Susan Erdman: the hormone of joy to the world

ALICE: Today's short episode is a peek into what's coming over the next months: we're going to be talking about microbes! And today's message is also a year-end, holiday wish to all our listeners, celebrating the end of a challenging year and looking forward to a bright future together. 

In a recent interview with Dr. Susan Erdman, a Principal Research Scientist and Assistant Director in the Division of Comparative Medicine at MIT, Susan mentioned how microbes could be connected to the expression of joy throughout humanity.

ERDMAN: You may be able to actually change the axis of caring in an individual within a society. The potential you could take that microbe out of that system and separate it, and put it into an adult, and change that adult's interest in taking care of others. 

So let's play with that concept for a moment and say this is a hormone that, in human subjects, has been connected with expressions of empathy, expressions of altruism, and expressions of enjoyment of spirituality-- the concept of belonging to a greater whole. That doesn't mean traditional religions, necessarily. 

It means the common threads of humans having a meaningful, spiritual experience that makes us belong to something, that makes us part of a larger whole, and makes us care about that larger whole to the same extent that we care about ourselves-- maybe even more than we care about ourselves as an individual.

ALICE: Thank you, Dr. Susan Erdman. We look forward to hearing more of your interview next year!

ERDMAN: Every discovery gives you this warm, fuzzy feeling about understanding a little bit more about the world that we live in.

ALICE: Thanks for listening. Check out our book, TUNING INTO FREQUENCY, available wherever books are sold.
 
 

And join us down the rabbit hole at ALICE IN FUTURELAND dot COM.
 
 

We will be bringing you new episodes, so stay tuned, and keep wandering…