We All Need To Stop Being Preoccupied With The Illusion Of Our Lives So That We Can Have Actual Lives

Sometimes if I go to a certain place or have a certain experience, it doesn’t feel real unless I have a photo to prove it. It’s a horrible mindset to have and I hate admitting it, but it’s the truth. I think a lot of us feel this way to some extent.

If we go out to dinner for a friend’s birthday, it didn’t happen unless there’s a photo on Instagram. If we’re witnessing a beautiful view, it’s not a full experience until we share it in our Snapchat story. Things don’t feel real anymore unless we have them validated by the likes and views of people we don’t even care about.

We’re so wrapped up in our virtual lives that at this point, the illusion of our life that we’re presenting to the world seems like our actual life. You may be tempted to believe that you are the exception to the rule, but think about it for a second. Most of the time, you share pictures of the cool things you’re doing, or you make a status when you’ve accomplished something noteworthy, such as a getting a job promotion or finishing in a marathon. Unless you are just incredibly honest, most of the things you share with your followers have been carefully selected by you and chosen for very specific reasons. They make you look impressive or interesting or worldly. You are presenting the best version of yourself to everyone, which is, in fact, an illusion.

We all have less glamorous sides too. Most people don’t make a Facebook status when their boss chews them out at work, and most people don’t tweet about sleeping until noon and then eating an entire sleeve of Oreos by themselves. Because that would make us seem like we are doing anything less than having an amazing time and an amazing life.

I’ve shared many a photo of myself having fun out at bars with my friends, or drinking a mimosa at brunch. But I don’t usually share any morning-after selfies with the world that consist of me looking hungover, with make-up smeared everywhere and a french fry halfway into my mouth. I don’t make Facebook statuses that inform people I just spent 4 hours watching Parks and Recreation and inhaling a bar of chocolate instead of going for a run. I don’t share that version of myself in my online profiles, but that’s still me too. That’s the same me as the one that seems to be living it up and having a blast and doing fun things. It’s just not the ideal version of me, so I keep it to myself.

Maybe we’re preoccupied with monitoring the illusion of our lives because it’s the only way that makes happiness seem like a real and attainable thing.

Maybe our virtual presence is our way of trying to measure success and contentment. Being able to tweak and perfect everything about our online presence makes us feel like we have some control over what happens to us in real life. We don’t want to share anything average or unpleasant about our lives because that would break the illusion that our lives are anything but perfect.

We all want to create a certain perception of our lives that will impress others, but I think we also just want to impress ourselves.

We all want to be able to look back through our Instagram feed and Facebook profile and believe that we have an impressive and noteworthy existence. We look at our virtual selves and imagine how we look from the perspective of another viewer – maybe an old friend or an ex. We scroll through our Instagram photos or our Twitter feed and we try to imagine what they would think if they were looking at our virtual life. Would they be impressed? Would they be jealous? Would they think we’ve done something with ourselves?

We imagine these situations over and over and over, subconsciously or not. We wonder what others think when they see us online. We wonder what thoughts go through their heads when they peek at what we’re up to. We wonder if they think it’s cool when we announce that we’re moving into our dream apartment. But no matter how many times we imagine what people are thinking, we will never actually find out. We will never know what’s going on in their heads or what their true opinions of us are.

We’re basically going around in circles and setting ourselves up for misery. We’re searching for validation in places where we’re never going to get it. You’re posting things and hoping for likes and shares and views, but what you’re really hoping is that someone is going to pull you aside and tell you that you’re doing it right. You want them to tell you that you’re living life to the fullest and you’re seeking out all the right experiences.

Our generation has a fear of not being extraordinary. We’re afraid of not leaving our mark and of not being admired and talked about. What we have to realize is being famous or wealthy or having thousands of online followers does not constitute an extraordinary life. An extraordinary life is made up of millions of ordinary moments, like laughing so hard that you lose control of your bladder, or laying in bed with your significant other during a rainstorm. These moments might not be captured in Facebook statuses and they might not be shared as filtered photos. But they’re the moments where you’re most present and most alive. So try to grasp onto them and hold on for dear life, because they are better than even the most perfect virtual life you could ever imagine.

Anti-Tech: The New Racism

I’m a tech enthusiast. It’s something that I can’t help – I was just born that way. Growing up, I couldn’t help the fact that my family had the resources to always have a new computer in our home, and I couldn’t help the fact that the education I was provided included classes on software development and future industries. I couldn’t help the fact that I came from money and means and that I was encouraged to go into app development – it’s who I am. It’s basically my race.

I don’t work in tech now, but I do identify with fellow technology enthusiasts. I identify with developers, and I pay close attention to the increasingly hostile attitudes towards my people in San Francisco.

While creating memes yesterday, I was looking at old photographs from WW2. Pictures from the camps. Pictures from the Polish ghettos in which Jews were required to wear gold stars, creating a sense of otherness and adding to the necessary fear that Hitler needed to create to justify the Holocaust. While these images were nothing new to me, something about them felt different. Something about them felt incredibly current.

“What if those little gold stars had cameras on them?” I thought to myself. “What if they could help you find restaurants or check your stock portfolio while you were on the go?”

As I jotted down my brilliant idea for a new piece of wearable tech, I realized that there’s not much of a difference between what those Jewish families faced in Poland, and what modern tech workers are facing in San Francisco. It’s just plain old racism, and it’s even worse now because people aren’t being attacked because of their faith or cultural background – they’re being attacked because they have lots of money and great ideas for gadgets.

When I read about rocks being hurled at the Google buses – the commuter system that ferries tech dynamos from “the ghetto” (recently gentrified neighborhoods where they have displaced longtime residents) to their “synagogue” (the Google headquarters where they make inordinate amounts of money to come up with things like Glasses that you can talk to) – I couldn’t help but think of the Freedom Riders in the south. I couldn’t help but think of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A man, who like many in tech, had a dream. A dream that one day young white girls and young black girls would play together – hopefully assisted by some kind of app that matches interracial friends based on location and skin tone.

I thought about those Freedom Riders, and how they had to stand up to local police departments that were predominantly staffed by KKK members. I realized that those Freedom Riders are just like today’s tech workers. Except they didn’t have WiFi on their buses.

“Hey Glass,” I said to my 1500 dollar glasses that record strangers without their permission. “Look up pictures of black people from the 60’s.”

They used to dress so nice back then. Kind of like how tech workers dress now. I felt like I was going to cry. Luckily I am physically incapable of weeping, as I had my tear ducts removed last year as to not accidentally damage my expensive nerd goggles that are only available to an exclusive group of people.

It’s funny, according to everything I hear outside of the snotty lamentations of my fellow tech enthusiasts, white people like myself are considered universal oppressors. Especially rich white people that are displacing those without means. But, if you think about it, and look at it through the Lens Of Innovation, it’s actually the affluent tech workers who are oppressed. The Google employees are basically the Freedom Riders and the Jews in Poland.

The poor people are Nazis, and the poor people are the ones we should be throwing rocks at. Not the tech people – not the people that the rocks hurt more. We bleed just like the poor, but our clothes are more expensive and so is our wearable tech. You’re causing more damage by hurting us.

It’ll be interesting to see how history views this debate. It’ll be good to know that I was right. In 40 years, people will look back and recognize the struggle of the brave tech workers against the oppressive lower income families that sought to destroy and oppress the only people that actually cared about making the world a better place.

Literary Therapy: 11 Quotes to Motivate Your Soul

“You can’t drive to the coastline. You can only drive so close to the white chalky cliff and then you have to get out and dive.”

-Joyelle McSweeney, Flet

“We all believe we can choose our own path from among the many alternatives. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we make the choice unconsciously. I think I did – but now I knew it, because now I was able to put it into words. But I don’t mean this in the fatalistic sense; we’re constantly making choices. With the breaths we take every day, with the expression in our eyes, with the daily actions we do over and over, we decide as though by instinct. And so some of us will inevitably find ourselves rolling around in a puddle on some roof in a strange place with a takeout katsudon in the middle of winter, looking up at the night sky, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.”

-Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

“Just say no
to family values,
and don’t quit
your day job.”

-John Giorno, “Just Say No To Family Values”

“I can look back and recognize the things I’ve done and said that were wrong: unethical, gratuitously hurtful, golden-rule-breaking, et cetera. Sometimes the wrongness was even clear at the time, though not as clear as it is now. But I did these things because I felt the pull of a trajectory, a sense of experience piling up the way it does as you turn the pages of a novel. I would be lying if I said I was a different person now. I am the same person. I would do it all again.”

-Emily Gould, And the Heart Says Whatever

“The only thing of value anyone has to offer
is their uniqueness
and individuality
no matter who you are or what you do.”

-Penny Arcade, “Manifesto”

“The meaning of mañana is ‘Wait until the signs are right.’”

-William S. Burroughs, Junky

“Both Henry and June have destroyed the logic and unity of my life. It is good, for a pattern is not living. Now I am living. I am not making patterns.”

-Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

“Move to the beat. Dance for hours. Plan and pack for a trip. Plan and pack for a scene. Set up camp in sub-zero weather. Cook over a fire. Sharpen a knife. Wield a scalpel. Fist her. Take a fist. Clean a wound. Kiss it better. Make ‘em laugh. Make ‘em cry. Lift weights. Pick up girls.
Wrestle.
Win.”

-Elaine Miller, “A Femme’s List of Incidental Skills or, Things This Femme Can Do”

“We keep moving. And as we do, things around us, well, they disappear.”

-Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas. To relax, as it were, in the womb of the desert sun. Just roll the roof back and screw it on, grease the face with white tanning butter and move out with the music at top volume, and at least a pint of ether.”

-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“I knew people want most what they pretend to hate, that it takes courage to say what you really want.”

-Darcey Steinke, Suicide Blonde

An Advancement and Missed Opportunity for Alzheimer's

Last week a paper was published in Nature Medicine that drew significant media buzz. The paper was titled "Plasma phospholipids identify antecedent memory impairment in older adults." You may know it better by the headlines "New blood test for Alzheimer's disease" or "Alzheimer's can be predicted three years in advance."

As a scientist, the discord between the popular mainstream media's presentation of this paper and the actual scientific paper was jarring. Firstly, there is a sharp contrast between the precise language of the Nature title and the more attention-seeking, market-sensitive language of the mainstream-media headlines. Secondly, the mainstream-media headlines are relatively misleading. There is no blood test available on the market today; there are still large scientific gaps that we need to fill before the technique can be used to predict Alzheimer's in a diverse population.

The typical quick reader of these headlines will leave with the impression that science is ahead of where it actually is. There is a confidence exuded by the media that is not echoed within the paper. This kind of approach to scientific news does everyone, from patients to scientists, a huge disservice. It is particularly troubling with a disease as prevalent as Alzheimer's, which is predicted to impact one out of every six women over the age of 65 and one out of every 11 men over the age of 65.

A few caveats are stated within the news articles: USA Today, NPR, and CNN all explained that there is still research to be done. According to CNN:

If any of these tests work out -- and that's still an if -- it would take years to make it to doctors' offices, since the test would need to be validated by other labs and with larger groups of people.
However, there is a wide gap between delivering the facts and explaining how the science works.

In this particular paper, the approach to a disease like Alzheimer's was impressive -- and is important for the public to understand. We really do not completely understand how Alzheimer's is triggered, and we can only diagnose it after it has developed past a point. As a result, the authors chose to assay blood from patients with and without cognitive impairments over a period of time, and see if they could find a predictive change in the lipid composition. If I lost you at "lipid composition," think of it like this: Lipids make up the walls of cells, including neurons (brain cells). If those walls change, it may correlate with neurodegeneration, or neurons dying prematurely. So it's smart to think of testing lipid levels in patients with Alzheimer's, and even smarter to think of running a five-year study in which you could track patients with initial cognitive impairments and patients who developed those over time. Identifying lipids as predictive is useful not only for earlier intervention but for identifying potential therapeutic targets. If the public fully understood the merit of this kind of study, setting up a second trial may be an easier, quicker and more thoughtful process.

The second trial is necessary for several reasons. This is the first study of its kind, and it took five years to run. The last paragraph of the Nature paper itself states:

This biomarker panel requires external validation using similar rigorous clinical classification before further development for clinical use. Such additional validation should be considered in a more diverse demographic group than our initial cohort.

In other words, for certain data analysis, they had as few as 41 patients, and depending on the genetic background of participants, they may not be able to make assumptions of predictability for everyone. This is important and is often overlooked when clinical trials are discussed. Scientists desperately need participants from a variety of genetic backgrounds -- and larger numbers of participants to build a test that is accurate and meaningful.

The public's appreciation of the scientific methodology and merit behind the paper are critical to the furthering of research like this. Within science, authors are careful and precise. We understand that there is a fine line between prediction and causation, between statistical significance and repeatability. Every paper that is peer-reviewed is vetted through critical, careful eyes. The claims are brought down to the facts, and the holes punctured quickly.

That process doesn't exist for science in the media world. It's particularly telling that in Nature's social-media indexing for this particular article, they show less than 100 direct Tweets to the paper. CNN's news article had over 500 comments, and it doesn't appear as though the majority had read or understood the actual paper.

As a scientist and as a patient, this is alarming. I understand the need for science to be scientific -- precise, complex and detail-oriented. As a patient, I want to understand things in a way that is relevant to me -- clear, evidence-based and friendly. No matter how empowered I am as a patient, if I don't have access to accurate, complete information, I am still fumbling in the dark. If scientists don't turn the light on for patients and take the lead with scientific education, they will lose out on a population that is eager and energized and wants to meet the same research goals.

Thanks to Climate Change, West Nile Virus Could Be Your New Neighbor

Invasive species aren’t just species — they can also be pathogens. Such is the case with the West Nile virus. A mosquito-borne virus identified in the West Nile subregion in Uganda in 1937 — hence the name — West Nile wasn’t much of a concern to people elsewhere until it broke out of Africa in 1999. The first U.S. cases were confirmed in New York City in 1999, and it has now spread throughout much of the world. Though 80% of infections are subclinical — meaning they yield no symptoms — those who do get sick can get very sick. The virus can lead to encephalitis — inflammation of the brain and nervous system — and even death, with 286 people dying from West Nile in the U.S. in 2012. There were more than 5,500 cases reported that year, and the scary thing is that as the climate warms, West Nile will continue to spread.

That’s the conclusion of a new study from a team of researchers in the U.S., Britain and Germany, including those at the Center for Tropical Research at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. In a study published in the journal Global Change Biology, the researchers took climate and species-distribution data, and created models that try to project the spread of the virus as the globe warms. West Nile virus is carried by mosquitoes, and infected insects transmit the virus to human beings with a bite. But birds play a role too — if bitten by an infected mosquito, birds can generate high levels of the virus in their bloodstream, and can then transmit it to uninfected mosquitoes, which in turn can infect people. The biggest indicator of whether West Nile virus will occur is the maximum temperature of the warmest month of the year, which is why the virus has caused the most damage in hot southern states like Texas.

The UCLA model indicates that higher temperatures and lower precipitation will generally lead to more cases of West Nile, as well as the spread of the virus to northern territories that haven’t yet been affected by it. In California alone, for example, more than half of the state will see an increased probability of West Nile in the decades to come, and by 2080 the virus may well be prevalent in parts of southern Canada, and as far north as northern British Columbia, as you can see in this map:

The UCLA model looks only at climate data and doesn’t take into account the kind of control methods that can be used to combat West Nile on the ground, including pesticide spraying and land-use changes that deny mosquitoes the pools of stagnant water they use as breeding sites. That’s important to remember: while climate change can raise the risk of typically tropical diseases like West Nile or malaria, smart control efforts can offset at least some of that danger. (Malaria used to be common throughout much of the South — which is easily warm enough in the summer for the disease — before steps were taken to eliminate it, a process that led to the creation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) But the UCLA study underscores the fact that climate change operates as a threat multiplier for tropical diseases, one that will allow pathogens to invade new territory — and, ultimately, us.

The Happiest and Healthiest States Are In the Midwest

A new Gallup survey of nationwide well-being ranks North Dakota at the top and West Virginia at the very bottom.

The annual survey interviews more 178,000 American adults from all 50 states. The well-being index scores states on various factors, including life evaluation, emotional health, work environment, physical health, healthy behaviors, and access to basic necessities. Hawaii was formerly the reigning state for the last four years, but it dropped to 8th this year. Based on the 2013 data, the states in the Midwest and West were generally the highest scoring, and the South had some of the lowest scores.

Other states reigned in their own well-being factors. For instance, Nebraska ranked highest for Life Evaluation Index, Alaska had the greatest score for Emotional Health Index, and Vermont held the top spot for Health Behaviors.

These are the top five states in the survey:

1. North Dakota
2. South Dakota
3. Nebraska
4. Minnesota
5. Montana

And these are the lowest-ranking states (starting from the bottom):

1. West Virginia
2. Kentucky
3. Mississippi
4. Alabama
5. Ohio

What Dreams Are Made Of: Understanding Why We Dream

Do they predict the future or simply rehash the past? By figuring out why we dream, researchers are hoping to nail down what the nightly cavalcade of images and events means. 

Ever since Sigmund Freud published his controversial theories about the meaning of dreams in 1900, we have been fascinated with the jumble of experiences we seem to live through while we slumber. Freud was convinced that dreams represent some unfulfilled desires or hoped-for wishes, while later investigators saw a more pragmatic quality to them, as reflection of waking life. None of these theories, however, have had the benefit of much in the way of solid, objective data.

At least, until now. Two new developments in research — brain imaging and big data — may offer some stronger answers. More detailed and timely snapshots of the brain at work, combined with the information researchers amassed about dreams from experiments in sleep labs, is gradually peeling away the mystery of dreams, and revealing their meaning.

From a strictly biological standpoint, scientists have learned much about the physiological process of dreaming, which occurs primarily in REM sleep. “During dreaming,” says Patrick McNamara, a neurologist at Boston University School of Medicine and the graduate school of Northcentral University in Prescott Valley, Ariz., “the limbic part of the brain—the emotional part—gets highly activated while the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, the executive part of the brain, is under-activated. So the kind of cognitions we experience during dreams are highly emotional, visually vivid, but often illogical, disconnected and sometimes bizarre.” That suggests that our dreams may have some role in emotional stability.

That does not necessarily mean, most dream researchers believe, that dreams are random expressions of emotion or devoid of some intellectual meaning. While some scientists maintain that dream patterns are strictly the result of how different neurons in the brain are firing, Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist and dream researcher at Harvard Medical School, believes they represent something more.  “I think it’s a fallacy that knowing brain action negates a subjective, psychological meaning any more than it does for waking thought. I think dreams are thinking in a different biochemical state.”

Defining that state, not to mention understanding the rules under which that universe operates, however, is a challenge. It may represent a complex interplay between emotional and cognitive information, says McNamara, so that dreams serve to help our brains process emotional memories and integrate them into our long-term memories. And because traumatic events are associated with higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, they can cause nightmares. Researchers believe that excessive amounts of cortisol can impair the interaction between the hippocampus and the amygdala, the two main brain systems that integrate memory. “The memories don’t get integrated,” he says, “but just sit around. In post traumatic stress disorder, they get re-experienced over and over.”

In fact, from sleep studies in which people were exposed to images, learning tasks or other experiences immediately before they dozed off and then examined when they awakened, many scientists believe that dreams can help us rehearse for challenges or threats we anticipate—emotionally, cognitively and even physiologically. In our dreams we may try out different scenarios to deal with what’s coming up. Although much of the evidence for this is anecdotal, McNamara says, someone practicing piano or playing video games in waking life may start to do the same while dreaming. People solving a puzzle or studying a foreign language, he adds, can have breakthroughs with dreams that go beyond the perceptions that simply taking a break from the problem can produce. 

And now, Barrett says, brain imaging holds the promise of being able to help scientists “see” what until now could only be reported by subjective, possibly inaccurately recalled, dream accounts. For example, in research with rats trained to run through mazes to get rewards, investigators were able to record neuron activity in sleeping rats and determined that the rats were running the same mazes in their dreams.

In other experiments with humans, scientists monitored volunteers who slept inside an fMRI scanner while hooked up to EEG electrodes that measured brain wave activity. When the EEG indicated they were dreaming, the participants were awakened and asked what images they had seen in their dreams. The investigators were later able to match certain patterns of brain activity to certain images for each person.  “There’s a crude correspondence between the brain scan and the image. “From the scan, you can guess it’s an animal with four legs,” says Barrett. Despite the primitive state of this dream decoding, the ability to actually glean content from a dream is getting closer.

Mining big data bases of reported dreams holds another kind of promise. Until now, researchers have been working on relatively small samples of dream accounts, usually fewer than 200 per study. But new dream websites and smartphone apps like DreamBoard and Dreamscloud are encouraging thousands of people to report their dreams into larger repositories so researchers can finally answer their most urgent questions.  McNamara, for example, is excited to study dreams from different countries to see whether there are cultural differences in what people’s brains do when they aren’t awake.

The data bases also provide an opportunity to investigate the intriguing but under-studied realm of sex dreams. Until recently, says McNamara, they represented only 10% of reported dreams, likely because people are not eager to share this type of content with researchers in white lab coats. But self-reporting via the apps and websites, despite its potential biases, may provide more information on these types of dreams. “This is a wide open area crying for investigation,” he says.

McNamara is also eager to study individuals’ dreams over time to observe differences and changes in emotional tone, colors, words and other significant patterns and connect these to events in their lives. That would bring him closer to answering whether dreams are, in fact, prophetic — it might be possible, for example, that certain kinds of dreams precede getting the flu, or that other other dreams are more associated with happier events.

Such investigations could also reveal more about less welcome dreams, such as nightmares, and potentially lead to ways to control or avoid them. Barrett plans to mine the new database to study how often nightmares occur, and how they relate to an individual’s trauma or a family history of anxiety disorder. One of her first projects will involve the dream data from DreamBoard.com, which has accumulated 165,000 dreams over the last two years. Because Dreamboard has coded the dreams by the gender, colors, emotions (joy, anxiety, anger) and the number and categories of people in a dream, Barrett says she can identify basic patterns.

We already know, she says, that women dream equally about men and women while men’s dreams are two-thirds populated by men. Research so far also shows that men’s dreams may show slightly more anger and physical aggression while women’s display a bit more sadness and verbal hostility. Interpreting what these differences mean, however, will require deeper studies.

What’s been discovered so far, however, suggests that such studies could reveal an enormous amount about what role dreams play in our lives, and how important they are for biological, psychological or social reasons. With this research, McNamara believes, scientists can find out if what shrinks have been saying for years is true — that reflecting on our dreams is useful and can give us insight into ourselves. Psychologists say so, and many people think so. But this research, he says, gives us the potential to know.