Madhumita Murgia

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TED-Ed

How stress affects your brain

Are you sleeping restlessly, feeling irritable or moody, forgetting little things, and feeling
overwhelmed and isolated? Don't worry. We've all been there. You're probably just stressed
out. Stress isn't always a bad thing. It can be handy for a burst of extra energy and focus, like
when you're playing a competitive sport, or have to speak in public. But when its continuous, the
kind most of us face day in and day out, it actually begins to change your brain. Chronic
stress, like being overworked or having arguments at home, can affect brain size, its
structure, and how it functions, right down to the level of your genes. Stress begins with
something called the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis, a series of interactions between
endocrine glands in the brain and on the kidney, which controls your body's reaction to
stress. When your brain detects a stressful situation, your HPA axis is instantly activated and
releases a hormone called cortisol, which primes your body for instant action. But high levels of
cortisol over long periods of time wreak havoc on your brain. For example, chronic stress
increases the activity level and number of neural connections in the amygdala, your brain's fear
center. And as levels of cortisol rise, electric signals in your hippocampus, the part of the brain
associated with learning, memories, and stress control, deteriorate. The hippocampus also
inhibits the activity of the HPA axis, so when it weakens, so does your ability to control your
stress. That's not all, though. Cortisol can literally cause your brain to shrink in size. Too much
of it results in the loss of synaptic connections between neurons and the shrinking of your
prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain the regulates behaviors like concentration, decision-
making, judgement, and social interaction. It also leads to fewer new brain cells being made in
the hippocampus. This means chronic stress might make it harder for you to learn and
remember things, and also set the stage for more serious mental problems, like depression and
eventually Alzheimer's disease. The effects of stress may filter right down to your brain's
DNA. An experiment showed that the amount of nurturing a mother rat provides its newborn
baby plays a part in determining how that baby responds to stress later in life. The pups of
nurturing moms turned out less sensitive to stress because their brains developed more cortisol
receptors, which stick to cortisol and dampen the stress response. The pups of negligent moms
had the opposite outcome, and so became more sensitive to stress throughout life. These are
considered epigenetic changes, meaning that they effect which genes are expressed without
directly changing the genetic code. And these changes can be reversed if the moms are
swapped. But there's a surprising result. The epigenetic changes caused by one single mother
rat were passed down to many generations of rats after her. In other words, the results of these
actions were inheritable. It's not all bad news, though. There are many ways to reverse what
cortisol does to your stressed brain. The most powerful weapons are exercise and
meditation, which involves breathing deeply and being aware and focused on your
surroundings. Both of these activities decrease your stress and increase the size of the
hippocampus, thereby improving your memory. So don't feel defeated by the pressures of daily
life. Get in control of your stress before it takes control of you.

Michael Molina
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TED-Ed

What is déjà vu? What is déjà vu?

Have you experienced déjà vu? It's that shadowy feeling you get when a situation seems
familiar. A scene in a restaurant plays out exactly as you remember. The world moves like a
ballet you've choreographed, but the sequence can't be based on a past experience because
you've never eaten here before. This is the first time you've had clams, so what's going
on? Unfortunately, there isn't one single explanation for déjà vu. The experience is brief and
occurs without notice, making it nearly impossible for scientists to record and study it. Scientists
can't simply sit around and wait for it to happen to them -- this could take years. It has no
physical manifestations and in studies, it's described by the subject as a sensation or
feeling. Because of this lack of hard evidence, there's been a surplus of speculation over the
years. Since Emile Boirac introduced déjà vu as a French term meaning "already seen," more
than 40 theories attempt to explain this phenomenon. Still, recent advancements in
neuroimaging and cognitive psychology narrow down the field of prospects. Let's walk through
three of today's more prevalent theories, using the same restaurant setting for each. First up is
dual processing. We'll need an action. Let's go with a waiter dropping a tray of dishes. As the
scene unfolds, your brain's hemispheres process a flurry of information: the waiter's flailing
arms, his cry for help, the smell of pasta. Within milliseconds, this information zips through
pathways and is processed into a single moment. Most of the time, everything is recorded in-
sync. However, this theory asserts that déjà vu occurs when there's a slight delay in information
from one of these pathways. The difference in arrival times causes the brain to interpret the late
information as a separate event. When it plays over the already-recorded moment, it feels as if
it's happened before because, in a sense, it has. Our next theory deals with a confusion of the
past rather than a mistake in the present. This is the hologram theory, and we'll use that
tablecloth to examine it. As you scan its squares, a distant memory swims up from deep within
your brain. According to the theory, this is because memories are stored in the form of
holograms, and in holograms, you only need one fragment to see the whole picture. Your brain
has identified the tablecloth with one from the past, maybe from your grandmother's
house. However, instead of remembering that you've seen it at your grandmother's, your brain
has summoned up the old memory without identifying it. This leaves you stuck with familiarity,
but no recollection. Although you've never been in this restaurant, you've seen that tablecloth
but are just failing to identify it. Now, look at this fork. Are you paying attention? Our last theory
is divided attention, and it states that déjà vu occurs when our brain subliminally takes in an
environment while we're distracted by one particular object. When our attention returns, we feel
as if we've been here before. For example, just now you focused on the fork and didn't observe
the tablecloth or the falling waiter. Although your brain has been recording everything in your
peripheral vision, it's been doing so below conscious awareness. When you finally pull yourself
away from the fork, you think you've been here before because you have, you just weren't
paying attention. While all three of these theories share the common features of déjà vu, none
of them propose to be the conclusive source of the phenomenon. Still, while we wait for
researchers and inventers to come up with new ways to capture this fleeting moment, we can
study the moment ourselves. After all, most studies of déjà vu are based on first-hand
accounts, so why can't one be yours? The next time you get déjà vu, take a moment to think
about it. Have you been distracted? Is there a familiar object somewhere? Is your brain just
acting slow? Or is it something else?

Nancy Lublin
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TED2012

Texting that saves lives

To most of you, this is a device to buy, sell, play games, watch videos. I think it might be a lifeline. I think
actually it might be able to save more lives than penicillin.

Texting: I know I say texting and a lot of you think sexting, a lot of you think about the lewd photos that
you see -- hopefully not your kids sending to somebody else -- or trying to translate the abbreviations
LOL, LMAO, HMU. I can help you with those later. But the parents in the room know that texting is
actually the best way to communicate with your kids. It might be the only way to communicate with
your kids. (Laughter) The average teenager sends 3,339 text messages a month, unless she's a girl, then
it's closer to 4,000. And the secret is she opens every single one. Texting has a 100 percent open rate.
Now the parents are really alarmed. It's a 100 percent open rate even if she doesn't respond to you
when you ask her when she's coming home for dinner. I promise she read that text. And this isn't some
suburban iPhone-using teen phenomenon. Texting actually overindexes for minority and urban youth. I
know this because at DoSomething.org, which is the largest organization for teenagers and social
change in America, about six months ago we pivoted and started focusing on text messaging. We're now
texting out to about 200,000 kids a week about doing our campaigns to make their schools more green
or to work on homeless issues and things like that. We're finding it 11 times more powerful than email.
We've also found an unintended consequence. We've been getting text messages back like these. "I
don't want to go to school today. The boys call me faggot." "I was cutting, my parents found out, and so
I stopped. But I just started again an hour ago." Or, "He won't stop raping me. He told me not to tell
anyone. It's my dad. Are you there?" That last one's an actual text message that we received. And yeah,
we're there. I will not forget the day we got that text message. And so it was that day that we decided
we needed to build a crisis text hotline. Because this isn't what we do. We do social change. Kids are just
sending us these text messages because texting is so familiar and comfortable to them and there's
nowhere else to turn that they're sending them to us. So think about it, a text hotline; it's pretty
powerful. It's fast, it's pretty private. No one hears you in a stall, you're just texting quietly. It's real time.
We can help millions of teens with counseling and referrals. That's great. But the thing that really makes
this awesome is the data. Because I'm not really comfortable just helping that girl with counseling and
referrals. I want to prevent this shit from happening. So think about a cop. There's something in New
York City. The police did it. It used to be just guess work, police work. And then they started crime
mapping. And so they started following and watching petty thefts, summonses, all kinds of things --
charting the future essentially. And they found things like, when you see crystal meth on the street, if
you add police presence, you can curb the otherwise inevitable spate of assaults and robberies that
would happen. In fact, the year after the NYPD put CompStat in place, the murder rate fell 60 percent.
So think about the data from a crisis text line. There is no census on bullying and dating abuse and
eating disorders and cutting and rape -- no census. Maybe there's some studies, some longitudinal
studies, that cost lots of money and took lots of time. Or maybe there's some anecdotal evidence.
Imagine having real time data on every one of those issues. You could inform legislation. You could
inform school policy. You could say to a principal, "You're having a problem every Thursday at three
o'clock. What's going on in your school?" You could see the immediate impact of legislation or a hateful
speech that somebody gives in a school assembly and see what happens as a result. This is really, to me,
the power of texting and the power of data. Because while people are talking about data, making it
possible for Facebook to mine my friend from the third grade, or Target to know when it's time for me
to buy more diapers, or some dude to build a better baseball team, I'm actually really excited about the
power of data and the power of texting to help that kid go to school, to help that girl stop cutting in the
bathroom and absolutely to help that girl whose father's raping her. Thank you.