How Your Hormones Control Everything

Doctor Randi Hutter Epstein likes to compare human hormones to the internet. And if you think about it, it makes sense. The brain sends messages to the testes in the same way that someone in Paris can send an email to someone in Tokyo. There’s no apparent infrastructure that connects the senders and receivers. Just a message floating out there, knowing what its target is. But it took a very long time before we had this kind of basic understanding of hormones. And, even today, most people doesn’t understand the power of these chemicals. We talk to Epstein, author of, “Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything,” about how we came to understand the endocrine system.