Category Archives: Psychology

Europe in The Now: A Hopeful Fiction

Here’s a future news story we may read someday:
The awakening of consciousness has a new ally, Rick Steves. The entertaining and eloquent host of the show “Rick Steves’ Europe” is teaming up with Eckhart Tolle and Oprah Winfrey to create a show called “Europe in The Now”.

Rick Steves

Rick Steves

Steves who describes himself as “fanatically positive and militantly optimistic” already embodies many of the personality traits associated with living consciously and mindfully. As an author, TV & radio host, business owner and NORML board member, he has a large following of individuals attracted to his positive energy. “Rick can reach a particularly receptive audience to these messages”, said one producer.

The new show retraces some of Ricks travels through Europe with an emphasis on lessons learned from history about living in a more conscious way. Eckhart Tolle, Oprah Winfrey and others will join Rick for dinners and discussions about the evolution of consciousness in a historical context at locations around Europe. Parts of the show will be filmed in front of audiences and double as helpful seminars on mindful living. “Europe in The Now” will air on most PBS stations and Oprahs’ networks.

 

What Mental Operating System Do You Use? Eckhart Tolle 101

When talking about the future many of us concentrate on technology. The most profound breakthroughs will probably come from innovations to how we manage our internal mind states. If you think about it, everything in our modern world is a result of the thoughts that led to actions in the minds of people. We create the world around us. That world reflects the inner state of the collective consciousness which itself is a collection of individual mind states.

Just as literacy was quite uncommon centuries ago, so too are ways of managing your internal mind state. Otherwise known as your Mental Operating System. It’s a loose analogy to a computer operating system that manages files on your hard drive. Some operating systems are more efficient than others. Some operating systems are more user-friendly…and so on.  Our brains/minds are more complex than the most sophisticated super computers. Yet, very few of us have any training on how to manage this complexity. Fortunately, the knowledge exists and has existed for thousands of years. Like the spread of literacy, is it reaching the masses. It’s know by many names: a new consciousness, awakening, enlightenment, spiritualism…..a new “mental operating system” for us techies. Imagine something like a factory reset button for your mind where you remember the knowledge but let go of all the useless files, junk mail, spam, recycle bin contents, pain etc. What you are left with is a clean, efficient, more benevolent to yourself and others, internal mind state.

At the forefront of this is Eckhart Tolle. Oprah Winfrey has called him a “rock star” of sorts. Progressive companies such as Google have had him as a special guest speaker for their employees. See the talk below.

There are more in depth talks by Eckhart Tolle available on Youtube and on his site

Happier people being kind to one another and progressing in a way with very little conflict does not make for a good scifi action movie. However, it would amount to one of mankind’s greatest achievements.

 

Inventions We Would Like to See

I’d like to make the disclaimer that the inventions mentioned here are purely fictional.

The New Apple Transformix: The Last Device You’ll Ever Need

This Summer, Apple releases it’s new device called the Transformix. It’s an adaptable and transformable device that can become any object of roughly the same mass. It will come in 3 sizes (tablet size, big screen tv size and car size). In its raw form it only has a voice interface.

Tablet Sized Transformix

Tablet Sized Transformix

At their latest demonstration, Apple showed the tablet sized Transformix change from a cell phone, to a tablet, to a rock, to a glass, to a furry Pokemon doll. In other demonstrations, the car sized Transformix was able to mimic the exterior of several different cars including a Ford Mustang, Mercedes E Class, a Corvette and a pickup truck. Before you get too excited, the engine is sold separately. The Transformix is due to hit select stores in late July.

 

Car Cameras to Catch People Texting and Driving

Texting while driving, or distracted drivers cause 100s of accidents every year. Despite an expensive and far reaching ad campaign meant to stop people from texting and driving, it still remains an issue. In response to this, car manufacturers will be installing a multitude of outward facing cameras in all vehicles starting next year.

Car_camera_front_usageCar_camera_side_usage

The system is set up so that when you press a button on your steering wheel, the surrounding 30 seconds (15 seconds before you pressed the button and 15 seconds after you pressed the button) of video from all cameras is saved.  When you get home you can choose to review and upload the video to authorities.

 

New Facebook App Measures the Diversity of Your Network

How ethnically diverse is your circle of friends?  And how does it compare to the diversity of other peoples groups? If you are a Facebook user, you will soon have the answer. Facebook plans to roll out a new feature that will identify different ethnic groups in your photos and among your list of friends.

Exactly how the algorithm works is a secret. What we do know is that it works pretty well. In test after test the app was able to calculate a diversity score of profiles and guess which friends were mere acquaintances and which friends were close confidants. It could also accurately guess the ethnicity of the people in the photos about 95% of the time.

 

The Big Business of Dating Gets Even Bigger

The latest players to get into the match making arena make for strange bedfellows. Comcast, Google, Microsoft and Apple have joined forces to create the ultimate predictor of romantic success. At first glance it would seem that these huge corporations would be the last to know anything about romance, let alone give advice. But as it turns out, these 4 companies know more about most people than the people know about themselves. Online habits, mood fluctuations, food preferences, political beliefs, communication styles and habits, vocabulary, movie preferences…you get the picture…they know a lot. In recent beta testing over the course of 2 years, the algorithm did some pretty amazing things. Follow up interviews verified many of its predictions.

matching

Seemingly unlikely matches were sometimes made. There were even several subjects who were matched with someone of the same gender even though they had never been in a homosexual relationship. When asked about the results they reported having had those longings but never acting on them.  “It’s not as easy as pairing people who like the same things, together.” Says Ike Sterling, head of the new dating initiative. “Differing tastes and preferences sometimes interact in a complimentary way that you could not predict unless you see the data.”

What Can We Learn from Your Auto Saved Drafts?

The days of losing our emails or documents because we forgot to save our work are almost over. Software such as Word or services like Gmail, auto save your work at regular intervals so that in the event your computer crashes or your connection is lost, you’ll still have a draft somewhere. There is no doubt, the auto save feature is extremely helpful.

An email message can go through quite a number of iterations before it is sent. What can we learn about a person based on how they come to a final version of an email?  And what can we learn about the relationship between the person sending the email and the person receiving the email? I think there is just as much information in what we choose NOT to share as there is in what we choose to share.  Facebook appears to agree. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/12/facebook_self_censorship_what_happens_to_the_posts_you_don_t_publish.html

Facebook keeps the information that you choose to share and the information that you don’t choose to share. That’s an immense amount of data.  If correlated and analyzed properly, it could shed light on quite a bit about our minds and personalities.

Psychologist House Call

Psychologist House Call

Very few of us are free from conflicting thoughts and emotions. We are not single minded, rather, we are all a collection of desires and beliefs that are sometimes at odds with each other.  For example, the internal debate you might have over picking junk food vs health food for dinner. Using two chess players as an analogy, the mind plays against itself at times.  As with chess, and many other games, you can learn a lot about the players based on how they play.

The Mind at Odds with Itself

The Mind at Odds with Itself

Some of these intellectual battles come to the surface when we communicate with other people. They happen almost too quickly to be analyzed when we are talking. Except in cases of parapraxis, Freudian slips.  Writing an email is a much slower process. And there is a physical record of changes made to the communicated message. The folks over at Google, owners of Gmail, are experts at collecting data and analyzing it. They’re sitting on a treasure trove of information about the human condition. I’m hopeful that it will be shared and used to help in areas such as anti terrorism and mental health.

An App that Knows How You Feel

I recently watched yet another fascinating Ted Talk. It was about an app that measures your facial expressions to determine how you feel. Watch it below.

If this technology is successful, the number of applications for it will be enormous. Rana touched on just a few examples.

What might be some of it’s long term effects on our society? What happens when we have Google Analytics for your emotions?  You face a video camera every time you look at your smart phone. And if you work at a computer for extended periods of time, chances are you’re facing a video camera for hours a day. That’s a lot of potential data. With mounds of data, there is the potential to vastly improve our lives.

Let’s assume that happy people are more productive and beneficial to society, government and corporations. We might see the use of our emotion data to improve the quality of our lives.  The media that we consume will react to our reactions to it. Over time it might become very efficient at making us feel the way it wants us to feel. Hopefully, it will be a positive emotion.

The mental health field might be able to help many more people with this data. What if individuals with certain conditions, depression to schizophrenia, exhibit patterns of facial motions?  Programs and apps might be able to pick up on those patterns. Potential patients could be somehow connected to a mental health professional.

Imagine existing security, street or other types of video cameras monitoring our emotions via our faces. If this technology turns out to be reliable, there will be an incentive to have as many cameras as possible to monitor as many faces as possible.  More cameras in public and more cameras integrated in to your appliances. What happens when parents or loved ones can get an automatic text alert, Facebook post, Tweet…. when you are feeling depressed?  Might we all start paying more attention to the emotional state of the people in our lives?

Grandpa This Should Cheer You Up

Grandpa This Should Cheer You Up

There will be data on the happiness of nations. We’ll know what country has the happiest citizens. Maybe this is how we move toward measuring the success of a society using multiple types of metrics, not just economic ones such as GNP (Gross National Product).

If laws do not keep up with this technology it may quickly be assimilated into all our devices. Our consent will be in some agreement we check off, never having read the whole thing. Big data firms will crunch numbers and compare what they know about us now to the patters of facial expressions we exhibit in a myriad of situations. The conclusions they reach could revolutionize areas such as marketing, entertainment and health care.

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