{"text":[[{"start":4.95,"text":"The writer is a systems engineer and author of ‘Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World’"}],[{"start":10.850000000000001,"text":"In a hot room, I balance on one foot, lifting the other high on to my opposite thigh, palms pressed together at my chest. Sweat stings my eyes as I lower into a toe stand, caught between faking it and maybe making it."}],[{"start":26,"text":"In corpse pose next, I relax my limbs across the mat and gently stare at the ceiling. “Optimise your breathing,” the instructor says. The word lands like an intruder in a practice far older than our machine metaphors for the body. In stillness, my mind wanders to the work of English physician William Harvey."}],[{"start":47.25,"text":"Harvey studied medicine when Galen’s ideas still dominated, as they had for 14 centuries. People believed the liver made blood and that arteries carried life-giving “vital spirit”. After years of animal vivisection and human dissection, Harvey published De Motu Cordis in 1628. Blood, he claimed, flowed in a loop, propelled by the heart, which was like a pump. "}],[{"start":70.45,"text":"Harvey still thought in Aristotelian terms, asking what purpose each organ served. His account of circulation, however, gave force to a new mechanical view of the body, like the mechanical clock that was once seen as the model for an orderly universe. And us."}],[{"start":86.55000000000001,"text":"In the 1630s, René Descartes viewed animal bodies as automata. Then, in 1687, Isaac Newton’s Principia described a universe governed by mathematical laws, inviting the idea that it also ran through bones and ligaments. Sixty years later, French physician and philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie, sick and on opium, anonymously published L’Homme Machine. Thought and feeling were only matter, he insisted, requiring no soul. Cut a heart open and you see only nerves and valves and nothing of a lifetime of passion and pain."}],[{"start":123.4,"text":"Taking living things apart has given us vast knowledge. But because such reductionism works profitably, we tend to miss its limits. "}],[{"start":131.65,"text":"In 1911 Frederick Winslow Taylor timed factory workers’ movements with a stopwatch and codified “scientific management” in pursuit of ever-greater productivity. The drive to optimise gradually spread from factory floors into sport, sleep, diet, the gym and the cues of a westernised yoga class. "}],[{"start":152.1,"text":"We invent machine metaphors to understand the body but then start living as if those metaphors were true."}],[{"start":159.04999999999998,"text":"The Yoga Sutras, a collection of aphorisms attributed to the Indian sage Patanjali and widely considered foundational to classical yoga, draw heavily on Samkhya, an ancient Hindu philosophical system. It resists reducing the person to physical processes by distinguishing prakṛti, material nature, including body and mind, from puruṣa, pure consciousness, to free the witness from the witnessed, prizing clarity over accomplishment."}],[{"start":186.54999999999998,"text":"When mending a blocked artery or replacing a worn-out hip, picturing the body as a machine can be useful. Yet as a guiding metaphor, it leads us off course. Randolph Nesse, a pioneer in evolutionary medicine, calls this mistake “tacit creationism”."}],[{"start":203.6,"text":"We talk and think as if our bodies were engineered from precise parts and partitions when in reality, our bodies depend on complex networks and co-ordination. Gut microbes, for instance, communicate with the nervous and immune systems, but chronic stress can upset both the microbiome and the signals they give out. Inflammation that ought to subside once the threat has passed can instead persist or become dysregulated."}],[{"start":228.15,"text":"While products can be machined to tight tolerances, natural selection can work only with what it inherits. Bodies make passable compromises across generations, even if they result in oddities."}],[{"start":239.5,"text":"Take the left recurrent laryngeal nerve. A remnant of our aquatic ancestors, it drops into the chest and hooks under the aortic arch before climbing back to the larynx. Then there is the eye. Light must pass through retinal tissue before reaching the eye’s photoreceptors. Where the optic nerve exits the retina, there are no photoreceptors, leaving a blind spot. Unlike the eye, a modern car partly compensates for a limited field of view with mirrors and sensors. Childbirth is a struggle because a baby’s wide skull and shoulders must pass through a narrow birth canal. Which engineer would approve such designs?"}],[{"start":277.3,"text":"On the yoga mat, the idea of the body as a machine shadows over me. Back in corpse pose, my breath ebbs and flows. The metaphor that once described the body now dictates how we imagine and inhabit it. “Let it go,” the instructor murmurs."}],[{"start":300.65000000000003,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1788101562_8681.mp3"}