"Worried Sick" premiered July 3. 2003.

				The Primates' Stress Club Baboons jockeying for social status stress themselves out and make themselves sick - just like us.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: This is the Masai Mara Game Reserve in Kenya-- 700 square miles of rolling grassland, filled with classic African scenes. When our cameras came here a few years ago, we were looking for these. Baboons are all over the Masai Mara. They're smart and successful primates, with no real enemies except perhaps themselves. In this respect, they're much like humans. Baboon troops have a lot of rules, which would have remained known only to baboons if it hadn't been for a Stanford University biologist, Robert Sapolsky. In 30 years of study, he's learned not only the complex rules of baboon social life, but also how those rules can place many members of the troop under immense stress. He's now a leading expert in what stress does to animals and to humans. Okay, now, don't be fooled. We've jumped from Africa to the San Francisco Zoo, and these are black buck, antelope from India.7?? Recently I caught up with Robert Sapolsky here to find out some of the basics of stress. So, what... what... How does an animal like that experience stress? What happens? Well, it's your basic sort of crisis in the savanna there. You're running for your life, something's coming after you. This is no time to plan for next winter's growth spurt. It's no time to, you know, reach puberty. It's no time to repair last week's injury. You mobilize energy to deliver at whichever muscles are going to get you across the grasslands there. You increase your blood pressure so you get the oxygen going there in two seconds instead of three. So basically you shut down all the long-term projects and you just divert all your physiology to getting away from that tiger. When they're stressed because a predator's coming after them, how long does that tend to last? I mean, might not... might not they be always attacked by predators? Is it just... really just a few seconds? I mean, that's the key difference between them and us. They are not thinking about predators. They are not thinking about any long term... They're probably not thinking about much of anything-- but that may be sort of my primate bias-- but they're certainly not having long-term psychological stress. Something happens and it's over with in 30 seconds or else they're over with. It's very short-term, acute stuff. They're not getting stressed, you know, worrying about the ozone layer or the rain forests or whatever it is that's sort of psychologically stressful to us. They're not worrying about the long-term stuff. ALDA: And every once in a while, one will pick up its head and thinks it hears something. And then they'll all get a little bit like that. And then maybe they'll take off. Now, in those moments, aren't they going through some beginning of this process even if there's nothing really out there bothering them? Oh, yeah, absolutely. They're mobilizing. There's a whole physiology of not yet using all that energy but getting ready to do it and, yeah, they're probably doing that 50 times a day for five seconds at a time. But the thing is that they're... when they're munching the grass, before they hear a sound or smell something that alerts them, they're not having this kind of anxiety thinking about it: "Even though I'm eating grass, something's liable to come along any minute now." SAPOLSKY: Exactly. None of them are sitting there thinking, "Oh, my God. I'm going to die someday." There's not that anticipatory sort of angst stuff. They're not sophisticated enough. They're not cognitively complex enough. ALDA: All animals, including us, have this "fight-or-flight" stress response, as it's called, whereby we shut down everything except what we need to survive. The problem is that big-brained primates get stressed constantly by all kinds of things-- like the stock market for us, or for baboons, like competing for social position. Antelopes, on the other hand, turn off their stress the moment pthe danger has passed, and their physiology comes back into balance. ALDA: You know that they're not in that physiological state of stress most of the time. And the best way to get a sense of that is the whole notion: stress-related diseases, stuff you get by just turning on the stress response all the time, all the time. That's a primate invention. That's an invention of species that are smart enough to just get oothemselves sick with psychological nonsense. woThey're not up to that level. That's our specialty. Boy, are we lucky. We got it... We got it figured out. What a deal. What a deal we got there with that cortex of ours. ALDA: Here's an example of baboon psychological nonsense, as Sapolsky calls it. The guy on the left is very worried. He knows he'll lose a fight, but it's a purely psychological clash, humiliating and stressful for the loser. Sapolsky sees baboons play out these kinds of mind games all the time. Sapolsky's been able to match up his knowledge of individual baboons' psychological stress with what's happening in their bodies. In blood samples analyzed in the field, he measures the stress hormones that trigger the fight-or-flight response. They should be present only briefly, but in psychologically stressed baboons they can be there over the long term, with serious consequences. ALDA: When a baboon is under stress and it's this kind of, uh... long-term thing, similar to what we go through, what's the baboon going through physiologically? SAPOLSKY: Bad news. I mean, you go back to the antelope running away from the tiger. You mobilize energy to power your leg muscles to get you across the savanna. Instead, you're sitting there for hours each day thinking about that scary guy on the other side of the field or the mortgage payment due at the end of this month. Chronically, you mobilize energy. You don't store it. Your body wastes a lot of it. There's a bunch of metabolic diseases you're more likely to get. You're that antelope running for your life. You increase your blood pressure, deliver the oxygen, glucose in two seconds, blah, blah... Do that chronically and what you're suffering from is high blood pressure. You're that antelope, short term. You shut down digestion, growth, reproduction, immunity, tissue repair, all of that. No problem, do all that stuff 30 minutes from now when it's all over with. Do it chronically, like a psychologically stressed primate, you get ulcers, you get colitis, you get reproductive problems, your immune system doesn't work as well, you get more infectious diseases. And those same stress hormones, which short-term can make you think more clearly, alertly-- a very good thing for that ten-second sprint. Do it chronically and they can be in fact very damaging to the nervous system. ALDA: In the rest of this program we're going to look more closely at some of the ways stress can undermine health, and we'll also see if there's anything we can do about it. ( exhales audibly, slowly )

				Angry at Heart Researchers find a direct link between long-term stress and clogged arteries. Can an aggressive personality make you sick?
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: We're at the Wake Forest Medical School in North Carolina, in the lab of Jay Kaplan. Who do you think is dominant in that pen? WOMAN: Oh, I'd say... ALDA: Kaplan has conducted a series of experiments that shed some light on the interactions among personality, stress and heart disease. His subjects are macaque monkeys. In the wild, macaques, like baboons, live in large groups filled with competition and contention. Social hierarchies are established, with dominant and subordinate animals. KAPLAN: If I look in this pen now, I see the two monkeys on the right, who look to be sitting exactly where they want to be sitting. One of them is now threatening three monkeys who are huddled off up on the upper left, hanging off the bars, which is a less preferred position. So I would say that these two guys are the dominant monkeys in this group, and the other three are more subordinate-- just by the nature of the way they're using the space in here. ALDA: The relationships the monkeys establish are not an accident. They're determined by interactions of their personalities. Some are just naturally more aggressive, and they come to dominate. Primate personalities are stable over the long run, as Robert Sapolsky discovered with his baboons. Personality is the key to understanding their lives, he says. ALDA: Does a difference in personality have something to do with how well they're able to handle stress or how much stress they experience? SAPOLSKY: Yeah, absolutely. Sort of my initial assumption that I sort of squandered my first 15 years on with them was "dominance rank." That's the thing. If you're a low-ranking baboon, you're going to have the stress-related diseases. And what I've learned since then is, yeah, rank's important. Far more important is what sort of society you have that rank in. Is it a troop that treats its low-ranking animals miserably? Is it a troop whose hierarchy is unstable? Those are both much more stressful situations. And then even more important than your rank and the sort of society in which it occurs is your personality-- which is basically saying, what's your filters with which you see the world around you? And that's the single biggest predictor. You look at a single question: How often, if you're a male baboon, how often do you sit there in contact with another baboon, grooming another baboon, being groomed back? Get sort of an aggregate measure of that, a sociality score, and that's the single strongest predictor I have ever found of stress hormone levels in these animals. ALDA: In the macaque monkey experiments, the kind of social complexity which macaques and baboons show in the wild has been stripped away. Come on, come on, come on. ALDA: Here a group of five males-- all strangers to one another-- are placed together. They immediately set about establishing who's dominant and who's subordinate. This is exactly what macaques do in the wild, but here everything's exaggerated. Groups are unnaturally small, and their members are switched often. So here complex social relationships aren't as important as just the relative aggressiveness of the personalities. This is a stressful time. But the question is, who's under most stress-- the top monkeys or the subordinates? Some groups are remotely monitored for vital signs-- heart rate, for example. Hi, guys. ALDA: The dominance hierarchies within the groups are constantly reinforced, with the leaders confirming their leadership. And as they do so, a surprising fact emerges. It's not subordinate but dominant monkeys that are most stressed-- with higher heart rates, blood pressure and stress hormone levels. Maybe in the wild it wouldn't be so simple, but here dominance equals aggression equals stress. Food is the next ingredient in the macaque experiments. The monkeys get a nutritious diet, but about one-third is fat. That's high fat for monkeys, and about average for Americans. So the dominant males lead the same kinds of lives that many humans do-- plenty of stress, with plenty of fat to eat. During the course of the experiments, the monkeys get regular checkups of their cardiovascular systems. This is an angiogram procedure, to look at the coronary arteries, exactly like what a human patient might receive. Some of the experiments run for two years, and over that time the dominant, stressed monkeys develop twice the artery-clogging atherosclerosis as the subordinate animals. KAPLAN: Animals who maintain their dominance under these conditions experience arousal of the fight-flight response. Whereas animals who immediately become subordinate under these conditions don't experience those same cardiovascular changes. And its the cardiovascular response that accompanies the behavior of maintaining dominance under these provocative conditions that we think is damaging when combined with a high-fat diet. ALDA: Males whose aggressive personalities compel them to keep a cageful of subordinates in their place experience constant surges in heart rate and blood pressure-- enough to damage their blood vessels and provide sites where artery-clogging deposits can build up. ( barking softly ) Good morning. BOTH: Good morning. I'd like for you, please, to fill out some questionnaires for us. These are some standard psychological questions. ALDA: So does aggressiveness damage arteries in people, too? Aggressiveness, along with mistrust and anger, define what psychologists call a "hostile personality." These qualities are assessed with this standard questionnaire. VOICES ( reading statements ): ALDA: Thirty years ago, it was thought that Type A personalities-- dynamic, always in a hurry-- got heart problems. But that wasn't always reliable. A few researchers thought hostility was a better match, so they went back through the records of old personality tests and tracked down the people who had taken them. Redford Williams takes up the story. WILLIAMS: What we found was that those people who had high hostility scores back in the 1950s were two to three times more likely to develop heart disease. And in one study, those with high hostility scores were about seven times more likely to die. The first time it inflates, it might be a little tight. ALDA: In Redford Williams' lab, they've been studying how hostile and nonhostile personalities react to stress. WOMAN: I'm just going to put a syringe on here, because we're going to be drawing bloods... ALDA: Blood stress hormone levels, blood pressure and pulse rates will be tracked while subjects remember and relive a stressful event. First unstressed, resting levels are measured. Terry's blood pressure is normal-- 136/72. The blood sample, analyzed later, will show low stress hormone levels. I'm just going to take blood like we had talked about. Now I want you to recall a time, sometime in the past, when you felt very angry towards another person. This should be a situation or incident that still makes you angry right now when you think about it. I was an assistant teacher... ALAN: Terry's blood pressure increases a little as her anger rises-- about ten percent. TERRY ( continuing ): And we had a small girl. She had been abused by her mother. And... but she had gotten to the point where she couldn't even speak anymore. So they put her in our autistic classroom... ALDA: Blood pressure is up another five percent. TERRY: She would come into class with bruises on her body. We called the Social Services... ALDA: Although Terry's now clearly upset, her blood pressure and stress hormone reactions are mild. TERRY: We couldn't get anybody to do anything about it. That made me angry. ALDA: Now a different kind of stress, and a new subject, Theresa. Your start number is 13,485. ALDA: Theresa has to keep on subtracting, in steps of nine, as quickly as possible. Okay, that would be thirteen thousand, four hundred and... did you say eighty-five? Um, seventy-six? That's correct. ALDA: The experimenter signals for Theresa to speed up. Um... ALDA: Now she's getting really flustered, but her blood pressure's hardly up at all. Last correct number-- 13,476 minus nine. Seventy-six minus nine, Theresa, is... Okay, now, remember, accuracy counts. Sixty-four. No, it's not. I got a phone call at work, and my coworker answered... ALDA: Now here's Carlton, doing the anger recall test. and it was the alarm company at my house. And my burglar alarm was going off, and police were called. Well, instant panic set in. I was scared to death. That's about the time my kids come home-- my little girl and my little boy get home from school. ALDA: Already Carlton's blood pressure has shot up, his pulse is racing. I yelled at my boss, "I'm leaving!" made the fastest ride home that I've ever made in my life. I got to the house, and the police officers were leaving. So I grabbed a great big Maglite flashlight that I have in my truck, opened the door, stormed into my house, yelling the whole time, "I've got a gun. If you're in my house, come out." I jump through the doorways, intending to crack the skull of anybody that was in there. I was so mad, thinking about my kids. ALDA: Unlike the others, Carlton scored high on the hostiYlity questionnaire. WILLIAMS: Even low hostile people vdo get angry. I mean, everybody gets angry if provoked enough. And the fascinating thing is that when high hostile people get angry, they have this very large fight-flight response. But when low hostile people get angry, their response-- their biological response-- is much smaller. It's as though they are wired in a different way. The connection between anger and that arousal-- that biological arousal for fight or flight-- is not so tight in low hostile people as it is in high hostile people. ALDA: The lesson of the lab stress tests is that personality really matters. Just as with Sapolsky's baboons and Jay Kaplan's macaques, hostile, aggressive personalities experience more stress over the long term, and that's bad for their health. WILLIAMS: The one person that we had today who had a higher level of hostility on the hostility questionnaire showed a much higher level of blood pressure-- both systolic and diastolic-- during the test, during the anger, than the other three who had lower levels. And this is probably what's happening with us-- and I include myself in this group-- us high hostile people. Day in and day out, we're getting angry at little things. Our blood pressure is going up more than people like Thom here who don't have a high hostility level. And that's probably what's clipping off our arteries and damaging our arteries and causing the increased atherosclerosis. Now, it's not the only thing, obviously. We have our cholesterol levels, our health habits, our exercise habits, and Lord knows, a multiplicity of genes that feed into this. But this is one thing that does feed in. And, you know, it doesn't mean you're, for sure, going to have a heart attack. It means that you've got a slightly, but reliably increased risk. ALDA: This is New York City-- urban living at its most hectic and its most stressful. You may be surprised to learn that walking around, hidden inside the chests of hundreds of New Yorkers are tiny stress-measuring devices. Charles Harmon has one. He's an office worker and also a heart patient who carries an automatic implanted defibrillator. When clogged arteries reduce blood flow to the heart, heart muscle can be damaged. Damaged hearts can lose their steady rhythm. Extreme arrhythmia is called "fibrillation," and the defibrillator shocks the heart back into action. DOCTOR: Have you had any racing heartbeats? HARMON: A little bit. I could feel it. DOCTOR: Enough to set off the defibrillator? HARMON: Not quite. No, it never did that. Did it make you feel dizzy or pass out? I didn't pass out, but I got a little dizzy. So let's interrogate the device. We'll talk to it. ALDA: Implanted defibrillators are pretty smart. Not only do they constantly monitor heart rhythm and deliver shocks when appropriate; they also record everything they do. Nothing's happened since we last saw you ??a few weeks ago. ALDA: Stress, with its surging blood pressure and pulse rate, can overload a damaged heart and disrupt its rhythm. Everybody is susceptible to stress. And everyone can have a physiologic response to stress. It's the interaction of that response and a damaged, diseased heart that leads to dangerous arrhythmias. ALDA: September 11, 2001, was the beginning of a time of extreme stress for New Yorkers. All over the city, implanted defibrillators were sitting in the chests of heart patients, monitoring hearts, firing off when they detected dangerous arrhythmias and recording their actions. Charles Harmon's cardiologist collected records downloaded from 200 implanted defibrillators. STEINBERG: We found the results were quite striking. There was about a 2-fold increase in the number of patients who experienced these arrhythmias in the period-- 30-day period after the attack-- compared to the 30-day period before the attack. ALDA: Stress can be the final trigger for a heart attack. It's estimated that 40,000 heart attacks a year are triggered by stress-- as many as caused by strenuous exercise. And as we've seen, chronic stress clogs up arteries as well, damaging the heart and making it more vulnerable to an attack. So stress is a major risk to cardiovascular health. And next we're going to see how stress undermines another of the body's essential systems.

				To Heal or Not to Heal For better or for worse, in sickness and in health; the state of your marriage can affect your immune system.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: We're in Columbus, Ohio, at the Ohio State University's Clinical Research Center. The couple on the left, Eve and Bud, are going to let the researchers probe into the most private areas of their marriage. Now, I usually start like right here in the middle. ALDA: The researchers are trying to see if the psychological health of the marriage has any effect on the physical health of the couple. Okay, great. ALDA: It's a gruesome, but ingenious technique. The couple's given superficial skin wounds on the arm-- eight small blisters, produced using a suction pump. Okay, now I'm going to turn this on. EVE: Okay. ( machine whirring ) Now, do you feel that? Yeah, I feel it. Okay, okay. ALDA: It's an uncomfortable process, but not painful. Bud'll get his blisters next. MAN: You're just going to do the best you can to fill out the bubbles. It's not a big deal. Okay. BUD: She cheats on all tests, you know. ALDA: Psychologist Tim Loving asks Eve and Bud to assess how much they disagree in typical sensitive areas like money or in-laws. A zero score means no disagreement, so it seems Eve and Bud, who've been married 13 years, get along pretty well. After ten minutes, nurse Lois Grinston checks her handiwork. GRINSTON: Oh, those are lovely. Just lovely. ALDA: The idea is to follow how well Eve and Bud's lovely blisters heal over the course of the next month and to see if the stress levels in their marriage have any effect. Ninety couples are in the study. The healing process will be monitored visually and by measuring the rate the blisters dry out. Also, during the first 24 hours, fluid placed in little chambers above the wounds will be drawn off. The fluid will be assayed for the chemicals which the body's immune system sends to wound sites to get healing started. GRINSTON: Okay, guys, we're getting ready to get started now. And I'm going to close the curtain. ALDA: With the blisters in place, and Lois Grinston ready to draw blood samples, Eve and Bud are supposed to start arguing. Likely hot topics have been suggested by the researchers, after exploring with the couples the questionnaires they had filled out. For Eve and Bud, they've zeroed in on Bud's hearing aid-- or rather his lack of a hearing aid. When they put me in the casket, you can go ahead and put the hearing aid in my ear. The bad thing is, we even have a hearing aid at home that you could wear so that you won't have to keep saying, "What? What? What?" even when we're watching a movie. ALDA: As with the hostility study we saw earlier, blood samples will show what levels of stress hormones the argument stimulates. We have to keep rewinding the movie so you can hear what they said, which is aggravating. Well, you should put the hearing aid in your ear and listen to the news for a while and see what the hearing aid sounds like. You've never had it in. How do you know? You've never tried to watch a movie with it. I watch a movie with it once in a while. ALDA: In fact, their hearts aren't really in this argument. When sometime? Next time we watch a movie. Okay, I'll go rent one tonight. I didn't say quite that soon. ALDA: Bud and Eve are really pretty good friends. Their argument provoked no stress hormones in the blood; their immune systems responded strongly to the blisters; and healing was close to complete by around day 12. They're a typical unstressed couple with healthy immune systems. Now let's follow Deb and Mike through the same procedure. They've been married ten years. They don't regard their relationship as terrible, but neither one has any difficulty coming up with multiple areas of disagreement. The researchers have several topics to suggest for discussion. For Mike and Deb, how to divide time between chores and relaxation is a contentious area. Observing this session is Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, the psychology professor who developed these tests. All right, well, I... Now wait, number one... Well, we can start talking. Number one. Two hours. You know, I put my workout schedule together for you on the fridge so you could see what days I'm going to run. Number one, you need a healthy heart. And number two... ALDA: As before, blood samples are taken to measure stress hormone levels. I talk about, in our lives right now... That's how you accomplish things. we are so busy from the minute we wake up till the minute we go to sleep. Take, for instance, the morning. When I wake up, you wake up, you get yourself ready, and you go to work. Yep. I get myself up. I get myself ready. I do a load of laundry, check the e-mails, pack the kids' lunches, put the dishes away... If you guys get together once in a while, whether it be in the evenings... How long is "once in a while"? ALDA: Deb and Mike may not have a perfect relationship, but as with almost all the couples in the study, it's still a marriage that works. In fact, Deb and Mike don't regard this argument as especially stressful. You said, "You got to do it the way I like it." KIECOLT-GLASER: The couples who tended to be nastier or more hostile toward each other had higher elevations in stress hormones, particularly the women, and they had greater changes 24 hours later, in terms of a whole battery of different immunological assays. We were surprised because the conflicts, the discussions of disagreement, weren't what you'd call heated or nasty, by and large-- it's only a relative kind of thing. These were very happy couples. They only represented... Among the sample we had, only three percent would be what we would call distressed couples based on the way they described their marriages. And yet we could find these reliable relationships between physiology and behavior. ALDA: Here are the blisters, unhealed at day 6, in one of those mildly stressed marriages. And here they are-- nearly healed-- at the same day in an unstressed marriage. It's a dramatic contrast, given the relatively low stress levels involved. Hey, guys, how you doing? Good. Dr. Pooles-- nice to meet you. So what are we supposed to be doing today? Today is head and neck. ALDA: These are medical students in the last few weeks before important exams. It's the kind of high-stress situation we all find ourselves in from time to time. You could look through the scalp, see if there's... ALDA: This is another Ohio State study-- this time to see if it's possible to deliberately counteract the effects of stress. John Stauffer and Ben Taylor are second-year students just coming up for their first clinical exams. A total of 57 students receive the same blister wounds the married couples got, with the progress of healing to be tracked in the same way. WOMAN: We place it just on top like that. ALDA: Soraya Rofagha is just completing her neurology rotation, and she has a big final exam in two weeks. ROFAGHA: Well, she's a 21-year-old white female with a 15-month history of weakness in her lower extremities which began in July 2001, when she noticed increased difficulty when she was walking to and from work. She has had increased weakness in the past two months... ALDA: The students continue with their routines as the blisters on their arms heal. So, functionally, she's really decreased, and they're thinking about putting her in a wheelchair. ALDA: The students were randomly assigned to two groups. John Stauffer was in the group that was simply left to cope with the stress >r>Vin their own ways. But Ben Taylor's group got something extra. WOMAN: gBreathe slowly and deeply. You let tension go, and you let yourself go deeper. Begin by relaxing your right foot, just letting the tension flow out... ALDA: Throughout the pre-exam period, all of Ben's group attended frequent sessions in which they received standard relaxation therapies. down into your fingertips, every muscle fiber just letting go. ALDA: All the students were tested again to compare healing during a relaxed, exam-free period. That ensures it was really the &jjstress of exams being assessed, not simply the stress of receiving the blister wounds. The study showed that students under a pretty common kind of stress suffered the same effects as the stressed married couples: increased stress hormones in the blood, reduced immune system function, and delayed wound healing. But it also showed that the simple relaxation therapies that Ben's group received were remarkably effective. Their blister wounds healed up as rapidly as everyone's did during the relaxed, non-exam period. The conclusion that our immune systems don't work so well when we're under psychological stress is completely consistent with what we know about the fight-or-flight stress response. After all, the whole point of the stress response is to briefly shut down nonessentials, while we make a quick getaway. You can afford to put off fighting infections for 30 seconds. But that means long-lasting stress makes us more vulnerable to disease. Exactly which diseases or how severe they might become is still controversial, but the basic conclusion that chronic stress and disease go together is beyond doubt. Next, we're going to explore further what we can do about stress.

				Just Relax Renowned stress researcher Herbert Benson helps Alan relax while scientists look into a meditating brain.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: So that's picking up what? WOMAN: This is the photoplethysmograph, and this is picking up your skin conductance, which is another way of saying your skin sweating. You sweat enough to indicate a change in... I mean a subtle change in... Oh, yes. Every time you experience any kind of emotional change, your circulation changes. ALDA: I always seem to be the guinea pig on Frontiers. This time, they want to see if I can relax. PREWITT: What I'm going to do now is just wipe off your forehead just to get any extra oil off and put the muscle-tension monitor on you... sensor. How do you measure muscle tension on my forehead? I'm not known for the muscles in my forehead. Well, there's not a lot of fatty tissue on the forehead, and it's considered to be a good indicator of the muscle tension in the rest of your body. What are you measuring? Well, it actually measures the electrical impulses put out by the muscle. Oh, I see. I'm just going to put the lead up. It's not going to be the most comfortable thing, but, uh... MAN: How many years have you been doing this? ALDA: This show, we've done, uh... I've been doing it about seven or eight years now. ALDA: Now I'm supposed to get into a normal, even state of mind as I make small talk with Herbert Benson. For 35 years, he's been a leading advocate of relaxation as a useful medical therapy. He even coined the phrase "relaxation response" to describe what I'm about to do. But first, just to make a nice contrast, I get to be totally frantic while everyone watches my numbers go off the charts. If I give you the number 113, I'd like you to subtract 13 so that you have 100, and then you subtract 13 again to have 87. ALDA: I see. I'm going to be testing you for speed and accuracy, so it's very important that you're accurate, but also very quick. Right. Okay? Do you have any questions? No, but I know my needle is jumping right now. Okay, okay, I would like you to say the numbers aloud and as fast as you can, okay? So I'm going to have you start from the number 6,046. And subtract 13. That's right. 6,046 minus 13. 6,033. Right, faster. Keep going. Oh, I keep going. Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, keep going. 6,033... 6,020... 6,003... 6,006... no. Wrong. 6,007... Could you just start over from the beginning. 6,046. ( Alda laughing ) Okay, start over. 6,046, subtract 13. 6,046 minus 13... six thousand... ( laughing ) I'm sorry. 6,046 minus 13... I could do this the first time; I can't do it now. ALDA: As I'm flailing around, it's not just these measures that are jumping. The stress hormones in my blood must be surging, too. ALDA: 6,020... ALDA: Mercifully, Herbert Benson comes to the rescue. 5,074... Seventy-seven... Okay, okay, that's enough. Let me show you how to evoke the relaxation response. So if you will, just close your eyes. And relax all your muscles, starting with your feet, your calves, your thighs. Shrug your shoulders around. Roll your head and neck around. Great. Wonderful. Now sit without movement and just focus on your breathing, but breathe oh, so slowly. Each time your breath is coming out, say silently to yourself the word "calm." You're going to find all sorts of other thoughts coming to mind. Those thoughts are natural. They should be expected. But when they occur, don't be upset, but simply say, "Oh, well," and passively come back to the word "calm." On each out breath, "calm," and as the other thoughts come to mind, just, "Oh, well," and back to "calm." ALDA: This is a simple, basic form of meditation. The sensors confirmed what I was beginning to feel-- that I was more relaxed. BENSON: Now just slowly, slowly open your eyes. How was that? It was nice. You got into it nicely. What did the physiologic changes show? PREWITT: I think the most dramatic one was your muscle tension, measured right here. Before it was so high, it was off the screen. And after about a minute and a half, it came down quite nicely. BENSON: This is how you can use the mind to affect the stresses of the body. And to the extent that any disorder is caused or made worse by stress, to that extent, we can use this as a therapy. Is there a difference between what you might call chronic stress and momentary stress? I mean, is it good for you to have short bursts of stress that you can handle? The more the stress, the more efficient you are, the more productive you are, but to a point. When it gets too chronic and... then performance and efficiency start dropping off. And that's what most people are experiencing. ALDA: John Goddard is one of the beneficiaries of Benson's relaxation therapy. Once a victim of panic attacks, depression and high blood pressure, he's now mentally stable and off his blood pressure medication. He says his daily meditation is responsible. GODDARD: It's given me my life back. I was hiding in my house for 12 years, I was so frightened. And now I'm out in the world. I'm actually working again. It's just so fantastic. ALDA: Gina Francis failed for years to get pregnant. After learning relaxation techniques, she now has one child, and there's another on the way. Elisa Toledo had a stress-induced heart attack. Her cardiologist recommended yoga-based relaxation for stress management. TOLEDO: When I used to feel stress, I would do very shallow breathing. And that really is a sign of stress. And by telling yourself the same word all the time or focusing on the same sound, you can de-stress yourself very quickly. I mean, it doesn't happen, like, within seconds, but you can, over a period of a few minutes, de-stress yourself, where before, I didn't know to do that. You know, I would be stressed, and I would just probably stay stressed for the day. ALDA: It makes sense that reducing stress lowers blood pressure or increases the chance of pregnancy, p(f because the fight-or-flight stress response does the opposite-- increases blood pressure and shuts down reproduction. But exactly how meditation and yoga function to reduce stress is still something of a mystery. This is northern India, the foothills of the Himalayas, and the year is 1981. These scenes were filmed on visits led by Herbert Benson to track down experts in Tum-mo yoga. It's practiced by Tibetan monks who had followed the Dalai Lama here when he was exiled. Benson, knowing of the Dalai Lama's reputation for openness, got permission to investigate. BENSON: For years, the practice of Tum-mo has been a secret within Tibetan Buddhist practice, and you allowed the West to have studies of this for the first time. Why is that? Yes, as you mentioned, this is a practice usually regarded as a secret doctrine and also a very private thing. But I feel, as usually I believe and also explain to people, that we are believing or... emphasis on reasons and facts. If this is something true, something fact, then the investigation taken through meditation, and investigation taken through instrument, may reach the same point. ALDA: The Tum-mo meditation experts live alone in unheated stone huts at high altitude. Benson was able to bring some into town for tests. He was astonished to learn what they were capable of. BENSON: What their monks can do in Tum-mo yoga is, essentially naked in midwinter, with... in 40-degree-Fahrenheit temperatures, take a sheet measuring six by three feet, dip it in icy water, wrap themselves in that sheet. You and I will go into uncontrollable shivering and perhaps even die. They can get that sheet steaming within three to five minutes. Steaming! We've been studying that for 20 years. ALDA: Benson brought back now famous film of the Tum-mo monks drying their ice-cold sheets. For them, it's of course an essential religious ritual, designed to create a fire which burns away all traces of improper thinking. For Benson, it was simply astonishing, and, in fact, he found with his tests that monks could, at will, raise the temperature of their extremities-- fingers and toes-- by as much as 15 degrees. At the same time, they don't increase their heart rates, he found. So somehow, they must be deliberately opening up their blood vessels, increasing the flow. I'm no Tibetan monk, but after my relaxation session, the idea of warming yourself up didn't sound out of the question to me. ALDA: Three-quarters of the way through, trying to repeat the word "calm," I felt warmer. BENSON: Exactly. That's a common response. You see, the stress hormones lead to vasoconstriction. That's just what we were measuring-- muscle tension. When you evoke the relaxation response that way, what then occurred, that hormone was counteracted, and that led to a warming of the skin. ALDA: But how exactly are the stress hormones counteracted? Usually the fight-or-flight stress response is beyond our conscious control. It just starts and stops automatically. Somehow meditators tap into the part of the brain that controls the switches. And you don't have to be a Tibetan monk to do it. ( people exhaling rhythmically in unison ) ALDA: We're in a community just outside Boston which follows the Sikh religion and practices a kind of yoga called Kundalini, which literally means "coiled like a snake." Kundalini yoga aims to uncoil the snake, unleashing the energy of body and mind. Hari Mandir Kaur Khalsa has practiced Kundalini for about ten years. She's come here to the Massachusetts General Hospital so researchers can look into her brain while she meditates. The study's being run by Sara Lazar, a psychologist, assisted by Katie Killilea. So this should be just a little snug. It should definitely not restrict your breathing, but you should feel it move upon inhalation and exhalation. Just tight enough... ALDA: Hari Mandir will be wearing uncomfortable wires and tubes, and she'll be inside a noisy MRI machine, so she needs to be an expert meditator to avoid distraction. Would you like something underneath your legs? Yes. Okay. Just as that goes into place. ALDA: There's a frame to hold a mirror so she can read an instruction screen. All right. ALDA: The operators line up the 30 thin slices in which the machine will picture brain activity. Okay, we're going to get started. This one's going to be a little bit loud, and it's going to last 32 minutes. Go. ALDA: First, in this control period, Hari Mandir's screen tells her to think randomly-- to run through an arbitrary list of animals, for example-- to show what a brain that's not meditating looks like. Right now, her breathing's about as expected. At this point, she's breathing at a fairly fast rate. This is about 12 breaths per minute. ALDA: When she starts to meditate, Hari Mandir's breathing should change. Now her instruction screen switches. Begin meditation. Begin meditation. ALDA: A common type of Kundalini meditation involves coordination of breathing with repetition of mantras. Breathing rate drops dramatically, without the meditator forcing it to. So you can see, now it's getting much wider, so she's beginning to meditate. Before she was going about 12 breaths per minute, and now, she's going... these are much longer, slower breaths, longer, slower exhalations. HARI MANDIR: As I inhaled, I thought "sat-nam," and as I exhaled I thought "wahe-guru." So it involved a focus, and also... with the breath. And I just kept focused on that and then allowed whatever changes would come about to happen. LAZAR: This is one particular slice tothe brain, and here we see a bit of the limbic system called the amygdala circled in blue. And this time course is the average activity of that bit of brain during the experiment. This bit of brain becomes more active during meditation than during the control period. So there's something going on during meditation which is not happening during just sitting there repeating the words of animals. ALDA: Do you know other stuff about that part of the brain that throws light on what functions are otherwise performed by it? Mm-hmm. It's involved in vigilance, so paying attention to things. And so certainly, events which provoke fear, i.e., lions and tigers and snakes, would activate the amygdala. But also other things. And so since, when you're meditating, you're being vigilant on yourself, on your mantra, and on your body, and subjective state, that's why we think we see the amygdala during meditation. What other kind of vigilance are you talking about? If you're hungry, and you're driving down the street and want to pay attention to which restaurants are there, that might be something similar. So it's vigilance to things which are biologically relevant. I guess that's... Ah, I see. a better... more precise. But probably not vigilance of, say, you're reading a book, or watching a movie. It's not the same attention. It's more... it's got to be biologically relevant, they think. Isn't that interesting, that meditation, which is supposed to be so spiritual, lights up the part of your brain that a sirloin steak does? Exactly. ALDA: People once thought meditation was a bit like dozing off, so the detection of vigilance in Hari Mandir's brain is especially interesting, and it matches what she feels. HARI MANDIR: There's a complete awareness, and in a way, even a more heightened awareness of everything. And then, with the particular sounds, "sat-nam" felt like it was very focusing for me. And then "wahe-guru" had a very kind of expanding feeling of awareness. So I felt more unified in my experience of the MRI and of myself. ALDA: I did think of a pretty straightforward way to explain the brain activity, but Sara Lazar, in her latest tests, had gotten there first. ALDA: Let me ask you a kind of a dumb question. LAZAR: Mm-hmm? How do you know they were meditating? If they can just bring their breath down... To four breaths per minute. To four breaths a minute, mechanically, then maybe you get this kind of... maybe these parts of the brain light up any time you bring your breath down to four times a minute. Very good question. That's another experiment we're doing this time, is we're having them go down to four breaths per minute-- we're showing them arrows and telling them when to breathe. And so far, what we've seen is that, no, this is not the pattern you see... Oh, really? when you just change your breathing rate, right. So there's something more to it. So, no. ALDA: Sara Lazar's experiments have shed some light on how meditation and relaxation reduce stress, because the part of the brain that was active in the meditators is also involved in sending signals that control the fight-or-flight stress response. But we still don't know how meditators change those signals more or less at will. ( chanting ) Regardless of how it works, meditation does help people deal with the stress of life. This is how Hari Mandir puts it. HARI MANDIR: Life presents situations, and most of these situations, I'm not going to know what they're going to be, and so by encountering my own self, my own mind, through meditation in my meditation practice, then when I'm out in the world, whatever confronts me, I've already confronted my own self and my own reactions, so then I can confront it squarely. ( chanting continues ) ALDA: Let's say you're worried about your health, or you're worried because your boss is stressing you all the time. Can simply meditating relieve you of that stress, or do you have to go through an involved psychotherapy? It's very important to try and change the situation itself. In other words, if it's a social situation, recognize it for what it is and try and rectify it. But if you can't-- as many of us can't-- change a situation, then you can protect against the harmful effects of stress, or at least lessen them, by regularly evoking the relaxation response. And people should do that regularly. Just think of the numbers of people who have told you, "without my yoga," "without my daily exercises"-- many will say, "without my prayer"-- "I don't feel as calm as I do otherwise." And although this isn't speaking to the inherent value of the beliefs in these various things, it certainly shows their effects. ALDA: So can we be worried sick? No doubt. Are less stressed people less sick? Yes. Can we deliberately reduce stress? Yes. And don't forget what Robert Sapolsky found: His least stressed baboons were the guys who just got along with others the best. Come visit us at PBS Online.

Please take a look at these related stories from the Frontiers Archive:

				Needles and Nerves Studies find acupuncture can reduce blood pressure, but how?
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: China International Medical University is a small company that offers an increasingly popular service: acupuncture. Dr. Jiang, who trained in China, will treat this young man for insomnia. ALDA: She measures down to the two Hsinshu, or heart back points. She inserts fine needles no thicker than a human hair and then uses an up-and-down movement to "tonify the heart Chi." Chi, in Chinese medicine, is the body's basic life energy. Now she moves down to the Kanshu, or liver back points, where she will relieve "stagnation of the liver Chi." The patient later reported his insomnia cleared up. Of all the alternative medical practices, acupuncture is probably the most widely accepted. It's often covered by insurers. In America, interest in acupuncture really took off after Nixon went to China in 1971. A New York Times reporter, James Reston, had been in Beijing during Henry Kissinger's preparatory visit. Reston had to have his appendix out, and after conventional surgery at the Anti-Imperialist Hospital, he was given acupuncture for post-surgical pain. He ended his glowing account of the experience by writing that the hospital... RESTON ( dramatized ): ...like everything else in China these days is on its way toward some different combination of the very old and the very new. ALDA: Acupuncture is very old. The first descriptions date back 4,000 years. These illustrations are about 1,500 years old, but the dense maps of meridian lines and acupuncture points that you see nowadays are from the 19th century. Depending on who you ask, there are up to a thousand usable points on the body. Bill Stroud gets acupuncture from Dr. Jiang every two weeks. Bill's got heart problems and diabetes, and he says these visits help. What science says right now is maybe. It says there could be something happening, but it's not clear what. STROUD: When they hit the mark, I get a tingle. ALDA: What do you mean, hitting the mark? STROUD: When she hits the nerve. After it reaches a certain depth and it gets to the nerve, that's when you feel a tingle? That's it. Then it goes down to my fingertips. Yeah. And my toes. Is it similar to the pins and needles you feel when your foot goes to sleep? No. What about, is it like... I'm trying to try out some feelings that I'm aware of. Is it like a little electric shock? Yeah, that's more like it. Yeah, it's a little shock. ALDA: We're observing Bill's treatment with a cardiologist who's a leading acupuncture researcher. Okay, so the Neikuan is right here. This is along the so-called pericardial meridian. That's what Bill is getting now? Yes, yeah. They're stimulating here, Neikuan, and then up here, at the Hsimen. This corresponds to a nerve identified by Western medicine that's actually in everybody's arm. What we've found is this, is that most meridians overlie major neural pathways. Most of them do. Not 100%, but most of them do. And then the acupuncture points would be sticking the median nerve at various different levels. ALDA: The central belief in acupuncture is that stimulating specific points can affect particular body functions. One of the few scientific demonstrations of this came when colleagues of John Longhurst used a brain scan to detect activity while stimulating a traditional, vision-related point on the toe. LONGHURST: They showed that the visual cortex up in the brain lit up. So that's kind of provocative. And that has been considered for centuries by the Chinese as a way to affect vision. Exactly. ALDA: Bill's Hsimen point is stimulated in order to help his heart Chi. It's not language scientists understand, but that doesn't mean nothing's happening. DR. JIANG: Heavy thrusting, light lifting. This is to build up the heart Chi. How do you know you've got the heart Chi? How do you know you've got the right spot for that? I feel some heaviness under my fingers. I feel the chi. I feel I've... You feel some resistance? Yeah, I've captured the chi. I see, so you're responding to the chi in his body, and that's how you know you've got it. ALDA: Twenty minutes later, and Bill's happy. How you doing, Bill? Fine. Yeah? Mm-hmm, real good. Do you feel relaxed? You said you often feel relaxed. Real relaxed, yeah. Why don't you... I think I almost dropped off to sleep while you fellas were talking. ( both chuckle ) ALDA: We're going to look at oneof John Longhurst's experiments involving blood pressure. ALDA: Does the act ofmeasuring somebody's blood pressure alone have an effect on the blood pressure? LONGHURST: Mm-hmm, and if you wear a white coat, it increases it even more. ALDA: The background to this experiment is some key results John Longhurst has found in animals. Stimulating the Hsimen and the Neikuan heart points released natural opiates in the brain. These opiates were able to reduce the animal's response to stress, suppressing blood pressure. He's sure this is real. He could stop the effect when he blocked the opiates, and animals, of course, don't have any ideas or beliefs about acupuncture. Were you surprised when you came across this confirmation that it stimulates the body's opiates? Let me just say that I, like most Western scientists and Western physicians, had absolutely no belief that acupuncture had any validity to it. I didn't believe it worked. It was only after I read the literature and started to do my own studies that I started to believe in it. But I did not come at this from the viewpoint that, a priori, that it worked. ALDA: Eric, our experimental subject, is having his Hsimen and Neikuan points located by Peng Li, Longhurst's Chinese collaborator. Any feeling now? ERIC: A little. When you leave here after one of these trials, do you feel any different from the way you did when you came in? I don't feel much different, and that's not normal after a workout like what I'm going to be doing. ALDA: They're going to use electric acupuncture to stimulate the nerves because it's more controllable than the manual method. Switch on. ALDA: The twitching shows Eric's median nerve, which runs from neck to fingertips, is being stimulated. Eric, we're going to shut the light, okay? Okay. ALDA: Eric gets 30 minutes of acupuncture in a low-stress setting which won't elevate his blood pressure. For comparison, other subjects get the same thing but without the acupuncture. Now the test. Eric has to pedal until he can pedal no more. At that point, his blood pressure will be at its peak. 105/70. ALDA: It's the first numbethat matters. 120/65. 128/68. 140/60. 148/60. 150/58. Uncle. Okay, let me get a last blood pressure. ALDA: You do want to gethis blood pressure before he's lying on the floor, right? Yes, I do. You can do it, Eric. 158/55. TECHNICIAN: Thank you. ALDA: The results of the study were a surprise. Subjects who got acupuncture at the Hsimen and Neikuan heart points, as expected, showed significantly lower peak blood pressure, compared to the no-acupuncture group. But as an additional control, another group received acupuncture at the Hoku point, which is supposed to affect the intestines, not the heart. And that point turned out to be just as good at lowering blood pressure. LONGHURST: We found that that was as potent as our cardiovascular active one. For a cardiovascular response? For the cardiovascular response to exercise, exactly. So now what will you do? You'll have to pick another spot. Exactly, so we do have another comparison, and that is no acupuncture whatsoever. And there, both of them seem to be better than no acupuncture whatsoever. But at the moment, that seems to indicate that if you stick a pin in a person anyplace, you're liable to get this cardiovascular response. At least in two places. At least in two places. ALDA: So acupuncture has effects, but not in the way Chinese theory describes. That's where John Longhurst's research stands right now, but his conclusion that acupuncture stimulates the body's own opiate system opens up some intriguing ideas. Scientists are now coming to believe that most alternative therapies, where they have any effect, operate through that same opiate system. There's another name for this. It's the "placebo effect," and it can be triggered by many things-- belief, expectation, habit, discussion, touch. Acupuncture, therefore, would be a kind of double dose of placebo. LONGHURST: Some of my colleagues in alternative medicine would not like me saying this, but almost any sort of alternative medicine that is being used today-- a significant portion of its effect is through a placebo. Whether you're talking about healing touch or aromatherapy or herbal medications or acupuncture-- just any of these things-- transcendental meditation, any of them, there is a potential for a placebo effect. But I will go one further step and say that I think despite this, I think that some of these alternative therapies, including acupuncture, there is a real effect over and above placebo. It's just that the window between what is placebo and what is real is somewhat narrow. What dyou look forward to finding out as time goes on? What are you really trying to... what do you want just to narrow down to? I would like to see it-- acupuncture and complementary therapies that have proven to be beneficial-- to be taught in medical schools today, because certainly when I went to medical school, we didn't even talk about this form of therapy. Yet we know that as many people see an acupuncturist or a physician who is going to give some form of complementary therapy, as see primary-care physicians today. And most people don't realize that so many patients are accessing this other form of therapy. So don't we need to know something about it? Don't our physicians need to be able to ask questions?

				Getting to Know Us Computers monitor users' emotions by measuring heart rate, jaw-tension and other physical cues.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: COMPUTER VOICE: Welcome to Ted Selker's office. What is your name? Ted Selker. Hi, Ted Selker. Welcome to your office. I'm going to go on in my office here. You see me going in there. Why don't you try to be Ted Selker? Okay, I'll try to be Ted Selker. ALDA: Ted Selker invented that little button that acts like a mouse in the middle of the keyboard on IBM laptops. Now he's here at the Media Lab, where his mission is to make computers aware of where we are and what we're doing. The door knows there's someone here, and it's not about to be fooled. COMPUTER: Hi, Ted Selker. Wait, Ted Selker is already in his office. Let's see, I guess I'll let you in. Ted Selker is ready to see you. Please come in. SELKER: Walk on in. Thanks, my heels are really cool by now. Thank you. Now, if somebody else comes up, it will do something a little different. Why don't you try to go in again? I'll be... I'll be somebody else. I get to play two parts in this-- that's great. Welcome to Ted Selker's office. What is your name? Ralph. Sorry, I didn't understand you. Please type your name here. ALDA: As usual, I'm having trouble getting the voice recognition system to understand me. You don't have an appointment with Ted Selker, and he is busy right now. He has just started a meeting. If this is important, please knock. Otherwise, please arrange an appointment or leave a message. This is the knocker? Yeah. I will inform him that you are here. Please wait. ( whistling tune ) Sorry, it seems that Ted Selker is very busy. Oh. Hmm. Does he know it's about insurance? ( chuckling ) ALDA: Well, I'll try my luck at making an appointment. Okay. Push "make appointment." No appointment set. Good-bye. Oh. ( laughs ) Uh, do you know if he has any insurance? ALDA: Even after you've made it into Ted Selker's lab, your every move is tracked-- first by a swarm of virtual bees, then by a clown face stepping on your foot. COMPUTER VOICE: Welcome. SELKER: We can measure how heavy a person is and where they're standing, and it's neat because it's only about 20 cents a square foot. So we're able to know these things and we use them to tell, you know, social things, too. But, in other words, if you... If the floor knows how much I weigh, then when I walk around, does it track me by how much I weigh? Yeah. So it knows where I am all the time. So if you lose your keys, we can just tell it, "Hey, where's that guy been?" Oh, my goodness. This... every floor could be made like this. That's a good idea. Huh? I mean, then you really could track everything that you do around the house. Well, you could... like when you're pouring some milk into a recipe, it could know when you've poured a cup in. By the change in weight? Yeah. It's that sensitive? Oh, yeah. ALDA: Intelligent doors, intelligent floors. This is an intelligent bed. That's right. So you're going to put your head underneath this Luxo lamp over here. I bet you've got an eye. Hey, there it is. ALDA: They're all part of Ted Selker's goal of using simple, cheap sensors everywhere around us to keep track of what we're doing and to anticipate our wants. If you kind of blink rapidly... it changed the music. And the reason it changed the music is because it decided you weren't happy. People blink a lot when they're not happy. Now if you just close your eyes for a moment, the system will think you're asleep, and now it goes and it puts z's across the screen. ( laughing ) Now if you open your eyes, the sun rises and the wake-up kind of thing. We'll have you do a couple of other things. Look at the newspaper for a moment, kind of stare at it. ALDA: By picking up my stares, the sensor in the lamp over the bed allows me to browse my e-mail... read a book, even control a video game. I imagine that eventually you're going to find a way to find my eye no matter where I am in the room; I don't have to be lying on a bed. ALDA: The lab has already developed a simple pair of eyeglasses that are able to tell if I'm staring at something... SELKER: And if you look over at this guy... ALDA: Or even somebody. Selker sees the day when people could exchange much more than a glance when they gaze at each other. SELKER: You, being interested in me, gave me your business card. In a party, the person that's paying attention to someone else is giving all those people their cards. I can just imagine that certain people would go home with an awful lot of business cards. ALDA: But first, the glasses would have to be much less obtrusive. Well, you know, they can do what they want with it. It can be reduced to a very, very small size. We use it just to demonstrate that we have something, otherwise it would be too small. There are lots and lots of things that are coming as technology that are going to make it very easy, for almost for nothing, recognize where you are, what you're looking at, how you're looking at it, without even having to wear anything, and without you having to be in any particular place. Clench your jaw for a second for me so I can find the muscle. ALDA: When I was here at the Media Lab six years ago, they were making a start not only on letting computers know what you're doing but even how you're feeling. So go ahead and clench your jaw. See? So that's how I know it's on a good place. ( growling ) Yeah, great. Good job. Whoa, look at that. ALDA: As well as the tension in my jaw, Jennifer Healy measured the clamminess of my hands. Yes, if you've ever noticed when you're nervous, your palms get all sweaty, and that sweat helps the electrical conductivity. I see. ALDA: Another sensor picked up my heart rate. The idea of all this was to let the computer know my emotional state, which, unknown to me, was about to be aroused. ( loud clang ) ( all chuckling ) Oh, look at that. Isn't that cool? Look-- he's off the screen. WOMAN: He went off the scale. ALDA: Now, as anyone who knows me can tell you, the secret to manipulating my emotions is food. All right, all right. I'm just going to think of a saltine. ( women laugh ) I bet you a saltine gets me right back on the... WOMAN: Now you went down. You just dropped all the way down. ALDA: Saltines are not very exciting. Now, watch this. Pasta. ( women laugh ) Oh, a red sauce, a little ricotta on the side, some hot red peppers. ( women laugh ) WOMAN: The peppers went up. Did they? Yeah, I could have told you that. I don't know about the ricotta. That just... ( Alda laughs ) ALDA: The point of having my computer know my emotions is that it could adjust itself to my mood, running faster when I'm bored, or trying another tactic if I'm frustrated. Is there a time limit on this? That would really make my heart rate... ALDA: But back then in 1996, reading my emotions was a cumbersome and intrusive business. Does this mean that at the next stage of this, somebody will have to be hooked up like this in order for the computer to recognize what they're going through? No, eventually, we hope that these sensors will disappear intoyour clothing or into the twiddler itself, into the devices that you're naturally in physical contact with. In fact, people are physically in contact with computers more than with other human beings frequently, so there's a lot more opportunity than you may realize for these sensors to be collecting information. Today you're going to see some of the progress we've made along these lines. One of the things we did, for example, was to take the blood volume pressure sensor that before was this big old clunky thing on your finger, and now you can wear it on your ear. Now, I see that you love to wear earrings, and maybe I can just attach this to your ear. Okay. And this is shining a light through my earlobe to see what the blood flow is in there? Yes, it shines an infrared light. It's called a photoplethysmograph, and it picks up the amount of light going through and the amount changes with your blood flow. It changes with your heartbeat and with stress information. Let's put it on your hand. ALDA: And now the clamminess of my hands can be measured with no wires at all, just a glove equipped with a light-emitting diode. But it's not lighting up yet. No, it's not lighting up. Well, that can... we can debug this together. First, what you can do is try taking some really quick deep breaths. It may take a second to get you to glow. I'm seeing a little teeny bit of glimmer there-- very, very slight. I'm going to pass out from hyperventilation. No, don't do that. Another thing you could do is you could tell me about something significant that's happened to you lately. Something significant. Or something that arouses you, um... Ah... I'm trying to think of something I can tell you on camera. That made him glow, look at that. Look at that! ( laughing ) You didn't actually have to say anything. ( laughing ) This is the hot-pepper phenomenon here. Whoa! Yeah, yeah. This signal doesn't tell people what you're feeling. It just tells one of the dimensions of emotion. So emotions such as anger, fear, excitement, joy, um, strong interest-- those map to a heightened arousal. So this tells us something about the height of that arousal level, but it doesn't tell us if it's a positive or negative response, and that's a key piece of information that we don't seem to be able to get from the surface of the skin right now. There we have to look at the face. Now, this takes a picture of my face and it finds my eyes right away. ALDA: Right now, the system can only tell when I nod, shake my head or blink. So how would this be used? Ordinarily, you wouldn't be looking at a picture of your face; you'd be looking at some other task that you're doing. And it's going to be watching you as you engage with it. It will be looking to see if you're looking at it or not, because if you're not even looking at the screen, why should it be continuing to present you with new information? It could be watching to see if you're looking at it intently, if you're raising your eyebrows, or if you're frowning by pushing them together, you know, lowering them like you're concentrating. These kinds of changes in the muscles around the eyes are part of the information that we want to use to try to determine if you're interested, if you're on the task or not. ALDA: Roz Picard's lab has also developed a mouse that can tell how hard I'm gripping it-- a measure, perhaps, of how annoyed I am with my computer. These images may also give hints at how I'm feeling about my computer, or the program it's running. PICARD: Right now you're sitting in a special chair. This chair contains a pad on the bottom and the back that contains an array of pressure- sensitive sensors, and it senses how... the points of pressure and the intensity of those. So there's a rather unusual portrait of you on the screen right now... This is what I'm sitting on. Yes, this is what you're sitting on. And this is my back? That's your back. So lean back, and we should see more blue lighting up there. Okay, and we see the weight shifting toward the back of the chair. And as you slump down, the pattern shifts that way. The dynamics of this pattern, we think, will give us some clues to things like are you starting to get fidgety, you know, and antsy, or are you on the edge of your seat, literally? ALDA: Sitting on the edge of his seat is six-year-old Adam, testing out the sensor chair as it analyzes his shifting weight and decides on his most likely posture. Graduate student Selene Modo has had scores of children sit in the chair while working at a computer. It's one more way Roz Picard's group is trying to make our computers sensitive to our mood and our interest. COMPUTER VOICE: Hi. Cool. This is cool. ALDA: So by the time Adam is an adult, his computer will know when it's losing him and try harder not to put him to sleep.

				Keeping the Peace Studies show both monkeys and apes actively seek to resolve conflicts within their groups, pointing to what scientists believe are the roots of human morality.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: HANGING OUT IN LARGE GROUPS. MOSTLY, THEY GET ALONG JUST FINE AND ARGUMENTS ONLY RARELY TURN VIOLENT ENOUGH FOR SOMEONE TO GET HURT. AND WHEN THINGS DO GET A LITTLE TOO STRESSFUL THE MONKEYS HAVE PLENTY OF ROOM ON THE ISLAND TO GET AWAY FROM IT ALL. BUT WHAT IF THEY LIVED IN MORE CROWDED CONDITIONS? THESE MONKEYS AREN'T ON AN ISLAND. THEY'RE IN A LARGE ENCLOSURE AT THE YERKES PRIMATE CENTER IN ATLANTA. HOW THEY COPE WITH CROWDING HERE MAY HELP US UNDERSTAND HOW THEIR FELLOW PRIMATES, PEOPLE, COPE WITH THE STRESS OF LIVING IN THE CROWDED CITIES. IT MAY LOOK AS THOUGH THE MONKEYS HERE HAVE PLENTY OF ROOM BUT THEY'RE 500 TIMES MORE CROWDED THAN THEY ARE ON THE ISLAND. THEY'RE PART OF A LONG-TERM EXPERIMENT ON CROWDING IN MONKEYS INSPIRED BY THE IDEAS OF YERKES PRIMATOLOGIST FRANS DE WAAL. HOW LONG HAVE PEOPLE BEEN STUDYING CROWDING IN ANIMALS? PROBABLY VERY LONG. THE MOST INFLUENTIAL STUDY CAME OUT IN THE '60s WHERE SOMEONE DID A STUDY ON RATS. RATS LIVED IN A SMALL ROOM AND AS IT GOT MORE CROWDED, THE MORE THEY MULTIPLIED AND THEY BECAME VERY AGGRESSIVE. THEY EVEN KILLED AND ATE EACH OTHER. Alda: IT'S UNUSUAL HERE AT YERKES FOR THE MONKEYS TO GET PACKED TOGETHER THE WAY THE RATS WERE BUT EVERY NOW AND THEN THEY HAVE TO BE ROUNDED UP FOR ROUTINE MEDICAL CARE. THEY'RE USED TO THE OPERATION AND THEY HEAD FOR THEIR INDOOR CAGE AS SOON AS THEIR KEEPERS APPEAR. ONCE INSIDE, THEY'RE ANYTHING BUT AGGRESSIVE. IN FACT, THEIR BEHAVIOR REMINDED ME OF THE WAY WE HUMANS COPE WITH BEING TIGHTLY PACKED TOGETHER. Alda: WHEN YOU CROWD PEOPLE IN AN ELEVATOR YOU DON'T TEND TO GET AGGRESSION YOU TEND TO GET RITUALIZED POLITE BEHAVIOR. PEOPLE DON'T EVEN LOOK AT ONE ANOTHER. YEAH, THEY AVOID INTERACTION AND SO THEY AVOID ANYTHING THAT MAY CAUSE PROBLEMS BECAUSE IT'S A VERY CROWDED SPACE. AND IF YOU DO WITH RHESUS MONKEYS AN ACUTE CROWDING EXPERIMENT-- SORT OF THE ELEVATOR EFFECT-- YOU GET SIMILAR BEHAVIOR. THEY MAY STAY NEXT TO EACH OTHER, BUT THEY DON'T MOVE AND THEY DON'T INTERACT VERY MUCH. Alda: SO WHEN WE'RE REALLY PACKED TOGETHER PEOPLE AND MONKEYS SEEM TO COPE IN THE SAME WAY BY BEING VERY CAREFUL. BUT WHAT ABOUT EVERYDAY LIFE? MONKEY SOCIETY IS BASED ON A STRICT HIERARCHY IN WHICH EVERYONE KNOWS HIS OR HER PLACE. IN THIS MODERATELY CROWDED ENCLOSURE ONE IMPORTANT WAY TO AVOID CONFLICT IS BY GRINNING A LOT-- MORE SCIENTIFICALLY CALLED "THE BARED TEETH RESPONSE. " De Waal: THAT'S A BEHAVIOR THAT GOES UP DRAMATICALLY UNDER MORE CROWDED CONDITIONS AS IF THE SUBORDINATES ARE TELLING THE DOMINANTS "I'M STILL SUBORDINATE IN THE HIERARCHY SO YOU DON'T NEED TO ATTACK ME. " ARE THERE SOME MONKEYS WHERE BARING THE TEETH IS A SIGN OF AGGRESSION? YOU CAN SHOW YOUR TEETH IN TWO WAYS. IF A RHESUS MONKEY OPENS THE MOUTH AND STARES AT SOMEONE THAT'S A THREAT. BUT BARING THE TEETH IN A SMILE TYPE OF WAY IS A SUBMISSIVE GESTURE. IN THE APES SUCH AS CHIMPANZEES AND IN HUMANS IT HAS GOT AN AFFILIATIVE AND FRIENDLY COMPONENT BUT STILL NERVOUSNESS IS OFTEN INVOLVED AND IF SOMEONE SMILES TOO MUCH WE SAY THAT'S A NERVOUS PERSON. RIGHT. I'M A LITTLE NERVOUS ABOUT GETTING SCRATCHED AND BITTEN LATER. Alda: PETER JUDGE IS IN CHARGE OF THE CROWDING STUDIES. HERE'S A TYPICAL INCIDENT IN THE LONG HOURS HE SPENDS MONKEY WATCHING. THIS BABY IS JUST A FEW WEEKS OLD AND A POPULAR PLAYMATE FOR THE OTHER MONKEYS. THE MOTHER, NAMED ALLIE IS CONSTANTLY FENDING OFF UNWANTED INVITATIONS. ( screeching ) SUDDENLY, A YOUNG MONKEY CALLED D. J. GETS TOO ROUGH. ALLIE THREAT D. J. Alda: BUT MOMENTS LATER, D. J. APPROACHES ALLIE AND THE TWO MONKEYS MAKE UP. D. J. SIT PROXIMITY ALLIE. D. J. GROOM ALLIE. Alda: GROOMING EACH OTHER IS THE MONKEY'S MAIN WAY OF RELAXING AND HAVING A GOOD TIME TOGETHER. WHAT PETER JUDGE FOUND IS THAT IN THE POTENTIALLY EXPLOSIVE CONDITIONS OF CROWDING MONKEYS DO A LOT MORE TO KEEP THE PEACE BETWEEN EACH OTHER THAN THEY DO WHEN THEY HAVE ROOM TO SPARE. Judge: IF YOU LOOK AT AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR SOME AGGRESSION GOES UP, AND SOME DOESN'T. IF YOU LOOK AT FRIENDLY BEHAVIOR ALMOST EVERY CATEGORY OF FRIENDLY BEHAVIOR INCREASES. IF IN A CONDITION LIKE THAT WHERE YOU'RE ALWAYS CLOSE TO YOUR POTENTIAL AGGRESSOR IT'S WORTH YOUR WHILE TO RESTORE THE RELATIONSHIP AND RESOLVE THE CONFLICT. Alda: RHESUS MONKEYS HAVE BEEN OFF ON THEIR OWN EVOLUTIONARY PATHWAY SEPARATE FROM THE ONE THAT LED TO HUMANS FOR SOMETHING LIKE 30 MILLION YEARS. MORE CLOSELY RELATED TO US-- SEPARATED BY ONLY SIX MILLION YEARS OF EVOLUTION-- ARE CHIMPANZEES. IT WAS WATCHING CHIMPS THAT FIRST CONVINCED FRANS DE WAAL 20 YEARS AGO THAT THE HIGHER PRIMATES ALL SHARE A DEEPLY-ROOTED INSTINCT FOR MAKING PEACE. THIS GROUP OF 19 CHIMPANZEES LIVING BELOW FRANS' OFFICE AT YERKES INCLUDED JIMOH, THE ALPHA MALE OR GROUP LEADER AND PEONY, THE DOMINANT FEMALE, HERE WITH HER DAUGHTER. THE ADOLESCENT MALES IN THE GROUP OFTEN ACT LIKE ADOLESCENTS. BUT THE FIGHTS RARELY GET SERIOUS AND AS WITH THE RHESUS MONKEYS THEY USUALLY END IN FRIENDLY RECONCILIATIONS THIS ONE INVOLVING TICKLING AND LAUGHTER. NOW WE WILL THROW THEM IN ONE AT A TIME. Alda: FRANS RECENTLY BEGAN SOME EXPERIMENTS WITH HIS CHIMPS THAT ARE CONVINCING HIM THAT NOT ONLY PEACEMAKING BUT EVEN SUCH SUPPOSEDLY HUMAN TRAITS AS MORALITY HAVE BIOLOGICAL ROOTS THAT WE SHARE WITH CHIMPANZEES. THESE BUNDLES OF LEAVES ARE A TREAT FOR THE CHIMPS AN ADDITION TO THEIR REGULAR DIET. De Waal: THAT'S A JUVENILE WHO TOOK IT AND THE ALPHA MALE TAKES IT OVER FROM HIM. Alda: MOST OF THE CHIMPS GATHER AROUND A BUNDLE AND PEACEFULLY SHARE THE LEAVES. BUT THE BUNDLE RIGHT BELOW US WAS TAKEN BY A YOUNG FEMALE CALLED GEORGIA WHO IS MUCH LESS WILLING TO SHARE. IS GEORGIA STINGY BECAUSE SHE HASN'T LEARNED TO SHARE OR IS SHE NATURALLY STINGY? IN HUMAN TERMS, YOU WOULD SAY SHE DOESN'T HAVE THE CONFIDENCE AND THE POSITION YET TO BE GENEROUS WITH OTHERS. SHE'S STILL VERY MUCH IN A COMPETITIVE MODE LIKE "HOW MUCH CAN I GET MYSELF? " Alda: GEORGIA SAT WITH HER BACK TO US FIRMLY MONOPOLIZING HER BUNDLE. WE COLLECT THOUSANDS OF FOOD TRANSFERS BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS. AMONG ADULTS, IT'S RECIPROCAL-- IF I SHARE WITH YOU, YOU WILL SHARE WITH ME. JUVENILES ARE TOTALLY OUT OF THIS. JUVENILES WORK ON A STEALING OPERATION. Alda: GEORGIA'S TACTIC OF STEALING BACKFIRES AS ANOTHER JUVENILE STEALS THE WHOLE BUNDLE FROM HER. THAT'S A TYPICAL JUVENILE WAY OF DOING IT. Alda: GEORGIA'S SELFISHNESS HAS OTHER CONSEQUENCES. INDIVIDUALS SUCH AS GEORGIA WHO ARE NOT VERY GENEROUS-- WHEN THEY ARE IN NEED OF FOOD THEY ARE REJECTED BY OTHER INDIVIDUALS AS IF THE OTHER INDIVIDUALS ARE SAYING "WELL, YOU'RE NEVER SHARING WITH ME WHY SHOULD I SHARE WITH YOU? " AND THIS IS ALSO HOW YOUNG FEMALES SUCH AS GEORGIA ARE GRADUALLY LEARNING IT IS MUCH BETTER TO COOPERATE WITH A SYSTEM LIKE THAT. WE GET ACTUALLY MORE OUT OF IT BY COOPERATING AND CONTRIBUTING TO IT. Alda: FRANS AND HIS RESEARCH ASSISTANT MIKE SERES HAVE KEPT TRACK IN THE THOUSANDS OF TRIALS THEY HAVE RUN OF JUST WHO SHARES WITH WHOM. WHAT'S REMARKABLE IS THAT THE CHIMPS KEEP TRACK, TOO. SO IF ONE CHIMP SHARES FOOD WITH ANOTHER IN THE MORNING THE GENEROSITY IS RETURNED BY A SPELL OF GROOMING IN THE AFTERNOON. THE VERY YOUNG ARE ALLOWED TO GET AWAY WITH BEHAVIOR THAT THE FEMALES IN THIS GROUP DON'T TOLERATE FROM AN ADOLESCENT MALE. HE PICKS UP A STICK AND TRIES INTIMIDATION BUT THE GROUP ISN'T IMPRESSED. HERE'S GEORGIA, AGAIN CAUSING TROUBLE. JIMOH AMBLES OVER, NUDGES HER GENTLY AND SHE HOLDS OUT HER HAND IN APOLOGY. AGAIN, JIMOH BREAKS UP A SQUABBLE. SO WHILE AS IN HUMAN SOCIETY, THERE'S CONFLICT AND AGGRESSION CHIMPS HAVE MANY STRATEGIES FOR KEEPING THE PEACE. FRANS SEES IN THESE BEHAVIORS THE ROOT OF WHAT IN HUMANS WE CALL MORALITY. THEY HAVE MANY OF THE EMOTIONS AND ELEMENTS OF HUMAN MORALITY SUCH AS EMPATHY AND SYMPATHY PROBABLY GENEROSITY, CERTAIN FORMS OF ALTRUISM, RULES AND REGULATIONS CONFLICT RESOLUTION, WHICH IS ONE OF MY MAIN INTERESTS IS HOW TO RESOLVE CONFLICTS AMONG THEMSELVES. AND BASICALLY, YOU CAN LOOK AT HUMAN MORALITY AS A SYSTEM THAT RESOLVES CONFLICTS AMONG PARTIES THAT LIVE IN ONE SOCIETY. DOES THAT LEAD YOU TO THINK IN A DIFFERENT WAY ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF HUMAN MORALITY THAN YOU DID BEFORE? HUMAN MORALITY MUST HAVE SOME DEEP EVOLUTIONARY ROOTS. IT MUST COME FROM SOMEWHERE AND PROBABLY IN OTHER ANIMALS, WE CAN FIND NOT THE WHOLE SYSTEM BUT WE CAN FIND CERTAIN ELEMENTS OF HUMAN MORALITY AND THAT'S WHAT I'M SEEING WHEN I LOOK AT CHIMPANZEES. Alda: CHIMPANZEES ARE OUR CLOSEST NONHUMAN RELATIVES. BUT THEY'RE NOT THE ONLY PRIMATES WITH A CODE OF ETHICS. EVEN THOUGH THEY BRANCHED OFF FROM US 40 MILLION YEARS AGO THERE'S A SPECIES OF MONKEY THAT ALSO TRADES TIT FOR TAT-- CAPUCHINS. CAPUCHINS ARE BEING STUDIED BY ONE OF FRANS DE WAAL'S RESEARCH STUDENTS, LISA PARR. CAPUCHINS ARE WELL KNOWN FOR BEING VERY MANIPULATIVE IN THEIR FOOD. SO YOU CAN SEE THAT THEY'LL... OOPS. HE WASN'T TOO GOOD ABOUT THAT MANIPULATION. HE WANTS THE WHOLE BUNCH, NOT JUST A PIECE. THEY ALSO HAVE LARGE BRAINS FOR THEIR BODY SIZE. IT'S THE LARGEST AMONG THE NEW WORLD MONKEYS. AND THEY ALL HAVE CREWCUTS, TOO. TODAY'S EXPERIMENT WILL INVOLVE "BIAS," A FEMALE CAPUCHIN... Woman: COME ON, VINCENT. Alda: AND VINCENT, A MALE COLLEAGUE. VINCENT IS GIVEN A BUCKET OF APPLES. THEN IT'S TIME FOR US TO DISCREETLY WITHDRAW. THESE TWO ARE VERY TOLERANT OF ONE ANOTHER. THEY'RE SITTING CLOSE TOGETHER DOING WHAT WE'VE TERMED "PASSIVE FOOD SHARING. " WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? IT MEANS THAT THE FOOD POSSESSOR IS SITTING CLOSE ENOUGH SO THAT DISCARDED PIECES AND BROKEN BITS OF PIECES ARE WITHIN REACH OF THE PASSIVE FOOD PARTNER. BECAUSE HE'S NOT PREVENTING HER FROM TAKING THE FOOD, THAT'S SHARING. IS THERE ANY INDICATION HE'S LEAVING THESE PIECES DELIBERATELY IN SOME WAY? I MEAN, IS HE JUST A SLOPPY EATER THAT DOESN'T CARE WHO GRABS HIS FOOD? WELL, WE HAVE CONTROL STUDIES THAT WE DO WHERE THERE'S ONLY ONE ANIMAL IN THE CAGE AND UNDER THOSE CIRCUMSTANCES THE ANIMAL USUALLY DOESN'T SIT CLOSE TO THE MESH SO THE PIECES AREN'T LEFT WITHIN REACH. Alda: SO CAPUCHINS, TOO, SHARE AND SHARE ALIKE. IT SEEMS THAT NO MATTER WHAT PRIMATE SPECIES HE LOOKS AT FRANS DE WAAL FINDS EVIDENCE OF COOPERATION AND PEACEMAKING. Alda: IT SEEMS KIND OF A REASSURING IDEA THAT THIS DRIVE FOR HOLDING DOWN VIOLENCE COMES NATURALLY TO... TO OUR COUSINS AND PROBABLY TO US. I'M GLAD YOU SAID "NATURALLY" BECAUSE USUALLY PEOPLE USE ANIMALS ONLY FOR THE BAD SIDE OF HUMAN NATURE. LIKE WHAT PEOPLE DO IN RWANDA WE SAY THEY ARE ACTING LIKE ANIMALS. AS SOON AS WE DO SOMETHING BAD IT'S BEASTLY BEHAVIOR. IF WE DO SOMETHING GOOD IT'S OUR NOBLE HUMAN NATURE THAT CAUSES IT AND I THINK WE HAVE BOTH SIDES IN US AND WE CAN SEE BOTH SIDES IN OTHER PRIMATES IS THAT WE HAVE AGGRESSIVE TENDENCIES, VIOLENT TENDENCIES. BUT AT THE SAME TIME WE HAVE MECHANISMS TO DEAL WITH THESE ISSUES. Alda: LIKE HUMAN BABIES CHIMP BABIES ARE DEPENDENT ON THEIR MOTHERS WHEN THEY'RE BORN AND FOR A LONG TIME AFTERWARDS