Program Particulars
*Times indicated refer to Web version of audio

(01:49–03:29) Music
"The Multiples of One"
from Awakening,
performed by Joseph Curiale

(02:01) Hans Selye and Stress
Known as the "father of stress," Hans Hugo Bruno Selye began his work on the influence of stress in 1926 during his second year of medical school, which would form the basis for his theory of General Adaptation Syndrome. He found that patients with a variety of illnesses had many of the same "non-specific" symptoms. But these non-specific symptoms were a common response to stressful stimuli experienced by the body. After a series of tests on laboratory rats, Selye asserted that stress wasn't the culprit that led to the body's vulnerability. Rather, it was the prolonged duration of stress resulting in "diseases of adaptation." Chronic stress, he says, results in the overproduction of chemicals and hormones, producing symptoms such as ulcers and high blood pressure.

(03:30) Article for The Scientific American
"The Mind-Body Interaction in Disease" by Esther Sternberg and Philip Gold was originally published in 1997 in The Scientific American and revised in 2002.

(04:46–07:12) Music
"Erik Satie: Gnossiene No. 1"
from The Guitarist,
performed by John Williams

(05:05) First Reading from Sternberg's Book
Sternberg begins her book, The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions, reflecting on her experience on the Greek island of Crete. The first chapter, "Emotions and Disease: Molecules and Ancient Myths," opens:

Nestled at the top of a brown stony hill above the modern Cretan village of Lentas, at the intermingling of cool sage mountain air and warm salt sea breezes, are the ruins of an ancient temple to Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. The temple's two remaining pillars stand like sentinels marking north and south, forming the narrow end of a one oblong colonnade, built in exact alignment with the sun's path. It is a few meters above what was once the source of a natural spring; ancient priests used these waters, and prayer, music, sleep, and dreams to cure the sick. The warm white marble columns still reflect the early morning sun against the blue Mediterranean below. On a flat terrace, just beyond the temple, a mythical animal with the head of a horse and body of a fish, patterned out of smooth, round, white and black pebbles, hides the floor of the priests' coffers of this once rich sanctuary. And the village people, who still live as one with the rhythms of the sea and sun, know, as their ancestors knew, that emotions and health are one.

As the wind and sun eroded that first ancient shrine and dried its healing source, something also happened to the world beyond the village. Our faith in the healing power of the spirit also waned; and the god of science and medicine became a much harder, more impersonal god than the fatherly Asclepius. When did we modern scientists and physicians lose the knowledge that was so much a part of these ancient teachings of medicine? And why has the road back to acceptance of this wholeness taken so many centuries to travel?

(07:55) Orthodox Judaism
Orthodoxy is the branch of Judaism in which believers adhere most strictly to traditional beliefs and practices as established in Written (Torah) and Oral Law (codified in the Mishna and interpreted in the Talmud). These include observance of kashruth (dietary laws); prayers, ceremonies, and rituals (lighting of the candles on Sabbath); study of the Torah; and the separation of men in women in the synagogue. Most Orthodox rabbis consider Jewish Law to be divine and therefore fixed and unchangeable, and not subject to modern cultural influences. Orthodox Judaism also, however, encompasses a variety of practitioners with flexibility and openness to modern culture. Neo-Orthodoxy sanctions modern dress, the use of native language in sermons, and an openness to modern culture.

(09:51) Exhibit at the National Library of Medicine
Sternberg participated in the creation of an exhibit for the National Library of Medicine honoring the role of female physicians in the United States: Changing the Face of Medicine.

(10:46) Invention of the Stethoscope
The French physician René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec invented the monaural stethoscope in 1816. Before that time, a physician would place his ear to a person's chest. Laennec found this improper and embarrassing when examining women. So, one day, he rolled up sheets of paper and placed his ear to one end and the other end to the patient's chest. He initially called it le cylindre but later combined the Greek words stethos (chest) and scope (to look at).

(11:25–13:40) Music
"Prayer" from Gurdjieff, Tsabropoulos: Chants, Hymns and Dances, performed by Anja Lechner

(11:56) Second Reading from Sternberg's Book
In the first chapter of The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions, Sternberg writes:

Think for a moment of what it is like to be sick. The boundaries of your world shrink to the edge of your mattress. Light filters through half drooping eyelids, and the cool sheets rub against your hot skin. A bowl of soup sits abandoned on the nightstand. The gulf of floor between you and the bathroom door seems as daunting as a desert trek. You will yourself to get out of bed, but each muscle aches and the weakness is overwhelming. You fall back against the pillows, exhausted, and demoralized.

Illness can be teased apart into its discrete components: fever, fatigue, sleepiness, weakness, sadness, loss of interest in the environment, loss of appetite for food and sex, and an overwhelming desire to be still. Each of these feelings can be explained by the effects on the brain of various molecules released from immune cells during an infection. But we usually describe all these components with one parsimonious phrase: "feeling sick." These two words compactly convey the notion that our awareness of being ill has a sensory component, such as pain, and an emotional component, such as feeling sad.

(...)

The central principle of medical teaching that for a thousand years linked emotions and disease was the balance of the four humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. These visible secretions were physicians' only window into the workings of the body. Imbalances in them were equated not only with disease but also with emotions. Vestiges of the concepts are buried in the words we still use to describe emotional types: sanguine, melancholy, phlegmatic, choleric. Sanguine, from the Latin sanguineus for "blood," describes an optimistic, confident person. In the 1495 Manual of Medicine by Johannes de Ketham, a sanguine person was described as fat and merry and liking Bacchus and Benus, the gods of wine and love. Not a surprising description perhaps, since these conditions — drink and love — are often associated with rosy blushing countenance, which is indeed caused by blood rushing to the cheeks. The opposite type in de Ketham's text, the melancholic, is a combination of melan, Latin for "black," and choler, or bitter bile. A melancholic person is gloomy and bitter. But pure bile, or choler, makes one impetuous and irascible. Today, the French word for anger is colere, and the root of the word shows up also in a "colicky" baby — one who is irritable. Phlegm, on the other hand, makes one fat and languid, show-moving. Today phlegmatic has come to mean stolidly calm, unexcitable, and unemotional.

(14:42) Origins of the Word Stress
Hans Selye couldn't find a word that accurately describe the physiological and biochemical responses to maintaining a state of balance within the body. As Sternberg explains in The Balance Within, another scientific term was adapted:

The closest he found was one used by physicists, who used the term "stress" in mechanics to describe a force applied against resistance. Cannon had also used "stress" to apply to general tensions that resulted in perturbation of homeostasis. Selye seized on this term to describe the general insults that could lead to the syndrome he had observed. He aggressively began to promote the concept of biological stress and soon managed to popularize the term in every language and every country where he lectured: "lo stress," "der stress," "el stress," "o stress." He was even able to have the English word "stress" accepted officially as a French term by the Acadèmie Française, the guardians of the purity of the French language. This august body decided, after much heated debate, to create a new word, and give it a masculine gender: "le stress."

(19:05) "Nervousness" in the 19th Century
George M. Beard was a well-known 19th-century neurologist and electrotherapist who identified stress as "nervousness." Beard wrote in his 1881 book, American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences, that "American nervousness is the product of American civilization." In a chapter entitled "Causes of American Nervousness," Beard attributes nervousness to five causes: "The chief and primary cause of … [the] very rapid increase of nervousness is modern civilization, which is distinguished from the ancient by these five characteristics: steampower, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women."

(21:13–22:36) Music
"In Dark Trees" from Another Green World, performed by Brian Eno

(23:20) What Is Cortisol?
Cortisol is one of nature's most powerful anti-inflammatory drugs. In "The Mind-Body Interaction in Disease," Sternberg describes this hormone and the role it plays in managing stress in the body: "Cortisol is a steroid hormone that increases the rate and strength of heart contractions, sensitizes blood vessels to the actions of norepinephrine (an adrenalinelike hormone) and affects many metabolic functions — actions that help the body meet a stressful situation. In addition, cortisol is a potent immunoregulator and anti-inflammatory agent. It plays a crucial role in preventing the immune system from overreacting to injuries and damaging tissues. Furthermore, cortisol inhibits the release of CRH by the hypothalamus — which keeps this component of the stress response under control. Thus, CRH and cortisol directly link the body's brain-regulated stress response and its immune response."

(23:58) Chronic Stress and Healing
Dr. Ronald Glaser heads the Center for Stress and Wound Healing at The Ohio State University. The center's research focuses on the impact of stress on the immune system and how that can affect the early stages of healing. Glaser and his colleague and wife, Dr. Janice Kiecolt-Glasert, are pioneers in the relatively new field of psychoneuroimmunology — a field that studies the interactions between the central nervous system, the endocrine system and the immune system; the impact of behavior/stress on these interactions; and the implications for health of these interactions. They have established through research and clinical trials that stress and psychosocial factors play a prominent role in the functioning of the immune system.

(27:53–32:30) Music
"In All the Wrong Places"
from A Strangely Isolated Place,
performed by Ulrich Schnauss

(30:31–32:39) Music
"Grand Pianola Music 1st/2nd Movement"
from Grand Pianola Music,
performed by John Adams

(31:08) Third Reading from Sternberg's Book
In The Balance Within, Sternberg reflects on the differences and interconnections between "emotions" and "disease":

Emotions are always with us, but constantly shifting. They change the way we see the world and the way we see ourselves. Diseases come and go but on a different time scale. And if they change the way we see the world, they do it through emotions. Could something as vague and fleeting as an emotion actually affect something as tangible as a disease? Can depression cause arthritis? Can laughing and a positive attitude ameliorate, even help to cure, disease? We all suspect that the answers to these questions are yes, yet we can't say why and certainly not how. Indeed, entire self-cure industries have been built on this underlying assumption. But physicians and scientists until recently dismissed such ideas as nonsense, because there did not appear to be a plausible biological mechanism to explain the link.

Is there something about the biology of emotions and disease that gives them their different characteristics? Is it something in this that gives them their different characteristics? Is it something in this biology that allows one to affect the other? These questions arise at the intersection of popular belief and everyone's own personal observations that emotions have something to do with disease. The disconnect that then occurs between these questions, which grow from the essence of our human experience, and the lack of concrete explanations that satisfy rigorous standards of proof has led to a mistrust between the questioners and the scientists who are expected to answer them. Part of the reason for this is that scientists and lay people speak different languages — but so do emotions and disease. Poetry and song are the language of emotions; scientific precision, logic, and deductive reasoning are the language of disease.

(36:29–37:29) Music
"Phillip Houghton: Stélé"
from The Guitarist,
performed by John Williams

(44:50) Study on Meditating Monks
In March 2000 in Dharamsala, Tibet, Richard Davidson, director of the University of Wisconsin's Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience and the W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior, met with a group of Buddhist monks for five days to discuss "negative emotions" and their potential to destroy. Later the next year, the Dalai Lama and several monks visited Davidson's labs, where he conducted studies and MRI scans of Buddhists while meditating. Davidson found that the monks were able to sail through adverse events and stimuli that might cause severe distress or overwhelm most Westerners. His results and explanations can be found in his book, Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature. Davidson's work on monks is one highly respected example of an exploding field of study of the physiological effects of meditation, prayer, and other spiritual practices.

(46:03–46:51) Music
"Sonata in F for Piano Duet: 1. Adagio - Allegro di molto"
from Mozart: Music for 2 Pianos; Piano Duets,
performed by Ingrid Haebler, Ludwig Hoffmann, Jorg Demus, and Paul Badura-Skoda

(46:03–46:51) Music
"Sonata in F for Piano Duet: 1. Adagio - Allegro di molto"
from Mozart: Music for 2 Pianos; Piano Duets,
performed by Ingrid Haebler, Ludwig Hoffmann, Jorg Demus, and Paul Badura-Skoda

(48:57–52:39 Music
"Erik Satie: Gnossiene No. 1"
from The Guitarist,
performed by John Williams