TED Talks Daily - The science of lifespan — and the impact of your five senses | Christi Gendron

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

What you experience through your senses — sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch — can impact how healthy you are and how long you live, says neurobiologist Christi Gendron. She explores how environmental cues like temperature, light and even just the sight of death have influenced the lifespan of fruit flies, suggesting your everyday perceptions may have direct repercussions on your ability to live a long, healthy life.

TED Audio Collective. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hume. Studies show how environmental cues, what we see, smell, taste, and touch, have an impact on our lifespans. What is it in our sensory environment that leads

to bodily changes that help us live longer or cut our lives shorter? Molecular biologist Christy Gendron shares the research behind this link after the break. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do,

and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. AI keeping you up at night? Wondering what it means for your business? Don't miss the latest season of Disruptors, Thank you. they ask bold questions like, why is Canada lagging in AI adoption and how to catch up? Don't get left behind. Listen to Disruptors, the innovation era, and stay ahead of the game in this

fast-changing world. Follow Disruptors on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. And now, our TED Talk of the day. I'm here to tell you that what we sense, meaning what we see, smell, hear, taste, and touch can impact how long we live. Now this may seem extraordinary, but it really isn't. Let's say that you wake up one morning and are trying to decide whether to go to an amusement park. One of the very first things you might do is to step outside and check the weather. When you do, you see that the sky is blue, that the sun is out.

You hear that the birds are chirping. You feel how warm it is on your skin. Based on all of this information, you decide it is a perfect day for going to the park. You have used your senses to impact your decision. Now, gathering this information does more than simply impact your behavior. It also can affect your emotions,

as well as how your body physically responds. To demonstrate, let's say you've arrived at that amusement park, and one of the very first things that you see is a roller coaster. You see the speed with which it moves. You see the twists and turns it takes. You see the terrified look on the riders' faces. You hear their screams. Even right here, right now, this sensory event may be causing you to feel anxious or even excited. Feelings that are associated with butterflies in your stomach, a racing heartbeat, even sweating palms. Your senses have caused your body to change.

This is an example of how a very short sensory perceptive event can impact you. What do you imagine a much longer sensory event might do to you? This is the question that I am interested in addressing. And what scientists like me have discovered is that prolonged sensory events can impact the lifespan of an animal. This has been shown with worms, flies, mice. When you expose them to pheromones, it impacts how long they live. Now, at this point, you might be asking yourself, what does a worm, a fly, or a mouse have to do with me?

I would argue more than you realize. The genes or genetic material that you find within a worm or within a fly, that is approximately 60 to 75 percent similar to our own. This increases to 85 percent if we compare ourselves to a mouse. Furthermore, the fact that three very different animals all respond in terms of changing their lifespan when exposed to a specific environmental cue, this suggests that those underlying biological processes that drive those changes are similar.

Therefore, there is every reason to believe that environmental cues impact our own very human aging process. In order to study environmental cues and how they impact lifespan, our lab has decided to focus on the nervous system. Now, why the nervous system? Well, we can think of the nervous system as a communication hub. It's responsible for gathering that sensory information, for processing it, and then for causing those bodily changes that occur.

Furthermore, to do this research, we need to control the environment that an animal is in for its entire life. This is something that would be pretty difficult at best and unethical at worst to do using humans. I, therefore, use this little guy. Drosophila melanogaster, also known as the fruit fly, or the pest that came home on your bananas from the grocery store, in order to understand the things that we share in common

that impact lifespan. Now, fruit flies are amazing for this type of research. They live a short amount of time. They only live two or three months. They have a brain and a central nervous system. And we can easily activate or inhibit specific neuron cells or even the activities of specific molecules in order to see how these changes

impact how long the animal lives. Now, I am the first to admit that my belief of how great it is to work with fruit flies is biased, but that's because I'm a fly girl. So, our lab has studied how very many different environmental cues have impacted the lifespan of this animal. I'm going to highlight one in particular, and that is death perception. Yes, I said death. So why are we interested in whether a fly can recognize other dead flies? We're interested in this so that we can develop therapies for people who find themselves developing negative health consequences as a result of stressful situations surrounding death. If you think about this, this could impact soldiers and first responders. You're thinking, what? A fly can actually recognize another dead fly? The answer is yes. If I take a vial of flies and I put dead in there,

they send out a signal to the other flies to stay away. We can measure this. You know those flies in the vial with the dead? They lose weight and they die sooner. Now that we know that there's all these effects, we wanted to make sure this was real. So, you know, the first thing that you might imagine is that, well, those flies with the dead, they're getting an infection, they're getting sick, and that's what's causing them to die. But we know this isn't the case, because if I do the experiment under sterile or infection-free conditions,

the live flies, they still die when they're with the dead. But if you take that vial of flies and you put them in complete darkness for 24 hours all the time, they never see light. Those flies live just as long as flies that never had dead in their vial to begin with. This indicates that it is the sight of the dead that is causing all those biological changes which impacts their lifespan. So now that we know that flies can sense other dead, we turned our attention toward trying to understand

a little bit more about those biological processes that are happening. What are the changes? And what we discovered was that molecules found in our own bodies, including serotonin and insulin, had a role. Furthermore, we discovered parts of the fly brain that played a role in how long they lived when exposed to dead that have similarities with regions of our own brains. This is what we know about just one type of environmental cue. There are many different environmental cues that impact the lifespan of animals.

These include the temperature that the animal is kept in. These include the smell of food, the wavelength of light they are exposed to, even the perception of pain. In order for us to develop therapies that promote healthy aging, we must understand the basic biology of all of these cues. Because after all, we don't live in a world

where we receive one cue at a time. So what does this all mean? I would love nothing more than to be able to tell you that you should expose yourself to this environmental cue, you should avoid that one in order to live your longest, healthiest life. But I simply can't do that yet. We're just not there.

But we're pushing hard towards this type of understanding. And we're going to do it with these little guys. After all, six Nobel Prizes have been won based on work with Drosophila that impacts the biology and helps us all, including worms, flies, mice, and yes, humans. And on that note, I'd like to leave you with a happy, perceptive experience and the hopes that this positively impacts your life. Thank you. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel.

They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think.

Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. That was Christy Gendron at TEDxJacksonville in 2023. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by Christopher Faisy-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner, Daniela Balarezo, and Will Hennessey. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

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