James' World 2

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You walk into a room, but can’t remember what you came in for. Or you bump into an old acquaintance at work and forget their name. Most of us have had momentary memory lapses like this, but in middle age, they can start to feel more ominous. Do they make us look unprofessional or past it? Could this even be a sign of impending dementia? The good news for the increasingly forgetful, however, is that not only can memory be improved with practice, but that it looks increasingly as if some cases of Alzheimer’s may be preventable too.

Neuroscientist Dr. Richard Restak is a past president of the American Neuropsychiatric Association, who has lectured on the brain and behavior everywhere from the Pentagon to Nasa, and written more than 20 books on the human brain. His latest, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind, homes in on the great unspoken fear that every time you can’t remember where you put your reading glasses, it’s a sign of impending doom. “In America today,” he writes, “anyone over 50 lives in dread of the big A.” Memory lapses are, he writes, the single most common complaint over-55s raise with their doctors, even though much of what they describe turns out to be nothing to worry about.

Coming out of a shop and not being able to remember where you left the car, for example, is perfectly normal: it’s likely you just weren’t concentrating when you parked, and therefore the car’s location wasn’t properly encoded in your brain. Forgetting what you came into a room for is probably just a sign you’re busy and preoccupied with other things, says Restak.

“Samuel Johnson said that the art of memory is the art of attention,” he says, down the line from his office in Washington, DC (at 80, Restak is still a practicing clinical professor at George Washington Hospital University School of Medicine and Health). “Most of these sins of ‘memory loss’ are sins of not paying attention. If you’re at a party, and you’re not really listening to someone, because you are still thinking about some work-related matter, suddenly later you find you can’t remember their name. The first thing is you put the information in memory – that’s consolidating it – and then you have to be able to retrieve it. But if you’ve never consolidated it in the first place, it doesn’t exist.”

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A father and daughter. Photo by Cavan Images/Getty Images

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Every week between May and October, the Maricopa County Department of Public Health in Arizona releases a heat morbidity report. The most recent report said that 180 people have succumbed to heat-associated illness in the county this year so far. But everyone agrees that number is off.

If previous years are any indication, the true number of heat-related deaths in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, is much higher: At the end of last summer, the county revised its initial reports upwards by a factor of five, ultimately reporting a sobering 425 heat-related deaths in total.

This lag plagues not just heat-related mortality reporting, but climate-related death data in general. It’s hard to get a full picture of the true number of mortalities connected to a given disaster in real-time. The full death toll often isn’t revealed until weeks, months, even years after the event occurs. And an unknown fraction of deaths often slide by undetected, never making it onto local and federal mortality spreadsheets at all. For example, a recent retrospective study found the number of people who died from exposure to hurricanes and tropical cyclones in the U.S. in the years between 1988 to 2019 was 13 times higher than the federal government’s official estimates. 

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People seek shelter from the heat at the First Congregational United Church of Christ cooling center on July 14 in Phoenix. Brandon Bell / Getty Images

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The population of our ancestors may have plummeted to as low as 1300 around 900,000 years ago, possibly as a result of our ancestral species splitting from other early humans.

That is the conclusion of an analysis of the variation in the genomes of living people by Haipeng Li at the Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health and his colleagues. However, while not dismissing the idea outright, independent experts say it isn’t supported by other lines of evidence.

Population bottlenecks occur when an existing population is reduced in size, for instance as a result of a catastrophe, or when a small number of individuals leave one population to found a new one. This results in a sudden loss of genetic diversity.

There have been numerous bottlenecks of varying scales as humans evolved and moved around the world. For instance, there was a major bottleneck when a small number of modern humans left Africa around 60,000 years ago, which is why there is still much more genetic diversity among people of African descent than in everyone living in the rest of the world combined. Much more recently, there was a series of bottlenecks as Polynesians settled island after island in the Pacific.

Past bottlenecks can be uncovered by looking for the reductions in genetic diversity they cause, but more ancient bottlenecks are harder to detect than recent ones. Li’s team developed a new method for estimating past changes in population size and applied it to the genomes of more than 3,000 people from around the world.

According to the researchers’ findings, the population of our ancestors fell by 98 percent to around 1280 “breeding individuals” around 930,000 years ago, and the population remained very low until around 815,000 years ago.

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He Jiankui, a young Chinese scientist known to his American colleagues as JK, dreamed of remaking humanity by exploiting the emergent technology of gene editing. He had academic polish and an aptitude for securing institutional support. As a student, he had left China for the United States, where he did graduate work in physics at Rice and a postdoc in a bioengineering lab at Stanford. At the age of twenty-eight, he was recruited into a prestigious Chinese government program for foreign-educated talent and was offered a founding position in the biology department of the Southern University of Science and Technology.

SUSTech was a newly created research institute in Shenzhen, a city in the midst of a biotech boom. JK, who arrived in 2012, likened Shenzhen’s startup culture to that of Silicon Valley—bold creativity was encouraged, and there was plenty of capital on hand. With colleagues from his lab, he often held brainstorming sessions at a café near campus, delineating his plans. In the first ten years, he would tackle a variety of genetic diseases; in the ten years after that, he’d extend the human life span to a hundred and twenty years. In a PowerPoint that he presented at the café, he wrote, “As a result of promoting genome editing, humanity is smarter, stronger, and healthier. Humanity enters an age of controlling destiny.”

JK’s agenda was spectacularly ambitious, and the pace he projected was aggressive—lifetimes of work in mere decades. To start, he would focus on what he believed was an achievable task: eradicating a disease governed by a single gene. He selected AIDS, an illness regarded in China as both pernicious and shameful but one for which there might be an elegant fix. H.I.V. enters human cells by way of a receptor created by a gene called CCR5. JK planned to use the gene-editing tool CRISPR to disrupt CCR5 in human embryos, which would, in theory, render the babies impervious to infection.

The experiment required volunteers, and, through a chat group associated with an H.I.V./AIDS charity, he began recruiting couples: H.I.V.-positive men married to uninfected women. Chinese law denies in-vitro fertilization and adoption to H.I.V.-positive people, and natural conception carries a risk of transmission. For couples with an infected partner, JK’s program was a chance at parenthood. It promised confidentiality, which was critical for a marginalized community; an H.I.V. diagnosis in China can cost a person his job. The treatments would take place discreetly, at facilities where only key employees were aware of the experiment.

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In the late nineteen-nineties, a neuroscientist named Mark Blumberg stood in a lab at the University of Iowa watching a litter of sleeping rats. Blumberg was then on the cusp of forty; the rats were newborns, and jerked and spasmed as they slept. Blumberg knew that the animals were fine. He had often seen his dogs twitch their paws while asleep. People, he knew, also twitch during sleep: our muscles contract to make small, sharp movements, and our closed eyes dart from side to side in a phenomenon known as rapid eye movement, or REM. It’s typically during REM sleep that we have our most vivid dreams.

Neuroscientists have long had an explanation for our somnolent twitches. During REM sleep, they say, our bodies are paralyzed to prevent us from acting out our dreams; the twitches are the movements that slip through the cracks. They’re dream debris—outward hints of an inner drama. Human adults spend only about two hours of each night in REM sleep. But fetuses, by the third trimester, are in REM for around twenty hours a day—researchers using ultrasound can see their eyes flitting to and fro—and their whole bodies seem to twitch. When a mother feels her baby kick, it may be because the baby is in REM sleep. Once born, babies continue to spend an unusual amount of time in REM, often sleeping for sixteen hours a day and dreaming for eight.

Increasingly, these facts struck Blumberg as odd. In adults, dreams are offshoots of waking life: we have experiences, then we dream about them. But a baby in the womb hasn’t had any experiences. Why spend so much time in REM before you have anything to dream about? According to the dominant theory, the rats’ twitching eyes were supposedly looking around at dream scenery. But the rat pups were just days old; their eyelids were still sealed shut, and they’d never seen anything. So why were their eyes—and their whiskers, limbs, and tails—twitching hundreds of thousands of times each day?

Blumberg decided to put the dream-debris theory to the test. He surgically removed the rats’ cortex—the brain region, involved in visual imagery and conscious experience, where dreams were believed to originate—leaving only the brain stem, which controls subconscious bodily functions, intact. The sleeping pups continued to twitch exactly as before. “There was no way that twitching was a by-product of dreams,” Blumberg told me when we spoke last fall.

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Illustration by Lina Müller

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A chill on our skin tells us that fall is in the air. Our noses let us know someone nearby is baking bread — or that it’s trash day. The sounds of songbirds, emergency sirens, or music playing in a passing car stir emotions. Our eyes show us that leaves are changing color. And our taste buds determine if it’s pumpkin-spice season or the soup needs a tad more salt.

Our senses provide endless information, yet unless we’re paying attention, their input can be easy to overlook. We get used to certain sounds, sights, and smells to the point that we no longer actively experience them. People who’ve ever lived near train tracks, a freeway, or an airport may know that best once they no longer notice the sound of trains chugging along, traffic whizzing by, or planes overhead.

Intentionally tuning in to our sensory perceptions can have big benefits for well-being. Senses bring us into the present moment when anxiety or panic strikes. Paying attention to what we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste can bring us deeper into the present moment, evoke meaningful memories, and help us connect with other people in the world.

The popular 5-4-3-2-1 technique grounds us in the now by asking us to notice five things we can see in our immediate environment, four things we can touch (such as the ground beneath our feet or clothing against our skin), three things we can hear, two things we can smell, and one thing we can taste (even just the inside of the mouth counts). This exercise takes us away from our spiraling thoughts and instantly puts us into what’s happening in the moment.

“It’s very easy to get stuck in our heads, so we don’t notice the beauty that’s around us,” says Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project and Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World. “We start to feel like our experiences are drained and flat because we’re getting information through screens, or it feels hyper-processed because we’re eating foods that hit every bliss point in a way that’s not natural. Tuning in to our five senses makes us feel that connection.”Individually exploring the senses can be a great source of delight and personal discovery, according to Rubin. We learn about ourselves and what we really like and don’t like when we tune in to what our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin are telling us.

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Cas Marotta

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Manifestation coaches are reinventing the law of attraction — the belief that you attract what you focus on — for a new generation. They spread the philosophy that self-worth is the law of attraction and that we can manifest anything that’s in alignment with “our current state of subconscious worthiness.” 

Dressed like fashion bloggers, these new leaders speak of “calling in” unseen powers to materialize new homes, jobs, or maybe just that perfect pair of jeans. On the To Be Magnetic website, one happy customer detailed manifesting a discounted white Le Creuset tea kettle. Other leaders skew more ambitious, selling $2,000 money workshops that reportedly draw in tenfold the class fee, thereby offering their own spin on the prosperity gospel.

Manifestation holds that there’s a tangible connection between the mind and cosmic workings. Spiritual influencers’ messages of overcoming personal struggles hold that you need a belief in yourself, since “the universe has your back.” That and with talk of modern-day issues — body image pressures, noncommittal boyfriends, sexist bosses — they’re instantly relatable. 

Today, Jessie De Lowe, a manifestation coach and co-founder of the lifestyle site How You Glow, likens manifestation to life coaching. The majority of De Lowe’s clients are young, female, and college-educated. Though they possess countless advantages, she describes an unsatisfied group gripped by peer competitiveness and unrealistic expectations fueled by social media. They aren’t comparing themselves to the millennial next door. They’re comparing themselves to start-up founders and the globe-trotting friends clogging their Instagram feed. “They feel inadequate, like they’re never where they should be [already],” says De Lowe.

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Annelisa Leinbach / Big Think, Wikimedia Commons, Adobe Stock

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Being a good listener means having empathy. But empathy is one of the most misunderstood listening skills.

Empathy is what we feel when we are trying to understand the world from the perspective of another person.

One of the common misconceptions about empathy is that you need to have lived through what the other person has experienced to understand them.

Simply having the same experiences as another person is not enough to understand them. Two people can face the same challenges or difficulties, but respond in completely different ways. Your experiences are unique to you and no one else can know how you feel, even if they have been wearing your shoes. The only way to understand how someone feels is to listen to them, without assuming that they feel the same as you did in that situation.

So, let’s think about empathy in a different way.

Your unique perception of the world

Imagine that every baby is born holding a wooden frame that contains a pane of glass. Whenever they look at anything in the world, they do so through this glass.

The glass is not completely clear when they receive it. It is slightly warped and discolored, and these are the marks of their genetics and biology. This means that everyone has a different piece of glass through which to see the world. And this glass becomes more marked as each of us moves through our lives. Every experience – good and bad – changes the glass. It warps, scratches, and smudges. Parts of it may be stained in different colors, like church windows. And so our view of the world changes as the glass changes over time.

We do not see the world as it truly exists. Rather, we see the world through a filter created by our biology and life experiences.

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After moving back in with her parents during the pandemic, Kayla Ibe was feeling restless. The 28-year-old public relations executive from Manahawkin, New Jersey, felt she wasn’t taking full advantage of her newfound perk of working remotely, so Ibe posted a half-joking tweet asking if anyone wanted to drive across the country with her. A few moments later, Ibe’s phone started buzzing.

It was her college friend Amaana Hasan. “She’s like, ‘I saw your tweet,’” Ibe reminisces. “‘Are you serious?’” Ibe wondered to herself if they would be compatible road trip partners considering they hadn’t been in proximity for years. “We were like, ‘Could we actually do this? Do we think we could make it work?’ By the end of the week, I had the first two weeks of our trip planned.”

The duo met the that way many new college students do: living in the same dorm during their freshman year. After graduating in 2016, they occasionally exchanged text messages. “We really didn’t have much of an in-person relationship post-college,” Ibe says, “which is what makes the story so fun.”

Ibe and Hasan had a preliminary conversation about the budget and the length of the trip. Because they would be working full-time, they decided to share hotel rooms to take advantage of free breakfasts and Wi-Fi. They committed to making lunch and dinner in Ibe’s mini Instant Pot and took turns cooking, from penne in Bryce Canyon to chili in Moab, Utah.

Initially, Ibe was nervous to broach other topics surrounding traveling together. “I didn’t want to be like, ‘I’m anticipating that we’re going to fight. How are you going to handle that?’” But on the first day of the trip, Ibe blurted out a question in the car about just that. Hasan’s answer was more relaxed than she anticipated. Ibe could stay in the room, and Hasan would go to the lobby or for a drive to give them space.

The conversation prepared the mates for an afternoon at Zion National Park when they had differing visions for their day. After a hike, Ibe wanted to do another, but Hasan wanted to go back to the hotel and nap. Hasan had put Ibe on her car insurance before the trip, so after a brief bit of tension, she suggested Ibe drop her off at the hotel and take the car to embark on a solo excursion. “That was the moment,” Ibe says, “that I realized we’re on this trip together … but we can still have our own experiences. Not every little moment has to be shared.”

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Shondaland Staff

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On a warm July evening, I dove into bed and grabbed my phone, giddy and anxious. As I scrolled through TikTok, attempting to calm my nerves, a Google Calendar notification flashed on the screen: “VIDEO CALL WITH SIMONE.”

Before I could swipe the reminder away, Simone FaceTimed me. I attempted to rehearse my greeting as the call buffered: Should I keep it cool with a, “Hey, what’s good?” No, that sounds cold. What about a Keke Palmer-esque, “Girl!” No, that’s doing too much. “Good evening?” No, it’s not evening her time, that doesn’t even make sen—

“Girl!” Simone said with a chuckle.

I couldn’t help but crack a smile. As I’d learned over the course of our six-year friendship, her warmth never failed to replace my anxiety with joy.

“Damn, it’s been a minute.” she added.

Both are my fault. In 2020, after months holed up in my tiny Washington, D.C. apartment, I decided to wait out the winter at my mother’s cottage in Kenya. It was just what the doctor ordered, and a few months later, I decided to move to Nairobi permanently.

My move changed our friendship—it changed all of my friendships, actually. I tried to stay in touch with my friends stateside for a while, but as time went on, FaceTime dates became harder to plan, and fewer voice notes were exchanged via WhatsApp. Now, I don’t know if I can call any of them friends anymore—and my relationship with Simone felt like it was hanging by a thread.

Things in Kenya aren’t much better. Though I’m Kenyan by ethnicity, I grew up abroad, in the US and UK, and I’ve found that my foreign accent and perspective other me, even within my family. These days, my social life tends to begin and end with nights on the couch, re-watching Shameless with my boyfriend. I’m ashamed and terrified about that reality; it feels dangerous to rely on only him for human connection.

After all, friends are witnesses to your life. They enrich the living experience. Not having that makes me feel like that tree that falls in the forest alone: Can anybody hear me? Do I matter?

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Photo Getty Images

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