good For Your Brain, with Dr. Paul Piff

Paddy: I'm wondering if you can describe a moment when you were watching your kids and felt that big capital a awe.

Dr. Piff: Before we went to South Lake, we hadn't had a lot of a moments together as a family.

But I'll never forget getting on the glass bottom kayaks with our eldest son, Vinny.

this was as part of a research project and I was kind of worried about how this was gonna go.

And the way these canoes are kind of configured is they're, they're made out of like a very transparent

plastic. And because Tahoe is so clear, you can see all the way through to the bottom of the lake, and it's a very deep

lake and it's very blue water. And the moment he like looked down, he was just like, like, totally face, spontaneously broke out into an awe face. Eyebrows up, eyes wide, open mouth, Aja breaking out into a smile. And he was just plastered. Onto the boat. His face was just like mashed up against the bottom of the boat, and he was just like, totally [00:01:00] exclaiming, totally exclaiming, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Pop, stop, pop, go, go back, go back, go back. What was that? What was that? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wow. Whoa, whoa, whoa. And almost like pre-verbal, just getting to see him have this experience to something that I hold so sacred,

right? Tahoe, that it struck him in the same way and forged a connection, a deep emotional connection between him and the thing that just like stunned him into bewilderment. Then made me connect to him even more,

Paddy: did you go out and immediately buy a glass bottom kayak? Like Vinny we're doing this every day,

Dr. Piff: we're doing this all the time. Yeah,

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PADDYO VO:

Picture this: You’re having a rough day—a grinding combination of pressing work deadlines and personal obligations has you overwhelmed and under inspired. You know a short midday hike would improve your mood, but you have to battle the gravitational pull of the to-do list to make it happen.

You manage to break free but, [00:02:00] even on the trail, there are coworkers and friends and family clanging around in your head at such a volume, you practically forget where you are. Then, for some reason, you look up into a canopy of trees. Leaves dance far overhead on the outstretched limbs of trees older than you, creating a lightshow of sun beams bouncing from cloud to earth and back again. The noise of your life recedes and a surge of connectedness and gratitude swells inside of you. You’ve been awestruck.

I’m sure you’ve had this experience plenty of times; I know I have, and I love it. But did you know that awe is a scientific term, and that experience is a scientific phenomenon? If you don’t believe me, just ask social psychologist, Dr. Paul Piff.

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Dr. Piff, a professor at the University of California Irvine, has been enthralled by the concept of [00:03:00] awe since his grandmother wrote him a profound letter about the word when he was still in grad school—more on that later. Over the last few years, he and a team of researchers have devised a series of novel experiments that have helped us define and better understand what awe is and how it impacts people.

You might wonder what any of that has to do with the outdoors, and the answer is that Piff has identified a place that’s particularly well suited to the study of awe, and it just happens to be one of the most famous outdoor destinations in the world: the South Shore of Lake Tahoe. It turns out that, when faced with the kind of stunning natural beauty that is everywhere you look in that corner of California, people respond with feelings of selflessness, empathy, and happiness—and the good doctor can prove it.

All of [00:04:00] this is investigated in great detail in the new show “Beyond Awestruck: The Scientific Search For Connection”, which just premiered on OutsideTV. For many viewers, Dr. Piff’s research will serve as a validation for why we’re so committed to—and why so many of us organize our entire lives around—time in the outdoors.

But Dr. Piff’s ambitions for this research go well beyond those who have already bought into these ideas. If we can better understand how nature works on the human mind to increase our sense of connectedness; if we can better communicate to those who are skeptical or unaware; we stand a much better chance at solving some of the thorniest problems of our time: the loneliness epidemic, digital addiction, and even the intractable polarization of society.

Go ahead and be skeptical if you’re so inclined, but I defy to you spend the next hour with Dr. Piff and [00:05:00] not come away feeling a little more optimistic about the simple power of time outside. That, and a powerful desire to go watch sunlight disco ball it’s way through some nearby trees.

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One quick production note: Dr. Piff is an excitable guy, and nothing gets him more excited than talking about his research. You’ll likely hear some ruffling of his clothes, so just picture him waving his arms wildly. Or, better yet, find us on Youtube where you can watch this episode, as well as all three episodes of “Beyond Awestruck” on Outside TV.

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Paddy: First things first, burnt toast. What's your last humbling and or hilarious moment? Outside

Dr. Piff: So we got two little kids

Paddy: Uhhuh?

Dr. Piff: and they've really changed how I get to experience the outdoors

because the things that I used to do, like solo camping, I

don't get to do anymore

for now. But one of the things that we have really liked doing is going swimming with them. [00:06:00] And so in December, we went to the Yucatan, of Mexico

and spent some weeks there. And on one particular occasion, we were taking turns jumping off of a pier into crystal clear blue water.

Paddy: Cool.

Dr. Piff: And I was trying to show my kids how to dive and instead, I massively belly flopped. And so, um. I don't even think my kids recognized it for what it was, but it was super painful and I had to like shake myself off.

I mean, so I don't know if that's the most embarrassing experience,

Paddy: that's great though. And you're like, this is the proper technique. Also, look how athletic dad is flop.

Dr. Piff: look checked, boom. And it's like, you know, nature can really humble you

like that water didn't care about me. It wasn't trying to like open itself up into like this embrace,

you know, it just like made itself known,

Paddy: Oh, just gotta love the Aqua SmackDown. All right, let's get into it.

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It seems to me that clearly [00:07:00] defining awe is very difficult, but I think I've come up with my own definition and I wanna lay it on you, and then I would like you to grade me as if I were one of your students.

Is that cool with you? Okay. So awe is a brief, euphoric feeling of the totality and beauty of all of existence, resulting in a reflective state of both deep wonder and calm connectedness to all things.

Dr. Piff: Hmm.

Paddy: How did did I do? Okay.

Dr. Piff: 10 outta 10.

That's beautiful. That was good. That was good. That

was really good. I

Paddy: Oh,

Dr. Piff: let me, let me say like, it sounds like I'm buttering you up. That's really good. I don't know where you got that definition. If you just like did a little bit of self-reflection

and, and put that together.

Paddy: yes. That's what

Dr. Piff: The All right. So if I were being like, really strict,

I would say you're including in your definition of awe, some of the things that I would say are consequences of awe.

Paddy: Okay.

Dr. Piff: for instance, the feelings of oneness and connectivity

is a [00:08:00] consequence, perhaps, as opposed to the kind of the brief burst of emotion that may be off first feels like when you have it.

Paddy: Like the fla, the flash of the thing.

Dr. Piff: Yeah. The, like, you're stunned by

Paddy: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Piff: know, and then, and then you're trying to make sense of that emotional experience, and you think about that emotional experience in relation to yourself.

I mean, but I, I don't wanna stray too far from the definition. Your definition's great, and I would say it's almost like comprehensive or all inclusive, you know what I mean?

But let's pick apart some elements of

Paddy: Okay. Okay. Yeah, let's, let's do it. Yeah.

Dr. Piff: if that's what you want, if that's what you

Paddy: I absolutely want, this is so professorial of you and I'm way into it. 'cause I missed this about school.

Dr. Piff: Well, you're in, you're in school

Paddy: Yeah,

Dr. Piff: You're,

Paddy: right.

Dr. Piff: I like that version of awe. It's a very western definition of awe

for most Americans, for instance, because like, um, awesome is good

and positive and exciting, it doesn't have to be [00:09:00] euphoric,

Paddy: Uh, okay. Okay.

Dr. Piff: But most of the awe that we study. Is that positive kind of awe,

If you ask someone off the street, like define

awe, they'll describe the awe that they felt when they experienced it in really profound ways.

Like, uh, going to the Grand Canyon for the first time or seeing a, a solar eclipse.

And so it's these like really groundbreaking experiences that feel like they epitomize awe to people. But we find that if you get people to attend in just basic ways to the world around them, that they inhabit all the time. Like if they just go to their backyard

or if they spend 30 seconds walking outside of their house to find awe on the street somewhere, whether it's patterns of light on the pavement. Or reflections of light on water, like lots of little things

that aren't about the whole world. You know, you're finding awe in this, like I would call quotidian everyday way that reminds you of the complexity and beauty of the world.

So it doesn't have to be [00:10:00] a massive experience.

So then what is your like clean, tight definition if, if mine is kind of there but not totally there?

I would say it's when you experience, see, think about perceive something. It could be music, it could be nature, it could

be art, it could be a concept that surprises you and transcends your understanding of the world. So it's experiences of beauty, of complexity, of vastness, of wonder that make you feel like your understanding of the world needs to be rearranged or that you can't make sense of the

thing immediately.

Paddy: Okay.

Dr. Piff: when people say, for example, that an experience blew their minds,

Paddy: Yeah.

Dr. Piff: I'd say that's an extreme version of awe. But what they're describing is. this feeling of, I saw something that was so cool that it like surprised me.

I gotta rearrange my mind to accommodate it, to make sense of it.

Paddy: You're the expert and [00:11:00] I'm gonna take your word for it. I also want to tell you that my freshman year of college in Psych 1 0 1, my first test, I absolutely bombed. Like, I'm pretty sure I spelled my name wrong on the thing. So by giving me a 10, outta 10, I want you, you have, you have brought me back to life.

You have made 18-year-old,

Dr. Piff: uh, look.

Paddy: psych student. Me. Very happy. So thank,

Dr. Piff: Okay. So take it, take it as a win.

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You've talked about experiences of, of awe being available in the tiny or the mundane.

Paddy: And I believe I can understand the tiny, right? It's like you look at an ant that is, carrying 10 to 50 times its body weight. That is amazing. I remember as a kid, the first time I looked under a microscope on my mind was blown. But the mundane bit I am confused on because it's like, are you saying that like I can find awe standing in line at the DMV?

Like I don't understand that. So can you explain how

Dr. Piff: Maybe you could, that becomes harder to do.[00:12:00]

What I mean by mundane is that you can take people and show them something that they've seen a thousand times, so it's mundane in that sense,

and try to get them to shift the way that they perceive that thing, and all of a sudden, the ma the mundane can become magical.

Paddy: So like a lot of people must think that awe requires something epic, right? Like summiting a massive peak, or, skiing, you know, an all time

Dr. Piff: yeah, it doesn't require epic.

Paddy: then how do we notice the smaller bits? How can we train ourselves? Like how do we get a walk around our neighborhood to give us the same sense that, hiking through a massive, know, national park would give us

Dr. Piff: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a, I mean, you're asking such a, an important question. We actually don't really know yet.

Scientifically.

But I think we're getting some, some insights.

Like if you ask people, in the West, where are you when you experience awe, 60 to 70% of the time it's toward nature.

Paddy: Oh, for sure. My [00:13:00] answer would be probably, a hundred percent of the time it would be nature or, you know, like the birth of my daughter or watching

Dr. Piff: Yeah, yeah.

Paddy: you know,

Dr. Piff: So those are, those are good examples. , If you study like the Himba, which we, which we did in early work on awe, the himba are, nomadic peoples that live in Namibia, in the desert, many of them untouched by the west.

So it's a way to study the universality of human experience

in people that haven't been influenced by culture. They do experience awe.

So there's something maybe about awe that suggests maybe it's an evolved emotion that humans have, which I think is already a controversial idea that it

evolved. And if it evolved, what purpose might it have served?

But among the himba, if you ask them what inspires awe, it's not nature.

Paddy: What? What do they say?

Dr. Piff: the forms of awe that we documented were social variants of awe. we heard awe stories of like they, they sing together in

groups. And so multiple awe stories were around that feeling of what I would almost call like collective effervescence, but like [00:14:00] this like

feeling

Paddy: that's a cool term.

Dr. Piff: That's a cool term.

It's a sociological term, but that feeling of

like, you're kind of enmeshed in this bigger collective and you kind of lose this, sense of me and you're like focused on the collective experience and how you are, but a small part of this like amazing thing that you're helping create,

which you can imagine also happens in, like, I was talking to a rower and a rower was talking about like this feeling of like how the boat,

if everyone's working together, the boat kinda lifts off the surface of the water.

That feeling of,

anyway. So for them, I would imagine that that nature which we in the west are often removed from, and we think of ourselves as like, you gotta leave and go out into nature. So it's something that's outside of us. They live in nature and so, nature to them is. I wouldn't say it's mundane, but it's not the kind of exotic thing that we think of nature as.

And so it might be that it exists there for them [00:15:00] toward nature, but it was a lot harder to find.

Paddy: Do you think then for us in the West, that nature provides some type of like, shortcut to awe?

it, it is a shortcut. Like you can go out into nature and have a lot of benefits

Dr. Piff: irrespective of awe.

one of the things that I've gotten really interested in about awe is people go on, go out into nature and. That ends up being this shortcut to this state that people really long for, I remember feeling like when I came back from a camping trip, I would tell when I'm describing the trip to someone, I would say it really put things in perspective

Paddy: Totally. Yeah.

Dr. Piff: and, and then, and then if you like, if you unpack that, like what, what the hell do you mean? Put what into what per, what do you mean by put it into perspective? But I think what people mean is like the stuff that I was thinking was important and that I, that was bothering me or stressing me out. I went out there into nature and I saw this view, or I did this hike and it just reminded me of what really matters.

And that's what I would say is the defining one of the defining features of awe, [00:16:00] which is that it reminds people that the world is bigger than them.

Paddy: Hmm.

Dr. Piff: That. You are not the biggest thing, but that you are, but a small part of this bigger thing that you're connected to and it puts yourself in this perspective that I think people really long for

Paddy: Yeah. , It gets you to look past your nose. It feels like you're, you know, a, a thread, in the great, grandma's Afghan blanket of life and existence like you're a part of.

And so if you're, more tapped into that in the outdoors, do you think that is why takeout day on a river trip is like the saddest day in all of the outdoors? Because, you know, you're going back, you know, or, or the last day, on a backcountry ski trip, right? Where you've just been, without technology, it's just been you and the movement of your body through terrain and weather, you know that moment when you realize you're coming back and you

Dr. Piff: yeah, it's so sad.

Paddy: little funeral, [00:17:00] like you get so sad for, for the reentry? Is it because you know, you're leaving this awe space and you're going back to the, like, more maybe self-centered, self-seeking?

Dr. Piff: I would imagine that's a, that's a huge part of it, It's a little complicated 'cause people are also on vacations

and maybe they don't wanna return to work. But, but I think, like, I think what's like deeply meaningful about what you're saying is that it's a misnomer that we go out into nature and we say. We're unplugging, which people say all the time, 'cause they're like, their phones might not work and they might not get reception, and they're not checking email

they're really plugging in and what, what they're really

plugging into is themselves. And that deeper sense of connection to the world and the deeper things about the world that matter. And that feel almost inexpressibly important. And we're sad to leave that behind

because we know that when we return to our lives back home, often that feeling of deep union with the world gets kind of [00:18:00] diminished

by daily stresses,

by what we gotta do, by traffic, by all the, you know, the, the endless laundry

to-do list of laundries and chores. So I think we miss that feeling of being alive.

Okay. And so one of the things that we measured in Tahoe, in our awe meter of people expressing this feeling of being alive, which is like such a cliche, but what is it? We're measuring that. And then

you've gotta be like, what does that mean? Like, you're going out into nature and it's like making you feel alive. Well, you're obviously alive objectively. You are alive before the nature experience. You're alive during it.

But what are people trying to put words on that they're having trouble putting words on when they say it made me feel

alive.

And I think it's this awakening you to the deeper sources of beauty and meaning that are inherently there in the world around you.

Paddy: okay. Well, I absolutely love that. And I think that you are maybe equal parts of scientist and, [00:19:00] uh, poet maybe. And I really, I like this a lot. This is, oh, the brain sparkles and the heart sparkles are all happening all at once.

Dr. Piff: Yay. Yay. Thanks Paddy. you might very well be my muse.

Paddy: okay.

Dr. Piff: of muses, yeah. Not to make things awkward.

Paddy: Oh no, not to make things. Are you kidding me? I get to update my LinkedIn profile after this. This is great.

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I have to believe that like you, you didn't just like stumble upon this in the lab or like reading a book and then this just like started your area of study. What was the experience of awe that set you on this course

Dr. Piff: I didn't grow up in the us I grew up in a different country and it was really important to my parents that we had experiences in nature.

so I grew up with a really deep, fascination and curiosity about the world.

So I was always like picking stuff up and flipping over rocks and just like curious about what you couldn't always see,

you know? So I was always finding stuff and loved interacting with nature. One experience that was like really deeply moving for me [00:20:00] was when we went on our first as a family, we went to East Africa and, I must have been nine or 10,

and for a few days we're on safari in

the Maasai Mara

Park. And I just remember this moment, like we were in this Jeep going out over this hill and I had, we hadn't seen any. Wildlife yet. And then we cleared this hill, and then for the first time we saw this out in the distance, it looked like the horizon was blanketed with these little moving intricate black, like a, just a, a, an undulating carpet of wildebeest.

they were like just running. It just looked unbelievable

I just never seen anything like this. I couldn't believe the number how many of them there were and what they were all doing together. And I just remember as a kid, just, I don't know that that sparked my scientific interest in awe, but

it like, wow, the world is an amazing place. and when I [00:21:00] started graduate school,

I so badly wanted to study awe because I felt like it was this experience that had been monumental in my life. And it was my grandmother's favorite word in the English language.

And my cousin and I had this, had this, yeah, we had this three letter word contest in college where he and I were in a competition to find the best three letter word, and then we would take

each of our best words from our list and then we submitted it to our grandma and she picked the winner and she picked awe.

And then she wrote this long letter about why she picked that word. This like big treatment on why awe was so important to her and why it was her favorite word in the English language.

And if my grandmother, who's one of the most amazing people that I, that I

know was talking

about the importance of awe. It felt like something that we ought to try to get some traction on scientifically.

Paddy: Yeah. Totally.

Dr. Piff: when I started graduate school, there were like, two papers on the topic and uh, the big problem was when no one really knew how to study it, you

know, or it was hard to put in a test tube,

Paddy: I want to dig into that because it's fascinating to me how you figure out [00:22:00] exactly how to measure a feeling like that.

It's like, that's the thing that I want a bottle. I don't know what the thing is though, and I also don't know how you get it into a bottle, but it seems like maybe you do, and I wanna chat to you about your research or as I have been lovingly referring to it, the Dr. Piff extended Awe universe. So

Dr. Piff: we should coin, we should bottle that.

We should coin that. I love that. Okay. Let's take

Paddy: Trademarked. Boom. So in your research, you're studying the impacts of awe on people in and around the south shore of Lake Tahoe. Can you describe how these experiments actually work and what you're seeing when you conduct them?

Dr. Piff: Yeah. So uh, I can try to, the problem that you're proposing is an important problem, which is how do you study something that's really subjective?

Paddy: Yes, exactly.

Dr. Piff: you, you could say that because our minds are. By definition totally subjective. And thus, our experiences are really subjective.

And so our emotions, which are a big part of our experiences, are gonna be hugely [00:23:00] subjective. And so what awe is to you, Paddy, is not what awe is to my grandmother,

but there's a bunch of work that we've done and that others have done to show that even though there's a highly subjective nature to what it brings about awe for people, like some person might find awe in Beethoven's Ninth, another person may listen to that same piece of music and be like, eh, it doesn't really move me at all.

Paddy: totally.

Dr. Piff: The experience of awe is pretty consistent for people in what it feels like. Okay. So people, when they experience awe, they describe, this sense of vastness.

They feel a sense of relative smallness.

Like their ego is being quieted . They report a sense of time slowing down they're feeling more rooted in the present.

They report feeling goosebumps. And this is in not just American participants, but all over people report this experience of what we call pilo erection, where your hairs are standing up,

So all has these pieces of it. And you can measure that. You can measure those feelings. And so when [00:24:00] we went to Tahoe, we used these measures, these scales, these meters designed to capture the different parts of the A experience.

Paddy: Like what does that, what does that mean though? Like, do are, is it like you're, you're sticking electrodes onto people,

Dr. Piff: you could do that. You could, yeah. But that if, if you did that, it's not gonna tell you an, like, electrodes will give you some kind of signal,

like is a person stressed. it's not gonna tell you about specific sort of psychological states necessarily. So we use self-report, uh, scales. So we we're giving people, for instance, iPads

and they're answering questionnaires.

Paddy: Okay. I see what you're

Dr. Piff: And on the questionnaires, you've got a bunch of different questions. The

easiest way would be how much awe are you feeling right now? But then you could say like, all right, that's a problem because how do you define awe?

And if someone's saying they're experiencing awe, what do they really mean?

So you gotta unpack that. If you really wanna do a good job scientifically, you gotta like figure out different ways to ask the question, different ways to measure different components of it.

And in Tahoe, we ran this summer. Seven to nine different studies with more than a thousand [00:25:00] different participants where we're

measuring, lived awe

in all sorts of different locations with all sorts of different experiences. So we would have people go on hikes, For example,

before they started the hike, they'd complete a bunch of surveys, including measures of how they're feeling right now, how happy, how much, uh, joy, how much fear, how much stress, how much awe are you experiencing right now?

Then they'd go on their hike, and then when the hike was over, we'd have them complete the same questionnaire we'd then be able to look at whether awe kind of increased or, stress decreased over time as a function of having this experience in nature. And I don't wanna like get too into the weeds, but I think the weeds matter and they can be beautiful if

you're looking at them in a particular way.

So lemme just spend a couple of minutes getting

Paddy: Let's weed, let's weed it up.

Dr. Piff: Let's weed it. So, we did this Van Sickle Trail study with lots of people. That was time intensive, where we measured how they were doing before, including how much awe. And then we looked for changes in awe afterwards. And when

we crunched the [00:26:00] numbers. The people that were on this, on the Van Sickle Trail, who also spent time taking in what we would have thought was a super awe-inspiring view. We didn't give them any instructions. We just have them complete surveys for and after. We didn't see any changes in awe.

Paddy: Really.

Dr. Piff: We didn't see awe go up as a result of people having these experiences in nature and so we were like, what? What? What's going? This is the first study that we ran that summer and we were like, what's going on? Are people not experiencing awe? Are we measuring it in the wrong way? What's going on?

What we then did was run a bunch of different studies where we gave people, little instructions to experience off. Through just like three simple little reminders.

Paddy: What were the reminders?

Dr. Piff: To breathe. Sense and savor. To slow down.

Take a deep breath

Paddy: Yeah.

Dr. Piff: to sense. That is open yourself up to what's around you.

Paddy: Oh, totally.

Dr. Piff: Savor to what I want. I don't wanna geek out too much. What is savor? Scientifically? It means to upregulate, which is a fancy way of saying to try to [00:27:00] promote

the, the good stuff.

To try to, to try to extract goodness. Okay.

And so I.

Paddy: because my assumption is like the difference between the first group and the, second group that were given the prompts is that the first group was doing probably what we all do when we go hiking, which is like, you're like, I go out in nature to get all these big views, and really what you do is you go head down and you look at your feet and you just try to power up something and you forget to stop and look

Dr. Piff: perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Or you're hanging out with people

or you're there to like throw a football around. you're not necessarily there for awe. Not to say that awe isn't there to be found, but that's not

Paddy: No, you're just, your, like, receptors aren't open to it.

Dr. Piff: Totally,

Paddy: So, so did you see that when you had people slow down and then look out upon beautiful Lake Tahoe that like, they were like, oh, ah.

Dr. Piff: Oh, like, I don't wanna use profanity, but it was like, holy, crap.

Paddy: you can. You can swear harder than crap. It's okay.

Dr. Piff: Okay. Okay. when we did that, it, [00:28:00] like, for us it was a holy shit moment. 'cause it was like, oh my god. the rates of awe. So

we've run now 40 different lab studies

where we're looking at increases in awe because of like videos we're playing for people or showing people awe inspiring,

photos.

Uh, we, I've done studies of big trees anyway. When we compare what happens in Tahoe to all of those other studies that we've run,

we saw a, across studies, a I think a 34% increase in awe

Paddy: Really.

Dr. Piff: who we gave those instructions to. And that, to me, as a scientist, that's hugely impressive. But to really get a sense, you compare it to what other studies of awe have found, and those rates are as high, if not higher than the cumulation of stuff we've done in the past.

I don't know that Tahoe is more awesome than other things, but it certainly provided lots of opportunities to study really high levels of awe.

Paddy: my immediate question is why, what's [00:29:00] up in Tahoe? I mean, does South Shore just have the secret sauce or like what's,

Dr. Piff: Yeah.

I mean it's a, I, I think other places have the secret sauce too. Again, I'm not saying you gotta go to South Lake to experience awe. 'cause you can get awe in lots of ways but Tahoe does a few things that we as humans really long for, which first of all is we have evolved to. Emotionally latch onto and respond to places that bring together blue and green.

Paddy: Yeah. Okay.

Dr. Piff: why, because like that, that's just an evolved human preference

for lots of obvious

Paddy: yeah, Totally.

Dr. Piff: But when you ask people about their conceptions of beauty

in a natural environment, deep blues and deep greens

are the epitome of

that.

And so Tahoe has this very magical quality of like a very, very blue lake and very, very green stuff around it. And that lake is very, very clear.

And [00:30:00] people love clear water because it taps this other thing that's essential to perceptions of beauty, which is that it's pure. And we as a human species. Long for purity

in all sorts of things.

Blue, clear water

is almost our definition of purity.

And so, you know, we

see ba like lots of the things that we value the most are also things that we think of as pure our, our, our definition of what's sacred is also what's

Paddy: Mm, mm

Dr. Piff: that are pure are things that we think of as sacred,

Paddy: doc, you are hitting like the gooey center of the feels, man, I love this. wow. This is so great.

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PADDYO VO:

More awe-inspired head and heart explosions courtesy of Dr. Paul Piff after the break.

MIDROLL MIDROLL MIDROLL MIDROLL MIDROLL MIDROLL MIDROLL MIDROLL MIDROLL

I was introduced to the concept of Blue Space by a guy named Dan Rubenstein, he standup paddle boarded from Ottawa.

[00:31:00] To New York City and back again. And he talked a lot about how water intrinsically creates community amongst people who share it even, or especially with folks who are from completely different backgrounds and perhaps would never, ever hang out with one another. Like water is some great

Dr. Piff: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Paddy: and community builder.

And I know that you are a kayaker, you're a water guy. So how does this phenomenon of the beauty of blue and Green in Lake Tahoe

create that special sauce of experience, of awe?

Dr. Piff: Okay, so to get there? Do you mind if I take a quick two steps back?

Paddy: No, not at all. . Take my hand and lead me to the promised land. Here, doc.

Dr. Piff: so, I'm not a health psychologist. I'm a social psychologist. And, and to most people that doesn't, that, that's, those are kind of meaningless words, but I'm like, fundamentally interested in human relationships, human connection.

and the reason I got interested in awe is because I was, [00:32:00] curious to know how experiences that a person could have that are often asocial, like in nature alone, could change. Would they change a person's social tendencies? And so one of the first studies that we did. Of awe in this space was where we took Berkeley students, uc, Berkeley students, into a grove of tall eucalyptus

trees that many of them would walk through on several occasions a day and just not look up.

Okay?

But it's a big, tall stand of eucalyptus

Paddy: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Piff: And some of the participants spent 60 seconds looking up at those big trees. Others had their backs to the trees, looking up at a big building, we know and we could measure this. And we did that. Looking up at the big trees, taking just 60 seconds to look up at those trees made people kind of quiet down and it filled them with

awe. They're looking up at something taller, older than them. It's reminding people of times vast scale, which I think is why we experience awe toward mountains.

Paddy: Yeah. Oh, for sure.[00:33:00]

Dr. Piff: for a long time. They're listening to wind rustling through the leaves. Okay? So they feel more awe. once the 60 seconds were done, we staged this accident in front of them where a person walks up and trips over themselves and drops a bunch of pens on the ground on the forest floor,

we secretly observe and record if our participants in the study then bend down and pick up these pens to help this other person out that they don't know. we measure, we measure other things. We that study

on a questionnaire, but that's the key thing. Helping behavior does being filled with awe, make you engage in more helping behavior in this staged accident. And what we found was that people who looked up at those big trees were way more likely to take time outta their own day, to bend down and pick up pens, and they picked up more pens to help this other person out. We did a bunch of other studies looking at this in other ways, doing laboratory studies, real world studies. We have now consistently found that the sense of awe, the experience of awe makes people more pro-social, more kind, more [00:34:00] empathetic, more ethical.

It makes them more willing to give up things of value to them to help another person out. And it connects people somehow to one another. People when they experience awe, feel a deeper sense of connection to others. One of my favorite ways to do this, to measure this, and then I'm gonna stop riffing for just a sec,

but like.

Paddy: Riff away. I feel like I'm, I'm like listening to Hendrix play right now. This is awesome.

Dr. Piff: So, so Lonnie, she is a, a social psychologist at a SU and she did a, one of the first studies of awe where she used what we call this social categorization task. When, when I ask you, Paddy to define

yourself, define yourself using

20 terms, you might say, okay, I am, I'm a husband, I'm a father, I'm a snowboarder and a skier. I'm an outdoors e person. I'm, I don't know,

you might, you come up with a bunch of different

ways. She had participants in her study experience awe in a [00:35:00] control condition, and then had them do this social categorization task. And what she found was that when people felt awe, the way that they described themselves, the way that they categorized themselves, the labels they used to identify themselves became broader. All of a sudden, people no longer thought of themselves as Americans. They thought of themselves as human. They thought of themselves as alive.

So one of the first insights about awe, and the reason I'm describing that study is that awe, by virtue of attuning yourself to how the world is much bigger than you, it puts you in this bigger context and connects you to things bigger than you. it basically is an emotional experience that imbues you, that imbues your life with the sense that the world is much bigger than you are and that you're deeply connected to that bigger thing

Paddy: So the, the sense or experience of awe, it creates charity, it creates, community, and it also creates altruism.

Dr. Piff: Yes, absolutely.

Paddy: So

Dr. Piff: We did.

Paddy: you could say it as simply as like [00:36:00] going outside just makes you less of a dick and a whole lot nicer.

Dr. Piff: Yeah, it, makes you less of an asshole and I mean, you could call it, you could call it the anti asshole effect, you know?

Paddy: What are you doing? Are you going for a jog? Nah, I'm going for a anti asshole trot.

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Dr. Piff: So once we figured out how to measure, the awe experience in South Lake this summer, like as a research team, then we were kind of up and running and we were interested in like in the studies that we ran, measuring three kind of clusters of things that we think are really deeply meaningful and potentially associated with awe. One of them was do awe experiences make people feel a sense of contentment and satisfaction with their lives? Like does awe give rise to wellbeing? And we found that it does, and that, that even a two minute experience of awe leads to statistically significance, but [00:37:00] also experientially significant increases in how happy you are with the state of your life and how content you are with where things are in your life.

So it, it just makes people feel more satisfied with the conditions of their life. It's is a really amazing thing

Paddy: is there a correlation between like two minutes of looking out at Lake Tahoe and X number of minutes of feeling more community? Uh, less alone, more togetherness, like is, is there a time limit on the awe experiences, positive impacts on your head and your

Dr. Piff: know.

Paddy: Dunno, still figuring it out.

Dr. Piff: We're gonna try to do that this summer.

Paddy: can I be your lab rat, lab monkey please? I wanna,

Dr. Piff: Can you or can you please just be there

and like, give us, like be, be our inspiration? Because you're asking like, you're, like, the fact that you arrived at that question, like it took us years to even get to like, okay. That's an important question

Paddy: You need to go back and add [00:38:00] and talk to my psych professor for my freshman year then. 'cause he

Dr. Piff: All right. So, so they get all the, they get all the

Paddy: uh, are you, no, because I'm pretty sure he thought that I was a dope. He was like, I'm surprised you've got sneakers that tie up. I thought you were more of a Velcro guy.

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Dr. Piff: And so the question is, if you go to Tahoe and you have an awe experience for two minutes, how does that experience carry with you? We know that in the moment, for example, it makes you feel greater wellbeing.

It makes you more caring about the environment, which is another thing that we measured and it gives rise to this. Motivation to socially connect. But we measured it right after the experience. We didn't follow people afterwards and continue to measure it and see what happens as a result of this experience. And I think that's the really important question.

I would guess that no single experience besides maybe the most fun, like you witnessed the birth of your child

and that probably changed you

Paddy: A hundred percent. Yeah.

Dr. Piff: you can think back on that experience

and [00:39:00] keep extracting awe from

Paddy: Oh yeah,

Dr. Piff: But I would guess that there's a lot of awe experiences that the dust settles on and you maybe can somewhat tend to forget about.

Paddy: yeah. Sure,

Dr. Piff: I think what's what's most interesting about awe is not how one experience affects you, but how a sustained orientation to experiencing awe changes you.

Paddy: The way I'm kind of picturing it is like, you know, when you've like, uh, you blow up a balloon and you start hitting it around a party and the balloon dips and then gets knocked back up, and then it

Dr. Piff: Yeah. There you go.

Paddy: and you just keep it in the air for as long as possible.

It seems like what you're saying is like sustained moments of awe throughout your life, right? You're going out to the south shore to go, paddle boarding, to go kayaking, to go trail running or something, but you're also going back home and you're, and, you're seeing the glint of the light through the window make a little rainbow on

Dr. Piff: Or vapors. Vapors on your cup of coffee in the

Paddy: Right. So,

having the top tier moments, which like keep the [00:40:00] balloon up maybe

Dr. Piff: Yeah. And and remind You that the balloon is there or that the balloon's important and then you've got

Paddy: the little things back home

Dr. Piff: Yeah. Yeah.

Paddy: to do that. Am I, am I, am I on the track here?

Dr. Piff: Perfect. Now we don't, I, we haven't done that study, but I think at the very least, I think that that's definitely true of awe. And what I think would be really interesting is I, I would imagine just like for instance, uh, people who keep gratitude journals,

and there's a lot of work talking about the benefits of gratitude

Paddy: okay. Yeah. Sure.

Dr. Piff: that journaling what you're grateful about, even for two weeks, can have these sustained shifts.

That what trying to build awe into your life would do. on a daily basis., I would bet you that it's going to shift such that you're gonna click into this new mode of seeing the world that doesn't require you to be like, oh, oh, let me see if I can find, awe it.

It's not even gonna be an explicit goal anymore because it's gonna become routinized and it's gonna, there's gonna become an awe layer built into [00:41:00] how you experience the world that's just there. Kind of like kids experience awe all the time

Paddy: God I

Dr. Piff: because. Novelty is all around

Paddy: because they're little Buddhas and, and haven't been spoiled and selled by whatever yet. Yeah, totally.

Dr. Piff: But if you're an

adult and you try to be a kid again by finding awe all the time, eventually you're gonna find novelty everywhere, because there's

always novel things to find.

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Paddy: I've only spent a little bit of time in and around Lake Tahoe. Not enough, admittedly. But you have lived there for years now, and you've spent a lot of time in the desolation wilderness, which sprawls Southwest of Lake Tahoe South Shore.

Now, the images I've seen of this region make it. Look kind of comically idyllic ice blue alpine lakes that reflects the sky white capped precipitous peak for days. I legit saw a sunset photo that looked like [00:42:00] the top half of the photo was just like schmeared with tangerine preserves. It was like, ah, delicious nature.

So the desolation wilderness looks kind of bonkers. What have your experiences back there been like and how has that informed your own understanding of your work?

Dr. Piff: That's a really good question. Like I love water and I love swimming.

And in desolation they're like these little swimming holes and bigger alpine lakes and even much larger Alpine Lakes. And you can hike and find tiny little places to swim and jump in, get out, hike some more, jump into a new body of water.

And each time you're doing that, you're getting this like reset. A moment because of for me, how water affects me.

And desolation, the desolation wilderness, I think is a lot like the Tahoe, you know, like just the South Lake wilderness, but you're further away from people and you're more solitary, you're a little more remote, and there's just like surrounded by [00:43:00] vastness, you know, surrounded by granite and peaks and looking at, the scale of the Sierras

around you. There are different channels for awe. One of them is visual, like seeing stuff that's big.

Okay. For example,

another one is being exposed to things that remind you of. quote unquote conceptual vastness. And what I mean by that is, for example, being reminded of the cosmic sense of time, the cosmic calendar

that you are, but a blip

in the cosmic calendar and being surrounded by things that have been here for a lot longer than you have.

You know, so, uh, sequoias redwoods, native American grinding holes,

right? That remind you that other people have been here for long before

Paddy: yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally.

Dr. Piff: And members of the Washoe Tribe that have lived around South Lake Tahoe for thousands of years for, ages and ages and ages,

you know, so being reminded of just that your life is what a small part of this, and that this stuff has been around here for a [00:44:00] lot longer than you have will be for a lot longer than you have.

And that other people have been through here

before you and '

Paddy: cause the timeline isn't stagnant. It's a train that's moving and you're on the train with all

Dr. Piff: you're on that train

Paddy: Yeah, totally. Absolutely.

Dr. Piff: and that, and think about like the sense of like interconnectivity and connection to human life that sustains and brings

about. People don't usually think about that, but

Paddy: Totally, no. 'cause we got emails in the frigging, TPS report on Monday and all that crap. Yeah. it seems very easy to tap into the sense of awe, right? In a place like Desolation Wilderness, now you're a dad and dad makes solo adventuring pretty non-existent. I understand that.

'cause I am a dad as well, a new dad, and I definitely understand the sense of, aw, when I watch my daughter climb around the living room or when she giggles in the, woods when we're out together. but awe is different than awe. Big a [00:45:00] awe. So I'm wondering if you can describe a moment when you were watching your kids and felt that big capital a awe.

If there's a specific place that you go to in South Shore that delivers that sense more than another place.

Dr. Piff: as a dad of young kids, I see my kids experience awe all the

time. And how does watching them experience awe transform not only how I see them and how I relate to them, but also how does it change how I see the world? Does it make me feel more awe in my life

because I'm getting to experience the world for the first time again through the eyes of my

kids. And so in Tahoe, I mean my kids are very small, you know what I mean? So they hadn't had they, before we went to South Lake, we hadn't had a lot of a moments together as a family.

But I'll never forget getting on the glass bottom kayaks with our eldest son, Vinny.

this was as part of a research project and I was kind of worried about how this was gonna [00:46:00] go.

And, uh, is Vinny even gonna be into this? Is he gonna be kind of scared?

People were filming, anyway, we get on the boat, we start kayaking. He's in front of me and he looks down. And the way these canoes are kind of configured is they're, they're made out of like a very transparent

plastic. And because Tahoe is so clear, you can see all the way through to the bottom of the lake, and it's a very deep

lake and it's very blue water. And the moment he like looked down, he was just like, like, totally face, spontaneously broke out into an awe face. We've studied the awe expression. Its eyebrows up, eyes wide, open mouth, Aja breaking out into a smile. That was, he was the prototypical awe face. And he was just plastered. Onto the boat. His face was just like mashed up against the bottom of the boat, and he was just like, totally exclaiming, totally exclaiming, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Pop, stop, pop, go, go back, go back, go back. What was that? What was that? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wow. Whoa, whoa, whoa. [00:47:00] And almost like pre-verbal, you know, like not able to

express. And just getting to see him have this experience to something that I hold so sacred,

right? Tahoe, that it struck him in the same way and forged a connection, a deep emotional connection between him and the thing that he's, that just like stunned him into bewilderment. Then made me connect to him even more, you know, so there's almost this like, this like love

Paddy: yeah,

Dr. Piff: where I'm like loving on the lake and he's loving on the lake and I'm loving on him 'cause he's loving on the lake and

Paddy: Did you go out and immediately buy a glass bottom kayak? Like Vinny we're doing this every day,

Dr. Piff: we're doing this all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is actually like that, like again, why you need to be like a research collaborator in these studies because we're like, we've done a bunch of studies now where we're finding that when you see your kid experience awe, it makes you as a parent want to invest in those things that made them feel awe.

You wanna just [00:48:00] do more of those

Paddy: Well, I've talked to know, everyone from pro athletes to extreme, bonkers, outdoorsy characters about parenting their, children and trying to instill this sense of outdoorsiness or outdoor love and the passion for the outdoors in them.

And I think you get so worried about, you know, getting the gear and doing the thing to do, and it's just like, just take 'em to the place. That seems like what you're saying. It's like, just

Dr. Piff: the place is gonna do it.

Paddy: you love

Dr. Piff: Yeah.

Paddy: they will

Dr. Piff: It's gonna do the rest of the work. Yeah. The, the place is gonna do the work. And I would say, like, as a parent, you can't force awe on anybody, but you can kind of nudge it along

and you can encourage it. But like, there's certain awe experiences like Tahoe that'll just, like, they're gonna come to you no matter where you

Paddy: Well, I love that too. It's like, what are you guys doing today? Ah, we're going out for a nudge.

Dr. Piff: We're nudging.

Paddy: I gotta go. We're going to the lake and a little nudge.

Dr. Piff: Yeah.

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Paddy: I think that our beloved outdoor pursuits can, you know, [00:49:00] unfairly be passed off as frivolous endeavors or even selfish or aggrandizing, you know, especially in a time like right now when the world is just in very serious hurt and harm.

But I also think that joy filled pursuits boost the battery life on our

Dr. Piff: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paddy: and our hope. And I think they can be as important in a time like now as ever. And so in a time of growing inequality and division, why might awe matter more than ever.

Dr. Piff: That's a great question. I think you hit on exactly the right kinds of things there's a lot of reasons that people could find to despair about the state of the world, whether it's rising inequality, increased polarization

politically and otherwise, people are inhabiting. Evermore insulated social worlds. Loneliness is on the rise. It's even called an epidemic by many.

people are feeling increasingly disconnected from each other, [00:50:00] from the world, potentially from themselves. And empathy is on the decline. People are, in some ways less empathetic with not only their neighbor, but certainly people different from them than they were in the past.

And amidst all those trends, you can't help but wonder what are the kinds of things that might help curb those changes and make us less narcissistic, less focused on ourselves, more connected to one another, more empathetic to increased community. And I think that in pursuit of the answers to that question, awe is an important answer. And an important antidote, not because it's the panacea or the silver magic bullet at all, but I think it provides us with the kind of psychological shortcut to those changes that we're hoping to bring about. We have found that experiences of awe not only make people feel more happy, more meaning and purpose in their lives, but it [00:51:00] also makes people feel more connected not only to nature and the natural environment, but to others, their communities.

And it makes them more empathetic and kind and pro-social. And so when you go out and you experience nature, you could think to yourself, I'm just doing a hedonistic. Pleasurable

activity, which is awesome. That evolution equipped you with the tools to think of that activity as pleasurable like cake

is, you know?

But it's also, I would say, hugely beneficial, not just for yourself psychologically and physically, but it also is beneficial for your relationships, for your connection to the world, and in creating a more sustained and deep sense of community between you and others in the world around you. So I'm not saying that awe is the medicine.

Paddy: Mm

Dr. Piff: Awe may not be the only medicine, but wouldn't it be amazing if people [00:52:00] started to think about experiences in nature, experiences in the outdoors, experiences of awe as something that's rewarding and beneficial for your family life, for your partnerships, for your relationship to your community,

for your, connecting with others, for your sustained sense of communion with things bigger than you.

Paddy: Preach doc. Preach. You are speaking my language. God, yes.

Dr. Piff: Nature and experiences of awe outside in the world, improve our health. They do.

They reduce our stress.

They deepen our feelings of connectedness and undermine loneliness and mo maybe most importantly, they enrich our actual relationships with one another in the world.

They don't only make you feel less alone and more connected, they actually make you behave in ways that prioritize the interests of others, the wellbeing of others, the greater good above your own individual [00:53:00] concerns, your own self-interests, and that's ultimately what a meaningful, purposeful life is all about, contributing to things bigger than you. That's what

religions try to do. That's what social institutions try to

do. They try to motivate you to serve the greater good and awe seems to be this emotional impulse toward that same end.

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Paddy: with all of your extensive experiments in research and your own personal experiences with awe on the South shore of Lake Tahoe, what is your major takeaway?

What is your message for all of us?

Dr. Piff: that's a man. I, I should have rehearsed that. That's,

There were two insights from Tahoe that I'm taking away.

One is that you can see massive increases In awe across all sorts of different contexts in Tahoe that are some of the biggest that we've ever seen in research. And as a result, you get these really interesting consequences that are deeply meaningful to people, [00:54:00] like it connects them more to one another.

It connects them more to the natural environment. It heightens their sense of meaning and purpose in their own

life. And that to do though, to get to those big consequential changes in people, it doesn't take much, but a simple kind of reminder to do it.

Paddy: Hmm.

Dr. Piff: I'd like to get the word out as others are doing

that awe is something you can build into your daily life. It's a way of seeing the world. It's a way of seeing your world. The world that you inhabit, you don't have to go far to experience it. you know, it's gonna sound like a cliche, like the world's a very magical place and we forget that.

And awe reminds us of that. It awakens that sense of play with the world.

And by doing that, it makes people feel alive. And it reminds people that the world is much bigger than them, which is a feeling that people long for. So I'd say go out, set an intention to experience awe. However big, however [00:55:00] small, and the world will be better off for it. Not just you. The world will be better off for it.

MUSIC IN THE CLEAR FOR A BEAT

Paddy: It is now time for the final ramble. One piece of gear you cannot live without.

Is it the glass bottom kayak?

Dr. Piff: I love that you're asking this

question. I don't drink a lot of it, but I love coffee

, And one of my favorite rituals is making coffee in the least likely of places, including in the wilderness. And my favorite piece of gear is a little hand grinder that I bought out of this little mom and pop shop in Kyoto in

Paddy: Oh,

Dr. Piff: And I travel with that whenever I go out into the outdoors with a little thermos of hot water and that little hand grinder, and I love. The feeling, uh, ritual is a big

part of, for

Paddy: yes.

Dr. Piff: coffee and awe. And I love the ritual of making coffee. And so the hand grinder,

Paddy: Yes. okay. I, I love it. Okay. Best outdoor snack [00:56:00] coffee.

Dr. Piff: peanut butter, pretzels, and an apple

Paddy: Great call. Nobody said that. Great call.

Dr. Piff: does that, is that count as two snacks. 'cause

I like, I'm kind of like doing bite for bite.

Paddy: Well, here's the thing. Can you stuff 'em both in your mouth at the same time?

Dr. Piff: Totally

easy, easy.

Paddy: That's one. That's one snack. What is your hottest outdoor hot take?

Dr. Piff: Take any opportunity to take your shoes off and feel some stuff underneath your feet.

Paddy: Oh, just go. Go barefoot. Go buck. Yeah.

Dr. Piff: Go barefoot. Go buck

Paddy: like it. Nobody has said that. That's so good.

Dr. Piff: documentary. Is that, is that a hot take? I don't even

Paddy: I don't know. I'm gonna take it though. I mean, I guess it, how spicy are your toes man? You got some mangled man gnarled stuff like, I dunno.

Your spicy toe, that's a great hot take.

Dr. Piff: let's go with the spicy toe. I mean,

MUSIC IN THE CLEAR FOR A BEAT

Dr. Paul Piff is...so damn fun to talk to. He is also an assistant professor of psychology and social behavior at University of California Irvine. And [00:57:00] one of his areas of study is the phenomenon of awe...which is, as I'm sure you've heard, endlessly fascinating. And lucky for you, there is more of Dr. Piff and his awe-some insights for you to ingest. He's the star of a brand new docuseries, called Beyond Awestruck: The Scientific Search for Connection, which you can watch right now on Outside TV.

 And don't forget that we are on Youtube.  That's right-- enjoy these chats with your eyes as well as your ears. Check out video episodes of the show at Outside Podcast 1 on YouTube.

And, remember that we want to hear from you. Sooo, email your pod reactions, guest nominations, what moment of awe made you say ahhhhhh, and whatever else you want to tell and/or ask us to Outside Podcast At Outside Inc Dot Com.

The Outside Podcast is hosted and produced by me, Paddy O'Connell. But [00:58:00] you can call me PaddyO. The show is also produced by the storytelling wizard, Micah "the wizard of awes --see what I did there?" Abrams. Music and Sound Design by Robbie Carver. Booking and research by Jeanette Courts.

The Outside Podcast is made possible by our Outside Plus members. Learn about all the extra rad benefits and become a member yourself at Outside Online Dot Com Slash Pod Plus.