JAD ABUMRAD: Jad here. This is WNYC's Radiolab. Prior to the station ID, we were listening to a conversation between two Roberts. Robert number one is right here with me. Mr. Krulwich?

ROBERT KRULWICH: Mm-hmm?

JAD: And Robert two is—well, we'll hear from him more in a moment. Robert Sapolsky, Stanford University professor. The topic of that conversation and of our show is stress. Stress then and stress now. As we heard, stress then would count as something like being chased across the savanna by a saber tooth tiger. Stress now? Standing in the wrong line at the supermarket. Very different kinds of stress, separated by thousands of years of human experience. But to the body, they are the same. And too many false tiger alerts will make you sick. Now that right there, the connection between stress and sickness, how that connection was made, is an interesting story which involves lots of people. But let's start with one.

PAUL ROSCH: Dr. Paul J. Rosch. I'm president of the American Institute of Stress, and I've been involved in stress research for well over 50 years.

JAD: And it was around 50 years ago that Dr. Rosch and a few colleagues made an interesting discovery. They took a bunch of rodents and did some—well, not so nice things to them.

PAUL ROSCH: Like sewing back the eyelids of mice and shining lights in their eyes, and deafening noises. And we put them on treadmills. We left them out on the roof of the medical school in the cold wintry Canadian blizzards. We'd throw the animals into water so they would have to constantly swim. We would do that for hours or days until they were too weak and then measure their hormonal secretion. Anything that would be a severely noxious threat or challenge.

ROBERT: If there's any justice in the world, this guy's going to rat hell. There's gonna be some rodent named Alice stitching his eyeballs back.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: But let's go on.

JAD: But in the name of science, what Rosch and company noticed is that every different type of cruel torture technique they did to these poor rodents resulted in the same outcome: they got sick, and sick in the same way. Sort of flu-like symptoms. Furthermore ...

PAUL ROSCH: We quickly learned that it wasn't necessary to do these horrible things to get almost the same effect.

JAD: No, they could get the same effect by merely frustrating the rats. Put their food out, and then before the rats get it, take it away. Then put it out again, then, "Ooh, thought you had it," take it away again. Just by doing that over and over, that would make some of the rats sick.

ROBERT: And some of them could cope.

JAD: And some of them could cope, yeah.

ROBERT: Well, this is—Robert Sapolsky, the professor who's been helping us along, says that human beings break down in pretty much the same categories. There are some people who can be challenged by all the daily experiences and they just kinda glide through it. And there are other people ...

JAD: Like you.

ROBERT: ... [laughs] who get furious, just furious.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: The key thing, really, is the hostility. It's the hostility, and it's a particular style that may seem very familiar to our New York metropolitan area listenership. And I say this as a native New Yorker. But it's the style called toxic hostility.

ROBERT: Toxic hostility!

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Which is everything in the world around you confirms they're out to get you, they're out to get you preferentially. Every elevator door that closes before you get there is proof the person inside who could have stopped it but chose not to is out to stab you in the back and this is a really, really hostile world out there.

ROBERT: This is a way of life!

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: To which everyone says, "It is, it's true. That is how the world is."

ROBERT: But some people have this in a dire sort of way.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: In a dire sort of way.

JAD: And I suppose his point is that the people who do have it in a dire sort of way get sick.

ROBERT: Yeah. There's a kind of anger in style that is so bad for your nervous system that's like worse than smoking. I mean, literally. This is what is famously called Type A behavior.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Type A was first described by these two cardiologists, Friedman and Rosenman.

ROBERT: That's Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman, and they came up with this idea in the 1950s.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Their original version was you're hostile, time pressured, impatient, low self esteem, joyless, striving, all you live for is to check things off your to-do list. And, you know, this is what they were originally saying greatly increases your risk of heart disease. And cardiologists hated these guys for the simple reason you're some Ozzie and Harriet, Eisenhower-era cardiologist and all you think about is heart valves and blood lipids, and here's these guys saying, "No, you gotta sit down your patients and talk to them and find out if they've picked the wrong line in the supermarket, do they go berserk at that point?" And it took decades for it to become clear that this really is for real.

ROBERT: Here are two cardiologists proposing that you are more likely to get a heart attack not based on the size of your veins or whatever's passing through you, but on the kind of guy or kind of gal you are.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Exactly.

ROBERT: How did they come to this peculiar insight?

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Okay, this is where this great story comes from, and I wouldn't have believed it except it was told to me by Friedman himself, and appropriately sheepishly. So this is back in the '50s, and they've got this cardiology practice. Everything's going great, except apparently they had this one problem which they were having to spend a fortune reupholstering the armchairs in their office.

ROBERT: In the office?

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: In their waiting room.

ROBERT: Oh.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: What's this about? They had no idea. They paid no attention to it. It's part of the overhead. They had this upholsterer who comes every month, gotta fix a couple of chairs.

ROBERT: Every month?

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Every month, yeah. So one month, the upholsterer's out on vacation, replacement upholsterer comes in, takes one look at the chairs, and discovers Type A personality.

[NEWSREEL: Presenting great moments in American upholstery!]

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: He says, "What the hell is wrong with your patients? Nobody wears out chairs this way." And the guy's absolutely right. They still have one chair, which I hope they're gonna give to the Smithsonian. And what it is is the front two inches of the seat cushion and the front two inches of the armrests are totally shredded and the rest of the chair is fine.

ROBERT: What do you mean by shredded?

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: It's like, ripped. That's where the tears are. It's not evenly distributed.

ROBERT: People were digging their nails into it or something?

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Well, basically what you've got there is the Type A profile, the person literally sitting on the edge of their seat and squirming and fussing with the armchairs and clawing. None of this wear on the chair distributed over the entire butt range of weight displacement. People are sitting there on the edge of their seats.

ROBERT: So the upholsterer says to the cardiologists, "There's something wrong with the people in your waiting room?"

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Exactly. And what's supposed to happen at this point, this is supposed to be this epiphanal moment and one of these that winds up in the textbooks, of midnight conferences between upholsters and cardiologists who do these huge surveys and young idealistic upholsters sweep across America discovering, you know, you don't see chairs like these in a podiatrist's office, only the cardiologists. That's what's supposed to happen. Here's where Friedman says, "Get this guy out of my face! I need to see patients. I'm this important guy. Give him his damn check." He was too Type A to listen to the guy.

ROBERT: So they threw the upholsterer out!

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: "Give him his check, get him out of here." And five years later, they're doing these studies with these psychologists and out pops the Type A profile, and they say, "Oh my God, the upholsterer, he was right." To this day, they have no idea who the man was. And I'm willing to bet that, like, there's this 95-year-old upholstery guy in some bar in San Francisco right now who's droning on about how he discovered Type A personality, and it's absolutely true.

[NEWSREEL: An intense nationwide search has yet to reveal the identity of that replacement upholsterer. This story has been brought to you by the American Upholstery Association, dedicated to fine cloth, fine furniture, and a healthier America.]

CHARLES YOUNG: My name is Charles Young, and I do upholstery.

ELLEN HORNE: Tell me what you're working on here.

CHARLES YOUNG: Well, I'm doing a rocker. It's a nice chair, actually. It's just they wore the seat all the way down to the wood. Sometimes things are so bad that they said, "Oh please cover it before you take this, 'cause I don't want people in the building to know how bad my furniture is." But I'm saying, how could you live like this in your own house? It's a mess. It's a mess. [laughs]

JAD: We couldn't find the guy, the Type A guy, but in the process of looking we ran across Charles Young. And in this messy, stressful world, his Lower East Side studio is a window onto calmer times.

CHARLES YOUNG: A long time ago, there was straw inside of the old stuff. Oh, let me see if I see that. Let me see what stuff is in that chair. This is a photograph of an old chair, looks like it was made about a hundred years ago. I don't know if you can see that, but there's straw inside there. The old stuff has such class to it. You don't mind working on it. The new stuff is not that good. The new stuff is all badly put together, stapled together so we can't fix it. Because everything we do, we throw away and go buy new. It's not the most glamorous job in the world, but it's a job. People don't want to learn how to do upholstery. It's a dying art. So I don't know what they're gonna do.

JAD: You want to know about upholstery? Visit Charles Young, owner of CY Upholstery Company on the Lower East Side. He's been doing it for decades.

CHARLES YOUNG: My best customers is dogs and cats. They chew up people's furniture, which is absolutely wonderful.

JAD:  Charlie spoke with producer Ellen Horne.

CHARLES YOUNG: You got a dog?

JAD: Jad here with Robert Krulwich. Today on Radiolab, we are looking at stress. The effects of stress on chairs—and on us.

ROBERT: To get back to our bodies for just a second, remember before we said that when you get scared and you're gonna make a presentation, your mouth goes dry 'cause your digestive system is beginning to shut down?

JAD:  Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: It's also true that if you're very, very nervous, though you wouldn't know this, you stop growing. And this is even for a really little bit of time. A short spurt of panic will create a short spurt of non growth. That's on one end. But since Professor Robert Sapolsky has supposedly exposed someone to a lot of continuing stress ...

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: And at an extreme, you get one of the truly bizarre outposts in medicine, this disease of kids who stop growing for reasons of psychological stress.

ROBERT: Meaning they're so nervous about whatever it is that their system doesn't—spends all it's time pumping and palpitating and doing all this and then no growing.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: It's saying, "Grow tomorrow, grow tomorrow, grow tomorrow. This is no time for it." And it's well documented. This is not, ooh, fourth grade teacher who is mean and yells at the kids. This is, like, nightmare, police and the social workers breaking down the door of the apartment sort of nightmare stuff. And amazingly, you get the kids out of those settings and often they will start growing again.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Okay, so you read up a lot about this, and there's this weird pattern I had noted in a lot of these unreadable chapters, which is they would make reference to Peter Pan. They would start with a quote from Peter Pan or some snide comment about Tinkerbell. And I'd seen this and I have no idea what this was about, until one day I finally found the explanation.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Eight-year-old kid, growing up in Victorian England. One day, he sees his beloved twelve-year-old brother killed in front of him, horrible accident. This destroys the family. This was the mother's favorite child who dies, takes to her bed in this Victorian swoon for the next 10 years, totally ignoring this child growing up in this emotional isolation, these horrible scenes. The boy comes in with a tray of food for his mother and she's going on, "Oh David, David. Is that you, David? Have you come to me, David?" The dead son.

ROBERT: So the second son's left standing at the door saying, "Gee, it's only me."

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: "It's me. It's me. Sorry I'm not David. Sorry I'm not David. Sorry it wasn't me instead of him." Only thing she apparently ever spoke to him about was this crazy idea she grabbed onto, which was if David had to die, at least he was still a boy, he's not one of these boys who grows up and doesn't need his mother anymore. "He'll always be my perfect little boy," because he didn't grow up. He didn't grow up and didn't grow up. This kid hears this with a vengeance and stops growing at that point. He lives to be 60 years old, under five foot tall, unconsummated marriage, complete maturational arrest.

ROBERT: Did he have puberty?

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: He did. He grew facial hair, but most indications are not a whole lot of other secondary sexual characteristics. And as an adult, this was the author of the much beloved children's classic, Peter Pan. This was JM Barrie, the guy who wrote Peter Pan.

ROBERT: Really?

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Who was a very, very troubled man who, among other things, just endlessly turned out plays and novels and whatevers about boys who die and come back as ghosts and marry their mothers and all sorts of Oedipal stuff like that. Sadomasochistic fantasy stuff with little boys all through his writings, his private writings. This was a very, very troubled man who did not deal very well with the consequences of this for the rest of his life.

JAD: Coming up, the therapeutic benefits of screaming, gnawing and beating the crap out of someone. This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. Robert Krulwich and I will continue in a moment.

 

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