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Join Dacher Keltner, Professor of Psychology at UC-Berkeley and Co-Director of the Greater Good Science Center for the first keynote of the Wonder: Art + Healing Symposium.

Dacher Keltner’s research focuses the biological and evolutionary origins of compassion, awe, love, and beauty, and power, social class, and inequality. As a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab, he is a leading scholar in the study of emotion, including a new project on awe around the globe, as well as power, class, and inequality.

Keltner also serves as the Faculty Director of the Berkeley Greater Good Science Center. In 2020, along with Michael Pollan and others, he co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. The center conducts research using psychedelics to investigate cognition, perception and emotion and their biological bases in the human brain. In addition, Keltner is Chief Scientific Advisor at Hume AI.

Keltner is the author of The Power Paradox, as well as the bestseller Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life and The Compassionate Instinct. He has published over 190 scientific articles, and is the co-author of two textbooks. He is co-editor of The Gratitude Project: How the Science of Thankfulness Can Rewire Our Brains for Resilience, Optimism, and the Greater Good. He has written for the New York Times Magazine, London Times, and Utne Reader, and his research has been covered in TIME, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, CNN, NPR, and the BBC. His newest book is Awe: The New Science Of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life.

Accessibility info: This event may include crowded areas, and dim lights.

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This lecture is part of WONDER: Art + Healing Symposium | May 14-16, 2025

As a museum complex featuring visual and performing arts alongside circus history and a Gilded Age mansion, all situated on a bayfront campus, The Ringling is truly a site filled with wonder. This interdisciplinary symposium explores wonder as a source of creative inspiration, artistic medium, and physical and social well-being. Learn more about the WONDER Symposium