YouSaid · the spoken record

Elsa Richardson

lines on the record: 37
first: 2024-07-22
most recent: 2024-07-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So I feel like one of the things that I have taken from researching this book is to, I think maybe like just find ways of embracing the weirdness of the gut and find ways of embracing its kind of strange and complex intricacies without attempting to instrumentalize it To become more productive, I guess.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quickly, the wellness industry, let's say, is able to transform this connection, emotional connection between guts and binds into something which has to be cultivated to be improved upon, to be kind of refined in some way, right? That you can do better, you can eat better and therefore feel better, therefore work better, let's say.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel that everything in my gut. If I'm unhappy, I don't want to eat. If I'm happy, you know, food is one of the places where I find that happiness. And so I feel like in terms of my day-to-day emotional life, I think it feels to me very, very tied into my stomach. I think that one of the ways in which it has maybe writing this book has changed my relationship with my stomach or changed my relationship perhaps even more widely to my body is perhaps to demand rather less of it or to be less to try and go easier on myself. I think that one of the problems that we have with our bodies in the modern world is the drive towards like perfection and optimization all the time, right? And I guess that maybe that's what I'm getting towards when I'm thinking about this kind of simplification of our emotional relationship with our guts. I think that so.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is such a good question. I think that maybe part of the impetus for writing the book, in a way, if I was to be completely honest, One of the impetuses, which was not intellectual, is the fact that I do think that I know that I feel things very much in my gut. So I'm the sort of person you pointed to earlier, Helen, where, you know, like if I'm unhappy,”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that there's something kind of very Allurin about that idea, very tempting to kind of simplify our emotions in that way, right?”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even when you think that you've lost anyway, it was in the bottom of your bag, that moment where you, yeah, it's really powerful. And I guess that one of the things I was interested in and thinking about in writing this book was thinking about or trying to kind of tease out or complicate a little bit. Understanding of the emotions and the relationship to the gut. Because I think that one of the things that happens in, I think, maybe popular science writing about this is that emotions as a category get kind of flattened out, right? So this idea that, you know, well, you know, If only you would, and also he often gets transcribed, often gets transcribed rather into kind of very orthodox diet advice, right? So this idea that, well, if only you would eat, I don't know, more almonds and more fermented foods, you would, you know,”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a really good point. And I mean, I think that that comes back as well, I think, to the way in which There seems to be such a kind of connection between our guts and our emotions, I guess. And I think that we can all feel that experientially, right? This idea that, you know, she's pointed to earlier, the stomach that flips when the person you love walks in the room or the kind of sinking feeling in your stomach when you realize you've come to the airport without your passport or whatever it is. I think that there's clearly that.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“conditions in the Western world. And I think for sufferers of chronic grassroot conditions like IBS, like Crohn's, for example, the idea that you would then see the gut in as a friend, I think would not quite sit right. There's something about there are conditions in which I think the gut remains framed as being a kind of problem in the body.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I was going to say, because I think we can think about that as being enacted today in the way that we are told to trust you about instinct, let's say, nurture your gut, nurture your microbial garden, let's say with fermented foods or whatever we're being recommended to do. And there's this, on the one hand, this idea that the gut is this friend in the body, right? If you kind of like, if you treat your friend correctly and you nurture it in the way that you should, that it will be good to you. However, even today, you know, thinking there's the opposite also exists, right? This idea that, I don't know, I'm trying to think for sufferers, let's say, of something like irritable bowel syndrome, right? That there is this kind of explosion or a seemingly kind of vast increase in the numbers of people suffering from chronic gastrochemical.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think those two understandings, the positive and the negative, let's say if we want to divide them that way, have always run along parallel with each other. So there is not one point in history I don't think in which we suddenly decide that we should listen to our guts and that our guts are friendly. Two things are always kind of in competition or in relation to one another. I would say.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feelings, delusions, even if we're going to come back to witchcraft again. So that obviously is a very different understanding of that connection from how we would kind of think about it now. Other things that change across time are, I think, the character of that connection.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that we can chart an understanding of the connection between the gut and the brain for as far back as we have writings about the body. So it is present from the ancient world onwards. Like I don't think there is an epoch or an era in which we don't have some conception of the connection between mind and mind and gut rather. I would say that things, the things that change across time are how that connection is imagined, right? So you have, for example, let's say at various points through the Middle Ages, you have this understanding of the gut as affecting the body through vapors, right? So this idea that when you're digesting food, it kind of creates these particles, vapors, atmospheres that then Rise up to the brain and cause certain moods, certain kind of, you know.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Standard, on the other hand, is just like a kind of deflated bag when it comes out of a dead body. It doesn't really understand what it's doing when it's not in process and it's not in motion. So one of the things I was interested in thinking about urology and other process so The study of stool samples would also come into cancels. Is the ways in which the waste products of the body have been used to better understand processes in the body which were Like hidden from few and hard to comprehend otherwise.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was using a waste product, one of the body's waste products, in order to gain information about what was going on in the body. Also, I guess my interest in neurology was also thinking about the ways in which, okay, so one of the things I think is interesting about the stomach, one of the things I think is interesting about digestion, is it's this process that for a long time remains kind of hidden to the medical gaze. Even when dissection, let's say in the 18th century becomes more widely used in medical schools, the stomach remains something of a kind of mysterious object in the body, right? Like it kind of, it's this like thing that doesn't make sense unless it's like in motion, right? You know, you can take the heart out and dissect the heart and still see the kind of the valves and the archuaries and understand, get a feel for the shape of that as a working organ.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, your auspicious was a study of urine and was used well into, I think, some of the kind of cartoons and to circle writings I came across pointed to this practice being used well into the 19th century. So even as there's this kind of emergence of what we would like perhaps understand now as modern medical thinking, the study of urine, at least within kind of at least by household physicians, was still widely used probably later than you would imagine. And so I guess my interest in neurology, one is about kind of thinking when you're thinking about the gut and you're thinking about digestion, one of the things that you're thinking about is waste products, right? You know, bodily wastes. And I guess that urology, I thought, was very interesting as a process because”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, the act of eating itself is one which Yeah, which is potentially unmanning, right? That this is like to eat is to take something. The outside into the deep interior of the body. And that in that act, you make yourself vulnerable. That's combined with the idea that the woman possess some kind of secret or kind of occulted knowledge about, as you point to, like as about herbs and preparations and mushrooms, I think that is probably why there was such a strong link between eating consumption and witchcraft.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that is going on is this kind of again this understanding of the body, this ordering of the body, which sees the gut and the bowels as a seat of corruption. And there's a number of kind of demonologists who warn that demons will make their home in the gut, right? This is the place in the body where demonic forces who love to feed on filth and dirt will make their home in the stomach. So one of the lengths is that. Another one I think that you're right to point out comes back again to this kind of perhaps an anxiety, a kind of cultural anxiety around the power that women wield over in the kitchen. So if we think about the way in which eating is always a vulnerable making act, right? Like to eat.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Therefore, has to be kind of kept under control via the head or via the heart. So I think that's the kind of an origin point for witches in the gut. I think that when we get into, I guess, closer, perhaps a little bit closer to your period, Alan,”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's quite kind of complicated. One thing I would say that I think the part of a kind of origin point for understanding the relationship between witchcraft and the stomach is probably to look back to the framing of the gut, the consistent framing of the gut from at least ancient Greece onwards as a space of kind of corruption in the body, right? So someone like Plato, for example, really in his ordering of the body has the kind of the rational mind, you know, the heart and then into the bowels and into the guts, that zone is really seen as being kind of a site in which one where impure emotions are generated, right? So all those kind of like, you know, sexual and corruptive urges are kind of generated in the gut, and that the gut”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. But again, it's kind of complicated by the fact that women were being, I think, the primary targets of that kind of advertising and that kind of health advice. But what is interesting is that when men were identified as sufferers of constipation, the way in which this was framed as a problem was really in feminizing language, right? So to be a constipated man in the early decades of the 20th century was to lack virility, lack kind of like get up and go to not be a kind of, you know, to not be fighting fit, let's say. So I think that it's interesting that even when male constipation is acknowledged as a problem, it's primarily a problem because it's something which brings them closer to being a woman.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One, there's this kind of booming consumer market for tonics, for pills, for devices, and help with constipation, help ease and improve digestion, and then also a kind of booming medical or kind of popular health literature, which suggested that constipation really was this kind of like a terrible problem, you know, that really framed constipation as being a real danger to health and one that became, that was strongly associated with, I guess, a kind of like Accelerating modernity, right? This idea that the stomach is unable to kind of keep pace.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's hard to tell. I think it's hard to tell, give a kind of firm answer to that. I think that women are reported to suffer from constipation more, but part of that ways in which that kind of data is gathered is through self-reporting. So it may just be that women are more likely to admit to suffering from digestive troubles than men rather than there being any kind of firm line in the sand. And men certainly in history have also been constipated hysterics. Men have also been constipated. But one of the things that's interesting about male constipation, so one of the areas of research, one of the kind of key areas of the research for this book was looking at the kind of early decades of the which have been termed and described in various places as a kind of golden age of constipation. So this is really when”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it was like optimal or something for encourage kind of regularity. And the imagery was of this ladies' handbag slowly filling with excessive kind of tissues and makeup and blah, like phones and etc etc etc. And that was the kind of the imagery of the overstuffed gut was the handbag. And what I found interesting in looking back to the history of purgatives, of solutions to constipation. They have so often been focused on the problem of female causiveness, the problem of female constipation. And I just find that fascinating that this constipation remains so kind of aligned with, I think particular understandings around kind of, I guess, femininity and womanhood in ways that I think are really kind of complicated and knotty.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it makes me think about you grow out of me, I don't know how we're like maybe roughly ages with one another, but I really remember this advert from it must have been like the 90s where it was a kind of a laxative and it was this kind of handbag the advert was this kind of handbarred bag slowly filling with do you remember this? I remember this”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the modern medicine which is predicated very much on the expertise of the physician and the patient as a kind of docile subject, let's say, when you think about what's interesting about diet and the gut is that that is always a kind of contested space, right? Medical knowledge never has complete authority over the gut in the way that it does, I think when you think about its authority over other organs, right? And I think that one of the things, one of the reasons for that is that so much of how we understand diet and digestion and so on still relies or relies throughout most of history on household wisdom. So much of the way that we understand and encounter our stomachs is much to do with domestic spaces as it is to do with medicalized spaces”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Understandings of the body, which are all focused around the nervous system, let's say, and definitely looking at this from a kind of rationalist empiricist viewpoint that we would associate with coming enlightenment. But at the same time, he's still wedded to old humoral theories, right? So even though he's using these kind of this new nervous understanding of the body, he's also still using diet, let's say, as something that, you know, can bring better balance to the body. So it's interesting that you look at”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cataclysm that explodes everything and kind of leaves old knowledge in its wake and kind of forges this kind of radically new understanding of the world. I think that actually when you look at text from the 17th and 18th centuries, the picture is a little bit more kind of muddy. So for example, something like a book that another book that I'm in love with, this book, The English Malady by George Cheney. And George Chaney was a kind of early 18th century physician who wrote this very popular bestselling self-help text called the English Malady, in which he's basically saying, you know, the English are suffering from excessive nervousness and melancholy. And here is my kind of self-help text to help you cure this through diet, exercise, new approaches to life. What is really interesting in something like George Cheney's book, so he's writing around the kind of middle of the 18th century, is that he, on the one hand, is using new”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's one story that you could definitely tell, which would be to say look, part of what happens with enlightenment thinking is this compartmentalization of the body. So we could think about perhaps to, you know, like Descartes and the idea of the kind of mechanistic body, this idea of, you know, the brain ruling the body and this kind of firm Cartesian, I guess, division between the work of the mind and the work of the body. And I think, you know, there's definitely an argument to be made that with this emerges a kind of severing of the gut brain connection that had been so important or so essential to humoral medicine. However, however, ever, I think that when you look into it kind of more closely, what emerges as a more kind of complicated picture? One, I would say that there is this kind of idea of the enlightenment as this kind of”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He cites ancient authorities in relation to the link between beef and melancholy, but then he also says You know but you have to take into account the English climate, right? So it may make those living in the Mediterranean the ancient Greek philosophers, it may have made them melancholic, but when you take into account the British climate, he argues that actually beef is actually very good for Englishmen to eat because of the way that it balances the climactic forces. So I guess that one of the things that human world theory Find interesting about humour moral theory is the way that it's always pressing you to think about your body in the context of the world that you live in, right? Pressing you to think about it.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, precisely. I guess that's what I feel like I've gone way off topic, but I feel like part of that is part of what I find interesting about that. So, for example, yeah, oysters ask a kind of aphrodisiac is definitely a throwback to humoral understandings of food because one of the things I love about dietary advice, I guess, is the kind of direct relation that it draws between what you eat and how you feel, right? So, you know, there's very little mediation. It's like you eat a turnip and you will feel horny or you eat too much pork and you will feel melancholic, let's say. But anyway, to bring it back around to the environment, one of the things that Thomas Cogan says in this book is something along the lines of like, well, you know, roast, I think it's like roast beef or beef, let's say, can make you melancholic. But he has this kind of, you know, and he”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's amazing. It's like it's kind of like one of the kind of first works of, I guess it's a kind of self-help. It's a book on diet. It's a book on kind of how to a kind of household manual for how to stay healthy in a way. But what he does is he lists everything that you could possibly eat, you know, so when talking from a kind of like radish to, you know, a leg of lamb from a leg of lamb to cannibalism, possibly, right? So everything that you could possibly eat. And he describes the effect that that will have on your body. In humoral terms, right? So, for example, I think it was turnips or chloric foods, I think, but also that they have, you know, they are, they can have amorous effects, right? So you eat too many turnips and you might become, you know, overcome with.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In relation to humoral theories, just to come back to that, because I think the part of what is happening with this kind of emergence of the gut into a kind of popular health discourse. Black bile to your collar to your, you know, to your blood and so on. But I think that maybe one of the things that we haven't rediscovered or that we're not quite there yet with is the way that humoral theory is also about how our bodies are enmeshed in our environment, right? So because pure moral theory is also about saying I came across this like I love this book by maybe you know it by Thomas Cogan called The Haven of Health, which is like, I think, oh God now I'm going to forget, but I think it's from the 16th century. Correct me if I'm wrong on that, but I think it's the 16th century.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Body is part of what we're thinking about is yeah, I guess like how the relationship between our bodies and between our bodies and between with culture.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“has a history, and part of what I found so interesting is looking at the ways in which throughout different historical epochs you have really radically different ways of imagining the body. So the humoral body, for example, is really different in its fundamentally kind of distinct from something like, let's say, the nervous body of the 18th century. And I guess that part of my interest is thinking about the ways in which these bodies, so let's think about the humoral body, the nervous body, maybe like we could also have the kind of later we could have the immunological body, that these bodies are made up of medical knowledge, right? Advancing medical or scientific theories and knowledge about the body, but they're also made up by language, by culture, by gender, by race, and then when we think about”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, in lots of different ways. So I think that part of one of the things that I've really uncovered with this research is that imagining the gut and the brain as connected is not something new. Rather, as I think that you're pointing to there with your comment about the enlightenment is that it's actually something that we are rediscovering. This is something that we knew and maybe kind of slightly have forgotten and we're kind of getting back to. So, I mean, the humorous is a really good example of that. And I guess that part of what the book is interested in, I guess that what I'm trying to say is that the gut, you know, that we could look at the gut and think about that as a kind of ahistorical object, right? This is like part of the body which does not change across time. This is part of our anatomy. Part of what I'm trying to say with the book is, well, yes, but also the gut does have a history, right? In the way that the body”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rediscovery of gut instinct to something which biomedicine has discovered and is now making available to us that this is being kind of packaged as something new, revolutionary, but it didn't feel particularly new to me as a historian of the body. So part of what the book is doing is thinking about, okay, can we look back into history and find instances in which this link between the gut and the brain has been recognized, theorized and imagined in different ways. And so part of what I'm saying is the gut brain connection is not new. We can find other instances in history, but I'm also suggesting that it's not as if this has been one thing across time, right? This has been imagined, this has been talked about, this has been theorized in radically different ways, and that's part of what makes it interesting.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a very good question. I mean, I guess that the Zeitgeist and this kind of popular explosion of interest in the gut and particularly in the kind of gut brain connection and also in this idea of the gut, you know, the gut's microbiome, right, that we have a ecosystem within us. Part of that was the kind of inspiration for the book, so noticing in this way that it's impossible not to notice how often the that is being discussed, how the gut has become something of a kind of a central problem in our health, but also as the solution, right? Look after your gut and the rest of you will mind and body will benefit from it. I guess that was part of the kind of impetus for the book, but also in that kind of classically annoying historian way, I also felt like, oh, this doesn't actually, this feels like it's being presented as kind of new, right? The gut brain connection.”
2024-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · Gut Feelings: A History of Our Most Mysterious Organ, with Elsa Richardson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT