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Intelligence Squared
The Secret Life of Our Organs and How They Keep us Healthy, with Dr Giulia Enders
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- [00:01]
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- [01:24]
Intelligence Squared Producer Mia Sorrenti
welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. How can changing the way we breathe lower stress and blood pressure? Why is touch so important for premature babies and ICU patients? And what can our organs teach us about staying healthy? In today's episode, Dr. Julia Enders, author of the Multimillion Best Selling Gut, returns with a new book, Organ Speak, an exploration of the lungs, skin, immune system, muscles and brain. In this episode, she joins science communicator Dr. Emma Weinel to discuss the the extraordinary ways our organs work together to keep us alive and well, including how exercise really works, the hidden sophistication of the immune system, why humans evolved to sleep and dream, and whether AI can ever compete with the complexity of the human brain. Let's join our host now, Dr. Emma
- [02:14]
Dr. Emma Weinel
Weinel for more welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Dr. Emma Weinl, an academic and science communicator and today our guest is Julia Enders. She's a medical doctor and author from Germany. Her bestseller, the Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ has sold more than 8 million copies and been published in over 40 countries. But today she's here to talk to me about her new book, Organ Speak. What it really means to listen to our bodies. This book explores five key parts of the body. The lungs, immune system, skin, skin, muscle, and the brain. And it draws lots of life lessons from each of these organs. So welcome to Intelligence Squared. Julia, hello. It's great to talk to you this morning and I'm really excited to run through your new book with you. So you started with your best selling book that was about the gut, but this book is a little bit different. It takes us as readers through five different parts of the body this time. So tell us a little bit about why you've chosen to focus on these particular five parts of the body for this book.
- [03:27]
Dr. Julia Enders
Well, I didn't plan on writing a second book. I was quite happy with how the first one turned out. But then I started working in a hospital and I realized after a while that I came across this pattern over and over again that I found irritating and also discovered in myself, which was that people would keep talking about their bodies in sort of like mechanistic way, like having lots of terms from economy or social media and all these other areas, but the body, but the organic, natural ways of how things are. And I thought it's a bit odd, like sometimes it stands in the way of us actually treating our body right, or even though we have all this information on what to do, what to eat, what not to do, and so on. But if you treat your body funnily, then you have a hard time, like, let's say you treat your spouse like a service butler or something, you know, it probably won't end well, you know, so. So I felt like, okay, how can I, how can I put a counter rate to this? And I realized soon when I looked at the lungs, that needs are actually quite central to how we change our behavior, how we change, like, you know, just people doing stuff in the world, how we go about history. And so I wanted to look at five parts of the body that mediate very important needs that we also find in the muscular pyramid, for example, which is the need for, you know, physical integrity. The lungs being the most important physical need. We have to breathe, although otherwise we die after a few minutes. Then safety, the immune system, I think, knows a thing or two about this. And relationships, being connected, being touched, but also wounded is something that the skin, you know, can, can shine a light on. And then the muscles for really being effective doing something, and the brain for everything, you know, up and above, like, super sensual, you could say. And, yeah, I just wanted to actually have the body talk a little bit and see what are some takes that are more physical on these topics that seem to be quite important and that are oftentimes just lectured on by, you know, aspects like economy, social media and so on.
- [05:46]
Dr. Emma Weinel
It's such a fascinating book and it does take us on such a tale. I've got my copy and I thought if we could. We could dig into each of those organs that you talk so nicely about, and we'll kick off, as you mentioned there, with the lung so vital, so important, as you say. But the thing that struck me about this chapter was the information that's really exploring breathing techniques. And we hear a lot about breathing techniques, particularly in the world that we live in, in social media, et cetera. But tell us a little bit about what you found out about breathing techniques and how people might be able to use them in their everyday lives.
- [06:26]
Dr. Julia Enders
Well, the thing that I like is always when I understand something to such a degree that I really feel like I know why I'm doing this. And oftentimes in these, like, digital spaces, people are just being told what to do and what not to do. And you hear like, oh, it's this kind of breathing. It's the box breathing, or you breathe in for six seconds and then you exhale for eight seconds, or like, all these schemes and patterns. But I hardly ever found someone that explained it to me in a way that I really went like, oh, that's why. Okay, now I'll do it, you know, so that is something that I like to do if I. If I can. And with the breathing techniques, one and two aspects to that where that when you breathe in, your heart has to pump around oxygenated blood. And so when you breathe in really long and really deep, this is a strong activation signal also for your nerves. And your nerves will tell the heart to speed it up a little, you know, get a little hectic, to, like, really get to it. And this creates a sort of balance. When you always breathe in a little deeper and a little longer than you exhale, then your nervous system gets in this more activated state. And this is the reason that when we elongate the exhalation phase, we actually can calm it down, you know, so the nerves around the heart can then relax a little bit. And this tells the nerves in the brain, oh, the nerves in the heart are relaxed. That's nice. You know, it has all these mechanisms where they know what each other is doing. So what I really like is when I can tell people why something works. There's all this health information everywhere nowadays telling you breathe in for five seconds and then breathe out for eight seconds or other patterns like that. And I like to understand a little deeper, why am I doing this? And when you read about the heart and the lung and the brain, what they are up to during breathing, you understand that when you breathe in, the heart has to get into sort of a hectic mode where it just pumps around the freshly oxygenated blood a little bit more effectively. So the nerves will activate the heart and inhibit the nerves that calm down the beating of the heart. And this is fine if you're in a balanced mode of breathing. But if you breathe in really deep and really long and then just exhale very shortly, there's sort of an imbalance where the heart is always a little bit more in this hectic mode. So when we reverse this and actually exhale longer consciously, then the nerves. Has the nerves of the heart get more like an elongated phase of time where they can just calm down a little bit. Do not have to be so hectical, because that's not so much to pump around. So this effect is one central to us. Reducing stress hormones, reducing the heart rate and blood pressure. If we just breathe out a little longer. And the second player in this is also the nose, because the nerves in the mucous membranes of the nose will notice every time you take a breathe in. And then they'll tell the brain, because this is a very nice index for them to see what metabolism is doing. If we need a lot of oxygen because we're running, you know, this is one very first moment where we realize, okay, we're really doing all these things where we need a lot of oxygen and maybe it's good to have a bit more activity in the brain. So they were like, awaken parts of the brain that mediate alertness, attentiveness through the nose. So this is. These are two mechanisms. How breathing can change how we feel, how activated the brain is, and how calm our nerves are. So I like to understand this. It makes me want to do it. And also while I'm doing it, I feel a bit more convinced by why I'm actually doing this.
- [10:09]
Dr. Emma Weinel
Yeah, me too. Breathing is such a vital function, but actually understanding it is really important too, and the impact that it can have on the nervous system. I want to move us on to a different system now because the next chapter talks all about our immune system. And, you know, with world events and pandemics, we've Spoken a lot in the kind of mainstream media about viruses. But this chapter, what I was interested in, is some of the kind of misconceptions and myths that we might have about the immune system. So are there any that you wanted to pick up on in particular?
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Dr. Julia Enders
Well, I like to understand that it is not simply about defending, like killing off the bed, because that's oftentimes what we think the immune system is about. And also during the pandemic, a lot of talk was just tailored towards that, understandably, you know, because that was this term. But it sort of skews the picture of what's really going on and what a body actually thinks safety is. Because when you look at an immune system, it really also has to master to other disciplines, which are really cooperating well with good microbes, tolerating microbes that don't do us any bad. And then really all of this it can only do because it knows us well. And it does so because every second while we're talking, even it has us that just roam around and see, you know, how is it going under there? You know, how are we up here? Is everything all right over there? It's sort of like this. And this is also important because it will tailor its reactions. It will not just kill everything that looks a bit suspicious or strange. When there's a virus in an optical nerve, it can even tolerate it if it's not doing too much harm, because we would go blind if it would attack it there. So the immune system is downregulated in the optical area for that. That's actually kind of smart. But in the throat, it will just go right at it, you know, so. So I think there's this part of safety that is very intelligent, that a body knows that sometimes we just in our own lives or even in society, disregard or don't have in the picture, you know, to a certain degree that I found it just nice to. To be reminded of by the body. And then just like everyday things also are cool, like understanding that when you're sick and you feel like, oh, this germ is doing all these horrible things, I'm having a sore throat and I'm having a fever and my nose is running, that this is really not the germ doing that, but it's the immune system that does these things to get rid of something. So sometimes this maybe shifts your feeling a little bit because you don't feel so much like a victim towards something bad, but you feel like, oh, there's actually stuff happening. You know, the nose is running because it wants to flush this germ. And the throat is hurting because the immune system is really taking away the cells that are infected and causing the nerves to be very sensitive, to alert them. And then all of this is a sort of like, soreness that serves a purpose at least. So sometimes understanding these things makes us not change everything we do, but sometimes, you know, gives us a little bit of a different taste to it.
- [13:17]
Dr. Emma Weinel
And it's interesting, isn't it, because we might be feeling sorry for ourselves, but actually, as you say, that's a really important and healthy function for our bodies when we are maybe a little bit under the weather.
- [13:30]
Dr. Julia Enders
Absolutely. And also patterns. There's patterns in this where when, for example, the nose swells up, it's because all these immune cells are gathering there because something's up. So they really want to all get together and communicate what their next step is and if they can get more help. But we have the same pattern when, for example, we make a wrong step and our ankle hurts and it swells up. This is also because the immune system is going bad, checking out what's now the problem and what was broken here and how they can maybe help fix it. So swell, for example, we can just understand a bit better. Or flushing. When you look at a runny nose, it's the same as diarrhea is. It's just flushing something out. So you could say it's nose diarrhea and coughing is the same, but it does so with air. So understanding suddenly all these mechanisms behind these patterns really gives you also a broader understanding of all kinds of other processes.
- [14:25]
Dr. Emma Weinel
And I wonder whether our listeners, the next time they're feeling a little bit poorly or unwell, whether they might feel actually a little bit better, understanding the maybe of their underlying illness. And the next chapter talks all about skin in terms of healing, protection. But as a premature baby myself, what I was interested in this chapter was the importance of touch, particularly physical touch and babies. So tell us a little bit about that.
- [14:56]
Dr. Julia Enders
So there's been studies on that, actually, for decades already, and starting in South America in the 70s, when we had to understand that we have all these great technical gadgets, but sometimes they just look very chic and still human. Touch is one of the most effective medicines in some situations. And we saw that when babies who were born preterm had contact to their mother's skin right after birth, this was very beneficial for many parameters. The stress, the metabolism, the risk of certain disadvantage events during the course of their stay in hospital, and actually did so with, well, much greater success than machines and incubators if this was added to the care. And we have now seen the study replicated many times. And we have seen it also with babies that are not born preterm, but also just right at the date that they were supposed to. Them having skin contact right after birth also really influences a lot of parameters very positively. And we've done so in other humans, in humans that are in intensive care as grown ups or humans that don't even like touch so much because they have autism, they have like they're on the autism spectrum or they have ADHD for example, find touch sometimes a bit overstimulating, but if someone that they feel comfortable with just touches someone's shoulder or something, we can see heart rate drop, we can see stress hormones drop. You can see all these effects that we would otherwise know from medicines, pills that we get from books. So I really liked just having this in the book also because it reminds us that, you know, it's not always just the great things that come from techniques or pillboxes, but also just from humans and interaction. And the effects are long lasting. Partly. I think when you talked about the preterm baby study, we could see that it was even a year after this event of them being born and then having skin contact that they were still positively influenced by that when you looked at it, stress sensitivity and metabolistic parameters related to stress. So I think this is something to really keep in mind, not also in the area, not only in the area of touch, but now that we are sometimes looking to feel connected through social media and our phones and screens the whole time. This is something we can't substitute. And if we try all the time in front of a screen and we keep scrolling and scrolling, we still won't be touched. So a little reminder of the physical world and it's very helpful effects and
- [17:34]
Dr. Emma Weinel
that uniqueness of being human and being able to communicate with other people because you touch on the impact of loneliness as well and how touch can maybe overcome that. I think this is something a lot of people found in the pandemic, didn't they? Around the real benefits of being able to touch people and have a hug and things like that as well.
- [18:00]
Dr. Julia Enders
Absolutely. And I think it also shines a light on another aspect that is often overlooked. We can't only be, you can not only be alone from, you know, being away from other people. We can also be alone by not being in touch with ourselves. And this is something that you can detect or that I got the inspiration from when just looking at human touch because we can not only touch others, we can also touch ourselves. We touch our faces the whole time or we touch our hands. And the way we do that is different and the situations we do that in different. So some people when they get really nervous or when they get very self critical or when they feel scared, it's all these different situations. And just the other day I had a conversation with my girlfriends where we said, but it's how do you shower? And this one friend, she's like basically roughing through her hair like really quick to get out of the shower, fast to get dressed to go to work. And she said, well, now that I think of it, now that I listen to my other girlfriend that has like all these ointments and oils and nice foamy things and like really does it so smoothly. She said, I feel like maybe I'm showering like I'm a farm animal who's just like rinsing everything off so quickly and a bit like rough, roughing it sort of. And in that way there's also a difference on how we talk to each, to ourselves and then how we talk to others. And sometimes it's interesting that we can be so rude to ourselves that we would never be that rude to others. We would never, if we had to wash someone else's hair, we would never rough it. Like we maybe do it to ourselves in the shower, you know. And so I think talking about the body and just the physical sometimes brings us, us back to very, you know, basic things that are easily forgotten in the digital space. There no one can hear how I talk to myself or how I treat myself. So yeah, we forgot these aspects in the pandemic. We tried to substitute them all with just screens having like business meetings. And to a degree that is a wonderful thing and it's fine if it works. But we also realize we have screen fatigue. So people getting really tired from just looking at others on screens. There's just a component missing. Yeah, the digital space kind of wants to persuade us that it's not so bad if it's missing, but we feel it, you know.
- [20:20]
Dr. Emma Weinel
Yeah. And calming down that, that nervous system as well as we've discussed so important. And that shower example is lovely. I think we probably all afford to take a little bit more time in the shower, perhaps just calming it down a little. And the next chapter talks all about muscles. Now listeners might be a little bit forgiven when we think about muscles for thinking about muscles in isolation. You know, we might have pulled a muscle, we might have sore muscles. From maybe overdoing it in the gym. But the key thing about this chapter for me was exploring the cooperation of our muscles with the brain. And as a neuroscientist, I was always going to pick up on this. But tell us a little bit about how our muscles and our brain work together.
- [21:08]
Dr. Julia Enders
Well, the thing is, if they don't work together, the muscles don't do much. Let's just put it like that. At least our skeletal muscles, they really need the brain to function and to have some movement at all. And the brain will need to change based on what it wants to do. If it wants to do a certain movement. Maybe you want to learn a new dance or you're a baby, you want to get up and sit for the first time, all these things, then the brain really has to get itself there and it has to be plastic. And if it realizes, well, the hand is really trying, or I'm really trying to do this dance move, but I'm not quite there yet, then it will have to change a little bit. And that is also the wonderful thing about humans is that we have this ability to adapt and change based on what we want and what's not there yet, you know, and with movement, this is exactly this game that we play, this challenge that we have changing our nerve cells based on what we want the body to look like, to move like and do. And so there's different papers on that, some ranging From I think 600 genes to a few thousand genes being switched on when we have just one hour of exercise. And this just goes to show that after we've had some exercise, our muscles aren't necessarily popping up right after it, but our shape, but our brain definitely changes and is activated. And if we could just only see that, maybe sometimes that would be really motivating, like seeing how receptors would dopamine, for example. Are transcribed more after moving and being challenged with moving in a certain way, and to a degree, I also wanted it to not only feel like this obligation that exercise and moving has become nowadays, we don't only talk about it in forms of being skinny or athletic or having metabolic health, but also really mental health is now this topic adding to it saying, well, if you're not feeling well after a week of just working on your computer and having stress and eating bad, then you should just, you know, move and have some exercise because then you won't be depressed. And that is an aspect that I sometimes I don't like it because that's not the way the body is set up. It's not there to just fulfill all these obligations and then be stupid if it doesn't. It's really also about understanding why certain things influence and feel like this. And it is because it's also a friendship between muscle and brain. The muscles can also say, I don't want to do this movement. If we run for like 20 minutes and they just hit a wall. This is not the muscles can't run anymore. This is usually because the muscles say, now we're reaching an area where tomorrow you might be so sore. I don't know if that's really worth it. And then the brain can overrule if it thinks it's really important, you know, running despite the pain, but you know they're communicating there. And also when you do some exercises that are more fun, that are outside, we have papers and science on that that it has an extra beneficial aspect that we don't have if we're just fulfilling a chore in the gym and staring at a wall, for example. So there's all these as aspects to understand and also to interpret exercise a little differently than just this, you know, boring obligational thing.
- [24:26]
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Dr. Julia Enders
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- [27:19]
Dr. Julia Enders
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Dr. Emma Weinel
And do we know about different types of exercise as well? So for example, is running different to weightlifting? There's lots of kind of competitive runs or competitive sports crazes going on at the moment. Do we know how different types of exercise impact our muscles?
- [28:09]
Dr. Julia Enders
Yeah, there's papers on differentiating between aerobic exercises and anaerobic exercises and strength training compared to durational like running for a long time compared to like, you know, being still able to breathe while you're running compared to lifting heavy weights, for example. There's different things ascribed to them but I try to not put that to the forefront because I think it's really important that people do what matches their body. Well, there's just people, they've tried doing this one hour in the gym and it's just horrible every time. And for them they should rather experiment with having this bouts of exercise where you do, you know, a few minutes of really getting at it and then take a break and then a few Minutes. And if you realize what type you are, then I would say stick to that and put the other form of training sometimes there in there when you can. But don't, you know, focus on it too much because it's important that you like to do it. You know, if you have fun, go to the samba class and don't, don't lift weights then all the time, if it's just horrible for you. So I really want to encourage people to see it from that perspective that they do something with their muscles that they feel. And maybe you have to try it out for two or three weeks, but then if you still hate it, please just do something else. Clean your apartment with music on the ears. That's really better than not doing anything because it's just so awful and finding
- [29:32]
Dr. Emma Weinel
out what's best for you or what works for you. Right. Because different people, I think, will naturally enjoy different things. And, you know, understanding that exercise often is such a privilege to be able
- [29:42]
Dr. Julia Enders
to do that as well and to be able to enjoy it. Yeah, because that's really what we come from. We had to work on the fields, we had to carry heavy loads to really have food and to stay alive. And now it's certainly this extra thing that we do because we're sitting on a desk the whole day. So I think we shouldn't add more obligation and dryness to our day. We should maybe enjoy that. We can choose which way of movement is good.
- [30:13]
Dr. Emma Weinel
And now the section I. Perhaps it was my favourite section of your book, the Brain. Talking a lot about the brain. As a neuroscientist, I would say this, but the thing that I found interesting here was huge sections on sleep. Now, something that we hopefully are all able to do, but a specific section on why we sleep. And I found this fascinating. It's something we probably don't think about a lot. But what is the function or the purpose of sleep?
- [30:47]
Dr. Julia Enders
Well, there's debates on the different phases of sleep. So if we talk about deep sleep, which occurs to a greater extent in the first half of the night, then this is really to restore our cells, to repair damage that was made to prepare ourselves for the demands of the next day. For example, most of our immune cells are being produced in this phase because also. So it's logistically clever to do so. Our body cells make significantly less mistakes because they're also not disturbed the whole time. You know, by someone eating, running, watching something. You know, things that change all these rhythms and processes around the cells. No, now they have this quiet time where everything can just be regulated super harmoniously. They produce more proteins that deal with mistakes while we transcribe our DNA. So everything is like efficiently packed here. So we really and replenish in the first half of the night and in deep sleep. And then when you look at other sleep phases, and a prominent one is the rem, REM sleep, where we know these typical eye movements, it is associated with dreaming much more than occurs in other sleep phases. And here, really, the research is a bit less unified on what's happening here. But I think the most reliable theories now are, the most repeated theories are that it's very important for problem solving, emotional processing, emotional memory, like remembering things that are emotionally important or charged to us. And the interesting thing here is that we have so much more of this kind of sleep than other animals. So researchers have argued that maybe this is one factor that made us so successful in, you know, having this huge human library of knowledge that we pass on, remember, and then multiply and improve from generation to generation. Because we have this phase of sleep that does that very well and have lots of it. And we also have communities of humans sleeping together so that they are safe enough to have lots of this sleep. Because we are paralyzed during REM sleep, we might move our eyeballs, but really our arms and legs can't do anything. So it seems like a very vulnerable phase of sleep. So it's has to have some nice effect other than just dreaming of your grandma looking like a crocodile or something. I really loved one study, especially on this, which was about people doing a ski trip during the day. And then they were being woken up during different phases of the night. And they would then be asked to repeat what they just dreamed of. And it would get more abstract from time to time. So during the night, they would start dreaming just about skiing. And then the next hour or two hours later, they would dream about being in a white hole, skiing. And then a little later after that, they would dream on standing on a conveyor belt being pulled through a white hole. And one theory is that we just take very different areas of the brain and ask them, does this remind you of something? Could you help me out with solving this problem? And then if we are skiing in a factory, or suddenly we can calculate out all the effects of wind, for example, or if we're standing on a convey belt, we could see, how would mechanics drive this curve? How would they do it? Like experiences we've already collected in our lives, trying to make this better, to make more sense of what we experienced in the day and Then the next day, we might just be able to take this ski route cleverly or just a bit more advanced than we were the day before. And this is just a theory at this point, but it was quite convincing and I liked it because it's also something AI is absolutely not capable of at this point. AI cannot take experiences from haptic things or from something it has. Has witnessed 40 years ago, which just in a way had different frequency, like neural frequencies added to it, like the color white in snow or in a white hall, or, you know, having wind out of the picture just by, you know, taking other sensual experiences. So, so I, I thought this was quite intriguing and I liked it.
- [34:53]
Dr. Emma Weinel
And the evolution of our brains is something that is fascinating in particular at modern life and all the things that. And all the joys and maybe less so joyous things that come with modern life. How do you think our brains might evolve in. In towards the future?
- [35:10]
Dr. Julia Enders
Well, at first, the wonderful thing is that they will because they're always adapting. So I think lots of fear and trouble people make with, you know, how, how we. How will we deal with this modern abstract life that's we were. It's just really, as you said, the question how? And here I find one risk and one opportunity. And this is the one risk is that everything is becoming very abstract. And this gives the brain the possibility to, in a way, disconnect from physical reality a lot more than it was able to in, well, all the times before us. Because now we can just be, you know, a visual and a brain, and we can pretty much ignore the rest until we really have to go to the loo or something. And in neuroscientific research, there's an element that reminds me of this, which is insular theory or just like introspective desynchronization. It's a bit hard for me to find the exact English word terms for it. So the one is that we were wondering for some time, and I think scientists were split up into camps that they said, could we have a brain in a petri dish? Could we have an isolated brain? And it would do all the things brains do, and it's just perfectly great and we can use it for all sorts of things. And then a larger number, I think in earlier times said, we absolutely can. And a smaller number said, oh, we don't think so. And now I think this has shifted a little bit to where we realize that a body actually influences and trains a brain so much and gives it sometimes so that it makes sense, so that it's not just running in purposeless ruminative loops. Then also we associate when we talk about interoception, we nowadays suddenly start to associate mental health problems like psychiatric diseases with problems in interoception. We say, oh, maybe psychiatric diseases have this one aspect where they arise because the signals coming from the outside world are not translated accurately in the brain. So we have false cause sensations that we think our body is feeling that way or the other. But it's rather a problem in transduction or translation so to say. And this also is an important factor when we talk about becoming more digital, having everything a bit more disconnected from actual reality. Because what if then the signals we get from this digital worlds are false as we now see in like fake news or whole world's being built up where people just don't trust reality anymore because they have better arguments online, you know. So these are I think the risks that we can translate to a physical reality quite well. We can see that it is not good for a body to be dissociated from the senses. It's not good for a body to then have wrong signals coming in. So this I think we're facing on two levels. Interestingly, we're facing it on the level of our own body singing in front of a computer or being on the phone too much. And we're witnessing it on the level of just world and world politics and economy and all these things. And so I think there is a great threat, a great thing we really have to be careful about and then also a great opportunity which is that while this is happening, we're building this sort of mega brain, like a huge brain composed of of all these people around the world, stringing their nerves through satellites and creating one sort of consciousness which we are doing online. And we can react so much more sensitive to weather data and weather phenomenon. We can suddenly for the maybe one of the first times in human history, foresee what is risky in 50 years. Because based on the data we have, we know that it will be a bit dangerous to have so much CO2 in the atmosphere. Because of this and this and that and those models. We can, so we can suddenly, suddenly have these senses for future and for present and for all these people that we're not actually in a room with. And that is very sophisticated and interesting. It is like a human brain doing all these things. Although it's not in your foot, it's moving your foot. So I'm excited and I'm cautious and I think this is a little bit ahead and just the troubles of day to day life, we have to navigate and I think we will, we will find balances between being in front of a screen and moving. We will have to find balances what our mental health is able to do, just two dimensional and where it really needs, for example, human touch to actually be healthy. You know, these days, Julia, we've covered
- [39:58]
Dr. Emma Weinel
so much from the lung, the immune system, skin, muscles, the brain and so much more. And if you had one thing that you wanted people listening to take away from your book, your new book, Organ Speak, what would it be?
- [40:16]
Dr. Julia Enders
I think this different feeling for being alive. I think we have lost a little spark because everything has become so mechanistic. So oftentimes we will ask, you know, what are you working, what are you doing? Rarely, you know, what do you need? Because it might be a funny question at a party, but it might tip off more interesting conversations. And just the sense that I've seen in people popping up when they were very much in sickness or shortly before their death and they knew it, suddenly they realized this value of their body, this value of being alive. And I oftentimes felt it was a privilege for me to, to see this over and over again because it reminded me and I think it's, it's very valuable to have this a little earlier in your life as well. You know, this, this body is something built over millions of years by absolutely like different animals, try and error doing all kinds of things. And now it's this shape and form and functioning in all these genius ways. And just no company on the planet can equal to the value of a body. We are different currencies maybe, you know, but the currency of nature essentially is life. So understanding this and feeling this value again and feeling also the genius aspects of all of this and not just what's broken, not just what's maybe not functioning the way you want it to be, really having the whole picture. I think this is something I want people not only to have information on, but to be able to grasp. But.
- [41:55]
Dr. Emma Weinel
And I think that's such a lovely way to end our conversation with that invite to reflect on the. The value of our bodies and how awesome they are, really. Julia, thank you so much for joining me. It's been an absolute pleasure.
- [42:08]
Dr. Julia Enders
Thank you for having me.
- [42:10]
Dr. Emma Weinel
That was Julia Enders, author of Organ Speak what It Really Means to Listen to Our Bodies, which is available now online and in stores. I'm Emma Winel and you've been listening to Intelligent Squared. Thank you for joining us.
- [42:25]
Intelligence Squared Producer Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Ginny Hooker and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings, you can become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership. If you'd like to join us at future live events, you can see our full program and buy tickets over@intelligencesquared.com you've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
- [43:03]
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- [44:03]
Dr. Emma Weinel
Your next chapter in health care starts
- [44:05]
Dr. Julia Enders
at Carrington College's School of Nursing in Port. Join us for our open house on Tuesday, January 13th from 4 to 7pm you'll tour our campus, see live demos, meet instructors and learn about our Associate Degree in Nursing program that prepares you to become a registered nurse. Take the first step toward your nursing career. Save your spot now at Carrington Edu Events. For information on program outcomes, visit carrington. Edu Sci
- [44:36]
Home Depot / Blinds.com / Sweetgreen Advertiser
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- [44:58]
Dr. Julia Enders
Visit your nearby Lowe's.