Humans aren't machines, and treating our bodies as such is a mistake.
Photo credit: Noah Silliman, Unsplash.com
When I was a child, some of my fondest educational moments came from a series of videos called Schoolhouse Rock. The catchy musical hooks helped me remember the academic lessons and the cartoons were more entertaining than watching my teachers diagram sentences.
But as my education advanced, I realized that the Schoolhouse Rock videos on science were pretty bad. To explain complex scientific concepts, the songs used misleading analogies. For example, 'The Nervous System' video compared complex, autonomic functions like heart rate to "a telegraph line."
Because the purpose of any analogy is to use what is familiar to explain what is unfamiliar, Schoolhouse writers might be excused for starting with the simple (e.g., technology) as an introduction to the complex (e.g., physiology), but in the video on nutrition and metabolism, the analogy is so oversimplified that it is best described as wrong.
I'm specifically talking about 'I'm A Machine.'
Taleb's Antifragile (2012) destroys the machine metaphor of the body by making a critical distinction, which I will paraphrase here:
Machines benefit from constancy and are good at doing the same thing. They repeat.
Living things benefit from variation and are good at doing different things. They adapt.
It's tempting to attribute the "human = machine" lessons delivered by my grammar school as an early indoctrination into the demands of factory work. In Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) silent film, he satirizes the subordination of the human to the factory by engulfing the worker inside the machine.
But my objection here is not political, economic, or artistic—it is scientific.
For example, in terms of nutrition, thinking of food merely as an interchangeable commodity—"fuel"—for our metabolic machines will lead to dangerous misconceptions about how to care for our health. Not all food is the same in terms of its effects on the body; neither are our bodies' needs static.
By contrast, an emerging movement in medicine emphasizes restoring the naturalistic rhythms and variations that have been removed from modern industrial life. To avoid the injurious constancy of a machine-like existence, we must introduce into our lives the kind of irregular stressors that our ancestors could not avoid.
Two Dutch scientists coined a new term for this approach called "Intermittent Living" (Pruimboom & Muskiet 2018), and they describe four examples: thirst, hunger, temperature, and oxygen.
Intermittent thirst involves allowing yourself to feel "mild thirst," which, according to the authors, will reduce cortisol levels and "decrease anxiety, fear, and aggressive behavior."
Intermittent hunger (fasting) amounts to skipping meals to initiate autophagy of weak or damaged cells, promote mitochondrial health, and increase insulin sensitivity.
Intermittent heat and cold exposure incorporate sauna and ice baths to stabilize metabolism, reduce blood glucose levels, guard against obesity, and promote mitochondrial proliferation.
Intermittent hypoxia/hypercapnia is the practice of modulating blood oxygen and carbon dioxide levels to reduce inflammation, boost immune system function, slow aging, and ameliorate feelings of panic or anxiety.
The mechanisms by which intermittent practices operate are similar to how exercising our muscles can make them weak and sore initially but ultimately prompt our body to adapt to the increased stress, recover, and soon become stronger.
The medical term for a cycle of stress, rest, and recovery is called hormesis, and it "is integral to the normal physiological function of cells and organisms" (Mattson 2008). However, only in the last decade has scientific interest in hormesis reached the medical mainstream (e.g., Calabrese 2018).
As the machine metaphor of the human body gives way to a more sophisticated understanding of the complex, adaptive mechanisms that make us more resilient, one of the most important realizations is that hormetic stress, also called eustress, may be critical to extending healthspan.
The practice of ice bathing exemplifies the principle of hormesis, wherein controlled exposure to cold stress prompts our bodies and minds to adapt and become more resilient.
About the Author
Thomas P. Seager, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University. Seager co-founded the Morozko Forge ice bath company and is an expert in using ice baths to build metabolic and psychological resilience.
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