This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedant.
In July 1798, an English poet visited the countryside on the banks of the River Y.
On seeing the natural beauty of the area, William Wordsworth composed a poem.
It's titled, Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintor Naby.
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.