Norman Swan
speaker
307 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 11 Aug
Norman Swan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
When I did not fully understand and I didn't know how it was going to end.
I didn't know when it was going to end.
And that's my dominant memory of it.
Feeling totally out of control in a situation which had unknown risk.
It is.
And we can come back to Daniel's situation with autism spectrum disorder because it could well be that what's happening with Daniel is that his autism spectrum disorder kind of dislocates him from an ability to control situations or situations are imposed on him which are unfair or unreasonable, which give a sense of loss of control and therefore stress.
rather than necessarily being a stress-causing condition in its own right.
It's the mushroom cloud around it that causes the response to stress.
So you've got this acute stress, which is designed for, in a hunter-gatherer situation, recognizing danger and being alert to it, and your body being prepared to fight or run away.
So that's why your blood goes to your brain.
Blood goes to the organs in your abdomen rather than to your skin.
So your skin feels cold and clammy.
Your heart rate goes up.
Your blood pressure goes up already for action.
And indeed, a whole series of hormones get into action as well.
including hormones which alert your immune system because when you're getting ready for that sort of acute response to a stressful situation, your immune system gets ready to defend against attack.
It doesn't know what the attack is, and that's called the innate immune system.
It's kind of a dumb part of the immune system where it just is like this barrage of artillery firing at anything and everything and anything, and that's called inflammation.
And that's also fired up in the acute stressful situation.
Your brain, the subconscious brain, is essentially a dumb organ, which is a... You're calling a lot of my body systems dumb today, Norman.
Showing 181–200 of 307 · page 10 of 16
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