now who's got the guts I think that perhaps you got the guts since you came
here even though it could have been raining it is not so do you have the
guts because we need your guts now to do an experiment and without you and your
courage and your stomachs we cannot do that experiment it's in two parts this
talk both of them about guts first in the sense of the experiment that I want
to do with you it's a very very simple experiment but it takes a lot of courage
on your side it's an experiment involving a phenomenon known from everyday
life in particular when you when you deal with kids the phenomenon of
tickling and I've tried with the help of Wikipedia to find tickling in as many
languages as I could come up with you know what tickling is you tickle another
person with your fingers on their skin and I want to do this experiment in two
parts the first part is extremely boring but we'll get quickly over it the first
part is that everyone in this room will be tickling themselves like this on some
some kind of skin that you can reach you will tickle yourself and you will
notice that this is really really boring because nothing really happens you can
tickle yourself okay but it doesn't tickle so we have to come up with
something else to do this so I'll ask everyone in this audience to turn to the
person sitting or standing to your right side and please tickle that person
thank you very much thank you very much it it seems that involving other
persons in your life does make a difference there is a problem however
here that all of the people sitting at one end of the row were not tickled and
those at the other end of the row didn't have the opportunity to tickle so
please will you now turn to the person sitting on your left and tickle back thank
you very much it it seems that this worked it's been tried in many audiences
if you would like to see another audience suffer there's a film on my home page
tour decay where you can where you can see an audience in Berlin covered by
seven cameras you were fortunate enough not to be covered that way here doing
the thing and it's a great great fun to watch just like you were and if you
noticed because you're staring at me I didn't touch anyone I was the one
person in this tent that was untouched and didn't didn't do harm to anyone
else I just exerted the power of words so you cannot really tickle yourself at
least not in a way that tickles scientists have been groping with this
problem here's a machine built about 10 years ago to permit people to tickle
themselves because you have this machine that will displace the whereabouts
of this little thing that will tickle you so it comes as a surprise and even
the experimenter will introduce a timing factor that comes as a surprise and the
funny thing here is that you can in you can actually sense tickling when you
tickle yourself in this robotic way this was done as a neuroscience project
Sarah Blakemore built the machine the the grand old man of this study was Chris
Frith a leading international theorist on schizophrenia you know split
personality people and they can tickle themselves in a way that tickles now I
would like to go to monkeys then because what it what does this phenomenon tell
us it tells us something that we already have learned from studying monkey
drinking orange juice as it's the wrong year of the publication it's from 87 it's
a 25-year-old study of a monkey getting orange juice you'll see on the top here
a monkey gets the orange juice at this point are and immediately there's a
strong reaction in the brain of the monkey a lot of dopamine is produced
and dopamine as you might have heard of is signals joy and the monkeys very
happy because he gets orange juice that's pretty fair people do that when
they go into a restaurant and get food they get happy too but then you train
the monkey in such a way that a signal will tell it orange juice is coming and
you will be served soon so what happens then is that the monkey when it gets the
signal orange juice on its way there comes this wave of dopamine hooray orange
juice on its way because now it knows it's coming so it's very happy just like
in a restaurant but when it actually arrives that was the wrong button I was
can we go back one here we should yeah sorry what happens here is that all the
dopamine comes when the orange when the orange juice is announced but when it's
actually served nothing happens because if you're quite certain that you will
get orange juice and scientific experimenters are more reliable than
than people in restaurants so the monkey knows that it will get its orange
juice as announced then there's no joy connected to that so if you're quite
certain of things they will no longer be a joy to you scientists call it the
reward prediction error it's really when you get something you didn't expect or
more than you expected that you feel joy when you get exactly what you expect
like a Western person taking his morning shower you're not joyful about that
even though millions and billions of people on this planet would be you just
get sour and angry when it doesn't work because you get used to it and and so I
created this formula which has even been exhibited in an art museum the
servant time gallery in London I'm very proud of it what it says is that storing
control sort of tend to exclude each other the more control you have of stuff
the less joyful it seems to you your morning shower you don't really notice
until it doesn't work while if you're surprised there's a chance that you
become very joyful so if you want joy you should not have too much control but
the problem of course is that our civilization is all about trying to
control and predict everything and make them predictable that it doesn't rain
when we're when we're discussing mad at least inside the tent that we have
streets where we have a predictable surface we can we can bike on or walk
on that trains go on time civilization is about making the world predictable
about taking away problems that annoy us and that's great because we get rid of
all these problems that annoy us but it doesn't make us happy because we just
get used to it so our world in the sense when we create a world that we control
that we cultivate that we produce to be pleasing to us the irony is that it
stops being joyful because it is exactly as we expected civilization will take
away our unhappiness but it will not make us happy and that's a very simple
lesson but it seems to be very surprising for civilized people like
ourselves civilization is very much like tickling yourself because there's no
surprise out there when you're tickling yourself your brain knows exactly what
will happen so it will not be ticked have that tickling sensation and
civilization is just like that and it doesn't tickle everyday life become
dull and boring now what what is it how does that relate to food now let's go
to guts number two let's go to the actual gut your stomach your intestines
and all that your inside surface you could say tickling is about your skin
your outside surface let's take a look at your inside surface your inside
surface is pretty big here's a drawing from one of my books published more than
20 years ago where you have the human being seen as a tube basically there's
a tube going from the mouse to the other end which is a little like the outside
skin tube in this simplistic drawing and you can see the human being as this
extended donut kind of character and you would say okay how big is that well
here's the cover of the magazine science from 2005 in a special issue on the
inner tube of life the gut which has a lot of beautiful articles about this
system with the general idea this is a huge system the tube as we heard is a
10 meter long between your mouth and your and your other end because it's
it's curled up or all the way along so it's a very big surface you have there
you can actually compare the the the size of the surface you have on your
inside to the surface you have on your outside on that little green thing there
is the two square meters of skin that you have that's the outside surface that
suffers the tickling sensation if you take your lungs they're very cleverly
arranged so there's a lot of surface inside your lungs if they're sort of
folded and folded and folded and the lungs are pretty big it's about 100
square meters that you have right there in your chest but then the intestines in
this very conservative estimate of what is the surface area of this enormously
long 9-10 meter long tube with all the foldings inside and all the wrappings and
all the funniest things going on the conservative estimate is 300 square
meters this morning you heard a less conservative estimate which was 10 times
higher but the important thing is that it's much much much much higher than the
actual skin surface much much higher so there's more surface within you than
without you so here is enormous potential for tickling tickling is always
something about the outside surface but but here you will you really have
something to tickle so you would say ah but but this inner surface isn't really
a surface it's just a hole inside me and nothing much goes on there you put
gourmet food in and you get gourmet shit out and that's that's about it it's
not really a border to the other like the like the skin is but as we all as
we've heard inside your gut lives on the order of one million million foreign
microorganisms each of which are free-living organisms with their own
reproductive system their own ability to reproduce themselves their own DNA
different from yours they're in every respect living beings and there are one
million million of those inside your stomach hopefully that is 100 times more
than the number of cells that you have in your body which is what you can
compare to these microorganisms the number of of units in you that could
reproduce your cells are much heavier than than the individual microorganisms so
you still outweigh the microorganisms in your gut but you do not outnumber them
on each chair in this tent sits a person with 100 times more foreign cells in her
than her own cells so you are in a sense a walking ecosystem you you are the
carrier of a fantastic ecology inside of yourself with enormous amounts of
organisms that do a lot of work for you in there that you provide also with the
benches and the tables and the knives for their for their work because the fiber
you eat in your food for instance will will be where the microorganisms will
sit to digest other parts of the food that you provide them with so even though
you are sitting ecosystem now you are you are you have you have other inside
yourself and that is important because you can program that other inside
yourself if you eat one kind of food you have one kind of microorganism
dominating the ecosystem within you if you eat another kind of food another
kind of microorganism or another spectrum of microorganisms will dominate
your gut so you can program it's like a computer your gut is like a computer that
you can program in different ways and of course if you give it the same McDonald
burger all the time you will have also a very dull system inside and now I come
to the problem that I want to address in this slide which is the problem of
industrial agriculture or the problem of human beings cultivating the planet in
their own image because they've not yet heard of Roland Riedman's revolution
that we've started earlier today that we try to make the world pleasing to us and
make the world do exactly what we want make it easily edible easy to digest
through the cultivation of plants through the way we process these plants and
so on we try we try to make things so that they're not challenging for us to
eat our project is historically to cultivate to process to prepare everything
so that it comes very easily into our body that creates a lot of problems for
us in the sense of overweight and overeating and so on but it also creates
an enormous lack of of joy because these things are become more and more
predictable and more and more the same all the time we are never challenged
inside so you could say that the problem with this kind of food is that that
really not enough surprises really not enough difficulty in eating it really
not enough chewing chewing also as a metaphor not only of what goes on in
your mouth but also deeper down in your system there's not enough there's not
enough challenge in that food it doesn't surprise you or unsettle you in any way
so it becomes boring and therefore there's also no diversity inside your
gut there's no rich ecosystem within you and therefore not a lot of fantastic
things to experience so what is then the problem with the food that we get from
agriculture and I use the word agriculture here to mean the modern
industrialized big-scale monoculture agriculture what is the problem with
this agriculture it is a very simple problem that the food we get from
agriculture is a little like tickling yourself in the sense you present
yourself with your own project you already know what you're getting all the
otherness has been taken out and therefore the problem with agriculture is
that agriculture doesn't tickle it will not tickle you on your inside when you
eat this kind of thing and that's a sad that's a sad thing it's it's it's like
tickling yourself to eat this over produced food so therefore my wish when
I go into one of the restaurants that you are dealing with my wish as a
customer as a human being wanting something to eat my wish is a very simple
wish and that is that I I would like you to tickle me on my inside dear chef I
would like you to challenge me I would not like you to please me or to make it
easy to digest your meal I would prefer that you would somehow challenge me with
with food stuff that is so surprising and so new to me that it will tickle I
was offered a grasshopper a live grasshopper collected here by Miles
Irving for lunch and I had to bite its head off first and then chew it and that
really tickled all the way down so that was that was sort of my ideal of a meal
is a tickling grasshopper going down your stomach at least I'm proud to tell
the story I'm not so sure that I was proud to experience the story at lunch
here but now I'm I'm I'm afraid that I may might be coming on stage because it's
a tickle me chef so I would like to add as my final word and slide here before
you jump on me that it's on the inside I want to be tickled thank you thank you
