Yo-Yo Ma has won 17 Grammy Awards, and has received the National Medal of Arts, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the 2014 Fred Rogers Legacy Award. He's also the founder of the Silk Road Project. His new album with the Silk Road Ensemble, Sing Me Home, will be released in April 2016. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Yo-Yo Ma — Music Happens Between the Notes." Find more at onbeing.org.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is the State University of New York Distinguished Teaching Professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. She is founding director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. Her books include "Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses" and "Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants." Find more at onbeing.org.

“Why is the world so beautiful?” This is a question Robin Wall Kimmerer pursues as a botanist and also as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She writes, “Science polishes the gift of seeing, indigenous traditions work with gifts of listening and language.” An expert in moss — a bryologist — she describes mosses as the “coral reefs of the forest.” Her work opens a sense of wonder and humility for the intelligence in all kinds of life we are used to naming and imagining as “inanimate.” She says that as our knowledge about plant life unfolds, human vocabulary and imaginations must adapt.

James Doty is a clinical professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University and founding director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. He is the author of "Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart." This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "James Doty — The Magic Shop of the Brain." Find more at onbeing.org.

Brain surgeon James Doty is on the cutting edge of our knowledge of the brain and the heart: how they talk to each other; what compassion means in the body and in action; and how we can reshape our lives and perhaps our species through the scientific and human understanding we are now gaining. The backstory of James Doty’s passions is told in his memoir, "Into the Magic Shop." In the summer of 1968, in the throes of a hardscrabble, perilous childhood, he wandered into a magic shop and met a woman named Ruth who taught him what she called “another kind of magic” that freed him from being a victim of the circumstances of his life, and that he now investigates through science.

Jean Berko Gleason is a living legend in the field of psycholinguistics — how language emerges, and what it tells us about how we think and who we are. She has helped to illustrate the remarkable ordinary human capacity to begin to speak, and she’s continued to break new ground in exploring what this may teach us about adults as about the children we’re raising. We keep learning about the human gift, as she puts it, to be conscious of ourselves and to comment on that. For her, the exploration of language is a frontier every bit as important and thrilling as exploring outer space or the deep sea.

Jean Berko Gleason is Professor Emerita of psychology at Boston University. This interview was edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Jean Berko Gleason — Unfolding Language, Unfolding Life." Find more at onbeing.org.

“Let death be what takes us,” Dr. BJ Miller has written, “not a lack of imagination.” As a palliative care physician, he brings a design sensibility to the matter of living until we die. And he’s largely redesigned his sense of own physical presence after an accident at college left him without both of his legs and part of one arm. He offers a transformative reframing on our imperfect bodies, the ways we move through the world, and all that we don’t control.

B.J. Miller is executive director of the Zen Hospice Project, an Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and an attending specialist for the Symptom Management Service of the UCSF Helen Diller Comprehensive Cancer Center. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "B.J. Miller — Reframing Our Relationship to That We Don't Control." Find more at onbeing.org

Brother David Steindl-Rast is a Benedictine monk, teacher, and author. He is the founder and senior advisor for A Network for Grateful Living. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Br. David Steindl-Rast — Anatomy of Gratitude." Find more at www.onbeing.org.