The Sunday Story: Body Electric

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So I work from home most days and, you know, this entire desk I work at, it's just, it's

a hot mess.

I just couldn't find my phone.

I sit at a chair that has clothes on it so I can't even sit back in the chair 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 naps because

I'm tired.

I think, do I need to go out?

Should I get some sun?

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 I already say that?

I need some sleep.

But our colleagues at TED Radio Hour have been digging into this question about the

relationship between technology and our bodies and how does it affect us in ways we don't

even realize.

You know, maybe it's the screens that are making me sleepy.

And how can we better understand and remake 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, we're joined by Manoush Zamorodi, the host

of TED Radio Hour.

Manoush, welcome to the podcast.

Everyone I talk to, friends, family, listeners, we all contort our lives and our bodies around

our screens.

They are the center of our universe.

And what you described 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 eras have morphed the human body in the past

to right now.

So from hunter-gatherers all the way to the Anthropocene bodies we have today, hunched

over our computer screens and devices for hours on end.

We also get into the interactive project that we are doing with Columbia University Medical

Center researchers.

Shall we listen?

And we'll talk more about this after the episode.

Something happened just a few seconds ago that was extraordinary.

You tapped or clicked a button to play this podcast.

You ever think 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 1780s, all kinds of animals, including frogs, were being dissected in the lab of

an Italian doctor named Luigi Galvani to study their anatomy.

One day, something wacky happened.

crural nerves of the frog, suddenly all the muscles of the limbs were seen so to contract

that they appeared to have fallen into violent tonic convulsions.

kicking.

Galvani believed he had made a major discovery.

He wrote up a report with lots of beautiful diagrams, printed just 10 copies, and sent

them off to scientist friends.

in Bologna.

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 publications.

One of Galvani's pals, an Italian physicist named Alessandro Volta, read his article.

And Volta thought Galvani's ideas about animal electricity, eh, they weren't quite

right.

Volta decided to test them.

was a circuit between the frog and the scalpel, which was made of steel, and a different metal

like copper or brass.

And when you have a circuit like that, it creates an electrical current.

You just need to put different metals together, stick them in a conduit like saltwater, and

presto!

You can generate electricity.

Volta calls his invention the voltaic pile.

There's a pile there, yes.

This was basically the invention of the battery.

as a current that continues to flow.

Electricity in the body works differently than what we use to keep the lights on.

But Galvani wasn't totally wrong.

It is what makes us move, think, and feel.

Electricity is the spark of life.

As the poet Walt 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 waning.

Our laptops and phones keep going.

But for many of us, spending hours attached to our devices, well, it's depleting us.

We feel stuck in a vicious cycle of type-tap-collapse.

I find myself trapped in that world.

I'm not moving as much as I could or should.

My shoulders sometimes hurt sitting at a computer hunched over.

It doesn't seem like it's something that takes a lot of energy, but it absolutely does.

I'm not sleeping great.

I'm so tense and tight.

I tend to just continuously lean further and further and further into the computer screen.

And it almost feels like you're drunk or something.

It's like it's such a dizzy, distractive, it's almost disassociative.

You know, I'll be like, OK, you need a break.

So stop looking at the big screen.

And now it's time to look at the little screen.

What? That's not good.

We are in a silent battle with our devices and they are slowly, stealthily draining us.

But how can we maintain our energy?

When nearly 85 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 because I'm not sure we can keep going like this.

I'm Manoush Zomorodi, host of the TED Radio Hour and a longtime tech journalist.

And welcome to NPR's Body Electric,

a special six part investigation into the relationship between

our technology and our bodies and what we can do to make it 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,

hardcore science and some self-experimentation can help us make real change,

which is why this series has an interactive element.

And we think it's actually a first for public radio and podcasts.

We're partnering with Columbia University's Medical Center to do a massive study with you.

Can we take their findings in the lab about getting off our butts

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.

Stick with us.

On the TED Radio Hour, MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle.

Her latest research into the intimate relationships people are having with chatbots.

Technologies that say, I care about you, I love you, I'm here for you, take care of me.

The pros and cons of artificial intimacy.

That's on the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

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 and good ways.

The density of the upper arm bone in female agriculturalists was greater than Olympic rowers.

This is Vybar Cregan-Reed.

And my most recent book is Primate Change, How the World We Made is Remaking Us.

Because as our work has morphed, our bodies have morphed in response.

But the ecology of labor has changed a great deal.

Now, what I mean by that is the variety of labor that a hunter-gatherer

would do with their body meant their bodies were very, very different to ours.

you'll find that humans were, on the whole, they were pretty tall, pretty skinny.

And humans kind of had the body that they needed to climb and to be able to move.

The African savannah became a kind of perfect place in which the human body could flourish.

We were foraging, hunting and fishing for hundreds of thousands of years.

But then, about 12,000 years ago...

And we'd call this the agricultural revolution.

And that's really a point at which access to water became easier.

Access to food, obviously, became a lot easier because it was being farmed.

And from that moment, what we can see is a pull towards efficiency,

removing friction from your everyday life.

The fact that your fruit tree is now in your garden, as opposed to two miles away,

saves you a great deal of time.

It also saves you calories.

It means you don't need to find as much food if you're using less food.

So a little less running around for us humans.

And then, about 5,000 years ago, the chair was invented.

But for a long time, mostly just rich and powerful people owned chairs.

You know, if you're working on the land, you haven't really got much time to be sitting around.

or even the Bible.

In the early 1600s, when Shakespeare wrote King Lear,

we see the word chair pop up just four times.

But then, 150 years after that, the Industrial Age commenced.

And so did the era of sitting.

In the mid-1800s, Charles Dickens was, of course, writing up a storm.

And chairs are mentioned all over the place in his manuscripts.

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 use them.

And one of those ways is in their work.

So in 1851, it's the first time in the history of our species

that we start to find more people living in urban centers than are living in rural ones.

And what it meant was their lives completely changed.

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.

And if you were injured at work, it was on you.

There was no legal recourse.

So it's incredibly dangerous.

But also what it 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 buy the bread for the following day.

So children were never outside.

So they would walk a few hundred meters to work.

Then they'd be inside a factory for 12 hours or 14 hours or longer.

And then they'd go back home and then they'd sleep.

And then they'd come back to their shift.

So it meant that children shrank, humans shrank quite substantially.

The average 16-year-old was at least a foot shorter than today.

But many of our daily chores still required a lot of time and hard work.

Take cleaning a rug, for example.

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 beater, you'd whack the bejesus out of the rug.

For a good 10 or 15 minutes.

And then you'd then reverse the process.

You roll back up the rug.

You go back in the house, roll it back on the floor, straighten it up.

Then move the furniture back onto the rug.

Now, to do that, you're talking about a calorie burn of about 200 to 300 calories.

Now, when I was a kid, these were quite common.

And they weighed a ton.

So even with an upright electric vacuum cleaner,

you're still talking about a good sort of 100 calorie burn to do a rug.

Now, we have a robo vac.

You go beep, beep, beep on your phone.

And the robo vac leaves its home.

And it starts and it goes to work cleaning the rug.

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 at the point where we don't really know what to do with ourselves.

In the 1840s, it was definitely less than 1% of the working population was doing sedentary work.

But if you fast forward through to today in the US, 85% of the population has a sedentary job.

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.

And it's because I have asthma and hay fever.

And the tree pollen has decided to dump its load all in one afternoon, it seems.

Hay fever doesn't exist until the 19th century.

It literally does not exist until the 19th century.

Most of the diseases that you can think of is they are connected in one way or another

with a diminution 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 eat too much and we can't move.

So even when we think about sedentary work from the 19th century and compare it to now,

we're still not talking about the same things because of technology.

So 40% of workers in the UK walk briskly for less than 10 minutes a month.

Well, and it's technology that has taken all of that movement from us.

as human activity has had a bigger and bigger impact on the planet.

And in your book, you say that we have Anthropocene bodies.

which is being remade and reshaped by the Anthropocene environment.

So the screens that we have in our hand, they're stopping us from going outside.

And when we don't go outside, we're not around green spaces.

We're not getting getting vitamin D.

And that's really the damage that's being done.

He's 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 Anthropocene body to use its tools better.

which brings us to now.

engaging in some form of technology.

And what are we typically doing when we're consuming technology?

Most likely not moving.

And we see movement now as often an inconvenience,

like, oh, no, I left my charger upstairs for my phone.

Oh, I got to go upstairs.

but at least I run or I go to the gym in the morning.

Keith says it's still a problem.

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 Netherlands where they had people sit for three days straight

and then they had them come back and sit another three days,

but exercise for one hour in the morning.

And what they found was that that one hour of exercise in the morning before they sat

for the rest of the day was not enough to offset the health harms of sitting.

But I bet some of you are also thinking,

good thing I got that standing desk.

And unfortunately, my opinion is that the standing desk manufacturers have capitalized

on the news headlines that sitting is the new smoking

and helped convince many consumers that standing is a healthier alternative to sitting.

But if you look at the scientific evidence, it is not convincing.

increase your risk for a lot of chronic diseases.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually you may get...

and sitting can also affect your mental health and your mood

and ultimately decreases your longevity.

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 typing, zooming, and tapping?

Well, this is where Keith's findings come in.

they need targets to shoot for.

They need guidance on what do I do?

And so really the goal of my lab is to try to figure out

what's the least amount of movement that you can do to offset the harms of sitting.

And so that's really what we're trying to do is try to figure out

how little we can get away with to offset the harms.

It was a pretty groundbreaking landmark study.

Can you describe it?

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

lowered their blood sugar spikes after eating by 60%.

are people getting up and like doing jumping jacks?

Or what are they doing?

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 energized, and in general, had a better mood.

And why I think this is so important is we spend our time trying to convince

the workforce and employers that you should allow your employees to take breaks to move.

And it seems counterintuitive to them, like,

no, I need them working, I need them productive.

That actually, a employee who's in a better mood,

who's feeling less fatigued and feeling more energized, is a more productive employee.

do this and you're not going to kill yourself from sitting on your butt all day.

So I reached out to you, and I was like,

what if we could invite our listeners to try out your findings in the wild, so to speak?

And I was pleased that you were intrigued.

What intrigued you, Keith?

I can give you a scientific answer of what you should do about it,

but can anybody actually do it?

If not, then it's pointless.

with listeners should they choose to join.

Let's lay out the plan.

movement breaks.

We want to see which ones work and which ones don't.

We're going to send you some text messages over the course of the month,

and just check in and see if you're taking the breaks.

If you are, we want to know when are you taking them,

what's making you successful in taking the breaks.

And if you're not, we just want to understand why not,

and understand what are your barriers.

We're also interested in seeing, does this change how you feel?

Does this change your mood?

So we want you 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,

or just walk throughout your workplace, throughout your home.

I'm picturing what might be not acceptable is like,

you're on this Zoom call with your colleagues,

and you're the one bopping up and down on the screen.

But that's what we're talking about here, right, Keith?

We're talking about a mindset shift.

it's a culture change.

There is this pure social element that we have to break,

if we're going to actually get this ingrained into everybody's lifestyles.

What if it works?

Like, what's your biggest fantasy about our experiment?

this is just fuel for us to then go and say,

look, people can do this.

And that's going to help us to start paving the way towards system-level change.

And that's, for me, where I want to take this.

I mean, it sounds like a really cool collaboration.

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, as 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

with an academic institution to produce a real study to ask listeners

to help us figure out what next steps are for a real change.

so we don't see the data.

But what we do know is that over 20,000 people have signed up.

Are there ways people can follow along and find out what's being discovered?

Even if you are not signed up for the study, you know, try out the movement breaks.

You just heard what Keith Diaz said is the gold standard.

That's moving, gently moving for five minutes every 30 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 we give some takeaways.

So, for example, we talked to an ophthalmologist who has done deep research

into why kids are going nearsighted earlier and earlier at soaring rates.

This double whammy 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.

I got three kids, so I'm very interested in that topic.

In your reporting, though, I do wonder, have you been converted?

Are you spreading the gospel of changing your relationship

to tech in your everyday life now?

But I have to say, I think for me, there was one factoid

that just kind of smacked me sideways.

It's that our legs are like a kinked garden hose when we sit for too long.

You stop the flow of water or your vacuum cleaner gets stuck.

When we stop blood flow, our body struggles to process fats and sugar,

and that can contribute to early diabetes and hypertension.

So every time I look at my seated 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 it.

Oh, no.

So that's why we got to do our movement breaks.

I do my movement breaks.

I'll swing my legs.

Are you sure you're in?

to stop these screens from overtaking my life.

Or so I say.

I'm saying that right now.

I do need accountability.

That's the only thing that works for me.

wherever you like listening to podcasts.