Lazy Sunday #18

Welcome to Lazy Sunday #18!

We got new iPads this week. And well, overall somewhat boring, to be honest. Nevertheless, there is one exciting trend. The M4 chip delivers the same performance as the M2 chip from two years ago at 50% of the power consumption. This is a trend that is great to see as we will need to reduce power consumption in the light of AI-always-on-technologies.

And while we are saving electricity with the Apple, humanity is creating more data with Google. Approximately 1.4 petabytes for a cubic millimeter of brain.

Other research points to better employee moral with a neuroscientific approach to training and team-building, cardio-vascular fitness keeps the brain young and how VR + EEG could shape the work of the future.

Find my research: neuroscience

A cubic millimeter of the brain - some 1.4 petabytes of data

Harvard and Google partnered together to take a make a 3D image of the brain. To achieve that, they sliced a 3-millimeter thick tissue of brain into 5000 slices, took images and stitched them bag together through ML models. As of date, this is the most detailed image of the brain we have.

The file itself is 1.4 petabytes big, that is 1,400,000 gigabytes.

Google Research released a video on the process of mapping fly and mouse brains. Yes, it is nerdy. But it is also interesting what can be done nowadays. 20 years ago, it took us 10 years to map 302 neurons. Today it takes us 1/10 of that for 100,000 neurons. It can only get better from here:

(MITReview / Science)

Fitness as a marker for better working memory in older adults

Good aerobic fitness (cardio) in older adults shows to have a positive result in working memory, that is, the ability to memorize and recollect small amounts of information. The study compared older adults (+65y) based on their fitness and let them do specific tasks.

That just shows how strongly body fitness is correlated with mental fitness. It shows the importance of cardio-movement at age. It is just never too late to start and never too late to continue being active and work against cognitive decline.

(MIT Imagine Neuroscience)

Find my research: office

VR + EEG = better designers

A tool to help during the design process by confronting the designer with her feelings.

Allow me to explain because I think this is where “co-create” gets a next-level meaning.

When we are creative, we constantly evaluate ideas against each other. We disregard some, we elaborate on others, we flip and adjust until we “feel” we are happy with it: a drawing, a song, an article, a new design.

Often we create based on “gut feelings”, which are not easy to “feel”, especially when you are new to the field.

Immediate feedback allows for better, more objective review of one’s own work, as if to collaborate with another person.

A team at the Cornell University created a VR-headset + EEG device, which allows designers to create a new project within the VR. The EEG headband measures the brains’ reaction to the design along specific “valence” metrics, which describes how we react emotionally to an incoming sensation: do we like or dislike it? This information is then displayed in real time into the VR headset, so the designer can have a more objective view on her own emotions to what she is building.

More inexperienced designers found the real-time input more helpful than experienced designers. Seems to be something with these “experienced” folks and AI. Maybe a little bit less chip-on-shoulder is helpful. But I digress…

While the setup is a bit clumsy, and the team is reflective enough to say the experiment could be improved in many different ways, I imagine this “direct feedback based on EEG” to actual be a thing of the future.

Just imagine a combination of the Neurable headphones with Apple Vision Pro. Oh, Apple has already filed a patent for something similar.

This would be the first time we can work with visualized data from our brain to tap into another level of “gut-feel” to perform better, be more creative and maybe even remove bias.

(Cornell University)

Neuroscience-based team building in the tourism industry

A hotel chain on Gran Canaria had a problem with conflictive work climate. To reverse this situation, the manager hired a professional trained in neuroscience to work with 325 employees. During a 6-month program, a control group worked through training sessions focusing on conflict-resolution, empathy and other soft skills.

After the program, the study showed a strong improvement, especially between co-workers and their immediate layer of management. Overall, it helped to increase the morale within the hotel chains. Unfortunately, it did not say anything about the impact on customer satisfaction.

While we often learn hard skills on the job (processes, tools, and software know-how), soft skills such as communication, conflict resolution or even meeting execution are often neglected. For whatever reason companies believe we all carry the best practices around.

Working with human beings means working through conflicts and misaligned interests. As such, it is essential to bring the right tool kit to the (meeting) table. Some examples from the study:

• show effect of chinese whisper aka office talk: one message never stays the same

• learning about emotions and the impact on our body and decision-making process

• collaborate to resolve unresolved issues within the team as a team

Neuroscience provides a vast area of insights into employee behaviour. And maybe, if available trainings were based more on science and research, the acceptance and implementation would improve.

(Study)

On top of tech

Will OpenAI release a search engine tomorrow?

Word on the street says it will happen. This will put them into direct competition with Google and Perplexity. Interestingly, you can use ChatGPT 4 with Perplexity.

I actually use Perplexity around 50% of my time researching. The other 50% is still on Google.

Fast Company wrote a piece about how GenAI is impacting Google Search dominance. It will be interesting to see what Google will release during Google I/O next week.

(OpenAI Search Engine / Google search dominance)

Additional investments into neurotech

Just within the last two weeks, we have seen more than US$250 million in funding in various neuroscience-focused tech.

Tether invested US$200 million in Blackrock Neurotech (not related to BlackRock, the investment firm we talked about last week).

US$27 million went to iVEACare, focusing on medical technologies for neuromodulation.

Munich-based TVM Capital invested €16 million in Singapore / Dubai based Neuracare.

And while a lot of these investments go into development of clinical / medical devices, the technology will ultimately trickle down into homes.

For example, Neurable - remember the headphones? - raised US$13 million for additional OEM partnerships.

Are we still better?

Curiosity, emotional intelligence, the capacity to learn from mistakes? Are these the areas we are still better than AI? Because we aren’t when it comes to sniffing through data, providing summaries, writing basic code.

Eric Markowitz thinks that maybe, finally, we are to get to do what we can do best: be creative, play our strong cards through soft skills, such as emotional intelligence.

This would be an interesting future: offload all the data heavy, time-consuming stuff to AI so we can go back and think, ponder, reflect and live.

(FastCompany)

Media Box

Singapore asked for data to train AI - writers response “not with us”

All countries are in for a race. Singapore is trying to build large language models as well. The goal is to avoid “western bias” and utilize local content for culturally more aligned models. To get the necessary training material, the government asked writers’ permission to tap into their content. But the government received a stern “no”, mainly over compensation concerns.

(RestOfWorld)

Misc but not least…

Photography is a remarkable medium. Photos can capture attention in a heartbeat. They can trigger emotions, send a message. It allows us to see parts of the world we have never seen and maybe would never see.

In the world of AI, photos take an interesting spot. On the one hand, everybody can generate images and it is very difficult to differentiate between real and AI-created.

Some might say, photography is dead.

When I need to “do nothing” I look for photos, photographers, through my library of thousands of pictures I have collected from travelling around the world, and my kids at sunset, sunrise, lunchtime, what not.

I admire people who decided to make photography their life’s passion. It is not an easy one. Creative jobs aren’t easy.

But they created something magical.

And maybe it is magical because it connects us with something very basic: with humans and nature.

The following video is a short documentary on really progressive and well-known photographers. And the images are amazing.

Thank you for reading.

Please share the link on social media or by forwarding this episode of Lazy Sunday to your friends and colleagues, soon-to-be-parents-in-law or training buddies.

https://bit.ly/3WDMeqP

Maybe they can learn something as well? ;-)

Have a great rest of the weekend.

Alex