Consider This from NPR - BONUS: Breathe

Episode Date: January 24, 2021

Breathing is essential to life. And lately, the safety of the air we inhale, or the need to pause and take a deep breath, is on our minds a lot. In this episode of NPR's TED Radio Hour, we explore the power of breath.Guests include former world champion freediver Tanya Streeter, journalist Beth Gardiner, activist Yvette Arellano, paleontologist Emma Schachner, scent historian Caro Verbeek and mindfulness expert Andy Puddicombe.Listen to TED Radio Hour wherever you get your podcasts, including NPR One, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts and Spotify.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org. Hey, Consider This listeners, Audie Cornish here, and it's Sunday. We have a bonus episode for you. This one comes from our colleagues at NPR's TED Radio Hour. That's a podcast that explores big ideas with the help of TED Talk speakers.

This episode is kind of a palate cleanser from the news. It's all about breath, since we could all use a reminder to breathe. TED Radio Hour host Manoush Zomorodi takes it from here. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamarodi, and today on the show, the power of breath. It's all about the breath. Everything that I'm doing from, gosh, from the time I opened my eyes that morning is really focused on my breathing. This is Tanya Streeter. She's a world champion freediver, which basically means taking in as

much air as possible into her lungs and then going down, down, down into a body of water as deep as possible. The thing about freedivers is that we're very tuned into our breath and it's at the forefront of whether or not we're going to be able to achieve this sport. So a few minutes before a big dive, Tanya's main job is to breathe. Because the idea is to super saturate

my entire system with oxygen. And we can achieve that by these long slow inhales and long slow exhales so if you were listening all you would hear would would be me like I'm going to put myself to sleep if I don't stop. It's so relaxing. It is. My fingertips are tingling right now. I got to shake it off. Yes, I find it. Yeah, it's the miracle of our human physiology is what it is.

It is not unique to just me. Free divers are aware of their every breath. But until recently, most of us didn't think much about the air we take in and breathe out. Now, though, breath is on our minds for lots of reasons. Respiratory viruses can be transmitted from one person to another through the air. I can't breathe! Fires burning up and down the West Coast are causing poor air quality and choking some communities. And as we become more aware of our breath, we become more aware of its power.

And so today on the show, ideas and stories about air and breathing. And back to freediver Tanya Streeter and the moment when one wrong breath changed her life. My mind was either going to be my weapon or my weakness. And so if I stopped and quit then, that was going to be my mind. In 2002, Tanya had been freediving for several years and had broken a few records. But she wanted to break the world record for women and men by diving to 525 feet in a category called No Limits. No Limits is where you hold on to this glorified bit of aluminum framework and zip down a rope to your target depth because there's a lot of weight in it.

And then you have to inflate a lift bag to bring it back up again. And there's an entire safety team that are put together to make sure this is done safely, not just for me, but also for them. So we had very, very well-trained and experienced mixed-gas divers going to be doing my safety all the way down almost to the bottom of the rope. It's actually incredibly dangerous for scuba divers to go as deep as I was going because believe it or not, they are not as designed to go down there as I am. Scuba equipment is basically life support on your back. Now, my life support is my body and my physiology is designed to do this. So my physiological blueprint allows me to dive and

they rely on their dive gear. But I need them. I need them for my safety. I need them for the rules under the governing body of the sport. Okay. so wait, before we get back to 2002, I have to ask, how different is your physiology? Like if you breathed into a spirometer, how much greater would your lung capacity be compared to someone, I don't know, like me, who just likes to go swimming once in a while? So the average person of my size and shape, when they take a deep breath to exhale into that spirometer to do their lung capacity test, would kind of go like this.

And that's all they would get. Now, as a trained freediver and somebody who's really trying to blow the lid off that spirometer, I would take a breath that sounds like this. And that's called packing and that is something that only experienced free divers should be doing because there are some inherent risks associated with it. But what it does for a freediver is it is a way of sucking more air volume into your lungs and expanding them as much as possible. Now back to 2002 and Tanya's attempt to break the world record.

I was basically as ready as I ever was going to be. So Tanya's there with her team in position. At 10 minutes before go time, I am mounted on my sled and the safety divers are waiting in the water. And at T-minus seven minutes, her safety divers begin their descent. It's all very, very carefully timed. Then with two minutes to go, it's just Tanya and her husband left at the surface. So I've done the long, slow inhales

and the long, slow exhales. I have put as much oxygen into my blood and my tissue as possible. And the long, slow exhale has reduced the amount of CO2 in my system as much oxygen into my blood and my tissue as possible and the long slow exhale has reduced the amount of CO2 in my system as much as possible. And so now I'm on my last breath and I take it as long and slow, as deep as I can using the muscles in my abdomen and my rib cage and then I pack and I hear the timer call out zero and I'm still packing.

But in the case of this particular dive, I actually overpacked. I did what I trained not to do and I just blacked out. Now, it's important to note that my airway was above water, and your body is an amazing thing. The second you black out, it relaxes. And so as I exhaled, the pressure was released on my heart. It began to beat properly almost immediately, sending oxygenated blood to the brain, and I regained consciousness.

And this took maybe three seconds. And I kind of lifted up my head, and I looked at the judge, and I said, I overpacked. Can I go again? And he gave it some thought and said I could. And so I took a deep breath. I listened to the timer counting down and I knew I had to go right there and then. And I packed a couple times and my dive began. Were you worried that you hadn't breathed in enough air at that point? I knew I hadn't breathed in enough air.

I think I left with about 80% of my capacity tops when I had proven time and time again that I needed 100% of my capacity to get to 525 feet. So with 80% of my capacity, I thought, the best I can do is try. So I got to about 350 feet or so, and it became difficult to equalize, to clear my ears against the mounting pressure around me. But I managed to equalize a little bit, and I thought, well, time to put my money where my mouth is and just try. So I released the brake on my sled and I slowly began to do the next 200 feet.

And they were slow, slow, slow, way too slow. Because if you spend too much time at depth, nitrogen dissolves into your blood and it has a narcotic effect. Tanya Streeter picks up her story from the TED stage. At 525 feet, I was hit by narcosis and I couldn't think straight. I knew that I had three simple steps to get me out of there and back to the surface. One, put my hand on the lift bag. Two, open the valve and dump air into the lift bag. Three, pull the pin. One, two, three.

But in my haze of narcosis, I remembered that I had wanted to blow a kiss to the sea. My crazy thank you for letting me go down there. I did three steps, but my third was the kiss, and I forgot to pull the pin. And for a few very tense and terrifying moments, I was there, alone, frozen at 525 feet. The narcosis just gripped me more and more, and I fumbled with my sled trying to get it to work. And then I had a very powerful, clear

thought. This is going to be sad. I was thinking about all of the people that were waiting for me at the surface. This is going to be sad. It was powerful enough that it jolted me back to reality, and I remembered to pull the pin. It was an incredibly quick ride back to the surface, but it was a new world record. I mean, it's a wild story, Tanya. You pushed yourself, your lungs, your body to the absolute limit. Everything went wrong. And yet you still broke the world record. And I guess I'm trying to wrap my head around whether this moment was a triumph for you or was it actually deeply traumatizing?

Have you come to reconcile that experience in your mind? Well, it was a decade before I spoke of this dive publicly because it was hard for me to accept that I had pushed as hard as I had, that that line between pushing hard and pushing too hard had become blurred, because I was the one who was always saying, freediving is safe. You just have to follow the rules. Freediving is safe. You just have to be smart. And, you know, this, I think, was one of the times where I took a risk that wasn't necessary. But I took it because everybody else was trying their hardest. And so I thought I should, too.

But I think that as a human, as a woman, as a man, as a child, as an adult, you have limits. And it isn't until you take the proverbial and the literal deep breath and dive in that you will find out where your limits really are. That's former world champion freediver Tanya Streeter. You can hear her full TED Talk at TED.npr.org. Andy, it's Manoush here. How are you? Hey, Manoush. How are you? Good. There may be a few people who don't know who you are. So would you mind introducing yourself? Sure. My name is Andy Padukam. And you are an expert in mindfulness. You gave a TED Talk on meditation. And you are an expert in mindfulness. You gave a TED Talk on meditation. And you've actually been on the show before telling your life story.

Since we're talking about breath in this episode, we really thought you'd be the perfect person to have on to sort of explain how breath relates to meditation and mindfulness. Yeah, I mean, at the most basic level, I think waking up in the morning and realizing that I still am breathing, it may sound sort of flippant, but I remember in the monastery, even training, my teacher always used to say, kind of first thing you do in the morning, just take a moment as you wake up, as you open your eyes, just to even realize, just to appreciate that the breath is still there, that you have woken up. It could so easily have been very different. So obviously it plays a vital role in our life, not only in keeping us alive, but also in meditation as well, where we're able to use the breath as an object to focus, to sort of extricate ourselves from the busyness of our thinking mind and actually be more present,

more grounded in everyday life. And why breath? Is it because it's sort of like a metronome in our bodies or is it because there's something inherently calming about it? The breath is almost a conduit between body and mind. So when we focus on the breath, not only do we help sort of unwind the busyness of the mind, but we also allow tension to be released from the body. So it is a particularly effective object of focus, I think. You have very kindly brought us several, I guess, reflections, a little bit of meditation, a little bit of breathing that we're going to do throughout the episode today. So let's get started. What do you have for us to begin with?

So I thought we'd start with appreciation. Actually, appreciation of the breath. I think so much of our life is caught up in distraction, you know, lost in sort of times gone by, or maybe even a future that's yet to happen. And because of this, I think we miss out on a lot of things in life. And maybe unintentionally, we even take these things, places, even people for granted. But when we focus very gently on the breath, we find ourselves more present, more aware of everything and everyone, full of appreciation. And as I say, perhaps even grateful for the breath itself. So I thought right now we could start by just taking a moment, whatever you're doing, just pausing, putting everything down. You don't have to breathe in any special way.

In fact, you can just place your hand on your stomach if you like. And just be present with that rising and falling sensation. Just for one, two, three times. And just knowing this is a place you can come back to at any time throughout the day. And actually, you will be guiding us back to this place later in the show, right? I will indeed. Okay. I will indeed. Great.

Andy Puddicombe is the co-founder of the meditation app Headspace. Later in the show, more ideas from him and other TED speakers on breath. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply.

It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and on the show today, breath. I don't think there's anything more fundamental to life than breathing. You know, I can't think of any other activity that if you stopped doing it for a few minutes, you're finished. It's, you know, literally the definition of being alive, right, or not being alive is that you're not breathing. This is Beth Gardner. She's an environmental journalist. I am the author of Choked, Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution. We've all heard that dirty air affects our lungs and hearts. But Beth has spent the last few years reporting on new research. Research that shows how pollution may have longer-term effects on our health and even damage our brains.

And it's not surprising who is most at risk. One thing that is really clear about air pollution is that it really intersects with all the pre-existing fractures in our society. It is still a problem that breaks along lines of economic inequality and racial injustice. Like in Houston, Texas, specifically a neighborhood called Manchester, next to 52 miles of oil refineries, the largest petrochemical complex in the U.S. So Houston is also a port city and the ships coming in and out and all the trucks and things that are associated with that are also highly polluting. So the neighborhood of Manchester is just really bearing a disproportionate brunt of

air pollution. And obviously the health consequences of this are devastating. As part of her work, Beth has interviewed local community activists there, like Yvette Arellano. If someone were to come into our community, into my apartment, they would be shocked at the fact that, you know, between three and five in the morning, they're going to be hit with these extremely pungent smells that can go everything from an extremely like saccharine, super sweet smell that's unnatural to smelling, you know, burning basketballs and sneakers because a lot of the facilities are actually plastic producing and resin producing facilities. So you never know

what you're going to get hit with. So from the time that we wake up to the time our head hits our pillow, you could be easily sitting inside, you know, having dinner and get hit with these smells. And the smells can obviously impact our direct health. So my nephew, you know, he was born with asthma. Asthma continues to be a problem, you know, and upper respiratory issues continue to be a problem in our family. I myself struggle with reproductive health issues and skin rashes. That's the reality for a lot of mothers and children and just parents, guardians in general. A simple act of going to the park can be cancelled by strong fumes emitting from down the waterway. It can be feeling sick, you know, having headaches,

the need to throw up while you're walking down the street to go get a nice tea. It can mean that you are barricaded in your home because there's a chemical disaster, a flare, an explosion at a facility, which happens a lot more often than what people think. And in those occasions, we're locked in our homes, and it's ridiculous. Even if you don't live near an oil refinery, just walking down a busy city street or going to school next to a highway can increase your chances of all kinds of health problems. Here's Beth Gardner on the TED stage.

I would have been pretty ready to believe that dirty air could trigger asthma attacks and other breathing problems, too. What shocked me was how much further the effects actually go. The evidence is overwhelming. Scientists have linked air pollution to increased rates of heart attacks, strokes, many kinds of cancer, dementia, Parkinson's disease, miscarriages, premature birth, and much more. One particularly vivid study really drove the dangers home for me. A neuropathologist examined puppies who'd lived in badly polluted Mexico City. She found the same markers in their brains that doctors use to diagnose Alzheimer's disease in humans. Plaques, twisted proteins,

degenerating neurons. The dog's youth made the discovery particularly disturbing. The same research team examined the brains of children and young people who'd been killed in accidents. They found the red flags of Alzheimer's in the brains of 40% of those who'd lived in polluted places and none who'd breathed cleaner air. There are other ways to see pollution's effects on the brain, too. The researchers gave cognitive tests to kids and found that those who had lived with dirty air and also carried a gene for Alzheimer's had short-term memory loss and IQs 10 points lower than their peers.

Wow, Beth, that is just shocking. I wonder if you could talk more about the people who live in these most polluted cities, how their everyday lives are affected. There's tons of research that finds that actually in heavily polluted neighborhoods that parents are going to end up missing more work and kids are going to end up missing more school because, you know, if your kid has an asthma attack, you need to deal with that. And if it's serious, you need to see a doctor or maybe even go to the hospital. So on top of the health effects of that, that's an educational impact, right? If the child has to miss school, that's an economic impact or maybe even a potential job

loss if the parent has to miss too much work. So it really is not only a matter of health, but also a matter of just everyday quality of life. Yeah. Is there a growing sense, I mean, thanks, of course, to people like you who do the work that you do, but is there a growing sense that, or acknowledgement that this is happening? Yeah. Like, is this something that is mainstream now? I mean, I think we understand it a little more maybe as a public than we used to. But I would say that I still don't think that the public awareness is up there in sync with actually the impact,

you know, 7 million people annually dying around the world, up to 100,000 deaths every year in the United States. You know, I mean, one thing that's interesting, actually, is that when the air gets cleaner, when we do the things to reduce pollution and clean it up, the health benefits materialize almost immediately. And that's pretty powerful. That is pretty powerful. I guess, though, I want to know, like, what would you like to see happen next then? How do we demand better air quality? Does it mean buying more electric cars if we can afford to do so? Or we're taking more companies to court over emissions? Well, it's a lot of things.

So there's not one cause of air pollution, right? But what it basically comes down to and what the thing that has gotten us as far as we have come, which is entity besides our government, our governments, have the power to check corporate pollution, right? To tell Volkswagen, you need to make your cars comply with the law. To tell Exxon or some big oil company, you need to make sure your refineries are complying with pollution limits. And here's the pollution limit that has been set in accordance with what public health demands, not what dollars and cents demand. So we're talking about regulation and holding governments accountable. And that makes me think

back to Yvette. Yvette's story, which we heard earlier, Yvette actually testified before Congress in 2018 about how little their community was told about the air pollution there. People deserve the right to know the information necessary to make informed decisions for them and their families. But do you think testimony like that really has an impact? Well, I think it's really powerful because air pollution suffers from this problem, I think, of political problem of feeling like an abstraction. Folks tend to think and say, why don't you just move? The assumption is that we have the resources. And that's not true.

But not only is there the resources, but how much does your family have invested in where you are? To be able to put a face on it for someone like Yvette to stand up or to sort of zoom in and talk about this is what air pollution is doing to my life. This is what air pollution is doing to my community. I think that really matters a lot. I'm talking about how much of your family do you have, like your roots, your culture, your language, where you are and born, and the love and the pride you have of your community, you know? I would rather fight my community and stay here knowing I'm actively doing something to change it than leave and say, okay, I'm done with that, wash my hands. And that's something I wish more people understood.

That's community activist Yvette Arellano, founder of Fence Line Watch in Houston, Texas, and Beth Gardner, author of the book Choked, Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution. You can find her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, ideas about breath. And we're going to go back now hundreds of millions of years before human history to dinosaurs. You know about their size. The largest replantators known as sauropods. And their chompers.

With serrated teeth 16 centimeters long. But there are still a lot of unanswered questions. Namely, Why did dinosaurs dominate in the beginning? This is paleontologist Emma Schachner. And why did they become the top predators, the top herbivores? That's what Emma has been researching for the past several years, working to explore this hypothesis. Their lungs may have played a role in this question.

Their lungs. And so at this point, we should say Emma is not your typical paleontologist. Her job is to figure out how dinosaur lungs may have worked by looking for clues in animals that still exist today. I personally am not doing a lot of the fossil work. I'm doing a lot more of pulling apart birds. I have a freezer filled with 80 hawks, owls, and vultures. Wow. And I have an 8-foot and 7-foot alligator in another freezer that we're going to CT and dissect. I'm doing a lot more of the validation of the modern animal.

Because I find every time I dissect or CT a modern animal, we find discoveries of just anatomical structures that have not been seen before. And so Emma is following these clues that she gets by dissecting all of these animal lungs and seeing if they can lead her to an explanation of how dinosaurs dominated the Earth, starting about 220 million years ago. The Triassic period, dinosaurs were not guaranteed to be the masters of the world at this point. So this is when the ancestors of mammals were evolving. And we have a really diverse array of other reptiles. We have all of these crocodilian-type ancestors that are running around. Some had hooves, some had sails,

a huge array of animals. And they were competing with dinosaurs at the same time. And then also the atmosphere was really different. The oxygen levels were lower than they were today. And Emma says not all animals have the same kinds of lungs or breathe the same way. And so she thinks, since there was less oxygen, only some animals, like maybe dinosaurs, were easily able to breathe the Triassic air and flourish. Here's Emma Schachner on the TED stage. So how do we know what dinosaur lungs were even like? Since all that remains of a dinosaur generally is its fossilized skeleton.

So we would look at the anatomy of birds, who are the direct descendants of dinosaurs, and we'd look at the anatomy of crocodilians, who are their closest living relatives, and then we would look at the anatomy of lizards and turtles, who we can think of like their cousins. And then we apply these anatomical data to the fossil record, and then we can use that to reconstruct the lungs of dinosaurs. And in this specific instance, the skeleton of dinosaurs most closely resembles that of modern

birds. So for Emma, birds are at the crux of her hypothesis, and for two big reasons. The first? Yes, so birds are the only living descendants of dinosaurs. Birds are basically living dinosaurs. They come from the same family tree. And second? The avian lung is specifically adapted to function under low oxygen environments. Birds fly up to where the air is thinner. But their lungs can handle it because they're built differently than ours. Okay, so Emma, let's get into the lungs. Like, how do they actually work? And let's start

with us mammals. So the mammalian lung is really interesting. Our bronchial tree is shaped like an actual tree. So if you think about tree branches, they split and split and split until they get to the end as terminal branches that end in what are called alveoli. So with this mammalian lung, we have this common distribution of this gas exchange tissue that's all over the place. And when you say gas exchange, that's oxygen moving from inside the lung and into the bloodstream, right? Yes. Oxygen is going to flow across this membrane. Now, this is called the blood-air barrier. Got it. Okay. So this blood-air barrier is really, really important. And because the entire lung is moving in mammals, because it's this giant,

flexible bag, it can't be too thin or it'll break. Birds have done the opposite approach. So are you still with me? Because we're going to start birds and it gets crazy, so hold on to your butts. So in the bird, air passes through the lung, but the lung does not expand or contract. The lung is immobilized, it's inflexible, and locked into place on the top and sides by the ribcage, and on the bottom by a horizontal membrane. It is then unidirectionally ventilated by a series of flexible, bag-like structures beyond the lung itself, and these are called air sacs. Now, this entire extremely delicate setup is locked into place by a series of forked ribs. Also, in many species of birds, extensions arise from the lung and the air sacs,

and they lock the respiratory system into place. And this is called... So a bird lung is really elaborate. Every part is separated, spread out, and super specialized. And the blood air barrier, that oxygenating membrane, it's protected by special ribs and bolted to the spine, which means it can be thinner and therefore transfer oxygen into the blood more efficiently.

And Emma has found that dinosaur lungs were structured in a similar way. So returning to dinosaurs, that's direct evidence that they had the infrastructural framework to thin the blood air barrier. And having lungs like that, like birds, would basically mean that in the low oxygen environment of the Triassic, what, 220 million years ago, dinosaurs would have had a huge advantage. Yes. So the advantage of having the thin blood air barrier is that oxygen can more easily cross the membrane and then dinosaurs could breathe under the low oxygen environment of the Triassic. And being able to breathe more easily means they could hunt more

easily, run around more easily, reproduce more easily, and ultimately just survive more easily in the Triassic period. And they could out-compete mammals, potentially lizards, and everybody else that they lived with in that environment. So lungs might be the key to understanding how dinosaurs dominated the earth. It's kind of amazing. I mean, I'm guessing that we humans, though, would never have made it back then. So I think if a human was in the Triassic, we would not last longer than perhaps a few seconds. That's paleontologist Emma Schachner. She researches and teaches animal anatomy. And you can find her full talk at TED.com. So when we think about how animal anatomy has evolved over millions of years,

it reminds us that everything is changing all the time, sometimes faster, sometimes more slowly. And Andy Puddicombe, our mindfulness expert for the hour, shares a reflection on this very idea. I thought we'd take a moment to reflect on impermanence and how we can use the breath as a way of better understanding, better coming to a sense of peace and ease with change in our life. Because everything is changing all of the time. And sometimes the pace of life and the rate of change can leave us spinning. But amongst all of that sort of coming and going, so long as we're alive, is the breath.

And it's a place we can come back to, to ground us in our life. I think of it almost like a thread running through the ups and downs of life, a place of stability, of calm, clarity and perspective through which to better see and understand the world around us. So right now, again, just take a moment. In fact, take one big deep breath, breathing in through the nose and breathing out through the mouth. As you breathe out, you can just gently close the eyes.

Take a moment to notice how the body's breathing. You don't have to breathe in any special way. But just knowing the more familiar you can get with this rising and falling sensation, the more stability it can provide in this ever-changing life. Stick around to hear Andy Puddicombe once more at the end of the show. We're exploring big ideas about breath. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi.

On the show today, breath. And something else we do, unconsciously, every single time we take a breath. We smell. We breathe about 22,000 times per 24 hours. And all that time we smell. This is Caro Verbeek. And I'm an art and scent historian. And I research lost scents,

try to recreate them, and then exhibit those smells. In case you missed that, Caro is a scent historian. Yeah. She works with other historians and artists and perfumers to bring smells to museums. the kind of smells that define pivotal moments in history.

So one of the smells that we introduced in a museum, in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, was the smell of the Battle of Waterloo. The Battle of Waterloo in 1815, when Napoleon Bonaparte lost to the British and their allies. There's a famous 200-year-old painting of the battle by Jan Willem Pinemann. And in 2017, Caro reconstructed the smells characterized in Pinemann's painting. So imagine this huge painting, 8 by 5 meters. Above you see very dark, dramatic clouds because it was very rainy during the Battle of Waterloo. You will also see thousands of tiny soldiers, thousands of horses, weapons,

some French captives, even some dead soldiers lying in the mud, all on the foreground. Then in the middle, center stage, General Wellington. And Wellington was English and he was victorious. So he's sitting there

on this horse-looking ground. So together with the perfumer, we decided to translate this painting into a composition, a smell composition, because we often forget that history is all about smells and particularly wars were incredibly smelly. So if I were visiting the museum when this exhibit was on, what was the experience like? So if you were present, you immediately would have noticed the smell of horses, but also of anxiety, the smell of fear, gunpowder, leather. And because it was raining, you would have smelled moist earth and grass and last but not least napoleon's

perfume and it might smell i don't know about your grandmother but my grandmother wore the same perfume as napoleon as did many of our grandmothers because it is now known as 4711 Eau de Cologne. Do you know this? It's the one with the turquoise circle on it? Yeah, yeah. And this cologne, worn by Napoleon, could be described as incredibly fresh and slightly sour and sweet because there were citrus fruits in there, like bergamot and lemon,

but also flowers and rosemary. I do know that one. I hate that smell. Napoleon loved that smell because he had a Prussian memory of his days that he was in power, that he was ruling Europe. So to him, that was a very important smell. But it was also a scent used by many soldiers in the 18th and 19th century because it helped them to mask and fight the evil smells of war. Because war is incredibly stinky.

You need to do something to protect yourself. And when you say war is stinky, not just because they weren't bathing very often, but because of, I'm assuming, injury and death. Yeah, that's a good question. And here, of course, you want to be historically as accurate as possible. But you also have to take into account that you're in a museum. This smell is the only scent that is innately foul. So people would feel so sick. We would have to position buckets below the painting if we would have done this.

So no, we did not include this horrible smell. And that's why we also decided to connect it to Napoleon fleeing the battlefield. So he's already distancing himself from this horrible putrid scent and instead you smell his perfume, the smell of fear, the moist earth, some gunpowder and some leather. And what happened was quite remarkable. I did not foresee this. Some people actually said that when they started smelling and looking at the painting simultaneously, they felt as though they were in the painting instead of just looking at it from a distance. One person even reported that she saw the horses move because it became so much more realistic because of the smell.

So history can tell us a lot about smells, but sometimes smells can also tell us a lot about history. Carl Verbeek continues from the TED stage. As a smell historian, I stick my nose into various things, things you cannot even imagine. I smelled mummies. Here I'm smelling an ancient fragment piece of jewelry. I've been to antique apothecary cabinets and I've also smelled perfumed wigs.

In the 18th century, the wealthy perfumed their wigs. The Amsterdam Museum has a wig of an 18th century Amsterdam mayor, and I wanted to smell if I could figure out which perfumes they might have used. So I went there. I was a bit hesitant at first because, of course, it's very intimate. It's something someone wore close to his skin. But I bent over, used both nostrils, inhaled, no perfume, but I did smell something else. I smelled this animal. This wig was clearly made of horse hair. And the smell of horses always takes me back to my childhood, because I used to do horseback riding. And I bet you all know this feeling. You enter a room, you smell something.

Suddenly you're back at your grandparents' house. Smell is apparently the strongest inducer of memories, of early memories. Horses have this sour, sweet, acrid smellrid smell very warm smell once i inhaled that smell i just i couldn't be prepared for what happened i felt emotional i felt as though i was a child again i was transported back in time immediately. It's like olfactory deja vu in some ways. Yeah, it's amazing. That's another reason why I love studying smells and actually smelling.

Because there's a big difference between thinking about a smell and actually smelling something. Because you can only have this Proustian memory if you are actually smelling a substance from your own past. So if you liked horseback riding as a child and you would smell a horse now or even when you're in your 80s, you would immediately be transported back in time. That it doesn't just make you think about that period in your early life. It makes you feel as though you are reliving it. And why it's so mind-blowing to smell something from the past and so emotional, and that's more important, is because in our brains, the olfactory bulb or our smell brain, so to say, is connected to our emotional brain or the amygdala. This, again, is connected to our brain stem where we regulate memory.

So memory, smell and emotion are one and the same. Can you tell me, you know, I assume that you must have a very keen sense of smell. Do you have a process by which you inhale a scent? Well, they say that you can use the sniffing technique. So short, fast inhalations, a bit like a dog, that can help. And what is also very important is to use both nostrils. Many of us are not aware of the fact that one nostril actually perceives something different than the other. No, I did not know that. My nostrils are not equal in power. No, no one's nostrils are equal in power. I don't know if you have anything

fragrance around you. You can even test it. I do. I have a coffee. Hang on. Okay, ready. So you close one nostril. It doesn't matter which one, and then you inhale the coffee. Okay. And then you simply close your other nostril and inhale the coffee again. Whoa, it was like complementary smells, but not the same. Yeah, exactly. Because those two smells from both of your nostrils, they produce the smell of coffee as we know it. But of course, we never close one nostril. That is so weird.

It was like hearing the melody in one nostril and the sort of the harmony in the other and hearing the two separate tracks and then bringing them together you got the full song yeah i like that we have two eyes and we have two ears to perceive ambiently but why do you think we have two nostrils? I'll explain why. There's a constant fast airflow in one of your nostrils and a slow one in the other, because some molecules are only detectable in slow or fast air flows. So in order to perceive everything, you have to use both nostrils to smell three dimensionally. And here it comes. Every three hours this changes. Your nostrils take shifts.

Wait, what? My nostrils swap smelling duties every three hours? Yeah, this is so fabulous. So why do you think it's important that we give more thought and attention to smell um why do you think that's important well smell and sense just like paintings and music are part of our heritage it's a different doorway and even more emotional and direct doorway to the past. And smell is a really good conversation starter. So as soon as you bring in smells, people start talking, start discussing in a very open way.

And I think this is important, not just the smelling itself, but that what it leads to, to beautiful discussions about the way we perceive the world. The other thing that strikes me is you can't avoid smelling because, as you said, you have to breathe 22,000 times a day. So there is no choice but to smell as you breathe, right? Yeah, so why not make it more interesting, right? And maybe connect it to who you are in the world in relation to other people in other cultures and our history.

That's Caro Verbeek. She's an art and scent historian at the Vreja University Amsterdam and the Rijksmuseum, where she that they face when it comes to breath? Is it that they don't feel connected to their body? They don't know where to go with it? Or I'll give you my own personal example that I tend to hold my breath when I'm doing things that stress me out. What do you see so look there's a lot of um i think within the world of meditation and yoga and relaxation there's often an idea that we have to breathe in a certain way um in the tradition that i trained in that's not the case actually of course we all breathe in different ways and a lot of that breathing comes about through our lifestyle so as you say kind of some people tend to hold their breath some people tend to breathe a lot through their chest or their shoulders i always encourage people rather than trying to do, meditation is about not doing. So rather than sitting down and trying to do the breath, trying to breathe in a special way,

just allow the body to breathe naturally. Over time, if we can do that without interfering too much, the breath will naturally calm down, the body will naturally let go of tension. And in turn, the mind will also begin to slow down as well. You've got one final thought about breath. What do you want to leave us with? For me, this is not only my favorite, but I actually think it's the most important as well. It's the sort of interconnectedness of breath. The breath brings us together. I think in a world where there's a lot of division, there's a lot of conflict, I think very often opinions and beliefs can create barriers between us. And amidst all this, I think there's something beautifully pure about the breath. Because the moment we let go of all of that thinking and we focus on the

breath, no matter who we are, where we're what we believe we're interconnected we're united in silence and we're united in this sort of sense of humanity this shared human existence so for me this is arguably the most valuable use of breath when we pause and we can do it right now where we just take a moment again to step out of the thinking mind take one big deep breath as you breathe out just gently closing the eyes and although we're not intentionally thinking of others arguably in coming back to the breath,

that thing we all share, feeling more connected with the people and the world around us. Oh, that was lovely. Andy, thank you so much for being with us throughout this hour my pleasure thanks for having me that's andy puttacombe he's a mindfulness expert and the co-founder of the meditation app headspace you can see his full talk at TED.com or the TED app. Our TED Radio production staff at NPR includes Jeff Rogers, Sanaz Meshkenpour, Rachel Faulkner, Diba Motisham, James Delahousie, J.C. Howard, Katie Monteleone, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Christina Kala, Matthew Cloutier, and Farah Safari, with help from Daniel Shukin. Our intern is Janet Lee. Our theme music was written by Ramteen Arablui. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Phelan, and Michelle Quint.

I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.