State of the Human

Losing - Story 2: Getting Off Track

As a successful track athlete, Amabel Stokes has crossed many finish lines. In this story, she learns to move beyond the red tape.
 
Producer: Justine BeedFeaturing: Amabel Stokes
Image via Wikimedia: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm…tion_(LOC).jpg

Losing - Story 1: Hole-Hearted

When a policeman stopped Gabe Lomeli on the street, he thought he had nothing to hide, but that one interaction would shift the course of his dreams.
 
Producer: Maddie Chang with help from Will RogersFeaturing: Gabriel Lomeli
Image via flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/stmarygypsy/3418160788

Secret-Keeping (full episode)

Nearly three decades ago, Psychologist James Pennebaker discovered a shocking correlation between secrets and health outcomes - that people who kept more secrets were dealing with more health issues. Today, secrets are generally considered bad. But in today’s episode, we’re going to discuss creative secret keepers. These people use secrets to form relationships, to explore worlds they wouldn’t otherwise be able to access, even to build new lives for themselves until - well - the secret’s out. Today we’ll explore what opportunities open up when someone keeps a secret, and what happens when that secret is revealed.
Host: Chelsea Davis
Producers: Rosie La Puma, Eileen Williams, Will Rogers, Claire Schoen, and Jonah Willihnganz
Featuring: James Pennebaker, Jackie Chan and Justin Krasner-Karpen. Thanks also to Preet Kaur, Natacha Ruck, Joshua Hoyt, Tess McCarthy, Alexander Muscat, Lilly Gill, Shara Tonn, Dustin Dienhart, Christy Hartman, Jake Warga.
Music used during transitions: Podington Bear, Revolution Void
Image via Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mharrsch/3292777771/

Healing (full episode)

We’ve come to think of healing in mechanical terms, as repairing something broken, like fixing a flat tire. But for most of human history healing has meant more than repairing the body. Healing has meant restoring a sense of wholeness to a person—or even a relationship or community. In today’s show we’ll hear two stories that explore this older sense of healing. First, a Bay Area woman diagnosed with breast cancer finds healing through a complementary medicine modality at Stanford Hospital called Healing Touch. Second, a Stanford student living with an incurable disease finds healing in an encounter with the ocean and one of its creatures. How do we heal when our bodies are irrevocably changed?
Host: Preet Kaur
Producers: Bonnie Swift, Christy Hartman, Taylor Shoolery, Preet Kaur, Alka Nath, Will Rogers, Julie Morrison, Mallory Smith, Natacha Ruck, Claire Schoen, Jonah Willihnganz
Featuring: Preet Kaur, Carolyn Helmke, Catherine Palter, Melissa Anderson, Rosa Fuerte, Marilyn Getas-Byrne, Anne Proctor, Laura Pexton, Margot Baker, David Wolf, Maggie Burgett, Maria Cacho, Katie Talamantez, Elizabeth Helms, Diane Wardell, Sue Kegal, Jim Batterson, Margaret Schink, and Mallory Smith
Image via The Archeological Museum of Piraeus

Believing (full episode)

In this show, we are talking about a very special kind of belief—belief in something. Often considered a defining human characteristic, like language, belief shapes our lives. We put our confidence in something that is unseen; we understand the world in terms of a bigger, unknowable framework. This ability may not be unique to humans, but it does appear to be a very special talent. Today, we want to find out what this specific type of believing means for our lives. How are we changed by belief? What does it do to us? Spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically: what can believing do?
Host: Eileen Williams
Producers: Eileen Williams, Rosie La Puma, Will Rogers, Claire Schoen, and Jonah Willihnganz
Featuring: Beth Duff-Brown, Krista Tippett, and Carol Dweck. Thanks also to Lora Kelley, Louis Lafair, Sonia Gonzalez, Natacha Ruck, Madeleine Chang, and Lisa Hicks.
Music used during transitions: Broke for Free (XXV, A Beautiful Life)
Image via Wikimedia: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Airplane_Window_View_6_2013-04-01.jpg

Promising (full episode)

Promises can be made about almost anything. From promising to be a knight of God, to promising to talk about sex... to promising to stay together until death do us part. In this show, eight different promises are made. Some are kept, many are broken. But every broken, these promises changed something. Because even a failed promise has the power to change the world.
Host: Nina Foushee
Producers: Nina Foushee, Hadley Reid, Christy Hartman
Featuring: Nina Foushee, Will Hamilton, Liz Matus, Professor Jorah Dannenberg, Hadley Reid, Don Reid, Holly Russell, and Matt Rothe
Music used during transitions: Chris Zabriskie, Kevin Macleod, A Smile For Timbuctu, The Kyoto Connection
photo via flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/23733274@N06/14178850322/

Control: The Stanford Prison Experiment (full episode)

In 1971, Dr. Philip Zimbardo created a mock prison in the basement of Jordan Hall, the psychology building at Stanford. Mentally healthy college students were randomly assigned the roles of prisoner and guard. Dr. Zimbardo was trying to test how situations control human behavior, but within days, the situation spun out of control.
In this special episode, Drs. Philip Zimbardo and Christina Maslach tell the story of what ended up being one of the most infamous psychology studies in history - where young, mentally healthy participants turned brutal and desperate in only a few days. You'll learn surprising details of what inspired the Stanford Prison Experiment and how it ended, and hear how the experiment helped contribute to understanding the relationship between individuals and the situations they find themselves in.
Note: The original version of this episode mis-identified the location of the pilot study that inspired the Prison Experiment. The Stanford Storytelling Project regrets this error.
Featuring: Dr. Philip Zimbardo, Dr. Christina Maslach
Host: Bojan Srbinovski
Produced by: Rachel Hamburg, Bojan Srbinovski, Mischa Shoni, Charlie Mintz
Interviews conducted by: Bojan Srbinovski, Natacha Ruck, Victoria Hurst
Additional production help from:Justine Beed, Kate Nelson, Will Rogers
Original Music by Rob Voigt
Other music: Chris Zabriskie, Billy Gomberg, Gillicuddy, Tearpalm
Audio clips of the Stanford and Toyon Prison Experiments are from The Philip G. Zimbardo Papers at the Stanford University Archives.
News clip credit:
http://abcnews.go.com/Archives/video/april-30-2004-abu-ghraib-prison-scandal-9120643
Photo credit: Chuck Painter

Datafying (full episode)

Today, we generate data with every mouse click, phone call, and even every breath. This week on State of the Human, you'll hear about how an 18th century historian, a poet, a computer scientist, a composer, and a mysterious future being are all trying to interpret that data to understand something about the human experience. We're asking: what do we learn from seeing ourselves as data? And what is lost in translation?
Host: Kate Nelson
Producers: Rachel Hamburg, Miles S, Charlie Mintz, Kate Nelson, Rosie La Puma
Featuring:
Dr. Daniel Rosenberg, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jonathan Berger, Raven Jiang, Alec Glassford
Music used during transitions: Aboombong (Drag Along Behind), Chuzausen, Koona (Starkey), Kai Engel
Story 1: Straws on the River of Time
Description: Joseph Priestley was an 18th Renaissance man who helped discover oxygen. But he also invented something: the Chart of Biography. Here’s why he shouldn’t get too much credit for doing either of those things. It’s a story about one of the first times that people were turned into data.
Producers: Jess Peterson and Charlie Mintz
Featuring: Dr. Dan Rosenberg
Music: Jared C Balogh, Ergo Phizmiz, Dexter Britain, and Circus Marcus.
Story 2: Exposed
Description: Kyle is on a mission to scrape every last piece of his data off the internet. He’s devoted to navigating cyberspace without leaving a trace - but privacy has a cost.
Producers: Niuniu Teo and Charlie Mintz
Featuring: Haha, like we’d tell you
Music: Rod Hamilton (Bird); Pork Secret (Cool Crocs); Podington Bear (Operatives, Clouds Pass Softly); Marcel Pequel (Seven)
Story 3: The Stories that Feed Us
Description: Naomi Shihab Nye is a novelist, songwriter, and wandering poet. She tells a story about staring at people on planes, and how googling strangers can lead to a bigger life.
Producers: Justine Beed, Jack Dewey, and Will Rogers
Featuring: Naomi Shihab Nye
Music: Podington Bear
Story 4: Breathing Data
Link to Image: composition
Description: Jonathan Berger, a composer, teams up with a radiologist who needs to figure out a way to help calm anxious patients. His solution - have patients listen to their own data.
Producer: Kate Nelson
Featuring: Dr. Jonathan Berger
Music: Advent Chamber Orchestra, SJ Mellia, deef, Plurabelle, ZOE.LEELA, Gustav Landin
Sounds?: Coffee Shop, Deep Breath
Story 5: A Single Lifetime
Description: A new consciousness has just emerged - a product of all data and the interactions between it. That consciousness exists as a detached force, until falling in love teaches it to be human.
Producer: Alec Glassford and Rachel Hamburg
Featuring: Alec Glassford, Raven Jiang
Music: YACHT (Ring the Bell (Instrumental), The Afterlife), Podington Bear (Rythn), The Shivers (Kisses, Only Mine)

Belonging (full episode)

Sometimes you’re in your own country, your own home, and you know in your bones you don’t belong. That feeling pushes you to change something. This week we bring you four stories of people who don’t quite belong in the world where they live, and who take matters in their own hands to construct their own belonging. A very young girl finds a sense of belonging while running away from an angry mob. A student creates a bridge between the Jewish and Irish sides of her family. Seven gender-defying divas share what it means to belong to yourself. And a young man discovers how to prove you belong, when the numbers are against you.
Host: Leslie Nguyen-Okwu
Producers: Will Rogers and Natacha Ruck
Featuring: Justine Beed, Carla Lewis, Eileen Williams, Josh Hoyt, Winona Azure, Raya Light, Macy Rodman, Peaches Christ, Alexis Blair Penney, Heklina, Sissy Spastik, Mathu Andersen, and Cher Noble.
photo via flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ganesha_isis/4439563089
Music used during transitions: Welcome Wizard, Monk Turner, Johnny Ripper, Zachary Cale, Mighty Moon, & Ethan Schmid, Blue Ducks

Beyond Human (full episode)

Humans aren’t the fastest or strongest animal, but we do make the best tools. From plows to pacemakers, we’ve always used technology to transcend our human limits. This week, we ask how far that project can go. We’ll tell you how the first farmers in history transcended the limits of meat and muscle, only to create a very different kind of boundary. And we’ll present the story of two scientists excited to leave their human skin behind. Also, the story of a man who cannot walk, but who can fly; why PCs can be our friends; and finally, robot phenomenology.
Host: Mischa Shoni
Producers: Charlie Mintz, Rachel Hamburg
Featuring: Ian Morris, Byron Reeves, BJ Fogg, Edward Maibach, Shyam Sundar, Laurie Mason, Henry Evans, Jackson Roach
Music used during transitions: Fabrizio Paterlini (Veloma); Gillicuddy (Porthlaze Glove); Podington Bear (Delphi); Latché Swing (Hungaria)
image via flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/1080p/2421386153
For more information, visit storytelling.stanford.edu
Intro Story: Feeding Back Into Us
After the last ice age, we humans moved from hunting and gathering to farming. With the plow, farming became a whole lot easier -- but there was a dark side too.
Producer: Charlie Mintz, Bojan Srbinovski
Featuring: Ian Morris
Music: Broke For Free (Night Owl, The Gold Lining, Only Knows); Wilted Woman (Turing); Podington Bear (Dole It Out,); Black Hoods (Talking Cure)
Story 1: Robots Are My Freedom
As an adult, Henry Evans suffered a medical trauma that left him paralyzed and unable to speak. Then the second half of his life began.
Producers: Eileen Williams, Miles S.
Featuring: Henry Evans
Links: Robots For Humanity
Music: Broke For Free (My Always Mood,One And, Budding); Audionautix (Atlantis)
Story 2: With 18 Arms And Compound Eyes
A scientist visits a relative in the hospital and finds the best available cures lacking. He and a partner go to work at the next frontier of medicine. They wind up bumping into the question of what makes us human.
Producer: Jack Dewey, Rachel Hamburg
Featuring: Xander Honkala, Andre Watson
Links: Ligandal
Music: Podington Bear Christian Bjoerklund Rolemusic
Story 3: Sympathy For The Dell
This story is a tribute to the late Stanford professor Clifford Nass. Friends and colleagues described him as one of the most human humans you could ever meet. He discovered ways that computers can be human too, and one consequence of that research is coming to a hospital near you.
Producers: Charlie Mintz, Josh Hoyt
Featuring: Clifford Nass, Byron Reeves, BJ Fogg, Laurie Mason, Edward Maibach, Shyam Sundar, Chris Corio
Link: Engineered Care
Music: Podington Bear (Lake Victoria, Formless) Broke For Free (Note Drop, Like Swimming, Luminous, Blown Out, One And); memotone (This Is The Room, Fractal, Sleeping With the Insects) ; 2ndMOUSE (Arc Reactor); Audionautix (Namaste)
Story 4: The Simulation Deck
A radio play about the strawberry-sized gap between humans and machines.
Producer: Jackson Roach
Featuring: Andrew Brassel, Matthew Libby.
Links: Robot voice created by Cepstral Voices.