I am happy to bring your attention to this summary of an APA journal article. One of the authors, Julianna Raye, will be profiled in my upcoming book on meditation teacher and neuroscience researcher, Shinzen Young. Julianna is such an impressive woman, from every angle, and you can learn more about her at: unifiedmindfulness.com.

In their recent article in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Jerry Slutsky, Brian Chin, Julianna Raye and J. David Creswell examined the effectiveness of mindfulness training in the workplace.
 
Top companies, such as Google, Apple, Aetna, and McKinsey, have conducted mindfulness training intended to improve employee well-being and productivity, but there's good reason to be skeptical about workplace mindfulness. Too often, what's being delivered as mindfulness training does not reflect the research-supported practice or may be led by instructors with as little as two days of teacher training. Additionally, few high-quality studies of the effects of workplace mindfulness training have been conducted.
 
This study is one of the few active treatment randomized controlled trials of mindfulness training in the workplace. Randomized controlled trials are designed to increase the validity of results.

Delivered by an instructor with more than 18 years' experience teaching mindfulness, the training was given to 60 employees of a Midwestern digital marketing firm. All participants completed a half-day mindfulness workshop using the Unified Mindfulness system.

In this approach, mindfulness is defined as three specific attention skills working together: Concentration, Sensory Clarity, and Equanimity.
 
Participants learned to practice while seated and also learned how to develop these skills during activities such as conversation, eating, and listening to music. Building the skills during a range of activities is intended to optimize people's time while enhancing a given activity.

After the half-day training, participants were randomly assigned to either a group that did not practice mindfulness during the six-week period or to a group that practiced mindfulness daily for six weeks. Researchers sent surveys measuring employee well-being to participating employees' smartphones throughout the workday for three consecutive days before and after the 6-week period.
 
While very few randomized controlled trial mindfulness studies have been conducted in the workplace, fewer still have surveyed participants while they were working. This step allowed for a more fine-grained data set, once again helping to increase the validity of the results.

Compared to the participants on the waiting list, the six-week participants showed reduced work-life conflict, increased job satisfaction, and an increased ability to focus their attention. Notably, this was the first study to research the effects of mindfulness training on attentional focus during the workday.
 
Overall, these findings suggest that while small doses of mindfulness training (such as the half-day training) may be enough to increase perceptions of job productivity, longer-term mindfulness training programs (such as the half-day training combined with daily practice for six weeks) are needed to improve work focus, job satisfaction, and a positive relationship to work.

Today's work culture can cause great strain on employees — high workloads and frequent distractions can have negative effects on employee well-being. A regular mindfulness practice might be one way to buffer from these negative effects on employees.
​
The researchers hope this study encourages further quality research investigating how mindfulness-based training can help employees.
​
Citation

• Slutsky, J., Chin, B., Raye, J., & Creswell, J. D. (2018). Mindfulness training improves employee well-being: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ocp0000132

 

I really enjoyed this recent Globe and Mail newsletter by Wency Leung. It reminds me of when I was pregnant with my first child. I had to stop watching the television series, The Waltons, a folksy, sentimental family drama, because I couldn't stop weeping when it touched my (very hormonally-charged) heart and brain. I also ate one whole lemon, plain, every day, during that pregnancy -- talk about the sweet and the sour!

Thanks Wency for sharing and for all the interesting links! You can sign up for this newsletter as well as others from The Globe and Mail here.

WENCY LEUNG
The Globe and Mail,
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 9, 2018
​
​The other night, in search of a bedtime story for my daughter, I reached for a new copy of Robert Munsch’s Love You Forever that a friend had given her. If you’ve never read it before, it’s a shamelessly sappy tale about a mother’s enduring love that, years ago, would have set my eyes rolling. Now, I could barely get through the last pages; tears blurred my vision and a serious lump formed in my throat.

I’m Wency Leung, a reporter for The Globe and Mail, focusing on brain health. My own brain hasn’t been the same since I became a mother five years ago.

After blinking hard and kissing my fluffy-haired kid goodnight, I went downstairs and turned to my husband: What on earth is going on with me?I’ve become uncharacteristically sentimental. I once prided myself in having a good memory, but now I’m constantly losing my phone, and forgetting the names of other parents.

My one comfort: It’s not just me.

As Chelsea Conaboy writes in The Boston Globe magazine, women’s brains undergo a major makeover as they enter motherhood, primed by a flood of hormones during pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding. While some brain changes subside over time, other functional and structural alterations can be lasting. And though parenthood can, no doubt, be life-changing for men too, likely also changing their brains, some of the changes found in mothers’ brains have not been found in fathers’.

It’s controversial to talk about differences between male and female brains. The Atlantic explores this hot debate in this article, quoting U.S. neuroscientist Lise Eliot, author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain. “People say men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but the brain is a unisex organ,” she says.

On average, men’s brains have been shown to be slightly bigger than women’s, the magazine notes, but Eliot says that’s because all of men’s organs are generally bigger, and that doesn’t mean they function differently.

I wholly agree one sex isn’t smarter than the other, and that some sex differences can be dangerously exaggerated. But the view that women’s brains are just the same as men’s fails to address real differences in how each is affected by brain trauma, disorders and diseases.

As my colleague Carly Weeks reported earlier this year, women are more likely to die from stroke, and have worse outcomes than men. An earlier report by Mahnoor Yawar highlighted research that shows girls are twice as likely to experience long-term concussion symptoms as boys. Meanwhile, according to The Guardian, one in two women will have dementia, Parkinson’s disease or stroke in their lifetime, compared with one in three men.

Some of these disparities may be explained by social and cultural factors, including gender biases (unconscious or otherwise) in how patients are treated. For example, Michelle Baril-Price writes about how her attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder was undiagnosed for most of her life because she didn’t fit the stereotype – one based on boys.
But we won’t know what kind of biological reasons for these health disparities exist, as long as we keep assuming the brain is unisex.

This article, published by the health site Stat, points out that women have historically been excluded in clinical trials of all kinds, while researchers have neglected to consider sex as a biological variable. To get a better handle on why a disease like Alzheimer’s affects men differently than women, researchers will need to do a better job of including female patients. It’s not a zero-sum game: parsing the differences between men’s and women’s brains can benefit everyone.

By Paddy Kamen, Publisher, BetterBrainBetterLife.com

​Getting in touch with my body has been quite a journey. Who knew that my mind might have to turn off while I did it with Feldenkrais?
 
 It has been a surprising journey, exploring the interrelatedness of my body/mind. I’m 60 years old as I write this and remember distinctly how out of touch I was with my body until the age of about 45 (the reason for the disconnect is based in childhood trauma).
 
Reading Eckhart Tolle did it for me: he wrote in The Power of Now about the feeling sense of having a hand – I got it! Finally, I knew what people in all those meditation and spiritual-personal growth classes I had taken were talking about when they identified certain types of sensation in their bodies. In the past, when they talked about ‘tingling in the legs’ or ‘energy flowing in the torso’, my inner response was: ‘huh’?
 
But I did not suddenly transform into a whole and connected body/mind. It’s a path, a process. One recent lesson that still surprises me is that the mind may not be ‘open for business’ when the body does not know itself.
 
Point in fact: although learning and writing about brain enhancement has been an interest of mine for several years, I simply could not ‘get’, or grok[i], how body work like the Feldenkrais method works to transform the brain, body and sense of self, despite having it explained to me by Feldenkrais practitioner Sandra Bradshaw.
​
Sandra found me through my website. We live in the same city, Kelowna, in the southern interior of British Columbia, Canada, and so decided to meet for coffee. She probably thought I had a brain at our first meeting, maybe even a pretty decent one. Sandra wrote a book -- Wake Up Your Body and Brain and so we knew from the start that we had something in common.

After we had known each other for a short while, Sandra offered me Feldenkrais ‘lessons’ (they don’t call them treatments) in exchange for writing this article about my experience. Was it obvious to her, sitting across from me at the GioBean café, that I was an assemblage of parts rather than an integrated person? Did she have any clue that it would take a full 16 months after the lessons for my brain to be able to fully integrate the work and write about it?
 
Why was I so ‘duh’?  I think it was partly because Sandra taught me to relax quickly (first lesson) and so thoroughly (without words or instruction, just by moving my body for me in seemingly strange ways) that much of my cognitive capacity went into torpor. I fell into deep relaxation, akin to sleep during the first session, and in subsequent visits, became sleepy as soon as I lay down on the table (in fact, I felt sleepy just walking into the room and seeing the table). It is possible that such deep relaxation had eluded me most of my life and I had a lot of catching up to do. It could be because the brain might not work right when the body ‘has its day’, meaning when the body has the attention it needs to reorganize the nervous system. It’s not that I was unable to think during this period of many months but I wasn’t able to think about this one thing in particular. I found this very odd, and frustrating, as I wanted to keep my end of the exchange by writing this article.
 
What actually happens during a one-on-one Feldenkrais session? They are unlike massage, although some elements are similar. To further complicate the explanation, there is no single prescriptive way for a practitioner to address specific problems. I had eight sessions of Feldenkrais with Sandra and so can share my experience: after asking me what I would like to learn, she made me comfortable on the table (like a massage table but lower and wider), with supportive cushions and pads for my head, arms and legs. I’ve never felt so completely taken care of during a bodywork session. She began to very gently move my body in new ways; for example, she held my whole body in a sheet and rocked me, lifted an arm, asked me to let her totally support it, and moved it in ways that seemed strange and new to me. I fell into such a deeply relaxed state during many lessons it was almost like I was asleep. I cried during others, releasing tensions that I couldn’t name (and didn’t need to). Bradshaw taught me how to roll onto my side and then sit up while on the table (which translates to how to get out of bed more efficiently), and how to move from sitting on the table to standing on the floor with my head positioned for optimal balance and flexibility. It may sound crazy to think there was something to learn about how to roll out of bed or stand on the floor but indeed there was. She taught me how to use my whole torso to turn my head, how to walk with greater ease, how to remind my neck that arthritis isn’t a life sentence for pain. Bradshaw realized that I would benefit from a stronger sense of my own power and she coached me toward that. Working with her was a wonderful experience that I highly recommend to anyone.

The Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education was developed by Moshe Feldenkrais, a Ukrainian Jew, who was born in 1904. When he was just 14 he decided to leave the Russian-controlled region of what is now Belarus, where his family lived, and which was hostile to Jews, and walk to Israel. Yes – he walked almost 6,000 kilometers! (That’s the equivalent of walking from Moncton, N.B. to Vancouver, B.C). He brought other young people with him, and continued to thrive through many harsh life experiences, until his passing in 1984. Along the way he built a particle accelerator in the Paris laboratory of Nobel prize winners Frederick and Irene Juliot-Curie, worked in British counter-espionage, taught unarmed combat to soldiers in the Israeli military, and helped many people live vastly more fulfilling lives, thanks to discoveries stemming from his debilitating knee problems that he resolved without the recommended surgery. Feldenkrais repeatedly defied great odds in his own life and, interestingly, chose to focus on somatic education, despite the many other avenues of achievement open to him.
 
The success of the Feldenkrais method hinges on Moshe Feldenkrais’s very personal discovery that the brain is plastic and that one can create new neural pathways through subtle and repeated manipulations of the body, thereby teaching the body new ways of moving and the mind new ways of experiencing life. He was a pioneer in the fields of brain plasticity, mind-body medicine and healing.
 
Feldenkrais realized that awareness of what is happening in the body is necessary for transformation to take place. Tying his personal discoveries into what was then the pioneering work of brain mapping by Canadian Wilder Penfield, Feldenkrais conjectured that when body parts are injured, their representation in the brain’s mapping system diminishes. It is only by making and observing repeated, slow and subtle movements that the brain can rewire itself for improved functioning. He learned this by using his knowledge of judo, physics and experiences of stress related to profound threats to his personal safety, to resolve his knee problems.
 
How could a method of body-mind work that espouses subtlety, slowness, suggestion and incremental growth in awareness yield much in the way of results? A jaw-dropping account of some Feldenkrais success stories can be found in Norman Doidge’s book, The Brain’s Way of Healing. These include helping a girl with a diagnosis of profound retardation live a normal life that included receiving advanced university degrees, helping a blind man to see and a boy lame from cerebral palsy to walk. Feldenkrais began teaching others his method in 1969. Today, practitioners around the world are furthering his work and changing lives, sometimes subtly, as was the case with me, and often dramatically.
 
An elementary school teacher at the time of her Feldenkrais training, Sandra Bradshaw’s school board gave her a leave of absence every March for four years to attend one of two required month-long intensives (the other intensive was during the summer when she was already on vacation). When back at work, where she taught young children with serious physical and developmental issues, Sandra found many opportunities to help her students with the Feldenkrais method. “In the final year of my training we had miracles happen with those kids,” she says. “The most dramatic was a five-year-old boy who had no language, was not toilet trained, had tremors in his hands, and could not use his hands beyond the palming grasp of an infant. He waddled when he walked, like a toddler. By the end of the year he had a 60-word functional vocabulary and could climb the jungle gym. The tremors disappeared and he could use his fine motor skills to pick up things with a pinching grasp. Although he still wasn’t toilet trained, everything else he achieved was beyond our wildest expectations.”
 
The Feldenkrais method can powerfully transform the whole person, with its emphasis on using awareness, the mind and imagination to experience life differently. It was like that for Bradshaw during her four years of training, and as she has continued with the program, both as a student and as a teacher. “Feldenkrais has helped me to allow myself to be vulnerable and that has given me greater confidence and a feeling of being at ease in my own skin. I see similar transformations with many clients.”
 
While some clients come to Bradshaw with basic problems like a frozen shoulder or arthritis pain and are looking only for physical relief, others are seeking deeper transformation. “There may be emotional stuff around physical challenges but I don’t go searching for it. If a client wants to share and let the emotion out I am here, seeing them as having everything they need to feel safe and supported. I take people as they are and see them as already whole,” she explains.
 
As for my journey into somatic awareness and my consternation about not being able to ‘grok’ the brain-body connections as developed by Feldenkrais, the living proof that at least some integration has been achieved is the fact that you are reading this story, the article I promised Sandra when we first agreed to work together. I am learning that ‘thinking’, i.e. language-based thought, knowing, and expression, while often useful, is not actually required for personal transformation.
 
An over-reliance on the thinking mind gets in the way of an holistic experience of life, and can in fact arrest development due to the fact that it is intrinsically constraining: we so quickly assume that we know something based on our experience to date – our learning and conditioning. Feldenkrais wrote: “When thinking in words, even subliminally, we are logical and think in familiar patterns, in categories that we have thought, dreamed, read, heard, or said sometime before. Learning to think in patterns of relationships, in sensations divorced from the fixity of words, allows us to find hidden resources and the ability to make new patterns, to carry over patterns of relationship from one discipline to another. In short, we think personally, originally, and thus take another route to the thing we already know.”[i]
 
Such reliance on cognition is also consistent with a limited view of what it means to be human, a view that grew from Western notions of the body as only a physical thing that houses the brain/mind, and an unintelligent, sinful one at that!
​
Anticipating Western cultural trends by over 50 years, Feldenkrais observed that the body and mind are not separate. “I believe that the unity of mind and body is an objective reality. They are not just parts somehow related to each other, but an inseparable whole while functioning. A brain without a body could not think.”[ii]
 
Integration is a key word for me in understanding what I have learned and how I can now write about it. As Sandra points out, given that I am a meaning-oriented person and a writer (with a mission in this case), it has been important for me to feel that I understand and can express what happened to me in working with her, as well as the reason it happened, i.e. the context of the Feldenkrais method. “For people like you, this work constitutes a paradigm shift, and it’s a huge leap. Our work together was, I think, a visceral experience without an intellectual template to put it on.”
 
I approached Patricia Kyle, a gifted massage therapist and Somatic Experiencing practitioner, also based in Kelowna, to get her thoughts on the way Feldenkrais work had seemingly ‘taken down’ aspects of my cognition for a time. Patricia notes: “We are so indoctrinated into what things mean. I try to stay out of that with any work now, because thinking is part of the problem. I like to stay out of thinking and see what naturally arises within the body. It’s hard to explain cognitively what happens in a body/mind experience. We live in a culture of words and so we try to put things into words and feel stupid when we can’t find the words. But maybe there are no words to adequately explain the experience. Feldenkrais is nervous system reorganization, and while it is happening it can seem like cognition isn’t connecting. You need your cognition but sometimes that is the last piece to catch up.”
 
It was when I read Doidge’s account of Feldenkrais’s life, and the seeming miraculous changes it has wrought in people’s lives, that something clicked. I was excited. I got it! But then I wondered: ‘Have I really got it?’ I keep going back and re-reading, and the more I discover about Feldenkrais and his method the more intrigued I am. In fact, I have a new mission in life, which is to discover, in my own experience, the infinite intelligence of the body and the non-mind world.
 
As I said, it’s a process, a path, and sometimes I decide to just go for a walk and feel the new swing in my hips and notice that my head is attached to the rest of me – viscerally. I leave mind aside. I know that I’m better for it – but can I tell you how?
 
****

P.S. You can learn more about Sandra Bradshaw, and purchase her books through her website: sandrabradshaw.com.

[1] Grok: a word coined by Robert Heinlein (1907–88), American science fiction writer, in Stranger in a Strange Land. Definitions: 1. understand (something) intuitively or by empathy. "because of all the commercials, children grok things immediately". 2. empathize or communicate sympathetically; establish a rapport. From google search: ‘define grok’.
 
[1] Moshe Feldenkrais, “Elusive Obvious”, Chapter: “On Learning”, as found at: http://utahfeldenkrais.org/blog/moshe-feldenkrais-quotes/
 
[1] Moshe Feldenkrais, “Body and Mind”, 1980. As found at: http://feldenkrais-method.org/archive/feldenkrais-method/.

Exciting news about a promising new app that appears to help OCD sufferers who wash their hands compulsively.

PUBLIC RELEASE: 23-OCT-2018Brain training app helps reduce OCD symptoms, study finds

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

A 'brain training' app developed at the University of Cambridge could help people who suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) manage their symptoms, which may typically include excessive handwashing and contamination fears.

In a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, Baland Jalal and Professor Barbara Sahakian from the Department of Psychiatry, show how just one week of training can lead to significant improvements.

One of the most common types of OCD, affecting up to 46% of OCD patients, is characterised by severe contamination fears and excessive washing behaviour. Excessive washing can be harmful as sometimes OCD patients use spirits, surface cleansers or even bleach to clean their hands. The behaviours can have a serious impact on people's lives, their mental health, their relationships and their ability to hold down jobs.

This repetitive and compulsive behaviour is also associated with 'cognitive rigidity' - in other words, an inability to adapt to new situations or new rules. Breaking out of compulsive habits, such as handwashing, requires cognitive flexibility so that the OCD patient can switch to new activities instead.

OCD is treated using a combination of medication such as Prozac and a form cognitive behavioural therapy ('talking therapy') termed 'exposure and response prevention'. This latter therapy often involves instructing OCD patients to touch contaminated surfaces, such as a toilet, but to refrain from then washing their hands.

These treatments are not particularly effective, however - as many as 40% of patients fail to show a good response to either treatment. This may be in part because often people with OCD have suffered for years prior to receiving a diagnosis and treatment. Another difficulty is that patients may fail to attend exposure and response prevention therapy as they find it too stressful to undertake.

For these reasons, Cambridge researchers developed a new treatment to help people with contamination fears and excessive washing. The intervention, which can be delivered through a smartphone app, involves patients watching videos of themselves washing their hands or touching fake contaminated surfaces.

Ninety-three healthy people who had indicated strong contamination fears as measured by high scores on the 'Padua Inventory Contamination Fear Subscale' participated in the study. The researchers used healthy volunteers rather than OCD patients in their study to ensure that the intervention did not potentially worsen symptoms.

The participants were divided into three groups: the first group watched videos on their smartphones of themselves washing their hands; the second group watched similar videos but of themselves touching fake contaminated surfaces; and the third, control group watched themselves making neutral hand movements on their smartphones.

After only one week of viewing their brief 30 second videos four times a day, participants from both of the first two groups - that is, those who had watched the hand washing video and those with the exposure and response prevention video - improved in terms of reductions in OCD symptoms and showed greater cognitive flexibility compared with the neutral control group. On average, participants in the first two groups saw their Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (YBOCS) scores improve by around 21%. YBOCS scores are the most widely used clinical assessments for assessing the severity of OCD.
Importantly, completion rates for the study were excellent - all participants completed the one week intervention, with participants viewing their video an average (mean) of 25 out of 28 times.

Mr Jalal said: "Participants told us that the smartphone washing app allowed them to easily engage in their daily activities. For example, one participant said 'if I am commuting on the bus and touch something contaminated and can't wash my hands for the next two hours, the app would be a sufficient substitute'."

Professor Sahakian said: "This technology will allow people to gain help at any time within the environment where they live or work, rather than having to wait for appointments. The use of smartphone videos allows the treatment to be personalised to the individual.

"These results while very exciting and encouraging, require further research, examining the use of these smartphone interventions in people with a diagnosis of OCD."

The smartphone app is not currently available for public use. Further research is required before the researchers can show conclusively that it is effective at helping patients with OCD.
###
The research was funded by the Wellcome, NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre, the Medical Research Council and the Wallitt Foundation.
​
Reference
Baland Jalal, Annette Bruhl, Claire O'Callaghan, Thomas Piercy, Rudolf N. Cardinal, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Barbara J. Sahakian. Novel smartphone interventions improve cognitive flexibility and obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms in individuals with contamination fears. Scientific Reports; 23 Oct 2018

With my country, Canada, now poised to legalize recreational use of marijuana, voters in seven U.S. states recently supported new laws to do the same. In total 29 states now permit the use of marijuana for medical and/or recreational purposes. 

I approve! Why should we criminalize behaviours that are widely engaged in by our citizens? What can be gained from pouring money into enforcing laws that are widely disrespected? Many lives have been damaged by unnecessary and ineffective drug laws. And sure, it's nice to chill.

But look! Marijuana appears to damage the brain's key memory and learning center.

​By Paddy Kamen

Can you significantly lower your risk of dementia by playing a game? Yes, according to research presented at the American Psychological Association (APA) meeting in Denver, CO in August 2016.
 
Jerri Edwards, Ph.D, of the University of South Florida, presented a study known as ‘ACTIVE’ (Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly), which followed 2,832 participants, ages 65 to 94. Participants practiced a brain training exercise known as ‘speed of processing training’ or ‘useful field of view’ (UFOV) training. 

Edward’s found that UFOV training reduced the risk of dementia in older adults by 48 percent over 10 years when they completed 11 or more training sessions. In fact, for each session of training the risk of dementia was reduced by eight percent. What a stunning result!

As a woman past my child bearing years, I wondered if it might be safe for me to travel to areas of the world where the Zika virus is active. But new research from The Rockefeller University and La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology demonstrates that the Zika virus may affect learning and memory in the adult brain.

"This is the first study looking at the effect of Zika infection on the adult brain," says Joseph Gleeson, adjunct professor at Rockefeller, head of the Laboratory of Pediatric Brain Disease, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. "Based on our findings, getting infected with Zika as an adult may not be as innocuous as people think."

Learn more here.

By Paddy Kamen, publisher BetterBrainBetterLife.com

Is it possible to turn Alzheimer’s around, to have someone walk back from a diagnosis, return to work, recall foreign languages that were lost to them, and re-grow hippocampal volume? The latest research says yes, but is that research sound? This article covers the details of this groundbreaking research, along with criticism of it. 

What constitutes crazy talk with respect to Alzheimer's treatment may be a matter of opinion. Click 'Read More' below to see where the battle lines are being drawn. 

By Kris James

Let me begin by saying I knew that the gut microbiome was an incredibly hot area of research these days, but beyond that, I was pretty much ignorant. Thankfully, Alanna Collen, author of 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness, does a stellar job of presenting this complex topic to the layperson that makes the subject both riveting and at times mind-blowing. 

​The book title is intriguing, and explained thus: “You are just 10% human. For every one of the cells that make up the vessel that you call your body, there are nine impostor cells hitching a ride. You are not just flesh and blood, muscle and bone, brain and skin, but also bacteria and fungi. You are more 'them' than you are 'you' Your gut alone hosts 100 trillion of them. Over your lifetime, you will play host to bugs the equivalent weight of five African elephants.”