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The Current Transcript for January 25, 2017

Host: Connie Walker

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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Breast milk, it's so cool. Breast milk is a complex, dynamic, situationally specific food. It’s the ultimate in eating local.

CONNIE WALKER: It's a message you've heard again and again and again. Breast is best. But some new mothers say the pressure to breastfeed has gotten too great. And the husband of one British Columbia mom who suffered from postpartum depression and took her own life last year has a warning for new moms everywhere — not to feel too burdened by society's pressure to breastfeed if it's not for you. We're taking up that discussion in half an hour. And then, it's one of the first things we learn about the way our bodies work, like in this old Disney film featuring Jiminy Cricket.

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You’re a human animal and you’ve got auditis, olfactics, gustis, visus, and tactiles. But don’t worry about it because in English that means the five senses.

CW: But it turns out the five senses, the way they play together, and play tricks on your brain is anything but child's play. Making sense of the senses, in an hour. But we start with this week's pipeline surprise.

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With wanting to see our energy industry rebound, with wanting to see those jobs that have been lost, returned, we know that this is the right announcement at this time.

CW: Who would have guessed it? The NDP Premier of Alberta Rachel Notley receiving welcome news from President Donald Trump. She was hardly alone amongst Canadian politicians yesterday, reacting positively to the news that the controversial Keystone XL pipeline may yet move Alberta bitumen south. But with plans afoot for Canada's own pipelines, and environmental concerns that never go away, is the return of Keystone something for Canada to celebrate? That's our debate first up today. I'm Connie Walker and you're listening to The Current.

Is Keystone XL pipeline approval good news for Canada?

Guests: Dennis McConaghy, Simon Dyer

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DONALD TRUMP: This is with regard to the construction of the Keystone Pipeline. Something that's been in dispute and is subject to a renegotiation of terms by us. We'll see if we can get that pipeline built.

CW: That's US President Donald Trump yesterday, signing new life into the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. His predecessor Barack Obama had vetoed legislation approving the long delayed project’s construction. Obama argued that a pipeline taking bitumen from the Alberta oil sands to refineries in the US south was hardly a bridge to greener, less carbon dependent future. But now the pipeline’s back on the table. The company behind it, TransCanada, saw its stock price soar yesterday, even as environmentalist’s spirits sagged. And the governments of Alberta and Canada both cautiously welcomed the news. Dennis McConaghy is a retired TransCanada senior executive who helped initiate the Keystone project. He's also the author of the book Dysfunction: Canada after Keystone XL. He's in our Calgary studio. Hello.

DENNIS MCCONAGHY: Good morning.

CW: So Dennis, what do you make of Donald Trump's executive order on Keystone XL?

DENNIS MCCONAGHY: Well, I think it's a significant revival of the project. It's notable that yesterday before the day was even over, TransCanada responded publicly that they intend to reapply. If people examine the specifics of the executive order that Donald Trump actually issued yesterday, it's a very expediting and facilitating order in terms of how the actual regulatory process is going to unfold related to it. Notably, within the order there's a 60 day period in which this negotiation of terms is sort of provided for. And so I think we're going to see fairly early in 2017 whether the ability of coming to terms, primarily it would seem on procurement terms for where the basic sourcing of the pipe, the steel.

CW: He said he wants American pipe right?

DENNIS MCCONAGHY: He wants an increased proportion of American procurement, the procurement of American produced steel for the project. And undoubtedly that will be a subject between the Trump administration and TransCanada. But I think it's evident that that's going to unfold fairly quickly within the next three months.

CW: So I mean, you know, he talked about the terms of the deal, renegotiated, maybe, using American pipe, but what do you expect some of the other terms might be and how much of a concern is that, that he wants to renegotiate?

DENNIS MCCONAGHY: Well, I frankly don't expect many other significant commercial terms to be in play. It's notable by the terms of the order yesterday, that it is still going to be the Department of State which will be the lead agency for the United States in this renegotiation and in this regulatory process related to this revived XL.I think the fact that Rex Tillerson is going to be the new secretary of state I think bodes very well for ultimately reasonable terms coming together on this point.

CW: What will it take for this to be a good deal for Canada?

DENNIS MCCONAGHY: Well, the pipeline itself of it is simply built will be a good deal for Canada, recognizing that most of the pipe related to XL exists in the United States. The biggest benefit from the project for Canada is actually derived from having improved transportation costs related to crude that is today moving out on railcars, the transportation economics of Keystone are demonstrably cheaper and that's a benefit on every barrel that's already moving out of this country into the United States, so more cash flow back to Canada. Secondly, the pipeline provides more capacity to accommodate increased growth of oil sands production in Alberta that I expect will occur. That will have employment impacts within Alberta for all of the renewed capital spending for debottlenecking and expansion projects. And yes, there will be some opportunity for some manufacturers of pipe and other services within Canada to be available for the construction process. So the benefits of this project are manifest for Canada and they mostly relate to the improved economics within the oil sands sector once this infrastructure is in place.

CW: In a press release yesterday, the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation promised to continue its legal challenges against Keystone XL. And given what we've seen at Standing Rock in recent months, how much opposition do you expect?

DENNIS MCCONAGHY: Well, Keystone XL is a pipeline that is going to start at Hardisty, Alberta, where there's a major oil terminal facility. It's going to run from Hardisty, Alberta, which is just about 60 miles southeast of Edmonton, to the Alberta Montana border. That represents about less than ten per cent of the entire Keystone XL system, which will then end up in Steele City, Nebraska, the south eastern corner of Nebraska.

CW: So a lot of Indigenous communities along that route potentially could oppose or have some resistance to this pipeline being built.

DENNIS MCCONAGHY: Not only First Nations resistance but other kinds of protesters. But the point is, within Canada, TransCanada currently today holds all the necessary legal regulatory permissions for building this pipeline in Canada. I fully expect that TransCanada will be able, in addition to getting the permit to cross the border, which was always the regulatory approval they were unsuccessful in getting from the Obama administration, I expect them to get them from the three states it has to traverse in the United States on a legal basis. So all this resistance, if it happens, is going to have to confront that TransCanada and its customers actually have the legal rights to do this project. So that's going to have to be confronted by anyone who thinks ultimately that's not going to be enforced.

CW: I have someone else I'd like to bring into the conversation, Simon Dyer is Director for Alberta at the Pembina Institute, he used to be director of the institute's oil sands program. Simon Dyer is with me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

SIMON DYER: Hello, thanks for having me.

CW: So what do you make of what Dennis McConaghy is saying? Is Keystone XL good for Canada in your view?

SIMON DYER: Well, I think the key point that Dennis made there was that this will facilitate oil sands expansion and there's the rub. I think a lot of the opposition we've seen to oil sands and pipelines is based on this idea that there seem to be two conversations happening that are not connected at all. The fact that we obviously have economic development objectives but also we have environmental objectives. In 2015 in Paris, Canada signed on with 192 other countries to the Paris Agreement, and we said we were going to reduce our emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, and to decarbonize 90 per cent below current emissions by 2050. At the same time, we have a federal government that certainly made some significant progress on the climate file in the past year, when you talk about the coal phase out and the introduction of a carbon price. But the math still doesn't add up. There is a gap in Canada's emissions profile. We're not on track to achieve our targets. And facilitating further oil sands expansion is going to take us further away from those targets and that's, you know, I think that is the flashpoint that's created here.

CW: What--

SIMON DYER: [interposing] And sorry, until we can square that circle, you're going to see that opposition, and pipelines are caught in the middle of this.

CW: What about the argument that it will be beneficial for the economies of Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada as a whole?

SIMON DYER: Well, certainly the economics of pipelines is such that, you know, better paybacks to Alberta in the short term you see some economic benefit there, absolutely. But it's also undermining the environmental commitments that we've made. Another very significant commitment came through Alberta's climate leadership plan, which said specifically that oil sands emissions would not be allowed to exceed 100 megatons per year. When you look at the potential pipelines that have already been approved and are in the queue from Kinder Morgan to Keystone XL to Energy East, that creates a pipeline glut. If those pipelines are filled, it will blast through Alberta's emissions limit. So something doesn't add up here. Are Alberta and Canada serious about reducing emissions or is the climate leadership plan not going to be implemented?

CW: Dennis, I'm curious, how much will the pipeline add to the economy or will it enrich TransCanada investors more than anything.

DENNIS MCCONAGHY: Well, let's just talk about the oil sands producers, because they are the biggest beneficiary. And clearly the Alberta government, as a major royalty holder, is de facto one of those. So just talking about improved transportation economics, you know, today's price of oil is roughly about 52 dollars a barrel US. The last railcar that a barrel of bitumen may go out of Alberta today might be in excess of 15 dollars a barrel. This pipeline might reduce that by half. If you multiply that by the plus million barrels that are going to flow on Keystone XL, that's a significant improvement. Immediately, once this pipeline is put into operation, probably within two years, that's a lot of incremental cash flow. And then you go on to say if you have other new barrels, you're looking at the full margin between what we can produce oil for in Canada and the world price, and by accessing the Gulf Coast market, you have an even more, the prospect of higher netbacks to Canada, which Simon alluded to. That's the biggest benefit to the country. The return that TransCanada makes is really a function of how much capital they deploy. It is the entire value chain here, you know, not the greatest benefit to Canada. But the real benefit is as an oil producer and the value that comes back to Canada that is captured by the investors in those companies, by notably the Alberta government, and the federal government through basically income taxes on those companies. It’s a substantial amount of value.

CW: Simon, what do you think about shipping unrefined oil?

SIMON DYER: Well, I think clearly as I've said, there isn't room for all these pipelines to proceed at the same time. So I think the Canadian and Alberta governments need to make a choice in terms of where they would like to see the small amount of increased production that can occur under the Alberta’s emissions cap to take place. And it would suggest then that there isn't room for Energy East if the decision is made to proceed with Kinder Morgan and Keystone XL. So I mean, I think we need to start talking about which of these pipelines has the most benefit to Canada.

CW: Well, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley was asked at a news conference yesterday if Keystone, along with Kinder Morgan and Line 3, would jeopardize the 100 megaton carbon emission cap in Alberta. Here's what she said.

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RACHEL NOTLEY: I don't think so actually, I mean, in terms of the timelines for getting these pipelines approved and then built, I don't think so. We believe that we'll have been able to work effectively with the companies to bring down the overall emissions of what they're extracting and that we're still in a good position. Because at the end of the day, the emissions cap is the emissions cap. This isn't about increasing the amount that is extracted, this is about greater levels of profit for the shippers and then ultimately greater return for Albertans.

CW: Simon Dyer, the premier feels confident that this won't affect her carbon emissions cap. What do you think of that?

SIMON DYER: Unfortunately, the track record is not good for the oil sands. I mean, if you look at data in terms of emissions per barrel from the oil sands in the past ten years, there’ve actually been no improvements, you know, performance has flat lined. So it's hoped through Alberta's stronger carbon levy and oil sands emission rules, you might see some improvement and that might create some room for growth under the cap. And certainly a number of environmental organizations support the Alberta Climate Leadership Plan. But if that does not happen, I think there is a serious risk that Alberta is going to have pipelines that it will not be able to fill under the cap. And that obviously puts a lot of political pressure on any jurisdiction, to say the infrastructure is in here, but, you know, we are going to expect our existing environmental rules and not fill those pipelines. So the assessment hasn’t been done. You know, in all our pipeline assessments we have in Canada, there’s never been a proper climate test that actually takes into account that 100 megaton limit in the pipeline, the induced development from expanded pipelines. Nor, perhaps more importantly, what is the future of oil in a world that seriously deals with its climate change obligations? I think that’s the critical issue. The issue is not so much who's the president of the United States for the next four years, but is there going to be a market for oil in the next 20? And that very much depends on whether those 192 countries who’ve signed onto the Paris agreement are serious about their emissions reduction goals. If they are, than the oil and gas industry is going to see a slow decline over time, as we see a shift to electrification in renewables.

DENNIS MCCONAGHY: If I could just respond.

CW: For sure.

DENNIS MCCONAGHY: I substantially agree with what Simon has said, that there is actually a coming to terms here, between capturing economic value for the country, which is palpable from Keystone XL going forward, and where we stand in meeting our current carbon reduction, and I'll call them aspirations, because that's really what's going to be put at a test here. We currently have a carbon price which is the centrepiece not only of Alberta's carbon policy but federal carbon policy. That carbon price we know at 30 dollars a ton, even going to 50, is not sufficient to decarbonize the Canadian energy systems, let alone virtually any country's energy systems. I agree, whether the world actually has the capacity to take what it committed to at Paris seriously or not is a real test. And we don't know today whether those countries will really have the will to actually try to do the things that will have to be done to come anywhere close to their own commitments they made at Paris, let alone go beyond that to achieve two degrees C. My own view is that with carbon pricing, that is the most rational way going forward to try to rationalize taking the economic advantage of carbon and hydrocarbons for Canada and being credible about carbon policy. And I only point out that the test as to whether the Notley emissions cap can sustain itself through the next Alberta election, or how Canada reacts if it can't meet its Paris targets, is all going to be put to the test. But Canada is not alone in this. All of those countries, especially the most developed ones, whether they actually have the will to meet those targets or whether they are just aspirations in a world that has to still balance the economic value that hydrocarbons provide and internalizing the risk of climate change.

CW: Dennis, in your book, you take issue with the way that environmentalists latched onto the Keystone pipeline. Why is that? What happened there?

DENNIS MCCONAGHY: My consistent view is that the most constructive place for the hydrocarbon industry and the environmental movement to meet was on carbon pricing. Trying to find commitments to a regime of carbon pricing that would be broadly applied across most of the developed economies, and that a price that would be steadily increasing with time as our understanding of the science and our capacity as economies to afford an increase in carbon price. I always took the view that that was the most productive way of finding common ground. Trying to resist specific infrastructure projects in a world that is likely, even out to 2040, 2050, to have modestly increasing world crude oil demand, made obstructing this kind of infrastructure, I think ultimately a misfocused emphasis. That's my view, that carbon pricing is the only way to find a constructive common ground between the objectives of dealing with this climate risk and capturing the economic value of hydrocarbons.

CW: Do you agree with that Simon?

SIMON DYER: I mean, I agree in principle that the big picture is how do we make progress on climate policy. I'd actually say the environmental opposition to Keystone was actually very rational. It was driven from a sense that there was not a serious discussion happening around climate policy, so it was rational that the environment community would focus on these infrastructure projects as a way to draw attention to these issues. And you could say that it’s actually been successful in terms of some of the policy that is created in Alberta and Canada. But the, I mean, the facts of the matter remains millions of people took action on Keystone XL because they felt that climate policy wasn't being addressed properly. You know, this project has the potential to be back, and that flashpoint is going to be here. The best thing that Canada and Alberta could do to moderate opposition to pipelines is to actually demonstrate that, you know, Canada in particular has a plan that enables us to meet our objectives. And, you know, we don't currently have that. So the federal minister saying, you know, this is a twin pillar approach, it's not a twin pillar approach when you're actually not on track to meet your climate objectives.

CW: So what would you like to see happen when it comes to the future of Keystone?

SIMON DYER: Well, I think, I mean, Keystone, as Dennis said, I mean, there’s a long way to be done before it's a done deal in the US, in terms of, you know, there isn't a defined route across Nebraska, the negotiations is underway I think from our perspective, the most critical thing is what happens in the future pipeline discussions that are happening in Canada? I mean, the federal government has said that they are looking at reforming the National Energy Board and the Canadian Environmental Assessment agency. Clearly modern regulators need to incorporate climate change into their decision making, and that isn't happening yet. So there’s something that needs to happen there. And we need to put more policies in the window that enable us to achieve our emission reductions.

CW: Alright. Well, thank you both for joining me today. I'm afraid we’ll have to leave it there.

DENNIS MCCONAGHY: Thank you.

SIMON DYER: Thank you.

CW: Dennis McConaghy is a retired TransCanada senior executive, and the author of Dysfunction: Canada after Keystone XL. He was in our Calgary studio. Simon Dyer is Director for Alberta at the Pembina Institute. He was in our Toronto studio. We'd like to hear from you. What do you think of Keystone XL and the prime minister's approval of pipeline projects in Canada? Let us know on our Facebook page, on Twitter we're @TheCurrentCBC, or send us an email. Visit our web site at cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link. The CBC News is next. Then you've heard it before, especially if you're a mother. Breastfeeding is best. But some moms who struggle with breastfeeding say the pressure to do it can be too much to bear. I'm Connie Walker and you're listening to The Current.

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Breastfeeding 'lactivists' may be doing more harm than good, says author

Guests: Courtney Jung, Dr. Ariel Dalfen, Dr. Jan Christilaw

CONNIE WALKER: Hello, I'm Connie Walker and you're listening to The Current.

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CW: Still to come, a new documentary about the secrets of the senses will have you questioning whether you can believe what you see, taste, hear, touch, and smell. The scientist and host of the CBC TV Nature of Things episode will unravel some of the stranger than fiction ways our senses conspired to sometimes trick our brains. That's in half an hour. But first, new mother's, new problem, the pressure to breastfeed.

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CW: You are not alone, you are not a bad mother. That was part of a message to new moms posted by Kim Chen last week to his wife's memorial page on Facebook. His wife Florence Leung was a new mother to their infant son. And according to Kim Chen, she was struggling with postpartum depression when she went missing from their home in New Westminster, BC. Her body was found in November and police do not suspect foul play. In his moving Facebook message, Kim Chen told new moms everywhere, quote, “do not ever feel bad or guilty about not being able to”, quote, “exclusively breastfeed”, “even though you may feel the pressure to do so,” end quote. Now we need to be clear that we don't know exactly what pressures to breastfeed Florence Leung may have felt or whether those pressures played a part in her postpartum depression. But we do know that many women echo that they feel pressured to breastfeed, and that pressure can affect their happiness and even their mental health. Sonya Kerr is a mother of four who lives just north of Toronto. She successfully breastfed her first three children but struggled with her last child.

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I would describe it as traumatic and I felt like I just needed to push through it. I’m an experienced mom, it’ll be fine, just push through this pain, push through, and, you know, I'll get through it. And it started to put me in a really bad place, like, mentally.

CW: Sonja Kerr blames the common message that breast is best, prizing breast milk over formula.

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That breast is best message is everywhere. It's in the material we get from our OB and midwife appointments. It’s, you know, on any parenting platform moms are going to to do the research before baby comes, all over the hospitals. Saying breast is best, it just sets up a mom to feel like if she's not providing in that way that she's already failed.

CW: Sonja Kerr is a mother of four. Courtney Jung is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and the author of Lactivism: How Feminists and Fundamentalists, Hippies and Yuppies and Physicians and Politicians Made Breastfeeding Big Business and Bad Policy. She's with me in our Toronto studio. Good morning.

COURTNEY JUNG: Good morning.

CW: So Courtney what is lactivism?

COURTNEY JUNG: Lactivism is a word that was invented by breastfeeding advocates themselves. And it's basically the ideology of breastfeeding. So it's moving from the idea that, you know, breastfeeding is good, I should breastfeed my own children to breast is best and everybody should breastfeed their own their children, and mothers who don't breastfeed are irresponsible or bad mothers and are not doing the best by their children.

CW: So do you take issue with breastfeeding itself or with the lactivists, as you call them?

COURTNEY JUNG: Right. So breast feeding, you know, there's nothing wrong with breastfeeding. I breastfed my own children, and, you know, it was fine. It's a good way to feed babies. But when it moves from being a way to feed babies to being an ideology, a pressure, a moral marker of who you are as a human being, then that moves it into a whole different realm. And in particular it reduces, in fact, you know, reduces to nil the ability that mothers, families have to make their own decisions about what works best for their family. Many women can't breastfeed physically. Experts estimate that up to 15 per cent of women can't breastfeed for a range of reasons, thyroid conditions, hypoplasia etc. And then on top of that, a lot of women find it very difficult to breastfeed, emotionally, physically, or because of work, because of pressures from other members of their family.

CW: But you talk a lot about the pressure or feeling pressured to breastfeed, is that something that you felt with your own children?

COURTNEY JUNG: Well, it's remarkably, it starts when you get pregnant. You know, people start to ask you about whether you plan to breastfeed and to tell you about the benefits of breastfeeding as soon as they realize you're pregnant. And yes, I did feel that pressure. But honestly, for me it was fairly easy to breastfeed. It was not a, I really didn't think much about it and it came easily to me. And so I realized that I was spared much of the shaming or all of it. Right? I was a mother who was sort of unmistakably in the club and beyond reproach.

CW: So help us understand, where did the breast is best idea originate?

COURTNEY JUNG: There is such a complex number of forces. Going back, you know, it starts in La Leche League, with La Leche League and the 1950s, 1956 La Leche League starts. And at that point, it's a back to nature, kind of anti-scientific motherhood sort of movement. And La Leche League was also Catholic and conservative, so it was part of sort of a nest of ideas like the mother belongs in the home, mother shouldn't go out to work, etc.. And then in the seventies it gets picked up by feminism, and so breastfeeding becomes a symbol of femininity, a symbol of the power of the woman's body to nurture and sustain human life. And then, you know, gradually in the 1990s or so, it turns into, it gets connected of course to attachment parenting. So it's one of the key elements of attachment parenting, which became the most popular parenting sort of philosophy of the late 20th century.

CW: But it also becomes policy and, you know, does become intertwined with science, in terms of there are studies and, you know, Health Canada recommends, Canadian Pediatric Society. So what issue do you take with the policy breast is best, and the encouragement by medical health professionals that women should breastfeed?

COURTNEY JUNG: Well, you know, I have a chapter in the book that's dedicated to the medical benefits of breastfeeding. And breastfeeding has been associated with benefits from everything to cancer, leukemia, obesity, celiac disease, Crohn's disease.

CW: Respiratory illnesses.

COURTNEY JUNG: Yeah, and then infections. And so it turns out that most of this research is quite weak and a lot of it is very contradictory. The results of most of it is inconclusive, which is to say there are studies that say that it does and studies that say that it doesn't. And on balance we don't really know. A lot of that research--

CW: [interposing] Although it is recommended by Health Canada and Canadian Pediatrics Society.

COURTNEY JUNG: Absolutely. Mmhmm. And the American Academy of Pediatrics, the World Health Organization, by everyone. It turns out that breastfeeding has a modest impact on infections, that's what, you know, we know that for sure. And the impact is genuinely modest. If six women breastfeed exclusively for six months, one ear infection will be averted. So that's what I mean by modest, it's pretty modest. So the idea that breast is crucially important for infant well-being and development is a vastly overblown idea, but if you believe that, and if you believe that all women can breastfeed then it's an obvious move to make to think that all women should breastfeed and that failing to breastfeed is irresponsible. On top of that, it's not only, breastfeeding advocates have actually moved in the last decade or so, from a breast is best kind of message, they've moved from the benefits of breastfeeding to the risks of not breastfeeding. So they've explicitly made a decision in the early 2000s that the idea that breast is best was not working well enough. That it was not convincing mothers to breastfeed in large enough numbers. And so that instead, mothers had to be made to be fearful of the risks of failing to breastfeed.

CW: What is the remedy then to try to lessen that pressure that some women feel?

COURTNEY JUNG: Well I think part of the remedy is to actually get the facts out there. And to say, you know, it's true, breastfeeding is marginally better if you're concerned about infections. But, you know, in most cases, in developed countries where we have good access to clean water, the risk of infection is not terrible and most babies are not going to die or even be hospitalized from an ear infection. Babies get ear infections and so if you think that there's a modest benefit then, you know, each family would have the right or ability to weigh that benefit as against the other benefit or do their own cost benefit analysis and weigh breastfeeding against all of the other things they need to do, the demands on them from their jobs, their other children, et cetera, and they could make their own decision about what works best for them. You know, we're very very lucky. We do have formula, formulas keep getting better and better. You know, 100 years ago we would not have had that option and now we do. And it's crazy not to avail ourselves of it.

CW: Alright, well thank you very much for joining us today, we appreciate it.

COURTNEY JUNG: Thank you.

CW: Courtney Young is the author of Lactivism: How Feminists and Fundamentalists, Hippies and Yuppies and Physicians and Politicians Made Breastfeeding Big Business and Bad Policy. She's also Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. And she was with me in our Toronto studio. Our next guest says she sees firsthand how the message that breast is best can put pressure on new moms. Dr. Ariel Dalfen is a psychiatrist and head of the Perinatal Mental Health Program at Mount Sinai Hospital. She's also an expert on postpartum depression. And she is in Toronto. Hello.

DR. ARIEL DALFEN: Good morning Connie.

CW: So Dr. Dalfen, is there a link between postpartum depression and breastfeeding?

DR. ARIEL DALFEN: Well, I think based on the evidence that's out there in the scientific literature, there's a lot of controversy. I think what we can say is that if people have postpartum depression, they will probably be less likely to breastfeed or breastfeed for as long. Or if they have negative experiences with with breast feeding. That this can lead to feelings of depression and feelings of anxiety. I think we can say that quite certainly based on the literature. I mean, there's also data out there to the contrary. So it is a very controversial body of literature. But by and large, there does seem to be a link between postpartum depression and less breastfeeding. And again, it's one of the situations in medicine where we're not exactly sure what comes first the chicken or the egg. But we do know that they can be very much linked and most likely it's the challenges with breastfeeding that lead to mental health issues.

CW: So I mean, what are the other causes, you’re not necessarily saying breastfeeding is a cause of postpartum depression, but what causes postpartum depression?

DR. ARIEL DALFEN: Well what I am saying is that challenges with breastfeeding and the intense pressure, like, both of your earlier guests Sonja and Courtney were mentioning, and the challenges with that and the stress with that can certainly be a significant factor that leads to postpartum depression and anxiety. Most of the time it's not the only factor, but very much of the time it can be a significant factor. So I probably, you know, day after day in our offices at Mount Sinai Hospital, we see women who are having challenges with breastfeeding, who feel like they are a failure, who feel like they are failing at their very first task of motherhood, who are feeling like failures at feeding their babies. And this is a significant contributor, I'd say, to their mental state and to feeling very unwell mentally.

CW: How do you help them deal with that pressure? And what message do you have for moms who are feeling that?

DR. ARIEL DALFEN: Well, what we do is make it not about the breastfeeding. So I think it's really important to step back and say, just like Courtney was saying, that we help each individual woman and her partner and her family make a decision about what is best for them. And we make it not about the breastfeeding, but make it about what is going to work for you. The most important thing is that you keep yourself healthy mentally and physically as a new mom, that your baby is fed and that your baby grows and develops. And how are we going to achieve those goals? Because achieving those things is the most important thing. And breastfeeding, like Courtney said, if it works, great. But it's one means for feeding the baby and we help each individual woman step back and look at and say OK, what are my options? What's working for me? What's not working for me? How am I possibly going to a, get better from the symptoms that I'm experiencing and not suffer from a serious mental health problem, so that I can be the best possible mom for my baby? And how can I keep my baby healthy? So we talk about all the different options that may be available to a woman and to her partner and help them come up with a plan, that again, may or may not include breastfeeding, and not making that the focus of the plan, perhaps, possibly, making that a component of the plan if that is not a significant source of a trigger.

CW: So some hospitals in Canada have been given a baby friendly designation by the World Health Organization as a part of an initiative to promote breastfeeding. Those hospitals have to meet a number of criteria, like not accepting free formula, informing women about the benefits of breastfeeding, and encouraging exclusive breastfeeding for six months. What do you think of that program?

DR. ARIEL DALFEN: Well, you know, I see where they're coming from with that. But again, I have a very different perspective, because I see day after day after day, women who are crying and struggling and suffering from very significant symptoms of depression and anxiety, because of the intense pressure that they feel, because they feel that they are told that this is the only way to feed their baby. And as Courtney Jung was saying, there is a morality attached to. And when you're a sleep deprived new mom who's learning how to be a mother or trying to be a mom with other kids and other things on the go, and you are, you know, you want to do your absolutely very best thing for your child and you're told that this was the only way to do that, it creates great great pressure and it creates, often as I see, significant mental health struggles and mental health problems for the women who we see. Which from my perspective, further compromises their functioning as a mom. And could have very far reaching damage in terms of the mom's health and well-being, her ability to parent, and as we've seen recently in certain unfortunate cases, possibly, you know, the mom taking her own life as a result of suffering from serious mental health issues. Possibly because part of the issue maybe struggles with the pressure to breastfeed. And, you know, from our perspective, now it may seem very dramatic, but as I said, and I'll reemphasize it, it’s so important to understand where new moms who are sleep deprived and struggling to do their very best, that pressure is magnified a millionfold, and is often translated. And again, depending on the woman's personality, into a sense of extreme failure and it translates into what may be very severe mental health psychiatric symptoms, with far reaching implications.

CW: Alright, well thank you very much for your perspective. Thanks for sharing that. Dr. Ariel Dalfen.

DR. ARIEL DALFEN: Thanks for having me.

CW: Dr. Ariel Dalfen is a psychiatrist and head of the Perinatal Mental Health Program at Mount Sinai Hospital. And she was in Toronto. Of course, mothers have been hearing for decades about the importance of breastfeeding. For more on why that message has been so consistent, I'm joined by Dr. Jan Christilaw. She is a Vice President for Provincial Women's and Newborn Health at BC’s Women's Hospital and Health Centre. And the BC Women's Hospital is certified under the World Health Organization’s Baby Friendly initiative. Dr. Christilaw joins me from Vancouver. Good morning.

DR. JAN CHRISTILAW: Good morning Connie.

CW: So what do you see as the benefits of your hospital being designated baby friendly?

DR. JAN CHRISTILAW: Well, Connie, first of all I want to say the whole conversation that's been happening in the last couple of weeks, I think has to be put into a little bit of perspective. And that is that for the vast majority of women, breastfeeding will be a very very positive thing to do. And I certainly want women to remember, people to remember that Dr. Dalfen for example, are seeing women who are already diagnosed with postpartum depression, and perhaps one or two per cent of women who are really struggling with that time. Now, I really want to take it back a step and say that for the vast majority of women that's not going to be the case. And I think it really is important that we separate postpartum depression from breastfeeding, on the scale where most women are experiencing it.

CW: Do you see cases where women feel extreme pressure to breastfeed and are struggling with that, in your practice?

DR. JAN CHRISTILAW: Well, you know, I really hope that women do not feel pressure to that extent. And I hate to think that that is happening on a widespread scale. Certainly, I think women in our world today feel compelled to do the best they can at everything. People feel that pressure. So I'm sure that the pressure is there. What I would like to think is that we are able to support women as they start on a very important journey of breastfeeding. And to keep in mind that for most women and for most babies, that breastfeeding is the natural thing to do, it’s the thing that's going to actually get the baby off to the best start. And having said that, we know that about 15 per cent of women, as Courtney said earlier, about 15 per cent of women will have trouble with breastfeeding, whether it's because they're HIV positive or because they're on some medication that precludes it or because they do have some other things, including postpartum depression. There may be things that stop women from being able to do it successfully or easily.

CW: Well why is that mantra, in your view, breast is best, a message that is important?

DR. JAN CHRISTILAW: Well, I think there's several reasons for that. First of all, when you really think about it, over millions of years of evolution, breast milk has been what nurtured human babies. And yes formula is better than it was 100 years ago, but there are still things about formula that are not the same as human breast milk. We can't put immunoglobulins in breast milk. We can't actually put the hormones in breast milk that we know are in human milk. So we know that for lots of reasons human milk is preferable. And, you know, there is evidence that yes it decreases infections, decreases asthma, many other things. And yes, if women can't breastfeed we do our best to make sure that we do close that gap. But it doesn't mean that there's not advantages to breast milk.

CW: What do you think can be done better to convey the message about the values of breastfeeding without making new moms feel bad or guilty if they don't breastfeed?

DR. JAN CHRISTILAW: Yeah. Well, I will say about the breastfeeding initiative, that goes on at our hospitals, that goes on around the world, it is about choice. It's about actually helping mothers all over the world deciding what's best for them. And it is about helping them get started with breastfeeding if in fact they make that choice. But it's also about respecting women where they are. So when you read the literature, it is built into the literature that that choice should be there. And yes, I think that there are people who feel so strongly about breastfeeding that that choice sometimes becomes secondary when you're having that discussion women. And so I do think that's something that we do need to look at. On the other hand, it's such an important time, right after the baby's born, you have a very short period of time to get it established. And we do do everything we do to support women if they make that choice.

CW: Do you see those lactivists, as they've been called, and that phenomenon of putting too much pressure on women to breastfeed, in your practice?

DR. JAN CHRISTILAW: I wouldn’t say in my practice, but certainly you hear about it in the literature, we hear about it. You know, I think they're out there. But I think there are people that are activists on both sides of this question that probably take it a little bit too far. I think the historical perspective is also very important. Remember that 30 years ago, breastfeeding was actually almost shameful and because it's been a huge campaign by the international formula companies to make sure that women saw breastfeeding as something that only women only did if they absolutely had to and that formula was better. And that led to, you know, the UN Declaration in the mid-eighties that we actually had to move in the other direction. So in some ways, we’re taking out of a historical hole where women have been shamed for breastfeeding. So I think you have to look at the whole historical perspective and look at both sides of the debate. But really that, you know, the main message I want to leave people with is that breastfeeding is normal, breastfeeding is natural, breastfeeding is really good for babies. And yes, for the vast majority of women it's going to be successful.

CW: Hm. Alright, well thank you very much. Definitely a complex topic and we appreciate you joining us to talk about it.

DR. JAN CHRISTILAW: Thank you very much Connie.

CW: Dr. Jan Christilaw is the Vice President for Provincial Women's and Newborn’s Health for BC’s Health Services Authority, and site executive at BC Women's Hospital and Health Centre. She was in Vancouver. Now we certainly want to hear your thoughts and experience with this. Have you experienced pressure to breastfeed? What do you think? We're on Facebook and on Twitter @TheCurrentCBC, and you can always send us an email. Just go to our web site at cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link. Coming up next, why scientists are tricking our senses to learn more about the brain. I'm Connie Walker and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Extro]

Scientists are tricking our senses to learn more about the brain

Guests: Jennifer Gardy, Lawrence Rosenblum

CONNIE WALKER: Hello, I'm Connie Walker and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

JENNIFER GARDY: That's weird.

RESEARCHER: Feels weird, doesn't it?

JENNIFER GARDY: That looks very odd.

RESEARCHER: Alright. So now just please observe what I do.

CW: That is Jennifer Gardy, she's a scientist. But as you'll soon hear, no amount of scientific training can keep the brain from being tricked by manipulating our senses. She's taking part in an experiment here. On the table in front of her is a rubber arm, alongside her own arm. And as the researcher across the table starts to touch that rubber arm, her own brain can't help but start to feel it.

SOUNDCLIP

JENNIFER GARDY: I've been watching this all afternoon and it's fooling me.

RESEARCHER: So this feels like your hand as much as this feels like your hand?

JENNIFER GARDY: Yeah, no, completely.

RESEARCHER: And so if I—

[Sound: forcefully jabs rubber arm with fork]

JENNIFER GARDY: [screams] Ah, ah. [laughs]

CW: And when he jabs that rubber arm with a fork, well, you get the idea. Jennifer Gardy is exploring the secrets of our offenses for a new documentary on the Nature of Things. It's airing tomorrow night on CBC TV. And as I mentioned, Jennifer Gardy is a scientist herself. She is also an Assistant Professor of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia. Anna Maria Tremonti spoke with her about the science of the senses. Here's their conversation.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello.

JENNIFER GARDY: Hello.

AMT: What's going on in that experiment?

JENNIFER GARDY: That experiment is so interesting. I'm sitting at a table, I've got my real right arm visible in front of me, I've got this fake rubber arm replacing my left arm. And as the experimenter strokes the fingers of both the rubber hand and my real arm simultaneously, and what's happening is I'm sort of transferring the sensation that is landing on my real left arm, I'm transferring it to this fake arm that I see in front of me. Somehow my sense of sight and my sense of touch have crossed their wires and the inputs from both are converging in a very confusing way in my brain.

AMT: And why is it that your brain is able to accept that rubber arm as your own?

JENNIFER GARDY: Well, it turns out our brains are remarkable in the depth and the breadth of the multisensory, the concept of multisensory integration. The notion that inputs from one sense don't just map to a particular part of the brain. I think we all grew up hearing about the five senses and thinking that these are five distinct senses, they each exist in their own little box, they each have their own portion of the brain that governs their sense. But what we're discovering now is that's not the case at all. All of our senses are mapping to multiple parts of our brain, so the inputs from your sense of sight from your sense of hearing, your sense of touch, they all converge and activate your brain in this wonderfully complex way that can create these tremendous opportunities for trickery like you see in the rubber hand illusion.

AMT: Well, it's interesting, so you know that intellectually but I was watching you, because I just expected that you would expect that you'd be wise to that and you wouldn't have jumped, but you did.

JENNIFER GARDY: Exactly. This show was so surprising, you know, I'm a microbiologist albeit, but I'm a trained scientist. I think like a scientist, I rationalize everything, I form hypotheses and I test those with experimentation. These sorts of things shouldn't be surprising to me. But as I sat through the rubber hand illusion, as I sat through a number of the other experiments you'll see in the film, time and time again I was blown away by how surprising the extent of this, the sensory integration is and how easy it is to fool, to completely override one sense with the input from another one. It's remarkable. And I think as people watch this doc, they will see how every single day they're experiencing the same phenomenon in their lives.

AMT: Well the taste experiments were really interesting. Tell me about how colour that we see can affect what we taste?

JENNIFER GARDY: This was a very very fun experiment. We went to Oxford University to do this. We worked with Charles Spence, who is a fantastically interesting researcher focused on how do all of our senses change the way we experience food and drink? And so the experiment that Charles helped us design, we went out into one of the local market spaces and set up a booth where we had a variety of different fruit drinks. We were asking people to taste them and describe the flavour that they tasted. But what we had done is even though each fruit drink had a fairly distinctive flavour, the orange drink, for example, or grape drink, we had changed the colours of the drinks so that the visual appearance of the beverage correlated in no way whatsoever with its actual taste. We might expect an orange drink to be coloured orange, here, you know, in our experiment, we might colour it green or purple instead. And it was surprising, the extent to which people's visualization of the drink in front of them impacted the flavour that they reported. Very rarely did they correctly state the flavour of that drink, they would instead report the flavour that was more associated with the colour. If we gave them a red drink, they'd say oh this is cherry or strawberry instead of lime or whatever we had actually flavoured it with.

AMT: I found that really interesting. And then you did one with sound. How does sound impact what we're tasting?

JENNIFER GARDY: This is an interesting one. Charles actually won the Ig Nobel Prize for this experiment that’s given annually to a piece of ridiculous but scientifically valid research. [chuckles] It's an experiment that's known in the communities, the sonic chip experiment. And so what Charles does is he has you sit in a booth and eat chips, although we were in Oxford, they were crisps over there. So he presents you with a crisp and you're wearing a pair of headphones and the sound of the chip as you bite into it feeds into a microphone, which in turn feeds back into the headphones that you're wearing. So the sound of the chip is amplified as you eat it. But the trickery here is that Charles, in this experimental setup, actually modifies the sound of the chip. So as you're biting into it, sound goes into the microphone, it's processed, and the sound that comes back into your headphones is slightly modified. And Charles found that when you take the crunchy kind of high end sound out of the chip, imagine you bite into a really fresh chip, it’ll kind of have that crunch sound to it. He takes that part of the sound out. And so what you hear in your headphones is sort of a modified, a softer chip. And people will rate the freshness of the chips differently depending on what sound they hear, even when they're eating chips out of the same batch. It's quite surprising.

AMT: And so you actually thought you were eating fresh potato chips when you were eating stale and vice versa?

JENNIFER GARDY: Exactly. And Charles has taken his interests and how sound and sense affect the way we eat and turned it into a practical application. He's worked with really amazing chefs and restaurateurs, Heston Blumenthal from The Fat Duck for example. Charles worked with Heston to create a sonic accompaniment to a dish that’s served at The Fat Duck, so that as you're presented with this lovely seafood dish, you also get a seashell with a pair of ear buds in it. You pop those into your ears, you listen to the sound of the sea as you're eating this, I think it's a crab bisque or something. And it elevates your experience of the food, so you've got this sort of bizarre academic experiment with this sonic chip. But it does actually have some very interesting real world applications.

AMT: You do realize that not everyone would consider that real world. But anyway, let’s continue.

JENNIFER GARDY: Yeah, that’s true. [laughs]

AMT: [laughs] OK. But our sense of smell can also be fooled by what we're told about a smell. Tell me what you discovered.

JENNIFER GARDY: This is a study that we did in Quebec. We went to Laval and talked to Johannes Frasnelli, who is a wonderful researcher doing very interesting stuff on how language affects our perception of what we're smelling. So he's got a neat setup where he's essentially got a machine that will feed odors to an individual, you sit in front of this machine, you pop a little mask on and scents will be pumped into the mask for you to smell. And Johannes has shown that when individuals are presented with a label for an odor, you are told hey, you’re about to smell parmesan cheese and you receive this odor. What you told in advance of receiving the odor will affect how you actually perceive that. So in the experiment that you'll see in the film, we're sending a set of odors to me, as the experimental subject. And before we send each odor, we present a label for it. So it might be a pleasant label, parmesan cheese, fresh flowers, or it might be an unpleasant label vomit or cheap perfume. And it is very interesting to see the extent to which that presentation of the word, priming you with the word, really sets you up to experience those scents differently.

AMT: And so if you think that you're smelling something that is unpleasant, you just automatically when you get that smell, you automatically think it's unpleasant?

JENNIFER GARDY: Exactly. It's, you know, would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? And it turns out that yeah, language has an incredibly deep impact on how we actually perceive things.

AMT: OK. So we're going after Shakespeare now. [laughs]

JENNIFER GARDY: Yeah.

AMT: I want to bring someone else into this discussion. The work of Lawrence Rosenblum is featured in your documentary. He has written a book called See What I'm Saying: The Extraordinary Powers of Our Five Senses. He's in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside. And we have reached him today in Riverside. Hello.

LAWRENCE ROSENBLUM: Hello.

AMT: You have done a lot of research on speech. So can you tell us what is the McGurk effect?

LAWRENCE ROSENBLUM: Well, in the McGurk effect you see somebody articulating syllables and you hear it them as well. But the way the face and the voice go together is mismatched. So you would, for example, see some lips articulating the syllable va, like v-a, and hear through a headphone or through a loudspeaker, them saying ba. And then you'd be asked what you hear. And even though you'd be thinking you were reporting what you were actually hearing, you could not help but be influenced by what you were seeing, and that influence would be strong and it would be unconscious. You wouldn't be aware of the fact that what you were seeing influences what you're hearing.

AMT: OK. So in this experiment Jennifer watches you say ba but you change your mouth movements and you say it again, but you say the same thing. And Jennifer, you’re tricked?

JENNIFER GARDY: Completely tricked.

AMT: And everybody is.

JENNIFER GARDY: Yeah. You know, it’s neat. In this episode we have recorded a little video with Laurence so that the viewers of the film can play along at home. And it is incredible to see the degree to which something that seems so true, I mean, sound, we’re on the radio. Sound is true, sound is this one perfect thing that we can hold on to, what we're hearing has got to be what is actually being produced, the sound that's actually coming out of the microphone, out of the speaker. But when you see, during the film, the extent to which visual input will alter what you're hearing, it really kind of throws into question the world around you. So viewers will have the chance to watch the ba, va video, and depending on when you open and close your eyes whether you are receiving the visual stimulus that modifies that the sound itself, it's remarkable the degree to which you will be fooled. It's one of the most impressive illusions that I've seen.

AMT: OK. And I was fooled and I spend my day in headphones, so there you go. So Lawrence, what's the wider lesson here?

LAWRENCE ROSENBLUM: Well I think the McGurk effect has turned out to be one of maybe the most important cross sensory sort of illusions that has been reported. And what it really suggests is that at least for the speech parts of your brain, it doesn't really care where it's getting it’s information about somebody's speech articulations. So it's looking for what's going on with the speaker's mouth movements, and it doesn't care whether it's seeing those mouth movements or hearing those mouth movements, and in some ways doesn't really know. And that's, I think, a really important lesson about the brain in general. These are things that Jennifer has alluded to, that this integration happens so readily and so early, and it's so pervasive throughout the brain that it's really the rule, I mean, it's really how things work. Now, the McGurk effect has been especially interesting because it's one of the first demonstrations where we see a part of the brain, the visual system part of the brain, I'm sorry the auditory systems part of the brain that's being influenced by another sense. So the auditory brain has long been thought to just be responsible for deciphering sounds. But using the McGurk effect, it was demonstrated that the auditory brain actually can respond to what one sees. So the auditory brain is in fact reacting to visual information and it's kind of been a prototypic example of how the brain seems designed around multi-sensory input.

AMT: And Lawrence, you do other work on speech. Tell me about what we are learning about the role of touch in communicating.

LAWRENCE ROSENBLUM: Yes. So as I said before, the speech brain really just wants information about what somebody is articulating and doesn't care about the senses. And that's not just true of visual and auditory speech, it's also true of touch and auditory speech. So the same sort of demonstration that you'd be seeing with visual and auditory speech can be done while not seeing and hearing a face, but touching and hearing a face. And then this is a really interesting because, you know, very few of us have experience touching faces for the purposes of speech perception. It's a technique that was used by Helen Keller and other folks that are blind and deaf. But, you know, for those of us that can see and hear, we don't do this sort of thing. But even without having that experience, the information we get from touching a face is used by the brain for determining what a person is saying as readily as it can actually integrate and influence what you are hearing. And we've been studying this sort of thing in the lab, other folks have studied this too. But what we're doing now is actually using the sense of touch to help train people hear distorted speech more easily. And we're finding that in fact it does that type of thing. And that down the road might have interesting implications for training people to better hear speech, such as cochlear implant patients and other folks that have hearing deficits.

AMT: Mm. And you've done work on imitation of sound as well and how other senses play into that?

LAWRENCE ROSENBLUM: Yeah, absolutely. So I think we have a sense that when we're interacting with somebody, we have subtle imitations of their, you know, say, body language and facial expressions that sort of thing. And that happens with speech language as well. When you're talking with somebody you match their speech rate to some extent, you match their intonation, maybe you've caught yourself imitating somebody foreign accent inadvertently and being embarrassed by that. This happens all the time. We are always doing a little bit of an imitation of the manner with which somebody is saying something. It's not really, you know, very conspicuous. It's not like, you know, an impersonator or something. But it does, we do this little matching. And that's not just true with the speech we hear a person say, it's also true with the speech, if we see somebody say. So if we're looking at a face and you're, you know, we bring in subjects that have no experience formally lip reading but we ask them to do a little lip reading anyway as they watch a face speak. They will end up producing their speech so it sounds like the speech that that person they were watching might have said if in fact they could hear them. So again, the idea here is that the speech brain is trying to bring in all the sensory information across the senses and it's doing so so effectively that it's actually affecting the speech that one then produces in response.

AMT: So can I use the example of someone who is from, say, a part of Canada who goes to the southern US and hangs around where there's a very pronounced southern accent. And after about a week or two, they start using a few words.

LAWRENCE ROSENBLUM: Absolutely.

AMT: So is that what they're doing? Is that what is happening?

LAWRENCE ROSENBLUM: Yeah. That would be one of the more, you know, kind of conspicuous examples of it. But the truth is, as you and I speak right now, as we’re conversing, we're actually matching each other's speech, probably in terms of the rate, in terms of the, you know, the pitch changes and in terms of very kind of microscopic things, like how we string together our consonants and vowels. Again, we're not doing it, you know, all the way, that we would be imitating each other all the time and that would be difficult [chuckles] and annoying but we're doing it just a little bit. And we believe that that probably helps facilitate social interactions and probably makes it easier for us to understand each other as well.

AMT: So as the three of us discuss, we end up speaking at roughly the same pace as opposed to one being faster or slower.

LAWRENCE ROSENBLUM: [crosstalk] More or less. Right. We come closer to each other's pace. Exactly.

AMT: OK. And so the bigger picture then of why it's so important to recognize how our senses all work together, Lawrence. Take us through that.

LAWRENCE ROSENBLUM: Well, in terms of, like, the practical considerations, it's already, you know, it's been very evident that this understanding has helped in designing rehabilitation programs for individuals who’re losing a sense or have a sensory degradation of one type or another. It's helped us understand more about what we call neuroplasticity, which is how the brain changes by virtue of experience or by virtue of some deprivation. Because I think some of the most dramatic examples of neuroplasticity come from what we call cross modal plasticity. And these are examples where somebody loses a sense or has some sort of degradation in a sense and then can kind of go through a compensatory sort of process and use another sense to make up for that. So the example I said before, of Helen Keller not having access to speech through hearing or sight, able to use touch for that purpose. But yeah, this is sorts of things we're learning is that, you know, that type of degradation doesn't need to be so dramatic. So I wear glasses, I'm near-sighted like a lot of my professor friends. And if it turns out because of that nearsightedness and because I don't have a correction in what we call the visual periphery. You know, when you wear glasses it's more the central part of your vision that's really corrected by the glasses, you're still seeing fuzzy on the edges. That fact actually allows me to hear certain spatial aspects of sound sources better than somebody who's not wearing glasses. So this plasticity, this compensation occurs in very dramatic examples when somebody loses a sense. But even in very subtle examples where someone has a very minor degradation, so the implication is for, you know, rehabilitation and understanding the brain in general are pretty large.

AMT: And so Jennifer, when you when you put all this together, and the way that we use our senses and the way we just automatically, they interact as our brain sort of does all of this at the same time. We talk about trusting our senses or I could just sense something. Really we're articulating what we're just learning more about scientifically now?

JENNIFER GARDY: Exactly. One of the nice demonstrations of that I think in the show is the idea that you can smell danger. We go and visit a researcher in Germany who is looking at whether chemo signals that are produced in human sweat can influence how people are perceived. So she collects what I'll describe as aggressive sweat and non-aggressive sweat. Aggressive sweat is collected from people that are boxing. So they they're doing a somewhat aggressive activity. And the notion is that maybe some danger chemo signals are present in the sweat that they're producing. As opposed to the sweat coming from somebody doing a very benign sort of exercise, walking on a treadmill. And when you present subjects with these differing sweat samples, it seems that there's something in that aggressive sweat, some sort of chemo signal that our brains are just subtly picking up on that's influencing our performance in a task that sort of measures almost a bit of a fight or flight sort of response. So there's really tremendous everyday implications to how we experience our world as a result of these incredibly subtle cues that are coming in from all of our senses, and being integrated and presenting us with what really is kind of this wonderful sensory layer that seems to lie just below the surface of what we would maybe ordinarily perceive as the world around us.

AMT: And of course as our senses help us, they also can trick us. That brings me back to the fake hand, and the fork in the fake hand.

JENNIFER GARDY: [laughs]

AMT: It's all fascinating. Thank you both.

JENNIFER GARDY: Thank you.

LAWRENCE ROSENBLUM: My pleasure.

CW: That was Anna Maria Tremonti speaking with Jennifer Gardy, the host of The Secrets of Our Senses on the Nature of Things. Jennifer Gardy is also an Assistant Professor at UBC’s school of Population and Public Health and a senior scientist at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. The Secrets of Our Senses airs tomorrow night on the Nature of Things on CBC Television. We also heard Lawrence Rosenblum, who wrote a book called See What I'm Saying: The Extraordinary Powers of Our Five Senses. He is in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside. Let's get to some of your feedback now. Our conversation yesterday about how redirection is increasingly replacing traditional retirement was one that many of you identified with. We heard from Bill Medd and Heather Leavens, both of whom started new careers in their mid-fifties.

SOUNDCLIP

BILL MEDD: Retirement's great and there's lots of things that you can do in retirement, but I'm not going to golf every day, I'm not a handyman.

HEATHER LEAVENS: I'm like Bill. I don't really need it for the financial. It was more that I just needed to be doing something.

CW: That discussion prompted Denise Hall of Vancouver to write, “I retired in 2008 and went on to complete a doctor of psychology and form my own private practice. I loved the work and balance of time for leisure, family involvement and work. Carole Fawcett a Vernon, BC writes, “I'm a 68-year-old woman who returned to school at 60. I've had my own counseling practice for seven years and enjoy it immensely. Unfortunately, since my divorce many years ago, I was never able to earn enough to save or plan ahead. My heart goes out to any woman who was forced to live in poverty in her old age. It is a fear that many boomer women share.” Jessica Ellingson of Salmo, BC writes, “it sounds like Bill and Heather had some financial security that allowed them to find their passions and make a second career out of it. But the reality for many older people who have lost their jobs is that they end up on EI or welfare.” And finally, Marieke Kerr writes, “there are many volunteer opportunities in which you can feel great fulfillment and contribute to people's lives and society as a whole. Leave the paid employment to those who need the money and have not had the opportunity to build a pension, pay off their house, and raise kids to be successful adults.” If you missed our conversation on redefining retirement, you can find it on our web site at cbc.ca/thecurrent or through the CBC Radio app. And you can always get in touch with The Current over Facebook, on Twitter @TheCurrentCBC or through our web site at cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link. That's our program for today. And remember you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. It's free from the App Store or on Google Play. Earlier in the show, we were discussing the pressure that many new mothers say they feel to breastfeed. You may have heard that the British singer Adele says she certainly felt the pressure. She sounded off about it on stage at a concert last year and got a lot of people around the world talking about the subject. Here's some music from Adele to go out on today. The song is Set Fire to the Rain, performed live at Radio City Music Hall in New York. I'm Connie Walker, thanks for listening to The Current.

[Music: Adele]

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January 25, 2017 full episode transcript

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