Month: July 2008

Show: Radiolab   

Episode Date: February  11, 2005, "Stress"

Length: 60 Minutes.

Producer: Radiolab is a 60 minutes audio collage/narrative exploration of a scientific issue. Its the kind of show built for trivia nerds who like to know a lot of silly factoids about subjects that are otherwise baffling or too obvious to have anything cool to comment upon.

Radiolab is produced by WNYC in New York and syndicated nationwide (podcast feed, blog). Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich.

What I Knew:

• Stress can be good for you. Its focuses your attention in dangerous or paramount situations and serves as a motivator to be better than we thought we could be. However…

• Constant stress is very bad for you. It sends your system into a flight-or-flight state when the situation does not warrant it. Repeated flight-or-flights over time can lead to weakened blood vessels, hypertension and adult onset diabetes no matter what your level of fitness. Adult Onset Diabetes is a disease entirely the product of our moden, high-stress age.

• It is better to suffer a clean, deep cut than a shallow jagged one as clean cuts merge the skin together easier and heal faster. It’s a similar principle to that of "clevage planes" in geology. No matter where you apply force to them, rocks will only break along at certain angles due to the arrangement of their molecules. In the organic world, this works the same way: A clean cut severs molecules in a fashion that they can be fused back together easily.

What I Didn’t Know:

• Stress can be measured by listening to the electrical charges that pass between our fingers (who knew that happened?). The faster the charges jump from one finger to another, the more stressed we are.  

• In stressful situations, our bodies begin to shut down all non essential systems. This explains why we get dry mouth when under stress. Producing saliva and its digestive enzymes is considered superfluous by the body if, say, the stressful situation is being chased by a lion. Strangly enough, this is also why we often don’t feel pain in a situation that causes us harm. The body also shuts non pain sensors s non essential functions in stressful situations.

• Continuous trauma can cause children to stop growing because, if the stress is bad enough, the body will begin to consider growth a low priority. Apparently, this happened in the case of J.M. Barrie, author of the Peter Pan books. Barrie’s older brother was killed when both were still children and Barrie’s mother never got over his death, even confusing Barrie with his dead brother, who in his mother’s eyes, would forever ramain her perfect little boy. In response, Barrie never grow beyond 5 feet tall, never had an adult relationship with a woman. In response to the terrible rejection of his mother, Barrie’s body tried to make him the son she had lost.

• Type A Personality theory was discovered by an upholsterer. In the 1950s, cardiologists Meyer Friedman and R.H. Rosenman noticed the chairs in their waiting room wore out incredibly fast and had to be refurbished every month. One month, their regular upholsterer was unavailable. The substitute came to their office and immediately asked the doctors, "Why are your patients sitting on the edge of the chair seats and shredding the armrests." Friedman and Rosenman noticed a correlation between the chair shredding patients and those prone to heart attacks. And thus was born the theory of Type A Personality and its relation to heath and heart disease.

• Shoot out The Lights, the legendary 1982 album of Richard and Linda Thompson’s was released  as their marriage was breaking up. Just before the album’s tour, Linda began suffering from Spasmodic Dysphonia, a disease which renders the sufferer unable to speak. Linda Thompon’s voice  disappeared upong discovery of her husband’s infidelity, returned for the tour, then vanished again. She’s continues to battle with it to this day.