I'm Dacher Keltner, and welcome to the third and final episode of The Science of Love, a series from The Science of Happiness. Hosted by Gina Davis, we explore the science of how love moves outward, from the things we cherish to the natural world and the love that unites communities. I want to be loved by you, just you, and nobody else but you. I want to be loved by you Love Hi, I'm Gina Davis, and you're listening to The Science of Love, a special series by the Science of Happiness podcast. This is our third and final episode in the series. I encourage you to go back and listen to the first two if you haven't yet. We talked about love in its endless forms, between family to friends, romance, and even our love for our pets. Today, we're talking about the type of love that only takes one heart to experience, like our love of stuff. Most of the things people love are things that connect them to other people. Our love of nature. Caring for the earth is caring for ourselves. Love that endures through grief and beyond our inner circles to our greater communities and even humanity. If we're not thinking about the collective, if we're not thinking about how we all make things better for each other, then we've missed an opportunity. More Science of Love after this break. Welcome back to The Science of Love, a special by the Science of Happiness podcast. I'm Gina Davis. So far on our Science of Love special, we've been talking about love of sentient beings. But what about inanimate objects? People say they love their stuff, but do we really love it? Most of the things people love are things that connect them to other people. Aaron Ahuvia is a marketing professor at the University of Michigan. He studies how and why we love objects and activities. So maybe you love a photograph of another person, or a souvenir of some experience you had with another person. Or maybe you love the dishes that you use at dinner parties because of the way they connect you to other people. But can we actually love objects in the same way that we love people? It's a little bit odd in a way that we can love things that aren't people, Because the brain actually evolved with mechanisms that go out of their way to keep us from forming emotional attachments to things that aren't people. That's because social coordination with people was vital to our early human survival. But our brains have developed different ways to overcome this. For example, anthropomorphic thinking. when we treat an object like a person because it looks or acts like one. This could be one explanation for why people are reporting to fall in love with AI chatbots. People who have not had the experience of forming social relationships, romantic relationships, friendships with chatbots generally say, oh, if I were to talk to this robot, I wouldn't feel anything because I know it's not a person. But what they don't recognize is that the part of your brain that causes those emotional reactions is unconscious. Our love of objects can also be tied to our identities. There have been really quite a few studies where they've put people into brain scanners and looked at what's going on in the brain when a person thinks about a person that they love and when they think about an object that they love or a brand that they love or a possession. And some parts of the brain where you think about yourself are also the same parts that you use when you think about people that you love and when you think about objects that you love. At quite a literal level, when you love something, you are making it part of who you are. And brands know all about this. So you get a lot of brands that we call badge value. Because I use this brand, I am a certain kind of person. I'm a Ford F-150 person. I'm a Birkenstocks person. Also, when customers love a brand, they are willing to go out of their way to find it. They're willing to pay more for it. If there's a problem, they're willing to forgive the brand. And you see that with Apple, Nike, Lululemon, many other brands that are really successful with this. But Ahuvia says the top things people say they love are things you just can't put a price on, like our pets and the natural world around us. And in the case of nature, I think it's because it's something we all have in common. Nature might be common ground, but does that mean that we can actually love nature? In the early 1980s, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson popularized the hypothesis known as biophilia, the idea that we all have an innate tendency to connect with the natural world and all living species. Reporter Kate Parkinson Morgan traveled to Bloomington, Indiana, to investigate the latest research about our connection to nature and how the strength of that connection might shape our future. It's a crisp autumn afternoon, and I'm watching a four-year-old zipline through the woods. Wow, you're really going! Wow! I'm here with social scientist Jessica Eyes, who's picking up her sons. Ages two and four, from a nature daycare that's also a farm. Hi little guys. Did you guys go out to the forest today? Yeah. At nearly six acres, the farm backs onto a forest. So all day, the kids do activities like climb trees, care for the farm animals, and forage for wild edibles shows that parents own connection to nature strongly influences how connected their children feel to the natural world And numerous studies have found that being in nature is good for our health It improves our overall well-being, reduces stress, and helps us feel a greater sense of connectedness to others and the world around us. Which is why Ice loves to talk about the wonders of nature with her boys. Can you feel that the tree's alive? Yeah. If you touch it, can you feel that there's life inside it? Another reason is that ice knows how much our feelings about nature affect our ability to protect it. It's what she studies as a social scientist. I try to understand how people relate to the Earth and how we can solve really tough challenges we face, like climate change, food insecurity, and other environmental crises. At Indiana University, ICE is leading ongoing studies looking at how our beliefs and values, things like spirituality, ethics, and morality, can shape the way we act on issues like climate change. We know how to solve climate change from a scientific perspective. What we don't know how to solve is human behavior. In one study, ICE's team asked around 300 people open-ended questions about how they felt about the environment. Things like, what's your personal relationship to nature? The primary feeling was love. The second feeling was longing. And then that was followed by a feeling of worry and guilt. Love is so much more powerful than the guilt and the fear. But right now, I don't think we're acting on our love for the Earth because the messaging we've been using for so long is the least motivating message. Messages about ice caps melting, polar bears dying, species being driven to extinction. So what does her research say is the most motivating message? Everyone and everything on Earth is connected. Caring for the Earth is caring for ourselves. The concept of care is the most motivating message. And care is a foundation of love. Neuroscience backs this up. Feeling love deactivates neural pathways for negative emotions like fear and judgment. And if we shift that messaging towards a love-based message system around climate issues, that builds in us a brain elasticity, a physiological ability to respond better to social challenges. Including political challenges. ICE's research shows our love of nature transcends party lines. Republicans, Democrats, moms, hunters, students, they're tearing up talking about these issues. And I think, wow, if I could just bottle up all this love that all these different people feel and just help them have a channel for it, to release it in a way that taps into what's good in us and not what is hateful in us. We're so entrenched in minutiae, these little differences that we feel towards issues. that we overlook the most fundamental part, which is that we love the Earth and we can unite around that. I'm Kate Parkinson-Morgan, reporting from Bloomington, Indiana. There needs to be really legally binding agreements that push governments to really commit to changes for the health of water bodies, the health of life on Earth, the health of forests, etc. Yuria Salidwin has spent years working within the United Nations to advance both indigenous people's rights and the rights of nature. We need to stop thinking that each state or each country, each government is on their own, and rather start thinking of all of us as part of a global community, of a planetary community. Salidwin is from the Nahuatl and Mayan lineages, born and raised in the highlands of Chiapas in Mexico. She says one reason indigenous communities are at the forefront of environmental movements is that they experience nature as more than just a resource. For many, if not all, of indigenous cultures of the world, there is a very similar view on seeing the natural universe as kin, as relatives. So when we are raised in a cultural context that embraces this constant interconnectedness with the natural environment, then we are constantly paying attention how we are impacting this environment. We as a planetary community need to really embrace, really integrate in our understanding of the world that the whole universe is alive, that water is alive, that the whole natural environment is a living entity that is speaking to us, speaking through us, because it always inhabits us. Coming up next, we learn how love endures through grief, how it can expand our sense of self and belonging and the love we feel for our wider communities. It's that connection and that feeling and that love of humanity generally which leads us to want to help people who are different from us. I'm Gina Davis. More signs of love after this break. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker. I host a podcast called A Slight Change of Plans that combines behavioral science and storytelling to help us navigate the big changes in our lives. I get so choked up because I feel like your show and the conversations are what the world needs, encouraging empowering counter that acts like a lighthouse when the world feels dark Listen to A Slight Change of Plans wherever you get your podcasts I Gina Davis Welcome back to The Science of Love a special by the Science of Happiness podcast. Loving nature. It's a big idea. I remember when I was about 11, we had five acres out on the foothills of the Sierras, and I used to go sit on this granite rock. and just listen to the birds sing. That's psychologist Dacher Keltner, a professor at UC Berkeley and host of the Science of Happiness podcast. Kate Parkinson-Morgan reports on how grief transforms the way we love and how rituals can help us process loss. Keltner and I are walking on a muddy trail in the Berkeley Hills where fog creeps around dense groves of eucalyptus trees. I turned to this trail for a year and a half or so while my brother had colon cancer. And then for a year or two after when he passed away, it was just this sense of being in a landscape that reminded me of him. And it kept him alive. You can't really talk about grief without talking about love. Psychologist Mary Frances O'Connor is a professor at the University of Arizona. She studies what happens to us when we grieve. Grief often is experienced as love with nowhere to go. We still have all of those continuing bonds with this person who we carry in our brain and in our heart. And because we loved this person, our physiology has changed. O'Connor says that grieving is a form of learning. And what I mean by that is we have to understand every habit that was responding to our loved one. The way you choose groceries because you know that your loved one likes to eat those things. Or the way you pick up the phone when something good happens or something bad happens. And so there's learning how to be without that person. That can take time. Our brains have to change to accommodate the loss. There is a part of the brain that is related to yearning. This predicting that we will see our loved one again, wanting them to be with us. This part of the brain is called the nucleus accumbens, and it's associated with motivation and reward-seeking. So we yearn for our loved one because that wanting motivates us to reach out to them, to be with them, and being with them is rewarding. The grieving process can take a toll on our bodies, too. Our cardiovascular system is tethered to the external pacemakers that are our relationships. when a loved one dies, that pacemaker is ripped away from us. In the first 24 hours after the death of a loved one, we're 21 times more likely to have a heart attack than any other day of our life, which is an absolutely shocking statistic. Eventually, as we learn day after painful day, we come to recognize that we can't expect them anymore. This change in the brain isn't about forgetting them. It is about overcoming our brain's belief that they will always be there, which takes a very long time to truly understand. One way to process the loss while honoring our loved ones is through memorials or rituals to mark birthdays or other major holidays. I think of the body as a container that absorbs our reactions that we're having emotionally and mentally. I think of our culture, sometimes our religion, sometimes just rituals we create, as an even bigger container that gives us some sense of context. Where are we in time? How long has it been? What are we feeling now that is different from what we felt when he first died? Rituals can connect us with this universal nature of grief. The grief of losing my brother, my turning to this trail, it became a ritual. Back on the trail in the Berkeley Hills, Keltner tells me he used to walk this path every day at dusk. And then the light would shine on the fall grasses or on the tree. My brother had this really interesting red hair, and the dusk light was very much like the color of his hair. And I just was like, whoa, there he is. It was like, he's here with me, you know. And I believe that. I believe that he's in my cells and he's in my consciousness and experiences. When you really love the person, the grief offers up opportunities for awe and growth and discovery. And of course, pain and deep sadness, but sadness is full of wisdom. And I found for me, Kate, like the grief opened me up to humility and a deeper love of humanity. You know, wow, humans, we're so vulnerable, and we're so tender, you know, and we're so, we're trying hard. This deeper love of humanity, the kind that can emerge from our hardest moments, can also surface during times of celebration and joy. Across the country, in a busy public library in New York City, a community is hosting a festival that brings that celebratory spirit to life. Suka Kalantari reports The festival is inside a three public library in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn On one floor a group of neighborhood kids are learning Ukrainian and Russian folk dancing. Dance with your friends, right? There's live jazz music on another floor. Neighborhood vendors are serving dumplings and flautas, a nod to Sunset Park's large Chinese and Mexican communities. Alexis Cariello and her son Nico are here. Where are the books? Hello. Upstairs. Go on, Chinese. You may remember Cariello if you heard the first episode of this three-part special. She's the one who wrote a lullaby for Nico when she was pregnant with him. I trust you, you know. She brought her son to the festival tonight so he could feel the collective care of their Brooklyn community. Whatever happens, I just want him to feel loved. But I also want everyone else in his life and our life to feel love. And so he has to believe that also to then, like, put that love out into the world. When we all think about love and connection, we think about the friends that we have. We think about our family members. We think about our romantic connections. And those are real and those are so important. That's psychologist Shira Gabriel. But what is missed is that humans also have what we call in my lab a need for social embeddedness, which is just a general feeling that we belong to a larger society, that we have a place in it that we fit in. Gabriel runs the Social Self Lab at the University at Buffalo. She studies what happens when people come together to experience something larger than themselves. Things like concerts or festivals or other large gatherings where people are really focused on a cool event and they're with a bunch of strangers, but you feel sort of a sense of connection while you're together in combination with a sensation of sacredness that the moment has transcended the ordinary day to day. And it's the combination of those two things that we found in my lab lead to the positive effects we find from these collective activities, and we refer to that as collective effervescence. To further study this collective effervescence, Gabriel got a bunch of people together in a concert hall and had them sing together. If you want to live your life, give it all away, don't you waste it? Learning a song and singing a song with thousands of other people, even six months down the road, led people to feel an increased sense of identification with their communities and an increased sense of identification with humanity and an increased feeling that their life had meaning. And maybe most importantly, this collective effervescence doesn't just help us. When we're in that event and we're singing with strangers and all of us are raising our voices together as one, we're being reminded that we're connected even to people we don't know. And it's that connection and that feeling and that love of humanity generally which leads us to want to help people who are different from us, leads us to want to help people who aren't our brothers and sisters, our romantic partners, or our kids. We're more likely to engage in those pro-social behaviors towards strangers because those strangers are fellow members of our society. They're no longer people who are different or separate from us. They're people who are connected to us. That's certainly true for Cariello. She says the greatest gift she can offer her son, Nico, is to teach him that to truly experience love, we have to also extend it outward. If we're not thinking about the collective, if we're not thinking about how we all make things better for each other, which to me, again, is all about love and liberation, then we've missed an opportunity. love expands our sense of belonging who belongs to us and who we belong to it shapes us from infancy through life and it's wildly diverse stretching far beyond romantic connections transcending human relationships ultimately love is about more than just survival it helps us flourish. It adds meaning to our lives. And while science continues to reveal how love works, and how we might nurture more of it, some parts will always remain unknown. Because love is an art as much as a science. A mix of chance, chemistry, and experience. An enduring mystery. And isn't that lovely? I'm Gina Davis. Thank you for exploring these many forms of love with us. This special is dedicated to the loving memory of radio producer Ben Manilla. The Science of Love is a production of the Science of Happiness podcast at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center. Our executive producer and editor is Suga Kalantari. Our senior producer and co-editor is Kate Parkinson-Morgan. Sound design and production by Jenny Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Our reporter is Truk Nguyen. Associate producers are Emily Brower and Tarani Kakar. Fact-checked by Dr. Eli Sussman. Funding for this special was provided by the John Templeton Foundation as part of the Greater Good Science Center's Spreading Love Through the Media Initiative. From PRX.
