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This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. In July 1798, an English poet visited the countryside on the banks of the River Wye. On seeing the natural beauty of the area, William Wordsworth composed a poem. It's titled Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tinton Abbey. At one point, he describes the effect of the landscape on his psychological state.

He writes, And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky and in the mind of man, a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things. Now, the romantic poets were sometimes given to literary excess. They felt things deeply, and they wrote effusively. But more than two centuries after Wordsworth composed his poem, some scientists today are asking an unusual question.

Were the romantics on to something? This week on Hidden Brain, we look at what happens when we stop, really stop, to smell the roses. For centuries, one of the central challenges in human behavior has been the problem of suffering. We all have aches and ailments, setbacks at work, and conflicts in personal relationships. Many years ago, the psychologist Dacker Keltner found himself in a world of suffering.

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