Finding Beauty and Purpose to Flourish
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Welcome to Stories of Impact. I'm your host, Tavia Gilbert, and along with journalist Richard Sergei, every first and third Tuesday of the month, we share conversations about the art and science of human flourishing. Today, we're bringing you another memorable session from last fall's Global Scientific Conference on Human Flourishing.

The first ever Human Flourishing Conference from Templeton World Charity Foundation aimed to showcase the latest and most meaningful scientific advances in understanding how humans flourish across cultures and alongside innovative new tools and strategies. And the conversation on how humans seek out and actually need beauty and purpose in order to flourish was truly remarkable.

We're going to start by listening to a presentation on awe and beauty by Dr. Dokkar Keltner. Then we'll hear science journalist Dr. Philip Ball in a musical interview with concert pianist and DJ, Ilu. Finally, we'll hear from Dr. Frank Wilczek and Dr. Catherine Cotter in a panel discussion on beauty and aesthetics, moderated by Dr. Philip Ball. So, let's get started.

Dr. Docha Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-director of the Greater Good Science Center, which studies the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of well-being, and teaches skills that foster a thriving, resilient, and compassionate society. Here's Dr. Keltner.

So what I want to talk about is awe and beauty. I think they are two emotional states that are deeply tied to our sense of purpose in both universal and personal and idiosyncratic ways. And I'm going to focus in particular on awe, which dating back historically and then more recently, I've defined as the feeling of being around vast and mysterious things that transcend our current frame of reference and then require us

that we seek integration and meaning. So our experiences of awe, by definition, prompt us to search for meaning, to find the deeper truths,

that makes sense of our lives. In this book that I have coming out, I also devote a lot of time to an old question, which is how do awe and beauty differ, which is a fascinating question with recent evidence, but here we'll focus on awe. In our work on awe, one of the questions, and this is parallel with the question about beauty, which is where do we find it? Where might we experience it on a daily basis? And we have surveyed 26 different countries

And what's striking about the narratives of awe that we gathered is that there is both a universality and a particularity to them. We surveyed countries of every imaginable religious orientation, economic conditions, political organization, sense of self, countries from China to Brazil to Mexico to Poland. And we simply asked people to write about the stories that accompany awe that sort of account for their experiences of awe.

Then we took about two years to code these with the speakers of 20 different languages. We find what I call the eight wonders of our everyday life. Moral beauty, which I'll highlight today, our relationship to nature, collective movement and ritual, visual patterns, music, ideas. Then of course, as you might expect with all mystical experiences,

Then life and death, people often feel awe in watching life emerge and then as life goes.

Very briefly, and I could get up on the hobby horse about this, but I think it's really important, which is these are just some highlights from the 15 years of science that we've conducted on awe and then related beauty. Very strikingly, people feel awe a couple of times a week in different parts of the world. This isn't for the privilege. It isn't a rarefied experience. It doesn't take a lot to just go outside and feel awe.

It deepens with practice and knowing. The more we know about a domain, the more we practice it, the richer the experience of awe. Very interestingly, it is around us. I actually think it's almost like a contemplative state of mind in which as we think about awe and go in search of it and enjoy its benefits, it suddenly feels omnipresent.

You can get benefits from experiencing awe from just a couple of minutes a day. A lot of our studies have people immerse themselves in nature, go on walks, read moving passages, and the benefits can be derived from just a couple of minutes. And then to purpose, which is, I can't think of a single emotion that leads people to a greater sense of purpose, sort of a deep sense of the point of life than awe, at

It leads to greater humility, sharing, sense of community, and then a grounding in the world and sense of purpose. What I'd like to just dwell on is with the title of this panel being related to beauty,

is what Immanuel Kant called moral beauty as kind of a realm of the sublime or awe, and it emerged in our research. So in our narratives that we gathered from 26 different countries and coded very carefully, we were somewhat surprised that the most common source of awe and deep inspiration and a sense of the sublime

is what Kant called moral beauty. And in particular, it had a few different kinds of moral beauty. Courage, right? Facing power, speaking truth to power, overcoming fears, elements of courage. Profound kindness moves people to a sense of awe and wonder. You know, sharing resources, giving your last dollar to somebody who needs it a little bit more, et cetera. And then overcoming obstacles, people who...

faced a lot of resistance or obstacles in their pursuit of their purpose are inspiring to us. I've just given a few examples here from Ella Baker, the great civil rights activist,

who really changed world history just by going around and building networks of people interested in the right to vote in the South. Jane Addams, who had one of the first homes for the poor in the United States in the 19th century, radical idea at the time. And then obviously, Mahatma Gandhi and his radical acts of courage and kindness, thinking about overthrowing colonial rule with nonviolent efforts.

I love this quote of Toni Morrison. It's from a speech, Harvard Divinity School graduation speech that she gave. And I think it really captures the spirit of moral beauty and what we humans want to do with it. Over time, these last 40 years, I've become more and more invested in making sure acts of goodness

however casual or deliberate or misapplied, produce language. Allowing goodness, its own speech does not annihilate evil, but it does allow me to signify my own understanding of goodness, the acquisition of self-knowledge. And what Morrison is speaking to is what we find in studies, which is that

these encounters with moral beauty in feelings of awe produce this kind of deep self-knowledge about the point of our lives. So I do a lot of, in my teaching, just given the times and the pandemic and so forth and the rise in depression and anxiety, ask people to do more contemplative approaches to the content of our work.

an exercise that I lead in classes where you just take a moment to think about a couple people who have inspired you and what their kindness and courage and overcoming might have been

And then how those qualities of this person of moral beauty live with you today. Very important questions to be asking for our young people today. And then finally, you know, there's a nice review by Thompson and Siegel that really brings into focus all the benefits of allowing goodness its own speech. You know, and these are very clear, straightforward, controlled experiments in which

You look at a morally inspiring person, a speech of Martin Luther King, somebody who's overcoming obstacles, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, et cetera. You compare it to appropriate control conditions like humor or neutral stimuli or the like. And I'll just note some really interesting things here. One is that there's this whole psychophysiology or neurophysiology of prosociality

that we've been working on in our lab that really is produced by these encounters with moral beauty. You get these specific kinds of chills up the back of your neck that a lot of social mammals show when they lean into each other and feel community. You tear up, which is a parasympathetic autonomic response. You show elevated vagal tone, the vagus nerve,

which produces social engagement. And in one study, oxytocin released this little neuropeptide that enables forms of cooperation. So these encounters with moral beauty really change us physiologically. And then they give us this deeper sense of purpose, right? These encounters with moral beauty lead to more sharing and cooperation and a sense of moving towards something better in our own individual lives. So the

The wonderful thing to think about with respect to these emotions of beauty and awe is they're all around us. We can access them through music and art and nature and other people.

And they do serve as a compass to orient us to what is our purpose given the life we are living. So there's wisdom in these passions. Thank you very much. Now we have the pleasure of hearing from jazz pianist and artist, Ilu.

Elu has played alongside the likes of Wynton Marsalis and Elvin Jones and has played for, amongst countless others, Barack and Michelle Obama at the White House. You're in for a real treat. Elu's music is amazing. It's unusual. It's unique. We begin with him in conversation with our moderator, Dr. Philip Ball. So, Elu, I wonder if, first of all, you could tell us a bit more about yourself and about your musical journey.

Yes, as stated, my name is Ilu. That is a contraction of my born name, which is Eric Lewis. And I come from the city of Camden, New Jersey. I am a fourth generation musician.

I'm the first jazz musician in my family. I received a full scholarship to Manhattan School of Music. I graduated Dean's List and immediately began touring the world with Wynton Marsalis and Elvin Jones and just the top musicians. I then broke away from jazz in search of my own voice and I ended up discovering rock. I found a way to bind the two genres together into

one of my first inventions which I called rock jazz where I took the virtuosic elements and improvisational elements of jazz and combined them with the sheer power and drive and the candor, contemporary candor of rock and roll. I can't wait for this. Let's hear it. ♪ ♪

And then later on, I became infatuated with the art of DJing and the idea that the two turntable platters

resembled the activity of my two hands. And so I began wondering if I could play two different songs at the same time in two different tempos, just the same as a DJ could spin two different albums at the same time in two different keys and tempos. A legendary technique that supposedly the great Art Tatum was able to do. And so eventually I figured that out. So I coined that skill, piano turntablism. ♪

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

And last but not least, I was interested in taking the Baroque, fugue, and contrapuntal elements

pioneered by Bach and Mozart, and bringing them to a jazz consciousness, a jazz aesthetic by infusing them with the melodic rigidities and challenges and syncopations of the form of jazz called bebop, pioneered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell, with an emphasis on getting the left hand

to essentially perform duets with the right hand, two-part inventions as it were. However, doing it in such a way that

these two lines did not hijack or interfere with the synchrony and the pulse of the bass and drums. I did figure out a way to get the left hand to bop along with the right hand, utilizing the richness of the melodic literature of jazz bebop. And so I came up with the term counter bop. And so that is the third thing that I, um,

innovating, pioneering in my lifetime, in my world.

Thank you.

♪

Was there a core aspect of those different types of music, those different genres that made you think, hang on, they're doing kind of the same thing, or at least I think I can make them do the same thing and work together? What is that core element? Well, the core element is the human brain, the human nervous system. And especially in my case, I'm a musician.

with the activity of the hemispheres, the wiring of the hemispheres, has everything to do with all of my pianistic goals. In the discussion that we just had earlier, we touched upon the fact that music has, for as long as we know, you know, archaeologically about human cultures, it has been there. What is it about music, do you think, that seems to make it so central and actually probably so essential to all cultures?

it immediately plugs us into wonder. It plugs us into awe because we as humans, and especially if we think about early humans, are so susceptible to awe. Sometimes it's to our detriment. Sometimes it's to our advantage. The invisible things are extremely vulnerable.

awe-inspiring and mentally and emotionally impactful to us. Music operates in that area. Sound implies consciousness. That's why if we hear a door creak, we assume that someone's sneaking into the room when it could just be the wind. The brain takes all those signals that's coming in from the hairs of our ears and translates them into brain language, and then we fill in the blanks.

So when we hear music, awe comes into it. I'm so glad that you've raised the issue of awe and wonder. Those are elements, I think, of what we regard as beautiful that we hadn't touched on before and that I think are central and perhaps essential also to its relationship to the transcendent. To err is human. To forgive, divine. But what is forgiveness?

When can it rightly be sought or offered? Can it be corporate as well as an individual? What role should forgiveness play in law, public policy, or even public health? How can we become more forgiving? Templeton World Charity Foundation is a co-host of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health's Human Flourishing Conference, Forgiveness, Interdisciplinary Perspectives.

On April 21st and 22nd, eminent scholars and practitioners from philosophy, theology, psychology, law, peace studies, and public health will gather together to consider forgiveness. The conference will be hosted in Harvard's Memorial Church and is open to the public, but registration is necessary.

To register, visit hfh.fas.harvard.edu slash forgiveness-conference-harvard. We'll add a link to that registration page in our show notes. We hope you can join us. Now it's time for our panel discussion, moderated by Dr. Ball.

Our first panelist, Dr. Frank Wilczek, is a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on what holds atomic nuclei and their constituent particles together.

But his interests range far and wide in physics, from condensed matter to quantum theory to cosmology. And Dr. Catherine Cotter is Associate Director of Research with the Humanities and Human Flourishing Project in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work focuses on the way people interact with music and visual arts, particularly in their everyday environment and lives.

Now I'll hand it over to Dr. Ball. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this session. This is Finding Beauty and Purpose to Flourish. My name is Philip Ball, and I'm a science writer and author. In this session, we're going to explore the nature and value of beauty and the relationships it has to transcendence, art, science, and the human mind.

Now, those are issues that are too vast to fully cover an entire conference, let alone in an hour or half an hour. But I hope and trust that our speakers will offer some stimulating perspectives that will give you new food for thought about these old questions.

And I say they're old questions because we know that Plato and Aristotle at least thought about them, as Confucius and other philosophers did in the ancient world. They didn't by any means think all in the same way about beauty or find it in the same places. But what's striking from today's perspective is how they all seemed to consider beauty to be bound up somehow with issues of virtue, morality, and goodness. And this is an idea that was expressed also by Saint Augustine, who asked Plato,

How can we love anything but the beautiful? Today, in contrast, I wonder if, particularly in science, we're more taken with the famous formulation that John Keats gave us when he postulated an equivalence between beauty and truth. And that's quite another matter. What strikes me today, too, is that these days, I think you're more likely to hear the word beauty spoken by a scientist than by an artist.

All of which leaves me with the questions that I'd like to perhaps gently float over the discussion that we're about to have. Do humans need beauty in order to flourish? And if so, where is it to be found?

So let's begin. And Frank, I'd like to start with you. The very title of the book that you published in 2015, A Beautiful Question, Finding Nature's Deep Design, I think gives a hint at what you as a theoretical physicist consider to be beautiful in what we've discovered about the natural world. And I wonder if you can start by saying something about that. What is it about our physical theories that strike you as beautiful?

Well, as our fundamental understanding has progressed, the frontiers of knowledge, the boundary between what we know and what we don't know, is increasingly in realms where experiments are very difficult. We pick the low-hanging fruit, so to speak, and now we're concerned with very extreme conditions, very complex situations, and in those very far away things, and we're

In those circumstances, when it's difficult to gather data and just make theories by correlating data, the procedure to make progress that's turned out amazingly to work is to guess how the laws should be in order that they make more sense and are more coherent.

work out the consequences of your guesses, and then compare them with the selected experiments that are very difficult to do. And it's worked amazingly well. That procedure has dominated, I would say, physics since the dawn of the 20th century and continues today and has certainly dominated my work. And where does beauty come into this process?

Well, beauty is a term that's used very, very flexibly in different circumstances. People can use that same word to mean very different things. But for me, a working definition of beauty is, well, first of all, there's no definition. You know it when you see it. But secondly, a beautiful thing, a beautiful idea is something we want to come back to

and that after interacting with it repeatedly, we still feel good about it. And I think that has evolutionary value. In the scientific world, a dominant theme where beauty is, I think, very clearly manifested is in the theme of symmetry. We want...

our laws to be able to be transformed and yet look the same. That's, if you think about it, that's the definition of symmetry. And that has been a guide to formulating new laws that have turned out to be quite successful. If you turn to what humans enjoy in artistic expression, you find symmetry also is a dominant theme.

If you look at decorative art across many cultures or look at what's on your bathroom floor, the tiling patterns, people like to see patterns that are very symmetric, both in the colloquial sense and in the technical sense. So that's one form of beauty that's common.

to art and science. I think not all forms of beauty are manifested in science, nor are all scientifically valid ideas manifested in art. But I do think there's a very, very

large area of commonality. Catherine, I wonder if I could get your response to that. You've considered how people actually develop and express their aesthetic responses. And I wonder if, from what Frank's just said, whether you felt that there are common aspects in the perception of beauty between how we respond to the arts and how we, or at least scientists, respond to science. Yeah, certainly. I would say...

Symmetry is a great place to start. As Frank was saying, that there are these really basic features that we quite like in what we visually want to see in our artwork, in our everyday lives, and symmetry is one of the most fundamental pieces.

And there are also some interesting symmetrical pieces with how we perceive and engage with art and how the artist actually created the artwork. Oftentimes as a perceiver, we start with really some of these surface features. What are the bright colors? What are the lines that we're seeing? And then we delve deeper and start thinking about, well, what is the objects we're

what is the story happening? And then maybe we go a little further in a conversation with the artists and start thinking, well, what were they trying to show us? What was the theme or the purpose that they're really trying to put forth? Whereas the artists, they're going the exact opposite way where they're starting. What is the message that I want to communicate and then start develop the objects and the stories around it and then put those finishing touches on it. And so this is actually a particular theory by Pablo Tineo that I really love to come back to. And I think

As scientists, if we think about when we are putting together a study or a line of research, often we as the creators are putting together, well, what is the theme we want to understand? Okay, how do we formulate this in a concrete way and then put the finishing touches on it for the publications, the presentations, the articles?

Whereas as the consumers of research, when I'm reading other articles or learning more about different scientific disciplines, I'm thinking about, well, what did this one study tell me? Now let me delve deeper. What does this collection of studies tell me? And really start thinking more deeply into, well, what is the underlying purpose and theme of this line of research? So I think there's a nice balance in a few different ways that aligns with some of the artistic theories that are prominent in the field.

It's very interesting that what you were talking about there was, it seemed to be that people were often looking for some kind of communication in art. They were looking for what they might feel the artist is trying to tell them, or at least what is communicated to them from what the artist has given us.

which might seem to be quite distinct from what's going on in the sciences, but maybe not so much. I mean, Frank, when we find out about the deeper laws of nature, is there a sense there that somehow, not literally you're communicating with the world, but that the world is perhaps telling you or disclosing something to you that has a kind of a similarity to that process?

Yes, I think another commonality between what people usually associate with aesthetics and art and science is that in both cases, it's very pleasing when you feel you get more out than you put in. So if you have a leading idea and then spell it out and you sort of unfold its potentials, I think that's something in science that is important.

of the richest and most appreciated theories that they're revelations. They tell you more than, well, you get out more than you put in, to put it briefly. And, well, I was struck also by, I think the extreme of that, which maybe it also plays into ideas of symmetry, is the study of fractals, which can be constructed using very, very simple computer programs and yet get extremely alarmingly

elaborate patterns that have high degrees of symmetry and internal structure is maybe the epitome of these things where you get much more out than you put in.

And also you get remarkable patterns of symmetry. It sounds to me as though perhaps part of what you're saying is an element of surprise plays a role here. That, you know, you're not simply finding your ideas confirmed. You're actually finding things you hadn't expected to find. And I wonder whether that's a connection too. Absolutely. That's right. Yeah, yeah.

Catherine, I wonder if that's also something that comes about in how people respond to art. I mean, certainly there's a strong case for it being the case in music that we get bored if we're not surprised by it. And in fact, it seems to be the surprise element

that creates an emotional response. I suspect the same is true for visual art. Is that something that people talk about? Yeah. So oftentimes when we approach an artwork, first there's really just basic vision. Just when you look at anything in your home, you're like, okay, what is this? What is this object? Let me categorize that. It doesn't look a little strange. But then with art in particular, when you delve more into the kind of aesthetic responding piece of things, you

Start connecting it back to yourself. And that's where a lot of that interesting surprise element can come from. Thinking about if you're looking at a portrait, perhaps you engage in a little empathy with that portrait and try to understand, well, what was this person going through? What was their life like?

Oh, they're sitting here looking out the window a little bit bored. Yeah, I remember a time when that happened to me. Am I still bored with things? And you start getting to this kind of complex internal dialogue with yourself and using that artwork. And that's where some of the most powerful aesthetic experiences can come is when people take that time.

to sit with an artwork and sit with their thoughts and see how does this connect back to myself and my life, my knowledge. And there's potential for perspective change and worldview changes and practicing some of those empathy skills and really having a deep, deep moment that you remember years later. It's not just a, oh, that was pretty. Let me move on. But this beauty can really provoke

some interesting insights about ourselves as well. Well, I mean, I can certainly speak for myself in saying that I think the times I've been most moved by art, and particularly by music, are the times that have completely taken me by surprise. I hadn't thought about it before in quite that way. But staying on that idea of... Sorry, yes. Let me supplement that or complement it. The surprise to me is the specialty-pleasing...

When in retrospect, it's not so surprising. It's revealing the potential of the initial idea. So certainly in the great classical composers like Bach and Beethoven, they often start with a very simple theme and

spell out its potentials in unexpected ways. And then you see that, but also in the Beatles, for instance, they may have a very, very simple melody to start with, but then orchestrate it and harmonize it and vary it. And that plays very much into the idea that you get out more than you put in.

You put in a very simple idea and then spell it out in surprising ways. And that combines novelty plus logic plus symmetry, everything. And that's where the research also bears out where we have the most powerful emotional reaction is when there are those like key changes or those modulations or where we revisit a theme in a new way or a new format. Right.

So it's very, very much all in there. That's the price element is quite important. And I think it also, it plays into one of my pet ideas about our experience of beauty, which is that it's rooted in evolution and rooted in the importance of learning things and learning things that are new and yet are not arbitrary, that somehow were inherent in what came before is especially pleasurable. So you have to...

just enough newness that it's not an arbitrary surprise, but a surprise that somehow enriches and elaborates the inherent potentials of what you started with. Frank, I wanted to pick up on the idea that is sometimes expressed

certainly as I mentioned by Keats, that beauty is somehow related to truth. In science, this is controversial. So we have on the one hand, string theorist Brian Greene has said, aesthetic judgments do not arbitrate scientific discourse.

On the other hand, we have people like Einstein saying the only physical theories that we are willing to accept are the beautiful ones. Or the physicist Paul Dirac saying that if he had to choose between an equation that was beautiful and one that actually fitted experiment, he'd always go for beauty. So which is it? Is beauty a guide to scientific truth or not?

Beauty has been a remarkably successful guide to scientific truth, but it has to be checked. I mean, there have also been theories that were beautiful in the eyes of their creators and proponents that turned out not to be so beautiful in the eyes of nature, or at least not to be accurate in the eyes of nature.

So I think beauty is an excellent way to motivate investigations. But at the end of the day, science is empirically based. And as Feynman said, no matter how beautiful you think your theory is, if it doesn't agree with nature, it's wrong. You can have theories, you mentioned string theory, you can have theories that

have undoubtedly, or for that matter pure mathematics, has a kind of logic and widely perceived ability to stimulate impressions of beauty in the people who understand it, but exists on its own, does not have to be compared with nature. However, to me, things reach a different level and having things that actually describe the real world takes it to another level.

Okay, so if in science beauty might be considered at least a hint towards truth, Catherine, I wanted to ask about the wider value of beauty. You've published a study on art museums as institutions of human flourishing. Can you explain what you mean by that? And in particular, I wonder whether part of the implication is that institutions like this are having access to beauty in art. To

should be seen as a kind of public resource that we need. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. So in that research and the broader work that I'm doing currently, what we're examining is, well, where do people go when they seek out art? It's very easy for me to bring people into a computer lab, flash them artworks on a little screen and say, okay, what was your aesthetic response? But that doesn't really mirror how people are going to engage with

with the arts in their actual lives. And if you will want to go see beautiful visual art, oftentimes they go to an art museum. And there's been really a burgeoning field starting to explore, well, what's not just our aesthetic responses, but what are our wellbeing and flourishing responses to this form of engagement?

And through this review that I recently published, what I found is that going to an art museum and engaging with art can help us feel more connected, even in an abstract sense to other people, whether it's people in our lives or just being part of the art lover community, it can help reduce our stress levels.

including biological stress levels with the hormone cortisol and reduce that much more rapidly than if we're just going about our daily lives trying to de-stress in other ways. It benefits, of course, our emotional well-being by helping us feel more engaged and more greater vitality in our lives and also can help kind of cultivate meaning and the like in our lives. And so if we think about not just

well, what are the individual artworks doing for us? What happens when we look at a single artwork? We can think about, well, where are we doing this? Because when you go to an art museum, that's a very put together experience.

by the institution. And so if we think about it beyond, well, what does a single artwork do for us? We can think about, well, what do these institutions that we go to to engage with the arts and what can they be doing to really cultivate and enhance and optimize our human flourishing? Looking at artwork does a lot for our well-being and flourishing, but how can we think about these as institutions that can really promote

well-being as one of their goals. And in a recent survey I conducted with a national sample of art museum professionals, we found that that's the area they want to grow most in, is really tapping into promoting well-being of visitors when they're in their institutions. And so if we think more broadly about art museums as institutions for human flourishing,

we can think about them, as you said, as these kind of community resources that we can go to. And this is becoming a much more popular idea, particularly in the UK and Canada and some spots in the US now through social prescribing mechanisms where people can go to their physician. And if what the physician is seeing is, well, you're feeling disconnected, it's not something I can prescribe a treatment for to really address, but maybe you're feeling a little lonely or disconnected or not sure what to do with yourself.

you can connect people to community resources. And one of the biggest

programs that they've launched is arts on prescription. So prescribing people to go visit their art museum. And they've seen great benefits with reductions in having to go back to your primary care physician and reductions in emergency care. So the arts in general is not just a luxury that only some can afford or dedicate time to go to. We really should be thinking of them as additional health and

that can be tapped into to make sure people are living full lives because the arts aren't a luxury. They're a vital part of all cultures and need to be recognized as such, in my opinion. It seems to me that the very fact that for as long as we know about human civilization, art has been there in some form, music has been there actually for, you know, at least 40,000 years. And

at visual arts have been there for longer, that it does seem to be clear that it's an essential part. All cultures have it. One of the things that's often said about the arts versus the sciences is that you don't need specialised training to read the beauty or whatever it is, whatever aesthetic value you get from art, you can read it off the surface, which is simplistic because I think that can be deepened

with greater understanding, but nevertheless, it's something that most people can do. Whereas, you know, Frank, that's clearly not the case for sciences, that sometimes you need specialized training, and particularly perhaps to perceive these aesthetic aspects of scientific research. It actually requires sometimes quite a deep understanding before you can even start to see it as something more than hard grind and equations. What do you think can be done to lessen that?

Yeah, I think as with music, really, the more you understand and the more you participate actively, the more you get out of it.

But there are aspects of science that I think can be widely shared. Certainly demonstration experiments of surprising phenomena and gadgetry is one. But also, you know, to contribute at the frontiers, there's no way around it. You need to master a lot of mathematics and specialized knowledge. But to grasp science,

Some of the basic concepts and sense how strange and yet logically coherent and also true they are requires more than anything else. It just requires a little bit of patience and a good teacher. And I think scientists have to work at sharing what they've discovered to a wide audience in terms that can be appreciated and built on is a real challenge and

And I've tried in my small way to help, but we need to work more on it. I wonder whether there's also an element of just changing perceptions. I've heard people often express surprise at the idea that there is creativity in science at all, that it is a creative venture. I'm not a mathematician by any means, but I've found that high mathematics is one of the most esoteric, one of the most impenetrable topics for outsiders. Well,

But I think that I've been really struck by how incredibly aesthetic the response mathematicians is to what their work and others' work is all about. The level of creativity and aesthetics there seems, if anything, even stronger than in the natural sciences.

Oh, I think so, because one of the things that computer scientists attempting to reproduce mathematical creativity have found, you know, to have theorem-proving machines and things like that, are not that you can't generate a lot of true statements, but they're not statements that humans find interesting. And so...

Aesthetics has to be built in if you want to teach a computer, no matter how powerful, to be a creative mathematician that humans will relate to.

I think you have similar problems, related problems in music or the visual arts. If you want to have a computer that really produces things that are seen as creative and pushing the frontiers of artistic expression, you'll need to bring in concepts of human experience and meaning that at present, I think we don't know how to capture in algorithms. So it's very much a case of you know it when you see it.

However, computers are getting better at knowing what they're seeing. So, for instance, they've learned to identify cats in images. So maybe at least the first baby steps have been taken in extracting meaning.

And that will be a very interesting thing to watch in the future. Well, thinking about extracting meaning and these questions of creativity, Catherine, I wonder whether, and also thinking about changing perceptions, I wonder whether there's a discussion to be had about sometimes the impression that is given is that we can all be consumers of beauty and consumers of creativity, but perhaps not enough attention given to the

the creativity that's expressed by everyone in everyday ways. And in fact, the creativity that's involved in simply experiencing art, that it's not a passive process. Is that something that you've looked at? Yeah. So there's this really lovely model of creativity that I find very influential that breaks down what are the different levels of creativity? What do you require that diligent training and specialized knowledge? And what

can anybody do anytime? And so you have the eminent creators that for hundreds and hundreds of years, Shakespeare, so forth, that the name will always be around. You learn about them in your classes as these major creative influences. Then you have your contemporaries who are doing creative endeavors in a number of fields at a professional level. But then there are these concepts of

little creativity or mini creativity that are really things that anybody can do in a wide variety of domains that requires no specialized training or knowledge.

And in particular, they're very influential in learning processes. So if you take an art class and are doodling, you're engaging in creativity, even if you're not creating something that is completely novel, completely revolutionary, completely stunning in some sort of way. But you can still tap into that creativity and that form of creativity, that everyday creativity has been linked to flourishing. So even if you're doing those smaller actions, it's still very much linked to flourishing. And if we think about...

with other people's art. So going to the art museum, listening to music and so forth. You're still doing creative interpretations as you're trying to decipher, well, what did the artist intend or what is the message or what is this potential challenge

lyric really communicating with some metaphorical component because you're trying to decipher it and you're generating ideas. You're thinking about the plausibility of how well they fit with the artwork and really just generating ideas and thinking about the plausibility or the appropriateness. That's the textbook definition of creativity. So you don't require that specialization to be creative. And even doing those little acts is very much linked with your flourishing.

Maybe we've at least partly addressed the question of what the role of beauty is in human flourishing, that actually we need to recognise that it's something that we needn't just experience, but that we can create. Frank, it sounded as though you had a thought on that.

Well, I was thinking more about this question of conveying the beauty of mathematics in particular and how challenging that can be. But on the other hand, there are many simple examples that don't require a lot of preparation. Like there are beautiful visual proofs of Pythagoras' theorem, for instance. There's the whole field of projective geometry, which I

is also known in the arts as perspective, which I really think should be taught much earlier. It's a very beautiful thing that allows even people without artistic skill to make beautiful objects and is also logical and very mathematical. People love to do

logic puzzles, Sudoku. These things are on the border of mathematics and logical thinking and physics. And so I don't think they're as alien to everyday life as might appear on the surface, that these advanced

forms of scientific endeavour. After all, they are done by human beings who once didn't have the training and acquired it and enjoyed doing it and have found their lives enriched that way. Well, that's a great place to leave it with the message that to enjoy creativity, you can all get out there and make it.

Thanks to everyone who participated in today's session. Dr. Dokkar Keltner, Ilu, Dr. Philip Ball, Dr. Frank Wilczek, and Dr. Katherine Cotter. This episode has been a little different for the Stories of Impact podcast, but I hope it's given you a better understanding of why we seek out beauty and how it helps us thrive, and that it might have even inspired you to look for more beauty in your own life.

We'll be back in two weeks with another episode that's a little bit more familiar to your ears with interviews by Richard Sergei on the subject of forgiveness. In the meantime, this has been the Stories of Impact podcast with Richard Sergei and Tavia Gilbert, written and produced by TalkBox Productions and Tavia Gilbert with senior producer Katie Flood.

Music by Alexander Filippiak. Mix and master by Kayla Elrod. Executive producer, Michelle Cobb. The Stories of Impact podcast is generously supported by Templeton World Charity Foundation.