The following information is used for educational purposes only.
The Power of Words
How to Avoid Stomping on Personal and Customer Relationships
"The power of the word is real whether or not you are conscious of it. Your own words are the bricks and mortar of the dreams you want to realize. Behind every word flows energy." Sonia Choquette {mosgoogle}
One of the most profound powers we have, in our business or personal life, is the power of speech. The way we talk to people, and ourselves, shapes our relationships; and these relationships shape our world.
When you speak to someone in a gentle, loving tone of voice, you will most likely receive a gentle, loving response � and build a relationship of caring and trust. When you talk to someone in a condescending manner, being sarcastic, hateful, or just plain nasty, you will probably get back the same.
I had an experience recently with the latter situation. I'm in the process of setting up a new blog in WordPress for Inner Clarity. I chose a web hosting company based on a recommendation from another coach. This whole blog scenario and its set-up is new to me, so I've been getting a lot of mental exercise learning about cpanel, Fantastico, and MySQL, etc. Sounds like a foreign language, doesn't it?
I've been working my way through the steps of learning this new language, so I can create my blog, without much support except online documentation. When I had questions for my new web hosting company, I expected help � not ridicule. In the beginning they were somewhat helpful, but obviously irritated about my lack of experience. As time went on, and other issues came up, they became downright condescending in our email communications. Every day I dreaded having to contact them about any questions or concerns I might have encountered.
This whole situation came to a climactic end when I asked them to make a change in my domain name set-up. As a result of the change they made, I lost all the work I had already entered into WordPress. They didn't inform me at any time that this was a possibility. Nonetheless, they managed to make it appear that the loss of data was my own fault, and had nothing to do with the changes they made.
It seemed that the words they used and the tone of their emails were geared towards making me feel inadequate and ignorant - and they succeeded! While their evaluation of my skill level, at that point, may have been accurate, that is certainly not the way to keep customers � not to mention get referrals. It became crystal clear that this was not a company I wanted to deal with on an ongoing basis, so I cancelled my account with them. My only regret is that I didn't cancel it sooner�
What's the point of this story? If you want to build a successful business, be aware of the impact your words have on your customers and the people who support you. If you're trying to irritate your clients so they'll move on, then the condescending, sarcastic words and tone of voice may be appropriate. But if you want to have happy customers and support people, you probably want to take a different tactic.
Here are 3 tips for choosing the right words to fit your situation.
1. Use the "positivity sandwich". When you have a need to correct someone, express disappointment, or give feedback, use the "positivity sandwich". This is a term coined by Dale Carnegie; author of the classic "How to Win Friends and Influence People". This concept operates on the basic premise that you can tell anyone anything if you sandwich it between two positive statements.
When using the positivity sandwich, the ACT with Tact approach may be helpful. ACT is an acronym for Appreciate, Correct (or Communicate), and Thank. In the book by Linda Kavelin Popov, "A Pace of Grace", she writes about the ACT with Tact approach for giving feedback about sensitive situations. Here's an example.
My ex-web hosting company could have said something like, "I appreciate and understand you're trying to learn something new. Why don't you try doing it this way? We value your business". Can you imagine what a different relationship we would have had!
2. Use the "Would you be willing" approach. When there's something you want, but don't quite know how to get it without offending the other person and starting an argument, try asking them "would you be willing to�" This is an approach used by Marshall Rosenburg, in his enlightening work on Nonviolent Communication. When you use this gentle approach to a sensitive situation, it shows you are caring and considerate of the other person's feelings and whatever may be going on in their life. In this way, you can ask for what you want without criticizing, condemning, or complaining. Just be sure you're using a tone of voice that says you're being sincere in your request.
3. What do you say when you talk to yourself? You tend to show the world the feelings you have inside of you. If you're being critical and condemning yourself on a regular basis, it's tough to be in a state of graciousness to others. The solution to self-criticism is to catch yourself when that internal critic takes over, STOP it in its tracks, and instead look for things you have done right � things that you can appreciate about yourself. Elevate your negative self-talk to, "I know how to do this", or "I'm clear about the next logical step to take", or "I know I can figure out how to�.", etc.
We all have our unique approaches to life. Just because your internal guidance led you to do something a particular way, and someone else did it differently, doesn't mean you were wrong. It just means you're different. We need different viewpoints and creations in this world. Be willing to give up the self-criticism and celebrate your uniqueness. Don't get hung up on the "good opinion of others". Here's a wonderful quote that expresses the beauty of diversity.
"You don't get harmony when everyone sings the same note." - Doug Floyd
The power of your words, whether external or internal, shapes your world and carries over into your physical and emotional state of being. Your internal critic may be replaying those critical and condemning words you heard as a child. These are the words you came to believe because other people were describing you to you, and we tend to believe other people more than we believe ourselves � especially as a small child. You can learn to replace these hurtful words with words of love and support for yourself.
If you're having a challenge in your life, whether it is health, finances, personal, or business; look to see if your words are supporting or hindering your progress towards your goals. You may find the answer to your challenges just by listening to what you say when you talk to yourself.
About the Author:Sandy Reed, Certified Life Coach, ex-corporate manager, and small business owner, is the coach to call for support when you're ready to break out of the corporate prison, and create a life of freedom and flexibility. Visit her website at http://www.innercla ritylifecoaching .com for more tools and information and to sign-up for her free mini-e-course "7 Steps to Personal Power".
Source: www.english-magazine.org
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Sunday, August 25, 2013
GralInt/POL-INTAFF-TED Talks-May El-Khalil: Making peace is a marathon
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
May El-Khalil: Making peace is a marathon
Filmed Jun 2013 • Posted Aug 2013 • TEDGlobal 2013
In Lebanon there is one gunshot a year that isn’t part of a scene of routine violence: The opening sound of the Beirut International Marathon. In a moving talk, marathon founder May El-Khalil explains why she believed a 26.2-mile running event could bring together a country divided for decades by politics and religion, even if for one day a year.
The Beirut Marathon is the largest running event in the Middle East. May El-Khalil founded it as an instrument of peace.
Transcript:
I come from Lebanon, and I believe that running can change the world. I know what I have just said is simply not obvious.
You know, Lebanon as a country has been once destroyed by a long and bloody civil war. Honestly, I don't know why they call it civil war when there is nothing civil about it. With Syria to the north, Israel and Palestine to the south, and our government even up till this moment is still fragmented and unstable. For years, the country has been divided between politics and religion. However, for one day a year, we truly stand united, and that's when the marathon takes place.
I used to be a marathon runner. Long distance running was not only good for my well-being but it helped me meditate and dream big. So the longer distances I ran, the bigger my dreams became, until one fateful morning, and while training, I was hit by a bus. I nearly died, was in a coma, stayed at the hospital for two years, and underwent 36 surgeries to be able to walk again.
As soon as I came out of my coma, I realized that I was no longer the same runner I used to be, so I decided, if I couldn't run myself, I wanted to make sure that others could. So out of my hospital bed, I asked my husband to start taking notes, and a few months later, the marathon was born.
Organizing a marathon as a reaction to an accident may sound strange, but at that time, even during my most vulnerable condition, I needed to dream big. I needed something to take me out of my pain, an objective to look forward to. I didn't want to pity myself, nor to be pitied, and I thought by organizing such a marathon, I'll be able to pay back to my community, build bridges with the outside world, and invite runners to come to Lebanon and run under the umbrella of peace. Organizing a marathon in Lebanon is definitely not like organizing one in New York. How do you introduce the concept of running to a nation that is constantly at the brink of war? How do you ask those who were once fighting and killing each other to come together and run next to each other? More than that, how do you convince people to run a distance of 26.2 miles at a time they were not even familiar with the word "marathon"? So we had to start from scratch.
For almost two years, we went all over the country and even visited remote villages. I personally met with people from all walks of life -- mayors, NGOs, schoolchildren, politicians, militiamen, people from mosques, churches, the president of the country, even housewives. I learned one thing: When you walk the talk, people believe you. Many were touched by my personal story, and they shared their stories in return. It was honesty and transparency that brought us together. We spoke one common language to each other, and that was from one human to another. Once that trust was built, everybody wanted to be part of the marathon to show the world the true colors of Lebanon and the Lebanese and their desire to live in peace and harmony.
In October 2003, over 6,000 runners from 49 different nationalities came to the start line, all determined, and when the gunfire went off, this time it was a signal to run in harmony for a change.
The marathon grew. So did our political problems. But for every disaster we had, the marathon found ways to bring people together. In 2005, our prime minister was assassinated, and the country came to a complete standstill, so we organized a five-kilometer United We Run campaign. Over 60,000 people came to the start line, all wearing white t-shirts with no political slogans. That was a turning point for the marathon, where people started looking at it as a platform for peace and unity.
Between 2006 up to 2009, our country, Lebanon, went through unstable years, invasions, and more assassinations that brought us close to a civil war. The country was divided again, so much that our parliament resigned, we had no president for a year, and no prime minister. But we did have a marathon.
(Applause)
So through the marathon, we learned that political problems can be overcome. When the opposition party decided to shut down part of the city center, we negotiated alternative routes. Government protesters became sideline cheerleaders. They even hosted juice stations.
You know, the marathon has really become one of a kind. It gained credibility from both the Lebanese and the international community. Last November 2012, over 33,000 runners from 85 different nationalities came to the start line, but this time, they challenged very stormy and rainy weather. The streets were flooded, but people didn't want to miss out on the opportunity of being part of such a national day.
BMA has expanded. We include everyone: the young, the elderly, the disabled, the mentally challenged, the blind, the elite, the amateur runners, even moms with their babies. Themes have included runs for the environment, breast cancer, for the love of Lebanon, for peace, or just simply to run.
The first annual all-women-and-girls race for empowerment, which is one of its kind in the region, has just taken place only a few weeks ago, with 4,512 women, including the first lady, and this is only the beginning.
Thank you.
(Applause)
BMA has supported charities and volunteers who have helped reshape Lebanon, raising funds for their causes and encouraging others to give. The culture of giving and doing good has become contagious. Stereotypes have been broken. Change-makers and future leaders have been created. I believe these are the building blocks for future peace.
BMA has become such a respected event in the region that government officials in the region like Iraq, Egypt and Syria, have asked the organization to help them structure a similar sporting event. We are now one of the largest running events in the Middle East, but most importantly, it is a platform for hope and cooperation in an ever-fragile and unstable part of the world. From Boston to Beirut, we stand as one.
(Applause)
After 10 years in Lebanon, from national marathons or from national events to smaller regional races, we've seen that people want to run for a better future. After all, peacemaking is not a sprint. It is more of a marathon.
Thank you.
(Applause)
May El-Khalil: Making peace is a marathon
Filmed Jun 2013 • Posted Aug 2013 • TEDGlobal 2013
In Lebanon there is one gunshot a year that isn’t part of a scene of routine violence: The opening sound of the Beirut International Marathon. In a moving talk, marathon founder May El-Khalil explains why she believed a 26.2-mile running event could bring together a country divided for decades by politics and religion, even if for one day a year.
The Beirut Marathon is the largest running event in the Middle East. May El-Khalil founded it as an instrument of peace.
Transcript:
I come from Lebanon, and I believe that running can change the world. I know what I have just said is simply not obvious.
You know, Lebanon as a country has been once destroyed by a long and bloody civil war. Honestly, I don't know why they call it civil war when there is nothing civil about it. With Syria to the north, Israel and Palestine to the south, and our government even up till this moment is still fragmented and unstable. For years, the country has been divided between politics and religion. However, for one day a year, we truly stand united, and that's when the marathon takes place.
I used to be a marathon runner. Long distance running was not only good for my well-being but it helped me meditate and dream big. So the longer distances I ran, the bigger my dreams became, until one fateful morning, and while training, I was hit by a bus. I nearly died, was in a coma, stayed at the hospital for two years, and underwent 36 surgeries to be able to walk again.
As soon as I came out of my coma, I realized that I was no longer the same runner I used to be, so I decided, if I couldn't run myself, I wanted to make sure that others could. So out of my hospital bed, I asked my husband to start taking notes, and a few months later, the marathon was born.
Organizing a marathon as a reaction to an accident may sound strange, but at that time, even during my most vulnerable condition, I needed to dream big. I needed something to take me out of my pain, an objective to look forward to. I didn't want to pity myself, nor to be pitied, and I thought by organizing such a marathon, I'll be able to pay back to my community, build bridges with the outside world, and invite runners to come to Lebanon and run under the umbrella of peace. Organizing a marathon in Lebanon is definitely not like organizing one in New York. How do you introduce the concept of running to a nation that is constantly at the brink of war? How do you ask those who were once fighting and killing each other to come together and run next to each other? More than that, how do you convince people to run a distance of 26.2 miles at a time they were not even familiar with the word "marathon"? So we had to start from scratch.
For almost two years, we went all over the country and even visited remote villages. I personally met with people from all walks of life -- mayors, NGOs, schoolchildren, politicians, militiamen, people from mosques, churches, the president of the country, even housewives. I learned one thing: When you walk the talk, people believe you. Many were touched by my personal story, and they shared their stories in return. It was honesty and transparency that brought us together. We spoke one common language to each other, and that was from one human to another. Once that trust was built, everybody wanted to be part of the marathon to show the world the true colors of Lebanon and the Lebanese and their desire to live in peace and harmony.
In October 2003, over 6,000 runners from 49 different nationalities came to the start line, all determined, and when the gunfire went off, this time it was a signal to run in harmony for a change.
The marathon grew. So did our political problems. But for every disaster we had, the marathon found ways to bring people together. In 2005, our prime minister was assassinated, and the country came to a complete standstill, so we organized a five-kilometer United We Run campaign. Over 60,000 people came to the start line, all wearing white t-shirts with no political slogans. That was a turning point for the marathon, where people started looking at it as a platform for peace and unity.
Between 2006 up to 2009, our country, Lebanon, went through unstable years, invasions, and more assassinations that brought us close to a civil war. The country was divided again, so much that our parliament resigned, we had no president for a year, and no prime minister. But we did have a marathon.
(Applause)
So through the marathon, we learned that political problems can be overcome. When the opposition party decided to shut down part of the city center, we negotiated alternative routes. Government protesters became sideline cheerleaders. They even hosted juice stations.
You know, the marathon has really become one of a kind. It gained credibility from both the Lebanese and the international community. Last November 2012, over 33,000 runners from 85 different nationalities came to the start line, but this time, they challenged very stormy and rainy weather. The streets were flooded, but people didn't want to miss out on the opportunity of being part of such a national day.
BMA has expanded. We include everyone: the young, the elderly, the disabled, the mentally challenged, the blind, the elite, the amateur runners, even moms with their babies. Themes have included runs for the environment, breast cancer, for the love of Lebanon, for peace, or just simply to run.
The first annual all-women-and-girls race for empowerment, which is one of its kind in the region, has just taken place only a few weeks ago, with 4,512 women, including the first lady, and this is only the beginning.
Thank you.
(Applause)
BMA has supported charities and volunteers who have helped reshape Lebanon, raising funds for their causes and encouraging others to give. The culture of giving and doing good has become contagious. Stereotypes have been broken. Change-makers and future leaders have been created. I believe these are the building blocks for future peace.
BMA has become such a respected event in the region that government officials in the region like Iraq, Egypt and Syria, have asked the organization to help them structure a similar sporting event. We are now one of the largest running events in the Middle East, but most importantly, it is a platform for hope and cooperation in an ever-fragile and unstable part of the world. From Boston to Beirut, we stand as one.
(Applause)
After 10 years in Lebanon, from national marathons or from national events to smaller regional races, we've seen that people want to run for a better future. After all, peacemaking is not a sprint. It is more of a marathon.
Thank you.
(Applause)
GralInt/BRAIN-TED Talks-Why do we sleep?
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Why do we sleep?
Filmed Jun 2013 • Posted Aug 2013 • TEDGlobal 2013
Russell Foster is a circadian neuroscientist: He studies the sleep cycles of the brain. And he asks: What do we know about sleep? Not a lot, it turns out, for something we do with one-third of our lives. In this talk, Foster shares three popular theories about why we sleep, busts some myths about how much sleep we need at different ages -- and hints at some bold new uses of sleep as a predictor of mental health.
Russell Foster studies sleep and its role in our lives, examining how our perception of light influences our sleep-wake rhythms.
Transcript:
What I'd like to do today is talk about one of my favorite subjects, and that is the neuroscience of sleep.
Now, there is a sound -- (Alarm clock) -- aah, it worked -- a sound that is desperately, desperately familiar to most of us, and of course it's the sound of the alarm clock. And what that truly ghastly, awful sound does is stop the single most important behavioral experience that we have, and that's sleep. If you're an average sort of person, 36 percent of your life will be spent asleep, which means that if you live to 90, then 32 years will have been spent entirely asleep.
Now what that 32 years is telling us is that sleep at some level is important. And yet, for most of us, we don't give sleep a second thought. We throw it away. We really just don't think about sleep. And so what I'd like to do today is change your views, change your ideas and your thoughts about sleep. And the journey that I want to take you on, we need to start by going back in time.
"Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber." Any ideas who said that? Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Yes, let me give you a few more quotes. "O sleep, O gentle sleep, nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee?" Shakespeare again, from -- I won't say it -- the Scottish play. [Correction: Henry IV, Part 2] (Laughter) From the same time: "Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together." Extremely prophetic, by Thomas Dekker, another Elizabethan dramatist.
But if we jump forward 400 years, the tone about sleep changes somewhat. This is from Thomas Edison, from the beginning of the 20th century. "Sleep is a criminal waste of time and a heritage from our cave days." Bang. (Laughter) And if we also jump into the 1980s, some of you may remember that Margaret Thatcher was reported to have said, "Sleep is for wimps." And of course the infamous -- what was his name? -- the infamous Gordon Gekko from "Wall Street" said, "Money never sleeps."
What do we do in the 20th century about sleep? Well, of course, we use Thomas Edison's light bulb to invade the night, and we occupied the dark, and in the process of this occupation, we've treated sleep as an illness, almost. We've treated it as an enemy. At most now, I suppose, we tolerate the need for sleep, and at worst perhaps many of us think of sleep as an illness that needs some sort of a cure. And our ignorance about sleep is really quite profound.
Why is it? Why do we abandon sleep in our thoughts? Well, it's because you don't do anything much while you're asleep, it seems. You don't eat. You don't drink. And you don't have sex. Well, most of us anyway. And so therefore it's -- Sorry. It's a complete waste of time, right? Wrong. Actually, sleep is an incredibly important part of our biology, and neuroscientists are beginning to explain why it's so very important. So let's move to the brain.
Now, here we have a brain. This is donated by a social scientist, and they said they didn't know what it was, or indeed how to use it, so -- (Laughter) Sorry. So I borrowed it. I don't think they noticed. Okay. (Laughter)
The point I'm trying to make is that when you're asleep, this thing doesn't shut down. In fact, some areas of the brain are actually more active during the sleep state than during the wake state. The other thing that's really important about sleep is that it doesn't arise from a single structure within the brain, but is to some extent a network property, and if we flip the brain on its back -- I love this little bit of spinal cord here -- this bit here is the hypothalamus, and right under there is a whole raft of interesting structures, not least the biological clock. The biological clock tells us when it's good to be up, when it's good to be asleep, and what that structure does is interact with a whole raft of other areas within the hypothalamus, the lateral hypothalamus, the ventrolateral preoptic nuclei. All of those combine, and they send projections down to the brain stem here. The brain stem then projects forward and bathes the cortex, this wonderfully wrinkly bit over here, with neurotransmitters that keep us awake and essentially provide us with our consciousness. So sleep arises from a whole raft of different interactions within the brain, and essentially, sleep is turned on and off as a result of a range of interactions in here.
Okay. So where have we got to? We've said that sleep is complicated and it takes 32 years of our life. But what I haven't explained is what sleep is about. So why do we sleep? And it won't surprise any of you that, of course, the scientists, we don't have a consensus. There are dozens of different ideas about why we sleep, and I'm going to outline three of those.
The first is sort of the restoration idea, and it's somewhat intuitive. Essentially, all the stuff we've burned up during the day, we restore, we replace, we rebuild during the night. And indeed, as an explanation, it goes back to Aristotle, so that's, what, 2,300 years ago. It's gone in and out of fashion. It's fashionable at the moment because what's been shown is that within the brain, a whole raft of genes have been shown to be turned on only during sleep, and those genes are associated with restoration and metabolic pathways. So there's good evidence for the whole restoration hypothesis.
What about energy conservation? Again, perhaps intuitive. You essentially sleep to save calories. Now, when you do the sums, though, it doesn't really pan out. If you compare an individual who has slept at night, or stayed awake and hasn't moved very much, the energy saving of sleeping is about 110 calories a night. Now, that's the equivalent of a hot dog bun. Now, I would say that a hot dog bun is kind of a meager return for such a complicated and demanding behavior as sleep. So I'm less convinced by the energy conservation idea.
But the third idea I'm quite attracted to, which is brain processing and memory consolidation. What we know is that, if after you've tried to learn a task, and you sleep-deprive individuals, the ability to learn that task is smashed. It's really hugely attenuated. So sleep and memory consolidation is also very important. However, it's not just the laying down of memory and recalling it. What's turned out to be really exciting is that our ability to come up with novel solutions to complex problems is hugely enhanced by a night of sleep. In fact, it's been estimated to give us a threefold advantage. Sleeping at night enhances our creativity. And what seems to be going on is that, in the brain, those neural connections that are important, those synaptic connections that are important, are linked and strengthened, while those that are less important tend to fade away and be less important.
Okay. So we've had three explanations for why we might sleep, and I think the important thing to realize is that the details will vary, and it's probable we sleep for multiple different reasons. But sleep is not an indulgence. It's not some sort of thing that we can take on board rather casually. I think that sleep was once likened to an upgrade from economy to business class, you know, the equivalent of. It's not even an upgrade from economy to first class. The critical thing to realize is that if you don't sleep, you don't fly. Essentially, you never get there, and what's extraordinary about much of our society these days is that we are desperately sleep-deprived.
So let's now look at sleep deprivation. Huge sectors of society are sleep-deprived, and let's look at our sleep-o-meter. So in the 1950s, good data suggests that most of us were getting around about eight hours of sleep a night. Nowadays, we sleep one and a half to two hours less every night, so we're in the six-and-a-half-hours-every-night league. For teenagers, it's worse, much worse. They need nine hours for full brain performance, and many of them, on a school night, are only getting five hours of sleep. It's simply not enough. If we think about other sectors of society, the aged, if you are aged, then your ability to sleep in a single block is somewhat disrupted, and many sleep, again, less than five hours a night. Shift work. Shift work is extraordinary, perhaps 20 percent of the working population, and the body clock does not shift to the demands of working at night. It's locked onto the same light-dark cycle as the rest of us. So when the poor old shift worker is going home to try and sleep during the day, desperately tired, the body clock is saying, "Wake up. This is the time to be awake." So the quality of sleep that you get as a night shift worker is usually very poor, again in that sort of five-hour region. And then, of course, tens of millions of people suffer from jet lag. So who here has jet lag? Well, my goodness gracious. Well, thank you very much indeed for not falling asleep, because that's what your brain is craving.
One of the things that the brain does is indulge in micro-sleeps, this involuntary falling asleep, and you have essentially no control over it. Now, micro-sleeps can be sort of somewhat embarrassing, but they can also be deadly. It's been estimated that 31 percent of drivers will fall asleep at the wheel at least once in their life, and in the U.S., the statistics are pretty good: 100,000 accidents on the freeway have been associated with tiredness, loss of vigilance, and falling asleep. A hundred thousand a year. It's extraordinary. At another level of terror, we dip into the tragic accidents at Chernobyl and indeed the space shuttle Challenger, which was so tragically lost. And in the investigations that followed those disasters, poor judgment as a result of extended shift work and loss of vigilance and tiredness was attributed to a big chunk of those disasters.
So when you're tired, and you lack sleep, you have poor memory, you have poor creativity, you have increased impulsiveness, and you have overall poor judgment. But my friends, it's so much worse than that.
(Laughter)
If you are a tired brain, the brain is craving things to wake it up. So drugs, stimulants. Caffeine represents the stimulant of choice across much of the Western world. Much of the day is fueled by caffeine, and if you're a really naughty tired brain, nicotine. And of course, you're fueling the waking state with these stimulants, and then of course it gets to 11 o'clock at night, and the brain says to itself, "Ah, well actually, I need to be asleep fairly shortly. What do we do about that when I'm feeling completely wired?" Well, of course, you then resort to alcohol. Now alcohol, short-term, you know, once or twice, to use to mildly sedate you, can be very useful. It can actually ease the sleep transition. But what you must be so aware of is that alcohol doesn't provide sleep, a biological mimic for sleep. It sedates you. So it actually harms some of the neural proccessing that's going on during memory consolidation and memory recall. So it's a short-term acute measure, but for goodness sake, don't become addicted to alcohol as a way of getting to sleep every night.
Another connection between loss of sleep is weight gain. If you sleep around about five hours or less every night, then you have a 50 percent likelihood of being obese. What's the connection here? Well, sleep loss seems to give rise to the release of the hormone ghrelin, the hunger hormone. Ghrelin is released. It gets to the brain. The brain says, "I need carbohydrates," and what it does is seek out carbohydrates and particularly sugars. So there's a link between tiredness and the metabolic predisposition for weight gain.
Stress. Tired people are massively stressed. And one of the things of stress, of course, is loss of memory, which is what I sort of just then had a little lapse of. But stress is so much more. So if you're acutely stressed, not a great problem, but it's sustained stress associated with sleep loss that's the problem. So sustained stress leads to suppressed immunity, and so tired people tend to have higher rates of overall infection, and there's some very good studies showing that shift workers, for example, have higher rates of cancer. Increased levels of stress throw glucose into the circulation. Glucose becomes a dominant part of the vasculature and essentially you become glucose intolerant. Therefore, diabetes 2. Stress increases cardiovascular disease as a result of raising blood pressure. So there's a whole raft of things associated with sleep loss that are more than just a mildly impaired brain, which is where I think most people think that sleep loss resides.
So at this point in the talk, this is a nice time to think, well, do you think on the whole I'm getting enough sleep? So a quick show of hands. Who feels that they're getting enough sleep here? Oh. Well, that's pretty impressive. Good. We'll talk more about that later, about what are your tips.
So most of us, of course, ask the question, "Well, how do I know whether I'm getting enough sleep?" Well, it's not rocket science. If you need an alarm clock to get you out of bed in the morning, if you are taking a long time to get up, if you need lots of stimulants, if you're grumpy, if you're irritable, if you're told by your work colleagues that you're looking tired and irritable, chances are you are sleep-deprived. Listen to them. Listen to yourself.
What do you do? Well -- and this is slightly offensive -- sleep for dummies: Make your bedroom a haven for sleep. The first critical thing is make it as dark as you possibly can, and also make it slightly cool. Very important. Actually, reduce your amount of light exposure at least half an hour before you go to bed. Light increases levels of alertness and will delay sleep. What's the last thing that most of us do before we go to bed? We stand in a massively lit bathroom looking into the mirror cleaning our teeth. It's the worst thing we can possibly do before we went to sleep. Turn off those mobile phones. Turn off those computers. Turn off all of those things that are also going to excite the brain. Try not to drink caffeine too late in the day, ideally not after lunch. Now, we've set about reducing light exposure before you go to bed, but light exposure in the morning is very good at setting the biological clock to the light-dark cycle. So seek out morning light. Basically, listen to yourself. Wind down. Do those sorts of things that you know are going to ease you off into the honey-heavy dew of slumber.
Okay. That's some facts. What about some myths?
Teenagers are lazy. No. Poor things. They have a biological predisposition to go to bed late and get up late, so give them a break.
We need eight hours of sleep a night. That's an average. Some people need more. Some people need less. And what you need to do is listen to your body. Do you need that much or do you need more? Simple as that.
Old people need less sleep. Not true. The sleep demands of the aged do not go down. Essentially, sleep fragments and becomes less robust, but sleep requirements do not go down.
And the fourth myth is, early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. Well that's wrong at so many different levels. (Laughter) There is no, no evidence that getting up early and going to bed early gives you more wealth at all. There's no difference in socioeconomic status. In my experience, the only difference between morning people and evening people is that those people that get up in the morning early are just horribly smug.
(Laughter) (Applause)
Okay. So for the last part, the last few minutes, what I want to do is change gears and talk about some really new, breaking areas of neuroscience, which is the association between mental health, mental illness and sleep disruption. We've known for 130 years that in severe mental illness, there is always, always sleep disruption, but it's been largely ignored. In the 1970s, when people started to think about this again, they said, "Yes, well, of course you have sleep disruption in schizophrenia because they're on anti-psychotics. It's the anti-psychotics causing the sleep problems," ignoring the fact that for a hundred years previously, sleep disruption had been reported before anti-psychotics.
So what's going on? Lots of groups, several groups are studying conditions like depression, schizophrenia and bipolar, and what's going on in terms of sleep disruption. We have a big study which we published last year on schizophrenia, and the data were quite extraordinary. In those individuals with schizophrenia, much of the time, they were awake during the night phase and then they were asleep during the day. Other groups showed no 24-hour patterns whatsoever. Their sleep was absolutely smashed. And some had no ability to regulate their sleep by the light-dark cycle. They were getting up later and later and later and later each night. It was smashed.
So what's going on? And the really exciting news is that mental illness and sleep are not simply associated but they are physically linked within the brain. The neural networks that predispose you to normal sleep, give you normal sleep, and those that give you normal mental health are overlapping. And what's the evidence for that? Well, genes that have been shown to be very important in the generation of normal sleep, when mutated, when changed, also predispose individuals to mental health problems. And last year, we published a study which showed that a gene that's been linked to schizophrenia, which, when mutated, also smashes the sleep. So we have evidence of a genuine mechanistic overlap between these two important systems.
Other work flowed from these studies. The first was that sleep disruption actually precedes certain types of mental illness, and we've shown that in those young individuals who are at high risk of developing bipolar disorder, they already have a sleep abnormality prior to any clinical diagnosis of bipolar. The other bit of data was that sleep disruption may actually exacerbate, make worse the mental illness state. My colleague Dan Freeman has used a range of agents which have stabilized sleep and reduced levels of paranoia in those individuals by 50 percent.
So what have we got? We've got, in these connections, some really exciting things. In terms of the neuroscience, by understanding the neuroscience of these two systems, we're really beginning to understand how both sleep and mental illness are generated and regulated within the brain. The second area is that if we can use sleep and sleep disruption as an early warning signal, then we have the chance of going in. If we know that these individuals are vulnerable, early intervention then becomes possible. And the third, which I think is the most exciting, is that we can think of the sleep centers within the brain as a new therapeutic target. Stabilize sleep in those individuals who are vulnerable, we can certainly make them healthier, but also alleviate some of the appalling symptoms of mental illness.
So let me just finish. What I started by saying is take sleep seriously. Our attitudes toward sleep are so very different from a pre-industrial age, when we were almost wrapped in a duvet. We used to understand intuitively the importance of sleep. And this isn't some sort of crystal-waving nonsense. This is a pragmatic response to good health. If you have good sleep, it increases your concentration, attention, decision-making, creativity, social skills, health. If you get sleep, it reduces your mood changes, your stress, your levels of anger, your impulsivity, and your tendency to drink and take drugs. And we finished by saying that an understanding of the neuroscience of sleep is really informing the way we think about some of the causes of mental illness, and indeed is providing us new ways to treat these incredibly debilitating conditions.
Jim Butcher, the fantasy writer, said, "Sleep is God. Go worship." And I can only recommend that you do the same.
Thank you for your attention.
(Applause)
Why do we sleep?
Filmed Jun 2013 • Posted Aug 2013 • TEDGlobal 2013
Russell Foster is a circadian neuroscientist: He studies the sleep cycles of the brain. And he asks: What do we know about sleep? Not a lot, it turns out, for something we do with one-third of our lives. In this talk, Foster shares three popular theories about why we sleep, busts some myths about how much sleep we need at different ages -- and hints at some bold new uses of sleep as a predictor of mental health.
Russell Foster studies sleep and its role in our lives, examining how our perception of light influences our sleep-wake rhythms.
Transcript:
What I'd like to do today is talk about one of my favorite subjects, and that is the neuroscience of sleep.
Now, there is a sound -- (Alarm clock) -- aah, it worked -- a sound that is desperately, desperately familiar to most of us, and of course it's the sound of the alarm clock. And what that truly ghastly, awful sound does is stop the single most important behavioral experience that we have, and that's sleep. If you're an average sort of person, 36 percent of your life will be spent asleep, which means that if you live to 90, then 32 years will have been spent entirely asleep.
Now what that 32 years is telling us is that sleep at some level is important. And yet, for most of us, we don't give sleep a second thought. We throw it away. We really just don't think about sleep. And so what I'd like to do today is change your views, change your ideas and your thoughts about sleep. And the journey that I want to take you on, we need to start by going back in time.
"Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber." Any ideas who said that? Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Yes, let me give you a few more quotes. "O sleep, O gentle sleep, nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee?" Shakespeare again, from -- I won't say it -- the Scottish play. [Correction: Henry IV, Part 2] (Laughter) From the same time: "Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together." Extremely prophetic, by Thomas Dekker, another Elizabethan dramatist.
But if we jump forward 400 years, the tone about sleep changes somewhat. This is from Thomas Edison, from the beginning of the 20th century. "Sleep is a criminal waste of time and a heritage from our cave days." Bang. (Laughter) And if we also jump into the 1980s, some of you may remember that Margaret Thatcher was reported to have said, "Sleep is for wimps." And of course the infamous -- what was his name? -- the infamous Gordon Gekko from "Wall Street" said, "Money never sleeps."
What do we do in the 20th century about sleep? Well, of course, we use Thomas Edison's light bulb to invade the night, and we occupied the dark, and in the process of this occupation, we've treated sleep as an illness, almost. We've treated it as an enemy. At most now, I suppose, we tolerate the need for sleep, and at worst perhaps many of us think of sleep as an illness that needs some sort of a cure. And our ignorance about sleep is really quite profound.
Why is it? Why do we abandon sleep in our thoughts? Well, it's because you don't do anything much while you're asleep, it seems. You don't eat. You don't drink. And you don't have sex. Well, most of us anyway. And so therefore it's -- Sorry. It's a complete waste of time, right? Wrong. Actually, sleep is an incredibly important part of our biology, and neuroscientists are beginning to explain why it's so very important. So let's move to the brain.
Now, here we have a brain. This is donated by a social scientist, and they said they didn't know what it was, or indeed how to use it, so -- (Laughter) Sorry. So I borrowed it. I don't think they noticed. Okay. (Laughter)
The point I'm trying to make is that when you're asleep, this thing doesn't shut down. In fact, some areas of the brain are actually more active during the sleep state than during the wake state. The other thing that's really important about sleep is that it doesn't arise from a single structure within the brain, but is to some extent a network property, and if we flip the brain on its back -- I love this little bit of spinal cord here -- this bit here is the hypothalamus, and right under there is a whole raft of interesting structures, not least the biological clock. The biological clock tells us when it's good to be up, when it's good to be asleep, and what that structure does is interact with a whole raft of other areas within the hypothalamus, the lateral hypothalamus, the ventrolateral preoptic nuclei. All of those combine, and they send projections down to the brain stem here. The brain stem then projects forward and bathes the cortex, this wonderfully wrinkly bit over here, with neurotransmitters that keep us awake and essentially provide us with our consciousness. So sleep arises from a whole raft of different interactions within the brain, and essentially, sleep is turned on and off as a result of a range of interactions in here.
Okay. So where have we got to? We've said that sleep is complicated and it takes 32 years of our life. But what I haven't explained is what sleep is about. So why do we sleep? And it won't surprise any of you that, of course, the scientists, we don't have a consensus. There are dozens of different ideas about why we sleep, and I'm going to outline three of those.
The first is sort of the restoration idea, and it's somewhat intuitive. Essentially, all the stuff we've burned up during the day, we restore, we replace, we rebuild during the night. And indeed, as an explanation, it goes back to Aristotle, so that's, what, 2,300 years ago. It's gone in and out of fashion. It's fashionable at the moment because what's been shown is that within the brain, a whole raft of genes have been shown to be turned on only during sleep, and those genes are associated with restoration and metabolic pathways. So there's good evidence for the whole restoration hypothesis.
What about energy conservation? Again, perhaps intuitive. You essentially sleep to save calories. Now, when you do the sums, though, it doesn't really pan out. If you compare an individual who has slept at night, or stayed awake and hasn't moved very much, the energy saving of sleeping is about 110 calories a night. Now, that's the equivalent of a hot dog bun. Now, I would say that a hot dog bun is kind of a meager return for such a complicated and demanding behavior as sleep. So I'm less convinced by the energy conservation idea.
But the third idea I'm quite attracted to, which is brain processing and memory consolidation. What we know is that, if after you've tried to learn a task, and you sleep-deprive individuals, the ability to learn that task is smashed. It's really hugely attenuated. So sleep and memory consolidation is also very important. However, it's not just the laying down of memory and recalling it. What's turned out to be really exciting is that our ability to come up with novel solutions to complex problems is hugely enhanced by a night of sleep. In fact, it's been estimated to give us a threefold advantage. Sleeping at night enhances our creativity. And what seems to be going on is that, in the brain, those neural connections that are important, those synaptic connections that are important, are linked and strengthened, while those that are less important tend to fade away and be less important.
Okay. So we've had three explanations for why we might sleep, and I think the important thing to realize is that the details will vary, and it's probable we sleep for multiple different reasons. But sleep is not an indulgence. It's not some sort of thing that we can take on board rather casually. I think that sleep was once likened to an upgrade from economy to business class, you know, the equivalent of. It's not even an upgrade from economy to first class. The critical thing to realize is that if you don't sleep, you don't fly. Essentially, you never get there, and what's extraordinary about much of our society these days is that we are desperately sleep-deprived.
So let's now look at sleep deprivation. Huge sectors of society are sleep-deprived, and let's look at our sleep-o-meter. So in the 1950s, good data suggests that most of us were getting around about eight hours of sleep a night. Nowadays, we sleep one and a half to two hours less every night, so we're in the six-and-a-half-hours-every-night league. For teenagers, it's worse, much worse. They need nine hours for full brain performance, and many of them, on a school night, are only getting five hours of sleep. It's simply not enough. If we think about other sectors of society, the aged, if you are aged, then your ability to sleep in a single block is somewhat disrupted, and many sleep, again, less than five hours a night. Shift work. Shift work is extraordinary, perhaps 20 percent of the working population, and the body clock does not shift to the demands of working at night. It's locked onto the same light-dark cycle as the rest of us. So when the poor old shift worker is going home to try and sleep during the day, desperately tired, the body clock is saying, "Wake up. This is the time to be awake." So the quality of sleep that you get as a night shift worker is usually very poor, again in that sort of five-hour region. And then, of course, tens of millions of people suffer from jet lag. So who here has jet lag? Well, my goodness gracious. Well, thank you very much indeed for not falling asleep, because that's what your brain is craving.
One of the things that the brain does is indulge in micro-sleeps, this involuntary falling asleep, and you have essentially no control over it. Now, micro-sleeps can be sort of somewhat embarrassing, but they can also be deadly. It's been estimated that 31 percent of drivers will fall asleep at the wheel at least once in their life, and in the U.S., the statistics are pretty good: 100,000 accidents on the freeway have been associated with tiredness, loss of vigilance, and falling asleep. A hundred thousand a year. It's extraordinary. At another level of terror, we dip into the tragic accidents at Chernobyl and indeed the space shuttle Challenger, which was so tragically lost. And in the investigations that followed those disasters, poor judgment as a result of extended shift work and loss of vigilance and tiredness was attributed to a big chunk of those disasters.
So when you're tired, and you lack sleep, you have poor memory, you have poor creativity, you have increased impulsiveness, and you have overall poor judgment. But my friends, it's so much worse than that.
(Laughter)
If you are a tired brain, the brain is craving things to wake it up. So drugs, stimulants. Caffeine represents the stimulant of choice across much of the Western world. Much of the day is fueled by caffeine, and if you're a really naughty tired brain, nicotine. And of course, you're fueling the waking state with these stimulants, and then of course it gets to 11 o'clock at night, and the brain says to itself, "Ah, well actually, I need to be asleep fairly shortly. What do we do about that when I'm feeling completely wired?" Well, of course, you then resort to alcohol. Now alcohol, short-term, you know, once or twice, to use to mildly sedate you, can be very useful. It can actually ease the sleep transition. But what you must be so aware of is that alcohol doesn't provide sleep, a biological mimic for sleep. It sedates you. So it actually harms some of the neural proccessing that's going on during memory consolidation and memory recall. So it's a short-term acute measure, but for goodness sake, don't become addicted to alcohol as a way of getting to sleep every night.
Another connection between loss of sleep is weight gain. If you sleep around about five hours or less every night, then you have a 50 percent likelihood of being obese. What's the connection here? Well, sleep loss seems to give rise to the release of the hormone ghrelin, the hunger hormone. Ghrelin is released. It gets to the brain. The brain says, "I need carbohydrates," and what it does is seek out carbohydrates and particularly sugars. So there's a link between tiredness and the metabolic predisposition for weight gain.
Stress. Tired people are massively stressed. And one of the things of stress, of course, is loss of memory, which is what I sort of just then had a little lapse of. But stress is so much more. So if you're acutely stressed, not a great problem, but it's sustained stress associated with sleep loss that's the problem. So sustained stress leads to suppressed immunity, and so tired people tend to have higher rates of overall infection, and there's some very good studies showing that shift workers, for example, have higher rates of cancer. Increased levels of stress throw glucose into the circulation. Glucose becomes a dominant part of the vasculature and essentially you become glucose intolerant. Therefore, diabetes 2. Stress increases cardiovascular disease as a result of raising blood pressure. So there's a whole raft of things associated with sleep loss that are more than just a mildly impaired brain, which is where I think most people think that sleep loss resides.
So at this point in the talk, this is a nice time to think, well, do you think on the whole I'm getting enough sleep? So a quick show of hands. Who feels that they're getting enough sleep here? Oh. Well, that's pretty impressive. Good. We'll talk more about that later, about what are your tips.
So most of us, of course, ask the question, "Well, how do I know whether I'm getting enough sleep?" Well, it's not rocket science. If you need an alarm clock to get you out of bed in the morning, if you are taking a long time to get up, if you need lots of stimulants, if you're grumpy, if you're irritable, if you're told by your work colleagues that you're looking tired and irritable, chances are you are sleep-deprived. Listen to them. Listen to yourself.
What do you do? Well -- and this is slightly offensive -- sleep for dummies: Make your bedroom a haven for sleep. The first critical thing is make it as dark as you possibly can, and also make it slightly cool. Very important. Actually, reduce your amount of light exposure at least half an hour before you go to bed. Light increases levels of alertness and will delay sleep. What's the last thing that most of us do before we go to bed? We stand in a massively lit bathroom looking into the mirror cleaning our teeth. It's the worst thing we can possibly do before we went to sleep. Turn off those mobile phones. Turn off those computers. Turn off all of those things that are also going to excite the brain. Try not to drink caffeine too late in the day, ideally not after lunch. Now, we've set about reducing light exposure before you go to bed, but light exposure in the morning is very good at setting the biological clock to the light-dark cycle. So seek out morning light. Basically, listen to yourself. Wind down. Do those sorts of things that you know are going to ease you off into the honey-heavy dew of slumber.
Okay. That's some facts. What about some myths?
Teenagers are lazy. No. Poor things. They have a biological predisposition to go to bed late and get up late, so give them a break.
We need eight hours of sleep a night. That's an average. Some people need more. Some people need less. And what you need to do is listen to your body. Do you need that much or do you need more? Simple as that.
Old people need less sleep. Not true. The sleep demands of the aged do not go down. Essentially, sleep fragments and becomes less robust, but sleep requirements do not go down.
And the fourth myth is, early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. Well that's wrong at so many different levels. (Laughter) There is no, no evidence that getting up early and going to bed early gives you more wealth at all. There's no difference in socioeconomic status. In my experience, the only difference between morning people and evening people is that those people that get up in the morning early are just horribly smug.
(Laughter) (Applause)
Okay. So for the last part, the last few minutes, what I want to do is change gears and talk about some really new, breaking areas of neuroscience, which is the association between mental health, mental illness and sleep disruption. We've known for 130 years that in severe mental illness, there is always, always sleep disruption, but it's been largely ignored. In the 1970s, when people started to think about this again, they said, "Yes, well, of course you have sleep disruption in schizophrenia because they're on anti-psychotics. It's the anti-psychotics causing the sleep problems," ignoring the fact that for a hundred years previously, sleep disruption had been reported before anti-psychotics.
So what's going on? Lots of groups, several groups are studying conditions like depression, schizophrenia and bipolar, and what's going on in terms of sleep disruption. We have a big study which we published last year on schizophrenia, and the data were quite extraordinary. In those individuals with schizophrenia, much of the time, they were awake during the night phase and then they were asleep during the day. Other groups showed no 24-hour patterns whatsoever. Their sleep was absolutely smashed. And some had no ability to regulate their sleep by the light-dark cycle. They were getting up later and later and later and later each night. It was smashed.
So what's going on? And the really exciting news is that mental illness and sleep are not simply associated but they are physically linked within the brain. The neural networks that predispose you to normal sleep, give you normal sleep, and those that give you normal mental health are overlapping. And what's the evidence for that? Well, genes that have been shown to be very important in the generation of normal sleep, when mutated, when changed, also predispose individuals to mental health problems. And last year, we published a study which showed that a gene that's been linked to schizophrenia, which, when mutated, also smashes the sleep. So we have evidence of a genuine mechanistic overlap between these two important systems.
Other work flowed from these studies. The first was that sleep disruption actually precedes certain types of mental illness, and we've shown that in those young individuals who are at high risk of developing bipolar disorder, they already have a sleep abnormality prior to any clinical diagnosis of bipolar. The other bit of data was that sleep disruption may actually exacerbate, make worse the mental illness state. My colleague Dan Freeman has used a range of agents which have stabilized sleep and reduced levels of paranoia in those individuals by 50 percent.
So what have we got? We've got, in these connections, some really exciting things. In terms of the neuroscience, by understanding the neuroscience of these two systems, we're really beginning to understand how both sleep and mental illness are generated and regulated within the brain. The second area is that if we can use sleep and sleep disruption as an early warning signal, then we have the chance of going in. If we know that these individuals are vulnerable, early intervention then becomes possible. And the third, which I think is the most exciting, is that we can think of the sleep centers within the brain as a new therapeutic target. Stabilize sleep in those individuals who are vulnerable, we can certainly make them healthier, but also alleviate some of the appalling symptoms of mental illness.
So let me just finish. What I started by saying is take sleep seriously. Our attitudes toward sleep are so very different from a pre-industrial age, when we were almost wrapped in a duvet. We used to understand intuitively the importance of sleep. And this isn't some sort of crystal-waving nonsense. This is a pragmatic response to good health. If you have good sleep, it increases your concentration, attention, decision-making, creativity, social skills, health. If you get sleep, it reduces your mood changes, your stress, your levels of anger, your impulsivity, and your tendency to drink and take drugs. And we finished by saying that an understanding of the neuroscience of sleep is really informing the way we think about some of the causes of mental illness, and indeed is providing us new ways to treat these incredibly debilitating conditions.
Jim Butcher, the fantasy writer, said, "Sleep is God. Go worship." And I can only recommend that you do the same.
Thank you for your attention.
(Applause)
GralInt/BRAIN-TED Talks-A mouse.A laser beam.A manipulated memory.
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
A mouse. A laser beam. A manipulated memory.
Filmed Jun 2013 • Posted Aug 2013 • TEDxBoston 2013
Can we edit the content of our memories? It’s a sci-fi-tinged question that Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu are asking in their lab at MIT. Essentially, the pair shoot a laser beam into the brain of a living mouse to activate and manipulate its memory. In this unexpectedly amusing talk they share not only how, but -- more importantly -- why they do this. (Filmed at TEDxBoston.)
When Steve Ramirez published his latest study in Science, it caused a media frenzy. Why? Because the paper was on implanting false memories in the brains of mice. Full bio »
After studying how to generate a fruit fly able to learn much faster than normal, Xu Liu's latest work investigates how to activate and deactivate specific memories in mice. Full bio »
Transcript:
Steve Ramirez: My first year of grad school, I found myself in my bedroom eating lots of Ben & Jerry's watching some trashy TV and maybe, maybe listening to Taylor Swift. I had just gone through a breakup. (Laughter) So for the longest time, all I would do is recall the memory of this person over and over again, wishing that I could get rid of that gut-wrenching, visceral "blah" feeling.
Now, as it turns out, I'm a neuroscientist, so I knew that the memory of that person and the awful, emotional undertones that color in that memory, are largely mediated by separate brain systems. And so I thought, what if we could go into the brain and edit out that nauseating feeling but while keeping the memory of that person intact? Then I realized, maybe that's a little bit lofty for now. So what if we could start off by going into the brain and just finding a single memory to begin with? Could we jump-start that memory back to life, maybe even play with the contents of that memory?
All that said, there is one person in the entire world right now that I really hope is not watching this talk.
(Laughter)
So there is a catch. There is a catch. These ideas probably remind you of "Total Recall," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," or of "Inception." But the movie stars that we work with are the celebrities of the lab.
Xu Liu: Test mice.
(Laughter)
As neuroscientists, we work in the lab with mice trying to understand how memory works. And today, we hope to convince you that now we are actually able to activate a memory in the brain at the speed of light. To do this, there's only two simple steps to follow. First, you find and label a memory in the brain, and then you activate it with a switch. As simple as that. (Laughter)
SR: Are you convinced? So, turns out finding a memory in the brain isn't all that easy.
XL: Indeed. This is way more difficult than, let's say, finding a needle in a haystack, because at least, you know, the needle is still something you can physically put your fingers on. But memory is not. And also, there's way more cells in your brain than the number of straws in a typical haystack. So yeah, this task does seem to be daunting. But luckily, we got help from the brain itself. It turned out that all we need to do is basically to let the brain form a memory, and then the brain will tell us which cells are involved in that particular memory.
SR: So what was going on in my brain while I was recalling the memory of an ex? If you were to just completely ignore human ethics for a second and slice up my brain right now, you would see that there was an amazing number of brain regions that were active while recalling that memory. Now one brain region that would be robustly active in particular is called the hippocampus, which for decades has been implicated in processing the kinds of memories that we hold near and dear, which also makes it an ideal target to go into and to try and find and maybe reactivate a memory.
XL: When you zoom in into the hippocampus, of course you will see lots of cells, but we are able to find which cells are involved in a particular memory, because whenever a cell is active, like when it's forming a memory, it will also leave a footprint that will later allow us to know these cells are recently active.
SR: So the same way that building lights at night let you know that somebody's probably working there at any given moment, in a very real sense, there are biological sensors within a cell that are turned on only when that cell was just working. They're sort of biological windows that light up to let us know that that cell was just active.
XL: So we clipped part of this sensor, and attached that to a switch to control the cells, and we packed this switch into an engineered virus and injected that into the brain of the mice. So whenever a memory is being formed, any active cells for that memory will also have this switch installed.
SR: So here is what the hippocampus looks like after forming a fear memory, for example. The sea of blue that you see here are densely packed brain cells, but the green brain cells, the green brain cells are the ones that are holding on to a specific fear memory. So you are looking at the crystallization of the fleeting formation of fear. You're actually looking at the cross-section of a memory right now.
XL: Now, for the switch we have been talking about, ideally, the switch has to act really fast. It shouldn't take minutes or hours to work. It should act at the speed of the brain, in milliseconds.
SR: So what do you think, Xu? Could we use, let's say, pharmacological drugs to activate or inactivate brain cells?
XL: Nah. Drugs are pretty messy. They spread everywhere. And also it takes them forever to act on cells. So it will not allow us to control a memory in real time. So Steve, how about let's zap the brain with electricity?
SR: So electricity is pretty fast, but we probably wouldn't be able to target it to just the specific cells that hold onto a memory, and we'd probably fry the brain.
XL: Oh. That's true. So it looks like, hmm, indeed we need to find a better way to impact the brain at the speed of light.
SR: So it just so happens that light travels at the speed of light. So maybe we could activate or inactive memories by just using light --
XL: That's pretty fast.
SR: -- and because normally brain cells don't respond to pulses of light, so those that would respond to pulses of light are those that contain a light-sensitive switch. Now to do that, first we need to trick brain cells to respond to laser beams.
XL: Yep. You heard it right. We are trying to shoot lasers into the brain. (Laughter)
SR: And the technique that lets us do that is optogenetics. Optogenetics gave us this light switch that we can use to turn brain cells on or off, and the name of that switch is channelrhodopsin, seen here as these green dots attached to this brain cell. You can think of channelrhodopsin as a sort of light-sensitive switch that can be artificially installed in brain cells so that now we can use that switch to activate or inactivate the brain cell simply by clicking it, and in this case we click it on with pulses of light. XL: So we attach this light-sensitive switch of channelrhodopsin to the sensor we've been talking about and inject this into the brain. So whenever a memory is being formed, any active cell for that particular memory will also have this light-sensitive switch installed in it so that we can control these cells by the flipping of a laser just like this one you see.
SR: So let's put all of this to the test now. What we can do is we can take our mice and then we can put them in a box that looks exactly like this box here, and then we can give them a very mild foot shock so that they form a fear memory of this box. They learn that something bad happened here. Now with our system, the cells that are active in the hippocampus in the making of this memory, only those cells will now contain channelrhodopsin.
XL: When you are as small as a mouse, it feels as if the whole world is trying to get you. So your best response of defense is trying to be undetected. Whenever a mouse is in fear, it will show this very typical behavior by staying at one corner of the box, trying to not move any part of its body, and this posture is called freezing. So if a mouse remembers that something bad happened in this box, and when we put them back into the same box, it will basically show freezing because it doesn't want to be detected by any potential threats in this box.
SR: So you can think of freezing as, you're walking down the street minding your own business, and then out of nowhere you almost run into an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend, and now those terrifying two seconds where you start thinking, "What do I do? Do I say hi? Do I shake their hand? Do I turn around and run away? Do I sit here and pretend like I don't exist?" Those kinds of fleeting thoughts that physically incapacitate you, that temporarily give you that deer-in-headlights look.
XL: However, if you put the mouse in a completely different new box, like the next one, it will not be afraid of this box because there's no reason that it will be afraid of this new environment.
But what if we put the mouse in this new box but at the same time, we activate the fear memory using lasers just like we did before? Are we going to bring back the fear memory for the first box into this completely new environment?
SR: All right, and here's the million-dollar experiment. Now to bring back to life the memory of that day, I remember that the Red Sox had just won, it was a green spring day, perfect for going up and down the river and then maybe going to the North End to get some cannolis, #justsaying. Now Xu and I, on the other hand, were in a completely windowless black room not making any ocular movement that even remotely resembles an eye blink because our eyes were fixed onto a computer screen. We were looking at this mouse here trying to activate a memory for the first time using our technique.
XL: And this is what we saw. When we first put the mouse into this box, it's exploring, sniffing around, walking around, minding its own business, because actually by nature, mice are pretty curious animals. They want to know, what's going on in this new box? It's interesting. But the moment we turned on the laser, like you see now, all of a sudden the mouse entered this freezing mode. It stayed here and tried not to move any part of its body. Clearly it's freezing. So indeed, it looks like we are able to bring back the fear memory for the first box in this completely new environment.
While watching this, Steve and I are as shocked as the mouse itself. (Laughter) So after the experiment, the two of us just left the room without saying anything.
After a kind of long, awkward period of time, Steve broke the silence.
SR: "Did that just work?"
XL: "Yes," I said. "Indeed it worked!" We're really excited about this. And then we published our findings in the journal Nature. Ever since the publication of our work, we've been receiving numerous comments from all over the Internet. Maybe we can take a look at some of those.
["OMGGGGG FINALLY... so much more to come, virtual reality, neural manipulation, visual dream emulation... neural coding, 'writing and re-writing of memories', mental illnesses. Ahhh the future is awesome"]
SR: So the first thing that you'll notice is that people have really strong opinions about this kind of work. Now I happen to completely agree with the optimism of this first quote, because on a scale of zero to Morgan Freeman's voice, it happens to be one of the most evocative accolades that I've heard come our way. (Laughter) But as you'll see, it's not the only opinion that's out there.
["This scares the hell out of me... What if they could do that easily in humans in a couple of years?! OH MY GOD WE'RE DOOMED"]
XL: Indeed, if we take a look at the second one, I think we can all agree that it's, meh, probably not as positive. But this also reminds us that, although we are still working with mice, it's probably a good idea to start thinking and discussing about the possible ethical ramifications of memory control.
SR: Now, in the spirit of the third quote, we want to tell you about a recent project that we've been working on in lab that we've called Project Inception. ["They should make a movie about this. Where they plant ideas into peoples minds, so they can control them for their own personal gain. We'll call it: Inception."] So we reasoned that now that we can reactivate a memory, what if we do so but then begin to tinker with that memory? Could we possibly even turn it into a false memory?
XL: So all memory is sophisticated and dynamic, but if just for simplicity, let's imagine memory as a movie clip. So far what we've told you is basically we can control this "play" button of the clip so that we can play this video clip any time, anywhere. But is there a possibility that we can actually get inside the brain and edit this movie clip so that we can make it different from the original? Yes we can. Turned out that all we need to do is basically reactivate a memory using lasers just like we did before, but at the same time, if we present new information and allow this new information to incorporate into this old memory, this will change the memory. It's sort of like making a remix tape.
SR: So how do we do this? Rather than finding a fear memory in the brain, we can start by taking our animals, and let's say we put them in a blue box like this blue box here and we find the brain cells that represent that blue box and we trick them to respond to pulses of light exactly like we had said before. Now the next day, we can take our animals and place them in a red box that they've never experienced before. We can shoot light into the brain to reactivate the memory of the blue box. So what would happen here if, while the animal is recalling the memory of the blue box, we gave it a couple of mild foot shocks? So here we're trying to artificially make an association between the memory of the blue box and the foot shocks themselves. We're just trying to connect the two. So to test if we had done so, we can take our animals once again and place them back in the blue box. Again, we had just reactivated the memory of the blue box while the animal got a couple of mild foot shocks, and now the animal suddenly freezes. It's as though it's recalling being mildly shocked in this environment even though that never actually happened. So it formed a false memory, because it's falsely fearing an environment where, technically speaking, nothing bad actually happened to it.
XL: So, so far we are only talking about this light-controlled "on" switch. In fact, we also have a light-controlled "off" switch, and it's very easy to imagine that by installing this light-controlled "off" switch, we can also turn off a memory, any time, anywhere.
So everything we've been talking about today is based on this philosophically charged principle of neuroscience that the mind, with its seemingly mysterious properties, is actually made of physical stuff that we can tinker with.
SR: And for me personally, I see a world where we can reactivate any kind of memory that we'd like. I also see a world where we can erase unwanted memories. Now, I even see a world where editing memories is something of a reality, because we're living in a time where it's possible to pluck questions from the tree of science fiction and to ground them in experimental reality.
XL: Nowadays, people in the lab and people in other groups all over the world are using similar methods to activate or edit memories, whether that's old or new, positive or negative, all sorts of memories so that we can understand how memory works.
SR: For example, one group in our lab was able to find the brain cells that make up a fear memory and converted them into a pleasurable memory, just like that. That's exactly what I mean about editing these kinds of processes. Now one dude in lab was even able to reactivate memories of female mice in male mice, which rumor has it is a pleasurable experience.
XL: Indeed, we are living in a very exciting moment where science doesn't have any arbitrary speed limits but is only bound by our own imagination.
SR: And finally, what do we make of all this? How do we push this technology forward? These are the questions that should not remain just inside the lab, and so one goal of today's talk was to bring everybody up to speed with the kind of stuff that's possible in modern neuroscience, but now, just as importantly, to actively engage everybody in this conversation. So let's think together as a team about what this all means and where we can and should go from here, because Xu and I think we all have some really big decisions ahead of us.
Thank you. XL: Thank you.
(Applause)
A mouse. A laser beam. A manipulated memory.
Filmed Jun 2013 • Posted Aug 2013 • TEDxBoston 2013
Can we edit the content of our memories? It’s a sci-fi-tinged question that Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu are asking in their lab at MIT. Essentially, the pair shoot a laser beam into the brain of a living mouse to activate and manipulate its memory. In this unexpectedly amusing talk they share not only how, but -- more importantly -- why they do this. (Filmed at TEDxBoston.)
When Steve Ramirez published his latest study in Science, it caused a media frenzy. Why? Because the paper was on implanting false memories in the brains of mice. Full bio »
After studying how to generate a fruit fly able to learn much faster than normal, Xu Liu's latest work investigates how to activate and deactivate specific memories in mice. Full bio »
Transcript:
Steve Ramirez: My first year of grad school, I found myself in my bedroom eating lots of Ben & Jerry's watching some trashy TV and maybe, maybe listening to Taylor Swift. I had just gone through a breakup. (Laughter) So for the longest time, all I would do is recall the memory of this person over and over again, wishing that I could get rid of that gut-wrenching, visceral "blah" feeling.
Now, as it turns out, I'm a neuroscientist, so I knew that the memory of that person and the awful, emotional undertones that color in that memory, are largely mediated by separate brain systems. And so I thought, what if we could go into the brain and edit out that nauseating feeling but while keeping the memory of that person intact? Then I realized, maybe that's a little bit lofty for now. So what if we could start off by going into the brain and just finding a single memory to begin with? Could we jump-start that memory back to life, maybe even play with the contents of that memory?
All that said, there is one person in the entire world right now that I really hope is not watching this talk.
(Laughter)
So there is a catch. There is a catch. These ideas probably remind you of "Total Recall," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," or of "Inception." But the movie stars that we work with are the celebrities of the lab.
Xu Liu: Test mice.
(Laughter)
As neuroscientists, we work in the lab with mice trying to understand how memory works. And today, we hope to convince you that now we are actually able to activate a memory in the brain at the speed of light. To do this, there's only two simple steps to follow. First, you find and label a memory in the brain, and then you activate it with a switch. As simple as that. (Laughter)
SR: Are you convinced? So, turns out finding a memory in the brain isn't all that easy.
XL: Indeed. This is way more difficult than, let's say, finding a needle in a haystack, because at least, you know, the needle is still something you can physically put your fingers on. But memory is not. And also, there's way more cells in your brain than the number of straws in a typical haystack. So yeah, this task does seem to be daunting. But luckily, we got help from the brain itself. It turned out that all we need to do is basically to let the brain form a memory, and then the brain will tell us which cells are involved in that particular memory.
SR: So what was going on in my brain while I was recalling the memory of an ex? If you were to just completely ignore human ethics for a second and slice up my brain right now, you would see that there was an amazing number of brain regions that were active while recalling that memory. Now one brain region that would be robustly active in particular is called the hippocampus, which for decades has been implicated in processing the kinds of memories that we hold near and dear, which also makes it an ideal target to go into and to try and find and maybe reactivate a memory.
XL: When you zoom in into the hippocampus, of course you will see lots of cells, but we are able to find which cells are involved in a particular memory, because whenever a cell is active, like when it's forming a memory, it will also leave a footprint that will later allow us to know these cells are recently active.
SR: So the same way that building lights at night let you know that somebody's probably working there at any given moment, in a very real sense, there are biological sensors within a cell that are turned on only when that cell was just working. They're sort of biological windows that light up to let us know that that cell was just active.
XL: So we clipped part of this sensor, and attached that to a switch to control the cells, and we packed this switch into an engineered virus and injected that into the brain of the mice. So whenever a memory is being formed, any active cells for that memory will also have this switch installed.
SR: So here is what the hippocampus looks like after forming a fear memory, for example. The sea of blue that you see here are densely packed brain cells, but the green brain cells, the green brain cells are the ones that are holding on to a specific fear memory. So you are looking at the crystallization of the fleeting formation of fear. You're actually looking at the cross-section of a memory right now.
XL: Now, for the switch we have been talking about, ideally, the switch has to act really fast. It shouldn't take minutes or hours to work. It should act at the speed of the brain, in milliseconds.
SR: So what do you think, Xu? Could we use, let's say, pharmacological drugs to activate or inactivate brain cells?
XL: Nah. Drugs are pretty messy. They spread everywhere. And also it takes them forever to act on cells. So it will not allow us to control a memory in real time. So Steve, how about let's zap the brain with electricity?
SR: So electricity is pretty fast, but we probably wouldn't be able to target it to just the specific cells that hold onto a memory, and we'd probably fry the brain.
XL: Oh. That's true. So it looks like, hmm, indeed we need to find a better way to impact the brain at the speed of light.
SR: So it just so happens that light travels at the speed of light. So maybe we could activate or inactive memories by just using light --
XL: That's pretty fast.
SR: -- and because normally brain cells don't respond to pulses of light, so those that would respond to pulses of light are those that contain a light-sensitive switch. Now to do that, first we need to trick brain cells to respond to laser beams.
XL: Yep. You heard it right. We are trying to shoot lasers into the brain. (Laughter)
SR: And the technique that lets us do that is optogenetics. Optogenetics gave us this light switch that we can use to turn brain cells on or off, and the name of that switch is channelrhodopsin, seen here as these green dots attached to this brain cell. You can think of channelrhodopsin as a sort of light-sensitive switch that can be artificially installed in brain cells so that now we can use that switch to activate or inactivate the brain cell simply by clicking it, and in this case we click it on with pulses of light. XL: So we attach this light-sensitive switch of channelrhodopsin to the sensor we've been talking about and inject this into the brain. So whenever a memory is being formed, any active cell for that particular memory will also have this light-sensitive switch installed in it so that we can control these cells by the flipping of a laser just like this one you see.
SR: So let's put all of this to the test now. What we can do is we can take our mice and then we can put them in a box that looks exactly like this box here, and then we can give them a very mild foot shock so that they form a fear memory of this box. They learn that something bad happened here. Now with our system, the cells that are active in the hippocampus in the making of this memory, only those cells will now contain channelrhodopsin.
XL: When you are as small as a mouse, it feels as if the whole world is trying to get you. So your best response of defense is trying to be undetected. Whenever a mouse is in fear, it will show this very typical behavior by staying at one corner of the box, trying to not move any part of its body, and this posture is called freezing. So if a mouse remembers that something bad happened in this box, and when we put them back into the same box, it will basically show freezing because it doesn't want to be detected by any potential threats in this box.
SR: So you can think of freezing as, you're walking down the street minding your own business, and then out of nowhere you almost run into an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend, and now those terrifying two seconds where you start thinking, "What do I do? Do I say hi? Do I shake their hand? Do I turn around and run away? Do I sit here and pretend like I don't exist?" Those kinds of fleeting thoughts that physically incapacitate you, that temporarily give you that deer-in-headlights look.
XL: However, if you put the mouse in a completely different new box, like the next one, it will not be afraid of this box because there's no reason that it will be afraid of this new environment.
But what if we put the mouse in this new box but at the same time, we activate the fear memory using lasers just like we did before? Are we going to bring back the fear memory for the first box into this completely new environment?
SR: All right, and here's the million-dollar experiment. Now to bring back to life the memory of that day, I remember that the Red Sox had just won, it was a green spring day, perfect for going up and down the river and then maybe going to the North End to get some cannolis, #justsaying. Now Xu and I, on the other hand, were in a completely windowless black room not making any ocular movement that even remotely resembles an eye blink because our eyes were fixed onto a computer screen. We were looking at this mouse here trying to activate a memory for the first time using our technique.
XL: And this is what we saw. When we first put the mouse into this box, it's exploring, sniffing around, walking around, minding its own business, because actually by nature, mice are pretty curious animals. They want to know, what's going on in this new box? It's interesting. But the moment we turned on the laser, like you see now, all of a sudden the mouse entered this freezing mode. It stayed here and tried not to move any part of its body. Clearly it's freezing. So indeed, it looks like we are able to bring back the fear memory for the first box in this completely new environment.
While watching this, Steve and I are as shocked as the mouse itself. (Laughter) So after the experiment, the two of us just left the room without saying anything.
After a kind of long, awkward period of time, Steve broke the silence.
SR: "Did that just work?"
XL: "Yes," I said. "Indeed it worked!" We're really excited about this. And then we published our findings in the journal Nature. Ever since the publication of our work, we've been receiving numerous comments from all over the Internet. Maybe we can take a look at some of those.
["OMGGGGG FINALLY... so much more to come, virtual reality, neural manipulation, visual dream emulation... neural coding, 'writing and re-writing of memories', mental illnesses. Ahhh the future is awesome"]
SR: So the first thing that you'll notice is that people have really strong opinions about this kind of work. Now I happen to completely agree with the optimism of this first quote, because on a scale of zero to Morgan Freeman's voice, it happens to be one of the most evocative accolades that I've heard come our way. (Laughter) But as you'll see, it's not the only opinion that's out there.
["This scares the hell out of me... What if they could do that easily in humans in a couple of years?! OH MY GOD WE'RE DOOMED"]
XL: Indeed, if we take a look at the second one, I think we can all agree that it's, meh, probably not as positive. But this also reminds us that, although we are still working with mice, it's probably a good idea to start thinking and discussing about the possible ethical ramifications of memory control.
SR: Now, in the spirit of the third quote, we want to tell you about a recent project that we've been working on in lab that we've called Project Inception. ["They should make a movie about this. Where they plant ideas into peoples minds, so they can control them for their own personal gain. We'll call it: Inception."] So we reasoned that now that we can reactivate a memory, what if we do so but then begin to tinker with that memory? Could we possibly even turn it into a false memory?
XL: So all memory is sophisticated and dynamic, but if just for simplicity, let's imagine memory as a movie clip. So far what we've told you is basically we can control this "play" button of the clip so that we can play this video clip any time, anywhere. But is there a possibility that we can actually get inside the brain and edit this movie clip so that we can make it different from the original? Yes we can. Turned out that all we need to do is basically reactivate a memory using lasers just like we did before, but at the same time, if we present new information and allow this new information to incorporate into this old memory, this will change the memory. It's sort of like making a remix tape.
SR: So how do we do this? Rather than finding a fear memory in the brain, we can start by taking our animals, and let's say we put them in a blue box like this blue box here and we find the brain cells that represent that blue box and we trick them to respond to pulses of light exactly like we had said before. Now the next day, we can take our animals and place them in a red box that they've never experienced before. We can shoot light into the brain to reactivate the memory of the blue box. So what would happen here if, while the animal is recalling the memory of the blue box, we gave it a couple of mild foot shocks? So here we're trying to artificially make an association between the memory of the blue box and the foot shocks themselves. We're just trying to connect the two. So to test if we had done so, we can take our animals once again and place them back in the blue box. Again, we had just reactivated the memory of the blue box while the animal got a couple of mild foot shocks, and now the animal suddenly freezes. It's as though it's recalling being mildly shocked in this environment even though that never actually happened. So it formed a false memory, because it's falsely fearing an environment where, technically speaking, nothing bad actually happened to it.
XL: So, so far we are only talking about this light-controlled "on" switch. In fact, we also have a light-controlled "off" switch, and it's very easy to imagine that by installing this light-controlled "off" switch, we can also turn off a memory, any time, anywhere.
So everything we've been talking about today is based on this philosophically charged principle of neuroscience that the mind, with its seemingly mysterious properties, is actually made of physical stuff that we can tinker with.
SR: And for me personally, I see a world where we can reactivate any kind of memory that we'd like. I also see a world where we can erase unwanted memories. Now, I even see a world where editing memories is something of a reality, because we're living in a time where it's possible to pluck questions from the tree of science fiction and to ground them in experimental reality.
XL: Nowadays, people in the lab and people in other groups all over the world are using similar methods to activate or edit memories, whether that's old or new, positive or negative, all sorts of memories so that we can understand how memory works.
SR: For example, one group in our lab was able to find the brain cells that make up a fear memory and converted them into a pleasurable memory, just like that. That's exactly what I mean about editing these kinds of processes. Now one dude in lab was even able to reactivate memories of female mice in male mice, which rumor has it is a pleasurable experience.
XL: Indeed, we are living in a very exciting moment where science doesn't have any arbitrary speed limits but is only bound by our own imagination.
SR: And finally, what do we make of all this? How do we push this technology forward? These are the questions that should not remain just inside the lab, and so one goal of today's talk was to bring everybody up to speed with the kind of stuff that's possible in modern neuroscience, but now, just as importantly, to actively engage everybody in this conversation. So let's think together as a team about what this all means and where we can and should go from here, because Xu and I think we all have some really big decisions ahead of us.
Thank you. XL: Thank you.
(Applause)
GRalInt-TED Talks-Margaret Heffernan
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Margaret Heffernan
Filmed Mar 2013 • Posted Aug 2013 • TEDxDanubia
Gayla Benefield was just doing her job -- until she uncovered an awful secret about her hometown that meant its mortality rate was 80 times higher than anywhere else in the U.S. But when she tried to tell people about it, she learned an even more shocking truth: People didn’t want to know. In a talk that’s part history lesson, part call-to-action, Margaret Heffernan demonstrates the danger of "willful blindness" and praises ordinary people like Benefield who are willing to speak up. (Filmed at TEDxDanubia.)
The former CEO of five businesses, Margaret Heffernan explores the all-too-human thought patterns -- like conflict avoidance and selective blindness -- that lead managers and organizations astray.
Transcript:
In the northwest corner of the United States, right up near the Canadian border, there's a little town called Libby, Montana, and it's surrounded by pine trees and lakes and just amazing wildlife and these enormous trees that scream up into the sky. And in there is a little town called Libby, which I visited, which feels kind of lonely, a little isolated.
And in Libby, Montana, there's a rather unusual woman named Gayla Benefield. She always felt a little bit of an outsider, although she's been there almost all her life, a woman of Russian extraction. She told me when she went to school, she was the only girl who ever chose to do mechanical drawing.
Later in life, she got a job going house to house reading utility meters -- gas meters, electricity meters. And she was doing the work in the middle of the day, and one thing particularly caught her notice, which was, in the middle of the day she met a lot of men who were at home, middle aged, late middle aged, and a lot of them seemed to be on oxygen tanks. It struck her as strange. Then, a few years later, her father died at the age of 59, five days before he was due to receive his pension. He'd been a miner. She thought he must just have been worn out by the work.
But then a few years later, her mother died, and that seemed stranger still, because her mother came from a long line of people who just seemed to live forever. In fact, Gayla's uncle is still alive to this day, and learning how to waltz. It didn't make sense that Gayla's mother should die so young. It was an anomaly, and she kept puzzling over anomalies. And as she did, other ones came to mind. She remembered, for example, when her mother had broken a leg and went into the hospital, and she had a lot of x-rays, and two of them were leg x-rays, which made sense, but six of them were chest x-rays, which didn't.
She puzzled and puzzled over every piece of her life and her parents' life, trying to understand what she was seeing.
She thought about her town. The town had a vermiculite mine in it. Vermiculite was used for soil conditioners, to make plants grow faster and better. Vermiculite was used to insulate lofts, huge amounts of it put under the roof to keep houses warm during the long Montana winters. Vermiculite was in the playground. It was in the football ground. It was in the skating rink. What she didn't learn until she started working this problem is vermiculite is a very toxic form of asbestos.
When she figured out the puzzle, she started telling everyone she could what had happened, what had been done to her parents and to the people that she saw on oxygen tanks at home in the afternoons. But she was really amazed. She thought, when everybody knows, they'll want to do something, but actually nobody wanted to know. In fact, she became so annoying as she kept insisting on telling this story to her neighbors, to her friends, to other people in the community, that eventually a bunch of them got together and they made a bumper sticker, which they proudly displayed on their cars, which said, "Yes, I'm from Libby, Montana, and no, I don't have asbestosis."
But Gayla didn't stop. She kept doing research. The advent of the Internet definitely helped her. She talked to anybody she could. She argued and argued, and finally she struck lucky when a researcher came through town studying the history of mines in the area, and she told him her story, and at first, of course, like everyone, he didn't believe her, but he went back to Seattle and he did his own research and he realized that she was right.
So now she had an ally. Nevertheless, people still didn't want to know. They said things like, "Well, if it were really dangerous, someone would have told us." "If that's really why everyone was dying, the doctors would have told us." Some of the guys used to very heavy jobs said, "I don't want to be a victim. I can't possibly be a victim, and anyway, every industry has its accidents."
But still Gayla went on, and finally she succeeded in getting a federal agency to come to town and to screen the inhabitants of the town -- 15,000 people -- and what they discovered was that the town had a mortality rate 80 times higher than anywhere in the United States. That was in 2002, and even at that moment, no one raised their hand to say, "Gayla, look in the playground where your grandchildren are playing. It's lined with vermiculite."
This wasn't ignorance. It was willful blindness. Willful blindness is a legal concept which means, if there's information that you could know and you should know but you somehow manage not to know, the law deems that you're willfully blind. You have chosen not to know. There's a lot of willful blindness around these days. You can see willful blindness in banks, when thousands of people sold mortgages to people who couldn't afford them. You could see them in banks when interest rates were manipulated and everyone around knew what was going on, but everyone studiously ignored it. You can see willful blindness in the Catholic Church, where decades of child abuse went ignored. You could see willful blindness in the run-up to the Iraq War. Willful blindness exists on epic scales like those, and it also exists on very small scales, in people's families, in people's homes and communities, and particularly in organizations and institutions. Companies that have been studied for willful blindness can be asked questions like, "Are there issues at work that people are afraid to raise?" And when academics have done studies like this of corporations in the United States, what they find is 85 percent of people say yes. Eighty-five percent of people know there's a problem, but they won't say anything. And when I duplicated the research in Europe, asking all the same questions, I found exactly the same number. Eighty-five percent. That's a lot of silence. It's a lot of blindness. And what's really interesting is that when I go to companies in Switzerland, they tell me, "This is a uniquely Swiss problem." And when I go to Germany, they say, "Oh yes, this is the German disease." And when I go to companies in England, they say, "Oh, yeah, the British are really bad at this." And the truth is, this is a human problem. We're all, under certain circumstances, willfully blind.
What the research shows is that some people are blind out of fear. They're afraid of retaliation. And some people are blind because they think, well, seeing anything is just futile. Nothing's ever going to change. If we make a protest, if we protest against the Iraq War, nothing changes, so why bother? Better not to see this stuff at all.
And the recurrent theme that I encounter all the time is people say, "Well, you know, the people who do see, they're whistleblowers, and we all know what happens to them." So there's this profound mythology around whistleblowers which says, first of all, they're all crazy. But what I've found going around the world and talking to whistleblowers is, actually, they're very loyal and quite often very conservative people. They're hugely dedicated to the institutions that they work for, and the reason that they speak up, the reason they insist on seeing, is because they care so much about the institution and want to keep it healthy.
And the other thing that people often say about whistleblowers is, "Well, there's no point, because you see what happens to them. They are crushed. Nobody would want to go through something like that." And yet, when I talk to whistleblowers, the recurrent tone that I hear is pride.
I think of Joe Darby. We all remember the photographs of Abu Ghraib, which so shocked the world and showed the kind of war that was being fought in Iraq. But I wonder who remembers Joe Darby, the very obedient, good soldier who found those photographs and handed them in. And he said, "You know, I'm not the kind of guy to rat people out, but some things just cross the line. Ignorance is bliss, they say, but you can't put up with things like this."
I talked to Steve Bolsin, a British doctor, who fought for five years to draw attention to a dangerous surgeon who was killing babies. And I asked him why he did it, and he said, "Well, it was really my daughter who prompted me to do it. She came up to me one night, and she just said, 'Dad, you can't let the kids die.'"
Or I think of Cynthia Thomas, a really loyal army daughter and army wife, who, as she saw her friends and relations coming back from the Iraq War, was so shocked by their mental condition and the refusal of the military to recognize and acknowledge post-traumatic stress syndrome that she set up a cafe in the middle of a military town to give them legal, psychological and medical assistance. And she said to me, she said, "You know, Margaret, I always used to say I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grow up. But I've found myself in this cause, and I'll never be the same."
We all enjoy so many freedoms today, hard-won freedoms: the freedom to write and publish without fear of censorship, a freedom that wasn't here the last time I came to Hungary; a freedom to vote, which women in particular had to fight so hard for; the freedom for people of different ethnicities and cultures and sexual orientation to live the way that they want. But freedom doesn't exist if you don't use it, and what whistleblowers do, and what people like Gayla Benefield do is they use the freedom that they have. And what they're very prepared to do is recognize that yes, this is going to be an argument, and yes I'm going to have a lot of rows with my neighbors and my colleagues and my friends, but I'm going to become very good at this conflict. I'm going to take on the naysayers, because they'll make my argument better and stronger. I can collaborate with my opponents to become better at what I do. These are people of immense persistence, incredible patience, and an absolute determination not to be blind and not to be silent.
When I went to Libby, Montana, I visited the asbestosis clinic that Gayla Benefield brought into being, a place where at first some of the people who wanted help and needed medical attention went in the back door because they didn't want to acknowledge that she'd been right. I sat in a diner, and I watched as trucks drove up and down the highway, carting away the earth out of gardens and replacing it with fresh, uncontaminated soil.
I took my 12-year-old daughter with me, because I really wanted her to meet Gayla.
And she said, "Why? What's the big deal?"
I said, "She's not a movie star, and she's not a celebrity, and she's not an expert, and Gayla's the first person who'd say she's not a saint. The really important thing about Gayla is she is ordinary. She's like you, and she's like me. She had freedom, and she was ready to use it."
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Margaret Heffernan
Filmed Mar 2013 • Posted Aug 2013 • TEDxDanubia
Gayla Benefield was just doing her job -- until she uncovered an awful secret about her hometown that meant its mortality rate was 80 times higher than anywhere else in the U.S. But when she tried to tell people about it, she learned an even more shocking truth: People didn’t want to know. In a talk that’s part history lesson, part call-to-action, Margaret Heffernan demonstrates the danger of "willful blindness" and praises ordinary people like Benefield who are willing to speak up. (Filmed at TEDxDanubia.)
The former CEO of five businesses, Margaret Heffernan explores the all-too-human thought patterns -- like conflict avoidance and selective blindness -- that lead managers and organizations astray.
Transcript:
In the northwest corner of the United States, right up near the Canadian border, there's a little town called Libby, Montana, and it's surrounded by pine trees and lakes and just amazing wildlife and these enormous trees that scream up into the sky. And in there is a little town called Libby, which I visited, which feels kind of lonely, a little isolated.
And in Libby, Montana, there's a rather unusual woman named Gayla Benefield. She always felt a little bit of an outsider, although she's been there almost all her life, a woman of Russian extraction. She told me when she went to school, she was the only girl who ever chose to do mechanical drawing.
Later in life, she got a job going house to house reading utility meters -- gas meters, electricity meters. And she was doing the work in the middle of the day, and one thing particularly caught her notice, which was, in the middle of the day she met a lot of men who were at home, middle aged, late middle aged, and a lot of them seemed to be on oxygen tanks. It struck her as strange. Then, a few years later, her father died at the age of 59, five days before he was due to receive his pension. He'd been a miner. She thought he must just have been worn out by the work.
But then a few years later, her mother died, and that seemed stranger still, because her mother came from a long line of people who just seemed to live forever. In fact, Gayla's uncle is still alive to this day, and learning how to waltz. It didn't make sense that Gayla's mother should die so young. It was an anomaly, and she kept puzzling over anomalies. And as she did, other ones came to mind. She remembered, for example, when her mother had broken a leg and went into the hospital, and she had a lot of x-rays, and two of them were leg x-rays, which made sense, but six of them were chest x-rays, which didn't.
She puzzled and puzzled over every piece of her life and her parents' life, trying to understand what she was seeing.
She thought about her town. The town had a vermiculite mine in it. Vermiculite was used for soil conditioners, to make plants grow faster and better. Vermiculite was used to insulate lofts, huge amounts of it put under the roof to keep houses warm during the long Montana winters. Vermiculite was in the playground. It was in the football ground. It was in the skating rink. What she didn't learn until she started working this problem is vermiculite is a very toxic form of asbestos.
When she figured out the puzzle, she started telling everyone she could what had happened, what had been done to her parents and to the people that she saw on oxygen tanks at home in the afternoons. But she was really amazed. She thought, when everybody knows, they'll want to do something, but actually nobody wanted to know. In fact, she became so annoying as she kept insisting on telling this story to her neighbors, to her friends, to other people in the community, that eventually a bunch of them got together and they made a bumper sticker, which they proudly displayed on their cars, which said, "Yes, I'm from Libby, Montana, and no, I don't have asbestosis."
But Gayla didn't stop. She kept doing research. The advent of the Internet definitely helped her. She talked to anybody she could. She argued and argued, and finally she struck lucky when a researcher came through town studying the history of mines in the area, and she told him her story, and at first, of course, like everyone, he didn't believe her, but he went back to Seattle and he did his own research and he realized that she was right.
So now she had an ally. Nevertheless, people still didn't want to know. They said things like, "Well, if it were really dangerous, someone would have told us." "If that's really why everyone was dying, the doctors would have told us." Some of the guys used to very heavy jobs said, "I don't want to be a victim. I can't possibly be a victim, and anyway, every industry has its accidents."
But still Gayla went on, and finally she succeeded in getting a federal agency to come to town and to screen the inhabitants of the town -- 15,000 people -- and what they discovered was that the town had a mortality rate 80 times higher than anywhere in the United States. That was in 2002, and even at that moment, no one raised their hand to say, "Gayla, look in the playground where your grandchildren are playing. It's lined with vermiculite."
This wasn't ignorance. It was willful blindness. Willful blindness is a legal concept which means, if there's information that you could know and you should know but you somehow manage not to know, the law deems that you're willfully blind. You have chosen not to know. There's a lot of willful blindness around these days. You can see willful blindness in banks, when thousands of people sold mortgages to people who couldn't afford them. You could see them in banks when interest rates were manipulated and everyone around knew what was going on, but everyone studiously ignored it. You can see willful blindness in the Catholic Church, where decades of child abuse went ignored. You could see willful blindness in the run-up to the Iraq War. Willful blindness exists on epic scales like those, and it also exists on very small scales, in people's families, in people's homes and communities, and particularly in organizations and institutions. Companies that have been studied for willful blindness can be asked questions like, "Are there issues at work that people are afraid to raise?" And when academics have done studies like this of corporations in the United States, what they find is 85 percent of people say yes. Eighty-five percent of people know there's a problem, but they won't say anything. And when I duplicated the research in Europe, asking all the same questions, I found exactly the same number. Eighty-five percent. That's a lot of silence. It's a lot of blindness. And what's really interesting is that when I go to companies in Switzerland, they tell me, "This is a uniquely Swiss problem." And when I go to Germany, they say, "Oh yes, this is the German disease." And when I go to companies in England, they say, "Oh, yeah, the British are really bad at this." And the truth is, this is a human problem. We're all, under certain circumstances, willfully blind.
What the research shows is that some people are blind out of fear. They're afraid of retaliation. And some people are blind because they think, well, seeing anything is just futile. Nothing's ever going to change. If we make a protest, if we protest against the Iraq War, nothing changes, so why bother? Better not to see this stuff at all.
And the recurrent theme that I encounter all the time is people say, "Well, you know, the people who do see, they're whistleblowers, and we all know what happens to them." So there's this profound mythology around whistleblowers which says, first of all, they're all crazy. But what I've found going around the world and talking to whistleblowers is, actually, they're very loyal and quite often very conservative people. They're hugely dedicated to the institutions that they work for, and the reason that they speak up, the reason they insist on seeing, is because they care so much about the institution and want to keep it healthy.
And the other thing that people often say about whistleblowers is, "Well, there's no point, because you see what happens to them. They are crushed. Nobody would want to go through something like that." And yet, when I talk to whistleblowers, the recurrent tone that I hear is pride.
I think of Joe Darby. We all remember the photographs of Abu Ghraib, which so shocked the world and showed the kind of war that was being fought in Iraq. But I wonder who remembers Joe Darby, the very obedient, good soldier who found those photographs and handed them in. And he said, "You know, I'm not the kind of guy to rat people out, but some things just cross the line. Ignorance is bliss, they say, but you can't put up with things like this."
I talked to Steve Bolsin, a British doctor, who fought for five years to draw attention to a dangerous surgeon who was killing babies. And I asked him why he did it, and he said, "Well, it was really my daughter who prompted me to do it. She came up to me one night, and she just said, 'Dad, you can't let the kids die.'"
Or I think of Cynthia Thomas, a really loyal army daughter and army wife, who, as she saw her friends and relations coming back from the Iraq War, was so shocked by their mental condition and the refusal of the military to recognize and acknowledge post-traumatic stress syndrome that she set up a cafe in the middle of a military town to give them legal, psychological and medical assistance. And she said to me, she said, "You know, Margaret, I always used to say I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grow up. But I've found myself in this cause, and I'll never be the same."
We all enjoy so many freedoms today, hard-won freedoms: the freedom to write and publish without fear of censorship, a freedom that wasn't here the last time I came to Hungary; a freedom to vote, which women in particular had to fight so hard for; the freedom for people of different ethnicities and cultures and sexual orientation to live the way that they want. But freedom doesn't exist if you don't use it, and what whistleblowers do, and what people like Gayla Benefield do is they use the freedom that they have. And what they're very prepared to do is recognize that yes, this is going to be an argument, and yes I'm going to have a lot of rows with my neighbors and my colleagues and my friends, but I'm going to become very good at this conflict. I'm going to take on the naysayers, because they'll make my argument better and stronger. I can collaborate with my opponents to become better at what I do. These are people of immense persistence, incredible patience, and an absolute determination not to be blind and not to be silent.
When I went to Libby, Montana, I visited the asbestosis clinic that Gayla Benefield brought into being, a place where at first some of the people who wanted help and needed medical attention went in the back door because they didn't want to acknowledge that she'd been right. I sat in a diner, and I watched as trucks drove up and down the highway, carting away the earth out of gardens and replacing it with fresh, uncontaminated soil.
I took my 12-year-old daughter with me, because I really wanted her to meet Gayla.
And she said, "Why? What's the big deal?"
I said, "She's not a movie star, and she's not a celebrity, and she's not an expert, and Gayla's the first person who'd say she's not a saint. The really important thing about Gayla is she is ordinary. She's like you, and she's like me. She had freedom, and she was ready to use it."
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
GRalInt/ENV-TED Talks-Emergency shelters made from paper
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Emergency shelters made from paper
Filmed May 2013 • Posted Aug 2013 • TEDxTokyo
Long before sustainability became a buzzword, architect Shigeru Ban had begun his experiments with ecologically-sound building materials such as cardboard tubes and paper. His remarkable structures are often intended as temporary housing, designed to help the dispossessed in disaster-struck nations such as Haiti, Rwanda or Japan. Yet equally often the buildings remain a beloved part of the landscape long after they have served their intended purpose. (Filmed at TEDxTokyo.)
Most people look at cardboard tubes and see something fit for the recycling bin. But architect Shigeru Ban turns them into beautiful buildings.
Transcript:
Hi. I am an architect. I am the only architect in the world making buildings out of paper like this cardboard tube, and this exhibition is the first one I did using paper tubes. 1986, much, much longer before people started talking about ecological issues and environmental issues, I just started testing the paper tube in order to use this as a building structure. It's very complicated to test the new material for the building, but this is much stronger than I expected, and also it's very easy to waterproof, and also, because it's industrial material, it's also possible to fireproof.
Then I built the temporary structure, 1990. This is the first temporary building made out of paper. There are 330 tubes, diameter 55 [centimeters], there are only 12 tubes with a diameter of 120 centimeters, or four feet, wide. As you see it in the photo, inside is the toilet. In case you're finished with toilet paper, you can tear off the inside of the wall. (Laughter) So it's very useful.
Year 2000, there was a big expo in Germany. I was asked to design the building, because the theme of the expo was environmental issues. So I was chosen to build the pavilion out of paper tubes, recyclable paper. My goal of the design is not when it's completed. My goal was when the building was demolished, because each country makes a lot of pavilions but after half a year, we create a lot of industrial waste, so my building has to be reused or recycled. After, the building was recycled. So that was the goal of my design.
Then I was very lucky to win the competition to build the second Pompidou Center in France in the city of Metz. Because I was so poor, I wanted to rent an office in Paris, but I couldn't afford it, so I decided to bring my students to Paris to build our office on top of the Pompidou Center in Paris by ourselves. So we brought the paper tubes and the wooden joints to complete the 35-meter-long office. We stayed there for six years without paying any rent.
(Laughter) (Applause)
Thank you. I had one big problem. Because we were part of the exhibition, even if my friend wanted to see me, they had to buy a ticket to see me. That was the problem.
Then I completed the Pompidou Center in Metz. It's a very popular museum now, and I created a big monument for the government.
But then I was very disappointed at my profession as an architect, because we are not helping, we are not working for society, but we are working for privileged people, rich people, government, developers. They have money and power. Those are invisible. So they hire us to visualize their power and money by making monumental architecture. That is our profession, even historically it's the same, even now we are doing the same. So I was very disappointed that we are not working for society, even though there are so many people who lost their houses by natural disasters. But I must say they are no longer natural disasters. For example, earthquakes never kill people, but collapse of the buildings kill people. That's the responsibility of architects. Then people need some temporary housing, but there are no architects working there because we are too busy working for privileged people. So I thought, even as architects, we can be involved in the reconstruction of temporary housing. We can make it better. So that is why I started working in disaster areas.
1994, there was a big disaster in Rwanda, Africa. Two tribes, Hutu and Tutsi, fought each other. Over two million people became refugees. But I was so surprised to see the shelter, refugee camp organized by the U.N. They're so poor, and they are freezing with blankets during the rainy season, In the shelters built by the U.N., they were just providing a plastic sheet, and the refugees had to cut the trees, and just like this. But over two million people cut trees. It just became big, heavy deforestation and an environmental problem. That is why they started providing [unclear] pipes, [unclear] barracks. Very expensive, they throw them out for money, then cutting trees again. So I proposed my idea to improve the situation using these recycled paper tubes because this is so cheap and also so strong, but my budget is only 50 U.S. dollars per unit. We built 50 units to do that as a monitoring test for the durability and moisture and termites, so on.
And then, year afterward, 1995, in Kobe, Japan, we had a big earthquake. Nearly 7,000 people were killed, and the city like this Nagata district, all the city was burned in a fire after the earthquake. And also I found out there's many Vietnamese refugees suffering and gathering at a Catholic church -- all the building was totally destroyed.
So I went there and also I proposed to the priests, "Why don't we rebuild the church out of paper tubes?"
And he said, "Oh God, are you crazy? After a fire, what are you proposing?"
So he never trusted me, but I didn't give up. I started commuting to Kobe, and I met the society of Vietnamese people. They were living like this with very poor plastic sheets in the park. So I proposed to rebuild. I raised -- did fundraising. I made a paper tube shelter for them, and in order to make it easy to be built by students and also easy to demolish, I used beer crates as a foundation. I asked the Kirin beer company to propose, because at that time, the Asahi beer company made their plastic beer crates red, which doesn't go with the color of the paper tubes. The color coordination is very important. And also I still remember, we were expecting to have a beer inside the plastic beer crate, but it came empty. (Laughter) So I remember it was so disappointing. So during the summer with my students, we built over 50 units of the shelters.
Finally the priest, finally he trusted me to rebuild. He said, "As long as you collect money by yourself, bring your students to build, you can do it."
So we spent five weeks rebuilding the church. It was meant to stay there for three years, but actually it stayed there 10 years because people loved it. Then, in Taiwan, they had a big earthquake, and we proposed to donate this church, so we dismantled them, we sent them over to be built by volunteer people. It stayed there in Taiwan as a permanent church even now. So this building became a permanent building.
Then I wonder, what is a permanent and what is a temporary building? Even a building made in paper can be permanent as long as people love it. Even a concrete building can be very temporary if that is made to make money.
In 1999, in Turkey, the big earthquake, I went there to use the local material to build a shelter. 2001, in West India, I built also a shelter. In 2004, in Sri Lanka, after the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami, I rebuilt Islamic fishermen's villages.
And in 2008, in Chengdu, Sichuan area in China, nearly 70,000 people were killed, and also especially many of the schools were destroyed because of the corruption between the authority and the contractor. I was asked to rebuild the temporary church. I brought my Japanese students to work with the Chinese students. In one month, we completed nine classrooms, over 500 square meters. It's still used, even after the current earthquake in China.
In 2009, in Italy, L'Aquila, also they had a big earthquake. And this is a very interesting photo: former Prime Minister Berlusconi and Japanese former former former former Prime Minister Mr. Aso -- you know, because we have to change the prime minister ever year. And they are very kind, affording my model. I proposed a big rebuilding, a temporary music hall, because L'Aquila is very famous for music and all the concert halls were destroyed, so musicians were moving out.
So I proposed to the mayor, I'd like to rebuild the temporary auditorium. He said, "As long as you bring your money, you can do it." And I was very lucky. Mr. Berlusconi brought G8 summit, and our former prime minister came, so they helped us to collect money, and I got half a million euros from the Japanese government to rebuild this temporary auditorium.
Year 2010 in Haiti, there was a big earthquake, but it's impossible to fly over, so I went to Santo Domingo, next-door country, to drive six hours to get to Haiti with the local students in Santo Domingo to build 50 units of shelter out of local paper tubes.
This is what happened in Japan two years ago, in northern Japan. After the earthquake and tsunami, people had to be evacuated in a big room like a gymnasium. But look at this. There's no privacy. People suffer mentally and physically. So we went there to build partitions with all the student volunteers with paper tubes, just a very simple shelter out of the tube frame and the curtain. However, some of the facility authority doesn't want us to do it, because, they said, simply, it's become more difficult to control them. But it's really necessary to do it.
They don't have enough flat area to build standard government single-story housing like this one. Look at this. Even civil government is doing such poor construction of the temporary housing, so dense and so messy because there is no storage, nothing, water is leaking, so I thought, we have to make multi-story building because there's no land and also it's not very comfortable.
So I proposed to the mayor while I was making partitions. Finally I met a very nice mayor in Onagawa village in Miyagi. He asked me to build three-story housing on baseball [fields]. I used the shipping container and also the students helped us to make all the building furniture to make them comfortable, within the budget of the government but also the area of the house is exactly the same, but much more comfortable. Many of the people want to stay here forever. I was very happy to hear that.
Now I am working in New Zealand, Christchurch. About 20 days before the Japanese earthquake happened, also they had a big earthquake, and many Japanese students were also killed, and the most important cathedral of the city, the symbol of Christchurch, was totally destroyed. And I was asked to come to rebuild the temporary cathedral.
So this is under construction. And I'd like to keep building monuments that are beloved by people.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Thank you. (Applause)
Thank you very much. (Applause)
Emergency shelters made from paper
Filmed May 2013 • Posted Aug 2013 • TEDxTokyo
Long before sustainability became a buzzword, architect Shigeru Ban had begun his experiments with ecologically-sound building materials such as cardboard tubes and paper. His remarkable structures are often intended as temporary housing, designed to help the dispossessed in disaster-struck nations such as Haiti, Rwanda or Japan. Yet equally often the buildings remain a beloved part of the landscape long after they have served their intended purpose. (Filmed at TEDxTokyo.)
Most people look at cardboard tubes and see something fit for the recycling bin. But architect Shigeru Ban turns them into beautiful buildings.
Transcript:
Hi. I am an architect. I am the only architect in the world making buildings out of paper like this cardboard tube, and this exhibition is the first one I did using paper tubes. 1986, much, much longer before people started talking about ecological issues and environmental issues, I just started testing the paper tube in order to use this as a building structure. It's very complicated to test the new material for the building, but this is much stronger than I expected, and also it's very easy to waterproof, and also, because it's industrial material, it's also possible to fireproof.
Then I built the temporary structure, 1990. This is the first temporary building made out of paper. There are 330 tubes, diameter 55 [centimeters], there are only 12 tubes with a diameter of 120 centimeters, or four feet, wide. As you see it in the photo, inside is the toilet. In case you're finished with toilet paper, you can tear off the inside of the wall. (Laughter) So it's very useful.
Year 2000, there was a big expo in Germany. I was asked to design the building, because the theme of the expo was environmental issues. So I was chosen to build the pavilion out of paper tubes, recyclable paper. My goal of the design is not when it's completed. My goal was when the building was demolished, because each country makes a lot of pavilions but after half a year, we create a lot of industrial waste, so my building has to be reused or recycled. After, the building was recycled. So that was the goal of my design.
Then I was very lucky to win the competition to build the second Pompidou Center in France in the city of Metz. Because I was so poor, I wanted to rent an office in Paris, but I couldn't afford it, so I decided to bring my students to Paris to build our office on top of the Pompidou Center in Paris by ourselves. So we brought the paper tubes and the wooden joints to complete the 35-meter-long office. We stayed there for six years without paying any rent.
(Laughter) (Applause)
Thank you. I had one big problem. Because we were part of the exhibition, even if my friend wanted to see me, they had to buy a ticket to see me. That was the problem.
Then I completed the Pompidou Center in Metz. It's a very popular museum now, and I created a big monument for the government.
But then I was very disappointed at my profession as an architect, because we are not helping, we are not working for society, but we are working for privileged people, rich people, government, developers. They have money and power. Those are invisible. So they hire us to visualize their power and money by making monumental architecture. That is our profession, even historically it's the same, even now we are doing the same. So I was very disappointed that we are not working for society, even though there are so many people who lost their houses by natural disasters. But I must say they are no longer natural disasters. For example, earthquakes never kill people, but collapse of the buildings kill people. That's the responsibility of architects. Then people need some temporary housing, but there are no architects working there because we are too busy working for privileged people. So I thought, even as architects, we can be involved in the reconstruction of temporary housing. We can make it better. So that is why I started working in disaster areas.
1994, there was a big disaster in Rwanda, Africa. Two tribes, Hutu and Tutsi, fought each other. Over two million people became refugees. But I was so surprised to see the shelter, refugee camp organized by the U.N. They're so poor, and they are freezing with blankets during the rainy season, In the shelters built by the U.N., they were just providing a plastic sheet, and the refugees had to cut the trees, and just like this. But over two million people cut trees. It just became big, heavy deforestation and an environmental problem. That is why they started providing [unclear] pipes, [unclear] barracks. Very expensive, they throw them out for money, then cutting trees again. So I proposed my idea to improve the situation using these recycled paper tubes because this is so cheap and also so strong, but my budget is only 50 U.S. dollars per unit. We built 50 units to do that as a monitoring test for the durability and moisture and termites, so on.
And then, year afterward, 1995, in Kobe, Japan, we had a big earthquake. Nearly 7,000 people were killed, and the city like this Nagata district, all the city was burned in a fire after the earthquake. And also I found out there's many Vietnamese refugees suffering and gathering at a Catholic church -- all the building was totally destroyed.
So I went there and also I proposed to the priests, "Why don't we rebuild the church out of paper tubes?"
And he said, "Oh God, are you crazy? After a fire, what are you proposing?"
So he never trusted me, but I didn't give up. I started commuting to Kobe, and I met the society of Vietnamese people. They were living like this with very poor plastic sheets in the park. So I proposed to rebuild. I raised -- did fundraising. I made a paper tube shelter for them, and in order to make it easy to be built by students and also easy to demolish, I used beer crates as a foundation. I asked the Kirin beer company to propose, because at that time, the Asahi beer company made their plastic beer crates red, which doesn't go with the color of the paper tubes. The color coordination is very important. And also I still remember, we were expecting to have a beer inside the plastic beer crate, but it came empty. (Laughter) So I remember it was so disappointing. So during the summer with my students, we built over 50 units of the shelters.
Finally the priest, finally he trusted me to rebuild. He said, "As long as you collect money by yourself, bring your students to build, you can do it."
So we spent five weeks rebuilding the church. It was meant to stay there for three years, but actually it stayed there 10 years because people loved it. Then, in Taiwan, they had a big earthquake, and we proposed to donate this church, so we dismantled them, we sent them over to be built by volunteer people. It stayed there in Taiwan as a permanent church even now. So this building became a permanent building.
Then I wonder, what is a permanent and what is a temporary building? Even a building made in paper can be permanent as long as people love it. Even a concrete building can be very temporary if that is made to make money.
In 1999, in Turkey, the big earthquake, I went there to use the local material to build a shelter. 2001, in West India, I built also a shelter. In 2004, in Sri Lanka, after the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami, I rebuilt Islamic fishermen's villages.
And in 2008, in Chengdu, Sichuan area in China, nearly 70,000 people were killed, and also especially many of the schools were destroyed because of the corruption between the authority and the contractor. I was asked to rebuild the temporary church. I brought my Japanese students to work with the Chinese students. In one month, we completed nine classrooms, over 500 square meters. It's still used, even after the current earthquake in China.
In 2009, in Italy, L'Aquila, also they had a big earthquake. And this is a very interesting photo: former Prime Minister Berlusconi and Japanese former former former former Prime Minister Mr. Aso -- you know, because we have to change the prime minister ever year. And they are very kind, affording my model. I proposed a big rebuilding, a temporary music hall, because L'Aquila is very famous for music and all the concert halls were destroyed, so musicians were moving out.
So I proposed to the mayor, I'd like to rebuild the temporary auditorium. He said, "As long as you bring your money, you can do it." And I was very lucky. Mr. Berlusconi brought G8 summit, and our former prime minister came, so they helped us to collect money, and I got half a million euros from the Japanese government to rebuild this temporary auditorium.
Year 2010 in Haiti, there was a big earthquake, but it's impossible to fly over, so I went to Santo Domingo, next-door country, to drive six hours to get to Haiti with the local students in Santo Domingo to build 50 units of shelter out of local paper tubes.
This is what happened in Japan two years ago, in northern Japan. After the earthquake and tsunami, people had to be evacuated in a big room like a gymnasium. But look at this. There's no privacy. People suffer mentally and physically. So we went there to build partitions with all the student volunteers with paper tubes, just a very simple shelter out of the tube frame and the curtain. However, some of the facility authority doesn't want us to do it, because, they said, simply, it's become more difficult to control them. But it's really necessary to do it.
They don't have enough flat area to build standard government single-story housing like this one. Look at this. Even civil government is doing such poor construction of the temporary housing, so dense and so messy because there is no storage, nothing, water is leaking, so I thought, we have to make multi-story building because there's no land and also it's not very comfortable.
So I proposed to the mayor while I was making partitions. Finally I met a very nice mayor in Onagawa village in Miyagi. He asked me to build three-story housing on baseball [fields]. I used the shipping container and also the students helped us to make all the building furniture to make them comfortable, within the budget of the government but also the area of the house is exactly the same, but much more comfortable. Many of the people want to stay here forever. I was very happy to hear that.
Now I am working in New Zealand, Christchurch. About 20 days before the Japanese earthquake happened, also they had a big earthquake, and many Japanese students were also killed, and the most important cathedral of the city, the symbol of Christchurch, was totally destroyed. And I was asked to come to rebuild the temporary cathedral.
So this is under construction. And I'd like to keep building monuments that are beloved by people.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Thank you. (Applause)
Thank you very much. (Applause)
GRalInt/PSYCH/HHRR-The importance of employee wellbeing
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
The importance of employee wellbeing
Chris Athanasiades and Allan Winthrop on the role of psychological support in promoting wellbeing at work.
Psychology has for sometime maintained an interest in the promotion of psychological wellbeing in the workplace. Peter Warr’s seminal work (see Warr, 1996) in the 90s has enabled our conceptual understanding of issues around employee wellbeing. Subsequent research in this area has led to an understanding of the detrimental effect of work-related stress on employee health (Bond, 2004; Loretto et al, 2005). This has facilitated policy-making with the government openly encouraging employers to take measures that promote the work-life balance of their employees (DfEE, 2000). Additionally, the World Health Organisation’s 2005 Mental Health Action Plan for Europe (St John, 2005) has called for an improvement of employee mental health and has made specific recommendations for the provision of mental health care services in the workplace. These developments have important scientific and employment implications for psychology.
Psychology has for sometime maintained an interest in the promotion of psychological wellbeing in the workplace. Peter Warr’s seminal work (see Warr, 1996) in the 90s has enabled our conceptual understanding of issues around employee wellbeing.
Subsequent research in this area has led to an understanding of the detrimental effect of work-related stress on employee health (Bond, 2004; Loretto et al, 2005). This has facilitated policy-making with the government openly encouraging employers to take measures that promote the work-life balance of their employees (DfEE, 2000). Additionally, the World Health Organisation’s 2005 Mental Health Action Plan for Europe (St John, 2005) has called for an improvement of employee mental health and has made specific recommendations for the provision of mental health care services in the workplace. These developments have important scientific and employment implications for psychology.
Occupational stress and employee wellbeing
Official figures show that 35% of the European workforce believe that their work affects their health (EFILWC, 2006). The Bristol Stress and Health at Work Study (Smith et al, 2000) showed that approximately 20% of the surveyed British employees suffered from high occupational stress. The same survey found that high occupational stress was significantly related to medical problems such as gastro-intestinal symptoms, fatigue, tension, depression and anxiety as well as to problems in the family (Smith et al, 2000).
Furthermore, stress was significantly associated with rates of sick leave, GP visits and accidents at work (Smith et al, 2000). The mental health charity Mind reports that stress is the highest cause of absence amongst non-manual employees which is associated with 12.8 million working days lost in Britain in 2003-04 whilst mental health problems in total result in the loss of 91 million working days every year. In addition, the 2005 Employer Survey of the Health and Safety Executive (Clarke et al, 2005) reveals that work-related injuries led to an estimated loss of 18,000 days of work per 100,000 employees whilst work-related ill-health led to a loss of 14,000 days off work per 100,000 employees. Work-related stress was the third most commonly reported health and safety risk (Clarke, et al, 2005).
Understandably, the evidence on the adverse effects of stress on employee wellbeing are of immediate interest to the corporate world. This is partly due to concerns that stress-related difficulties can lead to accidents and medical problems which can result in inability to work efficiently and in lost productivity due to increased sick leave (Kalia, 2002; Teasdale, 2006). Hence management research has concentrated heavily on the links between employee wellbeing and productivity (Csiernik, 1995). It is beyond the scope of this article to expound upon the relevant evidence. Nevertheless, it should be stated that this link has been demonstrated consistently in research. For example, Wright et al (2002) found that psychological wellbeing is a more consistent predictor of performance at work than dispositional attributes of employees. Additionally, empirical evidence has shown that employees who are happier with their jobs are also more productive (Patterson and West, 1998; Wright and Cropanzano, 2000; Wright et al, 2002) and less likely to be absent from work (McKenna, 1994). Conversely, evidence shows that unhappiness with one’s life stemming from personal difficulties such as substance abuse, mental health difficulties as well as interpersonal conflict can negatively impact upon productivity (White et al, 1996). For example, Warr (1996) presents evidence which shows that employee anxiety and occupational stress have a negative effect on the ability to work efficiently.
Stress management is becoming more and more important as workload increases (Morris and Raabe, 2002). The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that there will be a gradual rise in the number of people experiencing mental health difficulties in the workplace to the year 2020 (Kalia, 2002). Considering that government-sponsored mental health resources are shrinking, it is anticipated that some of the responsibility for the provision of mental health services will be passed on to the employer (Arthur, 2000). Additionally, it is expected that the recruitment of more people with mental health difficulties due to equal opportunity legislation and policies will add additional pressure on employers to provide mental health resources to all their employees who need such vital services (McDaid et al, 2005).
The maintenance and promotion of employee wellbeing
Current trends indicate an emphasis on the employer’s responsibility to provide services that meet their employees’ mental health needs (Arthur, 2000; Coles, 2003). This is reflected in the fact that international organisations such as the European Union and the World Health Organisation have been making recommendations about the measures that employers need to take to tackle workplace stress and promote employee health (McDaid et al, 2005).
Cooper and Cartwright (1997) suggest that there are three ways in which occupational stress can be prevented. Primary prevention can include education on stress matters and training in the recognition of stress symptoms. Secondary prevention can focus on simple ways of dealing with stress such as relaxation, ways of altering stress-inducing thinking and ways of improving one’s lifestyle. Tertiary prevention can include psychological support in the form of counselling and other support services, often delivered from either internal or external Employee Assistance Programmes (EAPs: used here to refer to any Employee Assistance scheme that includes counselling and/or psychological therapies amongst its services). Cooper and Cartwright (1997) propose that psychological support in the workplace, or ‘workplace counselling’ as it is often referred to, has an important role in the maintenance and promotion of employee wellbeing. A similar perspective is adopted by White et al (1996) who emphasise the role that EAPs can play in the prevention of mental health difficulties in the workplace. White et al (1996) propose 3 levels of prevention: primary, secondary and tertiary. In primary prevention employees can be educated with regards to preventing or managing stress. In secondary prevention any mental health issues currently experienced can be assisted via parallel support and by ensuring that the client is adhering to any medication regimes. Finally, in tertiary prevention, an EAP can help by supporting the suffering employee and his/her family and by averting alienation and isolation.
In addition, it has been suggested that EAPs can be of good service to workers with genuine psychological difficulties (Arthur, 2002; 2005). In the UK, research has shown that around 86% of a sample of users of a British EAP suffered from psychiatric problems as measured by the General Health Questionnaire (Arthur, 2002; 2005). White et al (1996) state that EAPs can help with the identification and referral of employees with complex psychological needs. Most importantly, the prompt identification of mental health difficulties and the use of psychological intervention may help reduce the need for a referral and it may help prevent the exacerbation of the employee’s mental health which can, in turn, prevent absence from work (White et al, 1996). Additionally, whilst some employees can be helped in their adjustment to their working environment, others can be sufficiently empowered to make the decision to leave an unsatisfying job (Coles, 2003). It would seem that EAPs can fulfil an important role in the maintenance and promotion of employee wellbeing and awareness of the advantages of using an EAP should be raised with employees (Ruiz, 2006).
According to Arthur (2000) the UK is potentially the only EU country where the corporate world shows serious consideration towards stress at work and where EAPs are used to deal with stress management. Coles (2003) refers to evidence from the Employee Assistance Professionals Association – UK which states that 10% of 1137 organisations with a total of 2.26 million employees use an external EAP. Arthur (2000) claims that there exist three groups of countries in the EU with respect to how they deal with stress at work. These groups are: (1) Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands where legal frameworks guide the provision of psychological support systems in companies; (2) Belgium, Denmark, UK, Germany and Ireland where the EU directive on health and safety has been taken onboard in the absence of a legal framework; and (3) Italy, Greece and Portugal where stress remains unrecognised as a factor that can affect employee health and where companies have no systems in place to offer psychological support to their employees. In view of this, there may be scope for the better integration of workplace counselling in organisational structures across countries. This has important professional and scientific implications.
Clearly, there is an increasing recognition of the importance of good mental health in the workplace (Bond, 2004). In light of this, and on the basis of the evidence that shows that employee wellbeing and satisfaction with work can be increased by helping employees alter their negative thinking (Judge and Locke, 1993), it would seem that psychology has an important role in the maintenance and promotion of employee wellbeing. Banister (1992) had speculated that counselling services would be an integral part of the workplace in the future and that psychology would play an important role in the maintenance of a positive working environment. Additionally EAPs may have an important role to play in the management of employee issues in the future as increasing unemployment and an increase in dual-worker households may start to affect personal and family lives which may in turn affect work performance (Highhouse, 1999). Finally, Hannabuss (1997) regards workplace counselling to be an invaluable resource and suggests that it should be part of the modern corporate world if human resources are to have a meaningful presence at work.
Suitability of psychological interventions for use in the workplace
In discussing the suitability of psychological interventions for use at the workplace consideration should be given to who the consumer of workplace counselling is (Friery, 2006). In addition, there is recognition that there are dual clients in workplace counselling, the individual employee as well as the employer/employing organisation (Carroll, 1996). Suggestions have been made about the adoption of systemic approaches that would account for complex relationships between all stakeholders (Claringbull, 2006).
Hannabuss (1997) argues that both the psychodynamic and the cognitive-behavioural (CBT) models are suitable for use in the workplace. Additionally, Coles (2003) provides examples of successful use of different therapeutic models in the workplace, such as the psychodynamic, the humanistic, the cognitive-behavioural and crisis interventions. Coles suggests that different models suit different individuals and different presenting difficulties. Orlans (2003) quotes evidence for the effectiveness of brief therapy and suggests it is a useful intervention especially where resources for counselling are limited. Finally, Carroll (1996) suggests the use of an integrative approach to workplace counselling according to the needs of the client.
Effectiveness of psychological interventions in the workplace
Perhaps the largest systematic study of workplace counselling in the UK was conducted by McLeod (2001). McLeod (2001) looked at the following themes: (1) psychosocial outcomes of workplace counselling; (2) studies of the economic cost and benefits of workplace counselling; (3) Studies of employee attitudes and utilisation; (4) research into further aspects of workplace counselling; (5) methodological issues in research into workplace counselling; (6) directions for future research. In summary, 34 studies were reviewed. The majority of these studies were conducted between 1983 and 2000. Only two studies were conducted earlier than 1983. McLeod (2001) evaluated the evidence from these studies on the basis of their methodological strengths. He concluded that there are three categories of studies: Those that provided ‘best evidence’ having the most robust methodologies, those with ‘supporting evidence’ where there were some methodological limitations and those with ‘authenticating evidence’ which provided descriptive information about the effectiveness of workplace counselling. In total, 11 of the 16 ‘best evidence’ studies provided evidence which was overwhelmingly in favour of the effectiveness of workplace counselling. This was also true for 4 of the 13 ‘supporting evidence’ studies and for 3 of the 5 studies in the ‘authenticating evidence’ category. The rest of the studies provided moderate support for the effectiveness of workplace counselling. Only 2 studies in the ‘best evidence’ category found workplace counselling to have no beneficial effect. McLeod concluded that there is strong evidence to suggest that workplace counselling has a significant beneficial effect on the wellbeing of employees. However, this study has been criticised for not providing negative outcomes and for ignoring the fact that therapy can do harm (Henderson et al, 2003). In fact there is some uncertainty with regards to the effectiveness of psychological interventions in the workplace. This is partly due to the inadvertent association of client satisfaction with intervention effectiveness (McLeod and Henderson, 2003). Nevertheless, employees seem to like psychological services in the workplace and some employees who use such services may not have been able to access independent or external mental health services (Kirk and Brown, 2003). Therefore, these services are of value to employee. In addition, the provision of psychological services in the workplace may be what Kirk and Brown (2003) have called “a socially responsible and humanitarian organisational initiative” (p. 142).
Opportunities for professional psychologists
Hannabuss (1997) argues that the use of psychological interventions in the workplace requires the skills and expertise of appropriately trained professionals. Carroll (1996) recommends that training in counselling in the workplace is included in training curriculums and quotes the Universities of Bristol, Roehampton and Birmingham as being amongst institutions that offer training programmes specifically on workplace counselling, indicating a training niche. In fact, the University of Southampton runs a 3-year professional postgraduate programme in Workplace Counselling. On the basis of this, academic programmes in professional psychology would do well to include training in the application of psychological knowledge to employee and other organisational matters.
In addition, the Association for Counselling at Work, a Division of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy exists to promote the interests of professionals involved in the area of workplace counselling (Cullup, 2005). The Division re-launched its journal in 2002 and appointed, Andrew Kinder, a Chartered Occupational and Counselling Psychologist as its new Chair in 2004 (Cullup, 2005) which indicates a growing professional interest in workplace counselling. Furthermore, 2002 saw the establishment of the Employee Assistance European Forum, a non-profit organisation for individuals and organisations interested in the development of Employee Assistance and Work-Life services in Europe (EAEF, 2005).
These are important developments and there is clear potential for psychologists with an interest and training in psychological counselling or psychotherapy to be involved in delivering psychological services to organisations. Such services could involve psychological therapies/interventions with employees and consultancy work to senior management with regards to workforce needs. Psychologists have a wealth of therapeutic knowledge and skills which could benefit employees and the organisations that work in them. There are currently great involvement opportunities for psychologists and these should not be missed.
- Chris Athanasiades is Senior Teaching Fellow at the University of Leeds, Charles Thackrah Building, 101 Clarendon Road, Woodhouse, Leeds LS2 9LJ. E-mail: C.Athanasiades@leeds.ac.uk
- Allan Winthrop is a Consultant Chartered Counselling Psychologist and Programme Director of the Doctorate in Counselling Psychology at the School of Social Sciences and Law, University of Teesside, Middlesbrough, TS1 3BA. E-mail: a.winthrop@tees.ac.uk.
References
Arthur, A. R. (2000). Employee assistance programmes: The emperor’s new clothes of stress management? British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 28 (4), 549-559.
Arthur, A. R. (2002). Mental health problems and British workers: A survey of mental health problems in employees who receive counselling from Employee Assistance Programmes. Stress & Health, 18, 69-74.
Arthur, A. R. (2005). When stress is mental illness: A study of anxiety and depression in employees who use occupational stress counselling schemes. Stress & Health, 21, 273-280.
Banister, E. W. (1992). The changing face of the workplace. International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics, 9, 37-52.
Bond, F. W. (2004). Commentary: Getting the balance right: The need for a comprehensive approach to occupational health. Work & Stress, 18 (2), 146-148.
Carroll, M. (1996). Workplace counselling: A systematic approach to employee care. Sage.
Claringbull, N. (2006, Autumn). Workplace counselling: New models for new times. Counselling at Work, 17-21.
Clarke, S. D., Webster, S. Jones, J. R., Blackburn, A. J., & Hodgson, J. T. (2005). Workplace health and safety survey programme: 2005 employer survey first findings report. Caerphilly: Health and Safety Executive.
Coles, A. (2003). Counselling in the workplace. Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open University Press.
Cooper, C. L., & Cartwright, S. (1997). An intervention strategy for workplace stress. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 43 (1), 7-16.
Csiernik, R. (1995). A review of research methods used to examine employee assistance program delivery options. Evaluation & Program Planning, 18 (1), 25-36.
Cullup, S. (2005, Summer). From CEPEC to ACW. Counselling at Work, 28-29.
Department for Education and Employment (2000). Work-life balance: Changing patterns in a changing world. London: The Stationary Office.
Employee Assistance European Forum (2005). Homepage. Retrieved November 25, 2006, from http://www.eaef.org
European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (2006). Fourth European working conditions survey: Info sheet. Dublin, Ireland: Author.
Friery, K. (2006, Autumn). Workplace counselling: Who is the consumer? Counselling at Work, 24-26.
Hannabuss, S. (1997). Counselling approaches and the workplace. Library Management, 18 (8), 373-379.
Henderson, M., Hotopf, M., & Wessley, S. (2003). Editorial: Workplace counselling: An appeal for evidence. Occupational & Environmental Medicine, 60 (12), 899-900.
Judge, T. A., & Locke, E. A. (1993). Effect of dysfunctional thought processes on subjective well-being and job satisfaction. Journal of Applied Psychology, 78 (3), 475-490.
Kalia, M. (2002). Assessing the economic impact of stress – The modern day hidden epidemic. Metabolism, 51 (6) (Suppl. 1), 49-53.
Kirk, A. K., & Brown, D. F. (2003). Employee Assistance Programs: A review of the management of stress and wellbeing through workplace counselling and consulting. Australian Psychologist, 36 (2), 138-143.
Loretto, W., Popham, F., Platt, S., Pavis, S., Hardy, G., MacLeod, L., & Gibbs, J. (2005). Assessing psychological well-being: A holistic investigation of NHS employees. International Review of Psychiatry, 17 (5), 329-336.
McDaid, D. Curran, C., & Knapp, M. (2005). Promoting mental well-being in the workplace: A European policy perspective. International Review of Psychiatry, 17 (5), 365-373.
McKenna, E. (1994). Business psychology & organisational behaviour: A student’s handbook. Hove, East Sussex: Erlbaum (UK) Taylor & Francis.
McLeod, J. (2001). Counselling in the workplace: The facts: A systematic study of the research evidence. Rugby, Warwickshire: The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.
McLeod, J., & Henderson, M. (2003). Does workplace counselling work? British Journal of Psychiatry, 182, 103-104.
Morris, N., & Raabe, B. (2002). Some legal implications of CBT stress counselling in the workplace. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 30 (1), 55-62.
Orlans, V. (2003). Counselling psychology in the workplace. In R. Woolfe, W. Dryden & S. Strawbridge (Eds.), Handbook of Counselling Psychology (pp. 536-551). London: Sage Publications Ltd.
Patterson, M., & West, M. (1998 Autumn). People power: The link between job satisfaction and productivity. CenterPiece.
Ruiz, G. (2006). Expanded EAPs land a hand to employers’ bottom lines. Workforce Management, 85 (1), 46-47.
St John, T. (2005, Autumn). Mental health at work. Counselling at Work, 2-4.
Smith, A., Johal, S., Wadsworth, E., Smith, G. D., & Peters, T. (2000). The scale of occupational stress: The Bristol stress and health at work study. Norwich: Health and Safety Executive.
Teasdale, E. L. (2006). Workplace stress. Psychiatry, 5 (7), 251-254.
Warr, P. (1996). Employee Well-being. In P. Warr (Ed), Psychology at Work (pp. 224-253). London: Penguin Books Ltd.
White, R. K., McDuff, D. R., Schwartz, R. P., Tiegel, S. A., & Judge, C. P. (1996, April). New developments in Employee Assistance Programs. Psychiatric Services, 47 (4), 387-391.
Wright, T. A., & Cropanzano, R. (2000). Psychological well-being and job satisfaction as predictors of job performance. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 5 (1), 84-94.
Wright, T. A, Cropanzano, R. Denney, P. J., & Moline, G. L. (2002). When a happy worker is a productive worker: A preliminary examination of three models. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 34 (3), 146-150.
Source:www.thepsychologist.org.uk
The importance of employee wellbeing
Chris Athanasiades and Allan Winthrop on the role of psychological support in promoting wellbeing at work.
Psychology has for sometime maintained an interest in the promotion of psychological wellbeing in the workplace. Peter Warr’s seminal work (see Warr, 1996) in the 90s has enabled our conceptual understanding of issues around employee wellbeing. Subsequent research in this area has led to an understanding of the detrimental effect of work-related stress on employee health (Bond, 2004; Loretto et al, 2005). This has facilitated policy-making with the government openly encouraging employers to take measures that promote the work-life balance of their employees (DfEE, 2000). Additionally, the World Health Organisation’s 2005 Mental Health Action Plan for Europe (St John, 2005) has called for an improvement of employee mental health and has made specific recommendations for the provision of mental health care services in the workplace. These developments have important scientific and employment implications for psychology.
Psychology has for sometime maintained an interest in the promotion of psychological wellbeing in the workplace. Peter Warr’s seminal work (see Warr, 1996) in the 90s has enabled our conceptual understanding of issues around employee wellbeing.
Subsequent research in this area has led to an understanding of the detrimental effect of work-related stress on employee health (Bond, 2004; Loretto et al, 2005). This has facilitated policy-making with the government openly encouraging employers to take measures that promote the work-life balance of their employees (DfEE, 2000). Additionally, the World Health Organisation’s 2005 Mental Health Action Plan for Europe (St John, 2005) has called for an improvement of employee mental health and has made specific recommendations for the provision of mental health care services in the workplace. These developments have important scientific and employment implications for psychology.
Occupational stress and employee wellbeing
Official figures show that 35% of the European workforce believe that their work affects their health (EFILWC, 2006). The Bristol Stress and Health at Work Study (Smith et al, 2000) showed that approximately 20% of the surveyed British employees suffered from high occupational stress. The same survey found that high occupational stress was significantly related to medical problems such as gastro-intestinal symptoms, fatigue, tension, depression and anxiety as well as to problems in the family (Smith et al, 2000).
Furthermore, stress was significantly associated with rates of sick leave, GP visits and accidents at work (Smith et al, 2000). The mental health charity Mind reports that stress is the highest cause of absence amongst non-manual employees which is associated with 12.8 million working days lost in Britain in 2003-04 whilst mental health problems in total result in the loss of 91 million working days every year. In addition, the 2005 Employer Survey of the Health and Safety Executive (Clarke et al, 2005) reveals that work-related injuries led to an estimated loss of 18,000 days of work per 100,000 employees whilst work-related ill-health led to a loss of 14,000 days off work per 100,000 employees. Work-related stress was the third most commonly reported health and safety risk (Clarke, et al, 2005).
Understandably, the evidence on the adverse effects of stress on employee wellbeing are of immediate interest to the corporate world. This is partly due to concerns that stress-related difficulties can lead to accidents and medical problems which can result in inability to work efficiently and in lost productivity due to increased sick leave (Kalia, 2002; Teasdale, 2006). Hence management research has concentrated heavily on the links between employee wellbeing and productivity (Csiernik, 1995). It is beyond the scope of this article to expound upon the relevant evidence. Nevertheless, it should be stated that this link has been demonstrated consistently in research. For example, Wright et al (2002) found that psychological wellbeing is a more consistent predictor of performance at work than dispositional attributes of employees. Additionally, empirical evidence has shown that employees who are happier with their jobs are also more productive (Patterson and West, 1998; Wright and Cropanzano, 2000; Wright et al, 2002) and less likely to be absent from work (McKenna, 1994). Conversely, evidence shows that unhappiness with one’s life stemming from personal difficulties such as substance abuse, mental health difficulties as well as interpersonal conflict can negatively impact upon productivity (White et al, 1996). For example, Warr (1996) presents evidence which shows that employee anxiety and occupational stress have a negative effect on the ability to work efficiently.
Stress management is becoming more and more important as workload increases (Morris and Raabe, 2002). The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that there will be a gradual rise in the number of people experiencing mental health difficulties in the workplace to the year 2020 (Kalia, 2002). Considering that government-sponsored mental health resources are shrinking, it is anticipated that some of the responsibility for the provision of mental health services will be passed on to the employer (Arthur, 2000). Additionally, it is expected that the recruitment of more people with mental health difficulties due to equal opportunity legislation and policies will add additional pressure on employers to provide mental health resources to all their employees who need such vital services (McDaid et al, 2005).
The maintenance and promotion of employee wellbeing
Current trends indicate an emphasis on the employer’s responsibility to provide services that meet their employees’ mental health needs (Arthur, 2000; Coles, 2003). This is reflected in the fact that international organisations such as the European Union and the World Health Organisation have been making recommendations about the measures that employers need to take to tackle workplace stress and promote employee health (McDaid et al, 2005).
Cooper and Cartwright (1997) suggest that there are three ways in which occupational stress can be prevented. Primary prevention can include education on stress matters and training in the recognition of stress symptoms. Secondary prevention can focus on simple ways of dealing with stress such as relaxation, ways of altering stress-inducing thinking and ways of improving one’s lifestyle. Tertiary prevention can include psychological support in the form of counselling and other support services, often delivered from either internal or external Employee Assistance Programmes (EAPs: used here to refer to any Employee Assistance scheme that includes counselling and/or psychological therapies amongst its services). Cooper and Cartwright (1997) propose that psychological support in the workplace, or ‘workplace counselling’ as it is often referred to, has an important role in the maintenance and promotion of employee wellbeing. A similar perspective is adopted by White et al (1996) who emphasise the role that EAPs can play in the prevention of mental health difficulties in the workplace. White et al (1996) propose 3 levels of prevention: primary, secondary and tertiary. In primary prevention employees can be educated with regards to preventing or managing stress. In secondary prevention any mental health issues currently experienced can be assisted via parallel support and by ensuring that the client is adhering to any medication regimes. Finally, in tertiary prevention, an EAP can help by supporting the suffering employee and his/her family and by averting alienation and isolation.
In addition, it has been suggested that EAPs can be of good service to workers with genuine psychological difficulties (Arthur, 2002; 2005). In the UK, research has shown that around 86% of a sample of users of a British EAP suffered from psychiatric problems as measured by the General Health Questionnaire (Arthur, 2002; 2005). White et al (1996) state that EAPs can help with the identification and referral of employees with complex psychological needs. Most importantly, the prompt identification of mental health difficulties and the use of psychological intervention may help reduce the need for a referral and it may help prevent the exacerbation of the employee’s mental health which can, in turn, prevent absence from work (White et al, 1996). Additionally, whilst some employees can be helped in their adjustment to their working environment, others can be sufficiently empowered to make the decision to leave an unsatisfying job (Coles, 2003). It would seem that EAPs can fulfil an important role in the maintenance and promotion of employee wellbeing and awareness of the advantages of using an EAP should be raised with employees (Ruiz, 2006).
According to Arthur (2000) the UK is potentially the only EU country where the corporate world shows serious consideration towards stress at work and where EAPs are used to deal with stress management. Coles (2003) refers to evidence from the Employee Assistance Professionals Association – UK which states that 10% of 1137 organisations with a total of 2.26 million employees use an external EAP. Arthur (2000) claims that there exist three groups of countries in the EU with respect to how they deal with stress at work. These groups are: (1) Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands where legal frameworks guide the provision of psychological support systems in companies; (2) Belgium, Denmark, UK, Germany and Ireland where the EU directive on health and safety has been taken onboard in the absence of a legal framework; and (3) Italy, Greece and Portugal where stress remains unrecognised as a factor that can affect employee health and where companies have no systems in place to offer psychological support to their employees. In view of this, there may be scope for the better integration of workplace counselling in organisational structures across countries. This has important professional and scientific implications.
Clearly, there is an increasing recognition of the importance of good mental health in the workplace (Bond, 2004). In light of this, and on the basis of the evidence that shows that employee wellbeing and satisfaction with work can be increased by helping employees alter their negative thinking (Judge and Locke, 1993), it would seem that psychology has an important role in the maintenance and promotion of employee wellbeing. Banister (1992) had speculated that counselling services would be an integral part of the workplace in the future and that psychology would play an important role in the maintenance of a positive working environment. Additionally EAPs may have an important role to play in the management of employee issues in the future as increasing unemployment and an increase in dual-worker households may start to affect personal and family lives which may in turn affect work performance (Highhouse, 1999). Finally, Hannabuss (1997) regards workplace counselling to be an invaluable resource and suggests that it should be part of the modern corporate world if human resources are to have a meaningful presence at work.
Suitability of psychological interventions for use in the workplace
In discussing the suitability of psychological interventions for use at the workplace consideration should be given to who the consumer of workplace counselling is (Friery, 2006). In addition, there is recognition that there are dual clients in workplace counselling, the individual employee as well as the employer/employing organisation (Carroll, 1996). Suggestions have been made about the adoption of systemic approaches that would account for complex relationships between all stakeholders (Claringbull, 2006).
Hannabuss (1997) argues that both the psychodynamic and the cognitive-behavioural (CBT) models are suitable for use in the workplace. Additionally, Coles (2003) provides examples of successful use of different therapeutic models in the workplace, such as the psychodynamic, the humanistic, the cognitive-behavioural and crisis interventions. Coles suggests that different models suit different individuals and different presenting difficulties. Orlans (2003) quotes evidence for the effectiveness of brief therapy and suggests it is a useful intervention especially where resources for counselling are limited. Finally, Carroll (1996) suggests the use of an integrative approach to workplace counselling according to the needs of the client.
Effectiveness of psychological interventions in the workplace
Perhaps the largest systematic study of workplace counselling in the UK was conducted by McLeod (2001). McLeod (2001) looked at the following themes: (1) psychosocial outcomes of workplace counselling; (2) studies of the economic cost and benefits of workplace counselling; (3) Studies of employee attitudes and utilisation; (4) research into further aspects of workplace counselling; (5) methodological issues in research into workplace counselling; (6) directions for future research. In summary, 34 studies were reviewed. The majority of these studies were conducted between 1983 and 2000. Only two studies were conducted earlier than 1983. McLeod (2001) evaluated the evidence from these studies on the basis of their methodological strengths. He concluded that there are three categories of studies: Those that provided ‘best evidence’ having the most robust methodologies, those with ‘supporting evidence’ where there were some methodological limitations and those with ‘authenticating evidence’ which provided descriptive information about the effectiveness of workplace counselling. In total, 11 of the 16 ‘best evidence’ studies provided evidence which was overwhelmingly in favour of the effectiveness of workplace counselling. This was also true for 4 of the 13 ‘supporting evidence’ studies and for 3 of the 5 studies in the ‘authenticating evidence’ category. The rest of the studies provided moderate support for the effectiveness of workplace counselling. Only 2 studies in the ‘best evidence’ category found workplace counselling to have no beneficial effect. McLeod concluded that there is strong evidence to suggest that workplace counselling has a significant beneficial effect on the wellbeing of employees. However, this study has been criticised for not providing negative outcomes and for ignoring the fact that therapy can do harm (Henderson et al, 2003). In fact there is some uncertainty with regards to the effectiveness of psychological interventions in the workplace. This is partly due to the inadvertent association of client satisfaction with intervention effectiveness (McLeod and Henderson, 2003). Nevertheless, employees seem to like psychological services in the workplace and some employees who use such services may not have been able to access independent or external mental health services (Kirk and Brown, 2003). Therefore, these services are of value to employee. In addition, the provision of psychological services in the workplace may be what Kirk and Brown (2003) have called “a socially responsible and humanitarian organisational initiative” (p. 142).
Opportunities for professional psychologists
Hannabuss (1997) argues that the use of psychological interventions in the workplace requires the skills and expertise of appropriately trained professionals. Carroll (1996) recommends that training in counselling in the workplace is included in training curriculums and quotes the Universities of Bristol, Roehampton and Birmingham as being amongst institutions that offer training programmes specifically on workplace counselling, indicating a training niche. In fact, the University of Southampton runs a 3-year professional postgraduate programme in Workplace Counselling. On the basis of this, academic programmes in professional psychology would do well to include training in the application of psychological knowledge to employee and other organisational matters.
In addition, the Association for Counselling at Work, a Division of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy exists to promote the interests of professionals involved in the area of workplace counselling (Cullup, 2005). The Division re-launched its journal in 2002 and appointed, Andrew Kinder, a Chartered Occupational and Counselling Psychologist as its new Chair in 2004 (Cullup, 2005) which indicates a growing professional interest in workplace counselling. Furthermore, 2002 saw the establishment of the Employee Assistance European Forum, a non-profit organisation for individuals and organisations interested in the development of Employee Assistance and Work-Life services in Europe (EAEF, 2005).
These are important developments and there is clear potential for psychologists with an interest and training in psychological counselling or psychotherapy to be involved in delivering psychological services to organisations. Such services could involve psychological therapies/interventions with employees and consultancy work to senior management with regards to workforce needs. Psychologists have a wealth of therapeutic knowledge and skills which could benefit employees and the organisations that work in them. There are currently great involvement opportunities for psychologists and these should not be missed.
- Chris Athanasiades is Senior Teaching Fellow at the University of Leeds, Charles Thackrah Building, 101 Clarendon Road, Woodhouse, Leeds LS2 9LJ. E-mail: C.Athanasiades@leeds.ac.uk
- Allan Winthrop is a Consultant Chartered Counselling Psychologist and Programme Director of the Doctorate in Counselling Psychology at the School of Social Sciences and Law, University of Teesside, Middlesbrough, TS1 3BA. E-mail: a.winthrop@tees.ac.uk.
References
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Source:www.thepsychologist.org.uk
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