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26 Aug 2023
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How to Thrive When Everything Feels Terrible

We’re surrounded by negativity everywhere we turn. The news we read, social media we peruse, and conversations we have and overhear. We absorb stress from our family, friends, and coworkers. And, it’s taking a toll.

The Mighty, a community platform (founded by Mike) that provides health information and brings people together around specific health issues, has surveyed more than 70,000 readers and community members since March around their awareness, perceptions, and experience with the coronavirus crisis. In September, respondents reported their top three emotions were frustration, worry, and anger. The number of respondents choosing anger as one of their top emotions has more than doubled since March — rising from 20% then to 45% in September.

Negativity can have toxic effects. In fact, Christine’s research has shown over and over that we falter when exposed to negativity or rudeness. Witnessing rudeness interferes with our working memory and decreases our performance. Mere exposure to rude words reduces our ability to process and recall information. We tend to shut down, stop communicating, and cease being helpful to others. Dysfunctional and aggressive thoughts (and sometimes actions) skyrocket.

Fortunately, Christine’s research also shows that there is a productive way to counter those effects. It’s called thriving — the psychological state in which people experience a sense of both vitality and learning. Thriving individuals are growing, developing, and energized rather than feeling stagnated or depleted.

In studies conducted across a range of industries, Christine has found that people who experience a state of thriving are healthier, more resilient, and more able to focus on their work. When people feel even an inkling of thriving, it tends to buffer them from distractions, stress, and negativity. In a study of six organizations across six different industries, employees characterized as highly thriving demonstrated 1.2 times less burnout compared with their peers. They were also 52% more confident in themselves and their ability to take control of a situation. They were far less likely to have negativity drag them into distraction or self-doubt.

So how do you increase your thriving especially when it feels like you’re drowning in negativity? Our research points to some tactics.

Avoid negativity. Pay attention to what you’re ingesting: what information you chose to read, the media you consume, the music you listen to, the people you choose to spend time with, and the people you look up to. Negativity seeps into our pores through these sources. So make simple choices away from negativity and toward positivity.

Watch what you say out loud. Negative language is particularly insidious and potent. Be mindful of what you’re thinking and saying. Yes, those around you influence you and your mood, but we have more control over our thoughts and feelings than anyone else. And what we say out loud also carries significant weight. According to Trevor Moawad, a mental conditioning coach who works primarily with elite athletes, it’s ten times more damaging to our sense of thriving if we verbalize a thought than if we just think it.

So, think twice about how you’re framing and speaking about a situation. Instead of saying, “This is the worst I’ve ever seen,” or “It’s catastrophic,” (or “devastating” or “terrible”), tweak your language to be more neutral. You might say, “This situation is challenging,” which recognizes the opportunity for growth or learning. You can — and should — acknowledge the truth, while minimizing its power to drag you down.

Adopt a neutral mindset. Negative thoughts and worries take us off track. We’re more likely to struggle on basic tasks. Long term, repetitive negative thinking is associated with cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease. It also hurts others because they are then exposed to our negativity. Of course, it’s all too easy to dwell on toxic people or situations. We might play the blame game, ruminate, or overanalyze the situation. It’s far better to adopt a proactive mindset, focusing on what we can control and what we should do next.

Moawad suggests using neutral thinking — a nonjudgmental, nonreactive way of assessing problems and analyzing crises. This includes staying in the moment, reacting to each moment as it unfolds, and keeping your focus on how you can influence your next action. Don’t get sucked into analyzing past failures or hijacked by future fears or thoughts. Take one play at a time.

Practice gratitude consistently. There is a lot to be said about the benefits of gratitude. Gratitude reduces our stress, makes us happier, and helps us reach our goals. Routinely feeling grateful increases the social support we receive, which further reduces stress and its negative effects. It’s especially powerful when practiced alongside neutral thinking. Seattle Seahawk quarterback and Super Bowl winner Russell Wilson has talked about how he has used this combination to navigate the death of his father, a gut-wrenching Super Bowl loss, the impact of Covid on his life and profession, and other challenges. Wilson says that with an “attitude of gratitude” you can be thankful for a challenge, and get through it.

His advice spurred our family to think about some of the positives that the pandemic brought. For example, like many families, we started a weekly Zoom meeting, uniting family members spread across the globe that hadn’t been in regular touch previously.

Manage your energy. You can also increase your resilience in the face of negativity and encourage thriving by exercising, eating well, and getting enough sleep — all things we know we’re supposed to do but we often fail to when we’re bombarded with negativity. When we exercise, our muscles pump “hope molecules” into our bodily systems that are good for our mental and physical health. You can amplify these effects by exercising outside, with others, or to music.

Healthy eating also helps you stave off negativity. How well do you respond to frustration when you’re hungry? We lack the self-control required to respond patiently. Sleep is also important. A lack of it impairs self-regulation and self-control, which can produce more negativity. Research has linked poor sleep to frustration, impatience, hostility, anxiety, low levels of joviality, lower levels of trust, workplace deviance, and unethical behavior. Sleep deprivation also hurts the relationship between leaders and their followers, and diminishes how much help people provide to others.

Seek out positive relationships — inside and outside of work. Christine’s research found that de-energizing relationships — in which one person possesses an enduring, recurring set of negative judgments, feelings, and intentions toward another person — have four to seven times greater impact on an employee’s sense of thriving than energizing, positive relationships. To offset these effects, surround yourself and spend more time with energizers — the people in your life who make you smile and laugh, and lift your spirits.

You may not be able to stop the flow of negativity in your life, especially right now, but you can resist its toxic effects by making smart choices about who and what you surround yourself with, the mindset you adapt, and the information you consume. Not only will you be better off because of these choices — those around you will too.

Original article here

23 Aug 2023
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You’re Never Too Old to Regain Lost Muscle. And You Can Do It at Home.

Pandemic life had a way of revealing our weaknesses. For those of us of a certain age, I mean that literally. If you are feeling like certain household activities — toting groceries, hoisting children, moving furniture, carrying laundry — are more difficult than they were in the past, you aren’t alone. And you aren’t imagining it.

This isn’t a new phenomenon; it just wasn’t until the 1800s that many of us lived long enough to experience this decline. For me, it started a few years ago, when I noticed that lifting an air conditioner, carrying a child up to bed or bringing in a load of firewood seemed harder than they once did. I summoned excuses for each difficulty (“Darned kid gained 20 pounds today!”), but now, at age 54, I’m ready to concede: I simply can’t lift as much as I once could.

Starting sometime in our 30s (the data aren’t precise), we lose up to 8 percent of our muscle mass per decade, a decline called sarcopenia, along with up to 30 percent of our strength and power. This leaves us weaker, less mobile and — especially after we cross age 50 — more vulnerable to injury from falls and similar accidents.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Men and women can regain some of that lost muscle mass and, importantly, stay strong enough to enjoy youthful activities well into their winter years, experts say. The key is strength training.

“I have people who start in their 60s, 70s and even 80s,” says Jordan Metzl, a sports medicine physician at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. “Building and maintaining strength is one of the most important things you can do at any stage of life, and it’s extremely important after age 50.”

Why? Strength training improves your “economy of movement,” Metzl says, meaning the amount of energy you expend to complete a task, and it “offloads joints, so you can do the same amount of work with less pain and lower risk of injury. You’re essentially getting more juice out of your muscles.” Metzl is personally vested in this quest: He has run 35 marathons and competed in Iron Man triathlons, and he says he aspires, even as he approaches his mid-50s, “to keep going forever.”

But what if your marathons are measured in Netflix episodes or you just need to jump-start an engine that’s been accumulating rust for years? Again, you’re not alone, says Dixie Stanforth, associate professor of instruction in the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Kinesiology and Health Education.

“Most people are professional sitters,” she says. As a result, many muscles in the front of our bodies — namely our hip flexors and chest muscles — become short and tight. That shuts off signals to their corresponding anterior muscles — the glutes and upper back — to keep working, so those areas become weak and inhibited. All the sitting we’re doing at home could be making things worse.

The first thing to do if you’re starting or resuming strength training, says Stanforth, a 60-year-old personal trainer and “avid athlete,” is to target major muscle groups, especially the glutes and back.

“Glutes are tremendously important, because they activate the ‘rear chain’ of the body and can produce a lot of power for movement,” Stanforth says. Rear chain muscles are critical for posture, balance, running, jumping and — yes — lifting heavy things. To strengthen those muscles, Stanforth says squats, rows and leg presses are all good, because they engage the core and require movement in multiple joints.

She advises strengthening front-facing muscles (chest, abs, biceps and quadriceps, for example), but also devoting extra time to stretching them because of how tight they become in our daily, deskbound lives. “Many people might consider a 1:2 ratio of exercises” — that is, double your strengthening time for rear-chain muscles — “but all of the major muscles [including biceps, calves and triceps] should be trained.”

And, before you even ask: Just about every exercise you can do in a gym you can do at home — albeit with some modification. Homebound strength exercises that don’t require equipment include squats (with or without weight); chair dips; pushups; pullups; planks; lunges; burpees; and step-ups. If you have canned goods or empty milk or drink containers (a gallon of water weighs approximately eight pounds), you can use them for strength training.

Both Stanforth and Metzl recommend building muscle by performing a high number of reps of a lighter weight — i.e., one you can lift at least 15 times before failure, the fitness term for can’t . . . do . . . one . . . more.

Data show that straining to perform fewer repetitions of much heavier weights greatly increases the risk of injuries to cartilage, tendons and ligaments, without offering much benefit over lighter weights. A 2017 meta-analysis of 21 studies, published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, found that people who engaged in strength training regimens for at least six weeks, performing exercises to failure, showed similar muscle cell growth regardless of whether they did high reps of low weights or fewer reps of heavy weights.

“Fatigue is fatigue no matter how you get there,” Stanforth says. “I recommend [sets of] a significant number of reps — 15, 20, 30 — and you’ll see all the gains that you would with heavier weights.” Encouragingly, studies also show that you’ll reap most of the gains from just one set of each exercise, so you can safely skip the oft-recommended second and third sets.

As for how often to train, the weekly guidelines for generally healthy people age 50 and older aren’t any different from those for other demographics: Strength train two to three days, engage in aerobic activity at least five days at moderate intensity, or at least three days a week at high intensity, and perform a stretching routine at least two days a week.

Metzl takes this up a notch by incorporating high-intensity interval training, or HIIT — short, punishing bursts of activity usually lasting 30 to 90 seconds with recovery breaks in between. “I do HIIT with people in their 70s and 80s,” he tells me. “We all change over the decades, but I don’t want people to be afraid of intensity.”

In fact, Metzl says, people should be increasing intensity as we age to “better stimulate all the cells in our bodies.” He cited a 2017 study published in the journal Cell Metabolism that showed that high-intensity training significantly improved how the body converts macronutrients into energy. But, he said: “For some people, a sprint is intense. For others, it’s walking up the stairs.”

For those who can perform them, Metzl suggests burpees, jump squats and lunges, which he says deliver full-body functional training. “Burpees utilize every muscle in your body. They’re high intensity and tremendously effective.” And, Metzl says, you’ll still reap a benefit from burpees if you opt to step — not jump — your feet back when dropping into the push-up position at the nadir of the exercise.

Stuart Phillips, director of the Physical Activity Center of Excellence at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, says that older people who regularly strength train can expect to see significant gains in strength and power, but not necessarily muscle mass. Still, the benefits of a training regimen — and the extended period of physical independence that comes with them — should be enough to motivate us all, he adds. “It’s about quality of life, and that’s not a function of muscle mass, but of strength/power.”

And, as Stanforth says, “exercise is better than any drug” in sustaining bone and countering the increased risk of osteoporosis that comes with age. “It helps tremendously. But we do have to be smarter about how we apply the dose as we age.” So, do it right, and we’ll feel stronger, and smarter for it, every day — and have one less thing to worry about.

Original article here

19 Aug 2023
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What Socrates Can Teach Us About AI

If Socrates was the wisest person in Ancient Greece, then large language models must be the most foolish systems in the modern world.

In his Apology, Plato tells the story of how Socrates’s friend Chaerephon goes to visit the oracle at Delphi. Chaerephon asks the oracle whether there is anyone wiser than Socrates. The priestess responds that there isn’t: Socrates is the wisest of them all.

At first, Socrates seems puzzled. How could he be the wisest, when there were so many other people who were well known for their knowledge and wisdom, and yet Socrates claims that he lacks both?

He makes it his mission to solve the mystery. He goes around interrogating a series of politicians, poets, and artisans (as philosophers do). And what does he find? Socrates’ investigation reveals that those who claim to have knowledge either do not really know what they think they know, or else know far less than they proclaim to know.

Socrates is the wisest, then, because he is aware of the limits of his own knowledge. He doesn’t think he knows more than he does, and he doesn’t claim to know more than he does.

How does that compare with large language models like ChatGPT4?

In contrast to Socrates, large language models don’t know what they don’t know. These systems are not built to be truth-tracking. They are not based on empirical evidence or logic. They make statistical guesses that are very often wrong.

Large language models don’t inform users that they are making statistical guesses. They present incorrect guesses with the same confidence as they present facts. Whatever you ask, they will come up with a convincing response, and it’s never “I don’t know,” even though it should be. If you ask ChatGPT about current events, it will remind you that it only has access to information up to September 2021 and it can’t browse the internet. For almost any other kind of question, it will venture a response that will often mix facts with confabulations.

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt famously argued that bullshit is speech that is typically persuasive but is detached from a concern with the truth. Large language models are the ultimate bullshitters because they are designed to be plausible (and therefore convincing) with no regard for the truth. Bullshit doesn’t need to be false. Sometimes bullshitters describe things as they are, but if they are not aiming for the truth, what they say is still bullshit.

And bullshit is dangerous, warned Frankfurt. Bullshit is a greater threat to the truth than lies. The person who lies thinks she knows what the truth is, and is therefore concerned with the truth. She can be challenged and held accountable; her agenda can be inferred. The truth-teller and the liar play on opposite sides of the same game, as Frankfurt puts it. The bullshitter pays no attention to the game. Truth doesn’t even get confronted; it gets ignored; it becomes irrelevant.

Bullshit is more dangerous the more persuasive it is, and large language models are persuasive by design on two counts. First, they have analysed enormous amounts of text, which allows them to make a statistical guess as to what is a likely appropriate response to the prompt given. In other words, it mimics the patterns that it has picked up in the texts it has gone through. Second, these systems are refined through a process of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The reward model has been trained directly from human feedback. Humans taught it what kinds of responses they prefer. Through numerous iterations, the system learns how to satisfy human beings’ preferences, thereby becoming more and more persuasive.

As the proliferation of fake news has taught us, human beings don’t always prefer truth. Falsity is often much more attractive than bland truths. We like good, exciting stories much more than we like truth. Large language models are analogous to a nightmare student, professor, or journalist; those who, instead of acknowledging the limits of their knowledge, try to wing it by bullshitting you.

Plato’s Apology suggests that we should build AI to be more like Socrates and less like bullshitters. We shouldn’t expect tech companies to design ethically out of their own good will. Silicon Valley is well known for its bullshitting abilities, and companies can even feel compelled to bullshit to stay competitive in that environment. That companies working in a corporate bullshitting environment create bullshitting products should hardly be surprising. One of the things that the past two decades have taught us is that tech needs as much regulation as any other industry, and no industry can regulate itself. We regulate food, drugs, telecommunications, finance, transport; why wouldn’t tech be next?

Plato leaves us with a final warning. One of the lessons of his work is to beware the flaws of democracy. Athenian democracy killed Socrates. It condemned its most committed citizen, its most valuable teacher, while it allowed sophists—the bullshitters of that time—to thrive. Our democracies seem likewise vulnerable to bullshitters. In the recent past, we have made them prime ministers and presidents. And now we are fueling the power of large language models, considering using them in all walks of life—even in contexts like journalism, politics, and medicine, in which truth is vital to the health of our institutions. Is that wise?

Original article here

15 Aug 2023
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3 Simple Habits That Can Protect Your Brain from Cognitive Decline

You might think that the impact of aging on the brain is something you can’t do much about. After all, isn’t it an inevitability?

To an extent, as we may not be able to rewind the clock and change our levels of higher education or intelligence (both factors that delay the onset of symptoms of aging). But adopting specific lifestyle behaviors–whether you’re in your thirties or late forties–can have a tangible effect on how well you age. Even in your fifties and beyond, activities like learning a new language or musical instrument, taking part in aerobic exercise, and developing meaningful social relationships can do wonders for your brain. There’s no question that when we compromise on looking after ourselves, our aging minds pick up the tab.

THE AGING PROCESS AND COGNITIVE DECLINE

Over time, there is a build-up of toxins such as tau proteins and beta-amyloid plaques in the brain that correlate to the aging process and associated cognitive decline. Although this is a natural part of growing older, many factors can exacerbate it. Stress, neurotoxins such as alcohol and lack of (quality and quantity) sleep can speed up the process.

Neuroplasticity–the function that allows the brain to change and develop in our lifetime–has three mechanisms: synaptic connection, myelination, and neurogenesis. The key to resilient aging is improving neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons. Neurogenesis happens far more in babies and children than adults. A 2018 study by researchers at Columbia University shows that in adults, this type of neuroplastic activity occurs in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that lays down memories. This makes sense as we respond to and store new experiences every day, and cement them during sleep. The more we can experience new things, activities, people, places, and emotions, the more likely we are to encourage neurogenesis.

With all this in mind, we can come up with a three-point plan to encourage “resilient aging” by activating neurogenesis in the brain:

GET YOUR HEART RATE UP

Aerobic exercise such as running or brisk walking has a potentially massive impact on neurogenesis. A 2016 rat study found that endurance exercise was most effective in increasing neurogenesis. It wins out over HIIT sessions and resistance training, although doing a variety of exercise also has its benefits.

Aim to do aerobic exercise for 150 minutes per week, and choose the gym, the park, or natural landscape over busy roads to avoid compromising brain-derived neurotrophic factor production (BDNF), a growth factor that encourages neurogenesis that aerobic exercise can boost. However, exercising in polluted areas decreases production.

If exercising alone isn’t your thing, consider taking up a team sport or one with a social element like table tennis. Exposure to social interaction can also increase the neurogenesis, and in many instances, doing so lets you practice your hand-eye coordination, which research has suggested leads to structural changes in the brain that may relate to a range of cognitive benefit. This combination of coordination and socializing has been shown to increase brain thickness in the parts of the cortex related to social/emotional welfare, which is crucial as we age.

CHANGE YOUR EATING PATTERNS

Evidence shows that calorie restriction, intermittent fasting, and time-restricted eating encourage neurogenesis in humans. In rodent studies, intermittent fasting has been found to improve cognitive function and brain structure, and reduce symptoms of metabolic disorders such as diabetes. Reducing refined sugar will help reduce oxidative damage to brain cells, too, and we know that increased oxidative damage has been linked with a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Twenty-four hour water-only fasts have also been proven to increase longevity and encourage neurogenesis.

Try any of the following, after checking with your doctor:

24-hour water-only fast once a month
Reducing your calorie intake by 50%-60% on two non-consecutive days of the week for two to three months or on an ongoing basis
Reducing calories by 20% every day for two weeks. You can do this three to four times a year
Eating only between 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., or 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. as a general rule

PRIORITIZE SLEEP

Sleep helps promote the brain’s neural “cleaning” glymphatic system, which flushes out the build-up of age-related toxins in the brain (the tau proteins and beta amyloid plaques mentioned above). When people are sleep-deprived, we see evidence of memory deficits, and if you miss a whole night of sleep, research proves that it impacts IQ. Aim for seven to nine hours, and nap if it suits you. Our need to sleep decreases as we age.

Of course, there are individual exceptions, but having consistent sleep times and making sure you’re getting sufficient quality and length of sleep supports brain resilience over time. So how do you know if you’re getting enough? If you naturally wake up at the same time on weekends that you have to during the week, you probably are. If you need to lie-in or take long naps, you’re probably not. Try practicing mindfulness or yoga nidra before bed at night, a guided breath-based meditation that has been shown in studies to improve sleep quality. There are plenty of recordings online if you want to experience it.

Pick any of the above that work for you and build it up until it becomes a habit, then move onto the next one and so on. You might find that by the end of the year, you’ll feel even healthier, more energized, and motivated than you do now, even as you turn another year older.

Original article here

11 Aug 2023
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5 Amazing New Discoveries About Light

You might think that after centuries of studying light, we know pretty much everything about it. It’s true we’ve had breakthrough after breakthrough in using it, from illumination to communication, from examining the micro- and macro-universes to scanning our own bodies. We understand that light is an electromagnetic wave, thanks to James Clerk Maxwell, whose equations established that in 1865; and that it also appears as quantum packets of electromagnetic energy called photons, as Albert Einstein recognized in 1905. But the more we look into light, the more we see and the more we learn. The classical view of light as a wave still produces new science as light waves interact with artificial “metamaterials”; and we are still exploring light as a quantum particle. Both approaches provide ways to manipulate light that were once only science fiction. Here are five recent marvels.

Bending Light for Invisibility

The magical invisibility rings and cloaks featured in fantasy stories reflect the ancient human dream of hiding things and people from sight. Invisibility shows up in science fiction too, like Star Trek, where hostile Romulan spacecraft conceal themselves with a cloaking device. This uses an idea from relativity, that strongly distorted spacetime makes light curve around the spacecraft as if it didn’t exist.

Physicists don’t yet know how to do that, but the classical optics of light waves and light rays points to another solution. We see an object as it interacts with incoming light. In principle, an invisibility cloak could intercept those incoming rays and bend or refract them into itself so they travel inside the cloak and emerge along their original paths. An observer, seeing what looks like undisturbed light, would think nothing is there, just as flowing water smoothly splitting around a rock and then recombining gives no downstream indication of the rock. But to make light follow this complex path, the cloak needs to be made from a metamaterial.

Researchers first tested this idea in 2006 with a rigid metamaterial cloak, a hollow cylinder whose wall held thousands of small structures that made microwaves traverse suitable paths within the wall. Placed around an opaque metal object, the cloak made the object nearly completely vanish under microwave radiation. Since then, researchers have made small inanimate objects and a fish, a cat, and a hand vanish under ordinary visible light, but only as seen over a narrow angle of view. Others have developed a flexible cloak that wraps around a small object to make it vanish, but only at one wavelength. Science can’t yet make a cloak that completely hides a person in ordinary light; but invisibility research is thriving and we’re approaching Harry Potter’s wondrous cloak.

Light Pushes and Pulls Things

Like thrown rocks, photons carry momentum that they transfer to an object on impact. This radiation pressure is why sunlight pushes comet tails away from the sun, and why it can propel a spacecraft. In 2010, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched IKAROS (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun, honoring Icarus who flew near the sun in myth). Its thin, tennis court-sized polymer sail gathered solar photons, which collectively exerted a small force that steadily accelerated IKAROS. Six months and 300 million miles later, it arrived on target near Venus without using any fuel for propulsion. Now JAXA and other space agencies are considering longer missions using bigger, more effective solar sails.

We’re approaching Harry Potter’s wondrous cloak.

Remarkably, a light source can also pull an object toward itself, against the direction that the light propagates. Physicists have shown that within a specially shaped laser beam, the forward push of photons on a particle is dominated by a backward force due to the particle’s own electromagnetic response. The effect is strong enough to pull a microscopic object like a biological cell backward toward the laser. In 2023, however, a related experiment showed that a low-power laser could pull a comparatively big macroscopic object, 0.2 inch x 0.1 inch. This is hardly a powerful sci-fi “tractor beam” that can reel in an entire spacecraft, but it could provide a new way to remotely sample the atmosphere on Earth and other planets, and phenomena like comet’s tails.

Ghost Imaging: Pictures in the Dark

Suppose you want to form an image of something like a living cell that could be changed or harmed by the light energy that illuminates it. Ghost imaging uses the phenomenon of photon entanglement to produce an excellent image of a barely illuminated object. Entangled photon pairs, which are formed by certain optical processes, are quantum-correlated, such that measuring the properties of one immediately reveals the properties of the other, no matter how distant.

In ghost imaging, one of each of a swarm of entangled photon pairs interacts with the object and encounters a detector that simply registers its arrival. A second beam of the corresponding entangled partners never touches the object but goes straight to a sensitive multi-pixel detector. Computer analysis of the correlations between the two detector results creates a high-quality image of the object, even with weak illumination. This approach has uses such as converting images covertly taken by invisible infrared light to visible images detected by a high-resolution camera; or obtaining good quality X-ray images from a patient exposed to a low, relatively safe X-ray dose.

Quantum Slits in Time

In the famous double-slit experiment, first done in 1801, a light beam splits as it passes through two narrow slits in an opaque barrier. On the far side, the beams spread and overlap to form a pattern of bright and dark areas on a screen, showing that light consists of waves that can interfere with each other. But a modern version of the experiment where just one photon at a time is aimed at the slits still produces a wave-like interference pattern. According to Richard Feynman, this striking, still unexplained example of wave-particle duality “has in it the heart of quantum mechanics … it contains the only mystery.”

Light was slowed to 38 mph, which a fit cyclist could match.

Now physicists have reproduced this experiment with slits in time rather than space. They used a thin film of indium tin oxide (ITO), which is transparent to infrared light but quickly becomes reflective within 10-15 sec when excited by a laser. In the experiment, the researchers shot infrared light at the ITO. When the ITO became a mirror for a short time, the reflected infrared light remained in its original form. But when the ITO mirror was very briefly turned on and off twice in rapid succession, the reflected infrared light showed definitively that it had interfered with itself as a result of passing through not one but two time portals or slits.

One observer has commented that this work could become a classic like the original double-slit experiment. By extending that into time rather than space, the research offers a new way to explore “the only mystery.” The work also shows the feasibility of using metamaterials like ITO to control light in optical systems and quantum computers at ultra-fast speeds.

Overtaking Light on a Bicycle

If there is one physics fact that people know, it’s that light is the fastest thing in the universe, traveling at 186,000 miles/sec in vacuum. The speed is reduced somewhat when light interacts with ordinary matter, dropping, for instance, to 124,000 miles/sec in optical fiber and plain glass. This is still fast enough to circle the Earth in a fraction of a second; and so it was big news in 1999 when Harvard researcher Lene Hau enormously slowed light to the human-scale speed of 38 mph, which a fit cyclist could match. This was accomplished in an exotic medium, a dense gas of sodium atoms cooled to nearly absolute zero. The result was a quantum medium called a Bose-Einstein condensate. Light interacts with this more strongly than with any ordinary medium and so it was hugely slowed. Later, Hau topped this achievement by bringing light to a screeching halt, then later recovering it and sending it on its way.

These results are breakthroughs in fundamental physics and could be useful as well, except for the need to work at temperatures near absolute zero. But since the original work, other researchers have slowed light in gases and solids at room temperature, making it possible to use slowed and stopped light in practical devices. These are currently being developed, for example, to synchronize signals in fiber optic networks and to store digital data in computers. Both applications are important steps toward developing advanced telecommunications networks and quantum computers based entirely on light rather than conventional electronic chips.

Original article here

08 Aug 2023
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How to connect with your future self

Need to know

In February 1969, around 10 in the morning, a young Jorge Luis Borges sat down next to an elderly Jorge Luis Borges on a bench by the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Or so it happened in the Borges short story ‘The Other’. The two Borgeses talk about writing, family and history – while puzzling over how a past self is confronting a future self. At one point, the younger Borges asks the older: ‘How’s your memory?’

‘I realised that for a mere boy not yet 20, a man of 70 some-odd years was practically a corpse,’ Borges wrote.

Outside of fiction, our past and future selves don’t encounter each other so directly. These selves are separated by time, and a future version of you can seem like a distant stranger. But your relationship with that future self could have a big impact on the decisions you make today.

You might think that the one person you can rely on to make decisions in your best interests would be yourself. Yet, people frequently make choices that they later suffer from, in part because the future feels far away. Maybe you’ve woken up after having one too many drinks the night before and thought: ‘Why did I do that?’ The Saturday-night version of you didn’t have the Sunday-morning self in mind. These choices aren’t trivial, or related only to hangovers. They can include not saving enough money for retirement, or not making enough time to exercise, rest, eat well or nurture relationships. What happens in the present catches up to us but, oddly enough, it’s difficult to remember that.

We may think of our future selves as more like strangers

Upon closer examination, it’s not unreasonable to feel detached from your future self. Any number of aspects of your life and physical self might transform over time: where you live, who you spend time with, your job, your hair colour, and even the cells in your body all change as the years pass by.

‘We can be estranged from our future selves,’ says Hal Hershfield, a psychologist at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and the author of Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today (2023). ‘That can help explain why we may prioritise today over the future.’

Many of us actually think of our future selves the way we think of other people. This has been demonstrated experimentally: when people are asked to imagine their own birthdays in the distant future, they do so from a third-person viewpoint; think ahead to your future self blowing out birthday candles, and you’re likely to picture yourself the way you would a character in a film, rather than seeing it through your own eyes. Research led by Emily Pronin at Princeton University has shown that people sometimes make similar decisions for their future selves and for others. For example, they sign up their future selves and other people to drink larger amounts of a disgusting liquid (for a science experiment) than they volunteer their present selves to drink. Studies even suggest that, for some people, parts of the brain activate in similar ways in response to thinking of the future self as they do when thinking of other people – and that this tendency is associated with choosing smaller rewards in the present over waiting for larger rewards in the future.

‘If we think about our future selves as if they are other people, then it makes sense why we sometimes treat them so poorly,’ Hershfield writes in his book. ‘It’s understandable to not diet, save or exercise for those temporally distant strangers, especially when we have this very vivid present self who is hungry and lazy and really wants that new iPhone.’

If you think your future self will be significantly different from who you are today, you are more likely to make choices that honour short-term desires, rather than longer-term needs. After all, if your future self seems barely connected to your current one, what do you owe them? What this means, however, is that getting a better understanding of how you think about your future self – and strengthening your connection to that self – could help you tend to your future health, wellbeing and bank account. In the rest of this Guide, I’ll share some practical approaches, informed by psychologists who study how people relate to future selves, for becoming more aligned to future versions of yourself – and making better choices as a result.

What to do

Focus on what will stay the same

Take a moment to think about your future self, the ‘you’ that lives five, 10 or 20 years into the future. How familiar do they seem? Research has found that people who feel more similar to their future self seem to make decisions that are more future-oriented, such as accumulating greater savings. Daniel Bartels and Oleg Urminsky at the University of Chicago found that, when college students were told that they would still be the same person after graduating, they were more likely to wait to receive a financial reward.

But you don’t have to commit to your future self being virtually identical to your present self in order to feel as though there’s continuity between who you are now and who you will be. Instead, try to home in on what some of the similarities between your present self and your future self might be.

We all expect – and might hope – to change in some ways, such as by developing skills, taking up new hobbies, or forming new relationships. There are likely certain characteristics, however, that you consider more fundamental to your sense of self, such as a particular talent you have or your most valued personal traits. Research on what people consider their ‘true selves’ suggests that one’s morality is typically seen as an essential component of the self.

People also have some characteristics that they consider ‘causally central’, meaning they underlie other events, relationships or situations in their lives. Let’s say Jack and Mack both had few friends as children and spent most of their time alone. Jack may think that this experience caused him to be a shy adult, whereas Mack could believe that it was because he was shy that he had few friends. According to Bartels, this means that ‘shyness will be more defining of Mack’s self-concept than Jack’s because it is causally linked to both his preferences and his memories.’

With all this in mind, think about which elements of your self have had an effect on various other aspects of your life, such as your job, your relationships or your hobbies. Additionally, what do you consider core features of your morality – what are your key values? Reflect on how your most central characteristics and values are likely to persist and show up in your life years or even decades from now. Naming these parts of you – the ones that seem key to your identity – can be helpful for maintaining a connection to the future self that shares those qualities. In ‘The Other’, Borges noticed, with affection, the qualities of his younger self that had remained the same, and that related to the defining passion in his life: ‘We haven’t changed a bit, I thought. Always referring back to books.’

Write a letter to your future self

If you’ve ever written yourself a reminder note or recorded your thoughts in a journal, you have, in a sense, written to your future self. But writing a detailed message to a self who exists even further in the future has been shown to make people feel more connected to that version of themselves.

In Hershfield’s research, people have been prompted to write a letter to their self who lives decades in the future: ‘Think about who you will be 20 years from now, and write about the person you are now, which topics are important and dear to you, and how you see your life.’ After doing so, study participants said it improved their sense of connection to their future self. They even exercised more, in the days after they wrote the letter, than participants who wrote to a version of themselves just three months in the future.

In another study, Anne Wilson, a psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, and her colleagues found that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, people who wrote letters to themselves one year into the future felt a drop in negative emotions.

It might help to direct your letter to your hoped-for or best-possible future self. This connects back to the core values you may have reflected on before – thinking about a best future self that maintains your sense of identity without too much disruption can help you feel more tied to that self.

Wilson has also had study participants write a letter back, from their future self in response to their present self. ‘Thinking about the perspective of the future self was actually more effective than just thinking about it from one perspective alone,’ Wilson says. The dialogue between future and present made the relationship stronger.

During the process of writing a letter, you can also spend time vividly picturing your future self. In a series of studies published in 2011, Hershfield and colleagues used virtual reality to show people digitally created, ‘older’ versions of themselves. In one study, the researchers found that the people who interacted with their virtual future selves were more likely to take a later monetary reward over a smaller immediate one. In a similar experiment, when people saw age-progressed images of themselves, they promised more money to a long-term savings account, compared with those who saw a current picture of themselves. Other experiments showed increased retirement-account contributions after people saw a picture of their older selves.

You could upload a current photo into an ‘ageing’ app, or use a filter that makes you look older. But it may be enough to simply imagine yourself as older, to envision the facial features that might remain similar over time and, importantly, to keep in mind that your future self ‘is a living, breathing individual who is dependent on the choices of the current self’, as Hershfield says.

Redraw, or erase, the boundary line between the present and the future

The American psychologist William James called the present moment the ‘specious present’, arguing that there was no such thing as ‘right now’ – it’s a subjective experience. So, when do you feel like the present ends? This is a question that Hershfield and his colleague Sam J Maglio have asked study participants. Five years is far enough away that it probably seems like ‘the future’, but what about five seconds from now? Five minutes? Five days?

People vary on when they think the present ends and the future begins – and, according to Hershfield, those who generally believe that the future starts sooner rather than later are more likely to make future-oriented choices. When people believe the present moment lasts longer, they feel less emotion about the future. But if the future seems closer, or if the start of the future seems closer, then there may be more motivation to ensure that the self on the other side of the present/future border is taken care of.

It could be helpful to think less rigidly about the boundaries between the present and the future, to blur the lines between the you that exists now and the one that has yet to be. In their study, Hershfield and Maglio used messaging that emphasised that the future was imminent in advertising a financial wellbeing course. One flyer said: ‘The present is short and the future starts sooner: acquire better financial habits today!’ (while a contrasting one said: ‘The present is long and the future starts later: acquire better financial habits today!’) Students who were exposed to the notion that the future was starting soon were more eager to sign up.

It may take some simple reminders of this sort to feel more tethered to the future. Hershfield has suggested an ‘elevated perspective’ on time: instead of dwelling only in the present, with the future far off, consider that ‘the past, present, and future are equally visible and subjectively relevant.’ Thinking about time in this way could help you appreciate the present moment while also recognising that the future is closer than it might seem, and intimately tied to the present. Like Annie Dillard put it in The Writing Life (1989): ‘How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.’

Think of your future self as a close loved one

In L A Paul’s book, Transformative Experience (2014), she argues that we simply can’t know what it’s like to live through certain moments until we experience them. You can try to imagine or anticipate what it might be like to have a child, say, or to live in a new place – but there’s a pool of knowledge that you can’t access until you’ve undergone the transformation and really lived it.

‘It can be hard to project ourselves into the future and really imagine: what is the right decision to make for this future self, down the road?’ Wilson says. The future is, by definition, hypothetical, she says. You should try to feel more connected to your future self. But also, there could be some version of your future self that’s just always going to be unknowable until you arrive at it.

To help you allow for these unknowns, you can try to think of your future self as you would a close loved one, such as a child, spouse or parent. You can’t know everything about them, and you expect them to change over time in ways you can’t control, but you’re still committed to that person. You can care about and feel a sense of responsibility and duty towards your future self in the way you care about those closest to you.

‘The reality is that they change and we change over time, too,’ Hershfield says. ‘And in the best relationships, we’re still committed to them.’ He advises us to ‘own the fact that we can never truly know our future selves’, but notes that ‘it would be irrational to not try to plan in some way.’

We do eventually turn into our future selves, which makes the relationship unlike any other. One day, you will wake up and be your future self. In a sense, you do this every day – becoming the self of tomorrow, from yesterday’s perspective. This perpetual becoming could make it the closest relationship you have to foster. When he met his past self, Borges wrote: ‘I, who have never been a father, felt a wave of love for that poor young man who was dearer to me than a child of my own flesh and blood.’

Original article here

26 Jul 2023
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The Chords of the Universe

My interest in the relations between music and mathematics started at an early age. My grandfather played his violin for me when I was about five years old, and I still remember it clearly. Later he explained to me various topics in his physics book, from which he himself had studied when he was young. In the chapter on sound there was a musical staff with the note A, and next to it the number 440, the frequency of that note. That image must have engraved itself on my mind – my first glimpse into the role that numbers play in music. While my grandfather’s violin is no more with us, his tuning fork did survive; although rusted, it still faithfully vibrates at 440 cycles per second. I recently gave it to my percussionist grandson. I hope he will one day pass it on to his grandchildren.

But it is not enough just to study music: one must play it. I started my musical journey playing a recorder. There are numerous Baroque-era works for this simple instrument, but for an appreciation of classical music (‘classical’ here meaning the era of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, roughly 1750 to 1830), a recorder just won’t do, so I took up the clarinet. This instrument was Mozart’s favourite wind instrument, and he wrote for it – or rather for his friend, the clarinetist Anton Stadler – some of his most sublime music. The clarinet has the unusual feature that when you open the thumb hole on the back of the instrument, the sound goes up not by an octave, as with most woodwinds, but by a twelfth – an octave and a fifth. This greatly intrigued me and made me dwell into the acoustics of wind instruments. I was fascinated – and still am – by the fact that a column of air can vibrate and produce a musical sound just like a violin string, even though the vibrations are totally invisible: you can hear them, but you cannot see them.

Music and mathematics have always been intimately intertwined. Anyone who has ever played a musical instrument is aware of the presence of mathematics on every page of the score – from the time signature that sets a piece’s rhythm, to the metronome number that determines the speed at which the piece should be played; and, of course, the very act of playing music requires us to count 1, 2, 3… and arrange these numbers into groups, called bars or measures. So it comes as no surprise that mathematics has had a significant influence on music. Much less known is that the influence extends both ways.

The Greek philosopher Pythagoras, active during the 6th century BCE, might have been the first to uncover a quantitative relation between music and mathematics. Experimenting with taut strings, he found that shortening the effective length of a string to one-half its original length raises the pitch of its sound by an agreeable interval, an octave. Other ratios of string lengths produce smaller intervals: 2:3 corresponds to the musical interval of a fifth (so called because it is the fifth note up the scale from the base note); 3:4 corresponded to a fourth; and so on. Pythagoras also discovered that multiplying two ratios is equivalent to adding their intervals: (2:3) x (3:4) = 1:2, so a fifth plus a fourth equals an octave. In doing so, he unknowingly came up with the first logarithmic law in history.

The octave, the fifth and the fourth produced pleasing combinations of tones, or consonants, whereas more complicated ratios, such as 9:8 or 15:16, led to dissonances. This revelation made a deep impression on the Pythagoreans, prompting their belief that everything in the Universe – from the laws of musical harmony to the motion of the Sun, Moon and the five planets – was governed by simple ratios of whole numbers. Number rules the Universe was the Pythagorean motto. It would dominate scientific thought for the next two millennia.

In Greek tradition, music ranked equal in status to arithmetic, geometry and spherics (astronomy), which together comprised the quadrivium, the core curriculum of four disciplines that a learned person was expected to master. We should note, however, that the word ‘arithmetic’ had a different meaning to the Pythagoreans than it has today: it meant number theory, the study of the properties of integers, rather than the practical skills needed to compute with numbers. Likewise, Pythagoreans regarded the music component of the quadrivium as referring to music theory – the study of harmony – rather than the practice of playing music. This was typical of the aloof attitude of the Pythagoreans to all things practical. Theirs was a perfect universe, governed by notions of beauty, symmetry and harmony, but removed from mundane considerations. It might have been one reason why they kept all their discussions secret, fearing that they would be ridiculed by their fellow citizens, the vast majority of whom had to toil daily to eke out a living.

Though no Pythagorean writings survive – if they left any at all (everything we know about them comes from much later writers) – the Pythagorean legacy lasted well over 2,000 years. Number rules the Universe became a rallying motto to generations of scientists and philosophers, who sought to explain the mysteries of the cosmos on the basis of musical ratios or simple, elegant geometric figures. The planets, for example, had to move around the Earth in perfect circular orbits; it was inconceivable to the Greeks that any shape other than the perfectly symmetric circle could rule. It was all part of their grand view of a Universe ruled by beauty and harmony – their musica universalis, or music of the spheres.

Among the last Pythagoreans was the eminent German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), considered one of the fathers of modern astronomy. At once a devout mystic and an ardent believer in Copernicus’s heliocentric system, Kepler spent more than half his life trying to derive the laws of planetary motion from those of musical harmony. He believed that each planet, in its motion around the Sun, plays a melody that our ears are unable to hear, being below the range of audible frequencies (not to mention that it was produced in the vacuum of space, where sound cannot propagate). He even assigned each planet a celestial tune and wrote it down on the musical staff – resurrecting the celebrated musica universalis. It was only after decades of following this blind path that Kepler finally abandoned the Greek circular orbits and replaced them with ellipses.

Every periodic function can be written as an infinite sum of pure sine waves

Half a century after Kepler, Isaac Newton formulated his universal law of gravitation, thereby providing a rational, mathematical explanation for the planetary orbits, and adding the parabola and hyperbola to the possible orbits of the celestial bodies. But he too was obsessed with musical ratios, devising a ‘palindromic scale’ in which the intervals were the same whether you went up or down: 9:8, 16:15, 10:9, 9:8, 10:9, 16:15, 9:8. He compared it to the seven rainbow colours of the spectrum.

The newly invented differential and integral calculus, developed independently by Newton and G W Leibniz in the decade 1666-1676, made it finally possible to put the relations between numerical ratios and musical harmony on a firm mathematical basis. One of the outstanding problems that the calculus was able to tackle was to find the exact shape of a vibrating string and the nature of the sound it produces. Was it the sum of many – perhaps infinitely many – sine waves or pure tones, each with its own frequency and amplitude? Or was it a combination of waves propagating back and forth along the string’s length? In what became known as the ‘Great String Debate’, four of Europe’s foremost mathematicians – Daniel Bernoulli, Leonhard Euler, Jean le Rond D’Alembert and Joseph Louis Lagrange – argued passionately over this issue, and laid the foundation of post-calculus analysis along the way.

But the definitive solution to the string problem had to wait another half-century, when the eminent French mathematical physicist Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) showed that every periodic function, subject to certain restrictions, can be written as an infinite sum of pure sine waves, whose frequencies are integral multiples of the fundamental, lowest frequency of the function. These individual sine waves are known as overtones or harmonics; they are the building blocks of all sound, and they give each sound its characteristic tone colour, or timbre – the quality that distinguished the sound of a violin from that of a clarinet, even when they play the same note.

As my musical interests expanded, I gradually ventured beyond the Baroque-Classical-Romantic period (roughly 1600 to 1900), and turned to modern music. In the 1960s there was still much talk about Arnold Schoenberg and his atonal or serial music. He devised it in the early 1900s, convinced that it should replace a sacred cornerstone of classical music: the principle of tonality. Tonality required that a piece of music should centre around a given key, called the tonic, such as C major or G minor. Granted, as the piece developed, it could stray from its designated key to related or even remote keys, but ultimately it would return to its home key, the tonic. The key thus served as a musical frame of reference, in which every note had a specific relation to the tonic; for example, in the key of C major, the note G (a fifth above C) was the ‘dominant’ note, while the note F below C was the ‘subdominant’.

But in the second half of the 19th century, composers gradually began to deviate from a strict adherence to the principle of tonality, making it difficult to sense where the music stood in relation to the tonic. Schoenberg, believing that tonality had run its course, was determined to supplant it with the series, or tone row. In a series, each of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale of semitones appears exactly once; a note could be repeated only after the series had been completed. This gave a composer a staggering number of combinations to choose from: 1 x 2 x 3 x … x 12 = 479,001,600, to be exact (not counting shifts by octaves, which Schoenberg allowed). In serial music, complete democracy ruled: no single note held any preferred status over the others. Every note was related only to its immediate predecessor in the series; gone were the roles that different notes had played in relation to the tonic. At its heart it was a mathematical system, and Schoenberg was determined to impose it on music.

As a mathematician, I see a striking similarity between Schoenberg’s serial music and Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, as though a parallel dismantling of the canonical structures of music and physics were happening simultaneously. In 1905, Einstein gave the ether its coup de grâce: there is no ether, no single universal frame of reference at absolute rest; rather, every observer has his or her own reference system, related only to its infinitesimally close neighbouring system in spacetime. One cannot fail to note the similarity to Schoenberg’s atonal music, in which each note is related only to its immediate predecessor in the series. You might call it relativistic music.

Schoenberg worked on the design of a musical typewriter; Einstein invented a refrigerator

Schoenberg and Einstein were almost exact contemporaries, born within five years of each other to middle-class Jewish families. Their mothers, both named Pauline, were steeped in classical music, so the two youngsters were raised in music-loving homes. They started their careers as low-level employees – Schoenberg as a bank clerk in Vienna, Einstein as a clerk at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. At a young age, both turned their backs on traditional Judaism, only to return to it late in life, having been deeply affected by the rise of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust that followed. Both men were essentially self-taught: Schoenberg never got a formal musical education, while Einstein (though he graduated from the University of Zurich) got his education by studying the great physics treatises of the 19th century on his own.

Following the Nazi rise to power in 1933, both men emigrated to the United States. Schoenberg immediately got rid of the German umlaut of his original name, Schönberg, while Einstein had to get used to the American pronunciation of his name (pronounced ‘Einshtein’ in German). Both passionately pursued their hobbies – Schoenberg as a painter and avid tennis player, Einstein playing his iconic violin and enjoying an outing on his little sailboat. They also liked to tinker with gadgets: Schoenberg worked on the design of a musical typewriter, while Einstein, with his fellow physicist Leo Szilard, invented and patented a refrigerator.

Following the Nazi dismissal of all Jewish professors from German universities, both men worked tirelessly to help displaced academics find jobs in their countries of refuge. Neither Schoenberg nor Einstein ever set foot on European soil again (although Schoenberg’s remains were buried in his native Vienna), and they died within the same time-span that separated them at birth, in their 76th year.

The revolutionary ideas of Einstein and Schoenberg came against the backdrop of groundbreaking changes in other fields, all happening as the 19th century turned into the 20th. Gustav Mahler premiered his First Symphony, Titan (1889), conducted by the composer himself. Sigmund Freud published his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Pablo Picasso entered his ‘Blue Period’ (1901-1904), and Max Planck introduced into physics a new concept that would soon revolutionise all of science: the quantum of energy. If all that weren’t enough, David Hilbert, Germany’s foremost mathematician at the turn of the century, challenged the Second International Congress of Mathematicians, held in Paris in 1900, with a list of 23 unsolved problems whose solutions he regarded as of utmost importance to the future growth of mathematics – as indeed they would prove to be.

Whether these developments had any effect on Einstein’s and Schoenberg’s work is difficult to say, but it is revealing that several of the actors in this new world were actively involved with music: Einstein’s violin immediately comes to mind; Planck was an accomplished pianist; and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg seriously considered pursuing a career in music before turning to quantum mechanics.

In his quest to unify music and mathematics under a single universal umbrella, perhaps Pythagoras was right after all.

Original article here

23 Jul 2023
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8 Natural Ways to Repel Insects Without Bug Spray

Unless you’re an entomologist (and on the clock), you probably hate being surrounded by bugs, especially if they bite. While these creatures play important roles in the environment, they can be a real nuisance to humans in the outdoors, and some of these bugs do transmit diseases. Your favorite store-bought bug repellent can keep them away for awhile, but what happens when the DEET can runs dry? Worse yet, what about when you’re in a survival situation and the bugs won’t leave you alone? Thankfully, there are some natural options to beat the bugs without all the chemicals.

Make Your Own Repellent

While it’s not the strongest option in the world, you can make your own bug repellent from essential oils and other household products. Make a trip to a health food store or similar shop for the essential oils (or order them online). Then you’ll be ready to blend and bottle your own bug repellent. You’ll need:

A one-quart spray bottle
1 pint distilled white vinegar
1 pint water
25 drops of tea tree oil
25 drops of lavender essential oil

Add the ingredients into a clean spray bottle and shake well. Spray your boots, clothing and skin with a generous coating before heading outside. Reapply every two to four hours for best results.

Check Often for Ticks

Ticks are more than a nuisance for our dogs. These troublesome arachnids are found in every habitat in the U.S., and we host more than 90 of the world’s 900 tick species. Many of these species pose a significant threat to outdoor enthusiasts, transmitting diseases such as Lyme disease, anaplasmosis, babesiosis, Powassan disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF), ehrlichiosis, STARI (Southern tick-associated rash illness), tularemia and other diseases. Spot them by wearing light colored clothing and doing frequent “tick checks” throughout the day. Remove embedded ticks quickly to limit your risk of contracting a tick-borne disease. Use tweezers or a tick removal tool to grab the tick by the mouth, pinching your own skin if necessary, then pull it straight out.

Watch Where You Put Your Gear

Scorpions, spiders, centipedes and other venomous creatures may consider your unattended boots, gloves, or other garments as a fine new home, especially if they have been undisturbed for a few hours. Then guess what happens when you suddenly pick these items up and put them on? The animal gets pressed against your skin and it bites or stings you. The venom can range from mild to intense, depending on the creature that you’ve disturbed and its size.

Take scorpions as an example. With more than a thousand known scorpion species in the world, there are plenty we’ll encounter in our travels. Mercifully, there are only 25 known to carry venom that would kill a human. From that group, there’s just one that lives in the continental U.S. It’s the Arizona bark scorpion (Centruroides sculpturatus) and its venom is on the low end of the spectrum (fatalities are very rare, usually occurring in small children and those with health problems).

So how do we avoid the sting or bite? Don’t leave your clothing, gloves or footwear on the ground or outside overnight. Don’t hang your jacket on a tree. Don’t give them a chance to crawl into your open backpack. Gear that’s not being worn should be put away, closed up or otherwise moved out of the creature’s reach. Yes, it’s a pain, but it’s less painful than getting bitten or stung.

Use Wild Plants as Repellents

Depending on your environment, there may be many wild plants which contain bug repelling compounds. Some of these may be native species and others may have been brought to this continent for various purposes. Either way, it could be very helpful to learn about the plant species that can ward off pests in the outdoors. Before you start scrubbing wild plants all over yourself, use a wild plant field guide to make 100 percent positive identification of any plant or plant part.

Paw Paw (Asimina triloba): This native tree species is commonly found along rivers and waterways throughout the eastern U.S. It bears large tropical-looking fruits (edible to people) that ripen in late summer. The trees also bear large ovate leaves which can be crushed and wiped on your skin as a useful insect repellent. The leaves are at their best in the spring and early summer, when their strong scent can remind us of fresh asphalt.

Catnip (Nepeta cataria): This common mint family member is a non-native species, brought to these shores for more than just driving your cat insane. A tea from the leaves can have a calming effect in humans and the plant can repel mosquitoes and other flying insects. The easiest way to use the plant is to crush the fresh leaves and stems onto your skin and clothing.

Don’t Forget The Net

They don’t have to be expensive and they won’t be pretty. They might just save your sanity though, and block the transmission of disease. Mesh bug suits and netted headwear can block the bugs when they come on strong.

This is much more effective than wearing multiple layers of clothing, as some people do, or by applying buckets of bug repellent. Make sure your exposed skin is covered and eliminate all gaps in your mesh suit and headwear. The only thing worse than having multiple bugs flying around inside your head net is not having a head net in the first place. Consider a sleeping net too, as these save lives in parts of the world. Mosquitos are more than just bothersome, they can transmit the malaria parasite (plasmodium, which kills over 1 million people per year globally), and many different viruses that cause encephalitis and dangerous fevers (like chikungunya, dengue, yellow fever, St. Louis encephalitis, West Nile virus and Zika).

Smoke the Bugs Away

Some savvy fishermen know how to beat biting flies and other pests around the water. They smoke cheap (or very good) cigars when the air gets buggy. For non-smokers (and those who’ve run out of cigars), there are plenty of other options – ones that won’t get you hooked on nicotine. It turns out that any smoke can act like a natural bug repellent, though some are much better than others. Remember grandma’s cedar chest full of blankets? Cedar has long been known as a natural bug repellent and cedar bark is famous for smoldering (rather than bursting into flame). So a bundle of smoldering cedar bark can help to keep the bugs at bay, and it’s also a fine way to transport a fire in the form of embers (for example, if you were leaving one camp and moving to another).

Another option for smoke uses a plant that normally grows by the water, like cattails. The dead brown seed heads can be found atop the tall grass-like plants. Grab one of these “burnt corn dogs” and apply an open flame to one end of it. Once smoldering, smoke will begin to drift out of it. Place the seed head upwind from you with the glowing end into the wind, and sit where the smoke can bathe you. Similarly, a fireproof container of crumbly rotten wood (aka punk wood) can also be lit to provide smoke. This is especially useful for “smudging” primitive survival shelters. Place the container of burning punk wood on the bare dirt floor of your shelter and allow the smoke to fill the structure. This will drive out insects, spiders and other unwelcomed guests. Repeat every few days in warmer weather, weekly or as needed in cooler weather.

Cover Up With Mud

You’re really serious if you go to this is extreme, but certain bug-infested environments may require this drastic solution. When smoke and wild plant scents aren’t strong enough to keep the bugs off your tender skin, you can create a physical barrier by coating your skin (and any thin clothing) with a layer of mud. Not only is this an effective camouflage against humans (remember the movie Rambo?), the mud suit is also effective when hiding from bugs. With the mud fresh and wet (and after it dries into a crusty shell), you’ll be wearing a surprisingly effective barrier that most bugs will not try to penetrate. It’s also useful for hiding your scent, which could come in handy while hunting.

Avoid Chigger Habitats

Sometimes, avoidance is the best way to win a fight. Chiggers (red bugs and harvest mites) are tiny biting arachnids that are found globally. Here in the U.S., there are only two species that impact us as outdoor enthusiasts. Eutrombicula alfreddugèsi is the main culprit, and the recently hatched larvae are the troublemakers. Too small to see with the naked eye, these hatchlings are hungry for any blood they can find (human or animal). Though they don’t transmit diseases, the intense itching of their bites can last for weeks. This has led to the popular (and incorrect) belief that these creatures burrow under your skin. In actuality, the larvae inject an enzyme into your skin, dissolving some skin cells (for them to drink) and hardening other skin cells (to make a “drinking straw” known as a stylostome). It’s this transformed tissue that causes such a severe itch, not a bug under your skin.

The best defense is to avoid likely breeding grounds where the larvae would be plentiful. Since they dry out easily, damp grassy areas, swampy spots, low lying and riverine environments are hot spots. Avoid these in late spring and early summer. If you do suspect you’ve wandered through their domain (due to a sensation of tiny prickly bites under your clothes), change your clothing immediately. They can crawl around in your clothes for hours, biting you in many different places. If you only had one set of clothes (say, in a survival setting), take the clothing off and hang them to dry for 30 minutes by a hot fire (socks and underwear too). This dry heat will kill the larvae.

Original article here

20 Jul 2023
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Total Recall: The People Who Never Forget

If you ask Jill Price to remember any day of her life, she can come up with an answer in a heartbeat. What was she doing on 29 August 1980? “It was a Friday, I went to Palm Springs with my friends, twins, Nina and Michelle, and their family for Labour Day weekend,” she says. “And before we went to Palm Springs, we went to get them bikini waxes. They were screaming through the whole thing.” Price was 14 years and eight months old.

What about the third time she drove a car? “The third time I drove a car was January 10 1981. Saturday. Teen Auto. That’s where we used to get our driving lessons from.” She was 15 years and two weeks old.

The first time she heard the Rick Springfield song Jessie’s Girl? “March 7 1981.” She was driving in a car with her mother, who was yelling at her. She was 16 years and two months old.

Price was born on 30 December 1965 in New York City. Her first clear memories start from around the age of 18 months. Back then, she lived with her parents in an apartment across the street from Roosevelt Hospital in Midtown Manhattan. She remembers the screaming ambulances and traffic, how she used to love climbing on the living room couch and staring out of the window down 9th Avenue.

When she was five years and three months old, her family – her father, a talent agent with William Morris who counted Ray Charles among his clients; her mother, a former variety show dancer, and her baby brother – moved to South Orange, New Jersey. They lived in a three-storey, red brick colonial house with a big backyard and huge trees, the kind of place people left the city for. Jill loved it.

When she was seven years old, her father was offered a job with Columbia Pictures Television in Los Angeles. He spent a year commuting back and forth from California to New Jersey, until he and her mother decided to move the family out there in the spring of 1974. By 1 July 1974, when Jill was eight and a half, they were living in a rented house in Los Angeles. That was the day, she says, her “brain snapped”.

She had always had a talent for remembering. She had also always dreaded change. Knowing that after they left New Jersey, nothing could ever be the same, Price tried to commit to memory the world she was being ripped away from. She made lists, took pictures, kept every artifact, every passed note and ticket stub. If this was a conscious effort to train her memory, it worked, perhaps better than she ever imagined.

Price was the first person ever to be diagnosed with what is now known as highly superior autobiographical memory, or HSAM, a condition she shares with around 60 other known people. She can remember most of the days of her life as clearly as the rest of us remember the recent past, with a mixture of broad strokes and sharp detail. Now 51, Price remembers the day of the week for every date since 1980; she remembers what she was doing, who she was with, where she was on each of these days. She can actively recall a memory of 20 years ago as easily as a memory of two days ago, but her memories are also triggered involuntarily.

It is, she says, like living with a split screen: on the left side is the present, on the right is a constantly rolling reel of memories, each one sparked by the appearance of present-day stimuli. With so many memories always at the ready, Price says, it can be maddening: virtually anything she sees or hears can be a potential trigger.

Before Price, HSAM was a completely unknown condition. So what about the day she sent an email to a Dr James McGaugh at University of California, Irvine? That was 8 June 2000, a Thursday. Price was 34 years and five months old.

Dr. James McGaugh remembers that day too. At the time, he was director of UC Irvine’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, the research institute that he founded in 1983. In her email, Jill Price said that she had a problem with her memory. McGaugh responded almost immediately, explaining that he worked at a research institute and not a clinic, and that he’d be happy to direct her to somewhere she could find help.

Price’s reply was swift and unexpected. “Whenever I see a date flash on the television (or anywhere else for that matter), I automatically go back to that day and remember where I was, what I was doing, what day it fell on and on and on and on and on. It is non-stop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting … Most have called it a gift but I call it a burden. I run my entire life through my head every day and it drives me crazy!!!”

McGaugh was a little wary, but he was intrigued. He invited her to his office to talk.

On the morning of Saturday, 24 June 2000, Price woke up “so, so, so excited”. She watched Apple’s Way, an obscure, short-lived 1970s series being re-run on TV, and felt, for the first time in ages, relaxed. She asked her father whether she should take all of the diaries that she had been keeping since Monday, 24 August 1981. No, he said, don’t take them all – you’ll freak him out. She packed a bag with six years’ worth, stowed them in the boot of her car, and set off to meet McGaugh.

She drove the hour south from her home in Encino, California, where she lived with her parents, and met McGaugh outside the Qureshey Research Building on the UC Irvine campus. It was a cloudy day, unusual for southern California. As they walked up to his second-floor office, she was still excited.

For Christmas the previous year, McGaugh had received a massive coffee-table book called 20th Century Day by Day, featuring photographs and brief accounts of the biggest news stories of the past 100 years. To test Price’s memory, he and his assistant used the book to come up with questions that someone with amazing powers of recall might plausibly be able to answer, beginning around 1974, when Price said her ability to remember really started.

Sitting across from Price, McGaugh asked, “When did the Iranian hostage crisis begin?”

After a brief pause, she answered, “4 November 1979.”

“No, that’s not right,” he said. “It was 5 November.”

“It was 4 November,” she said.

He checked another source: Price was right; the book was wrong.

The rest of Price’s responses came just as quickly, confidently, and for the most part, correctly. What day did the Los Angeles police beat taxi driver Rodney King? Sunday, 3 March 1991. What happened on 16 August 1977? Elvis Presley died in his Graceland bathroom. It was a Tuesday. When did Bing Crosby die? Friday, 14 October 1977, on a golf course in Spain. Price heard it on the radio in the car while her mother drove her to soccer practice.

McGaugh had been studying memory and learning for decades and he had never seen or heard of anything like this. After they had eaten lunch, Price remembers saying goodbye to McGaugh as he stood on the curb outside the restaurant, “literally scratching his head”.

Driving back, Price felt a little deflated. “I came home and I was kind of annoyed, and my dad said, ‘What did you expect, you’d get an answer?’” she recalled. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah! And I thought I’d get a pill for it, too!’”

McGaugh is a big deal in memory research. His office at UC Irvine is situated across a courtyard from another building, McGaugh Hall, named in his honour. He has written more than 550 papers and books, many on his specialist subject of how we form long-term memories. In 2015 he received a Grawemeyer award, a significant recognition in the crowded field of psychology that comes with a $100,000 prize, for his contribution to understanding memory and emotion. The small plaque sits on a shelf on his desk. Thumbtacked to a bulletin board next to his computer monitor is a colour photograph of McGaugh – trim grey beard, square glasses, academic robes – standing behind President Barack Obama during UCI’s graduation ceremony in 2014. The funny thing about that picture, McGaugh told me when I visited him last autumn, is that the photographer was actually trying to get a picture of him, not the president, for an article in the Los Angeles Times about McGaugh’s 50th anniversary at the university. “This is the absolute truth, but no one will believe it!” he said, chuckling. .

McGaugh, who is now 85 and closing in on retirement, first began studying memory in the 1950s. By the time Price contacted him, his research focused on showing that the more emotionally provocative an experience, the more likely the neurobiological systems involved in making memory will ensure that you remember it. When something even slightly stimulating happens, positive or negative, it causes the release of adrenal stress hormones, which in turn activate the amygdala. The amygdala then projects to other brain regions that the thing that has just happened is important and needs to be remembered. It is through this system, McGaugh explained, that the strength of our memories is controlled.

McGaugh had spent his professional career studying strongly formed memories, and Price seemed to have the strongest memories he had ever encountered. McGaugh’s earlier work had changed how we understand the mechanisms of memory, and his interest in Price was about more than just understanding her extraordinary abilities of recollection. He hoped that her unique condition could teach us something new about how we make and store memories. “The big pay-off on this,” he said, “is understanding how memory works.”

Still, he started from a position of scepticism. “In interrogating her, I started with the scientific assumption that she couldn’t do it,” he told me. And even though Price showed that she could, repeatedly, McGaugh was still unmoved. “Yeah, it got my attention, but I didn’t say, ‘Wow.’ We had to do a lot more. So we did a lot more.” (In Price’s recollection, however, her ability to remember “really freaked Dr McGaugh out.”)

After his first meeting with Price, McGaugh assembled a team to determine the depth and breadth of her memory. Elizabeth Parker, a neuropsychologist, mapped Price’s ability to learn and remember, and Larry Cahill, a neurobiologist, helped to analyse the results. Over the next five years, Price was given a battery of standardised memory, IQ and learning tests, as well as a series of specially devised ones. For example, they asked Price, who is Jewish, to write down the date of every Easter from 1980 to 2003 – she got only one wrong and in that case, she was off by only two days. Price was also able to say what she had done on those days. When the researchers asked her to do the same exercise again two years later, she not only corrected the date she had got wrong, but also gave the same answers for the personal details (a sample of those details: 17 April 1987 – “vomit up carrots”; 12 April 1998: “house smells like ham”).

Confirming whether or not autobiographical memories are accurate is usually a tricky job but, McGaugh said, “fortunately, she kept a diary”. Price had begun recording the details of her life in earnest on 24 August 1980, during a high-school romance she wanted to remember. She would make at least one, usually more, entry each day, comprising of short references to the most salient details of the day. Her journals were kept on calendars, on typing paper held together with binder clips, in notebooks, on index cards, even scrawled on the wallpaper in her childhood bedroom.

For Price, writing down her memories meant that they were “real”, part of a permanent historical record independent of herself. (When she dies, she told me, she wants her journals buried with her, or blown up in the desert.) They also functioned as a way to pin down the swirling mess in her head, to organise her thoughts. Price says she does not re-read her journals, and given the random dates the researchers threw at her, there is no reason to assume she could have prepared for their questions. The UCI researchers cross-referenced what she said she did with what was written in her diary; in some cases, they were also able to verify memories with her mother.

Over time, it became clear that Price’s autobiographical memory was potentially unprecedented. But when it came to remembering details that did not relate to her personally, Price proved no better than average. She recalled the date the Iran hostage crisis began because, as a self-described “news junkie”, she had made that detail part of her personal narrative of the day it happened. School, she says, was “torture” for her – she couldn’t remember facts and figures – but she’s unbelievably good at trivia about television of the 60s and 70s, her nostalgia years. Other details, if they didn’t relate to her or her interests, were forgotten: once, she was asked to close her eyes and recall what her two interviewers, who she’d spent several hours with that day, were wearing – she couldn’t. When asked to look at a bank of random numbers and memorise their order in a given period of time, she laughed and said it was impossible. Price’s memory is as selective as yours or mine, storing the things that she finds important – she is just a good deal better at retaining and retrieving those memories.

There was very little scientific literature about superior forms of memory, and none about a memory like Jill Price’s. Much of what did exist was about people who had the ability to memorise pi out to 22,514 decimal places or remember the order of a randomly shuffled deck of cards. The scientific consensus about these abilities was that they were the result of practice and acquired skill – strategy, rather than innate ability. Other people who are able to name the day of the week for any given date are also able to do it for dates outside of their lifetimes, and they tend to be autistic. Price can’t and is not. There was no one – as far as the UCI team could find – who had ever exhibited anything like Price’s automatic ability to recall her personal memories.

On 13 August 2003, three years after she first came to Irvine, McGaugh, Parker, and Cahill presented their initial findings on Jill Price’s memory to the UCI medical community in a large open forum. Price was invited to exhibit her memory, to show how she could “see” dates and memories in her head, and to explain how she conceives time: for her, each year is like a circle, with January in the 11 o’clock position, and the months progressing in an anti-clockwise motion. She was nervous about speaking in front of a large audience, especially of doctors – she has a phobia of doctors, she says – but it was the beginning of her seeing a “bigger picture” reason for her years of suffering: scientific progress.

Two years later, the UCI researchers asked Price to read a draft of the paper they had written about her before they submitted it. In it, they described Price as both the “warden and prisoner” of her memories. “I thought, God, if I didn’t know better, it sounds like this person has brain damage or something,” she said of “AJ”, the pseudonym they used for her. “I cried. I wept while I read it. Someone had finally heard me. Because I’ve spent my whole life screaming at the top of my lungs and nobody has heard anything.”

“A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering” was published by the neuropsychology journal Neurocase in February 2006. “We made the mistake of calling it ‘hyperthymesia’” – from the Greek thymesis, remembering – “which was a terrible idea, because when you name it in that way, it sounds as if you know what it is,” McGaugh said. In truth, all they had, in Price, was a data point of one, a lot of description, and no clear understanding of the mechanisms behind her memory. What they were about to get, however, was more people like Jill Price.

Price remembers 12 March 2006 as a very important day. “That was the last day that my life was my own,” she told me. The following morning, the first newspaper article about the discovery of “hyperthymesia” came out in the Orange County Register. By that afternoon, McGaugh’s assistant had already been contacted by five more media outlets who wanted to interview Price. A month later, the university was getting so many calls about Price that it asked her to hire a publicist to handle all the requests. (Price, who was still known to the public only as AJ, invented a publicist and fielded all the queries herself. “I had control over what was happening. For a year, nobody knew they were talking to me,” she says, “it was really quite hysterical.”) .

Almost immediately, emails also began to trickle in to McGaugh’s office from people who believed that they or someone they knew had the same condition. One email even pointed out that the scientists at UC Irvine were not the first to find someone with a memory like this – an 1871 article in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy described the curious case of Daniel McCartney, then a 54-year-old blind man living in Ohio who could remember the day of the week, the weather, what he was doing, and where he was for any date back to 1 January 1827, when he was nine years and four months old.

Dozens of people contacted McGaugh’s lab, where his assistant handled the first round of vetting, putting potential candidates through the same public events date test that McGaugh had initially given Price. The second person verified as having the condition was Brad Williams, a radio announcer in Wisconsin whose brother contacted McGaugh in 2007 after coming across an article about the UCI research. The third was Rick Baron, whose sister had read about “AJ” in online reports.

The fourth was Bob Petrella, a standup comic turned writer and TV producer for reality programmes such as The Deadliest Catch. Petrella had known since adolescence that his memory was different to other people’s, but he never thought it was all that unusual. “I just thought it was like being a redhead or being left-handed,” he told me when we met in Los Angeles in October.

Petrella sought out the UCI team after a friend suggested, on 19 June 2007, that he should learn the science behind his memory. He was referred to Elizabeth Parker, the neuropsychologist who had co-written the original paper on hyperthymesia. They met several times. After testing him, she confirmed that yes, Petrella had it, and sent him to McGaugh for further study. He met McGaugh and Cahill for the first time over lunch on 28 June 2008 (a “beautiful day”), where McGaugh quizzed him on dates just as he had done with Jill Price.

For the scientists, the research was exciting, but there was a concern as well, that it might all be a waste of time: given that such a tiny number of people with the condition had been identified, what could they definitively say about the condition? And what could this unique group reveal about memory? The only way to move forward was to continue testing the existing subjects and hope for more. By 2012, researchers had only identified six confirmed cases of what had been renamed highly superior autobiographical memory, or HSAM. (“Hyperthymesia”, McGaugh said, sounded “like a venereal disease”.) That’s when the news magazine programme 60 Minutes came calling.

In August 2010, 60 Minutes interviewed the “memory wizards” Bob Petrella, Brad Williams, Rick Baron, Louise Owen, and the actress Marilu Henner, best known for her role on the 1970s sitcom Taxi, for a segment entitled “Endless Memory”. (Price was not involved; by this time, she was no longer anonymous, having published a memoir in 2008, but she had begun to sour on media appearances, which she felt reduced her condition to a “sideshow”, and she has never met any of the other people with the condition.)

It was the first time that the HSAM subjects had met anyone like themselves and, watching the show today, the shock and delight in their mutual recognition is evident. When they first met on camera, there was a lot of hugging. Later, when quizzed on the date of a San Francisco earthquake, they give the answer almost in unison, some of them grinning. The programme aired on 19 December 2010 – a Sunday night – and was seen by nearly 19 million people.

After the programme was over, McGaugh said: “I turned on my computer and I had over 600 emails.” Most were from people who believed they or someone they knew had HSAM. McGaugh spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day responding to the emails. Graduate and undergraduate students were pressed into service to staff a phone bank, using the public events quiz to screen callers. Most were rejected, but a small group were invited to UCI for more testing. It is a measure of just how rare HSAM is that by 2011, even after millions of people had heard about it, researchers had identified only 22 people with the condition.

In May 2012, the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory published a follow-up study by UCI neuroscience graduate student Aurora LePort and neurobiologist Dr Craig Stark, then the director of the UCI Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. It was now nearly 12 years since Price first reached out to McGaugh, but researchers were only fractionally closer to finding the answer she was looking for.

In order to figure out how HSAM worked, researchers first needed to understand what it was and was not. LePort’s paper, the second to be published on the subject, established that Price and the 10 others in the study were not just high achievers on a spectrum of “good” to “bad” memory, they were in a separate, outlying class by themselves. The HSAM subjects turned out to be far better than people with average memories at recalling long-past autobiographical data; in memories that could be verified, they were correct 87% of the time. And the paper was able to offer some clues as to why they could do what they do.

For example, most of the HSAM subjects described mental systems that would seemingly improve retrieval, sorting memories chronologically or categorically (as in, every 15 April as far back as they could remember). This date-based structure seemed to help them organise their memories, as though they were tagging them for easy reference. Significantly, research shows that people with average memories are bad at temporally placing remembered events – we don’t have a sense of whether that thing happened two weeks ago or two months ago. (It is important to note here, as LePort, McGaugh, and Stark all did, that their research is limited by what they, as investigators, can verify as a real memory. Dates are the easiest and perhaps surest way to do that. “Everything we do is built around the ability to date. So are there people who have strong autobiographical memory who simply don’t bother to date them?” McGaugh said. “We’re missing them.”)

All of the HSAM subjects reported that they enjoyed replaying their memories in their minds, challenging themselves to remember days and events. When Jill Price is blow-drying her hair, she said, she flips through her memories of, say, every 4 October she can remember. “I’ll just do like the last 40 years in my head, the last 42 years in my head,” she said. “And then I’ll turn to an imaginary person in my head and say, ‘Now you do that. Go.’” When Bob Petrella is stuck in traffic, he scrolls through memories of that date, catalogues the best Saturdays in June he’s ever had, or tries to remember every day from 2002.

The researchers also noted that most of the HSAM subjects exhibited obsessive behaviours. Rick Baron used to keep every banknote in alphabetical order by the name of city of the Federal Reserve Bank from which it was issued. Price has a storage space jammed with neatly organised collection of personal artefacts that she couldn’t let go of – dolls and toys, dozens of Beanie Babies, tapes of songs she recorded off the radio. Bob Petrella used to clean his groceries with an antibacterial wipe when he got home from the grocery store. “There was a nice positive correlation there, showing that the better their memory, the more OCD they were,” LePort said, adding that it makes sense: if subjects are exhibiting obsessive behaviours generally, then they might also be obsessively recalling their memories, rehearsing and therefore retrenching them, making them stronger. Every time they access that memory, it is easier because they have done it before – repetition is one of the surest ways to memorise information.

There were also neuro-physical differences between HSAM subjects and people with average memories. Examination of their brain scans showed that HSAM subjects exhibited structural differences in areas of the brain associated with autobiographical memory creation: increases in the parahippocampal gyrus, for example – an area that some studies show is engaged during the recollection of emotional memories – and increases in the uncinate fascicle, the bridge between the frontal and temporal cortices that transmits information and is involved in episodic memory retention.

But none of these findings fully explains what enables people with HSAM to remember so much. After all, correlation is not causation. Whether their mental organisational systems helped the HSAM subjects to retain memories or whether they needed to develop elaborate systems because they could retain all those memories is unclear. Plenty of people rehearse their memories and don’t have HSAM, and plenty of people with OCD don’t have incredible recall of their autobiographical memories.

Even the structural differences in the brain, though significant, do not provide a satisfying explanation for why and how HSAM works. How we use our brain can change it physically – for example, a 2011 study of London taxi drivers found that the exercise of navigating the city’s dense streets led to an increase in grey matter volume in the mid-posterior hippocampus and an accompanying decrease in volume of the anterior hippocampus. Whether the differences in the HSAM brain is the cause of their memory or, as in the London taxi drivers, the result of it, or a combination of both, remains unclear. “Pulling that apart, in science, isn’t going to be easy. Especially when your population is so rare,” said Stark.

For both Price and Petrella, there is a specific point in their lives that they feel triggered their ability to remember things with extraordinary clarity. For Petrella, it was when he was seven years old and playing a deliriously fun game in his backyard with a childhood friend. The next day, Petrella invited his friend over to play it again, but they only played for a few minutes before getting bored. Petrella realised then that nothing ever stays the same and that it was important that he remember things before they changed. For Price, it was her family’s traumatic move to the West coast. In each case, Price and Petrella say they already had strong memories before this decisive moment, but after it, their ability to remember was transformed.

When I asked McGaugh what he thought of these backstory narratives, he was cautious. “How much of what they say is their own attempt at explanation for what exists as opposed to what really happened?” he asked. But Craig Stark is interested in those stories. He suggested that someone who feels anxiety about losing memories, the way Price and Petrella did, might be compelled to retain them, and therefore might think about them a lot.

Despite their amazing recall, however, there is one way that HSAM subjects are just like everyone else – they are just as prone to memory “distortions”, the editing, assumptions, conflation of time, and other discrepancies that are part and parcel of making memories.

In a study published in 2013, Dr Lawrence Patihis, a memory researcher at the University of Southern Mississippi working with scientists at UCI, asked 20 HSAM subjects and 38 people with standard memories to participate in a series of tests designed to assess their susceptibility to false memories. HSAM subjects were equally likely as the control group to claim words that had not appeared on a list had appeared, they showed a higher overall propensity to form false memories of a photographic slideshow, and they were equally likely to mistakenly report that they had seen non-existent video footage of the United 93 plane crash on 9/11.

The findings suggest that no one, not even a “memory wizard”, is immune to the reconstructive mechanisms that enable memory distortions. When people with average memory recall an experience, it is formed not only by what they think happened and how they felt at the time, but by what they know and feel now. “We’re pulling together everything in the present to come up with an approximation of the past, and that’s the same with HSAM people,” Patihis said. The findings were not popular with some of the HSAM subjects because, as Stark, a co-author on the paper, pointed out, having accurate memories is central to their identities.

But the findings square with two other important ideas. First, the initial process of encoding memories – that is, when the brain makes an experience into a memory, translating elements of that experience into a network of neurons and synaptic connections – seems no different for people with HSAM than for the rest of us.

In a study published in 2016, LePort and the other researchers tested the quality and quantity of autobiographical memories of HSAM and control groups at one week, one month, one year, and 10 years. At one week, both groups were the same in terms of the quality and quantity of information they recalled. After that first week, however, the controls’ powers of recall dropped off significantly, while HSAM people continued to be able to remember seemingly into perpetuity, with a much shallower forgetting curve. The evidence suggests that HSAM subjects form memories in much the same way as those of us with normal memories: like us, they make stronger memories of emotionally arousing experiences, and like us, they are prone to the same distortions in reconstruction.

The second idea is that however good they are at mentally representing and organising their memories, HSAM people don’t seem to be pulling up that information via a novel retrieval system. “It’s the same mechanism, it’s just better,” Stark, whose lab is now running most of the HSAM research, explained. This also implies that the thing HSAM people are doing differently to the rest of us happens somewhere in between the encoding of a memory and its retrieval – in the space where consolidation into a long-term memory takes place.

Testing that hypothesis is fairly straightforward: get HSAMs and controls into a functional MRI and ask them both to recall memories from about a week earlier, the time frame that both groups are performing at about the same level. “Are we thinking about it and reliving it in a different way?” said Stark. But that research is not happening – in part because of a lack of funding. HSAM is fascinating, but funding science for science’s sake is not popular in the US right now. Grant-giving institutions want to know what studying HSAM can do for us.

In 1953, 27-year-old Henry Molaison of Hartford, Connecticut, underwent a desperate surgery to cure his severe epilepsy. Drilling several holes in his head, surgeons performed a “bilateral medial temporal lobe resection”, essentially sucking away part of his hippocampus and much of his amygdala. The surgery worked – Molaison suffered fewer seizures – but it also left him unable to form new memories. His memories from before the surgery were intact, and he was able to learn new motor skills, but he was never able to recognise the researcher who worked with him for decades, whom he saw almost every day.

Molaison, who was known in medical journals as “HM” for the rest of his life, profoundly changed our scientific understanding of memory by showing that we don’t have a single, unified “memory system”. Instead, McGaugh explained, “We have different memory systems in the brain that handle different kinds of information for different periods of time.”

Understanding HSAM, he says, may lead to a similar revelation about the nature of memory. “That’s what is of interest,” he told me. “It’s not that HSAM is interesting, it’s that memory is interesting.”

Price and Petrella said that they hoped that studying their memories could aid research that would find a cure for the thing that surveys in Britain and America show people are most terrified of: dementia. Price, with characteristic directness, said: “I expect them to find a cure for Alzheimer’s. I told Dr McGaugh, ‘This is now your turn, go. Do what you got to do … No pressure, but just find a cure for Alzheimer’s.’”

In all likelihood, studying HSAM will not lead directly to a cure for Alzheimer’s or dementia. It is still unclear whether HSAM will turn out to be a fascinating curiosity, or a key that unlocks the deepest mysteries about how memory works. At the very least, Dr Dorthe Berntsen, founder of Aarhus University’s Center on Autobiographical Memory Research, told me, it shows the extraordinary potential of autobiographical memory. “Could I, as a non-HSAM person, have memory from each day in my life stored, but I just can’t get to it? Is that a retrieval problem or is it a storage and retention problem? Potentially, it can be very important, because it asks these new questions, it shows that we may have to revise how we have thought about our ability to remember the past.”

Every memory researcher I have ever spoken to describes our memories as the things that define us; they are us. There is a reason that people are more afraid of dementia than cancer. When someone you love dies, you fear the day you will forget how they laughed or the sound of their voice, because you will. It hurts to think of all the wonderful, thrilling, important, terrible, devastating things we’ve forgotten. But people with HSAM do remember. Besides the scientific questions HSAM raises, then, there is a different kind of question: would you want a memory like that, if you could have it?

“We call it forgetting but on the other hand, simple storage of information is stupid, it’s just data hoarding. What’s the point? You need to extract something useful from it, then we call it knowledge or wisdom,” Stark told me. “Memory is not about looking backwards, that is not why we have it. It’s there so that your past experiences will make you more adaptive in the here and now and in the future.” But when LePort asked her HSAM subjects in the 2012 study whether they considered their hoard of memories a burden, most said they did not.

Jill Price is not representative of everyone with HSAM, but she is the first data point in this small population. And Price wrote to McGaugh on Thursday 8 June, 2000, because she had a problem. “Everyone has those forks in the road, ‘If I had just done this and gone here, and nah nah nah,’ everyone has those,” she told me. “Except everyone doesn’t remember every single one of them.” Her memory is a map of regrets, other lives she could have lived. “I do this a lot: what would be, what would have been, or what would be today,” she said.

Price is now a freelance script supervisor for film and TV. She lives in an immaculate apartment in Encino, California with her parents, with whom she has lived for much of her adult life. She has a habit of looking off to the right, to the side of the split screen where her memories are, when we talk. She is cynical but not quite bitter – her life, all the details that she can remember so clearly, seems to have made her tired, although that may be the fact that she doesn’t sleep well and hasn’t really ever. She cuts quickly to the point and doesn’t hide her emotions, but she also has an easy, though often wry, laugh.

McGaugh likes to say – and it is written on a board in the lobby of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory – that memory is our bridge to the future. But for Price, it doesn’t feel like that. “I’m paralysed, because I’m afraid I’m going to fuck up another whole decade,” she said. She has felt this way since 30 March, 2005, the day her husband, Jim, died at the age of 42. Price bears the weight of remembering their wedding on Saturday, 1 March 2003, in the house she had lived in for most of her life in Los Angeles, just before her parents sold it, as heavily as she remembers seeing Jim’s empty, wide-open eyes after he suffered a major stroke, had fallen into a coma and been put on life support on Friday, 25 March 2005.

But for all the terrible things that people with HSAM can never forget, there are also wonderful memories. When Petrella turned 50, he put together the Book of Bob, a catalogue of the most memorable days he has ever had, one for each calendar day of the year. “It’s totally uninhibited, it talks about sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll,” he said. “I didn’t hold back.” And when he recalls 15 April 1967, he gets a kind of glow and a grin – that was the day that 16-year-old Petrella sat on the rooftop of the local newspaper, where he wrote sports pieces and obituaries, and listened to a battle of the bands contest going on in the street below. He felt like the “king of the town”, he says. “I just felt so good. I just felt so good about my life. That was my second-best April. But a time like that, just sticks in my mind.”

When I first spoke to McGaugh, he told me that the real question at the heart of HSAM wasn’t why his subjects remember, but why we forget. “The overall summary of all of this is that they’re bad forgetters,” he said. And forgetting is what humans do; often what we need to do. The title character in Jorge Luis Borges’s story Funes the Memorious, who acquires a perfect memory as the result of an accident, can no longer sleep because he is kept awake by the thousand mundane memories that whined like mosquitoes in his ears. The “peculiar mixture of forgetting with our remembering,” wrote William James, one of the founders of modern psychology, “is the very keel on which our mental ship is built.” “If we remembered everything,” he continued, “we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.”

Original article here

17 Jul 2023
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How do you stay optimistic in spite of it all? 6 hopeful souls share their secrets

Do the woes of the world get you down? Are daily headlines capsizing your ship?

Well, we’ve got just the pick-me-up for you. Last week, the Skoll World Forum was bustling with innovators and entrepreneurs engaged in the work of “transformational social change” — that is, making the world a better place. We drew lessons in optimism from six individuals in attendance, who shared what gives them cause to be hopeful — why they find themselves smiling in spite of everything. The following answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Don’t let the narrative change you. You must change the narrative

I don’t believe that all of these problems are happening to us. I believe they’re happening for us. Lonnie Holley is this wonderful artist who uses discarded material to create artwork. He says we shouldn’t think of it as trash and garbage. Rather, it’s something to work with … something to make something new out of. It’s this idea of narrative change. I like to think of it as “aesthetic force” because you can change people’s minds and opinions through this work.

And isn’t that a glorious thing? The possibility to shift and to pivot and to participate and to move … which becomes ignited when times get hard.

You look at the civil rights movement. All these horrible things were happening, and it just propelled them forward. It made them want to move. Same thing with this racial reckoning. Something challenging and horrible had to happen to activate people and make them want to embrace dignity in a new way.

So when we look at how much we’ve survived and the shoulders that we stand on, what’s not to be joyous about? — Ava Duvernay

Sleep, pray, love in safety

I love my family. I was brought up in a very close family. Of course we fight, but we also laugh together. We share everything — all the joys and the pains. And I know the pain I am feeling, my family will feel the same thing. We confide in each other and find comfort in that. When I want to be happy, my family is always there for me.

We are also a very religious family. We consider church our second home. All people want in church is peace. When we pray all together, I feel that I am reconnecting with God and that God can hear my prayer and everything that I’m concerned about because I open my heart completely.

Even when my whole family is overwhelmed, it is the priest and the church community who come to our rescue and comfort us as we pour our hearts out and cry. These are people who share my problems and I know they are on my side. I’m able to talk freely and not withhold anything.

So I can fall asleep in the presence of my family and my church — with these people who I love. I know that I am safe. — Mahali Hlasa

Tune into the genius of rural communities

I’ve been working in rural areas for the last ten years. And in the women, peasants and farmers I’ve met there, I’ve found another kind of genius. They help me understand that the future is possible.

I’ve seen how people in rural communities show a special sort of resilience and a lasting connection with nature and the universe that go back millennia.

In the north, we tend to be more similar in our approach. But amongst rural communities in the Global South, we see a beautiful diversity of opinions, understandings, ideas and knowledge that we need to recover to imagine a better future. These individuals can be tremendous leaders and mentors to all of us as we get back to our roots as humans in full connection with our planet. — Rodrigo Paris Rojas

Finding power in prayer

As for where I find optimism, I’ll tell you — I start my day with prayer and I end my day with prayer. That’s the biggest thing in my life. I’m a Roman Catholic and for me, that’s where it all starts. Prayer is very personal. My prayer is between me and my God. But of course, I also pray with other people. In Kenya, a lot of our meetings actually start with a prayer.

We’re a deeply spiritual people, whether we’re Christian, Muslim, or Hindu. I think that is what continues to hold us and keep us together and keep the humanity part of us alive. — Michael Onyango

Walk, chant, trust in goodness

When I see systems change so slowly, when I talk to girls and I find that not so much has changed in all these decades, of course I’m overwhelmed. Sometimes it really seems futile.

But I have this practice in the morning that I started doing during COVID when I was stuck at home and frightened. So after my walk in the morning, I come back, sit to face the sun, do a sun salutation, and I say some Vedic chants.

These invoke the goodness of the universe to protect and bless everything that exists — the sun, the moon, the fire, the wind, the Earth, living beings, the body, the soul and the self.

And along with that, I call out loud a set of affirmations. One is that I deeply love and accept myself.

Another one is that I trust the forces of goodness. That they’re taking care of the universe. And I believe it. It restores my faith and restores a feeling of wellbeing.

I focus on and have faith in the goodness around. And I think eventually, it will prevail. — Urvashi Sahni

Dance and draw strength from kids and nature

I find optimism in rural communities, in villages and slums. That’s because despite the difficult environment around them, they’re able to dance. At different times of year, they come together and celebrate. They bring so many smiles, so much joy. When I see that, I say, “I have more money than them, more education, more access, but they’re way happier than me.” So I find optimism in those ways of celebrating life and building community.

I’ve also found optimism among kids — Black, white, poor, rich — they play and they can enjoy life. They connect. It’s only later that they learn about differences and start to behave differently. But when I see how they interact as children, it’s all about playfulness. Even during war times or in refugee camps, I see kids finding ways to create joy amongst themselves.

And finally, in nature — how everything’s about collaboration. So when I see the patterns of nature and the way that nature treats me since I was a kid, it’s all about optimism. The negativity comes from humanity and the way that we behave to create scarcity — how we’re afraid of and draw boundaries between one another.

But from certain communities, from children, from our elders and from nature, I feel optimistic that we can fix things. That we can create abundance by sharing. — Edgard Gouveia Jr.

Original article here