The Sunday Story: Body Electric
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Am I shara? Girl, in this is a sunday story. Just before we get into things, I have a favourite to ask you every week. I feel so honour to bring you some of the best reporting from M, P, R and member stations around the country. Thank you for listening and being a part of this.

Now we're doing a sure, an anonymous vey, so you can share with us what you think, what you've liked and what you think we could improve on that survey is that in P R dot org slash fall survey, we would love to hear from you now on with the shelf. So I worked from home most days and um you know at the this entire desk I work is A T S. I just couldn't my phone.

I, that has closed on IT. So I came going to sit back in a cheer because it's also a hanger. I sit and look at the screen all day.

And every day I want to take at least three nets. I don't think trying to go out. So I get some n and I feel like I have a hard time focusing. So i'm saying all of this to say I really need some sleep.

Did did I already say that I needs some sleep? But our colleagues at the radio hour have been digging into this question about the relationship between technology and our bodies, and how does that affect this in ways we don't even realize? You know, maybe it's the screens that I making me sleepy.

And how can we Better understand? And we make our relationship to tech in order to improve our lives? They have a new six part series called body electric. And on today's episode of the sunday story were joined by a samarai, the host of ted radio hour. And welcome to .

the pack cast, oh, I eat a. Thank you so much for having me.

Do you hear a lot of people ranting the way I just did?

You have no idea, everyone I talk to, friends, family, listeners, we all control our lives and our bodies around our screens. They are the center of our universe. And what you describe is exactly why I wanted to do this series, because we all feel awful at the end of a long day, sitting attached to our devices.

But why, what exactly is happening to us physically when we use our technology? And what can we do about IT? So in our first episode, we get into how economic errors have morphed the human body in the past to right now. So from hunter gathers all the way to the antha cine bodies we have today, hunched over our computer screens and devices for hours on end, we also get into the interactive projects that we are doing with columbia university medical center researchers.

Shall we listened absolutely, and and will talk more about this after the episode?

Hey, there, something happened just a few seconds ago that was extraordinary. You tapped or click a button to play this podcast. Everything about what powered your brain and body to make your finger do that.

Well, it's the same thing that's powering the device you're listening to right now. Electricity, they don't work exactly the same way, but our bodies and batteries have a lot in common, including a story that starts with a frog. No, not that kind of story. This frog was dead. In the late seventeen eighty, all kinds of animals, including frogs, were being dissected in the lab of an italian doctor named vig golvin to study their anatomy one day, something that he .

happened when one of my assistance, by chance, lightly applied the point of a scalpel to the inner cruel nerves of the frog. Suddenly all the muscles of the limbs were seen. So to contract that, they appeared to have follow into violent tonic conventions.

This is massoni, an curator, ella, a varity, reading govan's account of the dead frog kicking gowne believed he had made a major discovery.

This hypotheses can be put in, toward phrase, animal electricity.

He thought that the frog, that all animals store electricity in their cells like a battery. He wrote up a report with lots of beautiful diagrams, printed just ten copies, and send them off to scientist friends.

So now we are looking at the title page of this publication from seventy ninety one, which was printed in baloney.

We see that I went to see one of golf ones precious copies at the national museum of american history in washington, D. C. It's almost like a magazine. I guess it's kind of like if we were to .

get like nature .

magazine today with one of gavan .

ese pals and italian physicist named AlexAndra volt read his article involved thought govan's ideas about animal electricity. They weren't quite right. Volta decided to test them.

Volta was a more rigorous scientist than galvani was.

and rodger sherman is the physics curator at the national museum american history.

And volt up experimented very carefully and determined that what was making the legs switch was a circuit between the the frog and the skulls, which was made of steel and a different metal like copy of breath. And when when you have a circuit like that, IT creates an electrical current.

So volt figures out that actually you don't need a dead frog or any other animal. You just need to put different metals together, stick them in a conduit like salt water, and presto, you can generate electricity.

Volt calls his invention .

the volt gue pile of .

stack of different disks of metal. This was basically the invention of the battery. yes.

And from that discovery comes our modern electric batteries and holy of electricity as a current that continues to flow.

Volta as an voltage .

electrical unit. Volt was named .

after go and govern ze.

yes.

that's right now comes back to the frog. Electricity in the body works differently than what we use to keep the lights on. But govan, I wasn't totally wrong.

IT is what makes us move, think and feel. Electricity is the Spark of life. As the poet, while whitman famously wrote, I sing the body electric to feel the pulse of the world in your veins is to feel alive.

But let's be real these days, that vitality is winning. Our laptops and phones keep going, but for many of us spending hours attached to warn devices, well, it's deplaning us. We feel stuck in a vicious cycle of type tap collapse.

I find myself sitting. I find myself during its screens. I find myself trapped in that world. I'm not moving as much as I could or should my shoulders, sometimes her sitting at a computer. Hunch ver IT IT doesn't seem like at something that a lot of energy, but IT absolutely does. I'm not sleeping great.

I'm so tense and tight. X I tend to just continuously lean further and further and further into the computer. Feeling most in my eyes, and I almost fears like your wrong or something is like it's such a busy destructive as almost this associated tired.

And I take breaks, know i've you OK you need to break. So stop working at the big screen. And now it's time to look at the little screen. But that's not good.

A man, I hear you. We are in a silent battle with our devices, and they are slowly, steadily draining us. But how can we maintain our energy when nearly eighty five percent of jobs are mostly sedentary? And even when we're not working, so many of us spend the majority of our other time on screens too.

Well, I think it's time to find out cause i'm not sure we can keep going like this. I menu to samarai, host of the ted radio hour and a long time tech journalist, and welcome to N, P, R, body electric, a special six part investigation into the relationship between our technology and our bodies and what we can do to make you Better. Over the last decade, i've been on a sort of quest to get people, including myself, to observe our behavior so that we can understand and change how we live with technology.

And I found that the right combination of history, hard core science and some self experimenting can help us make real change, which is why this series has an interactive elements. And we think it's actually a first for a public radio on pycke. We're partnering with colombia university's medical center to do a massive study with you. Can we take their findings in the lab about getting off our buts and translate their recommendations into the real world? The only way we're going to know is if we try first, though, we need to understand how we got ourselves in this position, the big picture when we come back, how our tools have shaped our anatomy through the ages, 直接 滚 us。

Before we get into what's going on with your health and your technology right now, let's get some context. Because since the beginning of humans, the work we did and the tools we used to put stress on our bodies in bad in god ways.

So we have approximate forty nine percent of the bone density than that of on togethers. The density of the upper arbon in female agriculturalist was greater. The olympic roers.

Wow, no man time at the gym is gonna ing that back, right? This is vibor cregan read.

and I am professor of english and environmental humanity at the university of kent in the U. K. And my most recent book is primate change. How the world we made is remaking us vibes.

A little obsessed with our health is impacted by how we spend our time, because as our work has moved, our bodies have morphed .

in response. Yeah, we have the same DNS weve we've always had. But the ecology of labor has changed a great deal. Now what I mean by that is the variety of labor that hunter gather would do with their body means their bodies were were very.

very different to us. yeah. So let's start with the paleo ic body.

So if we go back hundreds of thousands of years, maybe a million years, you'll find that that humans were, on the whole of pretty tall, pretty skinny, and humans kind of had the body that they needed to climb and to be able to move. The african savanna became a kind of perfect place in which the human body could flourish.

This was the longest period in human history. We were forging ing, hunting and fishing for hundreds of thousands of years, but then about twelve thousand years ago.

the biggest change that the human body undergoes is when we decide to settle. And you would call this the agricultural revolution. And that's really a point at which access to water became easier.

Access to food, obviously came a lot easier because I was being found. And from that moments, what we can see is a pull towards efficiency, removing friction from your everyday life. The fact that your bruti is now in your garden as a poster two miles away saves you a great deal time and also saves you calories. That means you don't need to find as much food if you're using less food.

Speeding things along, livestock and horses were domesticated, so a little less running around for us humans. And then about five thousand years ago, the chair was invented. But for a long time, mostly just rich and powerful people own chairs.

And the reason that people didn't have them is they have no use of them. If you're working on the land, haven't got much time to be sitting around.

If we look at literature, there is little mention of gears in the alia, the odessa, or even the bible. In the early sixteen hundreds, when shakespeare wrote king leer, we see the word chair pop up just four times. But then one hundred and fifty years after that, the industrial age commenced, and so did the era of sitting in the meeting.

Eighteen hundreds. Charles sticker s was, of course, riding up a storm. And shares are mentioned all over the place in his manuscripts.

You look for the word chairing bleak house. There are one hundred and ninety seven of them. So something had obviously hugely changed. And what had changed wasn't just the fact that IT was possible for us to make more chairs, but IT was the fact that there were just so many other ways for people to to use them. And one of those ways is in their work. So in thousand and fifty, one is the first time in the rest of our species that we started to find more people living in urban centres that are living in rural ones. And what I meant was their lives completely changed.

And in vivo, I guess we should also point out that simultaneously, just as chairs and more sedentary lifestyles were becoming common, people were also working in factories with horrible conditions, long hours, surrounded by really dangerous machines and chemicals.

very dangerous, dangerous chemicals. If you were injured at IT was on you. There was no legal records, so IT is incredibly dangerous. But also what I meant was people were exhausted. They didn't have access to the variety of food that they had access to in rural communities.

So people that worked in factories, they worked extremely long hours, but they were often working to the bread for the following day. So children were never outside, so they would walk a few hundred meters to work, then theyd be inside a factory for twelve hours or forty hours or longer, and then theyd go back home, and then theyd sleep, and then theyd come back to their shift. So IT meant verts.

Children shrunk. Humans shrunk quite substantially. The average sixteen old was at least a foot shorter than today.

As the industrial age progressed, we got electricity in gas, and life became more efficient. But many of our daily chores still required a lot of time and hard work. Take cleaning a rug, for example.

would move the furniture he from the rock, you'd then roll up the rug, you'd sling the rug over your shoulder, you'd sling the rug over the washing line. And then with a, with a beater, you'd White jesus out of out of the rock for a good ten or fifteen minutes. And then you'd then reverse the process.

You roll back up the rug. You go back in the house and roll IT back on the floor straight IT up, then move the furniture back onto the rug. To do that, you're talking about a calorie burn of about two to three hundred calories.

But then cleaning a rug got away easier with motorized appliances.

You have the upright vacuum cleaner. Now, when I was a kid, these were quite common. And they wait, they wait a ton. So even with a not bright electric backing, cleanly are still talking about a good sorts of hundred calorie burn to do a rug. Now we have a robot bag.

You go bb boop on your phone, and the robot back leaves at home, and IT starts and IT goes to work cleaning the rock. And that's just one aspect of efficiency in modern life. And if you think about basically everything that you do is now a more efficient version, and we're now a point where we don't really know what to do with ourselves.

In the eighteen forties, IT was definitely less than one percent of the working population was doing suddenly work. But if you fast forward through to today in the U. S, eighty five percent of the population has a suddenly job.

I mean, clearly, there are wonderful things that we have now, science, healthcare, medicine. We are living longer than ever. But IT seems like you're pointing to a quiet problem that's not going away.

Well, the quiet problem is things like I sound kind of croaky today and it's because I have asma and hay fever and the tree pollen has decided to dump its loud on in, on in one afternoon. IT seems if that doesn't exist until the sixth century. IT literally does not exist in in the twenty century.

Most of the diseases can think of. They are connected in one way or another with the dimensions of movement or in a move away from rural environments to urban ones. And our bodies are always trying to be the best bodies that they can be for us.

And modern life is really, really confusing them. So it's not so much that we're changing through evolution, but we're changing our bodies and what they're able to do through our habits. We used to die because we couldn't find food, and now we die because we need too much.

We can't move. So even when we think about seven three work from the one thousand nine hundred th century and compare IT to now, we're still not talking about the same thing because of technology. So forty percent of workers in the U.

K. Walk briskly for less than ten minutes a month. Well, and its technology that has taken all of that movement .

from us this era we're living in has been labeled the antha percent as human activity, has had a bigger and bigger impact on the planet. And in your book you say that we have Arthur percent bodies.

yeah. And the idea and anthropocene e body is simply one which is being remade and reshaped by the anthropy ini environment. So the screens that we have in our hand that are stopping us from going outside and when we don't go outside were not around Green spaces. We're not getting getting vitamin d. And that's really the damage is being done.

That's vibor cregan read. He is a professor of english and environmental humanities at the university of kent. His latest book is primate change, how the world we made is remaking us in a minute ideas for getting your antha cine body to use its tools Better.

We're back with a sunday story with manu samoa's, host of ted radio hour.

Okay, so we just had a speed history lesson about how our bodies have changed through the ages, which brings us to now.

So some of latest data suggest that the average adult spends eleven hours per day engaging in some form of technology. And what are we typically doing when we're consuming technology, most likely not moving?

Keh D S. Is an associate professor of behavioral medicine at colombia universities .

medical center. Unfortunately, we live in a world that the default position is sitting, and we see movement now is often an inconvenience. Like, oh, no, I left my charger upstairs for my phone. H, I gotto go upstairs.

Okay, maybe you're thinking, well, yeah, I sit around scrolling on my phone a lot, but at least I run when I go to the gym in the morning. Key says it's still a problem.

It's not enough to just check off that exercise box for your day and think that you're done and you don't have to move the rest of the day. And there's been studies done in the neverland ds, where they had people sit for three, they straight, and then they had them come back and set the other three days, but exercise for one hour the morning. And what they found was that that one hour exercises in the morning before they SAT for the rest of the day was not enough to offset the health arms of sitting.

I know IT feels so unfair that even if you're working out, it's not enough, but I bet some of you are also thinking, you, good thing I got that standing desk.

I'm not so sure. And unfortunately, my opinion is that the standing dest manufactures have capitalized on the new headlines that sitting as the new smoke king and helped convince many consumers that standing is a healthy alternative to sitting. But if you look at the scientific evidence, IT is not convincing.

The evidence is convincing that long periods of sitting increase your risk for a lot of chronic diseases, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually you may .

get diabetes, many forms of cancer, heart disease, dementia and sitting can also affect your mental health and your mood, and ultimately decreases your longevity.

But so many of us do work that requires sitting at a computer a lot. We don't have a choice. So what do we do about IT? How do we prevent those chronic health conditions? Or at the very least, how can we avoid feeling just gross like I do at the end of a long day of taping, zoom ing and taping? Well, this is where key th's findings come in. If people are .

going to change their behaviors and tackle this sitting problem that we have, they need targets to shoot for. They need guidance on what do I do. And so really the goal of of my lab is to try to figure out what's the least amount of movement that you can do to offset terms of sitting. And so that's really what we're trying to do, is trying to figure out how little can we can get away with to offset the arms.

So one of the studies that you've done when can viral, as they say over the last year, IT was IT was a pretty ground breaking landmark study. Can you describe IT?

yeah. So the straightforward answer is to offset the harms of sitting. You should move every half hour for five minutes.

The main take home message was that folks who moved every half hour for five minutes lower their blood sugar Spikes after eating by sixty percent. wow. And then IT also lowered their blood pressure by four to five points.

Can I ask those five minute movement breaks? Are people getting up and like doing jumping jack? Are, what are they doing?

This was light walking, two point zero miles per hour .

on a treat. Oh no, no.

As a stroll, we wanted something relatively light that everybody could do. And actually, those folks who moved every half hour, they had lower fatigue levels, they felt more energy ized and in general, had a Better mood. And why I think this is so important is, you know, we spend our time trying to convince the workforce and employers that you should allow your employees to take bricks to move. And IT seems counter intuitive to them, like, no, I need them working and need them productive. That actually a employee who's in a Better mood, who's feeling less fatigue and feeling more energized, is a more productive.

So I was reading about your work, and I love that there's a prescription, like, do this and you're gonna kill yourself from sitting on your bet all day. So I reached out to you and I was like, what if we could invade our listeners to try out your is in the wild, so to speak. And I I was pleased that you were inside .

what yeah mean thing lab by studies that not world. I can give you a scientific answer of what you should do about that, but can anybody actually do IT? If not, then it's pointless.

Okay, so we and P, R, are partnering with you and columbia to do a study with listeners should they choose to join. Let's lay out the plane up.

yeah. So the plane is that we're gonna you to sign up and commit to doing movement breaks .

for three weeks. Yes.

and we're going to try a couple of different doses. We want to see which one's work and which ones don't. We will send you some text messes over the course of the month and just check in and see if you're taking the bricks.

If you are going to know what when are you taking them? What's making you taking the brakes? And if you're not, just understand why not and and understand what are your barriers, but are also interested in seeing does this change how you feel? Does this change your mood?

Can we be more specific about what counts as an exercise snack?

yes. So first of standing doesn't count. So we want to moving. And so our ask here is that you walk either in place. If that's all you can do, you can get a stepper and walk on a stepper um or just walk no throughout your workplace, throughout your home. Okay, so .

shuffling side decide is perfectly acceptable. I'm picturing what might be not acceptable is like you're on the zoom call with your colleagues and you're the one popping up and down the screen. But like that's what we're talking about here, right kids, we're talking about A A, A mindset shift.

Yeah well, I mean, how to what you're getting as we have to as a culture change there is this peer social element that we have to break if we're going to actually get this ingrained in every boy's lifestyles.

Okay, last question. One of you works like, what's your biggest fantasy about our experiment?

Yeah, if this works with our experiment, this is just feel for us to then go and say, look, people can do this and that's gone to help us to start paving the way towards system level change. And that's for me where I wanted take this.

So so when you tell me more about this big study, and that sounds like a really cool collaboration.

h asia, i'm losing my mind. I'm so excited about this because I have done interactive public radio projects before. I've gotten people to consider how they use their attention span and the attention economy is it's called. I've gotten them to think about digital privacy online. But this is the first time, I think that anyone has partnered within academic institution to produce a real study to ask listeners to help us figure out what next steps are for a real change.

So how many people have signed up so far?

So, so like I said, this is a rigorous academic study. So we don't see the data. What we do know is that over twenty thousand people have signed up.

My, my good. So I so we have struck .

a nerve clearly.

right? So it'll be interesting to hear what the data shows. Are there ways people can follow along and find out what's being discovered? Yes.

absolutely. Even if you are not signed up for the study, you know try out the movement breaks. You just heard what cadia said is the gold standard that's moving, gently moving for five minutes every thirty minutes.

Give IT a try in your own life. See what it's like. Observe your own behavior.

Do you sit for hours on end? Could you maybe get up just once? But also, each episode we tackle a different aspect of how our bodies are adapting to technology and when we give some takeaway.

So for example, we talked to an optimal gist who has done deep research into why kids are going near, cited earlier and earlier at soaring rates. This double vami of not going outside and looking at screens. It's literally changing the shape of our eyeballs. And SHE has some easy tips, parents especially, but also all of us who are staring at a screen all day. You're going to want to hear that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah I got I got three kids. So I am very interested in that topic. Like in you're reporting though I do wonder, like have you been vert IT? Are you spread in the gasp of of changing your relationship to take in your everyday life now well.

i'm definitely sharing the gospel, that's for sure, with the series. But I have decided to think for me, there was one fact IT, that just kind of smack me sideways. It's that our legs are like a kid garden hose.

When we sit for too long, you know, you stop the flow of water, or your vacuum cleaner gets stuck. When we stop blood flow, our body struggles to process facts and sugar, and that can contribute to early diabetes and hype attention. So every time I look at my seat legs right now, all I see is like a garden hose. And this is the case, even if you work out in the morning, I hate to say, okay.

so that's why i'll swing .

my legs. What you think they are you in?

Look, yeah I mean for movement breaks and and trying to do some stuff to stop these screens from overtaking my life or so I say i'm saying there right now I do need accountability. This is the thing that works for me. Let me here for you and and so people who want to hear more episodes, they can listen to IT on ted radio hour.

Yes, you can find the series in the ted radio hour feed wherever you like, listening to podcast. Or you can just go to N P R dot org e slash body.

Well, i'm really excited to follow along and to see how things go, I think is really important.

We got thousands of people waking up in the morning and trying to move a little bit over the next few weeks. I'm excited.

Well, thank you so much for joining us menus.

Thank you.

That was munch samarai, host of the ted radio hour. You've been listening to the sunday story. Another reminder to please finish your feedback at epr dot or flash fall survey IT really helps a lot that the electric was produced by cai mutley and edited by sanaa messia, with production support from racial, White original music by David herman.

The audio engineer was patch mary. This episode of the Sunny story was produced by jun yan and edited by mh. Our engineer was Robert rod rigas.

Our supervising producer is leana symptoms, and our exceptional producer is I ran the gucci am I shao up verses back tomorrow with all the new sues. Start a week. Until then, have a great rest of your week.