It’s nearly impossible to avoid screens nowadays. This makes life difficult for the small but growing group of people that get debilitating symptoms when they look at screens for any amount of time.

Organizing on forums like the e-ink subreddit and LEDstrain, this community has been a wellspring of information about display technologies and eye health. They go further than the popular discourse in these areas, which usually centers around limiting screen time and how blue light disrupts our sleep.

It turns out that the only type of display that doesn’t trigger their symptoms are e-ink screens, which most people associate with the Amazon Kindle. E-ink differs from the ubiquitous LCD displays in that they don’t use a backlight to illuminate the display, instead relying on ambient light already found in the environment.

It’s not clear why e-ink screens don’t trigger symptoms beyond the fact that they’re not backlit. Research around the long-term health risks of extensive screen use is practically non-existent. To learn more, we’re left to lean on the personal experience of the screen-sensitive folks who have made the switch to e-ink.

Screen sensitivity

A reddit user shared his journey, which started with neck/occipital pain that appeared out of the blue at 33 years old. Previous to that, he had never had neck pain, led an active life, and was otherwise healthy.

Over the next few years, he worked with many types of doctors and tried various medications and therapies for the pain. Unfortunately, nothing was working so he took matters into his own hands by painstakingly testing and adapting every aspect of his life so that he could isolate the cause.

He eventually discovered that his issue was linked to the visual system. In one experiment, he went 48 hours without any screens and noticed that the pain came back instantly after he used a screen again. It was difficult to make this connection because the pain from LED screens took a long time to wear off.

He never got a good explanation from doctors as to why LED screens have this effect, but his personal theory is that it was caused by overuse of bright light therapy many years back. Nowadays, he makes a living only using e-ink screens that don’t trigger the pain.

This is a typical story. The symptoms either start out of the blue or gradually. Affected people usually have no issues with backlit displays until they find themselves unable to look at screens without serious discomfort or pain. If it weren’t for e-ink, many of them claim that they would have had to change careers.

Scarce scientific evidence

The reason for why these people develop screen sensitivity is unknown, but it’s clear that backlit displays are the cause and they’re more harmful for some than for others.

There’s no research on the long-term health risks of extensive screen use, with most studies focusing on short-term effects. One study compared the effects of different displays on the visual system found that prolonged reading on an LCD screen triggers higher visual fatigue than both E-ink and paper.

Another study suggested that reading on the two display types is very similar in terms of both measures of attention or visual strain. It’s hard to extrapolate much from these findings, due to small participant pools (10-12) as well as differences in device settings and ambient lighting conditions.

It’s one of those areas of research that isn’t taken seriously partly because it would be incredibly inconvenient if the findings suggested that the health risks of LCD screens were significant. The majority of the screens on any kind of consumer device are backlit displays, so the risks would be unavoidable.

Having a sustainable alternative to backlit displays in e-ink would not only help the screen sensitive community, but it would also change research incentives. It would impact the urgency and practicality of  large-scale comparative research on the effects of different display technologies on our visual health.

E-ink industry is ramping up

Compared to backlit screens, e-ink is much less disruptive for nighttime use, perfect visibility in the sun (no glare), and a battery life on the scale of weeks rather than days.

Unfortunately, the e-ink industry has never found mainstream consumer appeal beyond e-readers. The reMarkable tablet is probably the most successful e-ink computing device, recently crossing a million units sold. While this sounds impressive, it ultimately represents a tiny fraction of the overall tablet market.

The good news is that recent developments have enabled colored e-ink, which marks a watershed moment for the industry. After decades of obscurity, there’s a real possibility of a future where e-ink becomes a viable alternative to backlit displays. 

This isn’t to say that e-ink will be able to compete as a general-purpose device, especially when it comes to entertainment (e.g. streaming, video games) or video conferencing. It’s more likely that e-ink will be adopted as a dedicated device for tasks where low power consumption is preferable to high resolution.

E-ink might be appealing for students, knowledge workers, and anyone else that spends hours a day reading and writing digitally. Having a separate device helps establish a routine and is much less prone to distraction. It also makes it much easier to work under the sun, which has plenty of second-order benefits.

More importantly, shifting hours of screen time from backlit displays to e-ink may be significant for our eye health in ways we don’t yet understand. Our future selves might be shocked to think back to when we used backlit displays for all of the various digital tasks in our lives.

Configuring backlit displays

E-ink displays are unfortunately not widely available today, so you might be wondering what steps you can take to limit the negative effects of the backlit displays you use daily.

The first step is to check whether you current display has these features:

• Flicker-free. Avoid monitors using screen flickering (PWM) to achieve lower brightness settings. This can cause eye strain and headaches, especially for those with screen sensitivity.

• Refresh rate. This is the frequency at which the image on the display is refreshed. Aim for at least 60 - 75Hz to reduce eye strain. Higher refresh rates (100Hz+) might have diminishing returns.

• Blue light filter. Newer displays tend to have settings that automatically adjust from cooler during the day to warmer colors after sunset, to make it easier on your eyes and reduce sleep disruption.

The single most important factor for eye strain is whether the light emitted from the backlit display is balanced with the ambient light in the environment.

A common scenario is looking at a bright phone screen at night after turning off the lights, which causes dry eyes and fatigue due to the light contrast. Most people intuitively lower the phone’s brightness to combat this, but it’s also important to turn on a dim light while you’re using your phone at night.

This principle also applies during the day. The brightness of your laptop or monitor display should adjust to the intensity of sunlight throughout the day. It’s easiest if the display does this automatically, but make sure to tune it so that the light emitted by the display is comparable to the ambient light around it.

The other side of the equation is the indoor lighting setup. Investing in quality lighting could be just as important as a quality display in terms of visual comfort. Most people have fairly dim lighting, which makes it so that the screen brightness is out of balance. This is especially noticeable in the winter, when the sun goes down earlier than usual. Check out this post for more about setting up your indoor lighting.

What’s kept this journey interesting for me (and hopefully for you all) is the variety. I could spend a month diving into the science of music, switch gears completely, and cover brain-computer interfaces the next month.

But there’s one topic in particular that has continued to be on my mind since I first wrote about it in May 2020.

I have a strong belief that there is untapped wisdom in the energy healing practices developed by several Eastern cultures over thousands of years. All of these practices rely on the concept of “energy”, which has been relegated to the domain of spirituality.

What’s immensely exciting to me is these energy-based practices are finally being examined more rigorously from a scientific perspective.

The emerging field of bioelectricity is starting to unpack the concept of “energy”, and it has the potential to completely change how we think about health and disease.

Since this isn’t the reason that any of you have signed up this newsletter, I’m starting a new publication focused solely on the science of bioelectricity.

(To clarify, I’ll still be posting regularly on Friday Brainstorm. Stay tuned for next week!)

My hope is to make it easier to cut through the noise and find evidence-based coverage of an area that is considered to be pseudoscience by the mainstream.

Apart from my own interpretation, you can also expect interviews with researchers and practitioners on the frontier of this exciting new field.

Here’s a sample of what I’ll be covering:

• The science of acupuncture

• How to train yourself to detect biofields

• How can biofields be measured and imaged?

If this sounds like something you’d like to hear more about, sign up here:

Here’s a snippet of the first post:

Since the discovery of DNA in the 1950s, the field of biology has tended to focus on genetics. This focus has produced incredible advances in reading and editing DNA.

There’s an implicit assumption that if you just understand the genetic code (and the proteins encoded by genes), you’ll understand everything about biological systems.

Michael Levin, a biologist at Tufts University, says there’s more to the story.

It turns out that all cells, not just neurons, produce and sense electrical signals that coordinate cell behavior. This electrical signaling, also called bioelectricity, plays a key role in the process by which a cell, tissue, or organism takes (and maintains) its anatomical shape.

Breaking with standard assumptions, Levin’s research has demonstrated anatomical information is not actually encoded in the DNA. Instead, it’s stored in the bioelectric network of the organism.

Levin and his collaborators have developed tools to read and edit the anatomical information encoded in these bioelectric networks. His lab has been able to create flatworms with two heads, induce frog cells to regenerate a severed limb, and even produce novel life forms – all without modifying any genetic information.

Levin believes that understanding this bioelectric code will give scientists unprecedented control over what cells will build. This represents a new approach to medicine, directing cells in the body towards replacing tissue or organs that have been damaged by disease, trauma, cancer or aging.

Check out the full article on the new publication.

It’s probably too late to wish you a happy new year, but I hope you had a great holiday season anyway.

This week’s newsletter features an article I wrote about how almost everyone suffers from light deprivation in the winter months (and how to fix it). After upgrading my indoor lighting, I was shocked by how dramatically it impacted my energy and mood. It’s crazy to me that more people don’t talk about this.

I wanted to share the months of research I did into the science of why light affects us as well as concrete tips for designing the indoor lighting in your space.

Here’s a short snippet –

How to fix your indoor lighting to simulate sunlight

I’ve always been someone who's hated the winter months, which I thought was mostly because of the cold. With the shift to working from home though, I’ve increasingly been noticing how hard it is for me to focus after it gets dark outside (as early as 4:30pm in NYC).

I finally decided to buy bright lights for my room to better simulate daylight, and the effect was really dramatic. Instead of having a strong urge to stop working whenever it got dark out, I was suddenly able to maintain my normal summer schedule and keep working until dinner.

I’m going to make the case that upgrading your lighting is one of the most impactful purchases you can make to improve quality of life during the winter months.

Light suppresses melatonin release

Studies have shown that sufficient light exposure in the evening time is associated with increased subjective alertness and mood, primarily by suppressing melatonin.

If you don’t have bright enough indoor lighting in the winter, then your body essentially sends the signal to get ready for sleep after the sun goes down at 4:30.

This means that you're needlessly fighting with your own body by trying to power through and continue working. During the summer, your body is exposed to natural light until much later in the day and so the melatonin signal is delayed until 7 or 8.

The idea is to use artificial lights to simulate daylight in those 3-4 hours, so that you’re essentially on your summer schedule all year.

Check out the full article for concrete tips on designing indoor lighting. 💡

I hope you’ve enjoyed this issue of Friday Brainstorm — let me know what you think! I’d love to hear about people’s experiences with designing their indoor lighting.

—Shamay

As I’m warming up to being consistent about this newsletter in 2022, I wanted to share some of my favorite neuroscience-y books (📖) and essays (📝) from this year. I’m also including an excerpt or a takeaway from each one to give you a quick taste.

Here’s the full list (with links):

• 📖 Reductionism in Art and Brain Science

• 📖 Projections: Story of Human Emotions

• 📝 Thin Places

• 📝 Review: Unlocking the Emotional Brain

• 📝 Questions Are Not Just For Asking

Let’s get into it.

📖 Reductionism in Art and Brain Science 📖

I’ve been spending a lot of time this year learning about abstract art, which is not something I’ve really understood before. On a recent trip to Dia:Beacon, I picked up Eric Kandel’s book on the history of modern art from the perspective of neuroscience.

Kandel demonstrates through bottom-up sensory and top-down cognitive functions how science can explore the complexities of human perception and help us to perceive, appreciate, and understand great works of art.

Abstract art poses an enormous challenge to the viewer by asking our visual system to interpret images that are fundamentally different from the kind of images our brains have evolved to reconstruct. Modern artists distill their subjects into the primitive building blocks of perception – color, form, and light – so that we project our own impressions, memories, aspirations, and feelings onto the canvas.

I’m really excited about how interdisciplinary artists may use our new understanding of the biology of perception and of emotional and empathic response to create new art forms and other expressions of creativity.

—

📖 Projections: Story of Human Emotions 📖

Karl Deisseroth stands out to me as one of the few people who is both an incredible researcher and a gifted storyteller. His biggest contribution to science was developing a research tool called optogenetics, which gives neuroscientists the ability control neurons using light.

In his book, Deisseroth details how the past 15 years of research using this technique has revised our understanding of mental disorders.

In his practice as a psychiatrist, he had a particular interest in autism-spectrum disorder. Many adult autism patients avoid eye contact, which was previously attributed to social anxiety. An observation by a high-functioning autism patient of his seems to suggest more subtle information processing challenges:

Well, when I’m looking at you and talking, if your face changes then I have to think about what that means, and how I should react to that, and change what I’m saying.

The anxiety stemmed from the patient’s brain detecting its own inability to keep up with the social data stream, while being aware that it should be keeping up. This is just one of many case studies on eating disorders, depression, dementia, and more.

—

📝 Thin Places 📝

This essay by Jordan Kisner explores the experience of living with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and the life-changing impact of a new, experimental application of deep brain stimulation, which is usually reserved for Parkinson’s patients.

What I like most about this piece is that Kisner is not an expert in psychiatry or medicine, instead relying on months of research, “reviewing articles, deciphering studies, interviewing physicians, scrolling through procedure videos on YouTube”.

Instead, she’s exceptionally talented at humanizing the people suffering from OCD and the emotional journey of going through the experimental medical procedure. The beautiful writing alternates between memoir-style narrative and fictional patients that are a composite of people Kisner has encountered in her research.

It seems important to cling to the concrete, to remember that illness is not a metaphor or a study but a phenomenon unfolding in (and on) real bodies in real rooms. Its qualia, the crinkly paper hospital gown and metallic adrenaline taste, the mutable and inexpressible shades of pain, demand articulation because they matter.

We work so hard at telling others what it is like to be sick in whichever particular way we are sick; we are reassured to hear that our particulars fit within larger known narratives of illness. With sickness as with anything else, communicating what it is like so others can know, or understanding others in precisely the way they wish we could, is next to impossible. We try anyway.

—

📝 Review: Unlocking the Emotional Brain 📝

It’s rare to find a review of a book that’s better than the book itself. Kaj Sotala summarizes the authors’ claims and draws on scientific literature to evaluate whether we should believe in them. This genre of content — bringing together analysis, commentary, and research — is something I’d like to see more of.

The book itself offers a neuroscience-grounded, comprehensive model of how effective talk therapy works. It claims that

change from a wide variety of therapeutic approaches [. . .] results from the updating of prior emotional memories through a process of reconsolidation that incorporates new emotional experiences.

Delving into a fictional series of therapy sessions, Kaj illustrates how the science of emotional reconsolidation is implicitly modelled in the process of these therapy techniques. As someone who sees the value of therapy but always had trouble grasping how it works on a mechanistic level, the book’s model is very promising.

—

📝 Questions Are Not Just For Asking 📝

Malcolm Ocean points out that we implicitly assume that questions are just for asking, when they can be used in many other ways. The deceptively simple technique he describes is holding questions, meaning both holding off on asking them and holding onto them:

Effectively working with curiosity involves being able relax yourself while experiencing a tension of not-knowing, without insisting on immediate resolution.

Whereas some questions can be easily answered, many will take time and non-obvious exploration. Being comfortable with the tension of holding them helps you organize your attention towards the problem space, so that your mind can figure it out as you encounter new ideas and processes.

I’ve put this into practice by going through the exercise of writing down my favorite problems/questions so that they are top of mind when answers appear in front of me.

In the spirit of holding questions, I wanted to cap off this newsletter with one of my favorite passages from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet:

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart
and try to love the questions themselves
as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.
Don't search for the answers,
which could not be given to you now,
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the future,
you will gradually, without even noticing it,
live your way into the answer.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this issue of Friday Brainstorm — until next year!

—Shamay

It’s been a while since you’ve heard from me. I’ve taken a pause on sending out this newsletter because I wasn’t enjoying it as much and I felt like the quality was slipping.

I started this newsletter because I wanted to think out loud about what I’m learning and share it with people that want to follow along. I’m going to slowly ease back into publishing more consistently.

—

Today, I wanted to share some of the best science-focused digital magazines I follow. Naturally, I spend a lot of time reading content to write this newsletter and I’d like to think that I’ve stumbled on a few gems along the way.

Most people get their fill from the occasional feature in popular publications like The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic. If you’re interested in the intersection of tech and science, you’ve probably come across Slate, Verge, or Wired.

These are usually great, but it’s not unusual that scientific findings are misinterpreted or the implications are grossly exaggerated. It’s rare to find well-researched and thought-provoking science articles that are also engaging and beautifully written.

Here are the best science publications I follow plus a recent article I loved from them.

NEO.LIFE

“We ask the big questions about how we’re engineering our own evolution. How biology and technology are coming together to help us all live healthier, happier, and longer lives.”

NEO.LIFE covers the latest research and developments in neuroscience, genetics, longevity, and the microbiome. They have two main formats:

• essays – traditional, full-length feature stories written by

• dispatches – short summaries of research papers from the frontiers of science

Recent article – Joel Garreau argues that new technologies with the potential to transform us physically and cognitively demand new rituals – akin to baptisms, marriages, and funerals – to embrace these critical moments in a person’s life.

Think about how we’ve handled our first primitive enhancements – Botox injections, Viagra prescriptions, even pacemaker implants. These are all met with a touch of embarrassment even though the number of procedures grows every year. Rather than being sheepish about the lines we are crossing when we augment ourselves, we should start marking these rites of passage as an important part of the future of humanity.

We don’t think twice about giving a child their first smartphone, which is maybe why so many develop unhealthy relationships with their devices. Imagine if we had a ritual to mark this critical moment, to show the young person that technology is wonderful but it also necessitates restraint and intentional use.

In the future, people might more regularly use cognitive implants to augment their natural abilities. Garreau thinks we might start formally marking these occasions, inviting those we know from all walks of life to these ceremonies. Maybe that would help knit together the different kinds of human natures to come. Read more.

Check out the NEO.LIFE for more ideas on the frontier of science.

Aeon & Psyche

“A sanctuary for serious thinking. We ask the big questions and find the freshest, most original answers, provided by leading thinkers on science, philosophy, society and the arts.”

Aeon publishes both long-form explorations of deep issues and short documentaries. Psyche is the sister magazine, started in May 2020, with a focus on psychology and philosophy. There, you can find shorter articles and in-depth, expert-written guides.

Recent article – Pia Callesen, a therapist and metacognitive specialist, wrote a guide about breaking free from excessive worrying and unwanted ruminations.

Common strategies to control anxiety usually backfire and lead to further worries, creating a cycle of overthinking. In fact, many people view overthinking as an innate personality trait, but Callesen argues that it’s a pattern or habit that we fall into, meaning that we can learn to change it.

The critical realization is that everyone can learn to be in control of their thoughts, rather than letting overthinking be something that happens to us.

• To develop the skill of letting go of unwanted thoughts, Callesen suggests the following exercise – tune into 3 or more environmental sounds and cycle through them, giving your full attention to each one for 10 seconds. The aim is to become familiar with shifting your attention and eventually applying it to your thoughts.

• The unpleasant symptoms that come from overthinking are influenced by the time you spend engaging with these thoughts. She recommends attempting to postpone unwanted thoughts until a specific time of day where you can freely worry and ruminate. This is to prevent repressing your thoughts completely.

The prospect letting go of these strategies might be scary to those that have lifelong habits of overthinking, because it gives people a sense of control and safety. To challenge these beliefs, Callesen suggests asking yourself – have these patterns of thought ever led to better decisions, less worrying and more control? Read more.

Check out Aeon and Psyche for thought-provoking science pieces.

Nautilus

“We are here to tell you about science and its endless connections to our lives. Combining the sciences, culture and philosophy into a single story told by the world’s leading thinkers.”

Each month, the editors at Nautilus choose a single topic and every Thursday they publish a new chapter on that topic. The content spans essays, investigative reports, videos, graphic stories, games, and fiction.

Recent article – Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a world-class scientist with a talent for engaging writing, was a recent contributor. We delved into her unintuitive research on how emotions are made in the last issue of this newsletter.

In the article, Dr. Barrett discussed a couple of outdated scientific myths that regularly make their way into news stories. The most common myth is thinking of the brain as having three distinct layers — one for surviving, one for feeling, and one for thinking:

• The deepest layer, or lizard brain, which we allegedly inherited from ancient reptiles, is said to house our survival instincts.

• The middle layer, dubbed the limbic system, supposedly contains ancient parts for emotion that we inherited from prehistoric mammals.

• The outermost layer, part of the cerebral cortex, is said to be uniquely human and the source of rational thought; it’s known as the neocortex (“new cortex”).

It’s easy to see why this account is so popular — everyone has felt the inner tug-of-war between desire and reason. It also paints the story of how humans, with our unique capacity for rationality, triumphed over our animal nature and now rule the planet.

The truth is that natural selection did not aim itself at us; we’re not superior to other animals. Evolution does not add layers to brain anatomy like geological layers of sedimentary rock; each species has brains that are uniquely and effectively adapted to their environment. Our neocortex is not more evolved, it’s just different. Read more.

Check out Nautilus for more unique perspectives on science.

Bonus Publications 🎁

Massive Science delivers bleeding-edge scientific research and expertise. The content is written by a growing community of over 2,000 scientists, with formats ranging from:

• articles – traditional, full-length science stories

• lab notes – short stories and links shared by scientists in the community

• videos – beautiful animations exploring the limits of our knowledge

• reports – unbiased, in-depth answers to important questions from scientists

  

Futurity is a nonprofit site supported by university partners in an effort to share research news directly with the public. It features the latest discoveries at top research universities, spanning various content formats including videos, interviews, and audio.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this issue of Friday Brainstorm! What got you thinking? Anything to add? Let me know by replying to this email.

—Shamay

This week’s newsletter delves into the science of emotions and tools for growing your emotional vocabulary. Thinking about emotions in a structured way is important because it gives you a framework for understanding what you're feeling and why. It also helps you develop a richer emotional life that translates to long-term satisfaction.

Here’s what I’ll be sharing with you in this issue:

• the latest research on emotions

• an app to grow your emotional vocabulary

Let’s get into it.

How Emotions Are Made 🔬

The latest research on emotions is not super intuitive and breaks from many of our most firmly held ideas about how emotions work.

Pixar's Inside Out is a great illustration of the classical model of emotion, which assumes that our actions are controlled by a number of basic emotions – Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger.

This aligns with our intuitive sense of how emotions work and makes for great entertainment. The not-so-great part is that researchers studying emotions have spent a century essentially taking this model at face value and searching for these characters in the brain.

In her book How Emotions Are Made, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett proposes a radical theory on what emotions are, where they come from, and how they shape our lives.

Emotions are predictions

Rather than thinking of emotions as labels like happy or sad, Dr. Barrett describes three basic "ingredients" that make up the mental experience that we call emotion:

• internal sensations from our body (e.g. Am I alert or calm?; Do I feel pleasant or unpleasant?)

• sensory information from the outside world (e.g. Where am I?; Who am I around?; What is that sound?)

• mental representations from past experiences (e.g. What is this like?; How do I expect to feel? )

Using these three sources, your brain proactively predicts what emotion is most appropriate for the situation and you start to experience that emotion.

This probably doesn't align with your intuition; we usually think about emotions as reactions to external events. The reality is that predictions allow us to respond much faster and more efficiently than if we were to react to everything in real time.

Emotions as concepts

In fact, your brain is always using past experiences to predict and create your current experience.

As Tiago Forte puts it,

"When you see something new, your brain doesn’t ask “What is this?”; it asks “What is this like?”. In other words, your brain is constantly trying to put everything you perceive into an existing category. This is much easier than trying to figure out what it is from scratch."

The labels or categories your brain forms to make sense of the world around you are called concepts. For example, we have different concepts for plants that serve different purposes – flowers are beautiful plants, weeds are unwanted plants, and salads are plants that we eat.

Emotions could be understood as concepts too. The same bodily sensation of a stomachache could be interpreted as "nervousness" in the context of a date, "hungry" if it's lunchtime, or "feeling sick" if we're in bed with a thermometer.

In all these cases, the emotion you feel is a self-fulfilling prediction about what emotion is best suited to help your body cope with the present moment. Emotions might not feel like concepts because we experience them so intensely, but it's all the same to our predicting brains.

In summary – emotions are created from concepts, which are the predictions that give meaning to our internal bodily sensations in relation to the outside world.

To learn more without committing to reading the book, check out Tiago Forte's excellent summary or this engaging 40-minute cinematic lecture by Dr. Barrett.

Mood Meter: grow your emotional vocabulary 📱

We learn emotional concepts as we grow. Whereas toddlers might only know whether they're happy and sad, older children might understand emotions like fear and anger.

Recently, schools have begun to incorporate social-emotional learning (SEL) programs (i.e. RULER, Second Step) into the classroom to help kids make sense of their emotions. For instance, It might seem intuitive that we feel emotions in our bodies, but a child might not make the connection.

I would have personally loved to have this kind of education when I was still in school, but there’s no reason that adults can’t also use the tools developed for these programs.

The Mood Meter app was developed by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. The idea is to help people discover and label emotions with more specificity.

You’re shown a 10 by 10 grid of emotion words, with the horizontal axis being how pleasant or unpleasant you feel and the vertical axis relating to high or low energy.

Once you choose an emotion, it gives you a chance to describe why you are feeling that way and then presents you with different strategies to shift your emotions. The app also provides some basic tracking of your emotions over time. That’s it!

It sounds simple, but many adults struggle with accurately labelling their emotions, and often have a limited set of words that they use to describe them. The Mood Meter app helps put more nuance on our words and language for emotions.

For instance, "stress" is a word that's commonly used to mean at least four distinct emotions, each with it's own source (internal or external):

• Anxiety is worry about future uncertainty and our inability to control the outcome.

• Fear is the palpable sense of a danger that lies just ahead and will eventually strike us.

• Pressure is the force from the outside that tells us something important is at stake, and whether we succeed or fail will depend on how we perform.

• Stress is what we feel when we’re facing too many demands from all of the above and fear we may not be up to it.

Although it might seem like semantics, attaching the correct label to emotions helps us begin figuring out what to do about it. Beyond that, it also helps other people meet our needs by expressing how we feel with more specificity.

Don't be satisfied with "happy" when you really mean "ecstatic", "blissful", or "inspired". Learn the difference between "discouraged" and "dejected" instead of settling for the generic "sad".

This is a bit speculative, but we can only assume that the size of our emotional vocabulary is correlated with the importance of emotions in our lives and the richness of our emotional experience.

I'll leave off with a quote from Marc Brackett, the founder of the Mood Meter app:

“When we don’t have the words for our feelings, we’re not just lacking descriptive flourish. We’re lacking authorship of our own lives.”

I hope you’ve enjoyed this issue of Friday Brainstorm! What got you thinking? Anything to add? Let me know by replying to this email.

—Shamay

This is a special edition of the Friday Brainstorm newsletter because it’s been exactly a year since the first newsletter was sent out on March 20th last year! 🎉 🍾 🥳

In 1 year — there have been 23 newsletters, we’ve grown to 250 subscribers, and have gotten over 15,000 page views across different channels. This is without any marketing on my end, so I’m excited to see the growth over the next year where I take promotion a little more seriously.

Here’s what I’ll be sharing with you in this issue:

• a reading list on framing complex ideas

• the world’s first neurotech publication

• rethinking notifications on future AR devices

Let’s get into it.

FCI Learning Club — Public Reading List 📚

How might we help readers internalize complex ideas?

This is a question I grapple with regularly when I write content about neuroscience. Over the past year, I've found a number of helpful resources for getting better at communicating complex ideas and I wanted to share them here.

This reading list was originally put together for a learning club I was facilitating, where we had discussions every week for a month (Feb 11th — Mar 8th, 2021).

Now that we're done, I wanted to make a public reading list so that anyone can drop in and browse through the readings we’ve done.

Here’s an overview of the topic areas:

• using metaphors to deconstruct your ideas

• using stories to communicate your ideas

• new mediums for conveying knowledge

• new mediums for capturing complexity

For each topic, there are main readings as well as further readings to learn more. If you want to get better at communicating complex ideas, check out the reading list.

The world’s first neurotech publication 🧠

Given my interests, it’s probably no surprise that I’ve long been a part of NeuroTechX, the world’s largest non-profit focused on neurotechnology.

Last year, I teamed up with Adam Molnar and Sophie Valentine to launch the NeuroTechX Content Lab — the first publication focused exclusively on neurotech. The idea is to provide members of the NeuroTechX community with editorial support to produce engaging, accessible, and well-researched content.

Our first 5 pieces have just been published — check them out:

• Nehchal Kaur offers a three part story based on the use of neurotechnology for war and peace-keeping purposes. Read

• Simon Spichak discusses how grand tech demos and presentations impact our perceptions of neurotechnology, science and medicine. Read

• Hannah Hare takes a deep dive into how a tiny vascular implant is enabling paralyzed people to communicate again. Read

• Erin Staples asks what data concerns should we be aware of as a neurotech industry, and what precedent should we be setting with personal data? Read

• Firas Safieddine looks into how recent advances in neuroscience have significant implications for the field of architecture and urban design. Read

If want to stay updated or are curious about NeuroTechX, sign up for their newsletter!

What I’m writing: rethinking notifications 📱

Last year, I wrote about Facebook’s guiding principles for responsibility innovation around hardware products, including their work in VR/AR:

“The 4th principle suggests that Facebook will put people’s interests over profits, but how realistic is this promise for a company whose business model is built on advertising? How will “put people first” extend to monetizing the platform? What guardrails and protections will there be for advertisements in AR?”

This is a good time to reignite this discussion, because in a series of recent blog posts, Facebook has been sharing the progress they’ve made towards a “contextually-aware, AI-powered interface for AR glasses”.

One of their talking point is how today’s devices (e.g. phones, watches) come at the expense of the interactions with people physically present with us. Instead of forcing us to choose between the two, future devices will let us look up and stay in the world.

To get there, we’ll need to rethink the most disruptive element of modern devices — notifications. What design affordances do we want around future AR systems so that they don’t inherit the shortcomings of today’s notifications?

If you’re curious about these kinds of things, check out the full article I wrote.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this issue of Friday Brainstorm! What got you thinking? Anything to add? Let me know by replying to this email.

—Shamay

I’m going to be experimenting with a new shorter format, sending something out every week and focusing on just one idea in each edition. Let’s see how it goes.

Quick shoutout: I had the honor of being the guest on my good friend Avthar’s podcast (Learn with Avthar), where we talked about the neuroscience of wellness, the brain-body connection, and wearables that read your brainwaves. Definitely check it out!

This week’s newsletter is about why the Myers-Briggs personality test has such widespread appeal, how it compares to astrology signs, and why we might never settle on a unified theory of personality.

Let’s get into it.

On the psychology of personality types

It’s funny to think back to this, but personality theory was the initial spark that got me interested in psychology and neuroscience.

I went to a nerdy high school, and so it was completely natural that a classmate was reading about Carl Jung under his desk during math class. I ended up buying the book myself and spending the next few years obsessing over his ideas.

What is the MBTI test?

For the purposes of this discussion, Carl Jung was a 20th century psychiatrist that laid the groundwork for what would become a popular personality test, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Here’s a quick overview:

Personality preference is measured along four dichotomies: Extraversion / Introversion, Sensing / Intuition, Thinking / Feeling, and Judging / Perceiving. Combinations of these scales produce a four-letter acronym (e.g. INFJ, ESTP) that reflects the dominant score on each factor. — ScienceDirect

Back to the story, learning about personality theory as a 16-year-old gave me a new way of thinking about the world and the people in it. I developed the annoying habit of trying to guess the MBTI types of all my friends. It’s definitely cringey to look back on those days, but they were also formative experiences for me.

It was the first time I really thought about who I was, who the people around me were, and how that influenced our interactions.

—

Problems with the MBTI test

It was only later that I discovered all the problems with the MBTI types:

• poor validity — it’s not predictive of future behavior or attitudes

• poor reliability — the results are sometimes inconsistent between tests

• not independent — the dimensions are correlated with each other

• not comprehensive — it omits predictive traits like neuroticism

The MBTI test is also confounded by the fact that it asks you what you believe about yourself, which may or may not align with your actual behavior in real life. It’s really hard to avoid giving socially desirable or idealized answers to the questions.

Beyond that, the descriptions of the types are crafted to be simultaneously generic, yet specific enough that you think you are being directly addressed. This is why the test results seem so true when you read them.

MBTI tests have barely more scientific validity than astrology signs do.

—

But what’s the harm in believing?

That being said, both MBTI tests and astrology signs give people insights about themselves and others, in a way that’s approachable and comforting.

They are entry points for reflection, acting as shortcuts for having conversations about who we are and how we relate to each other.

The meteoric rise of social astrology apps likes Co-Star is a testament to this. Banu Guler, the app’s founder, believes that astrology has stuck around for 2,500 years because it’s remarkably good at helping people talk about their reality.

To be more specific, MBTI indicators and astrology signs provide a shared vocabulary for explaining yourself and understanding others.

“If you tell me that you’re an introvert, I know exactly what that means or I think I know exactly what that means and I think I know you. All of a sudden, you have a place in my social worldview, the same way you might have a place in your own social worldview if you know that you are a feeler and you know that other people prefer thinking.” — Merve Emre

This creates a sense of social belonging and comfort, in that there are many people with the same sign/type as you, going through the same type of struggles as you are.

I would argue that personality types and astrology signs, despite having little to no scientific basis, have fairly positive effects as long as you don’t take it too seriously.

Alternatives to the MBTI test

Although it’s not problematic on an individual level, the lack of scientific validity starts to be concerning when 80% of Fortune 500 companies give personality tests to their employees and potentially make decisions based on the results.

It begs the question: is there an empirical way to derive personality dimensions?

The research that most psychologists hold up as the best attempt is the Five Factor theory, which emerged from several large-scale studies across different cultures. This construct features 5 core dimensions, in contrast to the MBTI’s 4 dimensions.

Unlike MBTI, where each personality type has unique and constructive strengths, the Five Factor model features traits where one side of the spectrum has undeniably negative associations.

For instance, the neuroticism dimension contrasts emotional stability with feelings of impulsivity, anxiety, and nervousness. This makes it much less appealing to organizations from a marketing perspective.

Even if the Five Factor model were more marketable (which might come at the cost of scientific accuracy), it raises bigger questions about personality typing.

Are these even the categories that we should be using to think about human beings?

Who’s to say that 5 is the appropriate amount of dimensions? In fact, there is evidence for a six-factor HEXACO model that adds a honesty-humility dimension. Why stop there though? There’s also a 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF).

Maybe it’s wrong to use dichotomies and hierarchies at all. There are alternative approaches where relationships between traits are envisioned as a circle or in even more abstract graph structures (link if you're curious).

I don’t know if we’ll ever settle on a single way to make sense of personality, and that’s OK as long as people have rich language to understand both themselves and others.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this issue of Friday Brainstorm! What got you thinking? Anything to add? Let me know by replying to this email.

—Shamay

Just a quick reminder that there’s still time to sign up for my learning club on framing complex ideas. The first live meeting is next Thursday @ 8:30 ET. More details here.

This week’s newsletter is about deep rest during our waking states, which is talked about far less than the value and importance of sleep. I draw heavily on material from the first three episodes of the Huberman Podcast, which I cannot recommend enough for people interested in tools and techniques for enhancing your nervous system.

Here’s what I’ll be sharing with you in this issue:

• what are ultradian rhythms ⏲️

• non-sleep deep rest protocols 😴

• music as a tool to help you align with your biological rhythms 🎶

Let’s get into it.

What are ultradian rhythms ⏲️

All our bodies are regulated by various biological rhythms, the most well-known of which is the circadian rhythm that governs the 24 hour cycle of sleep and wakefulness aligned with the rotation of the earth.

Public discourse has placed a lot of emphasis on the value and importance of sleep, but far less attention has been paid to the rhythms that occur in our waking states. Most people aren’t attuned to when their brains are optimized for focus and when it’s better suited for a more diffuse flavor of thinking.

It turns out that there’s a reasonable amount of scientific data that points to the existence of ultradian rhythms, which oscillate on a shorter time scale than 24 hours. For this discussion, we’re going to focus on a 90-minute rhythm that regulates our ability to focus throughout the day and facilitates memory consolidation at night.

You might already know that throughout the night, we cycle through different stages of sleep at 90-minute intervals. When you wake up in the morning, these ultradian rhythms don’t suddenly just stop — they continue to oscillate throughout the day.

These 90-minute cycles regulate when you are most optimized for focus and learning.

• in the first 5 - 10 minutes, you feel agitation and strain trying to get into focus

• in the middle, it is the optimal time for learning and sustained focus

• in the last 5 - 10 minutes, it becomes hard to maintain focus or learn any more

After 90 minutes of focus, you need to recharge. A study published last year shows that 20 minute naps or light sleep taken shortly after learning has been shown to increase the amount of information learned as well as the retention of that information.

Key takeaway — 90:20 is the ideal ratio of focus to rest.

Now, this ratio doesn’t apply to everyone precisely. More generally, it’s best to focus really hard and then let your mind drift. It’s up to you to experiment with the specifics of your ultradian rhythms and plan your schedule around them. Ask yourself: when are you most and least focused? most lethargic? most anxious? most motivated?

Also, if you’re like me and can’t just nap mid-day, the larger point is that you have to give your brain a rest — whether by taking a walk or making some lunch. There are also a number of scientifically-backed ways to put the brain into states of deep relaxation that we’ll cover in the next section.👇

Non-sleep deep rest 😴

Another way to think about ultradian rhythms is that they regulate the transitions between alertness and calmness throughout the day, analogously to how circadian rhythms regulate the transition between wakefulness and sleep over 24 hours.

There’s an asymmetry here — most people find it much easier to engage wakefulness and alertness as compared to sleep and relaxation. For example, we can force ourselves to stay up late or pull an all-nighter (some more than others) but we can’t really force ourselves to fall asleep. This might be simply how we’re wired, but it could also stem from societal pressures for productivity at school or work.

Regardless of the cause, a lot of people are not good at falling asleep because they’re not good at calming down. You might have had the experience of trying to sleep after working late or being stressed out, where your mind is stuck in a loop and you can’t disengage from your thoughts.

Key takeaway — it’s very hard to control the mind with the mind.

Andrew Huberman encourages people to look towards the body to control the mind rather than trying to mentally wrestle your mind into a certain pattern of relaxation.

There are 2 non-sleep deep rest (NSDR) protocols that Huberman mentions to access states of deep relaxation, all involving passively listening to 10 to 30 minutes scripts:

• yoga nidra: guided meditations for relaxation involving breathing & body scans

• digital hypnosis: evidence-backed script to help people fall into deep rest

These protocols are meant to help people learn to relax not just in the moment, but to get better at relaxing and turning off thinking in order to fall asleep when they want to do that at night. They are interventions by which you train your nervous system to go from states of heightened alertness to heightened relaxation.

More generally, for all the time we spend thinking about getting and staying focused, it’s good to also devote time each day to getting better at accessing calm states.

Music as a tool to help you align with your biological rhythms 🎶

By expanding your awareness of how your mind usually wants to be engaged or not engaged, you begin to develop an intuition for how to shift into states of deep focus and deep relaxation at different times of day.

That being said, it’s not easy to understand and become attuned to your biological rhythms through self-experimentation — it’s highly subjective and dependent on so many factors. We’re starting to see the emergence of software tools and hardware devices that could help you align with your biological rhythms more robustly.

Music is a particularly fitting medium for this purpose because it’s fairly ubiquitous and it has significant effects on our alertness levels (more on music’s cognitive effects).

Here are a few startups that are leading the charge:

Endel Sound

Endel is an algorithmically-generated, personalized sound environment to help you focus, relax, and sleep. It adapts the sound in real-time based on ultradian rhythms, local weather conditions, time of day, heart rate, and motion. I first covered Endel last year and I’m still using them today — it has definitely lived up to the hype.

Throughout the day, the app helps me better plan out my work by notifying me of when I’m projected to peak and slump in my energy. It also subtly tapers off the intensity of the sound to ease my mind into a relaxed state at the tail end of an 90-minute ultradian cycle.

I’m very excited about how this service continues to evolve, potentially accepting brainwaves as an input in the near future. Speaking of brainwaves…

Neurosity

Neurosity developed one of the first consumer-grade EEG headsets, measuring your levels of focus and calm by interpreting your brainwaves in real-time. The founders want to create a platform for people to start making brain-powered apps, or software that responds to our brainwaves in real-time.

Their first proof-of-concept app is Neurosity Music, which asks you how long you want to focus for and curates music to help you sustain your focus. For example, if your focus begins to slip up, it might cue up a more energetic song to perk you up.

I hope that Neurosity follows Endel’s lead and integrates a model of ultradian rhythms into their recommendation algorithm. Brain-powered apps need to be built with the underlying biological systems in mind to be truly effective.

Looking towards the future, EEG devices will continue to grow smaller and more discrete. We’re already seeing it today with companies like Emotiv releasing a set of EEG earbuds, a perfect form factor to complement the music use case.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this issue of Friday Brainstorm! What got you thinking? Anything to add? Let me know by replying to this email.

—Shamay

Happy Friday! As promised in the last issue, I launched a learning club to bring together the community of Friday Brainstorm readers. More details below!

Here’s what you can expect in this issue:

• learning club on framing complex ideas 💡

• reimagining Maslow’s hierarchy of needs ⛵

• phase shifting your circadian rhythm 😴

Let’s get into it.

Learning club on framing complex ideas 💡

I’m really excited to announce the launch of Framing Complex Ideas, a peer-driven learning club for the Friday Brainstorm community.

Learning goals

We will be exploring theoretical and practical tools for distilling and transmitting complex ideas so that readers deeply internalize them. To get a taste for the types of readings we’ll be discussing, check out these sections from earlier newsletters:

• on using metaphors (Brainstorm S1 E3)

• on non-linear writing (Brainstorm S2 E2)

• on deconstructing complex ideas (Brainstorm S2 E5)

Apart from discussions, there will also be optional weekly challenges such as:

• take an explanation you really like and remix it for a different audience

• flesh out a novel metaphor to describe an idea you're curious about

On a collective level, we'll be thinking about how we could build tools to help writers search for resonant ideas (analogous to SEO tools for marketers).

Who should sign up

My personal motivation for starting the club is to improve as a science communicator. Ultimately, I hope to bring together a group of 20 curious people that want to level up as communicators and are open to a community-oriented learning experience.

If you have a purely theoretical interest and have no plans for applying any of the ideas and techniques into practice, this club is probably not for you. That being said, writers at any stage are welcome - even if you’ve haven’t published anything yet!

Structure and commitment

The learning club will meet weekly for 5 live sessions over the course of a month, tentatively beginning on Thursday, February 4th at 8PM EST (exact schedule TBD).

The live sessions are the minimum commitment for a participant, but we’ll also have optional sessions to share what we've been working on or to continue our discussions.

Payment details

Joining the club will cost $20 for Friday Brainstorm subscribers. I want to be clear that all proceeds will be donated to a charity of your choice (email me).

I’m only attaching a price tag to the club as a commitment device so that people have more motivation to follow through and participate for the whole month. If paying the fee would be a financial burden to you, let me know and we can work it out.

—

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, check out the full description!

Metaphors for Maslow’s hierarchy of needs ⛵

Scott Barry Kaufman’s book, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, is a bold revitalization of Maslow’s misconstrued hierarchy of needs.

Kaufman draws on personal journal entries to contextualize Maslow’s work with who he was as a person — his worries, motivations, and undying optimism for humanity.

After having a debilitating heart-attack, Maslow spent the last years of his life anxious that he wouldn’t have time to finish perhaps his greatest contribution to the world. The theory of transcendence, or going beyond reaching for your individual potential and being motivated primarily by a calling outside one’s self, was never completed.

Kaufman picks up where Maslow left off, unraveling the mysteries of his unfinished theory, and integrating these ideas with the latest research on attachment, connection, creativity, love, purpose and other building blocks of a life well-lived.

The book is structured around an elegant metaphor that Kaufman introduces to more precisely represent Maslow’s intention for the hierarchy of needs.

—

Hierarchy of needs as a pyramid

If you’ve ever taken a Psychology 101 course, you’ve likely seen a version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a pyramid.

The idea is that the lower needs in the hierarchy must be satisfied before you can attend to the higher up needs. For example, this would mean that you can only get to the “love and belonging” stage if your “safety” needs are taken care of.

You might be surprised to learn that Maslow never represented his hierarchy of needs as a pyramid. “Maslow’s pyramid” was actually created by a management consultant in the 1960s and became popular in the field of organizational psychology.

The pyramid from the sixties told a story that Maslow never meant to tell; a story of achievement, of mastering level by level until you’ve “won” the game of life. But that is most definitely not the spirit of self-actualization.

The metaphor of a pyramid puts the focus on the ordering of the stages, whereas Maslow conceived of the hierarchy in a completely different way. He grouped the needs into two classes of needs: deficiency and growth.

1. Deficiency needs are motivated by a lack of satisfaction (e.g. lack of food, safety, affection, belonging, self-esteem) and driven by fears, anxiety, and demands.

2. Growth needs span the spirit of exploration, selfless love, and finding purpose.

With this categorization in mind, Kaufman introduces a new metaphor:

The human condition isn’t a competition; it’s an experience. Life isn’t a trek up a summit but a journey to travel through—a vast blue ocean, full of new opportunities for meaning and discovery but also danger and uncertainty. In this choppy surf, a clunky pyramid is of little use. Instead [. . .] we’ll need a sailboat.

Hierarchy of needs as a sailboat

Let’s unpack the metaphorical components of the sailboat. The deficiency needs make up the frame of the boat, protecting us from the unpredictability of the seas (or life). Without this foundation, we’d be spending energy just trying to stay above water.

Just having a secure boat is not enough for going anywhere, though. You also need a sail to capture wind (opportunity) to explore and adapt to your environment.

You don’t “climb” a sailboat like you’d climb a mountain or a pyramid. Instead, you open your sail, just like you’d drop your defenses once you felt secure enough. This is an ongoing dynamic: you can be open and spontaneous one minute but can feel threatened enough to prepare for the storm by closing yourself [. . .] the next minute.

In other words, the sailboat tells a different story about reaching your potential — it’s not about a linear journey; there will be serious setbacks as well as periods of immense growth. This seems like a much healthier approach for navigating life and striving to be a more complete person.

Too many people get caught up in insecurity throughout their lives, and stay there, missing out on the immense beauty in the world that is still left to explore and the possibilities for their own self-actualization. We miss the ocean for the waves.

The metaphor used to frame complex ideas has a powerful effect on how people internalize it. Kaufman’s sailboat breathes new life into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and his book provides a science-backed blueprint for applying it in your own life.

I highly recommend that you check out the book.

Setting your circadian clock 😴

The most highly anticipated podcast of 2021 for me was easily the Huberman Lab. Andrew Huberman, a tenured Stanford professor, uses simple language to help you understand how your nervous system operates in the context of everyday life. He also discusses tools and techniques for enhancing any aspect of your biology.

Not only is the content excellent, but Huberman is also taking the podcasting medium in an exciting new direction. Instead of focusing on a new subject every episode, this podcast will have monthly themes so that Huberman can dive deep into a topic area.

The focus in the month of January is the science of sleep, spanning the effects of light exposure, diet, exercise and other factors. What I like most about his approach is that Huberman tries to help you internalize the dynamics of your body so that you can self-experiment and figure out what works best for you, rather than offering quick hacks.

I wanted to share an insight from Episode 2 that’s had a big impact on my life already.

—

What drives your circadian rhythm?

Perhaps the most powerful driving force behind your cycles of wakefulness and sleep is the circadian rhythm, a 24-hour clock that exists in your brain.

This circadian clock is governed by a few things, the most important of which is light exposure. Think about why this would be the case — the circadian rhythm is an evolutionary adaptation to life on our planet, which goes through cycles of day and night every 24 hours.

When you wake up in the morning, this is because a hormone called cortisol is released from your adrenal glands. This is the “wakefulness signal”, alerting the various systems in your body that it’s time to increase your heart rate, raise your temperature, and generally get ready for the day.

It’s really important that the release of cortisol happens early in the morning, because it starts an internal timer (12-14 hours) for the release of melatonin.

Melatonin is a different hormone that is known as the “sleepiness signal”. Importantly, it is triggered by the onset of the “wakefulness signal” in the morning.

How to set your circadian clock?

In the midst of the pandemic, remote work has made it easier to wake up and go straight to work. This is an issue because we miss out on the time we would have spent outside while commuting to work.

Huberman says that you want to get direct sunlight in your eyes as close to waking as possible, and preferably before 9am, so that your internal clock is set properly.

Light coming in through a window is about 50 times less effective at triggering cortisol release than being outside.

The problem, it turns out, is that many people don’t get enough light in the morning to properly trigger the wakefulness signal and start the clock. As a result, the timing of melatonin release is delayed at night and we have trouble sleeping at a normal time.

How long and when do you have to be outside for? It ranges from 1 minute on a clear, sunny day to 10 minutes with cloud cover. The sunlight intensity also matters.

Huberman also mentions that our bodies respond particularly well to the quality of light emitted by the sun when it’s low in the sky (within a few hours of sunrise). You can still trigger the release of cortisol outside of that time frame, but it’s slightly less effective (but still much more effective than light through a window).

How well does it work? I was a little skeptical at Huberman’s claim that it only takes 2-3 days to shift your sleep schedule if you get proper light exposure in the morning. After trying it for the past week, though, I’m really shocked by how effective it is. Within just a few days of taking walks as soon as I woke up, I had no problem getting up at 7am and going to bed by 11pm.

—

Huberman goes into far more detail in the podcast, also touching on exercise and diet.

I should also mention that in the first episode, Huberman lays out the foundation and common terms that he will be using in later episodes. It’s little boring, but definitely worth watching.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this issue of Friday Brainstorm! What got you thinking? Anything to add? Let me know by replying to this email.

—Shamay

Happy New Years! Welcome to the first Friday Brainstorm newsletter of 2021.

It’s hard to believe that we’re hitting on 20 issues of this newsletter since March. There’s no time to reminisce though, I have so much planned for this upcoming year.

Most notably, Friday Brainstorm has been a one-way street for far too long. I’m going to be starting a learning club to bring together the community of readers around our shared interests in neuroscience, learning, metacognition, or whatever it might be. I’m really excited about the future of peer-to-peer learning experiences and thought that this would be a great way to add a participatory element to this newsletter.

In the meantime, here’s what in store today:

• parsing and transmitting complex ideas 💡

• warped time perception in the pandemic ⏱️

• (podcast) transforming your relationship with digital tech 💻

Let’s get into it.

On deconstructing complex ideas 💡

Tim Urban, and his Wait But Why blog, has been a huge inspiration to me both as a writer and as a curious person. He’s probably appeared in this newsletter more than anyone else — on relationships, on politics, and on the future of neurotechnology.

In a fascinating 2018 interview, Tim shares how he distills and presents complex ideas so they’re rich and resonant for others. He introduces his personal taxonomy of complexity and deconstructs his process for unravelling the different types.

“When thinking of an idea that’s hard to understand, it’s tempting to think of complexity in a singular way. Instead consider it in three distinct forms: complexity as gathering, complexity as dusting, and complexity as pattern-matching.”

What’s different is the type and proportion of effort needed to crack the case — knowing that ratio can help you better tackle complex ideas.

1. Complexity as gathering

These are ideas that aren’t particularly difficult to explain, but require a lot of up-front research and learning to make sense of.

It takes Urban an average of 160 hours to learn everything he needs to learn about a topic to write a post. Urban knows he’s lucky if a reader will spend two hours reading his post, so his challenge is to present complex topics in a way that readers can learn 80x faster than he did.

The key skill is the ability to find the relevant material and to synthesize it in a concise and approachable way. The challenge is to guide your readers through the information and engage them well enough that they can still explain the idea two weeks later.

An example is Urban’s Neuralink post, Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface venture.

2. Complexity as dusting

These are ideas that are more revealed than learned. It’s about finding simple yet powerful concepts that aren’t obvious at first glance. A great example is Urban’s cook versus chef concept.

The challenge here is to explain the idea in a way that people not only understand it, but know how to apply it in different contexts. I love this quote from Tim:

If you’ve explained it, you've just done step one of 20. The next 19 steps are the hard part, which is getting to a place where people deeply internalize the concept in the different ways that it manifests in life — and that they have words that they can assign to it and visuals so they can really envision the concept. To me, it's getting that concept deep into someone's psyche — not just into their understanding, but into their intuition.

3. Complexity as pattern-matching (and pattern-resisting)

These are ideas that share characteristics with both the first two types of complexity. They require intensive up-front research and learning as well as looking out for the underlying patterns that others don’t notice.

The challenge is “assigning each new bit of information to a pattern and then — and only then — deciding if that pattern should be included or resisted”. In other words, this class of complexity often comes with preset patterns accepted as the status quo. It’s important to start from first principles and move past the usual approach.

The best example is Urban’s The Story of Us. He spent three years working on a new metaphorical language we can use to think and talk about our societies and its people.

—

For each type of complexity, there’s a different ratio of effort needed to make sense of the idea versus figuring out how to explain the idea.

In the rest of the article, Tim expands on the questions to ask and tactics to consider as you’re thinking through how to explain a complex idea. Really fantastic read!

Warped time perception during the pandemic ⏱️

Recently, I came across a Vox article about how our relationship with time was altered by the pandemic. To cap off the year, it feels fitting to reflect on this theme.

The pandemic has brought two types of changes affecting our perception of time:

• we’ve lost our usual markers of time to divide up days, weeks, and months

• we’ve lost our sense of the future due to the uncertainty of when it will end

Let’s explore what psychological effects each of these might have on memory and other cognitive functions.

Loss of usual markers of time

Before the pandemic, many of us had routines that would segment our lives.

“We wake up, take the kids to school, commute to work, take lunch breaks, go to the gym, have dinners out. Now, though, any activities we once might have participated in outside the home have been abruptly removed, and we’ve lost the sense of time these seemingly mundane markers once provided.”

Without these markers, thinking back to the past 9 months can feel like a blur even though each individual day may have felt torturously long. It turns out that our retrospective perception of time, or the subjective experience of looking back, is closely related to our memory.

This isn’t intuitive, but the evolutionary purpose of memory is predict the future. It allow us to draw on past events, experiences and emotions to construct plausible scenarios of future events and act accordingly to increase our chances of survival.

To bring up a silly example - we know not to touch a hot stove because we’ve likely made the mistake in the past and our brains cemented the memory to dissuade us from doing it again. Whether or not to capture a long-term memory depends on its usefulness to us, whether physically or socially.

Since most people didn’t have many novel experiences this year, our brains have less useful information to represent in memory relative to past years. As a result, time seems to pass quickly in retrospect. Hopefully you took a few photos to fill in the gaps.

Loss of our sense of future

Perhaps more disorienting has been the uncertainty around the future. To reiterate, time perception supports the brain’s most important function: predicting the future.

“Covid-19, and its resulting effect on our lives, has stifled this instinct. Even thinking about the future conjures only a strange, fuzzy block because we know neither when this will end nor how different our world will look when it does.”

A major source of stress for a lot of people is not being able to plan ahead and reduce the ambiguity of what the future might hold for them. It’s natural to want to feel in control and have your life figured out; it’s one of our most inherent skills and desires.

An interesting parallel is the experience of schizophrenic patients, who commonly report a disturbance in the continuity of temporal experience. Time seems to stand still for them, and with that, it feels like the “self” is stuck in the present with all future perspective vanishing.

This might be hard to wrap your head around, but “the consciousness of time and consciousness of self co-create each other to construct our experience of who we are.” These patients cannot integrate the past, present, and future and so their continuity of self is shattered.

I’m not trying to say that our experiences during the pandemic compare to that of schizophrenic patients, but we could better understand the existential dread that hangs over us through this lens. Our experience of self relies in part of our ability to anticipate the future, which is disrupted by a high degree of uncertainty. What we’re left with is the past and present, which is highly unnerving to our brains. This leads to the subjective experience of time passing very slowly in the moment.

—

Curious for more? I’ve previously written about time — how our time perception is linked with our experience of self and why time feels faster with every year.

Transforming your relationship with technology 💻

In episode 3 of the Mind Gym podcast, we explore strategies for hacking back against social media, outlining specific techniques developed by experts for living a more intentional, distraction-free life by transforming your relationship with technology.

Check it out 👇

—

In the podcast, we draw on concepts from Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. Back in 2019, I wrote an article where I summarized the most important ideas and contrasted them with Nir Eyal’s Indistractible — which approaches the same problem differently.

Here’s a snippet from the article:

A more subtle commonality between the two authors is the importance of committing to what Nir calls an identity pact, or a commitment to a self-image. The idea is that you can prevent distraction by acting in line with your identity, which has a significant impact on our behavior.

Nir overtly advocates for “becoming a noun”, with the noun being indistractable, which also happens to be the title of the book. Cal is a bit more subtle about it, dispersing throughout the book what it means to be a digital minimalist. These are powerful psychological appeals that attempt to help the reader reframe how they think about themselves.

If you’re curious, go ahead and read the whole thing.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this issue of Friday Brainstorm! What got you thinking? Anything to add? Let me know by replying to this email.

—Shamay

Happy Hanukkah for those that are celebrating, and happy Friday to everyone else!

I’m going to be touching on business models in this issue, but rest assured that this won’t turn into another tech business newsletter. You don’t want that, I don’t want that, nobody wants that (unless…?). I’m narrowly interested in how the emerging neurotech industry will develop in the next couple of years, so that’s the motive.

Here’s what you can expect:

• the case for hardware subscriptions 🔄

• why you should think about lighting 💡

• (podcast) the freedom of attention 💻

Let’s get into it!

The case for hardware subscriptions 🔄

I’ve recently been thinking about how the value of certain products is best conveyed by getting it in the hands of customers. This is especially true of products that create a truly novel experience, where it’s best to let the product itself do the talking — think Peloton, Slack, or Zoom.

With software, it’s fairly easy to distribute to potential customers with a free trial because there’s no cost to letting more people try out the product. With hardware, on the other hand, it’s more tricky — there are shipping costs involved and you can’t simply repackage returned hardware as new anymore.

As a result, hardware companies can’t afford to offer a true free trial experience. There is usually a customer satisfaction period within which you could return the product, but the consumer still has to pay the upfront sticker price to get their hands on it.

What if these companies adopt a Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS) model, where customers pay for the value provided by the service, rather than the underlying hardware? This is analogous to the ubiquitous Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, where software is licensed on a subscription basis rather than a one-time purchase.

The HaaS model gives consumers the ability to essentially rent or lease the hardware product rather than owning it. This translates to a lower upfront cost as well as the ability to pause or terminate the subscription if you aren’t using it.

Importantly, it also makes consumers more open-minded about trying products from less established brands by reducing the barriers to experimenting with different devices, which is valuable in the post-pandemic world where the in-person store experience is much less common.

Consumer hardware startups building expensive, software-enabled devices will see a lot of upside from adopting a HaaS pricing model.

Let’s take a look at a case study: the NuraNow subscription program.

For context, Nura developed tech to analyze the acoustic dynamics of your ears and personalize the perfect sound. Until Apple released the AirMax Pro’s (at $550!), the Nuraphone was one of the most expensive headphones on the market at $400.

If you’re like me, this sounds pretty cool but I wouldn’t go so far as to outright buy it. Luckily, they have another plan where you pay only $70 up-front and then $12/month for as long as you own the nuraphone. You can cancel anytime and every 24 months, you have the option to upgrade. Importantly, you never really own the Nuraphones — if you stop paying, the device will be deactivated and you have to send it back.

This might seem counterintuitive. Why not just let people buy out their device similarly to how you could buy out a car after leasing it for a couple of years?

The assumption is that the consumer wants to own the hardware rather than the underlying service (high quality, personalized music delivery). This may seem like semantics, but there’s an important distinction here — owning a device means that you are liable for any damages or repair costs once the warranty is up. Additionally, if a new device comes out with a killer feature in a couple of years, you will have to pay the up-front cost again.

Now, this might not matter in the saturated smartphone market where, year after year, there isn’t much of a difference between models. But when it comes to emerging technology — like a VR headset, AR glasses, or an EEG headset — you probably want to upgrade often because the experience will change dramatically with every model.

Not only that, but HaaS makes for a more intentional and sustainable relationship between the consumer and the device.

Think about all the devices you have collecting dust in some drawer — I am certainly guilty of this with an iPad I bought back in March. If you’re getting consistent value out of it, then it should be worth the monthly cost. If not, just return it so that someone else can make use of it.

From the consumer perspective, you save on the difference between the amount paid so far in subscription costs and the full up-front cost of buying the device. In fact, the only time you don’t save money is when you’ve used the device for 2 - 3 years already, at which point it’s a good investment anyway since you seemingly got so much value of it.

From the hardware startup’s perspective, this is a net positive if you only have capacity to manufacture in small batch sizes and need the extra inventory. That being said, if you’re building a novel experience that people get continuous value from, then you don’t have to worry about a high churn rate.

The HaaS model also lets companies effectively build loyalty and longer customer relationships, as long as they’re consistently adding value over time — whether through new models, software updates, or both. The subscription is even more compelling when the software is a significant part of the product offering and updates can really improve the customer experience (think Tesla’s autonomous driving software upgrades).

For other examples of HaaS in action, check out Neosensory (early termination fee) and Peloton (up-front cost + subscription).

For brevity’s sake, I won’t cover the risks, costs, and pain points associated with the HaaS model but I’m hoping to do so when I turn this into a full blog post. Stay tuned!

Why you should think about lighting 💡

We’re 3 days away from the darkest day of winter — the sun sets at 4:30 these days.

Do you notice any differences in your mood or focus levels these days? Maybe you’re more lethargic towards the end of your workday, or maybe you’re not in good spirits these days. These are all symptoms that people usually associate with winter, but have you considered that it doesn’t have to be this way?

If you try to Google these questions, you end up on a website describing seasonal depression, or seasonal affective disorder (SAD — a very fitting acronym).

While some people really do suffer from SAD, the majority of people have only very mild symptoms such as feeling more tired on cloudy days. Instead of thinking about SAD as a discrete diagnosis, a better model is to look at it as a continuum of how light deprivation affects people. Ben Kuhn captured it perfectly in this graph:

“Typical indoor light levels run from 100-500 lux, which at the high end is about as bright as sunrise outdoors, and about 100x dimmer than daylight. Other than “we’ve been doing it for a while,” there seems to be no reason to expect that being in a 100x dimmer environment all day wouldn’t be awful. Indoor darkness seems to be one of those things that we don’t question only because it’s been that way forever.”

If you’re like most people, you probably haven’t thought much about the indoor lighting conditions in your home. It turns out that investing in really bright lights not only helps with productivity, but also with how the cheerful a room might look.

For practical advice on how to fill your home with light that truly resembles daylight, check out the rest of Ben Kuhn's blog post.

—

I’ll be writing more about the cognitive effects of light in the coming weeks. As a teaser, I’m working on a project using an EEG headset to control Nanoleaf lights.

The Freedom of Attention 💻

The second episode of my new podcast, Mind Gym, was just released. I even got a real microphone this time, so no more shitty phone recordings!

We discuss the themes explored by the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, and more specifically, how the rise of social media has chipped away at our ability to pay attention to the things that matter.

Ask yourself: what is technology supposed to be doing for us?

There is a deep misalignment between the goals we have for ourselves and the goals our technologies have for us. We need a new framework for talking about attention to fully understand the implications of the deep sense of distraction we all feel.

Check it out 👇

—

In the podcast, we draw on James Williams’ Stand Out of Our Light, which is by far the most profound book I've read on the attention crisis. To get more people to read the book, I wrote an article earlier this year where I summarized the most important ideas.

Here’s a snippet from the article:

What do you pay when you pay attention?

You pay with the everything else you could have paid attention to, but didn't. You pay with all the goals you didn't realize, all the decisions you didn't make, all the versions of you that you could have been.

You pay for those extra few Friends episodes with the sleep you didn't get and the fresh feeling you didn't have the next morning. You pay for that extra hour you spent compulsively reading about the coronavirus with the heart-to-heart talk you could have had with an anxious friend.

“We pay attention with the lives we might have lived. When we consider the opportunity costs in this wider view, the question of attention extends far beyond the next turn in your life’s GPS: it encompasses all the turns and their relations, the nature of your destination, the specific way you want to get there, why you’re going there, and also your ability to ask any of these questions in the first place.”

If you’re curious, go ahead and read the whole thing.

—

Fun fact: I featured this article in the first edition of Friday Brainstorm back in March. That feels soo long ago 😨. For better or for worse, it looks like I use more emojis now.

If you’ve been here since Day 1, this button will take you down memory lane. If you’re new, this button will take you to the humble beginnings of this newsletter.

Take me back to where it all started

I hope you’ve enjoyed this issue of Friday Brainstorm! What got you thinking? Anything to add? Let me know by replying to this email.

— Shamay

I hope you all had a happy and safe Thanksgiving! Welcome to the ~100 new readers that joined us since the last edition, really happy to have you.

I usually send this newsletter out on Fridays, but the past three editions have gone out on Saturdays due to poor planning on my part. Honestly I would just change the name, but Saturday Brainstorm doesn’t have the same ring to it. Anyway, you probably don’t care; I’m writing this bit mostly to guilt myself into publishing on Fridays again.

You’re going to like this week’s issue if you’re curious about the frontier of biological and computational neuroscience. You can expect:

• the science of cell communication 🔬

• why we dream (a computational lens) 🛌

• (podcast) on cultivating flow states 🍳

Let’s get into it!

The emerging science of cell communication 🔬

Jon Lieff’s book, The Secret Language of Cells, is a comprehensive exploration of the groundbreaking new research findings in the field of cellular communication.

He explains the surprising science of how very different cells—bacteria and brain cells, blood cells and viruses—all speak the same language. [. . .] it has applications for immunity, chronic pain, weight loss, depression, cancer treatment, and virtually every aspect of health and biology.

Not only is this is first effort at making these findings accessible to a general audience, but it also represents a paradigm shift in how we understand health and disease.

The book has personal significance to me because I grew up in a family that had a strong distrust for Western medicine, relying instead on alternative treatments like acupuncture and energy-based therapy. Until recently, scientific explanations for these treatments didn’t exist in the mainstream academic literature.

Let’s take acupuncture — it’s most often used to relieve pain by inserting thin needles into “acupuncture points” that are distant from the area in question. For example, the feet are a particularly rich body part when it comes to these points.

Until recently, pain was thought to be caused by well-known brain circuits. It turns out that circuits that influence pain also involve immune cells and are decentralized, in that they converse with one another from many locations throughout the body.

Recent research showed that electrical stimulation of immune cells (T cells) altered a neural pain circuit in a distant organ, by sending molecular signals to a nearby neuron that served as the intermediate messenger. To tie this back to acupuncture, it starts to make sense how using thin needles to stimulate pockets of immune cells can work to decrease pain and inflammation in other parts of the body.

Understanding these complex circuits will enable new types of medical treatments and justify the efficacy of alternative treatments that have existed for thousands of years.

Ultimately, Lieff’s synthesis of the research opens more questions than it answers.

One issue facing scientists is the fact that we don’t know if all the types of signals have been discovered yet. As well as chemical and electrical signals, there could be other types, such as electromagnetic fields, photons, and quantum states, which might be directing information flow.

I’m excited about the prospect of more attention being given to these understudied signaling mechanisms. Earlier this year, I highlighted an emerging field that provides a novel framework for studying energy-based therapies. It turns out that all living systems generate a dynamic electro-magnetic field, called a biofield.

If you’re curious, I give a high-level overview in my article — Biological WiFi.

Why we dream from a computational lens 🛌

You’ve probably heard that the brain consolidates your memories when you sleep, but have you ever wondered how this happens? It turns out that dreams are a crucial part of this process, and not for the reasons you might think. Computational neuroscience studies have revealed the functional role of dreams in helping us preserve memories.

As a bit of background, there are two types of long-term memory:

• episodic memory: involves the actual details of an event, situation or experience (e.g. where did I park today)

• semantic memory: related to meaning, knowledge, significance, or relationships (e.g. where do I usually park?)

The brain is responsible for both remembering specifics (episodic) and extracting generalities over multiple experiences (semantic). To support these incompatible goals, there are two separate brain circuits for learning: hippocampus and neocortex.

Episodic information is initially encoded in the hippocampus, where it can be stored rapidly without interfering with existing knowledge. This turns into semantic memory when it’s slowly consolidated to the neocortex, which contains all your accumulated memories and experiences.

Behavioral evidence suggests that we consolidate new experiences from the day while we sleep. In an experiment, participants were taught new information and split into two groups — Group 1 was deprived of sleep the same night whereas Group 2 didn’t sleep the following night. After two days, the participants were tested and those from Group 1 performed worse even though Group 2 was more tired. This demonstrated that sleep plays a crucial role in same-day memory consolidation. The findings extends to declarative learning, perceptual learning, and skill learning.

How does the memory consolidation process work?

In short, the theory is that the hippocampus replays memories back to the neocortex during sleep. Researchers tried to model the integration of new info, but ran into a problem — all the old info was being immediately unlearned in the simulations.

Consider the paired associates learning paradigm. Here’s how it works:

1. A set of paired associations, AB, are learned (ex: window-reason, bicycle-garbage)

2. A new set of associations, AC, are learned for half of the old pair (ex: window-telephone, bicycle-desk)

3. Both sets of associations, AB and AC, are tested (ex: window - ?, bicycle - ?)

In humans, we see a modest and gradual loss of memory for AB set as the number of AC set learning trials increases. This is expected, since half of the AC associations are overwriting the previously learned AB associations in memory.

The neural network model, on the other hand, was able to initially learn the AB set but the AB associations are completely overwritten when it starts to learn the AC set. In other words, the model wasn’t able to integrate the new info as well as humans can.

This puzzled researchers for a long time, until they discovered that the problem was the training regimen they used. Their assumption was that the hippocampus simply replayed new memories to the neocortex, but the simulations showed that this heavily interfered with older knowledge.

It turns out that the brain uses a slightly less efficient method called interleaved training, where new info is regularly jumbled with old and inconsistent knowledge. While this means that learning is slightly slower, it allows for the new info to coexist with the older knowledge in memory.

Imagine this process as slowly sifting flour (new info) into the dough of old knowledge.

This is where dreams come in. While we’re sleeping, our brain cycles between slow-wave (deep) sleep, where recent memories are integrated, and REM (dreaming) sleep, where connections damaged by new learning are revisited and repaired. Without dreams, old memories are more likely to be overwritten by new info being integrated.

Dreams are a byproduct of your brain bringing up random old information to aid in the memory consolidation process.

I always found it fascinating that the role of dreams was discovered only after trying to model the brain’s neural architecture and running into same problems that nature did.

I also wanted to thank my professor, Jon Cohen, for his brilliant lecture that inspired this post.

Living a fulfilling life by cultivating flow 🍳

I’m excited to announce that my new podcast, Mind Gym, has finally launched.

I teamed up with John Alvarez to explore the neuroscience of optimal cognition. Each episode will be 15 - 20 minutes and full of actionable insights. Think The Happiness Lab, but with a focus on mental states and cognitive neuroscience.

In the first episode, we discuss how life can be made more enjoyable by recognizing the conditions that are favorable to flow and working to actively cultivate them.

For the keen reader, I know that I promised to focus on cultivating flow at work in the podcast teaser but it ended up being too much content to cover in 20 minutes. I hope to cover it in a future episode — in the meantime, check out this one!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this issue of Friday Brainstorm! What got you thinking? Anything to add? Let me know by replying to this email.

— Shamay

Happy Friday! Welcome back for Edition 2 of Friday Brainstorm’s second season (or #16 for anyone counting).

This issue will primarily focus on flow states. You can expect:

• the future of non-fiction is non-linear 📖

• personal experience with flow states 🧠

• an upcoming podcast about designing work for flow 👩‍💻

Let’s get into it!

Why the future of non-fiction is non-linear 📖

Books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it.

This bold claim comes from Andy Matuschak’s thought-provoking essay Why Books Don’t Work. When it comes to non-fiction books specifically, there’s an implicit assumption that people absorb knowledge by reading sentences. People often think like they absorb knowledge when they read, but in reality, they usually only have a vague idea of the main arguments or concepts presented in the book.

Why is that? Genuine understanding relies on readers actively engaging with the ideas, which can be really challenging.

Apart from the content of the book, there’s a lot of additional overhead involved that can be mentally taxing. For example, you constantly have to be assessing whether you understood the passage you just read, and if not, whether you should re-read it or consult another text.

How might we reimagine the medium of a book such that its design lightens the burden of absorbing knowledge?

One possibility is to reduce the overhead of memorizing low-level facts. By testing your memory about what you just read at regular intervals, more complex topics like quantum theory might be more accessible. If you’re curious, I’ve previously written about Andy Matuschak’s interactive book based on these principles.

Another possibility is to overcome the constraints of traditional books by reimagining the reading experience as a choose-your-own-adventure. In other words, what advantages are afforded by presenting the ideas in a book in a non-linear fashion rather than a linear narrative?

Luca Dellanna, a seasoned author and consultant, recently published Ergodicity — one of the first books available to read in a non-linear format.

The book was published in Roam Research, a note-taking tool that is structured as a graph of interconnected nodes (or ideas) behind the scenes (more on Roam Research). This is what the book looks like from a graphical perspective:

After reading Ergodicity, I wanted to reflect on the format and reading experience. There are three main features of non-linear books that aid comprehension:

1. Non-linear exploration

While reading, I could sporadically fall into a rabbit hole around a certain topic and end up in a completely different part of the book. This makes the reading experience more like browsing the internet, allowing you to easily navigate at your own pace and to dive more deeply into parts of the book you’re more interested in.

At the same time, the content was poorly suited for this type of exploration because the book only focused on one concept and elaborated on it in different ways. The author included a table of contents to add some optional structure, and I ended up not straying too far from the intended linear flow.

It’s hard to say what kind of books can exploit non-linearity better, but a topic area with more interconnected nodes, like history or science, might feel more rewarding.

2. Contextual information

Ergodicity, the concept explored in the book, is fairly complex and takes some building up to. That being said, it is helpful to have definitions easily accessible. Roam provides many ways for earlier passages to be embedded in-line to avoid duplicate information.

In addition to references, you could instantly look up all instances of the law of large numbers if you wanted to explore all the contexts in which it’s mentioned in the book. This helps you find connections between ideas and see how a concept is applied in different settings, thereby improving your understanding of the book.

That being said, the book could go farther in structuring the arguments and linked references. If you’re curious and familiar with Roam, see Robert Haisfield’s criticism.

3. Naturally extensible

The most exciting aspect of this format is that it can be downloaded and integrated directly into your own graph database on Roam Research. This is the closest thing we have to the common sci-fi trope of downloading information into your (digital) brain.

This is particularly effective because it allows you to make connections to pre-existing knowledge you have stored in Roam Research. This heavily reduces the friction of taking notes and referencing related ideas while you’re reading. This process of making connections is really important for effective understanding (for more on this, see my summary of the book How to Take Smart Notes).

—

All in all, Luca Dellanna’s attempt at a non-linear book was a fantastic effort and sets up the stage for further innovation down the line. I firmly believe that this will be the future of non-fiction books.

Personal experience with flow states 🧠

I usually don’t read books that are so popular that their ideas have become ubiquitous in our culture. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience is one of those books — I had come across so many articles and videos rehashing the books’ main ideas, that it didn’t feel necessary to actually read it.

I finally came around to reading the book recently and I really wish that I had found this book earlier in my life.

After graduating from university some 18 months ago, I felt really lost without the external structure of classes and assignments. I didn’t have much experience in structuring my time and goals as an adult, which made life feel really unfulfilling.

The turning point came when I picked up the guitar again. I used to play as a kid, but I never really found it very enjoyable. It hadn’t occurred to me that when external goals (e.g. performances) weren’t involved, getting better at music for its own sake was fun.

I was shocked at how much better I felt when I spent weekends picking up a new song instead of watching Netflix. Practicing guitar was the only leisurely activity that made me feel more energized afterwards. Since then, I’ve experimented with many different activities in search of that feeling, ultimately landing on writing and (most recently) digital art.

Csikszentmihalyi’s book gave me the framework to understand the common thread connecting music, writing, and making art — these are all activities that are known to be deeply fulfilling because they consistently produce flow. To briefly define flow,

Flow is a mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. — Wikipedia

Simply put, it’s the feeling of being “in the zone”. Think about the feeling of being immersed in a book, playing a sport, or performing a musical piece.

Activities that are conducive to flow states share a couple of common characteristics:

• need an investment of attention

• need to be just challenging enough

• need clear goals and immediate feedback

• need to be intrinsically rewarding

These elements lead to personal growth, novelty, and accomplishment — culminating in a sense of deep enjoyment that feels really rewarding. 

Csikszentmihalyi argues life can be made more enjoyable by recognizing the conditions that are favorable to flow states and working to actively cultivate them.

Importantly, all activities that lead to flow require an unusual investment of attention. When we passively perform our jobs or mindlessly consume entertainment, these activities sap our attention and leave us more exhausted and disheartened than before.

Attention is our most valuable resource and anything worthwhile in life requires an investment of attention. 

Making the space to deliberately fill my free time with hobbies that energized me was a long journey, especially with how easy it is to find low-effort forms of entertainment these days (e.g. Netflix, social media). With many flow-conducive activities, you have to reach a certain level of skill before it begins to be rewarding — there’s no shortcut, which is why many people never consistently stick with these habits.

Being able to structure my free time in a way that energizes me dramatically changed the quality of my life. Csikszentmihalyi’s book helped me understand why certain activities feel so rewarding and gave me a framework for cultivating flow.

Podcast teaser: designing work for flow 👩‍💻

In the last newsletter, I announced that I’m launching a podcast that will overlap heavily with the themes of this newsletter.

To give a brief sneak peak, the first episode will focus on cultivating flow at work. So far, I’ve only discussed flow in the context of leisurely activities, but people spend a significant amount of their lives at work.

To improve the quality of life through work, we’ll discuss how to design the day-to-day at your job so that it resembles other flow inducing activities — with appropriate and flexible challenges, clear goals, and immediate feedback.

There are multiple philosophies about how to best structure your work to cultivate flow states, from thinkers including Cal Newport and Tiago Forte.

Stay tuned for all this and more in the upcoming podcast!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this issue of Friday Brainstorm! What got you thinking? Anything to add? Let me know by replying to this email.

—Shamay

Welcome back to Friday Brainstorm! If you missed last week’s update, I’ve taken some time to rethink this newsletter from the ground up.

Friday Brainstorm is neuroscience made approachable and actionable for people who want to better understand their brain.

With blog posts, the goal is short-form articles that are practical and well-researched. At the same time, I want to leave space for half-baked ideas, unfiltered commentary, and off the cuff reactions to content I’m consuming.

I’ll try my best to differentiate between

• 🌲 finished pieces (refined articles that are checked for scientific accuracy)

• 🌱 early hunches (seeds that may later turn into blog posts or projects).

—

Anyway, let’s get back into it. This issue is all about lifelong learning.

We’re conditioned to think of school as the place where learning happens, but that’s simply outdated. The idea that by the time you graduate college, you’ll have acquired all the knowledge you need for a lifelong career is long gone. The pace of change is too rapid these days and knowledge quickly becomes obsolete in most industries. The fact is that everyone will need to continually learn and adapt in order to stay competitive in the job market and beyond.

Here’s an overview of what you can expect:

• some exciting personal updates 🆕

• people-centered learning platforms 👪

• reflections on a new kind of book club 📚

Hope you enjoy!

But first, some personal updates 🆕

There have been 3 developments in the past month that I’m excited to share:

1. Helping lead the NeuroTechX Content Lab

Given my interests, it’s probably no surprise that I’ve long been a part of NeuroTechX, the world’s largest non-profit focused on neurotechnology.

Recently, the organization launched a new initiative, the Content Lab, to draw on the collective curiosity and creativity of the community. I’ll be leading a team of writers, editors, and designers to create the world’s first publication focused on neurotech.

I’m really happy to have the opportunity to scale my efforts and work with an entire team to produce engaging, accessible, and well-researched neuroscience content.

If want to stay updated or are just curious about NeuroTechX, sign up for their newsletter!

2. Starting a new podcast

Everyone has a podcast these days, what’s one more?

I’m joining forces with longtime friend John Alvarez to explore the world of audio. If you like this newsletter, you’re going to like the Mind Gym Podcast (working title).

The podcast will be about the neuroscience of optimal cognition, for people who want better control of their mental environment. Each episode will be 15 - 20 minutes and full of actionable insights. Think Laurie Santos’s The Happiness Lab, but with a focus on mental habits and cognition.

The first few episodes will focus on topics I’ve covered in past issues of this newsletter - the neuroscience of music, flow states, and attention. More details to come!

3. Quantifying attention with a BCI

Lastly, a side-project I’ll be working on.

After writing a series on the future of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), I felt like I couldn’t just sit around and wait for someone else to invent these things.

Last month, I bought one of the first consumer-ready EEG headsets - the Notion.

The founders behind this device wanted to create a platform for people to start making brain-powered apps, or software that responds to our brainwaves in real time.

I’m interested in measuring attention, not from the lens of productivity, but rather focusing on the attentional costs of our digital technologies. Quantifying attention lets us build the first cognitive metrics, giving us concrete data on the relative harms of social media and other apps that compete for our attention.

Look forward to more content about what the Notion lets us do!

People-centered learning platforms 👪

We’ve seen an explosion in online educational platforms in the last few decades — Coursera, Udemy, Khan Academy, and many more. For the first time, knowledge was democratized and accessible to just about anyone with an internet connection.

In 2020, this market is now saturated and we’re finding that the drop-off rate for these massive online open courses (MOOCs) is extremely high. This isn’t all the surprising, as online courses are usually not much more than a playlist of videos with intermittent quizzes and additional reading. If there’s any community aspect, it’s often a forum.

This begs the question - what does engaging, internet-native learning look like?

Hyperlink Academy

Hyperlink is a platform for creating and participating in community-driven online courses. The founders noticed that despite the saturated market, there aren’t many options for people who prioritize teaching and learning together with others.

At universities, learning is often a social endeavor. Many of my classes emphasized precepts, or small discussion groups, as a core part of the learning experience. This aspect hasn’t translated very well to modern learning platforms.

Hyperlink has a strong focus on enabling active, participatory learning experiences. Here are a few of the guiding principles behind the platform:

• Community-driven: building space for small, focused groups, learning together

• Ambitious learning: going way beyond reading lists and video lectures to learn challenging ideas

• Experimentation: courses with innovative structures, that adapt and improve over time

• Peer to peer: instead of "teachers" and "students", facilitators and learners co-create the learning experience

This makes for much different learning experience than the competition. The courses themselves are also much more niche than those you can find on other platforms, from web typography to language construction. Check out two more examples below:

Probably the most underrated aspect of these courses though, are the people you’ll meet — who are drawn to the same niche topics and fields that you are.

But there’s more! In addition to the traditional course, Hyperlink is experimenting with the idea of clubs — “a lightweight way to convene people with shared interests to explore new things together”.

The first batch of learning clubs are kicking off now, including a reading group, an artist circle, a club on the future of media, and even a virtual museum explorer club.

Be sure to take a look at Hyperlink’s library of courses and clubs!

Learn Awesome

Another problem with online learning is that despite the plethora of information, it’s still a big challenge to discover the right learning material.

There are a lot of open resources available on the web, but finding, qualifying, and navigating them–let alone combining them into a self directed system–is a challenge. That’s because the tools we use today to search the web are designed for quickly finding facts, not for guiding you on a learning journey. — Dani Grant

If we want to teach ourselves a new topic efficiently, we need the real-world analog of a course syllabus. A syllabus is essentially a learning map; it defines a thematic structure, tells you what to read, and also it what order to read it.

The founder of Learn Awesome is trying to build humanity’s learning map, a crowdsourced syllabus for any topic you can think of. Unlike a syllabus, this platform draws on all the ways we learn today — blogs, podcasts, videos, graphics, forums, etc.

Not only that, but the community seems to also be experimenting with peer learning groups. I’ve been interested in fiction writing for a while, and the crowdsourced syllabus is probably one of the best collection of resources I’ve found on the subject.

With any luck, this platform could become the Wikipedia for learning. Check it out!

Reflections on a new kind of book club 📚

In the last few months, I was part of an online book club where we discussed Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From. The book itself was interesting, but the structure of the club and the people involved were really fascinating.

For context, this book club was created from the community of early adopters of the note-taking tool Roam Research, which I’ve written about earlier. As you might imagine, people in this category are pretty thorough and take lots of notes.

Without going into too many specifics, Roam Research provided a common space for the club members not only to leave their own thoughts, but also to read through the thoughts of everyone else for a specific chapter or section.

For example, we went through the exercise of providing a brief summary of each chapter. After everyone added their summary, it was a really magical experience to read through 50 different interpretations of the same text. Here’s a sample:

It not only gave me a much deeper understanding of the ideas we’ve discussed, but also a greater appreciation for the diversity of perspectives within the group. It was a reminder that we all come to the table with vastly different sets of experiences, and it’s a wonder we ever understand each other at all!

The book club also had weekly Zoom calls, which featured various speakers (including the author himself) as well as breakout rooms to discuss the chapter we just read.

This was my first experience with an online, community-driven learning group of sorts, and it was truly transformative. Reading a book alone can be nice, but this format showed me that even reading can be an inherently social endeavor.

Personally, I would love to see a platform like Goodreads that also provided a way for people to easily find others reading the same books they are to form spontaneous reading groups.

I’m confident that many more people would be drawn to lifelong learning if platforms like Hyperlink and Learn Awesome continue to grow and provide more opportunities for active, participatory learning experiences.

If you’re curious to experience this for yourself, the book How to Take Smart Notes was chosen for the next iteration of the Roam Book Club and the first meeting is tomorrow. Sign up here!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this issue of Friday Brainstorm! What got you thinking? Anything to add? Let me know by replying to this email.

—Shamay

It’s been a little over a month since the last issue of Friday Brainstorm. I wanted to take a break and process the feedback I got from writing this newsletter for 6 months.

Having some space away from writing gave me clarity on what’s been working and what needs a refresh. That being said — I’m excited to announce that Friday Brainstorm is returning next week, with a fresh look and all-new content style.

The next season of Friday Brainstorm will be snappier, more engaging, and better researched. If you enjoyed the past newsletters, you’ll absolutely love where this newsletter is going next.

I also have a couple of personal updates that I can’t wait to share with you all. It will have to wait until next week though!

— Shamay

To prepare for the launch, I would really appreciate it if you shared this newsletter with friends, family and coworkers who would get something out of it.

Share Friday Brainstorm Newsletter

In one sentence - Friday Brainstorm is where I try to unpack the neuroscience behind everyday experiences. My hope is that readers walk away with a better understanding of why their brain works the way it does.

In any given newsletter, you might find some combination of:

• any new pieces I’m writing ✍️

• powerful concepts from books I’m reading 📚

• unfiltered thoughts on an app/startup 📱

• deep dives into an topic area from multiple angles 🤔

• quality content recommendations 📦

• my take on the latest neuroscience research findings 🧠

Shanah Tovah to those of you who are celebrating Rosh Hashanah and happy Friday to everyone else. Welcome back for issue 14 of Friday Brainstorm.

This issue will focus primarily on tech ethics. You can expect:

• the struggle for our freedom of attention 📱

• Facebook’s principles for building AR hardware 👓

Let’s get into it!

The struggle for our freedom of attention 📱

The Social Dilemma is a Netflix documentary/drama hybrid about the corrosive impact of social media. This is a must-watch — as a society, we need to start a conversation about how our attention is being exploited and sold.

For those that remember, I often touched on attention when I first started writing. There’s an important idea from The Freedom of Attention that I want to resurface:

While the defining paradigm shift in tech over the past few years has been that of data privacy rights, the next movement will be over our freedom of attention.

In other words, we've fought for transparency and regulation around how companies handle our information, but not around how they manage our attention.

Attention is quite literally our most precious resource in life — it’s the filter through which we take in the world. What we pay attention to determines what we do, what we think about, and who we are.

It’s no surprise that our attention is valuable to companies. There is a fierce global competition between digital products and services all vying for our attention. The business model is almost always the same — it’s free to join but you pay with your attention, which they sell to the highest bidder via advertisements.

Where does this lead? An environment where companies are financially incentivized to keep you scrolling/watching for as long as possible. There is a deep misalignment between the goals we have for ourselves and the goals our technologies have for us.

“We are more profitable to a corporation if we are staring at a screen that if we're spending that time living our life in a rich way.”

This is where we find ourselves today. But what if there was another way? What if companies were financially incentivized to direct our attention towards things that helped us pursue our goals and values?

I really do hope that The Social Dilemma brings these issues into the national spotlight. It’s not too late to correct course, but first we have to acknowledge the problem.

After watching the documentary, here is some further reading:

• The Freedom of Attention: a deep dive into the ideas of tech ethicist James Williams on the modern attention crisis and how to approach solving it.

• Digital Minimalism: comparing two books on living a more intentional, distraction-free life by transforming your relationship with technology.

• Dopamine Fasting: if you’re going to do a digital detox, you need to be observant and intentional about the experience

Facebook’s principles for building AR hardware 👓

Speaking of tech companies that mine your attention, Facebook recently held their Connect conference where they unveiled their latest progress in VR and AR. Among other things, the company announced that they will be partnering with Luxottica (the makers of Ray-Ban) to create a pair of stylish, augmented reality (AR) glasses by 2021.

As we’ve seen with the infamous Google Glass, controversy and backlash is inevitable when dealing with camera-enabled eyewear. This is compounded by the fact that Facebook has a poor record on privacy and has usually been reactive (rather than proactive) about societal issues created by its far-reaching software and services.

This time, the tech giant is trying a different approach — launching initiatives around safety, privacy, ethics, and inclusion years before it is ready to sell AR hardware.

• Project Aria. Research tool (pictured above) to help Facebook “develop the safeguards, policies, and even social norms necessary to govern the use of AR glasses and future wearable devices”. Read more.

• Research grants. Facebook is offering $1M in funding for research focused on the impact of AR, VR, and smart device tech on non-users — with an emphasis on perspectives from under-represented communities and outside the US.

Facebook also published a set of responsible innovation principles to guide the company’s work on existing and future hardware products.

Here’s are the four principles from their website:

• Never surprise people. We’re transparent about how our products work, the data they collect, and how that data is used over time so that people know what to expect.

• Provide controls that matter. We build simple controls that are easy to understand, and we’re clear about the implications involved in people’s choices.

• Consider everyone. We build for people of all backgrounds, including people who aren’t using our products but may be affected by them.

• Put people first. We strive to do what’s right for our community, individuals, and our business. When faced with tradeoffs, we prioritize what’s best for our community.

The fourth principle suggests that Facebook will put people’s interests over profits, but how realistic is this promise for a company whose business model is built on advertising? How will “put people first” extend to monetizing the platform? What guardrails and protections will there be for advertisements in the AR environment?

In some sense, the financial incentive structures in place today make it impossible for Facebook to truly live up these principles.

Here’s another thought along the same lines:

“Facebook's commitments to investigate AR's potential impact on racism and inequality, for instance, sounds good on paper. But how will the company really react once law enforcement agencies put in orders for its future AR glasses? How will it weigh potential contributions to public safety against concerns that this technology may exacerbate systemic racism?” — Janko Roettgers

While it’s heartening to see that Facebook is trying to anticipate challenges around privacy, ethics, and inclusion — I wonder how effectively it can follow through.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Friday Brainstorm! What did you think? Anything that stood out or sparked your curiosity? Let me know by replying to this email.

—Shamay

Happy Friday and welcome back for Friday Brainstorm #13! This issue will largely focus on brain plasticity, or the ongoing change happening in our brains.

You probably know a few things about plasticity, like how children have a larger capacity for learning than adults. I’m here to tell you that's only the tip of the iceberg. The last decade of research have drastically changed our understanding of plasticity.

Here’s an overview of what you can expect:

• New sensory experiences 🤯

• Brain training app review 💪

• Learning to make digital art 🖍️

Let’s get into it.

New sensory experiences 🤯

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and NYT bestselling author, but I appreciate him most for his talent as a science communicator — using straightforward language to make ideas about neuroscience widely accessible. Livedwired is his latest book, where he attempts to change the narrative around how we think about brain plasticity.

Let's think about human-built technology - an Apple Watch, for instance. We buy a specific model (hardware) and install apps (software) to help us accomplish whatever we need to do. This is a plastic system that depends on apps to adapt the functionality. If a new model comes out with heart-rate monitoring capabilities, however, we can't just install an app or update our watch. We would need new hardware.

This is where the hardware-software metaphor breaks down for understanding the brain. Unlike our technology, our neurons (hardware) are constantly redesigned by input through our senses (software). If we encounter a problem that we're not currently equipped for, we don't need a new brain - it can change itself dramatically to meet the demands.

Eagleman introduces a new term to describe a dynamic, adaptable, information-seeking system like our brain - a “livedwired” system.

To illustrate this, consider our five senses: touch, smell, sight, hearing, and taste. You might think that there is something special about them, but to our brain, it really doesn't matter kind of sensory organs we have.

Eagleman calls this the Potato Head model of evolution - our sensory organs are just plug-and-play peripheral devices.

“Whatever information the brain is fed, it will learn to adjust to it and extract what it can. As long as the data have a structure that reflects something important about the outside world”

In other words, our senses are arbitrary. Over the course of evolution, random mutations led to the senses we have and the brain simply figured out how to use them.

Here's why this matters:

Sensory Substitution

What if you could stream the sound environment around you and convert it into touch on your skin? Would you be able to hear through your touch?

Turns out, the answer is yes. I briefly touched on this in an earlier newsletter, but Eagleman's startup created the Buzz, a wearable wristband that enables deaf people to hear the world via vibrations.

Here is one user's experience:

“Philip reports he can tell when his dogs are barking, or the faucet is running, or the doorbell rings, or his wife calls his name (something she never used to do, but does routinely now).”

Importantly, Philip isn’t just interpreting the buzzing on his wrist. After some training, he has the sensation of distinct sounds in his head! In other words, the brain has learned how to translate the vibrations into a perceived sound in real-time.

If you're curious to read about the experiences of deaf people using the Buzz device, check out the startup's blog.

Sensory Addition

Beyond expanding senses to take in more of what they normally do, could we create entirely new senses?

“Given our current knowledge, there’s no end to imagining the sensory expansions we’ll build: vision in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, or ultrasonic hearing, or being plugged into the invisible states of your body’s physiology.”

Here are a few wild possibilities:

• a surgeon feeling patient data so that they don't have to look up at the monitor during an operation

• a trader perceiving real-time data from the stock market

• a long-distance couple feeling each other's biometric data

You might not want any of these applications in your own life, but this is only meant to help you imagine that landscape of possibilities.

What will these things feel like? It’s impossible to describe. This much is clear: it won’t just feel like a buzz on your wrist. Over time, your brain will internalize the new data stream as an internal sense, much like sight or hearing.

What I’ve described so far is just a few ideas in this brilliant book. Check it out:

👉 Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain 👈

App review: Brain Training 💪

In the last newsletter, I reviewed book summary apps — exploring the neuroscience behind why they aren’t effective and how they could be improved. I decided this would be a recurring segment, called App Review.

This week, I’m looking into the world of brain-training with apps like Lumosity, Elevate, and Peak. All of these services make claims about increasing your mental fitness and slowing cognitive decline. The idea is simple — create simple games that train cognitive tasks and track people’s progress over time.

While we do see improvements on the games people trained on, the benefits don’t extend outside the context of the games. Unless you just want to get better at the games themselves, you’re not getting the advertised cognitive benefits.

In 2014, a group of scientists released a statement that there isn’t enough scientific evidence to suggest that brain games improves cognitive abilities or slows decline.

“The promise of a magic bullet detracts from the best evidence to date [...] cognitive health in old age reflects the long-term effects of healthy, engaged lifestyles.”

Now that we’ve established that they don’t work as advertised, I do think there is potential for a mental fitness industry in the future. Let’s explore a few possibilities:

Benchmarking your cognitive capacity

While it’s true that the benefits don’t generalize outside of the games, we can still use this to our advantage. If we’re trying a new diet, exercise routine, or sleeping more — it might be useful to track how much it’s improving your mental abilities. By playing the games before and after the health change, we can quantify the improvement!

On the flip side, if you’re finding yourself trending towards a less healthy lifestyle, seeing the negative effects on your cognitive capabilities might be a game-changer.

It’s easy to imagine this integrating with health wearables and adding a cognitive dimension to the metrics tracked.

Real-time biofeedback

A month ago, I wrote an article that argued our capacity to sustain attention is something we can train, like a mental muscle.

The problem with the status quo is that progress is subjective and hard to measure. But what if you could monitor your focus levels on a moment-by-moment basis?

Recent advances in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have made this a real possibility. Having a real-time measure of the cognitive ability you’re training might be pivotal in making brain training games truly effective.

Even if “training” isn’t an effective model, BCIs will help people learn more about their patterns of focus and potentially find new strategies to manage distractions.

If you’re curious, the article imagines a futuristic BCI-enabled VR game for focus:

👉 BCI 2022: Peloton for the Mind 👈

Learning to make digital art 🖍️

I've been taking a little break from writing full blog posts. In the meantime, I've been learning how to make digital art.

With the pandemic, everyone's feeling a little more lonely and confined. I really like the way that the artists behind Pavlov Visuals captured this feeling in their work.

I spent a good chunk of Sunday imitating their pieces. Here’s the result:

Hoping to post more digital art as I get better at this!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Friday Brainstorm! What did you think? Anything that stood out or sparked your curiosity? Let me know by replying to this email.

—Shamay

Happy Friday and welcome back for the twelfth issue of Friday Brainstorm! This one is going to be a slightly shorter than usual.

I wanted to share some thoughts on the future of long-form content (books, articles, podcasts, shows, you name it) and how we’ll be engaging with it.

We know that bite-sized, easily consumable content does well on the internet. It’s easy to look at this as an existential threat to long-form, but it’s also worth framing this is a challenge to embrace. In some sense, the bar has been raised — content creators are better than ever at engaging their audience. At the same time, people worry that this content is becoming more shallow.

Here are the two questions I want to explore:

• What is the future of engaging with long-form content?

• How do we make sure that people are engaging deeply?

Let’s get into it.

Is an animated podcast just a show? 🎙️

There’s a new animated show on Netflix called The Midnight Gospel, and it’s a little different from what you’re used to.

Pendleton Ward (creator of Adventure Time) and Duncan Trussell (comedian and host of The Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast) have joined forces to create a trippy hybrid between an adult cartoon and a podcast.

“The result is a legitimate visual podcast. Sure, many podcasts offer supplementary video footage, but The Midnight Gospel creates a world of its own where its dialogue can flourish.” — Joshua Robinson

The show is highly experimental, turning the medium of podcasting into something you can watch. It features conversations taken directly from Trussell’s podcast, touching on heavy themes of spirituality, mindfulness, mental health, hope and death.

“What podcasting represents to me is that authenticity and vulnerability that’s sometimes missing from shows on TV, so I think it’s really good for people to see that -- you realize you’re not as crazy as you thought.” — Duncan Trussell

Let’s think about what this means for a moment.

Despite the overall trend towards bite-sized content, podcasts have exploded as a new long-form medium in the last few years. As a platform, podcasts have normalized the intimate and thought-provoking conversations that have never had a place in the media landscape before.

At the same time, podcasts do have their limitations:

• people who are visually-driven might have a hard time tuning into the audio without something visual to focus their attention on

• podcast are typically something you listen to alone, on your commute or whenever else you might have downtime

Midnight Gospel hits two birds with one stone in this sense — not only is there a bizarre cartoon to compliment the conversation, but it’s also a Netflix show that you can watch in a social setting.

Going forward, I’m excited for podcast-style content to continue to take on new experimental forms.

The silver lining of 15-minute book summaries 📚

If you remember SparkNotes or CliffNotes from high school English class, this is going to sound very familiar — the Blinkist app gives you 15-minute book summaries (text or audio) from a library of over 3,000 popular nonfiction books.

When I first heard about Blinkist, I was not a fan.

There’s no way that a quick summary can substitute taking the time to engage with a full book. At best, it gives people the illusion that they’re smarter because they feel like they’re finishing a book every day. If you asked them to elaborate on the concepts they learned a few days later, I imagine that most people would only have a vague idea.

That being said, there’s potential for platforms like Blinkist to nurture meaningful engagement with non-fiction books. Let’s explore a few possibilities.

Book previews

Before you dive into a non-fiction book, you might want to see if it’s worth reading. This is the ideal scenario for taking advantage of a 15-minute book summary — listen to the main ideas and decide whether you want to read the book.

Ideally, these summaries would actually be created by the authors themselves. Even though many people will probably never make it past the summary, it’s a great way for authors to hook readers that wouldn’t have otherwise found their book to begin with.

As an additional benefit, this will disincentivize authors who write 250-page books filled with fluff when they only really need 10% of that to get their idea across.

Built-in review

The main drawback of Blinkist is the low retention rate of concepts learned.

To counteract this, I would love to see the integration of spaced repetition — a powerful memory system that ensures retention. The basic idea is to repeatedly review a piece of information until it is committed to your long-term memory (learn more).

Lucid, a Blinkist competitor, has a feature where there’s a mini-quiz after each chapter to make sure that you’re paying attention and retaining the content.

In the future, authors might create a set of review cards that are meant to test your understanding of the book and compliment the reading experience. Even after finishing a book, these cards would occasionally be surfaced for review so that important ideas can stay embedded in long-term memory.

In summary

As our world gets increasingly digital, I imagine that authors of the future will want to provide create online experiences to accompany their physical books. Platforms like Blinkist or Lucid (or their successors) have the potential to provide authors with a set of tools to enrich the reading experience - from high-level summaries to review cards.

Newsletter recommendation 🧠

Since this issue is a bit shorter, I wanted to give a shout out to Clayton Mansel’s Synapse newsletter in case you were looking for more neuroscience-inspired writing.

Similar to this newsletter, Clayton aims to write thoughtfully about neuroscience in a way that doesn’t fall victim to the typical pitfalls of pseudoscience or pop psychology. So far, he’s written about consciousness, memory, and gender bias in neuroscience. Definitely check it out!

👉 Synapse Newsletter 👈

I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Friday Brainstorm! What did you think? Anything that stood out or sparked your curiosity? Let me know by replying to this email.

—Shamay

Happy Friday and welcome back for the eleventh issue of Friday Brainstorm!

This issue is all about the individuality of our inner experiences. You might think that most people have reasonably similar mental states, but it would be incredibly disorienting to be in another person’s head. We don’t even know if we all experience color in the same way, let alone more complicated feelings and thoughts.

Here’s an overview of what you can expect:

• BCIs will help you better understand your emotions in 2022 ✨

• what it feels like to be a visual reader 📖

• how inner speech varies from person to person 🎙️

And away we go…

BCI 2022: Emotional Recognition ✨

This is the third and last installment of the BCI 2022 series, where I depict how brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) will change our daily lives by the year 2022.

This time, I’m exploring how BCIs will help you better understand your emotions.

Emotions are highly subjective and hard to pin down, largely due to the fact that our language is poorly equipped to accurately describe them. When someone says that they’re anxious, it could mean different things to different people.

In the words of Tim Urban, “[in the future] we’ll probably learn that the specific emotions people feel are as unique to people as their appearance or sense of humor”.

The failure of our language in depicting emotions not only causes us to misunderstand each other, but it also means that we know far less about our own emotional states.

Here’s a snippet from the article:

As you grow up, your vocabulary of emotions expands dramatically and you begin to notice the differences between similar emotions.

This larger vocabulary likely encompasses most of your emotional states, but there are moments where you might be unsure about exactly what you're feeling. Often times, these subtle emotions may be associated with mental or physical sensations that you don't have words to describe.

It shouldn't be a surprise that there aren't words to describe all your emotional states. Think about how words are coined - an experience has to be common enough that people decide to name it. By definition, we all have emotional states that are specific to us (and maybe 1,000 other people in the world) due to our unique set of traits and personality. Unfortunately, these atypical experiences will probably never get named unless they become more common over time.

So what if we don't have words to describe certain emotional states? Well, language actually plays an important role in our perception and thoughts.

We're often not consciously aware of the things we don't have words for. Think back to the time before the word "anxious" was popularized - you likely knew that you were feeling uneasy, but couldn't quite put your finger on what exactly was wrong. This ultimately makes the feeling harder to deal with.

How might technology help us be more aware of and better regulate our emotions in 2022?

Check out the full article to explore the possibilities that BCI technology opens up:

👉 BCI 2022: Emotional Recognition 👈

Reading is different for everyone 📖

I never liked fiction all that much as a kid. I would get bored reading descriptions of characters and scenes, so I mainly focused on the dialogue between characters to get a sense of the plot.

I thought that “getting lost in a book” was just something people said when they really liked the book. It had never even occurred to me that my experience might be atypical.

At some point, I was talking with a friend about a book they read recently. They were describing it as an immersive, cinematic experience. Vivid imagery of the characters and scenes would spontaneously appear in their mind as they read.

I couldn’t believe it - unless I actively tried to imagine a character, reading was not a visual activity for me. Is this why most fiction books were less immersive to me?

It turns out that some people are visual readers while others are not. According to recent surveys, about 20% of regular readers (and 33% of professional writers) experience very vivid visuals as they read, much like watching a movie.

There’s no consensus on why these differences arise. It might just be genetic OR it could the unique reading strategies that a child learns when they first start reading. Either way, having this experience is not inherently better or worse.

You might surprised to learn that there are many fiction writers who aren’t visual readers, yet still manage to depict intricate fictional worlds in their work. Catherine McKenzie gives a firsthand account of her writing process - she first writes out the dialogue and then goes back to add in the descriptive elements.

“I literally turn my character around in a circle (in my mind) and have them describe a few elements in the room and a few things about the person they’re talking to.”

McKenzie also uses a great analogy to describe her experience.

“To answer the person who questioned me closely about my ability to write without visuals, obviously, I do have them. It’s simply not my focus when I write. I have to remember to add them, just like I sometimes have to remember to ask someone how they’re doing in an email after I’ve written straight to the point.”

In closing, here are some questions to think through: Are you a visual reader? What types of books evoke the most visuals for you? How might this influence other aspects of your life, like learning?

Tuning in to inner speech 🎙️

Aside from visual reading, the same survey revealed that about 70% of survey participants describe being able to hear characters’ voices while reading.

Among writers, about 15% even report speaking with their characters directly:

“They sometimes tell me that what I have in mind for them isn’t right – that they would never behave or speak that way.”

One explanation for these experiences is inner speech, or the inner monologue or dialogue that many people have when thinking verbally. It’s often described as an internal narrator, the voice inside your head, or your stream of consciousness.

Inner speech varies heavily from person to person. There are people who report hearing their inner speech all the time, whereas others are barely conscious of it at all.

Among other functions, it plays an important role in self-regulation, problem solving, and planning. There are also a few different types of inner speech:

• Narration. An inner monologue — for example, you might be rehearsing an important conversation in your head.

• Conversational. A dialogue with yourself — like when you’re rehashing an old argument in the shower.

• Self-reflective. Encompasses your inner critic, motivational coach, and self-evaluations of your mental state.

• Simulating others. Hearing the voices of other people — like hearing your parents’ voice saying “you shouldn’t do that”.

Whereas the first three types of inner speech are fairly common (reported by more than 75% of people), only about 25% of people experience the presence of other people (real or imaginary) in their inner speech.

To clarify, this is different from deliberately imagining a person saying something. It’s more involuntary and intuitive, like being able to anticipate how a friend is likely to respond because you know them well.

As with real people, writers “get to know” their characters over time:

“First, there are the initial stages where the writer consciously determines what the characters do and say. Yet after a certain point, the writer’s greater familiarity with the characters provides the same kind of immediate and intuitive sense of what they would do or say that often applies to our imaginings of real people.”

It’s possible that these experiences allow writers to build more realistic characters, but this type of inner speech is not strictly necessary for writing great fiction.

In closing, ask yourself: How would you describe your inner speech? How often are you aware of it? What type of roles does it play in your life?

For more on inner speech, check out this article or this research paper (more rigorous).

I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Friday Brainstorm! What did you think? Anything that stood out or sparked your curiosity? Let me know by replying to this email.

—Shamay