Video Transcript
Edmund: A Scottish man named Agostino Angus Barbieri sat down one morning to eat a very interesting breakfast: one boiled egg, one slice of bread with butter, and one cup of coffee. But the most interesting part of the meal was that this breakfast in July of 1966 marked the first time Angus ate food in over a year.
It’s commonly said that humans can live a few weeks without food, a few days without water, and a few minutes without air. These are the basic human needs, aren’t they? But is this really all we need to survive?
Under medical supervision, Angus Barbieri fasted for over 382 days and survived. But how did he do it? On day one of the fast—when Angus stepped on the scale—he weighed 456 pounds. By the end of his fast, he weighed 180 pounds. Throughout that time, he mainly consumed beverages like tea, coffee, and soda water. Doctors supervised this experiment and made sure to provide him with vitamin supplements. His case later appeared in the Postgraduate Medical Journal in 1973, and it remains one of the most extreme and well-documented examples of the limits of the human body.
The truth is, most people can only live a short time without food. The body uses fat stores to survive when it’s not receiving enough calories from food. Because Angus had a large store of body fat, he was able to go much longer without food.
So it turns out it’s a bit oversimplified to say people just need “food” to survive. What the body really needs is calories, either from food or fat stores. And calories? Well, that’s a unit of energy. Specifically, the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. But maybe it doesn’t stop there. Maybe what we need to survive is even more complicated than that.
In the early 1900s, a man by the name of Abraham was working on a similar riddle while studying psychology at Columbia University. At that time, psychology focused a great deal on pathology, or abnormal psychology. Behaviorist and Freudian schools of thought focused a great deal on identifying and treating abnormal behaviors. But Abraham wondered if it was a little oversimplified to say that “healthy” people are merely people with an absence of abnormal psychological conditions.
Born in Brooklyn in 1908 to a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Abraham experienced feelings of isolation and loneliness in his youth. And this may have sparked his hunch that there are certain factors that could be identified as “needs” of the human person outside of basic physical needs, or just merely an absence of abnormal psychological conditions. Instead of viewing human flourishing as understanding and treating any disorder or dysfunction in patients, Abraham wondered if he could focus on a “third force” in psychology that was neither psychoanalytic nor behaviorist.
Abraham worked under one psychologist named Harry Harlow, who was conducting research on baby monkeys. Harlow’s work showed that baby Rhesus monkeys deprived of maternal warmth (and given only fake, wire “monkey” mothers that provided food) grew up with extreme behavioral disturbances. Although they survived physically, they displayed profound social deficits—like an inability to bond, and severe anxiety or aggression.
Abraham Maslow went on to spend a great deal of time observing and writing about people he considered exceptionally productive or compassionate— people like Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, and others—trying to pinpoint the qualities they all shared in common. And this was unusual for the time, as psychology tended to focus on mental illness rather than on what healthy, thriving people did right.
In his seminal 1943 paper, titled “A Theory of Human Motivation,” published in the Psychological Review, Abraham Maslow articulated a “hierarchy of needs” that people generally move through as they pursue a satisfied life. Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” categorizes human needs into five levels, from basic to advanced. The levels are: physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and finally, self-actualization.
Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” is now widely known and understood as representative of some of the “other” needs beyond the basic, bodily needs. The human person is not just a physical, biological system. We are also communal, emotional, and psychological. We have needs for safety, acceptance, and love. So it is a little simplistic to say that for humans to survive, they just need their physical needs met. And don’t we all want to do more than just survive? We want to flourish!
But years after publishing his “hierarchy of needs” theory, Maslow felt there was still a higher level missing from the original. Later in his career, Maslow concluded that humanistic psychology was incapable of explaining all aspects of human experience.
When you wake up tomorrow morning, you’ll get to work; making sure you’ve taken care of yourself. And by the end of the day, you’ll have fed yourself, done the work in front of you, and maybe even talked to some of your friends or family. We all naturally set out at the beginning of our day to get our needs met. But what really are our daily needs? And what do you really need to not just survive, but flourish?
