TED Radio Hour - Body Electric Part 6: Walk Into The Future

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

In part six: host Manoush Zomorodi digs into the preliminary results of the listener study with Columbia University researcher Keith Diaz. He shares the surprising — and encouraging — initial findings from more than 20,000 listeners who tried to incorporate movement breaks into their day.Also on this episode, listener Dana Lopez Maile shares how the study was a "game changer" for her health. Yiliu Shen-Burke, founder of the augmented reality app SoftSpace, explains his vision of augmented reality. Finally, Manoush explores the future of screen time in a new era of artificial intelligence, and the inextricable convergence of humans and machines.Click here to find out more about the project: npr.org/bodyelectricWe'd love to hear what you thought of the Body Electric series. Go to npr.org/tedsurvey to share your feedback. 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 Manushe. Hello, Manus. And I'd like to introduce you to your fellow listener, Dana Lopez-Miley. First of all, I want to thank you for your work on bringing... Six weeks ago, we kicked off this body electric thing and invited you to take part in our study with Columbia University. The goal? To move more regularly and see if we could change our screen-filled sedentary lives. Over 23,000 people signed up. Dana was one of them, and she was all in.

I truly believe that this change of a lifestyle with five minutes of movement every 30 minutes is hopefully a game changer for me. Ever since I heard Dana's voice memo, I've been wondering how it's going for her. So when the study wrapped, she kindly agreed to fill me in on Zoom. Hi, Dana, how you doing? I was just about to turn my camera off, but since you have yours on. So Dana is 43 years old. She lives in Dallas, Texas. She works remotely in HR for Hyatt Hotels.

The job requires spending a lot of time in her home office. We're looking at three to four screens at a time and lots of spreadsheets. I mean, you can hear. Dana is an extremely positive person and she is okay with all that work. Yeah, so it's what I call my happy place and I literally have something on the walls that says that. I love my job, and I've been working for the same company for 18 years. But one day last year, Dana got a real scare. I remember having a big headache all week. Finally, I couldn't stand the pain anymore, and I went to the

emergency room. They finally determined that I had a stroke, and that's really hard to say, but it was October of last year. After months of testing, doctors diagnosed. Dana with arterosclerosis. This is a relatively common genetic disease that causes fat and cholesterol build up in the arteries. People don't usually know they have it until something happens. I had no idea. And even my cousin who was 25 years old passed away from a massive stroke, I had no idea. Wow, gosh, Dana, that's crazy. Oh, what did your doctor tell you? Well, you know, diet and exercise were important.

It was important to keep the arteries as clean as possible. And I heard them loud and clear. So I now eat 90% vegan. And then the 10% is a splurge here and there or to feel human again. When this happened last year, were you living an unhealthy lifestyle? Or, you know, did your doctor say you need an overhaul? What did they say? I certainly wasn't the poster child for health.

You know, I've always been the chubby kid. I've always loved candy and everything under the sun carb-related. And exercise, you know, there were times where I got into a real exercise regime. And then it was just I would, you know, fizzle that away and inserting double cheeseburgers. But, you know, certainly not. the type that is, you know, smoking a cart in a day and sitting on the couch, I was always very active in my own right. And doctor just basically said, hey, you need to reevaluate everything. You need to reevaluate your exercise regime and do a daily walk.

So Dana started going on a long morning walk every day with her dog. And she felt better. But after several months, her blood sugar and blood pressure numbers just weren't where she wanted them to be. And she still felt kind of off. Yeah, so there are times where I feel just exhausted. And I say to myself, why am I so tired? Why am I so mentally drained, exhausted? After I have the pleasure of working in my own home, eating well, and, you know, moving around, there's something missing. And so when you introduced body electric, I felt like you were talking to me. Movement for five minutes every 30 minutes, that seemed doable.

And it certainly seemed like something I can incorporate into my remote work lifestyle. So I figured, well, why not? You know, what do I have to lose? This is episode six of NPR's Body Electric. I'm Manushe Zamorodi, and we have made it to the grand finale of our series investigating the relationship between our bodies and our technology and how we can make it better. Today, we'll be getting the results from Columbia University's Keith Diaz, the head researcher of our listener study, and I'll be taking a journey into the future to see how the big tech companies are redesigning our screens and want to redesign our lives.

I'm trapped inside my laptop. It's like my worst nightmare, actually. But first, you got to hear what happened to Dana. So she joined the study group that was assigned to do five minutes of movement every 30 minutes. And she started using a timer and the treadmill that had been collecting dust in the corner of her home office. At first, she tried taking her laptop with her for her walking breaks so she could... You know, maybe organize some email boxes or respond to some emails. And I quickly realized that five minutes wasn't enough time to do efficient work. And so what I do is I take that as a mental break.

It's a five-minute mental break and five-minute physical break at the same time. And so when my buzzer goes off, I stop what I'm doing and I get onto the treadmill and I walk for five minutes. And then after that's done, I get back to work. And what do you think of the constant interruptions? because it's a lot. It is a lot. I will say that that was the toughest thing. It's very difficult to make that mental switch of, I need to do this. It's going to make me more efficient. It's going to make me happier. It's going to make me more energized. And that was the true difference was the energy that I was feeling when I was taking these breaks regularly. I felt as if I could go for longer and maybe I was

little faster because my brain was less cloudy. It really did make a difference. Did you have meetings? Were there ever times where you're like, I cannot do this half hour? I got to skip it. Yeah, well, there are times where I was a little late in taking the break, but I would take the break as soon as the Zoom meeting was off and continue the momentum there. but I do time my work in between the breaks. So if I'll look at my timer and say, okay, 16 minutes until another break, let me make that call after the break and I'll just whip out an email right now. So basically what you've done, it sounds like, is you're managing your work so it fits around these breaks as opposed to what you were doing before, which was managing your breaks so they fit around your work. That's absolutely right.

After we spoke, Dana texted me she'd gotten the results of the blood work she'd just done. Her blood pressure was down 40 points from before the project. Her doctor thinks she can get off insulin soon. And her cholesterol is better than normal range. And meanwhile, she says the project has had other benefits. My husband's doing it at work and he swears it's making a difference. He actually is coming home happier and not so moody in the day. Nice for you, right?

I know, seriously. In a minute, the full report, the data, the stats on how this whole body electric study went. Did we break new scientific ground, change humanity for the better? That's coming up in a sec. Okay, here we go. Finally, after months of planning, weeks of data collection, and some long days making sense of all the information we gave him. The head researcher of our study with Columbia University Medical Center, Keith Diaz, was back in an NPR studio. I've been cunching

the numbers for days. Yeah. So before we start, we closed our study last week. And what have you been looking at since? Yeah. So we had people for two weeks, we just asked them to try out movement breaks in their everyday lives. And we gave them the option, which, how often they could move around. So you could say every half hour I'm going to do it, every hour I'm going to do it, or every two hours I'll do it. And we gave people the option of the freedom to choose which one they want to try. And for two weeks, they went out and did it. I'm feeling actually really, really anxious and excited to hear what you found. But I feel like we need to keep a few things in mind as you share your findings.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that the biggest caveat. to this is these are preliminary data. This is just an early first look. And maybe the bigger thing is also to say this is not peer reviewed yet. And so the scientific process, anytime you go to publish a paper and put it out into the world, you have to get it reviewed by other experts in the field. And so this is non-peer-reviewed research at this point. Okay, very good. So enough preamble.

bring it, Keith. What'd you find? Well, maybe the first question we'll start with is, did it work? The take home here is everybody improved. Everybody saw improvements in their fatigue levels, in their positive emotions, and they saw decreases in their negative emotions. But what we found was something we call a dose response relationship. And what that means is that the group that took the most breaks, every half hour had the greatest response.

Oh my gosh, really? Yeah. So for fatigue levels, folks who moved every half hour improved their fatigue levels by about 30%. The group that moved every hour improved their fatigue levels by about 25%. And the group that moved every two hours improved their fatigue levels by about 20%. Uh-huh. All right. So everybody improved, but the group that moved the most had the greatest improvements.

Yeah, that's amazing. Now, one of the big questions we had when we began this was compliance. Who would stick to actually taking the breaks? Yeah, yeah, right? That was the big question of can we actually get people to do this? We had a lot of people drop out. How many? Like, what percentage would you say?

Um, you know, 40%. I mean, we were asking a lot of people who did sign up. So, like, you know, 40%, that's actually, that means 60% did do it, like, which is crazy. Yes, we got people to do it. They did it. And I was really surprised how much people actually liked it. So we asked a bunch of questions about what we'll call acceptability. But it's just essentially, did you like it? Did you want to keep doing it? And so we found that it didn't matter what dose you had, whether you moved every half hour or every two hours, about 82 to 83 percent liked doing this intervention, these movement breaks. And so people liked it, which was great. But. But the flip side is then we ask people, well, how hard was it? Is it feasible? Is it doable? And only about half of the people who took movement breaks every half hour said it was doable. Wow. 70% said it was doable every hour. And then 80% said it was doable every two hours.

And when we looked at the numbers and we asked people to report, how often did they take movement breaks? The group that moved every half hour, they took on average eight breaks a day. That's not even close to how much you're supposed to be doing. In an eight-hour day, at least age eight-hour workday, you should have took in 16 breaks. And so, yes, we got people to do it. No, could they do it at the level that they were supposed to do it? But let me turn this back around and say, we saw amazing effects. We have a little montage of listeners,

and I wonder if now is a good time to play that for you as we get to dig down deeper into some of the responses that you got. Yeah, let's go for it. Hi, I'm Bridget Collins, and I'm a software. engineer. It's good to walk. It's good to be outside. It's good to be looking around. I have taken some of the breaks on my desk, marching and dancing and doing as much movement as I can. I am a remote worker living in Vermont. My newest exercise is doing 15 minutes of soccer drills outside. I facilitate a training session for three hours. Before the training session starts,

I tell the participants we're going to take a break every half hour. And they get really excited. I work in a museum, but I am in management, so I am mostly at my computer in the back offices. To take my break, I got up and walked around the museum. And it was fantastic to be out on the floor. My energy went way up. So when you get home from work, you typically just want to, you don't feel like cooking dinner. You don't feel like doing anything.

I didn't really get any of that while I was doing the study. I'm a stay-at-home mom while my kids are still sleeping. I've started implementing five-minute bike rides every 25 minutes. I quit my desk job. Listening to the podcast just articulated everything I was feeling so perfectly and really helped me hand in my resignation. There's so much to unpack there. And we heard from so many people.

just how life-changing this was for them. And so that for me stood out as, if we're going to actually get people to do this for long-term, that we're going to have to help develop habit. The aspiration here is to make it like brushing teeth. And how do we get to that level of building that habit where it's automatic and that I don't need a reminder to do it? And we saw people during the study try to cue themselves too.

So some of the cues that they used were when I finish a work meeting or whenever I finish like a task, I take a walking break. Right. And so instead of needing a reminder, they were trying to naturally build it into their work habit and routine. Especially if they see it as a reward because they start to see that they actually feel good when they do it, that it's not something they have to do, but that they want to do. Yeah. And that was when we looked at the other facilitators that people most often said was helpful, listening to their body cues. So I think honing in and harnessing this notion or idea that I feel better and my mood is better and my fee levels bound. I think it's really what's going to help us get people to change their behaviors, not telling them that their blood pressure is going to change or their glucose levels are going to change a couple weeks, a couple months, a couple of years.

I had a lot of people reach out to me and be like, even if they weren't filling out the survey, this got, this was like a little worm in their brain that kept being like, are you moving? How do you feel now? What about now? Did you move? Like it was something that kept popping back up that just nudged them in a loving way. No, undoubtedly, I think we got into some people's heads for the good and have changed their mindsets. And we heard from people who were just like, they're going to keep this going. I did get people asking me, why don't you and Keith partner up with Fitbit or Apple Watch or whatever else is out there? And I said, well, if only it were that simple. Yeah. You know, Fitbit and Apple are largely in the business of making money. And so their interests lie in doing something that's going to benefit them.

And, you know, sometimes that doesn't align well with science and the things that we want to accomplish and do. Yeah. So tell folks what should they look out for next from you because there are going to be some people who are like, I'm in. I'm in now, Keith. What do I do next? Yeah. So we're going to keep this going. We're going to be conducting the next phase of our research and we'll be reaching out to those folks who participated.

to see if they want to help us on the next phase and our next journey in doing this. But aside from that, my hope is that we can just, you know, thrive on contagion here and just make this something that just continues to penetrate our society little by little from person to person, word of mouth. And so for those folks who are really motivated by this and want to keep the momentum going, you know, I'd say start in your small circles, of the world in getting your family, your friends, your work colleagues moving. Many, many thanks to Keith Diaz and the whole Columbia University Medical Center team who

worked so hard to make this study happen. Maggie Murdoch, Maria Serafini, and Adriana Clark. But we absolutely cannot leave it there. In a minute, we need to talk tech and the future of your screen time. Don't go away. We started this whole series looking back at how different economic eras have impacted the human body over time, from those lean and nimble hunter-gatherers to today's more sedentary laptop laborers. I want to wrap up this series by looking at what comes next. Because many people, especially technologists, believe that we are in the opening chapters of a new economic era, the so-periodic.

called Fourth Industrial Revolution. So if the third industrial revolution brought us computers and digitized everything, the fourth is about harnessing all that data into artificial intelligence to power nearly everything we do in our lives, from ordering groceries to getting medical diagnoses, to launching a cyber attack on another country. But also, in the short term, This new economic era could mean experiencing screen time in a whole new way. And we can get a glimpse of that future with devices that are already out there. If you or someone you know is really into gaming, you might already be fans of virtual reality headsets. Like meta has the quest.

Sony has the PlayStation one. Strap on these goggles and your mind and body are tricked into believing that you're at the top of the French Alps. watching the sunrise. Or you're surrounded by little creatures who you can whack on the head for points. One of the most popular games is Walking Dead, where, yes, your job is to kill the zombies before they kill you.

Besides gamers, VR is also used in different professions, like to train pilots. To create immersive virtual reality training environments for the U.S. Air Force. To teach surgeons, because, it is so realistic and way safer and cheaper to practice landing a plane or cutting someone open with virtual technology. I'm going to select a scalpel from the mail stand. I am not a surgeon or a pilot or a gamer. So I'll admit, I have not been terribly interested in spending hundreds of dollars to buy one of these headsets.

Chances are, if you're listening to this podcast, you probably haven't either. But the tech companies are coming for us, desk jockeys, and regular folks, too. In fact, many techies think that 2023 is kind of like 2006. So in 2006, Apple was stealthily putting the finishing touches on the first iPhone, which, when it came out in 2007, blew the Blackberry and the sidekick. Remember that one? Out of the water.

And it created the app economy. Those touchscreens made us feel connected to information in a whole new way. We could do email on the go, text each other photos all day long, play Candy Crush anytime, anywhere. Well, now Apple hopes to do it again. In the next few months, it's releasing its Vision Pro headset to try and take on Sony and meta and launch what it calls the era of spatial computing is here. What is spatial computing, you ask? Well, it's basically a mix of virtual and augmented reality.

Essentially, when you put on this headset, other people can still see your eyes behind the goggles. It looks more like you're wearing scuba gear, not like you've been blindfolded. But also, you can see the people and the world around you, too. So think of it as mixed reality. In the promotional video, various people strap on these futuristic goggles, and they do all kinds of things. A woman sits on the couch editing photos from her last vacation. The photos hover in front of her. She pinches her fingers to crop them.

No mouse needed. Another woman is in a hotel room. She straps on the headset and reads the L.A. Times as it floats huge in front of her. Then she opens a presentation for work. She shows it to colleagues on a video call. They appear life size next to her. After that, she lays down on her hotel bed. and stares up at the virtual sky.

Based on the video, it seems like Apple thinks that your whole life, your real life, could use a high-tech upgrade. Right now, just a select few have been invited to try the headset at Apple HQ. And developers who hope to make apps for Apple's new toy are sworn to secrecy about the technology. We engineered a system that uses advanced machine learning. Your persona dynamically reflects your face and hand movements. As someone who's researched text effect on humans for the last decade, I feel like this is deja vu.

A profound new way to be together. Not just because a potentially big moment in tech hardware is about to happen, which will be awe-inspiring, at least at first, but because once again, one of the biggest companies in the world wants to infiltrate our lives. Apple and the developers working to make apps for this headset, that once again, they are coming for our time, our attention, our data, and definitely our money. But here's what's new this time around. They're also coming for us physically with the ability to take over our senses,

to make us feel in body and mind like we can live in a different dimension. Does this sound dramatic? Yeah, maybe. I wanted to check myself. So in an attempt to get a little taste for this possible future, which, by the way, there are lots of different devices in development, but I got the closest thing to Apple's device that's on the market right now. That's Meta's Quest 3 headset.

I had tried virtual reality before at art exhibits and with techie friends. I'd ridden a dinosaur's back across a lake, bounced around as a sheep in a virtual field. My take, so far, was that virtual reality was fascinating, but not something I wanted in my life on a daily basis. Okay. I am in my basement, and I have just set up Meta's Oculus, Quest 3 headset, the new one. So this was my first time home, alone, with mixed reality. So I have it strapped on my head.

Like, it feels weird, though. It feels like if I look down in my feet, it's like, are those attached to my body? I found an app called SoftSpace that can turn spreadsheets and articles and photos into massive virtual objects so that you can walk around web pages like you're in a forest of trees. You can see your ideas and how they all connect in theory. I'm now going to try out SoftSpace. I wanted to try it out myself because maybe, just maybe, if I'm being. optimistic, this could be a way for us to get our work done and get some movement into our lives.

If we can walk around our email inbox, why not? I can move photos with my hands. They're kind of floating around me in the air. This is confusing, but kind of cool. But honestly, it was kind of hard to set up and tough at first to figure out how to pinch my fingers to move a block of text from the right side of the room to the left. inch, go to next. Why doesn't it work? It became pretty clear that right now the software is more a proof of concept.

It's for first adopters rather than people like, well, me. It's like being trapped inside my laptop. I don't know how I feel about that. I decided to give the app's creator Ilyu Shenberg a call. Because I think we should know the people working to change the fundamentals of how we live. And also, maybe, I just didn't get how working like this will improve our lives. what soft space represents is an alternative vision for how humans and computers will coexist and cooperate going into the future. So I guess that's part of the reason why I was intrigued by your work because I thought, well, does, will this, could this add movement to my life?

Yeah. So this is absolutely an inescapable difference between working on a laptop. and working in a VR app, which is that you have to move your body to use your hands and use your arms and move the information virtually into view, take a piece of information up. There's already sort of like a built-in minimum amount of physical effort you need to use one of these devices. And I think that's what worries me about this immersive technology

is we will be putting our brains and our bodies, in the hands of technologists in a completely new and more intense way. And I could see why, you know, the other day, I came home and I couldn't find my daughter. And she was in the basement with the thing on her head. And on the one hand, I'm like, sure she was. It's really cool. On the other hand, I'm like, oh, no, that's awful. Yeah.

that that's where, like, if my kids want to be in the basement alone with a thing strapped to their head because it's so amazing. Yeah. Oh, I have such mixed feelings, clearly. I hear you. I hear you. I have quite a strong opinion about what an augmented reality future should be. And I don't think that this is tech that we should be in all the time. I would love to make something that you use for concentrated bouts of deep work.

And then you can take the headset off, put it back on your desk, and you walk away from it. You continue with the rest of your day and your workflow. I think of the long run, people are going to have the kind of reaction you had, which is, no, actually, you know, it was novel and exciting the first time I tried that. But we have wizened up in the last, you know, decade or so that. Technology is like anything else. You can have too much of it. You can have too much of it. Yeah.

There was this moment 10, 15 years ago, when our online lives seemed to offer so much, we felt excited, hopeful that the world would be connected in ways that brought us together, helped us understand each other and ourselves. But it feels like we got burned. Humans were turned into you. users, are vulnerabilities exploited for shareholders, with the smartest minds in the world focused on how to turn screen time into ad dollars. So what's that going to mean if we're talking about

technology that merges humans with machines, whether that's goggles, strapped to our faces, or eventually, as some predict, implanted in our brains? It just means that we need to talk more about our concerns that we can't just cross our fingers and hope that Elon, Mark, and Jeff have our best interests at heart, L.O.L. But also, we need to constantly remind ourselves to break free of the disembodied way so many of us are living right now, give ourselves and the next generation a chance to at least pepper our days with the joy of feeling the earth beneath our feet and gazing out to where the trees meet a real sky above. Many thanks to Ilyushen Burke, the founder of Soft Space,

and all our guests on the series for being so thoughtful and generous with their time and brain power. If you liked the Body Electric series, please share it with someone. Tell them to search Body Electric wherever they listen to podcasts. Also, I have got a very important question. for you. Should we do something like this again? What would be useful for you? I really want to know. Like, also, would you like to get the final results of the study when it's officially published? For the next week, you can go to npr.org slash ted survey. We would love you to go to npr.org slash ted survey. Answer a few questions. Tell us what you think. I know. I ask a lot.

but it means a lot, so thank you. If you're new to NPR or TED Radio Hour, or sad that the Body Electric series is over, do stick around for weekly episodes of TED Radio Hour. And hey, maybe listen to the Body Electric bonus episodes that we've released. You can listen to those if you're a TED Radio Hour plus supporter, and you'll continue getting more TED Radio bonus content

and all our episodes sponsor-free. Oh my god, I almost forgot to thank you. Thank you for listening and being here with me, for sharing your own experiences. It's just been awesome. Body Electric was produced by Katie Montalione and edited by Sana's Meskampur with production support from Rachel Faulkner White.

Original music was by David Herman. Our audio engineers were Gilly Moon and Robert Rodriguez. Thanks also so much to Anya Grundman, Lauren Gonzalez, Lindsay McKenna, Yolanda Sangueni, Beth Donovan, Irene Noguchi, Julia Carney, and Fiona Guren. I'm Manusa Zamorodi, and you've been listening to Body Electric from NPR. Okay, menu, menu, menu. Nope, not working. Okay, hitting the power switch.

Okay, not for that for today.