TED Health TED Audio Collective

What's the relationship between physical and mental pain, and how can you ease both? Revealing how your experiences of love, loss and pain are deeply intertwined, neuroscientist Yoram Yovell sheds light on the surprising role of your brain's endorphins and opioid receptors to ease physical and emotional suffering — and shows how this connection could pave the way to new treatments for mental health and well-being.

Biomedical researcher Sonia Vallabh's life was turned upside down when she learned she had the genetic mutation for a rare and fatal illness, prion disease, that could strike at any time. Thirteen years later, her search for a cure has led to new insights about how to catch and prevent disease — and how to honor our grandest, most mysterious inheritance: our brains.

What if you could transform your anxiety into something you can actually use during your work day? This week, we're revisiting a talk by neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki, who shares two evidence-based activities — breathing and movement — that can soothe your nervous system and fuel creativity and connection.

What you experience through your senses — sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch — can impact how healthy you are and how long you live, says neurobiologist Christi Gendron. She explores how environmental cues like temperature, light and even just the sight of death have influenced the lifespan of fruit flies, suggesting your everyday perceptions may have direct repercussions on your ability to live a long, healthy life.

Here's a conundrum: the same aerosol pollutants that harm human health also help cool the climate, says atmospheric scientist Sarah J. Doherty. Is there a way to clean up the air without warming the planet? Exploring the unintended consequences of reducing air pollution, she makes the case for a better understanding of marine cloud brightening — or intentionally adding sea salt aerosols to clouds over the ocean, which could reflect sunlight back into space and potentially reduce global warming.

Countries around the world waste huge amounts of food every year: roughly a fifth of food items in the US are tossed because consumers aren't sure how to interpret expiration labels. But most groceries are still perfectly safe to eat past their expiration dates. If the dates on our food don't tell us that something's gone bad, what do they tell us? Carolyn Beans shares how to prevent food waste. This TED-Ed lesson was directed by Anton Bogaty, narrated by Alexandra Panzer and the music is by Salil Bhayani, cAMP Studio.