Lazy Sunday #22

Hello and good evening.

(yes, it is not Sunday. My kids weren’t in the mood for me to send it on time. Monday is the new Sunday this week….)

Have you ever wondered how you can remember (or not) social interactions? A neuromodulator called serotonin, plays a significant role. More on that in the neuroscience section of the newsletter.

So what is serotonin? Browsing the internet, there are many names: cuddle-chemical, confidence molecule…needless to say, none of these are used in studies and research.

Serotonin is a chemical, in the group of neuromodulators. It is responsible to enabling communication between synaptic nerve cells. In contrast to my assumption, most of the bodily serotonin is actually produced in the gut.

90% or serotonin is responsible for digestion, appetite, bone health, blood flow.

The other 10% are produced in the brain. Serotonin is supposed to play a role in sleep, learning, mood and depression, ADHD, autism, social interaction and memory, focus or anxiety, and even impulse-control. We know that low serotonin levels in the brain increase impulsivity and aggression.

I was surprised about the vast area of impact serotonin had.

I was also surprised about how little we know about a chemical that seemingly has it’s fingers in fundamental processes.

Too little serotonin can impact memory, sleep and sleep cycles, focus and overall happiness. Or let’s say overall contempt.

Too much serotonin in the gut can lead to obesity. Counterintuitive, given that typically serotonin is responsible for signalling “fullness” as well.

We can increase serotonin through sun, exercise and food: salmon, eggs, cheddar cheese, turkey tofu and oats.

Serotonin in your gut can not cross into the brain. Nature developed the blood-brain-barrier to prohibit unwelcome stuff into the brain. This means that serotonin, released in the gut, stays below your neck.

There is so much talk about this “happiness-substance”, but ultimately research says nothing 100% clear. It does something in us, something that is important, it plays a role in learning, in early development, in mood, in weight and hunger control, but it is 2024, and we aren’t sure.

A long way to go, I’d say.

Find my research: neuroscience

Social memory and serotonin

A study shows, that by inhibiting serotonin in a mouse brain during a first encounter with another animal, the mouse will not remember (or rapidly forget), the encounter.

Increasing serotonin during a first encounter will make the memory of this encounter last unusually long (mouse life long).

Imagine somebody zaps your serotonin remotely, and you will not be able to remember social encounters at all. By the way, that’s what they think happens partially with people developing Alzheimer’s. The serotonin receptors don’t function as well, and hence the brain can not store memories well enough.

(Stanford)

Harvard x Google Deep Mind = real virtual rat brain

I had to think for a moment: is this a neuroscience topic or a tech topic. Well, here we are.

Imagine a deep neural network can mimic the brain exactly, to the extent it can move a virtual rat around, behave like a real rat in digital experiments, even in situations the simulation has not been 100% trained on.

Granted, we are talking mostly movements here and building that into a real looking physical robot rat is more difficult as we do not have the technology - the theory is already there.

For researchers, this provides a digital model to do tests, influence “brain” parts and see how it impacts the rat’s behaviour. Less animal tests, much quick testing, more results.

(Harvard)

Routine brain scans for health check ups?

Last week I shared the story of new brain scan MEG centers opening up in the UK and US. My comment there was more a question: “Why is it, that we do not pay the brain any routine attention during medical examination?”

The Guardian shared an article, showing promising results of detecting Alzheimer’s through a short MRI scan. MRI scans are a non-invasive way to get a picture of what is happening in the brain and how brain regions interact with each other in specific circumstances. It is like a taking your blood pressure.

Images taken through MRI were then analysed and used to identify potential Alzheimer’s onset. The accuracy was at around 80%, which is pretty damn good, and good to predict the onset of the disease between 8-10 years. If you knew, you might develop Alzheimer’s in 10 years, you’d be pretty quick to do everything possible to slow it down.

The point is not to be all Doctor Alex, but rather highlight how basic our medical understanding of the brain is. And, most importantly, how far improvements in analysing data through AI-models will bring us in the next couple of years.

(TheGuardian)

Find my research: office

Office stressors: age and silos

Two independent articles shed some light on two prominent stress factors in the office: silos and age gaps.

1. An article in the Harvard Business Review shows that employees working across siloed departments are more likely to get burned out. Different departments have different ways of working. These different styles create friction, like two tectonic plates moving at slightly different pace. While employees bridging these departments (e.g. program managers or product managers), are important and often motivated to do the work, they end up stressed which, long-term, can lead to mental exhaustion. This is especially true if the role does not have full overhead support

2. A survey done by the American Psychological Association looked into the impact of age differences on employees. Especially younger employees (18-25) struggle to feel a sense of belonging and undervalued. This leads to stress, and if persistent, can lead to burn-out. At a time, where the maximum employment age continues to increase, more age groups than ever before share the same office space. This means different way of working, different views on technology, different way of communication. All of these are frictions points.

The point is not to try to avoid these. That is impossible. I do think, though, that leaders require a certain sensitivity and understanding of these stressors as they do negatively impact the motivation of employees. Being aware of them is a good first step to be able to talk these through and act as a stress-reducing for impacted employees.

(HBR / APA)

Do we really learn from failure?

300 surgeons have been studied for their ability to learn from mistakes during operations.

While we learn from mistakes, there is a threshold when learning diminishes or these mistakes actually have a negative impact on performance.

Seemingly it has to make with the extent of mistake. The death of a patient during or shortly after operations impacts the learning in a much more negative way. Instead of being a motivation to do better, the feeling of error is such a big stressor, that surgeons perform worse.

Luckily, for most of us, mistakes don’t have a life or death impact, but we can still make serious mistakes at home or at work.

It then largely depends on our ability to reframe the situation: anger and fear needs to make space for curiosity and optimism. Instead of looking at a mistake as pure failure, we need to quickly flip to “oh, this is how I can improve next time.”

It is also a good reminder of how managers should deal with their teammates’ failure: don’t crush them on a mistake, but elevate them. It is ok to let them know it was wrong, but once that is communicated, looking forward is the better option.

(Carnegie Melon)

Continuing on with the theme, there is another recent study across 1,800 participants, showing that individuals overestimate the benefits from failure on learning.

No matter whether in hospitals, lawyers or other professions, the tendency is the same: we expect failure (our or others) to be a learning ground and hence improve or change future behavior. Most often, it actually does not.

Seemingly the answer is simple: because we do no spend enough time reviewing failures and drawing conclusions.

Going back through failure is painful. It is easier to blame others. Macro wasn’t right. The other team was shit. My boss did not get it. His boss is a maniac. The customer is a turkey.

No, actually, often WE could have done better. But we don’t go back and learn. And hence we don’t get better. We make the same mistake again.

(Journal of Experimental Psychology)

On top of tech

Google for Startups: AI for Health - list of companies participating in Google Growth Academy

Google selected 24 companies for the 2024 AI health cohort.

8 out of the 24 come from the Middle East or Africa.

7 out of 24 companies focus on mental health.

Interesting list, there are even some German companies 🙂

(Google for Startups)

New headphone technology could alter percept…well the future

Perception of reality is an interpretation of electric signals (sound, wave length, touch), transferred into sensations (“bottom-up”, see, hear, smell etc.) combined with “top-down” memories of similar situations from the past. The interpretation of this combination makes the “reality” of each individual human being slightly different.

Now imagine, you put another layer between the incoming electrical signals and your brain’s interpretation, e.g. in the form of headphones. Apple Airpods, and now other brands as well, have massively improved their ability to alter the “reality”, by filtering background noise and increasing speech wave length.

There are other companies, like Iyo, who developed more sophisticated technology to filter out noise, communicate with your phone or others in noisy environments. The founder, Jason Rugolo, went through an impressive TED Talk:

There are some positive and negative aspects, I don’t think many people realize:

1. Headphones will become smarter with the onset of smaller and more powerful chips. More voice alteration (incoming and outgoing) will be possible on device. The “Mission Impossible” like change of voice with the click of a button (or a mask like in the movies), is not that far away. I will let your creativity play out the different scenarios.

2. This technology would also allow for accessible hearing aids, and hearing protection. Hearing aids have shown to help avoid further brain decline in hearing impaired people.

3. Over hundred of thousands of years, we relied on our ears to keep us safe. The brain is very tuned into noise signals, and reacts very quickly to sounds through stress or happiness. Could we alter stress noises through the headphones? Imagine you live close to a busy street, and you could filter out that noise without impacting the sensitivity to other relevant sound sources like the conversation of your family members?

4. It is not only voice. Apple filed a patent to include EEG sensors in the Apple AirPods. That means “listening in” to your attention, your stress levels and your reaction to incoming sounds. Don’t like that voice? Let the headphones alter it slightly to make you feel more comfortable. Going from here to reading “your thoughts” is not a rocket jump any more. One day, we might be able to think in our head for Perplexity to read back the search results in our headphones.

Maybe, smart headphones are the new smart glasses?

(FastCompany)

Female AI get women to engage more

In one of the first newsletters, I talked about anticipatory processes in social environments. Our brain is wired to look for cues that we are familiar with and our brain can relate to. That reduces stress and increases engagement.

Apparently, having an “AI teammate” with a female voice can get women to be more engaged when the group is predominantly male.

I am sure this would work very similar the other way around. It is astounding, how the brain is really soothed by “familiarity”.

(Cornell)

Near-Infrared helmet to help cognitive impairment

Infrared has been a hot (pun intended) topic on various podcasts. Dr. Rhona Patrick, whom I first heard of through the Dr. Peter Attia podcast, is a strong proponent of infrared sauna.

Actually, my mum used to shine an infrared lamp on my back when I had colds as a little kid to help with cough relieve.

New research showed that infrared light can help brain impairments, increasing blood flow and hence increasing synaptic repair.

How this can really help with Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, depression or ADHD is not so clear yet, but even there it shows some promising early results.

This type of treatment could actually be better than deep brain stimulation through electric fields, which could have many more side effects.

(Neuronic)

Misc but not least…

What was the most expensive drink you have ever had? What about a US$335 espresso?

Thank you for reading.

Please share the link on social media or by forwarding this episode of Lazy Sunday to your friends and colleagues.

Maybe they can learn something as well? ;-)

Enjoy the start of the week.

Alex