TED Radio Hour - Body Electric Part 5: The Mind-Body-Tech Connection

Episode Date: October 31, 2023

In part five: host Manoush Zomorodi investigates what information overload does to our physical and mental health. Could our tech use be interfering with the critical dialogue that takes place between the body and the brain? Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Sahib Khalsa shares his latest research on interoception — the brain's ability to sense how the body is feeling — and how finding time to unplug from our devices can help us tune into our body's natural signals.Also in this episode: neurologist Caroline Olvera takes us inside the "TikTok tics" outbreak — exploring why thousands of teens developed Tourette's-like symptoms after watching TikTok videos in 2021. Plus, how a school in Washington, DC helps kids stay connected to their bodies by creating a high-movement, low-tech environment.Click here to find out more about the project: npr.org/bodyelectricAre you signed up for Columbia's study, or following along with the series? We want to hear from you! Send us a voice memo at [e-mail]. Talk to us on Instagram @ManoushZ, and on Facebook @tedradiohour. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey, it's Manusch. So do you remember back in 2021 when this strange phenomenon began developing? Teenagers all over the world suddenly started showing Tourette's like symptoms, seemingly out of nowhere. What we started to see is women that are college-aged. So 18 to 19 come in with like an abrupt onset of ticks that are very violent. very severe that they had to go to the emergency room for. Caroline O'Vera is a neurologist in Chicago, and she had treated plenty of teenagers with tick disorders in the past.

But the symptoms were usually more mild and came on gradually. Oh, yeah. So if you look at a typical kind of timeline of ticks, the kid might notice it get worse or their parents, and that's when they're typically brought to see a physician or a neurologist. But if you, like, sit down and talk to them, it's been going on for years. These cases were different. Patient after patient after patient with sudden severe symptoms. Really for like three months, we were seeing a couple every week, which doesn't sound like a lot.

But when you're used to seeing one of those patients a year, then it's kind of a pattern. Caroline and her colleagues were stumped. Where were all these ticks coming from? The teenage daughter of one of the doctors pointed out what she saw as an obvious culprit. Yeah, the daughter knew that her mom was a Tourette's doctor was like, oh, mom, like, you know, this is all over TikTok. Like, kids are having ticks everywhere. I'm baking a kick while having Tourette syndrome. And so I had to download TikTok and looked at it like myself.

And started looking at the video. and they looked very similar to what we were seeing come into clinic. With a simple Google search, you will find that complex vocal texts involve repeating others' words. I get excited easily, so not I have a tick word. Just as quickly as they appeared, the symptoms faded away, sometimes with help from therapists, sometimes just on their own. An outbreak of a malady with no clear medical reason is often referred to as a mass psychogenic illness. And they have been documented through the ages. There was the dancing plague of 1518 when people in a French town danced until they literally dropped dead.

In 1962, an epidemic of laughter swept through a handful of girls' schools in Tanzania. More recently, Havana syndrome, the mysterious illness that hit dozens of U.S. Embassy, staffers in Cuba has been put in this category two. ...and-explained symptoms of vertigo, confusion, and memory loss. But the TikTok-Tic incident? Well, it's kind of like those contagions, but with a high-tech upgrade. Because social media, of course, made it possible for the symptoms to spread further and faster. And in some cases, even send kids to the emergency room.

Which brings us to episode five. So far in this series, we've talked about the effects of sitting and being stuck looking at screens for hours, what that can do to our bodies. But this episode is about what information overload does to our physical and mental health. Think of it as the mind-body tech connection. I'm Anush Zamerooti, and this is Body Electric. Our special series from NPR investigating the relationship between our technology and. and our bodies. For years, we've been hearing about the connection between social media and rising rates of depression and anxiety, especially in teenage girls. It's been freaking us all out for a while now.

So it probably won't surprise you to hear that when researchers started piecing together the puzzle of the TikTok tick phenomenon, they found, yep, most of those teens were girls with a history of depression or anxiety. Their theory is that going through adolescence during a pandemic and spending lots of time online looking at these videos, well, the combination was just too much for some of them. I mean, who hasn't felt sick or worried or overwhelmed after spending time online? But the TikTok story shows that the right cocktail of stress, circumstance, and content, well, it can hit certain people hard.

So what makes some people, especially young people, so vulnerable? And what can we do about it? Perhaps the key clue to this mystery when we come back. Okay, we're back. So we don't know exactly what was going on in the brains of the young people in that TikTok story. Because there is no one-size-fits-all. we each respond to information and emotion and feeling things differently. But there's a lot of research being done to understand mental health and its connection to the body.

And in particular, a human sense that you probably haven't heard of is getting a lot more attention these days. I think we all need to add it to our vocabulary. Interoception. No, not perception or pro preoception. That's the awareness of where you're, body is in space. This is interoception. Some experts call it our sixth sense. So interoception is a process by which the nervous system senses, interprets, and integrates information about the status of the interior of your body.

Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Saib Khalsa studies the role of interoception in human health at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So if I asked you to tell me, are you breathing quickly, or are you hungry or are you having a stomach cramp or bloating, you could readily kind of tune into your body and tell me what you were feeling? Most of the time, you're not aware of most of the things that are happening inside of your body. oftentimes it's not until there's actually a meaningful change that happens, like your bladder fills and you notice, oh, my bladder's full, I need to pee, otherwise I'm going to be really uncomfortable. Or let's say you know that if you don't eat enough in the morning, you get really angry.

And at some point, you made the connection between being grouchy and not eating. And so now you avoid that feeling by, say, packing a granola bar just in case. There are also certain physical sensations like sweaty palms or a jittery hand that can show up in a fun situation or an awful one. Either way, the symptom feels the same, but we learn to interpret it based on the circumstances. Think about a time when your heart was pounding, like vigorously pounding in your chest, and you were breathing in a very hurried manner. you were in a state of internal excitement. So you could have just ridden a roller coaster or been awaiting the final interview for a very important job that you wanted

or about to step out on stage to give an important presentation. Maybe you just had a near-fatal car accident. Or you were engaged in sexual activity, right? So here's a span of emotions that you can, experienced and for which the state of your body is a critical ingredient. When all this communication between our bodies, brains, and the outside world is running smoothly, our lives run more smoothly, and we don't even notice it. But stress and mental health conditions can cause signals to get scrambled.

And oof, that's when things can get rough. Yeah. Well, so people with anxiety disorders frequently report feelings. of heart palpitations or difficulty breathing, perhaps feeling that they're choking, flushing. Some people will feel disproportionate stomach, cramping, bloating, early fullness, even after eating very small meals.

For the last several years, I've been wondering if our tech was somehow interfering with this dialogue between the body and the brain. I mean, on the one hand, we use tech as a tool, to distract ourselves from feeling uncomfortable. We use it to tune out. On the other hand, the very things we look at on those gadgets, the content, well, that can be the source of our distress.

Yeah, so I think interreception comes into this because there's a very close link between what we're sensing and what we're preparing to do. So in my lab, we've done a number of different experiments. we've used a number of different approaches to try to better understand interception. And then how is interception abnormally manifested in conditions like anxiety disorders, eating disorders? So we have a medicine that we can introduce in the body that manipulates your heart rate.

And we can map both the areas of your brain that respond to changes in heart rate in the areas of the brain that change in response to your feeling of your heart rate. And what we've found so far is that people with anxiety disorders, people with eating disorders, they tend to be more sensitive. In other words, they feel the change more even when we provide the same manipulation of their heart rate. Ah, okay. So some people are more affected by internal sensations. And maybe they don't even know that that feeling is influencing them.

Yeah. So maybe somebody who feels everything intensely, maybe what they need to learn is how to kind of ignore or at least live with the sensation, right? Realize that it's just a natural part of their body. It's not something to be feared. I mean, applying this all to our daily lives, it just makes me think of how many sensations all of us feel when we go. on the internet. It's, there's obviously outrage and anger and sadness and shock and beautiful things. And it's just so much emotion that we take in every time we look at a screen. And no wonder, I guess, we feel physically bombarded? Yeah.

So, so I think bombarded is a good term. We are increasingly being bombarded by sensory signals. whether it's what we're looking at on the internet, whether it's our social media, whether it's simply the number of times we check email, right? What happens is that silence is an increasingly endangered species. It's become that way for us as a species. How often can you say that in your day-to-day environment,

you took the time to not be engaged in something? So the antidote to over-stimulation is taking in nothing. Yeah, absolutely. So something that we're studying called reduced environmental stimulation therapy or rest. You probably know it as the older term sensory deprivation. But essentially, what we've been studying for the past eight years is what's the impact of exposing somebody to an environment, where there really is a limited amount of input for their nervous system to have to deal with.

So when we put somebody in one of our flotation tanks, they will lay down in a pool of water, about 11 inches, that's filled with Epsom salt. And it's a warm solution of water, so it's heated to about 95, 94 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature of the surface of your skin. The air is also heated to the same level. And the salt water is so dense that when you lay down in the water, you float effortlessly on top.

If you're not moving, there's no periiceptive signals for your brain to have to process. So how do you think that would make somebody feel? Well, funny you should mention this. We actually have one of those float centers here in my neighborhood. And I tried it a couple years ago and was coming from, you know, my crazy name. neighborhood and then suddenly plunged into nothingness. And I really, I struggled to settle down. Well, one thing I would say is, you know, my first float was also not a great one. Hmm. Really? Yeah. But my second float was a much, much more enjoyable experience. And one of the things

that still persists as a memory, it's like a physical memory, is the muscle relaxation that I felt for days afterwards. Oh, really? Yeah. And actually, so we've done research on this now. We've done studies showing that in anxious and depressed individuals, when they floated six times, the feeling of anxiety and stress reduction and the relaxation and the muscle tension reduction persisted for up to two days after floats. And why? Why do you think this is happening? Is it just simply that we stop giving the nervous system so much input? So I ask you the question, how often can you say that in your daily life you've actually taken the time to simply not engage in an activity? Yeah.

So this is different from meditation. We're just simply giving the nervous system a rest. There are anthropologic studies that have been done of hunter-gather societies where they categorize the activity that people were engaged in. and the activity that's in the top three or the top five is doing nothing. Yeah, that does not sound like my life or my kids' lives at all. So what do you think people, especially young people, can do to help them tune into what their bodies and minds need? Yeah, that's a good question based on what I know from my research. One of the questions that I would want to ask is, what do you notice in your body when you see,

particular content. How does it impact you? Are you attending to that? If the reinforcement learning algorithm that's feeding you visual and auditory images that you seem to like, if it makes you feel uncomfortable, do you notice that? After talking to Siebe, I decided to give the flotation tank another try. All right. This is exciting. And after a long week of loud midtown, mayhem, terrifying headlines, and intense Zoom meetings running long. Now, lie back and float. Don't worry, the Epson's Sought solution will support you. Spending an hour with no expectations, nothing to look at, or listen to, it felt like when

you push that force-quit button on your laptop, after you finally realize that you haven't turned off your computer in a week, and all the apps you've been running that whole time are starting to slow you down. Okay. When my hour was up, I got out of the tank, and I felt less like an automaton, more human again. All done. Very decompressed. No more words.

The frasal faded away, and I went back to just being a hunk of flesh. And now it makes me think, we're always saying we need to do more, exercise more. exercise more, sleep more, meditate more. But what if we also need to experience less? Is it an oxymoron to put feel no sensations on my to-do list? Because I think I need it. Zahib says if you can't get to a float tank, you can just try to find a quiet room with no dog, no phone, no interruptions.

It's not easy. So you could do this in your own home, assuming you're able to construct or engineer your environment in a way that you're not going to be distracted for an hour or 45 minutes or even a half hour. If you think about sort of what rhythms and reflexes may be occurring, even just muscle tension, it just may take time for those to play out in order for you to sort of experience that physical reset. So, Sayib, you're saying you can rush the rest of your life, but your body is going to need to take the time that it needs. Yes, you cannot rush the body. Dr. Sahib Khalsa is a psychiatrist, a neuroscientist, and he's director of clinical operations at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research. After a quick break, how do we set up kids to manage their emotions and their bodies better? A school that thinks it's found an answer.

Over the course of this series, and especially the last couple of weeks, we've been hearing from educators and students about the relationship they have between their tech and their bodies and how they are succeeding or struggling to get movement into their day. Hi, this is Nora Mattel. I live in Anchorage, Alaska, and I am a high school teacher. I maybe sit an hour or day max. The rest of the time, I'm up just kind of moving around my students. This is Annalise Rosen. I am an NPR listener and a first grade teacher in Marenach, New York. This cultural shift doesn't begin in the workplace. It begins in our school system. I have my classes online.

I have some homework online. But I almost was like an excuse to say, I can also look on Instagram. You know, something like that. So say eight to ten times a day, I get up and walk around for five minutes. In fact, the school campus has some outreach. space so I go out and I walk around outdoors. My move throughout the day when I do that is much more stable.

We are training our children from the moment they enter the school doors that sitting and listening is part of success rather than taking the time to move in order to fuel our minds and bodies. We so appreciate your feedback. Please keep it coming. Bodyelectric at npr.org. And we want to share one. More story.

This is a good one before we go. It's from an elementary school that coaches kids to be in touch with their sensory signals right from the start. I was going to say, unlike most classes, we don't use power boards or like electronic boards. Body electric producer Katie Montalione was so intrigued by what they're doing at the River School that she went for a visit. If you need to get up and move or you need water or something like that, how do you tell your teacher? A lot of the times you can just, like, walk over there. Maybe you need to do some, like, push-ups or wall sits or jumping jacks, you know? Like, just wait for, like, a good time.

Because here's the really unusual thing about the river school. There are no desks. No desks. No, they don't. They don't need it. But you're seeing a lot of... Christian Connors is director of curriculum and instruction. A playground down there, so you have three playgrounds.

Oh, cool. And so those little guys are preparing to go downstairs. She showed Katie lots of places where students can sit, beanbag chairs, cushions on the ground, couches. The wobble stools, a calm-down corner, pillows, alternative seating. But when they went to some classrooms, the kids weren't even there. A third of our children's days spent in movement, so you'll often see students going on nature walks or community walks.

All this movement isn't just about getting exercise. The curriculum includes teaching kids to feel their breathing, pay attention to how they're feeling, and self-regulate. Yeah, since we can move it around and sit, we're pretty much wherever you long. Back in one classroom, fourth graders gathered around Katie to tell her all about the communal tables that they constantly move around the room. It's kind of more like open to eating because we move the tables every day. Yeah, it's like they're never in the same spot. Most of the students seem to love it. Like, sometimes we'll do, like, math basketball.

Yeah, it also makes it more interesting. I'm just doing, like, busy work and sitting in a chair and, like, going out of test. The approach also works for teacher Natalie McFetridge. Yeah, I think that having the different options and being in tune with what their body needs because there are different options and we give them the opportunity. to decide where would be the best learning environment for them, depending on the day. If only all kids could get the best learning environment for them, one that includes lots of movement and interoception.

Obviously, that is far easier to do at a private progressive school, which has smaller classes and lots of staff. Let's not get ourselves. But as we've been talking about, to really live healthier, It's more than just each of us changing our personal habits. We need to rethink how we structure time in our workplaces in our schools. And we got to start somewhere. So thank you very much, River School students and teachers for having us.

And listeners, the takeaway for this week is try, try including just a little bit more silence, a little less noise in your life. If it means putting away the phone, yeah, we all try to do that right, maybe just turning off podcasts while you walk or go on your movement snacks. Speaking of which, if you've been taking movement breaks over the last couple weeks and had, I don't know, some kind of personal breakthrough, it doesn't have to be big, anything, anything at all. I want to know, record a voice memo or even a video and send it to Body Electric at npr.org. And please, I love hearing from you, please keep the feedback on Instagram. I'm at Manusse Z and on Facebook at TED Radio Hour coming. It is super helpful.

Next week, our grand finale, part six, results, data from our study with Columbia University researchers. How it all went? Did we collectively change how society sees movement in our day, even just a little bit? or were all the interruptions just too much? Lead researcher Keith Diaz is back. Plus, can our future technology help us have a better relationship with our bodies and upend this era of sedentary living? I try out the latest gear and talk to a developer thinking really hard about this topic.

Please find and share this series. All of the episodes so far are at npr.com. or slash Body Electric or in the TED Radio Hour podcast feed. Body Electric was produced by Katie Montalione and edited by Sana's Meskampore with production support from Rachel Faulkner White, original music by David Herman. Our audio engineer was Carly Strange. Our fact checker was Chloe Weiner. Thanks also so much to Anya Grunman, Lauren Gonzalez, Lindsay McKenna, Yolanda Sangueni, Beth Donovan, Irene Noguchi, Julia Carney, and Fiona Gehran. I'm Anoush Zamoroni, and you've been listening to Body Electric from NPR.