evolution | Ascension Lifestyle

18 Sep 2023
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Voice Is the Next Big Platform, Unless You Have an Accent

My mother waited two months for her Amazon Echo to arrive. Then, she waited again — leaving it in the box until I came to help her install it. Her forehead crinkled as I download the Alexa app on her phone. Any device that requires vocal instructions makes my mother skeptical. She has bad memories of Siri. “She could not understand me,” my mom told me.

My mother was born in the Philippines, my father in India. Both of them speak English as a third language. In the nearly 50 years they’ve lived in the United States, they’ve spoken English daily — fluently, but with distinct accents and sometimes different phrasings than a native speaker. In their experience, that means Siri, Alexa, or basically any device that uses speech technology will struggle to recognize their commands.

My parents’ experience is hardly exclusive or unknown. (It’s even been chronicled in comedy, with this infamous trapped-in-a-voice-activated elevator sketch.) My sister-in-law told me she gave up on using Siri after it failed to recognize the “ethnic names” of her friends and family. I can vouch for the frustration: The other day, my command of “Text Zahir” morphed into “Text Zara here.”

Right now, it’s not much of a problem — but it’s slated to become more serious, given that we are in the middle of a voice revolution. Voice-based wearables, audio, and video entertainment systems are already here. Due in part to distracted drivers, voice control systems will soon be the norm in vehicles. Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa are radicalizing the idea of a “smart home” across millions of households in the US. That’s why it took so long for my mother’s Echo to arrive — the Echo was among Amazon’s bestsellers this holiday season, with a 900 percent increase from 2016 sales. It was backordered for weeks.

Overall, researchers estimate 24.5 million voice-driven devices will be delivered to Americans’ daily routines this year — evidence that underscores ComScore’s prediction that by 2020, half of all our searches will be performed by voice.

But as technology shifts to respond to our vocal chords, what happens to the huge swath of people who can’t be understood?

To train a machine to recognize speech, you need a lot of audio samples. First, researchers have to collect thousands of voices, speaking on a range of topics. They then manually transcribe the audio clips. This combination of data — audio clips and written transcriptions — allows machines to make associations between sound and words. The phrases that occur most frequently become a pattern for an algorithm to learn how a human speaks.

But an AI can only recognize what it’s been trained to hear. Its flexibility depends on the diversity of the accents to which it’s been introduced. Governments, academics, and smaller startups rely on collections of audio and transcriptions, called speech corpora, to bypass doing labor-intensive transcriptions themselves. The University of Pennsylvania’s Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) is a powerhouse of these data sets, making them available under licensed agreements for companies and researchers. One of its most famous corpora is Switchboard.

Texas Instruments launched Switchboard in the early 1990s to build up a repository of voice data, which was then distributed by the LDC for machine learning programs. It’s a collection of roughly 2,400 telephone conversations, amassed from 543 people from around the US — a total of about 250 hours. Researchers lured the callers by offering them long-distance calling cards. A participant would dial in and be connected with another study participant. The two strangers would then chat spontaneously about a given topic — say, childcare or sports.

For years linguists have assumed that because the LDC is located in Philadelphia, the conversations skewed towards a Northeastern accent. But when Marsal Gavaldà, the director of machine intelligence at the messaging app Yik Yak, crunched the numbers in Switchboard’s demographic history, he found that the accent pool skewed more midwestern. South and North Midland accents comprised more than 40 percent of the voice data.

Other corpora exist, but Switchboard remains a benchmark for the models used in voice recognition systems. Case in point: Both IBM and Microsoft use Switchboard to test the word error rates for their voice-based systems. “From this set of just over 500 speakers, pretty much all engines have been trained,” says Gavaldà.

But building voice technology on a 26-year-old corpus inevitably lays a foundation for misunderstanding. English is professional currency in the linguistic marketplace, but numerous speakers learn it as a second, third, or fourth language. Gavaldà likens the process to drug trials. “It may have been tried in a hundred patients, [but] for a narrow demographic,” he tells me. “You try to extrapolate that to the general population, the dosage may be incorrect.”

Larger companies, of course, have to think globally to stay competitive — especially because most sales of smartphones happen outside the US Technology companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon have private, in-house methods of collecting this data for the languages and accents they’d like to accommodate. And the more consumers use their products the more their feedback will improve the products, through programs like Voice Traininglanguage on the Alexa app.

But even if larger tech companies are making headway in collecting more specific data, they’re motivated by the market to not share it with anyone — which is why it takes so long for the technology to trickle down. This secrecy also applied to my reporting of this piece. Amazon never replied to my request for comment, a spokesperson for Google directed me to a blog post outlining its deep learning techniques, and an Apple PR representative noted that Siri is now customized for 36 countries and supports 21 languages, language variants, and accents.

Outside the US, companies are aware of the importance of catering to accents. The Chinese search engine company Baidu, for one, says its deep learning approach to speech recognition achieves accuracy in English and Mandarin better than humans, and it’s developing a “deep speech” algorithm that will recognize a range of dialects and accents. “China has a fairly deep awareness of what’s happening in the English-speaking world, but the opposite is not true,” Baidu chief scientist Andrew Ng told The Atlantic.

Yet smaller companies and individuals who can’t invest in collecting data on their own are beholden to cheaper, more readily available databases that may not be as diverse as their target demographics. “[The data’s] not really becoming more diverse, at least from my perspective,” Arlo Faria, a speech researcher at the conference transcription startup Remeeting, tells me. Remeeting, for example, has used a corpus called Fisher that includes a group of non-native English speakers — but Fisher’s accents are largely left up to chance, depending on who happened to participate in the data collection. There are some Spanish and Indian accents, for instance, but very few British accents, Faria recalls.

That’s why, very often, voice recognition technology reacts to accents differently than humans, says Anne Wootton, co-founder and CEO of the Oakland-based audio search platform Pop Up Archive, “Oftentimes the software does a better job with like, Indian accents than deep Southern, like Shenandoah Valley accents,” she says. “I think that’s a reflection of what the training data includes or does not include.”

Rachael Tatman, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington’s Department of Linguistics who focuses on sociolinguistics, noted that the underrepresented groups in these data sets tend to be groups that are marginalized in general. A typical database of American voices, for example, would lack poor, uneducated, rural, non-white, non-native English voices. “The more of those categories you fall into, the worse speech recognition is for you,” she says.

Still, Jeffrey Kofman, the CEO and co-founder of Trint, another automated speech-to-text software based in the UK, is confident accent recognition is something speech science will be able to eventually solve. We video chatted on the Trint platform itself, where Australian English is now available alongside British and North American English as transcription accents. Trint also offers speech-to-text in a dozen European languages, and plans to add South Asian English sometime this year, he said.

Collecting data is expensive and cumbersome, which is why certain key demographics take priority. For Kofman, that’s South Asian accents, “because there are so many people from India, Pakistan, and those countries here in England, in the US and Canada, who speak very clearly but with a distinct accent,” he says. Next, he suspects, he’ll prioritize South African accents.

Obviously, it’s not just technology that discriminates against people with accents. It’s also other people. Mass media and globalization are having a huge effect on how people sound. Speech experts have documented the decline of certain regional American accents since as early as 1960, for example, in favor of a more homogenous accent fit for populations from mixed geographic areas. This effect is exacerbated when humans deal with digital assistants or operators; they tend to use a voice devoid of colloquialisms and natural cadence.

Or, in other words, a voice devoid of an identity and accent.

As voice recognition technology becomes better, using a robotic accent to communicate with a device stands to be challenged — if people feel less of a need to talk to their devices as if they are machines, they can start talking to them as naturally as they would a friend. And while some accent reduction coaches find their clients use voice assistants to practice neutralizing their thick foreign or regional accents, Lisa Wentz, a public speaking coach in San Francisco who works in accent reduction, says that she doesn’t recommend it.

That’s because, she tells me, most of her clients are aiming for other people to understand them. They don’t want to have to repeat themselves or feel like their accents prevent others from hearing them. Using devices that aren’t ready for different voices, then, only stands to make this feeling echo.

My mother and I set up her Alexa app together. She wasn’t very excited about it. I could already imagine her distrust and fear of a car purported to drive by the command of her voice. My mother would never ride in it; the risk of crashing would be too real. Still, she tried out a couple of questions on the Echo.

“Alexa, play ‘Que sera sera,’” my mother said.

“I can’t find the song ‘Kiss your ass era.’”

My mom laughed, less out of frustration and more out of amusement. She tried again, this time speaking slower, as if she were talking to a child. “Alexa, play ‘Que sera sera.’” She sang out the syllables of sera in a slight melody, so that the device could clearly hear “se-rah.”

Alexa understood, and found what my mom was looking for. “Here’s a sample of ‘Que sera sera,’ by Doris Day,” she said, pronouncing the sera a bit harsher — “se-raw.”

The 1964 hit started to play, and my mother smiled at the pleasure of recognition.

Original article here

14 Sep 2023
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Why You Should Cultivate a Fluid Sense of Self

If you want to learn something about change there is no better place to look than evolution. Nothing represents a continuous and unrelenting cycle of order, disorder, and reorder on a grander scale. For long periods of time, Earth is relatively stable. Sweeping changes—warming, cooling, or an asteroid falling from space, for example—occur. These inflection points are followed by periods of disruption and chaos. Eventually, Earth, and everything on it, regains stability, but that stability is somewhere new.

During this cycle, some species get selected out. Others survive and thrive. Species in the latter group tend to have high degrees of what evolutionary biologists call “complexity.” Complexity is comprised of two elements: differentiation and integration. Differentiation is the degree to which a species is composed of parts that are distinct in structure or function from one another. Integration is the degree to which those distinct parts communicate and enhance each other’s goals to create a cohesive whole.

Consider Homo sapiens (you and me), by far the most abundant and widespread species of primate. we have large frames, four limbs, opposable thumbs, body temperature that is somewhat resistant to external conditions, good vision and hearing, digestive tracts that can accommodate a variety of nutrients, and the capacity for language and understanding. In other words, we are a highly differentiated species. But we also have enormous brains and advanced nervous systems that integrate all of these parts into a cohesive whole. The combination of these qualities—widespread differentiation and strong integration—makes us a decidedly complex species. Our complexity is how we got here today and why, hopefully, we’ll stick around for at least a bit longer.

Though change at the individual level, the primary concern of my new book Master of Change, is different than change on an evolutionary scale, there is still much we can learn from evolution’s foundational principles, lessons that apply to the horizons of our own lives. If we want to survive and thrive during ongoing cycles of change and disorder, then we, too, can benefit from developing our own versions of complexity.

As a matter of fact, there is a psychological construct called self-complexity. Essentially, it says that the key to a strong and enduring identity—one that is equal parts rugged and flexible, that can navigate the inevitable changes we all face—is to diversify your sense of self.

The more you define yourself by any one activity, the more fragile you become. If that activity doesn’t go well or something changes unexpectedly, you lose a sense of who you are. But with self-complexity, you have develop multiple components to your identity.

We all can wear many hats: examples include writer, spouse, artist, parent, employee, neighbor, entrepreneur, baker, and creative, to name just a few. Take an inventory of your own identities. Are there any upon which you are over-reliant for meaning and self-worth? What would it look like to diversify your sense of self? Even if you desire to go “all in” on a certain endeavor, you’ve got to ensure that you don’t leave others completely behind.

I’ve come to use the metaphor of a house for identity. If your house only has one room in it, and that rooms floods, you are going to be very disoriented. But if your house has multiple rooms, you can seek refuge in the others while you weather the storm. It’s okay to put spend a lot of time in one room—so long as you have other rooms available when the one you are currently pouring yourself into changes.

For example: there are times when I lean heavily into each of my main identities—father, husband, writer, coach, friend, athlete, and neighbor. I’ve learned that keeping all of these identities strong ensures that when things don’t go well in one area of my life I can rely on the others to pick me up, which helps me to stay grounded and navigate whatever challenge I am facing.

What you want to do is challenge yourself to integrate the various elements of your identity into a cohesive whole. This allows you to emphasize and de-emphasize certain parts of your identity at different periods of time. The result is a fluid sense of self.

Unlike other types of matter, fluid contains both mass and volume but not shape. This allows it to flow over and around obstacles, changing form while retaining substance, neither getting stuck nor fracturing when unforeseen impediments manifest on its path. Cultivating a fluid sense of self allows you to do the same. By developing and nurturing multiple parts of your identity, you can more easily navigate change.

A large body of research shows that when there is too great a fusion between one’s identity and their pursuit, then anxiety, depression, and burnout frequently result. This is especially true for athlete’s during periods of change and transition, when one’s dominant—and all to often, sole— sense of identity feels at risk. Yet while it may be heightened for athletes, it’s a pattern that holds true in all lines of work and all walks of life: if you want to be excellent and experience something fully, then you’ve got to go all in, but only to a point. If your identity becomes too enmeshed in any one concept or endeavor—be it your age, how you look in the mirror, a relationship, or your career—then you are likely to face significant distress when things change, which, for better or worse, they always do.

None of the above is permission to be laissez-faire or go through the motions. Caring deeply about the people, activities, and projects you love is key to a rich and meaningful existence. The problem is not caring deeply; it is when your identity becomes too rigidly attached to any single object or endeavor.

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

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

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

03 Aug 2023
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2023 So Far

We’re now 7 months into 2023 and I’ve been noticing some things that are quite different from previous years.

People are curious for something new, something fresh and different. Almost like folks have stopped saying that’s woowoo and started saying ‘Whatcha got?’
There are most definitely two distinct realities emerging. The old hierarchical one where everything is scary and scarce. And the new quantum one where everything is available for you to create your own version of life and reality.
While the weather might seem unpredictable, at the same time there’s an increase in the miraculousness of Nature. One wonders if the weather gods aren’t putting purpose in people’s faces and saying ‘Time to act.’, while at the same time the Nature gods are enticing us into a more wondrous interconnection with all of life.
The quantum field is present all around us now. The air we breathe is packed with great possibilities. Super flow of genius, ideas & innovation have become easy to access.
We believe … we create. In other words, you think a subtle thought and minutes later whoosh there it is staring you in the face in your reality. So make your thoughts and beliefs great ones! Coz they’re gonna become real real fast from now on.
There is Joy, oh so much Joy, if you just let yourself experience it. It’s really just a matter of raising your vibration and poof a smile comes on your face with laughter bubbling up from inside. One wonders if that godness that dwells within us all isn’t eager to burst through into our daily lives now. Big smile at that thought.
And the animals … omg! Spectacular. Sentiently more conscious than ever before. Perhaps they have an ability to let that inner godness burst free more easily than humans.

All that to say that while this might be a really weird year so far, in my books it’s truly an awesome one. Here’s to more great wonders to come.

About the Author:

Soleira Green is a visionary author, quantum coach, ALLchemist & future innovator. She has been creating leading edge breakthroughs in consciousness, quantum evolution, transformation, innovation, intelligence and more over the past 25 years, has written and self-published eleven books, and taught courses all over the world on these topics.

28 Jul 2023
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Super Powers … Everybody’s Got ‘Em!

I believe this with every fibre of my being and I live it, in myself and witnessing it in others, in every way I can. So what are some of these super powers that we’re seeing these days? I’ll try to encapsulate a few of the ones I’m aware of.

ENERGETIC FREQUENCY GENERATOR … There are a lot of new technologies that can generate higher frequencies for us these days. I actually prefer to do it for myself. We can generate higher frequencies from deep within ourselves (our source centre) as well as able to draw them in from the limitless energies of the universe in creation. We can use these frequencies to source high vibe vitality in ourselves and others. We’re also experimenting right now the possibility of using these self-generated frequencies to eliminate disease and activate the physical body’s miraculous capacities.

THE ABILITY TO REACH OUT TO COMMUNICATE WITH THOSE ON THE OTHER SIDE AND TO PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD … It’s the same skill, no matter who you’re talking with, those alive or those who’ve passed over. My way of doing this is to reach out to connect with their greater being and commune being to being. Others may do this in a variety of ways. We are all infinite fields of intelligence, mastery and power that are available in shared communion, especially for greater purpose insights.

ALCHEMICAL SOURCE CREATOR … An alchemist has the ability to take something as it is and unleash its miraculous potentiality and possibilities. Doing this as a source for Life to thrive makes it a deliciously wondrous thing to do for anyone or anything, unleashing their awesomeness that simply awaits an alchemical touch.

REALITY CREATOR … I’m not just talking about creating our own lovely reality, but about being able to source the creation of a brilliant reality for the world to thrive upon. We can do this in a variety of ways. By innovating consciousness (the beliefs, possibilities & frequencies by which we live our lives). By sourcing a new matrix of high vibrational frequency as the vibe we all get to live and create within. By uplifting all beings upon the planet, seeing them in their sourceness, calling their magnificence present and quickening their evolutionary callings into who and what we’re all meant to become next for this world to elevate and thrive.

SYNERGY SYNCHRONIZER … I had to stretch to find a name for this one. It’s one I’ve been playing with in the past year. It’s about aligning a person or circumstance to the perfect synchronization with all that they are meant to become and source in this world. As if all this great stuff is just waiting for us in a field of us somewhere and generally folks aren’t aligned with that level of synergistic opportunity. So I align them with their own field of brilliant flow and, ‘zing’, amazing things happen for them effortlessly and graciously.

As I said, these are just a few. There are soooo many. It’s an exciting time as we explore and unleash these in ourselves throughout the world.

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