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Oct 19, 2013
"A kind heart is a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity freshen into smiles." --Washington Irving
Darwin & The Survival of the Kindest
Dacher Keltner, director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory, investigates what it means to live a good and meaningful life from the fascinating perspectives of neurobiology, emotion science, and evolutionary science. Contrary to the idea that Darwin saw human beings as competitive and self-interested, Keltner argues that Darwin saw the human species as profoundly social and caring. He explains that humans have developed remarkable tendencies toward kindness, play, generosity, reverence, and self-sacrifice that are vital to our survival as a species and are experienced through emotions such as compassion, gratitude, awe, embarrassment, and mirth. He discusses findings from the science of happiness that uncover familiar ways in which such goodness can be cultivated in oneself and in others.
BE THE CHANGE
Experiment with one of the practices suggested in the article as a means to cultivating more goodness in your own life.
