Mind-opening lectures on the physiology of stress

Saturday, March 18, 2006

Mind-opening lectures on the physiology of stress

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/03/18/mindopening_lectures.html

Stanford's Dr. Robert Sapolsky is a specialist in the physiology of stress, and two of his sterling lectures are available gratis through the iTunes music-store. When I quit my day-job on Jan 1, I finally got around to going to the doctor about all the little ailments that had plagued me for the years leading up, little patches of skin conditions, aches, pains and botheration, and as each was diagnosed and treated, I looked them up online and saw that they were all symptomatic of excessive stress.

Sapolsky's engaging, fascinating lectures trace all the ways that stress creates heretofore unseen ailments in a population that has largely cured all the fast-killing diseases and can now afford to contract slow and lingering ones. From psychogenic dwarfism -- children who stop growing and never go through puberty due to extreme abuse-stress, something that Peter Pan author JM Barrie suffered from -- to the effects of stress on the heart, brain, blood, and long term overall health, Sapolsky's research is mind-blowing to those of us who wear our stress and overwork like badges of honor.

What's more fascinating is Sapolsky's citations to empirical research on the factors that mitigate harm from stress, which are surprisingly simple and intuitive. All told, listening to these two lectures was the best audio experience I've had in months:

Saplosky related a story about a boy from a very psychologically-abusive setting who was hospitalized in a New York hospital with zero growth hormone in his bloodstream. Over the next two months he developed a close relationship with the nurse at the hospital–undoubtedly the first normal relationship he had ever had–and soon, amazingly enough, the growth hormone levels zoomed back to normal. The nurse then went on vacation and the levels dropped again, rising once more immediately after her return.

"Think about it," Sapolsky said, commenting upon the story. "The rate at which this child was depositing calcium in his bones could be explained entirely by how safe and loved he was feeling in the world." He added that while this standard textbook version of stressed dwarfism is rare, there is nevertheless "major league psychopathology" throughout society, retarding human growth.

"Major stress is the police and social workers breaking down the door of the apartment, finding the kids who have been locked in the closet for two months, the food slipped under the door. Total nightmare situations that turn out often in history. . . kids in war zones, kids in areas of civil strife."

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Those of you who have stayed with me here at Sinopian View and Ameri's life will find that some of what is posted here is reflected in Ameri's history. The piece that I quote above is from one of my favorite Daily Reads, Boing Boing .

No one human is of whole cloth at birth or even at conception. The quality of the care given before and immediately after birth is the continuation of the looming that is necessary to make a whole human and a human whole. That looming, which is the totality of all the care and relationships from conception to old age, contiues right up to the moment of the last breath.

The evidence of failure on the part of humankind to care for its own is evidenced by the news photographs of the starving in Africa, the bulging at the seams prision systems, and the sleeping lumps in the door ways of the great metropolitan cities of the world.

More.