Food For Thought | Ascension Lifestyle

11 Sep 2023
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Scientists may be on brink of discovering fifth force of nature

The tantalising theory that a fifth force of nature could exist has been given a boost thanks to unexpected wobbling by a subatomic particle, physicists have revealed.

According to current understanding, there are four fundamental forces in nature, three of which – the electromagnetic force and the strong and weak nuclear forces – are explained by the standard model of particle physics.

However, the model does not explain the other known fundamental force, gravity, or dark matter – a strange and mysterious substance thought to make up about 27% of the universe.

Now researchers have said there could be another, fifth, fundamental force of nature.

Dr Mitesh Patel, from Imperial College London, said: “We’re talking about a fifth force because we can’t necessarily explain the behaviour [in these experiments] with the four we know about.”

The data comes from experiments at the Fermilab US particle accelerator facility, which explored how subatomic particles called muons – similar to electrons but about 200 times heavier – move in a magnetic field.

Patel says the muons behave a bit like a child’s spinning top, in rotating around the axis of the magnetic field. However, as the muons move, they wobble. The frequency of that wobble can be predicted by the standard model.

But the experimental results from FermiLab do not appear to match those predictions.

Prof Jon Butterworth of University College London, who works on the Atlas experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, said: “The wobbles are due to the way the muon interacts with a magnetic field. They can be calculated very precisely in the standard model but that calculation involves quantum loops, with known particles appearing in those loops.

“If the measurements don’t line up with the prediction, that could be a sign that there is some unknown particle appearing in the loops – which could, for example, be the carrier of a fifth force.”

The findings follow previous work from FermiLab that showed similar results.

But Patel said there was a “fly in the ointment”, noting that between the first results and the new data, uncertainty has increased around the theoretical prediction of the frequency.

That, he said, could shift the situation. “Maybe what they are seeing is standard scientific thinking – the so-called standard model,” Patel said.

There are other issues. Butterworth said: “If the discrepancy is confirmed, we will be sure there is something new and exciting but we won’t be sure exactly what it is.

“Ideally the discrepancy would inform new theoretical ideas that would lead to new predictions – for example, of how we might find the particle that carries the new force, if that’s what it is. The final confirmation would then be building an experiment to directly discover that particle.”

The experiments at Fermilab are not the only ones to suggest the possibility of a fifth force: work at the LHC has also produced tantalising findings, albeit with a different type of experiment looking at the rate at which muons and electrons are produced as certain particles decay.

But Patel, who worked on the LHC experiments, said those results were now less coherent.

“They are different experiments, measuring different things, and there may or may not be a connection,” he said.

Butterworth added that the unexpected frequency of the muons’ wobbles was one of the longest-standing and most significant discrepancies between a measurement and the standard model.

“The measurement is a great achievement, and very unlikely to be in error now,” he said. “So if the theory predictions get sorted out, this could indeed be the first confirmed evidence for a fifth force – or something else strange and beyond the standard model.”

Original article here

06 Sep 2023
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So…How Do Adults Make New Friends?

In approximately one month and 10 days, I’ll be on my way to making one of the larger decisions of my adult life (so far, anyway); I’m moving to Austin, Texas, approximately 2,000 miles and one hell of a road trip away from my family and almost my entire friend group back in New York. While I have many questions about my move—chief among them, “How much should a mattress cost?” and “Will everyone hate me for being a Brooklyn transplant?”—nothing has loomed larger in my mind than the question of friendship, or, more specifically, how a full-grown adult goes about making new friends with no partner or kids to act as built-in buffers.

Of course, a big move is hardly the only circumstance in which an otherwise reasonably socialized adult might find herself craving new friendships. The COVID-19 pandemic shrunk our social circles considerably, with many of us spending the last year-plus in the company of family and only our absolute closest BFFs. As the world slowly reopens, it stands to reason that we might want to seek out new connections—and feel somewhat unsure about where to start (especially as COVID-19 rates continue to climb in many cities).

Anxiety about friend-making isn’t so uncommon, according to clinical psychologist and friendship researcher Dr. Miriam Kirmayer, although some of these nerves may be linked to misconceptions about how meaningful friendships actually come about. “There does seem to be, for many people, this belief that friendships should just happen—whether we’re in a new city or a new phase of life—and that our people, so to speak, will magically show up. As beautiful as that is, that isn’t the reality for most people,” explains Kirmayer. “My best advice is to be very intentional with how we approach making friends; seek out opportunities, experiences and activities where we are likely to meet new people with whom we share something in common. My second piece of advice is to try and choose wisely, or, in other words, choose opportunities where we will have more frequent interactions, because we know that friendships often require that frequency of interaction in order to develop.”

Conventional wisdom has it that you should pick popular yet slightly off-the-beaten path activities, like a running group or a knitting club, to meet new people. But what about those of us for whom a good Friday night hinges on the strength of a gummy edible and the availability of a new episode of The Bold Type on Hulu? I’m not trying to paint myself as a total couch potato, but…let’s just say my social style is definitely on the “chill” side, not so much the “go hiking and meet new people on top of a mountain at 7:00 a.m.” side. My quest for new friendships almost feels like dating, something I’m meh at yet very enthusiastic about, except that I don’t have a great frame of reference for what “success” would look like. Does friendship success equal a hangout invite? A standing Saturday-night bar crawl? Godparent-ing each other’s children? How will I know when I’ve cracked it, socially speaking?

For some people, social success—however they define it—can spring from a source as prosaic as social media. Mijal Tenenbaum, 27, moved to Los Angeles with only a few loose acquaintances at her disposal. She DM-ed one of them on Twitter and invited them out to brunch, and while that plan never came to be, Tenenbaum’s new friend did invite her to Disneyland, of all places. Today, the two are best friends, and Tenenbaum’s advice to people in similar situations (whether they’re in a new city or just feeling socially stagnant) would be: “If you get good vibes from an acquaintance or Twitter mutual, reach out and give them a chance! Even if you’re a little insecure and you don’t know them well, just go for it.”

For Hannah Smith, 27, friendship began at home—quite literally—when she moved to San Francisco in 2019 without knowing anyone. Smith sublet three different rooms through Craigslist before she finally signed a month-to-month lease in the perfect place (which she also found through Craigslist), eventually turning a roommate from her final apartment into one of her best friends. “Low-commitment living situations can be a great way to get to know people in a new place,” says Smith, although she adds that this strategy might be somewhat complicated by the ongoing effects of COVID-19.

One popular method for friend-making endorsed by Kirmayer is volunteering, which is exactly how Courtney Gustafson, 31, ended up meeting her two best friends. “During the pandemic, I happened upon a colony of feral cats, started caring for them, made them an Instagram, and then two different people reached out to offer help with the cats,” says Gustafson. “The three of us turned out to be around the same age and have a lot in common, and now we are a cat rescue/best friend team of 3!”

Ultimately, there’s no perfect way to predict the success of a new friendship. After all, you could join a volunteer effort or a cooking club and meet absolutely nobody you bond with, or you could meet your all-time, Elena Ferrante–novel–level soulmate at a random party you almost skipped. Still, as more people get vaccinated and life ever-so-creepingly returns to “normal,” it’s worth thinking about whether the friendships in your life are giving you what you need and want. If they’re not, maybe you should DM that cool-seeming Twitter person, sublet with a friendly acquaintance, or bond over a mutual love of feral cats—because after all, without true and lasting friendships, who would have the courage tell us when we were being annoying on the internet?

Original article here

02 Sep 2023
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This Is Where Your Childhood Memories Went

We called them fairy rocks. They were just colorful specks of gravel—the kind you might buy for a fish tank—mixed into my preschool’s playground sand pit. But my classmates and I endowed them with magical properties, hunted them like treasure, and carefully sorted them into piles of sapphire, emerald, and ruby. Sifting the sand for those mystical gems is one of my earliest memories. I was no older than 3 at the time. My memory of kindergarten has likewise been reduced to isolated moments: tracing letters on tan paper with pink dashed lines; watching a movie about ocean creatures; my teacher slicing up a giant roll of parchment so we could all finger-paint self-portraits.

When I try to recall my life before my fifth birthday, I can summon only these glimmers—these match strikes in the dark. Yet I know I must have thought and felt and learned so much. Where did all those years go?

Psychologists have named this dramatic forgetting “childhood amnesia.” On average, people’s memories stretch no farther than age three and a half. Everything before then is a dark abyss. “This is a phenomenon of longstanding focus,” says Patricia Bauer of Emory University, a leading expert on memory development. “It demands our attention because it’s a paradox: Very young children show evidence of memory for events in their lives, yet as adults we have relatively few of these memories.”

In the last few years, scientists have finally started to unravel precisely what is happening in the brain around the time that we forsake recollection of our earliest years. “What we are adding to the story now is the biological basis,” says Paul Frankland, a neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. This new science suggests that as a necessary part of the passage into adulthood, the brain must let go of much of our childhood.

Sigmund Freud gave childhood amnesia its name in the early 1900s. He argued that adults forgot their earliest years of life in the process of repressing disturbing memories of sexual awakening. While a handful of psychologists saw merit in this claim, the most commonly accepted explanation for childhood amnesia was that children simply couldn’t form stable memories until age 7—even though there was little evidence to support this idea. For nearly 100 years, psychologists assumed that memories of infancy did not endure because they were never durable in the first place.

The late 1980s marked the beginning of a reformation in child psychology. Bauer and other psychologists began to test infant memory by performing a series of actions—such as building a simple toy gong and striking it—and then waiting to see if a child could imitate the actions in the right order, after a delay ranging from minutes to months.

“Mice performed worse on certain kinds of memory tests after living in a cage with a running wheel.

This work laid bare the contradiction at the heart of childhood amnesia: Infants can create and access memories in their first few years of life, yet most of these memories eventually vanish at a rate far beyond the typical forgetting of the past we experience as adults.

Maybe, some researchers thought, enduring memories require language or a sense of self, both of which we lack as infants. But although verbal communication and self-awareness undoubtedly strengthen human memories, their absence could not be the whole explanation for childhood amnesia. After all, certain animals that have large and complex brains relative to their body size—such as mice and rats—but do not have language or, presumably, our level of self-awareness, also lose the memories they make in infancy.

Perhaps, then, researchers reasoned, the paradox had a more fundamental physical basis that was common to people and other big-brained mammals. The question was, what?

Between birth and our early teens, the brain is still laying down some of its fundamental circuitry and thickening its electrical pathways with fatty tissue to make them more conductive. In a massive surge of growth, the brain sprouts innumerable new bridges between neurons. In fact, we have far more links between brain cells in our earliest years than we end up with in adulthood; most are pruned away. All that excess brain mass is the wet clay from which our genes and experiences sculpt a brain to suit its particular environment. Without such limber brains, young children would never be able to learn as much as quickly as they do.

As Bauer and others discovered, this adaptability comes with a price. While the brain undergoes this prolonged development outside the womb, the large and complex network of disparate brain regions that collectively create and maintain our memories is still under construction, Bauer explains, and not as capable of forming memories as it will be in adulthood. As a consequence, the long-term memories formed in our first three years of life are the least stable memories we ever make and highly prone to disintegrating as we age.

In early 2018, Frankland and his colleagues published a study indicating another way the brain relinquishes our childhood memories: not only do they degrade, but they also become concealed. A few years back, Frankland and his wife Sheena Josselyn—also a neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children—started to notice that the mice they studied performed worse on certain kinds of memory tests after living in a cage with a running wheel.

“Our earliest memories are often insoluble blends of genuine recollections, narratives we sponged up from others, and imaginary scenes dreamt up by the subconscious.

As the couple knew, exercise on a running wheel promotes neurogenesis—the growth of whole new neurons—in the seahorse-shaped hippocampus, a brain region that is essential for memory. But while neurogenesis in the adult hippocampus likely contributes to the ability to learn and remember, Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University and others had suggested that it might also necessitate a certain amount of forgetting. Just as a forest has room for only so many trees, the hippocampus can hold only so many neurons. New brain cells might crowd the territory of other neurons or even replace them altogether, which could in turn break or reconfigure the small circuits that likely store individual memories. Perhaps, then, the especially high rate of neurogenesis in infancy was partly responsible for childhood amnesia.

To put this notion to the test, Frankland and Josselyn transferred infant and adult mice from the plastic shoebox-sized cages they had known all their lives to larger metal cages they had never seen before. In these new containers, they zapped the rodents’ feet with mild electric shocks. The mice quickly learned to associate the metal cages with the shocks, stiffening with fear whenever they were returned to those enclosures.

While baby mice began to forget about this connection after a single day—relaxing when they found themselves in the shock cages—adult mice never forgot about the danger. But when adults ran on a hamster wheel after the shocks—thereby stimulating neurogenesis—they started to mirror infants in their forgetfulness. Prozac, which also encourages neural growth, had the same effect. Conversely, when the researchers hindered neurogenesis in infant mice with drugs or genetic engineering, the young animals formed much more stable memories.

To get a really close look at how neurogenesis might change memory, Frankland and Josselyn used a virus to insert a gene encoding a green fluorescent protein into the DNA of the mice’s newly sprouted brain cells. The glowing dye revealed that the new cells were not replacing old ones; rather, they were joining existing circuitry. That suggests that, technically, the many little circuits of neurons that store our earliest memories are not wiped out by neurogenesis. Instead, they are thoroughly restructured, which probably explains why the original memories become so difficult to recall. “We think it’s an accessibility issue,” Frankland says, “but it’s sort of a semantic issue too. If a memory becomes impossible to access, then it is effectively erased.”

This restructuring of memory circuits means that, while some of our childhood memories are truly gone, others persist in a scrambled, refracted way. Studies have shown that people can retrieve at least some childhood memories by responding to specific prompts—dredging up the earliest recollection associated with the word “milk,” for example—or by imagining a house, school, or specific location tied to a certain age and allowing the relevant memories to bubble up on their own.

But even if we manage to untangle a few distinct memories that survive the tumultuous cycles of growth and decay in the infant brain, we can never fully trust them; some of them might be partly or entirely fabricated. Through her pioneering research, Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine has demonstrated that our earliest memories in particular are often insoluble blends of genuine recollections, narratives we sponged up from others, and imaginary scenes dreamt up by the subconscious.

In one set of groundbreaking experiments conducted in 1995, Loftus and her colleagues presented volunteers with short stories about their childhood provided by relatives. Unbeknownst to the study participants, one of these stories—about being lost in a mall at age 5—was mostly fiction. Yet a quarter of the volunteers said they had a memory of the experience. And even when they were told that one of the stories they had read was invented, some participants failed to realize it was the lost-in-a-mall story.

When I was a toddler, I got lost in Disneyland. Here is what I recall: It was December and I was watching a toy train loop through a Christmas village. When I turned around, my parents had disappeared. Dread dripped down my body like cold molasses. I began blubbering and wandering the park, searching for them. A stranger approached me and took me to a giant building filled with TV screens playing feeds from security cameras all over the park. Did I see my parents on any of the screens? I did not. We went back to the train where we found my parents. I ran into their arms, overcome with joy and relief.

Recently, for the first time in quite a while, I asked my mom exactly what she remembers about that day in Disneyland. She says it was spring or summer and that she and my family last saw me beside the remote control Jungle Cruise boats, not the railroad near the entrance of the park. As soon as they realized I was missing, they went straight to the Lost and Found Center. A park official had indeed discovered me and brought me to the center, where I had been placated with ice cream.

It was unsettling to have what I thought was a pretty accurate memory so thoroughly contradicted, so I asked my mom to search our family photo albums for some hard evidence. All she could find were pictures from an earlier trip. We will probably never have any tangible proof of what happened. We are left with something far more elusive: those tiny embers of the past, embedded in our mind, twinkling like fool’s gold.

Original article here

30 Aug 2023
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The Mystery Genes That Are Keeping You Alive

One could be forgiven for a little genetic déjà vu.

Launched in 1990, the Human Genome Project unveiled its first readout of the human DNA sequence with great fanfare in 2000. The human genome was declared essentially complete in 2003—but it took nearly 20 more years before the final, complete version was released.

This did not mark the end of humankind’s genetic puzzle, however. A new study has mapped the yawning gap between reading our genes and understanding them. Vast parts of the genome—areas the study authors have nicknamed the “Unknome”—are made of genes whose function we still don’t know.

This has important implications for medicine: Genes are the instructions for making the protein building blocks of the body. Plenty of those still shrouded in darkness could have profound medical significance and may hold the keys to disorders of development, cancer, neurodegeneration, and more.

The study makes it embarrassingly clear just how many important genes we know little to nothing about. It estimates that a fifth of human genes with a vital function are still essentially a mystery. The good news is that the research also outlines how scientists can focus on those mystery genes. “We might now be at the beginning of the end of the Unknome,” says Matthew Freeman of the Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford, a coauthor of the study.

The research team used two tools to find the gaps in our knowledge. First, using the plethora of existing databases of genetic information, they compared the genetic codes of many different species to reveal genes that look roughly similar.

These riffs on a genetic theme are known as conserved genes, and even if we don’t understand what they do, we know that they must be important because nature is parsimonious and tends to use the same genetic machinery to do important jobs in different organisms. “The one thing we could be confident of is that, if important, these genes would be quite well-conserved across evolution,” says Freeman.

Once they had found similar genetic riffs in worms, humans, flies, bacteria, and other organisms, the researchers could look at what was known about the function of these clearly important genes and score them accordingly, with a high “knownness” score reflecting solid understanding.

Because so much genetic information is already available on hundreds of genomes and recorded in a standardized way, it was possible to automate this scoring process. “We then asked how many of those [conserved genes] have a score of less than one, where essentially nothing is known about them,” says Freeman. “To our surprise, two decades after the first human genome, it is still an extraordinary number.”

In all, the total number of human genes with a knownness score of 1 or less is currently 1,723 out of 19,664.

By the same token, the top 10 genes identified by the team’s rummage through genetic databases corresponded with “all the most famous genes, which is reassuring,” says Sean Munro of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, a study coauthor. “We recognized every single one of them, and there are already thousands of papers about each of them.”

When it came to the substantial number that were unknown, the team conducted one more study, using the best understood (at the genetic level) organism of all: Drosophila melanogaster. These fruit flies have been the subject of research for more than a century because they are easy and inexpensive to breed, have a short life cycle, produce lots of young, and can be genetically modified in numerous ways.

The team used gene editing to dial down the use of around 300 low-scoring genes found in both humans and fruit flies. “We found that one-quarter of these unknown genes were lethal—when knocked out, they caused the flies to die, and yet nobody had ever known anything about them,” says Freeman. “Another 25 percent of them caused changes in the flies—phenotypes—that we could detect in many ways.” These genes were linked with fertility, development, locomotion, protein quality control, and resilience to stress. “That so many fundamental genes are not understood was eye-opening,” Freeman says. It’s possible that variation in these genes could have very big impacts on human health.

All of this “unknomics” information is held on a database, which the team is making available for other researchers to use to discover new biology. The next step may be to hand the data on these mystery genes and the mystery proteins they create over to AI.

DeepMind’s AlphaFold, for example, can provide important insights into what mystery proteins do, notably by revealing how they interact with other proteins, says Alex Bateman of the European Bioinformatics Institute, based near Cambridge, UK. So can cryo-EM, which is a way of producing images of large, complex molecules, he says. And a University College London team has shown a systematic way to use machine learning to figure out what proteins do in yeast.

The Unknome is unusual in that it’s a biology database that will shrink as we understand it better. The paper shows that over the past decade “we have moved from 40 percent to 20 percent of the human proteome having a certain level of unknownness,” says Bateman. However, at current progress rates, working out the function of all human protein-coding genes could take more than half a century, Freeman estimates.

The discovery that so many genes remain misunderstood reflects what is called the streetlight effect, or the drunkard’s search principle, an observational bias that occurs when people only search for something where it is easiest to look. In this case, it has caused what Freeman and Munro call a “bias in biological research toward the previously studied.”

The same goes for researchers, who tend to get funding for research in relatively well-understood areas, rather than going off into what Freeman calls the wilderness. This is why the database is so important, Munro explains—it fights back against the economics of academia, which avoids things that are very poorly understood. “There is a need for a different type of support to address these unknowns,” says Munro.

But even with the database becoming available and researchers picking through it, there will still be some knowledge blind spots. The study focused on genes that are responsible for proteins. Over the past two decades, uncharted areas of the genome have also been found to harbor the code for small RNAs—scraps of genetic material that can affect other genes, and which are critical regulators of normal development and bodily functions. There may be more “unknown unknowns” lurking in the human genome.

For now, there’s still plenty to get into, and Freeman hopes this work will encourage others to study the genetic Terra Incognita: “There’s more than enough Unknome for anyone who wants to explore genuinely new biology.”

Original article here

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