Big mysteries explained through your senses

Our senses help us navigate everyday life. But can they also reveal what lies beyond our perception? This hour, TED speakers explore the hidden world through the senses. Guests include astronomer Mark Whittle, chemosensory researcher Paule Joseph and artist Yiyun Kang. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 0:14Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 0:52Manoush Zomorodi?

  I'm Manoush Zamirodi. Today on the show, how our senses can reveal things about ourselves and the world around us that might otherwise remain invisible, starting with what we can hear.

• 1:08Manoush Zomorodi?

  Roughly 13.8 billion years ago, the universe began. We call that moment the Big Bang, except it didn't make a sound.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  The term Big Bang does suggest an explosion. It suggests a sound, but things are a little bit more subtle than that.

• 1:30Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Mark Whittle. He's a professor of astronomy at the University of Virginia. And the first thing that Mark wants us to understand is that the Big Bang wasn't an explosion, per se, at least not like in the movies.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  It was really, in a way, the expansion, not of something in a pre-existing space, but it was the expansion of space itself, carrying material with it. And so, paradoxically, the Big Bang was probably, in a way, silent because everything's moving away from everything else. There are no pressure waves.

• 2:05Manoush Zomorodi?

  Pressure waves. That's what sound is. Right now, as I speak, tiny molecules are moving through the air. But if there's nothing to move through, no air, gas, or water, then there is no sound. So the universe, in its first few moments, was silent. But then, as it expanded, things changed.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  In the young universe, you did actually have a gaseous atmosphere pervading everywhere. That was the nature of the young universe. It was hot, but there was a gas. And through the gas, sound waves can move.

• 2:43Manoush Zomorodi?

  So the Big Bang itself may have been silent, but almost immediately afterwards, the universe got noisy.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  The acoustic era started almost immediately, basically, and extended for about 400,000 years.

• 3:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  400,000 years might seem like a long time, but compared with the nearly 14 billion-year life of the universe, Mark says it's roughly the equivalent of its first day. And during this period, the acoustic era, certain areas of space had more matter than others. Gravity pulled gas towards those denser regions, compressing it, bouncing it back out, pulling it in again, over and over.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  What you have there is an approximately spherical sound wave being created by gravity, pulling gas into these slightly denser regions and away from the slightly less dense regions. So you have this whole set of compressions and rarefactions.

• 3:48Manoush Zomorodi?

  This created sound waves moving through the entire young universe. Of course, no one was around to hear them, and even if you somehow could have been there, your ears would have been useless.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  The frequencies of the waves that I'm talking about are one wave every 50,000 years. So, I mean, you wouldn't even live to see one wave pass you.

• 4:12Manoush Zomorodi?

  But what if we translated those waves into something the human ear can perceive? What would the beginning of the universe sound like? What you're about to hear represents the first 400,000 years of the universe, compressed into about 10 seconds and raised roughly 50 octaves into the range of human hearing.

• 4:47Manoush Zomorodi?

  Thanks to Mark Whittle, it's like we can hear the universe expanding.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  So the most obvious thing is this decrease in pitch, the drop in pitch.

• 5:02Manoush Zomorodi?

  Mark says, imagine the young universe as an enormous musical instrument, almost like an organ. At first, only its smallest pipes had enough time to produce waves, but as the universe aged, larger and larger regions joined in, and larger pipes make deeper notes.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  The musical instrument, if you like, of the universe is beginning to wake up, and it wakes up in sequence, starting with the smallest organ pipes and ending with the largest.

• 5:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  Our senses are how we make contact with the world around us. We use them to navigate everyday life, but they can also help us understand things that seem almost impossible to comprehend. So on the show today, a journey through the senses. What we can hear, see, feel, and smell. From an artist translating modern-day challenges into physical art experiences, to a chemosensory researcher exploring the science of smell, and using sound to understand the expansion of the universe. Which brings us back to cosmologist Mark Whittle. Mark has been obsessed with astronomy since he was a child growing up in England.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  I was lucky in being a sort of 10-year-old in the mid-'60s, when a lot happened in astronomy.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  And I also happened, just happened to be living in Cambridge in England, and some of what was going on was happening there. So, discovery of pulsars, these sort of rotating neutron stars, discovery of quasars, so these were huge black holes, you know, far across the universe. And then, of course, you know, the famous discovery of the microwave background, the fireball of the Big Bang, and they all happened roughly at the same time. I had a little box that I put, you know, articles that I'd cut out of the newspaper and a little paraphernalia.

• 7:08Manoush Zomorodi?

  Your own little Google.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  That's, yes, way predates anything like that, but that was my little way of doing it, and it fascinated me, and I don't think I've ever looked back.

• 7:19Manoush Zomorodi?

  Can we just lay some groundwork? The Big Bang has really become one of your specialties, explaining and talking about that. But when I was a kid, it was presented as a theory of one of the things that may have happened to create everything around us.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  So certainly, I mean, of course, there's a famous TV show called The Big Bang Theory, and the word "theory" is attached to it. Nowadays, I would say there's sort of, oh, maybe five or six just really key pieces of evidence which support the reality of a hot early phase in the universe's life, roughly 14 billion years ago. And, you know, maybe the most obvious is the microwave background. It's essentially the glow coming to us from those early times across space. But when we look out, we don't see that light directly. The light waves got stretched as they crossed the expanding universe.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  And so they started out as light, leaving the young universe with wavelengths of about a millionth of a meter, that's a micron, and they arrived 1,000 times longer. And sure, it's a millimeter, and those are microwaves. So it is light that left the young universe, but it's microwaves that arrived. They've had a very long journey, you know, 14 billion years, and during that time, they've been stretched, and they arrive there for as microwaves. And that wavelength, of course, we attach the name microwave. It's the same, basically, the same type of waves that are inside your microwave oven.

• 8:54Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah, so I guess that brings me back to my question about the name, the Big Bang. I mean, call me literal, but I always assumed that meant there was a loud explosion.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Yes, so let's just look at the coining of that term, the Big Bang, which was sort of 1950s, actually, and it goes to a series of radio programs broadcast on the BBC where a prominent British cosmologist called Fred Hoyle was actually doing an excellent job communicating these, all these new discoveries.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  The implications of new galaxies forming are striking.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  He coined the term Big Bang to be slightly derisive, just saying, well, it's nothing more than a Big Bang, really. And that name, that name has stuck.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  There are actually many Big Bang cosmologists, and they all have the property that the universe is supposed to have started at a particular moment.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  But the creation of the universe in this so-called Big Bang was really rather different. It's involved, and it's difficult to get your head around this, but it's really not of an expansion into anything. It's an expansion of everything.

• 10:05Manoush Zomorodi?

  God, it really messes with your head, doesn't it, Mark?

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 10:10Manoush Zomorodi?

  So how did you come up with this idea of translating all your measurements of these sound waves into music, something that is, we can listen to?

• 10:20Speaker 02

  So, starting with the COBE mission, that's a NASA satellite in 1990, and then the WMAP satellite in 2003, the sensitivity of the microwave telescopes began to reveal these very slight patches on the microwave background. And what scientists do with the image of the microwave background, this full sky, this sphere of glowing with patchiness on it, is they do a wave analysis of it, and it produces a spectrum. And not only were these waves basically acoustic waves, but also there was a fundamental of harmonics. And that is exactly the signature of something like a musical instrument or a human voice.

• 11:04Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, it brings new meaning to the phrase, feeling like you're in harmony with the universe, right?

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. I mean, it's a, yes, both harmony, sort of emotionally and aesthetically, but also acoustically.

• 11:16Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  And so I just thought it was a wonderful way of communicating to the, to the public what this, these new discoveries were, was to actually use sound as the bridge, rather than light. Because everything, for the most part, as you, as you said, is visual. You have the wonderful pictures from, you know, Hubble and other telescopes. They're all visual, and they're color, and that triggers our, you know, our sensitivity to color. But our ears are not often used. And so I thought, well, here's an appropriate vehicle. Now, here's a map of today's old universe, spanning 4 billion light years with us at the center. And it shows the positions of about 100,000 galaxies.

• 11:56Manoush Zomorodi?

  Mark Whittle explains more from the TED stage.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  And if you perform a similar wave analysis, sure enough, there's the fundamental and harmonics showing up faintly in those web-like patterns. The sound waves have turned to stone, so to speak, and become fossilized in the patterns of galaxies. But even more remarkable, I think, is that we think all of this cosmic structure, the sound waves and the galaxy patterns, had their ultimate cause with subatomic quantum vibrations during the universe's birth process, an incredibly short time of hyperexpansion that we call inflation. Now, this is a truly stunning proposition, that quantum oscillations smaller

• 12:44Speaker 02

  than atoms get amplified by cosmic expansion to make huge sound waves that then transform into an ever-expanding tapestry of galaxies.

• 12:58Manoush Zomorodi?

  In a minute, more about using sound to help us understand how the universe began and turning the mysteries of space into music. On the show today, making sense of the invisible world around us. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

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• 15:35Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, making sense of the invisible world around us. Cosmologist Mark Whittle has spent decades explaining the creation of the universe to his students at the University of Virginia. But he's also been using sound and music to help the public at large connect with these mind-blowing concepts. Earlier, we heard those ancient sound waves turned into something that we can actually hear as humans. But Mark also wanted to know, could those sound waves be turned into actual music?

• 16:16Speaker 02

  Yes. So in this period in the early 2000s, when the data were coming in, and the first three harmonics were seen, and then, more recently, with the Planck mission, the first seven harmonics were seen, you know, I began to sort of play with it a bit more and sort of measure, well, what are the frequencies of the, what are the tones?

• 16:40Speaker 02

  And as you heard from that rendering of the raw sound, it's really more like noise than music. And that's for a very simple reason, and that is that the young, those harmonics coming from the young universe are actually very wide. You know, if you're standing at a piano, you don't put your finger on one note. You put your full forearm onto a lot of notes. It all comes out together. And so it's not very musical, and it's more like noise. And so, you know, I just thought of the simple modification, really, which was to narrow the harmonics, bring them down to the kind of width in frequency and pitch

• 17:23Speaker 02

  that a musical instrument has, and that's very much narrower. And so then it becomes more like a note. And then you start saying, oh, well, what were these notes? What kind of chord was it? And then I also thought, although it's continuous sound, so it's, it's, I mean, the technical term is microtonal, so they're not individual notes. They, it slides down. I just thought, well, why not map it onto all the notes that we know about?

• 17:52Manoush Zomorodi?

  We want to play it, if that's okay.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

• 18:06Manoush Zomorodi?

  So in simple terms, what did we hear there?

• 18:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that was the, the sounds that, that come from when you track the harmonics dropping in pitch as they cross each note on a piano keyboard. So, or instead of sliding down, they're now sounded at particular moments, just depending on when they cross that, that note on the piano. And those are the first eight harmonics, which are, which are basically the, the eight that have been seen by, by telescopes. And, you know, I chose to sound those using a piano, but it's still not particularly sort of orchestral and musical.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  To finally add artistic expression to this, I gave these notes to sound artist Ander Mickelson, who worked with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw to write a work for choir and organ lasting about 10 minutes and based on these note sequences. It's been performed a number of times, but here's a brief excerpt from a performance in the Catholic Cathedral in Richmond, Virginia.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  I think this is one of the few times I've experienced a genuine coming together of science and art, both framed within a sacred context. It was a moment to feel deeply connected to and part of the entire universe. Those particles and atoms from that first acoustic era went on to make stars and galaxies and planets and, of course, us. And right now, some of those atoms are inside your brain, somehow witnessing and understanding their own ancestry. They were out in that hot glowing gas, participating in that first symphony.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Nowhere else, as far as we know, can the universe appreciate itself.

• 20:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's intense.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yes, the piece lasts 10 minutes. I picked that because I thought it demonstrated the range and including that lovely transformation towards the end of that excerpt where it gets a, you know, just delicious, so lovely. And actually, I think there's something really sort of, almost philosophically rather delicious here, which is that it turns out that most of the cosmological story and most of science in general is actually intuitible. And there's, in a way, we have no right for that to happen because we've evolved in a very different environment on the surface of the Earth.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  What sort of, why is it that we can understand and translate these things that are so remote into our world? And I think the answer is because, actually, you know, all the laws of physics are right here on the surface of the Earth and we've sort of been coached in them through our evolution. So that, yes, we know what sound waves are and we know what light waves are because we've developed sensors and the universe is filled with those two things and more. And so actually, we've got a very rich intuition. For most of the rest of the universe, even though we've only been constructed on this tiny little sphere, we've come from that material. The material that was making the sound has become us.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  I mean, not just us, it's made a lot of stars and galaxies, but our material was out there in that hot gas. And extraordinarily, for reasons which we really don't understand, that same material can now actually understand itself and witness its own origins and at some level appreciate them. And that seemed to me to be a rather beautiful loop from the unconscious early universe

• 22:44Speaker 02

  sort of becoming awake through us and our ability to somehow understand our surroundings enough to appreciate the deep lineage of how we got here.

• 22:58Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, I love hearing about this because it just takes me out of my minute-to-minute worries. And it's easy not to think about this stuff because I don't understand it, but then I'm reminded by someone like you, who does extraordinary projects like this, that, no, actually, we do understand quite a bit of it. Sure, we don't know the why or the how, but there's so, but science is unraveling and can be made more sort of tangible to regular people.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I basically spent my life doing my childhood hobby, which is incredibly lucky to do that. And through that exploration of astronomy, I actually can, without any real effort, just sort of see the universe around me. I mean, just to give you a quick example, you know, I went for my morning walk and I, you know, as each foot lands on the pavement, you just think, well, what is that material that's my feet are landing on? It's hard and it's, it's got, you know, magnesium and silicon and oxygen. And then you think for a moment about, well, what are those things?

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Well, they're made of atoms, but go inside the atom to get to the nucleus. There's a bundle of protons that are stuck together. How the hell did they get together? Because they push each other apart. And the answer is, well, they got pushed together in the centers of stars about five billion years ago, where the, you know, the pressures were enormous and the temperatures flung those protons together. And then they got, you know, expelled out into the coldness of space. And then four and a half billion years ago, it all collapsed in an incredible crash onto the Earth. And through billions of years, here they are now, under your feet with every step.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  And they have that history locked inside them. And that's remarkable to come out of a morning walk down the pavement. But it's all there, just the enormity of the universe and its incredibly varied environments that can create all these things and then bring them together and mess them around in a big cauldron and out we come.

• 25:26Manoush Zomorodi?

  Mark Whittle is a professor of astronomy at the University of Virginia. You can see and hear his full TED Talk at ted.com. On the show today, ideas about using our senses to navigate and understand the world, including our sense of smell.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  So when it comes to the evolutionary purpose of smell, you know, it's survival.

• 25:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  Polly Joseph is a senior investigator at the National Institute of Health, where she co-directs the National Smell and Taste Center.

• 26:08Speaker 04

  I study how important smell and taste are for health and well-being.

• 26:15Manoush Zomorodi?

  Polly says smell is the body's early warning system, detecting things way before we become consciously aware of them.

• 26:23Speaker 04

  So it detects airborne threats like smoke, fire, toxic chemicals that are in the environment, including predators, before they can be seen or heard. It also helps determine if food is safe to eat or dangerous. So you can think about that as like one of these evolutionary systems that has been preserved across species for survival.

• 26:51Manoush Zomorodi?

  So smell can alert us to danger in our surroundings, but over the past decade, Polly has been studying how smell can be an early warning system for things that are happening inside the body as well, specifically the brain. It all started with her mother-in-law's cooking.

• 27:09Speaker 04

  Her food started tasting very salty or very sweet. You know, an excellent cook, amazing delicious Mexican cuisine, and she's Mexican, but we started noticing this.

• 27:23Manoush Zomorodi?

  So she would make you a meal and you'd be like, whoa, everything is super salty or really sweet?

• 27:28Speaker 04

  Yes, even the kids would notice. It was extremely salty. And, you know, one of the things that she was also starting to do and compensate was like she will ask us to taste the food for her.

• 27:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  Ah.

• 27:40Speaker 04

  Like, how does this taste? So I tell my, I turn around and tell my husband, I think something's wrong.

• 27:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  Polly knew exactly what to do. She got a booklet of scratch and sniff stickers to test her mother-in-law's sense of smell.

• 27:55Speaker 04

  And then that tells you, you know, depending on how you answer, that tells you whether you have decreased sense of smell or complete loss of smell, or whether your sense of smell is normal.

• 28:05Manoush Zomorodi?

  Huh.

• 28:06Speaker 04

  And long and behold, for her, it was a decreased sense of smell. And that kind of sort of led to a cascade of doctors' appointments and a number of tests. And then we realized that, you know, she had frontal temporal dementia.

• 28:19Manoush Zomorodi?

  Is that because it's the same region in the brain that's being affected?

• 28:24Speaker 04

  Correct. So it's like the areas of the brain that are being affected, you know, are sort of degenerating the olfactory patterns as well. So in particular, you know, for her, I mean, we noticed this early. So we see that in individuals with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease and even frontal temporal dementia, the sense of smell is decreased early, like years before any other symptoms appear.

• 28:58Manoush Zomorodi?

  Years before?

• 29:00Speaker 04

  Years before any other symptoms appear. So for many people, we're not getting, you know, we're not getting our sense of smell measured by our primary care doctors. I mean, if I ask you, Manoush, when was the last time you had your sense of smell measured?

• 29:13Manoush Zomorodi?

  Never.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  Never. That's usually the answer that most people give.

• 29:17Manoush Zomorodi?

  That is true. That's funny. I just had my checkup the other day and he checked, you know, my tongue and looked in my ears and my eyes and measured, you know, my body temperature and weight. But there was, that was the one sense that we had no discussion about, my sense of smell.

• 29:36Speaker 04

  Exactly. So, and, you know, and your provider is not alone. You know, we have school vision screenings for hearing, we have the same. For smell, we have instruments and they're good ones we have, but they're primarily used in research and no specialty really owns it. There's no reimbursement. And until recently, there was not much to offer people once you found out there was a problem. So if you ask me, who should be doing these tests? I would say at a minimum, primary care should be screening and then doing the proper referrals.

• 30:11Manoush Zomorodi?

  So just like, you know, I get my cholesterol done every year and I have a baseline, we would know like, oh, boy, this is skyrocketing and we need to do something about it.

• 30:21Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 30:22Manoush Zomorodi?

  But what is the difference between regular loss of smell and taste due to aging versus it being a symptom of something much, much more wrong, deeply wrong?

• 30:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, you know, one of the things, like, our senses are going to decline as we age. But one of the things that happens when, you know, neurodegeneration is that even though it's slow, you can see those changes most more pronounced.

• 30:57Speaker 04

  In in some ways, for some patients. And it's really tied sometimes to the to cognitive decline as well. So I think what matters is not whether your smell is perfect, is whether it changed, especially if this changes suddenly, or and it has not come back. And, you know, when you think about, for example, COVID, COVID was actually a very interesting, you know, social experiment when it comes to smell.

• 31:26Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah, because I feel like for many of us, that was the strangest symptom, which was people immediately losing their sense of smell, something, you know, not like with a cold where it's dampened, but like completely gone.

• 31:38Speaker 04

  Exactly. You know, and one of the things that we have seen with COVID is like, you know, most people recovered, but we've seen that small group did not. And some of them have developed parasmia, which is an absence of distortion. For example, your coffee smells like burning garbage.

• 31:57Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh, no, that's so sad.

• 32:00Speaker 04

  Yes. So, you know, you know, their own partner smells wrong.

• 32:05Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh, no.

• 32:06Speaker 04

  And that's hard to live with than losing it all together. And that gets badly underestimated because it sounds minor when you say it out loud, but it is really, it changes your quality of life.

• 32:20Manoush Zomorodi?

  You know what it actually reminds me of is when I was pregnant and I would walk by bakeries. And normally I would love the smell of bread baking, wafting through the air. And it made me so nauseous and it was such a strange feeling. What is happening when something actively smells bad that used to smell good? What what is going on in the brain?

• 32:44Speaker 04

  So actually, currently, we have a study that we have that it's ongoing right now, which is really, we're trying to understand exactly this question. You know, what happens when someone develops parasmia? So we're getting individuals with parasmia and putting them inside a scanner to understand through, you know, FMRI, just scanning their brain, what, you know, what signals are changing? So we can really understand why is this distortion happening? And what can and what are the mechanisms? And is there something that we can offer patients that can ameliorate their symptoms?

• 33:27Speaker 04

  If you go to the doctor, they will say, you know, it's in your brain. No, this is an actual experience that someone is having.

• 33:35Manoush Zomorodi?

  In a minute, more about your sense of smell and what it means when it goes away with chemosensory researcher Polly Joseph. Today on the show, how our senses help us understand our surroundings. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

• 34:06Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 35:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zamirodi. Today, we're talking about how using our senses, including sound and smell, help us better navigate and understand our world and ourselves. Polly Joseph is the co-director of the National Smell and Taste Center. She's researching why some illnesses cause our ability to smell to suddenly disappear and the effect it can have on people's lives.

• 35:38Speaker 04

  One person that comes to mind, you know, is this young man who was a firefighter and lost his smell to COVID. And as you can think, you know, being exposed to things like, you know, smoke and burn, you need to be able to smell this.

• 36:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  Right.

• 36:00Speaker 04

  So one of the things that really was causing him a lot of distress was the fact that he wouldn't be able to do his job. Like he was, and and at this point, he was being diagnosed with long COVID. He was not recovering. And we really needed to start thinking about this as a disability. This is one of those things that we consider an invisible disability. And he had to change, he had to think about different accommodations at work because he couldn't necessarily, you know, work in the field anymore because of this. And I had another patient who was a chef. And as you can think, you need your sense of smell and taste as a chef.

• 36:44Speaker 04

  And just the deep grief that, you know, these two individuals experienced as a firefighter, as a chef, their community, like things were changing so quickly for them. Just because the senses that they needed for work were was just gone. And till this day, they have not recovered.

• 37:10Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh, they haven't? Yeah, I was going to ask, is there anything you can do for them?

• 37:14Speaker 04

  So we don't have a lot of treatment when it comes to to smell and taste. We primarily have, you know, olfactory training is one of the things that we tend to recommend to individuals. And it works for some people, but it doesn't work for others. We need to know exactly, you know, the the reason, like what caused the loss of smell? And how early are we catching people? And if we catch it early, we see that if it's based on a virus, you can, it can regenerate and people can gain their sense of smell back. But for others, it just doesn't happen at all.

• 37:58Speaker 04

  So this is why we have been focused through, you know, through the National Smell and Taste Center and some of the other centers around the country on really understanding what is happening. What are the mechanisms? What are the things that are changing from a biological perspective? So we can develop drugs and treatments and interventions that can help people long term. And if we understand this, we might be able to create alternative therapy that can help also people preserve their brain health through their sense of smell.

• 38:32Manoush Zomorodi?

  Can you tell us more about the research you're doing where you're linking it to obesity and alcohol use disorder in addition to neurodegenerative diseases? How does that fit in?

• 38:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, so one of the things that when we think about, for example, alcohol, we think about cravings. The smell of alcohol gives individuals cravings. But one of the things that we have not really looked is to, you know, how are the senses affected by long term alcohol use? So one of the things that we are looking in in in my lab in particular is, you know, what happens when sustained drinking? And what happens when individuals stop drinking? Is there recovery of their sense of smell and to what baseline? And it's the same thing with obesity.

• 39:24Speaker 04

  So you probably heard a bit of like, you know, the changes that are occurring right now when individuals taking GLP-1s. So, you know, just as of this month, there's been some study just showing that, you know, everybody assumes that these medications make food taste bad or taste like nothing. And that's not what this group of investigators found. Smell was unchanged, but the main difference showed up in something called detection threshold. It's just a degree of sweetness that you, or for example, that you need to be able to detect something.

• 40:05Speaker 04

  So that's one of the things that changed for individuals that actually had, that were taking GLP-1 and what we call food noise. So people on the medication longer reported, you know, fewer intrusive thoughts about food and less craving, less reaction to food cues and less wanting high fat foods than than those that didn't. So but when it comes to the particular changes in the sensory processes itself, we need more studies on this to understand how the world is changing for people on taking these medications.

• 40:46Manoush Zomorodi?

  So just to sum it up, I think what you're saying is that this study is saying it's not just how hungry you are, it is how things taste when you do eat them, what they smell, the sort of the the textures, whether you are thinking about food, whether it feels as satisfying when and when you do eat it, everything.

• 41:06Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 41:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yes, I would love you to just sort of tell me what you, on a daily basis, just like in our everyday lives, do you think that we should put more of an emphasis on smell? Do you think it could change our experience of the world? I mean, I've never been that into aromatherapy, but I don't know. You're making me think maybe I should be.

• 41:24Speaker 04

  I mean, I think we need to be more conscious and, you know, like I think mindful about this, the orders around us. Stop and smell the roses. It is important for us to do this, right? Like to be, to do more active, like olfactory training. Like you can do this even when you're cooking at home, right? Just get something out of your cabinet when you're putting the spices in, you know, in as you're cooking your meal. So it's not only just about aromatherapy, it's even in the way that we are interacting in our kitchen. There's so many places around our lives where smell is actually playing an important role.

• 42:11Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was chemosensory researcher Polly Joseph. She is a senior investigator at the National Institute of Health, where she co-directs the National Smell and Taste Center. You can watch a video about her work at ted.com. So on this episode, we have talked about sound and smell, and now how sight can help us comprehend the nearly incomprehensible, like how our planet's climate is morphing and changing, or the sometimes scary and very confusing capabilities of AI.

• 42:48Speaker 05

  We are the reason for all these complicated problems. We made it, but we don't even know what is happening, how to understand it, how to solve the problems.

• 43:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Yiyun Kang. She is a multimedia artist based in Seoul. And in her work, she tries to span that gap between humans and the forces we've created that we can't even see.

• 43:15Speaker 05

  So the first thing I believe that we could do is make the problems ours. And to do that, I think we need to feel it. We need to sense it.

• 43:26Manoush Zomorodi?

  I saw Yiyun's talk in the TED Theater. She was an ethereal figure onstage, almost as though she'd been brought there from the future, surrounded by shifting light, lasers, and enormous moving images. Her work takes things that are mostly invisible to us, like satellite data, artificial intelligence algorithms, and gives them a shape that people can actually see.

• 43:53Speaker 05

  Living at the intersection of arts and technology, our mission became clear, to render the invisible visible. But how do we translate the intangibles? Let me take you on my journey.

• 44:10Speaker 05

  I began with the most vital data set, the Earth. Specifically, our water. Half of humanity will like clean water by 2050, and many already do. To expose the crisis of this vital resource, I spent an intense year with Google. They were searching for an artist to bridge the gap between complex data and creative storytelling. And an amazing door opened. NASA joined the team to offer me an exclusive access to the satellite data. This rare gift becomes the soul of my artwork, Passage of Water. My goal is to turn these NASA numbers into visceral experiences,

• 44:53Speaker 05

  dramatize them, so that we can truly see and feel what is happening to our freshwater. Look at this. This is the raw satellite data that captures the water situation.

• 45:06Manoush Zomorodi?

  At first, the raw data is not exactly moving. On three enormous screens, it looks like what it is, columns and columns of tiny white numbers racing around.

• 45:16Speaker 05

  We have the most sophisticated technology over time, but who can actually understand what is happening here? What happens if we change the interface? This is Passage of Water. It lives on Google's platform, designed for you to fully interact with.

• 45:36Manoush Zomorodi?

  Picture Planet Earth floating in space, suspended against a black background. Across its surface, the freshwater appears in blue, while the water we've lost is marked in red. And suddenly, as the years go by, from 2002 to 2023, the planet becomes a deeper, deeper shade of that red.

• 46:00Speaker 05

  We are losing our freshwater fast, and we are the reason. And this is where artistic creativity becomes an essential, not a luxury. You don't just see the data, you feel it. It is the language that allows me to tackle those wicked problems and turn them into something we can grasp. We brought this project to COP28. There, we spoke with climate scientists, policymakers, indigenous people who face water scarcity every day. Seeing their reactions in front of my artwork gave me absolute certainty. Arts is the vital bridge, a missing link

• 46:43Speaker 05

  that has undeniable power to restore our lost connection.

• 46:51Manoush Zomorodi?

  Let's turn the conversation to your more recent work, which is to do with AI, which honestly, to me, is the least tangible and hardest for people to wrap their heads around. What was the point for you that you were like, OK, it's time to figure out how we get people to connect with their bodies, with their senses, to this invisible force in their lives?

• 47:18Speaker 05

  For me, the reason why I actively started tackling the AI recently is because of the user interface. Before the ChatGPT-4, the AI was still very difficult. You have to have a proper coding knowledge. You have to have a proper experience so that you can train the model. But now, everything is just at our fingertips. We just need to type it, so it removes all the barrier. And people started using AI like a chatbot every day. So I thought that, well, something's going wrong. The technology is way much more complicated than any other technology of our time. But what is going on behind that clean user interface?

• 48:03Speaker 05

  We should talk about it.

• 48:06Speaker 05

  I felt a strong yearning to pull this intelligence into tangible forms. I wanted to make an overwhelming experience, something that you don't just look at, but something you inhabit with your body. We are at a threshold. To co-design a future with AI, we must ask, what is the shape of future AI? I built a physical answer to that question, and this is Light Architecture.

• 48:42Manoush Zomorodi?

  Picture yourself walking into a dark, circular room that represents the mind of the computer. Around you, 24 slender, gold rods rise up from the floor, each with a light on top. Beams shoot across that floor, climbing the walls and reaching up to the ceiling, intersecting. And as the lights pulse, they form and break into patterns. It's almost as though they have their own language. This is Yiyun's way of giving the activity inside an AI system a physical and beautifully arresting form.

• 49:19Speaker 05

  In Light Architecture, AI takes a physical breath. These modules are no longer flat pixels. They are living neurons, and I call them neural pods. Here, you don't just watch a model. You stand inside the mind of a machine. I found my inspiration in human brain. Our brains have an incredible mechanism within data from cortex to deeper layers with the flexibility that AI cannot yet replicate. But it makes me wonder, with this incredible power inside our heads, are we genuinely training it? Or we're simply leaning on AI, paralyzed by the fear of being replaced by a machine,

• 50:02Speaker 05

  only to let our creativity and curiosity wither? Is that the future we want? Sometimes, people find it scary. Some people find it very interesting. I don't give them an answer. It's rather having an opportunity to think about it. How do you want to design your life with AI?

• 50:27Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, it sounds like I hear your own feelings of

• 50:30Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 50:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  conflictedness, because you used AI to make the artwork about AI, right?

• 50:37Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 50:38Manoush Zomorodi?

  And so it sounds like you are curious about a symbiotic relationship with AI, but also cautious and skeptical and unsure.

• 50:53Speaker 05

  It is so true. I'm exactly like a huge excitement, great anxiety, all kind of entangled inside of me. That's the reason why my artwork is also fluctuate, positive, negative, lighting and darkness, because this is the technology we built. So we want to share that feeling together. And I want to believe that we still have an opportunity to make decisions, proper decisions, proper time, so that we can progress together.

• 51:33Speaker 05

  This is who I am. I'm an artist who builds bridges. I collaborate with scientists. I build systems. And I connect the physical and the virtual. My art is about building spaces where you can step inside the unseen. I do this because I believe one simple truth, that we are all deeply entangled.

• 52:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was artist Yiyun Kang. You can see her full talk at ted.com. Thank you so much for journeying through the senses with us on this episode. It was produced by Katie Monteleone, Harsha Nahada, and Rachel Faulkner White, with help from Lucy Little. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkhanpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Matthew Cloutier, Avery Keatley, Theo Guerin, and James Delahoussaye. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineer was Jimmy Keely. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Sal Khan, Logan McLeod-Davda, Helen Walters, Roxanne Hylash, and Daniela Bello Rezo. I'm Manoush Zamirodi,

• 52:52Manoush Zomorodi?

  and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

• 52:58Speaker 00

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• 53:03Speaker 06

  Support for this podcast and the following message come from Henry Ford Health. What if medical expertise could travel far beyond the hospital? This led Henry Ford Health doctors to develop remote ultrasound diagnostics used by astronauts. More at henryford.com/scienceforthewin. This message comes from Charles Schwab with their original podcast, Choiceology. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/podcast.