TED Radio Hour - Listen Again: It Takes Time

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

Original broadcast date: February 5, 2021. We live in an era of instant gratification. But some things--to reach their full potential--simply cannot be rushed. This hour, TED speakers explore what we can learn from ideas ... that take time. Guests include zoologist Lucy Cooke, neuroscientist Matthew Walker, architect Julia Watson, and NASA engineer Nagin Cox.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, everybody, it's Manus here. And for me, there is one good thing that came out of the pandemic, going a little bit slower in life. That is what inspired our episode called It Takes Time, where we explore why certain things just can't be rushed. Things like sloths, sleep, a special kind of architecture, and the Mars rover. Yes, this is a goodie from back in February of last year, and really, really. worth a listen if you are trying to pace yourself these days. Anyway, I'll be back next week with an all-new episode. Meanwhile, thank you as always for being here. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences

to bring about the future we want to see around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes.

Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Anoush Zamoroti. And on the show today, we are surrendering to things that take time. With a moment or two, appreciating the slowest mammal in the world. There is no other animal like them on the planet.

The sloths. There is no other animal that comes with a built-in philosophy. This is Lucy Cook. And I am a writer, broadcaster, conservationist, zoologist. I wear a lot of hats. But mostly, I'm known for being a huge advocate of sloths. So, Lucy, do you remember the first time you saw a sloth in person? I do. I do. I was traveling around South America trying to raise awareness about endangered amphibians.

And the one non-frog-based thing that I did was visit a sanctuary in Costa Rica. And I was not disappointed. It was love at first sight. I was just mesmerized by their strangeness. because they are, they really are slow, and that's quite stunning. They are extraordinarily graceful. They really do move like a ballet dancer that's been slowed down. You know, it's like they have this incredible control. And what's so kind of amazing about that is they actually managed to move so gracefully with 50% less muscle mass than most upright.

mammals. So, you know, for the zoologists, you're just, your brain's just working over time, going, how does that work? And why, why, why? You know. That was back in 2010. And Lucy has since then been obsessed with sloths. This is a lifelong commitment I've made. You know, it would be churlish and inappropriate to have a fleeting fancy with the sloth, wouldn't it? We live in an era of instant gratification. a culture that prizes efficiency over patience. But some things, to reach their full potential, they simply cannot be rushed. Optimizing or speeding them up is impossible.

And given how the past year has warped our sense of time, perhaps we're ready to value a different tempo. And so today on the show, ideas and projects that take time. how a more deliberate pace can be productive if we revel in it, or if we observe how another creature embraces it, like the sloth. Lucy Cook says that living in slow motion is the ultimate evolutionary adaptation. Sloths are completely perfect. They're as perfect as you or I, and they're perfectly adapted to their arboreal lifestyle. and they are rather unusual because they are the world's only inverted quadruped.

So they are a four-legged animal that lives most of its life upside down. And there are two different types of sloth. You have two-toed sloths. And they're the ones that look basically like a cross between a wookie and a pig, actually. They've got this sort of really kind of boopable kind of pig-like nose and sort of beige brown fur. And then you have your three-toed sloths, and they're the ones that have got like a sort of a band across their eyes, and they've got kind of medieval haircuts and Mona Lisa smiles.

And they're quite different. They're actually as genetically different as cats and dogs. Really? Yeah, yeah. Because the sloths were once a huge group. They were like sort of over 50 species, including giant ground sloths and all sorts. So the ones that are left, they're from that group,

but they're all the small ones that live in trees, basically, are the ones that survived. And Lucy says the secret to their survival is their metabolism. Fundamentally, they're vegetarians, and they live on leaves. But, you know, leaves don't want to be eaten any more than antelope do. You know, so they're loaded full of toxins. And so in order to digest those leaves, sloths have a very slow digestion rate, takes them up to a month to digest a single leaf. Wow.

Yeah. Lucy Cook continues from the TED stage. Sloths have a freakishly low metabolism. And we think that this might be one of the reasons that they can sometimes recover from injuries that would kill most animals. This sloth recovered from a double amputation, and I've known sloths that have managed to survive

even powerline electrocutions. And we now think that a low metabolism may well be key to surviving extinct. Researchers at Kansas University, who was studying mollus, found that a high metabolism predicted which species of mollusk had gone extinct. Sloths have been around on this planet in one shape or another for over 40 million years. The secret to their success is their slothful nature. They are energy-saving icons. This is a creature that everything about it is shaped around burning very little energy, slow digestion, slow metabolism.

And so they have all these adaptations to living on a very low energy diet, which is having a very slow metabolism. And living upside down, for example, that requires less energy and less muscle just to dangle from a tree. Go with gravity. Yeah, exactly. go with gravity 100% if you've got the option, hang out from a tree like a happy hairy hammock. It's going to save you a lot of energy if you can. If you can, do it.

So what is a sloth's kind of ideal day? They basically spend their entire day waking, snacking, snoozing, repeat. Sounds so good. Yeah. And then once a week, a major event happens, and that's the need to take a poop. Nice. And then they'll climb a great, this,

laborious climb down from a tree in order to do their business at the bottom of a tree, which is a conundrum that has mystified scientists for many, many years, because why would you do that? Because when you come to the ground, you're completely vulnerable and, you know, could get tacked by Jaguas and Osolots or whatever. We think that they do it in order to send love messages to other sloths. I know, it doesn't sound terribly. romantic to us, but yes, romance is a latrine-based sport if you're a sloth. Now, this risky and energetic behaviour has long been a mystery, and there are lots of theories as to why they do it. But I think they're leaving surreptitious, scented messages for potential mates.

Because, you see, sloths are generally silent, solitary creatures. except for when the female is in heat, she will climb to the top of a tree and scream for sex in D-sharp. Don't believe me? D-sharp. This and only this note will get the male's attention. It mimics the sound of the kiss-gadie flycatcher, so the female remains covert,

even when yodling for sex at the top of her lungs. Her clandestine booty calls will carry for miles across the canopy, and males will beat a slow path to water. I think scented messages in her dung will help send Romeo up the right tree so that he doesn't waste precious energy scaling the wrong one. Sex, by the way, is the only thing that sloths do swiftly.

I've seen them do it in the wild, and it's over and done within a matter of seconds. But then why waste precious energy on it, particularly after that journey? So how has this world's slowest mammal been able to survive for millions of years? Because it's not like they can outrun predators. Well, do you know what? That was exactly the same question that the early naturalists were completely befuddled by this creature.

Because they're like, how does it escape from being eaten? Like, how does that happen? You know, but actually it just, it doesn't escape by running away. It escapes by being cryptic, you see. So their fur actually has grooves in it that traps moisture and allows algae to grow so that they often have a greenish hue, the wild sloths.

So they totally blend in with the trees. They look and smell just like a tree. And these movements are so slow that we think that they pass under the radar of the harpy eagle, which is their main predator as they fly around the treetops scanning for motion. You know, they don't crash around and make a load of noise like monkeys do. They're really hard to spot because they're silent and solitary and totally camouflaged. So that's how they've done it really.

It's just a different way, you know, which I find very pleasing. When I first think of the word sloth, it's really. related to idle and laziness and being a bit of a heathen, right? Like a sinner, as it were. But the sloth has had sort of a makeover in the last few years. Why has it changed from being the emblem of all that is idle to this lovable creature who kind of symbolizes a simpler, kinder, slower way of life? Well, I think that when I first stumbled across them 10 years ago, nobody had really heard of them.

And then now they are everywhere, you know, for sure. And I think to a certain extent, I'd like to think that we are all becoming aware that our lives as humans are unsustainable. And maybe we're fed up with moving too fast and being in the rat race and running. in the hamster wheel every single day to what end, you know, and maybe this having been something that was considered to be a sin, you know, is now an aspirational quality, the idea that you could be slow and that would be okay. So, yeah, I mean, you know, it's cheesy, but I think taking a leaf out of the, a slowly digested leaf out of the sloth's book is, isn't a bad thing to do. That's Lucy Cook. She's a zoologist, author, and founder of the Sloth Appreciation Society. You can hear her full talk at ted.com. On the show today, it takes time, how some things you just can't rush. I'm Anoush Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamoroti, and today on the show, we're giving in to things that take time, like sleep. There is no rushing sleep. One of the unusual things relative to diet or exercise is that you get to decide, do I exercise, and for how long do I rush it, do I not rush it? With sleep, you don't have a choice. This is Matt Walker.

I am a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and I'm also the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science here at UC Berkeley. And Matt says, optimizing how your brain works when you sleep, it's not really possible. You can't just generate sleep, you know, consciously and say, okay, tonight, off the menu, I'm going to actually dial up my deep sleep by an hour and a half. I think I'm going to reduce my REM sleep down, maybe a little bit. I'll bring it back down to maybe just 50 minutes tonight.

You can't do that. You have to let sleep unfold naturally. You have to give in to sleep and give sleep time to do all of the wonderful things that we know it does. Your brain is erupting in these incredible bursts of electrical activity, going through all of these fantastic sleep stages. It's an electrical ballet that takes place at night. That electrical ballet of sleep is crucial for every aspect.

aspect of our health. And when we don't make time for sleep, there are consequences. Once you drop below seven hours, we can start to measure objective impairments in your brain and your body. The shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. Short sleep predicts all-cause mortality. We humans have evolved to need a specific amount of sleep. It's taken Mother Nature, let's say, 3.6 million years to put this essential need of seven to nine hours in place for the average adult. And for us to think, perhaps with a little bit of hubris, that we could come along and start to say, you know, I can train myself to survive on, let's say, just six hours or six and a half hours a night. It's a dangerous thing. You know, when you

Fight biology, you normally lose. And when you lose, the way that it's usually revealed is disease and sickness. And unfortunately, that's what we see with insufficient sleep. So to understand the strength of a full night's sleep, we need to understand what's happening in our brains, especially during those last few hours before the alarm goes off. When you fall asleep tonight, you're going to experience two main types of sleep. You may have heard of these before.

There's rapid eye movement or REM sleep and non-REM sleep. And our brains and bodies need to cycle through both. Approximately every 90 minutes you go through a cycle of non-REM to REM. But what changes, however, is the ratio of non-REM to REM within those 90-minute cycles as you move across the night, such that in the first half of the night, the majority of those 90-minute cycles are comprised of lots of deep. sleep and very little REM sleep. But as you push through to the second half of the night, that seesaw balance actually shifts. And now you have much more rapid eye movement sleep.

I mean, that is fascinating. So you can't hack this. You can't say, well, I got four or five hours of sleep. That's good enough. Like, what happens when we do skimp on sleep? Because I mean, we all do it. So let's say that normally you would sleep eight hours. But today you want to get a jump start.

and you've got an early morning meeting or you want to get to the gym. And so instead of going to bed, let's say at 10 p.m. and waking up at 6 a.m., you're going to wake up at 4 a.m. How much sleep have you lost? Well, you've taken away two hours from your eight-hour night of sleep, so you've lost 25% of your sleep. Well, yes and no, you've lost 25% of your total sleep, but you may have lost 60, 70, 70, 80% of all of your REM sleep, because that's when you're getting your REM sleep in those last morning hours. So there are ramifications there. So what do those things do for our brain and our body? Well, firstly what we know is that it's during deep sleep at night that your memory systems undergo a radical change.

The first thing that we've learned is that you need sleep before learning to act. actually prepare your brain, almost like a sort of a dry sponge, ready to initially soak up new memories and lay down those sort of those new memory traces in the brain. But we've also learned that you need sleep after learning to then take those freshly minted memories in the brain and cement them and solidify them into the neural architecture of the brain. Matt Walker picks up this idea from the TED stage. So let me show you the data. Here in this study, we decided to test the hypothesis that pulling the all-nighter was a good idea.

So we took a group of individuals and we assigned them to one of two experimental groups, a sleep group and a sleep deprivation group. Now, the sleep group, they're going to get a full eight hours of slumber. But the deprivation group, we're going to keep them awake in the laboratory under full supervision. and then the next day we're going to place those participants inside an MRI scanner. And we're going to have them try and learn a whole list of new facts as we're taking snapshots of brain activity. In those people who'd had a full night of sleep, we saw lots of healthy learning-related activity.

Yet in those people who were sleep-deprived, we actually couldn't find any significant signal whatsoever. So it's almost as though sleep deprivation had shut down your memory inbox. And any new incoming files, they were just being bounced. Sleep will take those new memories and it will start to integrate them and associate them with all of your past back catalogue of autobiographical memories. So in other words, you wake up the next morning with a revised mind-wide web of associations. And it's sort of like group therapy for memories.

You know, at the end of the day, everyone gets a name badge. And then sleep gathers in all of this information. And I would argue that during deep sleep, that's taking memories and sort of improving them and strengthening them. But what dream sleep does by interconnecting them is it shifts us from knowledge, which is the individual facts, to wisdom. which is knowing what it all means when you fit it together. And I think it's probably no coincidence that you've never been told to stay awake on a problem. You know, actually, you're making me think of the saying, never go to bed angry with your partner.

And actually, I have found that once I, it's better to go to bed angry because then you don't have an argument because when I wake up in the morning, I feel like I have a new perspective on the issue. It sounds like maybe I actually do. maybe my brain's been working out the problem overnight. Well, it's been working out the problem, but this brings us on to another benefit of sleep for the brain, which is that sleep provides a form of emotional first aid.

Sleep provides overnight therapy. And what we've discovered is that sleep will take these difficult, painful experiences, sometimes even moving into the area of trauma. And it will act almost like a knockout, eternal soothing balm, and it will just take the sharp edges off those emotional memories so that when you come back the next day, they don't feel as emotional anymore. So, yes, you remember what happened yesterday, but you no longer regurgitate that same visceral emotional reaction that you had at the time of the event.

My saying to my kids is sleep makes everything better. Yeah. There is no major physiological system. of the body or major operation of the brain that isn't wonderfully enhanced by sleep when we get it or demonstrably impaired when we don't get enough. At this point, you may be thinking, oh my goodness, how do I start to get better sleep? What are your tips for good sleep? Well, beyond avoiding the damaging and harmful impact of alcohol and caffeine on sleep,

and if you're struggling with sleep at night, avoiding naps during the day, I have two pieces of advice for you. The first is regularity. Go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time, no matter whether it's the weekday or the weekend. The second is keep it cool. Your body needs to drop its core temperature by about two to three degrees Fahrenheit to initiate sleep and then to stay asleep. And it's the reason you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot. So aim for a bedroom temperature of around 65 degrees or about 18 degrees Celsius. That's going to be optimal for the sleep of most people. Sleep, unfortunately, is not an optional lifestyle luxury.

Sleep is a non-negotiable biological necessity. It is your life support system. And it is a It is Mother Nature's best effort yet at immortality. I believe it is now time for us to reclaim our right to a full night of sleep. And without embarrassment or that unfortunate stigma of laziness. And in doing so, we can be reunited with the most powerful elixir of life. And with that, I will simply say, good night, good luck. And above all, I do hope you sleep well. Thank you very much indeed.

That's Matthew Walker. He's a sleep scientist and the author of the book Why We Sleep. You can see his full talk at ted.com. On the show today, things that take time, including designs that need decades to be built, like in one of the wettest places on earth. It's treacherous terrain. It's very moist. anything that you build

rot. This is architect Julia Watson, and she's talking about the jungles of Megalea in northern India, where the Kasi people live. This is a place that gets nearly 500 inches of rain a year. And

because of such high rainfall and because of the monsoon, they're incredibly fast-flowing rivers, and they just take out bridges, whereby you couldn't actually travel from village to village because of the high water levels. And so what the Kasi did to figure out how to walk and transport through this region is they grew their bridges from trees. So they'd intentionally plant trees along these river corridors, wait for these beautiful phycus trees to grow,

and then take their root systems that hang down from the huge branches, and they would train them to grow across the river corridors and then plant them into the other side. And eventually they grow a huge bridge. that's alive. Over the last thousand years, the Kassis have developed an intricate technique to build these living root bridges. They're just these beautiful, elegant,

sort of trust-systemed bridges. They're, you know, very sophisticated in their design. There's like a scaffolding system, then there's a wrapping system of roots, and then there's railings. And they hang down from these trees and just sort of arc across these rivers. corridors hanging in mid-air across the water.

And they enable people to actually walk through this landscape in the monsoon. And it's not like they get built in a year or two like a typical bridge, right? These take, what, decades? So people are planning where these trees are growing generations before. And once they reach a large enough height, then they start this process of the weaving and the scaffolding and the train. across the actual river. And then it's up to everybody to take care and maintain how that growth happens until

about 50 years. And then you can start to walk across them. I mean, the thought of having the foresight to build a bridge like this, how would you know it might not even work in your lifetime? Did you sense that they think of time differently than you do when they think of a project? Yeah. I mean, this type of generational thinking, it's kind of just embedded and part of how you relate to the forest. There's understandings that you're not working for the individual,

and you sort of identify with community and you are part of your environment. You know, we have certain climatic extremes, and we call them challenges or crises, that we see ourselves faced with. And we have this idea that there's one way to build, and there's one way to think of technology and progress. And high tech is going to solve everything. But that's something that I'm questioning. And Julia's doing that by researching low-tech technologies. Indigenous designs developed hundreds, even thousands of years ago, to respond to crisis and to strengthen over time.

Here's Julia Watson on the TED state. I'm an architect and I've been trained to seek solutions in permanence, concrete, steel, glass. These are all used to build a fortress against nature. But my search for ancient systems and indigenous technologies has been different. It's been inspired by an idea that we can seed creativity in crisis. All across the globe, I've seen cultures who have been living with floods for thousands of years. by evolving these ancient technologies that allow them to work with the water. In the southern wetlands of Iraq, a unique water-based civilization lives.

For 6,000 years, the Madonna floated villages on man-made islands that are constructed from a single species of reed that grows around them, on islands that stay afloat for over 25 years. And the Kasab reed is integral to every, every aspect of life. It is food for water buffalo, flower for humans, and building material for these biodegradable buoyant islands

and their cathedral-like houses that they construct in as little as three days. They use a cassar breed to make columns, to make rafters, they weave it into walls, they weave it into a roof systems, and then they make it into a twine which allows them to construct the houses without using any nails. And so everything about this community is really so closely linked to the Khazar breed.

And so this is amazingly innovative and undocumented in terms of how we can think about mobile flood resilient island architecture. The photos that you include of their homes, they are ethereal. some way. They almost, like the light coming through the reeds, like stained glass, but they look quite fragile. I guess I'm trying to understand how this technology has lasted for thousand, six thousand years, and yet it seems like it's a short-term structure. Yeah, but I think that's part of like why it's so resilient. Because in that environment, there's a there's an understanding that things are not going to last for hundreds of years. The technology will last, but the actual individual built component is not going to last. And part of the

definition of being resilient is being adaptable. So there's this whole intelligence about, well, if there is a crisis, if there is a flood, we can deconstruct it, we can put it somewhere else. And so it's actually built into the technology that there's an incredible robustness in its potential to adapt very quickly to changing conditions. And that's something that we have to learn as well. When we come back more from architect Julia Watson on what we can learn from these ancient designs. On the show today, it takes time. I'm Minouche Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manus Shumerode. On the show today, it takes time.

And we were just hearing architect Julia Watson on ancient design systems. One's developed over thousands of years and what they can teach us about how we build things now. Although global attention is focused on the pandemic, cities are still sinking and sea levels are still rising. And high-tech solutions are definitely going to help us solve some of these problems. But in our rush towards the future, we tend to forget about the past. We have thousands of years of ancient knowledge that we just need to listen to and allow it to expand our thinking about designing symbiotically with nature. And by listening, we'll only become wiser and ready for those 21st century challenges

that we know will endanger our people and our planet. And I've seen it. So what do you say to that high-tech person who's like, well, these are beautiful examples. But they take a long time to come to fruition. We don't have that kind of time when it comes to climate change. We need to use fast new technologies. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, there's like three answers to that. I'm saying, okay, you've had... had the run for a really long time, allow some other ideas to be brought to the table. But, you know, your question is a question that comes up a lot. Part of the work of low tech is to question, you know, is there just one way to think about the built environment? Is that the most sustainable way that we think about the built environment? And is the way we think about sustainability actually going to get us anywhere? Because we're not pushing the envelope in terms of of the types of technologies that are symbiotic with natural systems.

They're band-aids. There are other ways of thinking about the built environment that are productive, that are adaptable, that deal with crises, but deal with them intelligently and don't just try and shut them out. And, you know, I think the next phase of where I'm headed as a designer and a practitioner is to figure out how do we work with indigenous communities to share knowledge and how do we really reframe? What is the growth of our cities into the future?

I really take your point that we can't just look at what's been developed in the past decade or so, but we have to look at innovation from an extremely long-term perspective. And it almost makes me think that what you're talking about, sure, it's low tech, but it's also slow tech. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting what you're saying. And there's this concept of deep time that a lot of this technology comes from. And it's deep time is when you're talking about thousands of years. And so this knowledge is based upon thousands of years of thinking and understanding and adapting.

And it's also circular time because it works with seasons. And it repeats and it builds upon itself. And it strengthens as it. build on itself and repeats and changes based upon new impacts. And the benefits, while they might be slow, they had this incredible multiplier effect. So Lotech really takes the opinion that we're going to be here and we're going to be here for a long time. So let's move in the cycles that we have moved in of deep time from the past and bring that deep time into our future thinking. That's Julia Watson. She's an architecture.

architect, designer, and the author of Low Tech, Design by Radical Indigenousism. To see photos of the designs that Julia talked about, check out our feed on Twitter and Facebook. We are at TED Radio Hour. And you can see Julia's full talk at TED.com. On the show today, it takes time. And Earthlings, so far we've been talking about the 24-7, 365 days a year kind of time. Get ready for something different. have been reenabled. We will control our attitude on shoot. We are decelerating.

This is mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA's robotics headquarters. Come back again with wrist mode dynamics. Risk mode is nominal. It's August 2012, and for the Curiosity rover that's been headed to Mars, it's landing day. We're down to 86 meters per second at an altitude of four kilometers. Rows of engineers are stationed at computers. The landing director is pacing. Light, EDIL, we've got some Tweedal warnings. Tensions are high. We found a nice flat place.

We're coming in, ready for Skycrans. They've spent years designing and programming the rover to land safely. Now, they can only watch as the data come in. You have to wait. You have to wait patiently. It's very hard to wait on landing day. That's Nagy Cox. And I am an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

And I am the deputy team chief of the engineering. engineering operations team for the Mars 2020 rover. In the last two decades, NASA has put four rovers on Lars. Nagy has worked on all of them. And in 2012, she's there in mission control, watching as the rover slowly descends. And finally... Touchout, confirmed.

But now for Naguie and her team of engineers, the clock really starts ticking. You know, we're landing. with a multi-billion dollar asset that is priceless on the surface of Mars, and we want to make use of every minute. Which means putting the rover on a very strict schedule. Power is a very important resource on Mars. So the rover sleeps at night because it takes a lot of power to do anything at night.

So the rover basically wakes up at about 9.30 in the morning and receives instructions from the earth and starts working at approximately 10 a.m. and will do activities that we have told her to do, but we are not joysticking this rover. It's too far. Then, at around 5.30 p.m., the rover finishes her day, and basically, when she goes to sleep, we get the data, see how her day went, and now we have the information to plan her next day. Nighi can start crunching the rover's data while the rover sleeps.

But don't think of it as your typical night shift, because working on Mars time is a little different. So a Martian day, which we call a Saul, is longer than an Earth day. Our planet rotates in 24 hours relative to the sun. Mars rotates at a different rate. So a Martian day is approximately 24 hours and 40 minutes. Nagu Kox continues from the TED stage. So in order to come to work on the Earth at the same time every day on Mars,

then we have to come into work on the Earth, 40 minutes later every day in order to stay in sync with Mars. So that's like moving a time zone every day. Right? So one day you come in at 8, the next day 40 minutes later at 840, the next day 40 minutes later at 920, the next day at 10. So you keep moving 40 minutes every day until soon you're coming to work in the middle of the night, the middle of the earth night.

Right? So you can imagine how confusing that is. Hence, the Mars watch. This watch has been mechanically, the weights have been mechanically adjusted so that it runs more slowly. Right. And we didn't start out, I got this watch in 2004 when Spirit and Opportunity, the rovers back then. We didn't start out thinking that we were going to need Mars watches. Right? We thought, okay, we'll just have the time on our computers. on the mission control screens, and that would be enough. Yeah, not so much. Because we weren't just working on Mars time.

We were actually living on Mars time. And we got just instant... I mean, it sounds like, oh, it's just a 40-minute difference. But over a 90-day mission, that can add up, and I assume be pretty disorienting. Yeah, so the minute you have to shift your sleep cycle and are moving in time, you also need to eliminate the cues of what is earth time. So it started with shades and blinds and things to keep us from seeing the earth daylight. Because if we had rotated to the point where it was night on Mars, but daylight on the earth, we didn't want the daylight to come in and mess up our body clocks and not

just our body clocks, but also our mental sense of where we were. And it even started to spread into our language. I distinctly remember someone walking up to me and saying, hey, Nagee, we need to do this activity on the vehicle tomorrow. And I absolutely said, which tomorrow? Tomorrow, tomorrow, or Mars tomorrow? So how do you solve for that? So a lot of this was tied to how can we get our jobs done in the most efficient way? And again, that was coming up with words that would make it clear quickly what day we were talking, you know, what planet we were talking about, where we talking about the Earth or Mars. And so if a day on Mars is a Saul, then tomorrow becomes nexter Saul. And yesterday becomes yester Saul. So we have the watches and the language

and one of the things that we all discovered is you can get anywhere in Los Angeles at three in the morning when there's no traffic. So we would get off work and we, instead of going, you know, we didn't want to go home and bother our families. And we were hungry. So instead of going, you know, locally to eat something, we'd go, wait, there's this great all-night deli in Long Beach. And we can get there in like 10 minutes. So we would drive down. It was like the 60s, right? No traffic. We would drive down there. And the restaurant owners would go, who are you people? and why are you at my restaurant at three in the morning?

So they came to realize that there were these packs of Martians roaming the L.A. freeways in the middle of the night. And we did actually start calling ourselves Martians. So those of us who were on Mars time, we would refer to ourselves as Martians and everyone else as earthlings. And that's because when you're moving a time zone every day, you start to really feel separated from everyone else. You're literally in your own world.

Only imagine that that had kind of a wonderful effect on your relationships with your colleagues. Like having worked in a newsroom, there's a lingo, right? You all speak the same language and there's a shorthand and you can move through information so much more quickly. Did it have that? Did it bring you together in some ways as a team when you started to be living on a different planet, at least in terms of what time it was and the vocabulary that you used? It absolutely did in ways that we didn't expect. The isolation, the sense of separation from even your family, your friends, other colleagues who aren't working this mission, sets in pretty close. quickly. And most of that is due to the time. You are very quickly shifted from them. Your experience becomes extremely focused on what happens on Mars. You don't have any idea what time it is on Earth because we're trying to get rid of the cues. You don't even remember what day it is on Earth. You

remember what Saul it is because your mind is constantly projecting you to Mars. So, the people that you're sharing this experience with will always be the humans that you experienced Mars time with. You know, this episode is all about topics or things that you cannot rush. They take time. That's, you know, from sloths to bridges made of roots to the amount of time that we, need to sleep to be healthy human beings. And I guess I wonder, you know, for me, these conversations are making me want to slow down to not rush things. And I wonder if there are some lessons of

from when you've been on Mars time that you've taken back to when you are on Earth time. Certainly Mars time reminds you of, it makes you not take time. for granted. You look at time differently because we've changed it. And when you are someplace on Mars, exploring for all of humankind, it is a different rhythm. We are there to look around, to explore, to go slowly, to get our job done, which does mean we have distance to cover, but the ability to get from one location to another, but then to stop and look at what we're doing. It is the rhythm of humanity scale exploration.

That's Nagu Kox. She's an operations engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a deputy team chief for the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover. You can learn more about the mission at JPL.NASA.NASA And you can watch Nogu's full talk at TED.com. My name is Teneal. I'm from Hampton Roads, Virginia. My name is Nicole, and I live in Savannah, Georgia. Hi, my name is Elena. I am from Chicago, Illinois.

So in the spirit of today's episode, we wanted to take some time to hear from you, dear listeners. Hi, my name is Hannah Tran. This is Elizabeth Wood. My name is Atulia. Because we have all had to rethink how we pace ourselves over the past year. Every school week seems to be incredibly long, like maybe a century. I used to think a 60-second plank was the longest, most miserable thing in the world. No way to measure the progress of my day, nothing to accomplish, no finish line.

I would sit at my desk in class and ask myself, how is it only 11 a.m.? But now I'm always asking myself, how is it already 11 a.m.? I wake up, see the same people, do mostly the same things, go to bed, repeat. I feel like I'm trapped in the movie Groundhog Day. When I talk to my students about my experience this year, I tell them that I could use an extra four hours just to get things done. And the school year has been incredibly draining, incredibly exhausting, incredibly just everything. And as much as I do love my students and I do love teaching, there's never enough. time to be the teacher that I'd like to be, and it's worn me out. If I could, I think I'd retire

this June. Time has become almost an enemy. I don't know who I am or where I have to be without my job or without a schedule that delineates my day. I sometimes look at the clock, and I catch myself feeling totally shaken and sick. when I realize it's only 11, and I've checked every box off my list. The difference with time now is that it's more painful. Some days I wonder if these 15 minutes of FaceTime are the last I'll get with my father, who barely survived COVID and had his heart and lungs ravaged. Or if a six-hour flight home could lead to a lifetime of regret.

The worst is the future. If it'll come, and who will be around to see it? I lost my full-time job shortly after the start of the pandemic, and while it's definitely put an additional financial and even a sort of existential burden on me, I've also been finding more joy in the free time I do have, even though there's this additional stress involved with having more free time in the first place. But even when the opportunity for full-time work comes again, I'm finding myself more and more committed to the idea of preserving my time for self-care

and for exploring my hobbies and passions. So if anything, this past year has put into perspective how fleeting, fragile, and meaningful our time truly is. And I know that for myself moving forward, I want to do all I can to honor that time as much as possible. I miss, you know, being able to do musical theater, heading to the cafeteria for lunch, to talk with a group of friends. And surprisingly, I actually even miss simply walking to class. I took the little things for granted, and I appreciate the little things so much more now, which has impacted my productivity very positively. I finished recording this audio, so I'm going to go check that box off my list.

Thanks. Thank you so much for your messages. And as always, thank you for listening to our show this week on It Takes Time. To learn more about the people who are people who are going to you. who were on today's show, go to ted.npr.org to see hundreds more TED Talks. Check out TED.com or the TED app. Our TED Radio production staff at NPR includes Jeff Rogers, Sanaz Meshkampur, Rachel Faulkner, Diba Motisham, James Delahousie, J.C. Howard, Katie Montalione,

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