Moment 110- The Unknown And Surprising Power Of Physical Touch: Dacher Keltner
Guests: Dacher Keltner
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents1 chapter
§01Transcript — part 1§01Transcript — part 1
I have some breaking news and no this is an emergency. I've spent the last two years writing a book and I've written 33 laws for business, marketing and life that I derive from all of these conversations I've had here. I travelled the world to write this book, I interviewed some of the most incredible people, I did six months of extensive research on scientific studies and principles to corroborate everything that I wrote into these 33 laws. And ladies and gentlemen, that book called The Diary of a CEO, The 33 Laws for Business, Marketing and Life, is now available for pre-order. And there are 5,000, only 5,000 signed copies and it's first come first serve the link is in the bio right now so if you want that book honestly it's the best book i've ever written it's the book i always should have written it's the book i also wish someone had written for me when i was starting out in my career i'm really proud of it i'm really really proud of it really really proud of it and i can't wait for all of you to get to read it it's out in august i couldn't be more excited about this as you can probably tell i don't know what to say to say other than the words i've said to emphasize my excitement because i think it's important and i think it's really valuable um link in the description
i was blown away um when reading your your work and watching videos that you produced about um so many things the one of the real startling things is the the power of touch yeah i read i read um that if you pat a kid on the back in the classroom that child is three to four five times more likely to try hard problems on the blackboard. And that touch can make you live longer and be less stressed. Just someone touching you. Yeah. Is that true? Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, touch in a lot of mammalian species, including humans is just connection. It's, it's identity.
It's I'm with you. You know, you think early in life, we are constantly being held and in skin to skin contact with our caregivers. It's foundational. It's where my sense of me and you connection emerges. The physiology of touch is mind blowing. You know, our hands are incredible. They're spectacular, you know, evolutionary adaptations that can do all kinds of things, including touch. Our skin, eight pounds, billions of cells, our immune system is in the skin.
you know it registers touch in many different ways from the sexual to the friendly to the cooperative goes up into the brain and says man you're being touched in this way uh and and that has direct effects on your immune system and your vagus nerve and your heart rate and the health of your body and so you know early discoveries um you know you have premature babies they're going to die. And, and they used to just put them in these little, you know, sort of units that warm them and had them sort of be comfortable and fed and they would die.
And then they figured out you got to hold the premature baby. They needed skin to skin contact lately. They need food, right? And they live, they gain 47% weight gain. And then, you know, There are just studies time and time again, a nice hug, lower cortisol, nice embrace with somebody, elevated vagal tone. The studies that you referred to of patting kids on the back, they do better in school. And it's so interesting, parts of English culture, Victorian culture, Western European culture, they came up with the idea like touch is sexual it's you got to get it and it is but only certain kinds of touch are sexual there's a lot of friendly touch we need right and it just shut it down and now it's coming back it's uh thank goodness it's it's good for us we we talked before we started filming about the study with the resource monkeys yeah i can't remember that who the researcher was but yeah i was saying to you that harlow harlow that was it yeah um how that was mind-blowing to me at 16 to learn that they put these monkeys in these cages they had like a pretend wire mother so a mother made out of like metal and then they had another one made out of like cloth yeah and like a mother made out of cloth which was essentially a teddy bear
and there was huge variance between the outcomes of those kids right yeah i mean if you derive those monkeys of the nice touch they they don't learn how to behave socially effectively you know if you give them a choice between a wire uh monkey mother and that provides milk and then a terry cloth one they always hang around the terry cloth one right they just love the social contact if you deprive non-human primates of touch they they are almost schizophrenic or psychopathic or they're just like aggressive they can't handle social interactions you know orphans deprived of touch, famous orphan studies, you know, in humans, same thing. They just like, they don't become human in some way, or they are human, but they have trouble with social contact. Yeah. You know, I mean, part of the questioning that you're engaging in Stephen of the literature is like, well, what can I do just to live a more meaningful life? And, you know, from gratitude to kindness to find some, ah, man, you know, if you're not hugging people you love, if you're not, if you don't have a rich language of touch with your friends, you know, I learned it playing pickup basketball. Basketball, which is the, I believe the most fascinating sport in human history,
it has this amazing language of touch, you know, and it's, it's unique to the court, right? You're fist bumping, chest bumping and the like. If you're not doing that with your friends, you're missing out on one of the great languages of humankind, which is to be in contact with each other. So, you know, parents, you know, when you have kids and I hope some of your listeners are doing that, you know, it's this mystery, like, should they take naps on my body? Should we, how should I hold them? Should I carry them in public? Am I indulging them? And I think the more friendly kind touch the better. So we're moving back to where we began evolutionarily. And I think it'll be a good thing. What if I'm touching a dog? Does it have the same effect? Yeah. I mean, Dogs evolved because we love them and they love us.
And there's all this new amazing dog science where this is one of my favorite studies. And touch releases oxytocin, which is this little chemical that floats in your brain and your blood. And it helps you be kind to other people and cooperate. And there are now studies from Japan showing you may do this with your dog, Stephen, where if you look into the eyes of your dog, your dog will have a surge of oxytocin. And you will have a surge of oxytocin.
So it's like all of this social stuff that's so simple of eye contact and touch brings us good things, even with our dogs. It makes me kind of realize two things. The first is that men tend to be stereotypically much worse at that. Yeah. Much worse at touch. We don't, we do the like the macho hug where you like on the back, you know, like when you pat them on the back and say, get the fuck off me. we're less good at even things like eye contact and sort of emotional engagement and then you look at the stats around male suicides and all of those, you know, drug addiction and all those things and it's significantly higher.
I believe the stats say that the biggest killer of men under the age of 40 is themselves in this country by suicide. And there really feels like there needs to be a reversal of that. The adjacent point is just the one we talked about earlier which is just loneliness. yeah and now it kind of makes sense as to why if you are lonely you have a significantly worth worse health outcomes um and a shorter life expectancy because you're not getting the compassion the touch you're not you're probably experiencing less or gratitude etc yeah um and i feel like we have to we have to talk about how we fix that yeah like you know because some of the saddest moments i can i think about when i've had private conversations are men coming up to me after like a talk on stage and whispering to me that the part I said about me being lonely when I was like 23, 24, and I'd given everything just for this business, coming to the office every day, sacrifice friendships, family relationships. I'll have men come up to me and whisper to me that that was the part that they needed to hear the most, but then asking me what they can actionably do to fix that. As if they don't want the group around me to hear that they are lonely and they want to do something about it. They are sat on their
computers, often playing video games or on the internet, um, struggling to attract, you know, maybe the opposite sex or the same sex or whatever, whatever they're interested in. And it feels like it's going in one negative direction generally. I mean, the stats kind of support the fact that we're getting lonelier and lonelier. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, those are such deep insights um and uh really worth thinking more concretely about what to do i think that the you know kind of the the gender complexities here are really striking right men live significantly fewer years than women um in most western globalized cultures and and i think you're on a really interesting hypothesis steven which is that you know if the gender stereotypes and these rigid concepts and then the lives we lead don't allow us to hug and feel grateful and feel empathetic it countervails that and they're those are gender stereotypes right oh if i practice compassion at work i'll be weak and i won't rise that's not true that's a gender stereotype and it it denies men um disproportionately this opportunity for these emotions right and that's that you know with new conceptions of gender, new ideas about work is changing dramatically, that will shift.
And I think it'll be good news for the health of men. And then loneliness, loneliness in some sense is the deprivation of everything we've been talking about. It's that you don't get to hug somebody like you would like to every day and that you don't hear the words of appreciation. William James, you know, the deepest craving we have is to be appreciated by other people. You don't hear it. You don't hear the thank you. You don't get to go out and feel awe with somebody or feel kindness. You know, so I think we have to think very actively about building these emotions into those contexts.
In the United States, there are 35,000 long-term care facilities. The elderly in the United States, a lot of them live alone. You know, when people from India see how we treat the elderly or people from Mexico, it's just like the unhoused. They're like, what are you guys doing? You know, you're taking the vulnerable and sort of shunting them off alone. But these emotions point to really direct actionable things to do, right, with all practices and compassion.
So it gives me hope. But we've got, you know, I think in part historically we took these pro-social emotions out of our lives, right? And now we've got to build them back in. And if we do, it's good for not just ourselves, but it's good for the recipients of those emotions. You know, hugging my dad or hugging my mom or hugging anybody is a mutually beneficial behavior in terms of all the life expectancy, happiness, reduction in stress. And not only that, but, you know, I just heard 50% of U.S. health care expenses are on the last five years of life when a lot of those people are living alone and feeling lonely.
And there are simple ways to address that, as we've been talking about. So there's a bottom line that's really relevant here, too. And then the really, the bit I imagine a lot of people will, especially those that are much more spiritually inclined will love is the idea of that karma and how, you know, if I hug one person or if I'm kind to some person or express that gratitude or compassion, it has this sort of cascading knock on effect and how they go through the day.
So like in that sense, karma is a very real thing. It's very real. Yeah. In every respect, even in the concept of gossip, where how you treat someone more spread. I think you said in your book that when we treat someone badly, people on average gossip that bad treatment to 2.5 people. Yeah. Which is, you know, which is slightly terrifying, but it makes sense. um yeah you know it's in part of our theme in our conversation is how we're all connected and united in these these superorganisms some people call them through practicing gratitude and sharing resources that spreads through uh these social networks and then the the compliment is also true which is you know and and as much as i don't like gossip and i didn't like being gossiped about it's a human universal it can be horrifying and and we've got to worry about it like online cat fights and it escalates but we study these social groups and and the thing that people really gossip about is when you're not kind right they're like look at what that that person just said these harsh things that spreads through the network and it tries to keep those problematic tendencies in check