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actutrends · 5 years ago

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Google AI chief Jeff Dean interview: Machine learning trends in 2020

At the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference this week in Vancouver, Canada, machine learning took center stage as 13,000 researchers explored things like neuroscience, how to interpret neural network outputs, and how AI can help solve big real-world problems.

With more than 1,400 works accepted for publication, you have to choose how to prioritize your time. For Google AI chief Jeff Dean, that means giving talks at workshops about how machine learning can help confront the threat posed by climate change and how machine learning is reshaping systems and semiconductors.

VentureBeat spoke with Dean Thursday about Google’s early work on the use of ML to create semiconductors for machine learning, the impact of Google’s BERT on conversational AI, and machine learning trends to watch in 2020.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

VentureBeat: So you’re going to be talking at the Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning workshop Saturday. Anything you can share ahead of your speech?

Jeff Dean: That’s obviously a very broad space, and there’s a lot of potential for using machine learning to help tackle climate change-related topics or mitigate some of the effects. So we’re pretty excited about this. I think Google and the [AI] community in general [are] excited because it’s a serious problem, and also … one that has a lot of technical meat behind it. Like, how can we actually apply machine learning [to] some of these subproblems?

VentureBeat: Do you get to go through the work that’s here [at NeurIPS]? I mean, I presume you didn’t sift through all the posters, but outside of stuff that was shown by Google was there anything that you were particularly excited about?

Dean: Well, probably not quite all of the posters, but we have internal discussions about things people have seen that seem interesting. And I think the ML field as a whole is fairly prolific in its research output these days so it’s really hard to keep up, but one way is having lots of collective opinions about things that people see that seem important.

I just arrived yesterday, so I haven’t actually seen with my own eyes a lot of stuff, but I know other people have been interested in lots of other things.

VentureBeat: I saw your remarks last month on arXiv about the evolution of hardware for machine learning that you’ll expand upon at the ISSCC next month. What do you think are some of the things that in a post-Moore’s Law world people are going to have to keep in mind?

Dean: Well I think one thing that’s been shown to be pretty effective is specialization of chips to do certain kinds of computation that you want to do that are not completely general purpose, like a general-purpose CPU. So we’ve seen a lot of benefit from more restricted computational models, like GPUs or even TPUs, which are more restricted but really designed around what ML computations need to do. And that actually gets you a fair amount of performance advantage, relative to general-purpose CPUs. And so you’re then not getting the great increases we used to get in sort of the general fabrication process improving your year-over-year substantially. But we are getting significant architectural advantages by specialization.

VentureBeat: You also got a little into the use of machine learning for the creation of machine learning hardware. Can you talk more about that?

Dean: Yeah, the other talk I’m giving on Saturday is in the ML for Systems workshop. And so one of the things I’ll talk about there is [how] we’ve been doing some early work on machine learning for ASIC chip design, in particular placement and routing. So you have a chip design, and then you have lots and lots of transistors and how they’re connected.

Basically, right now in the design process you have design tools that can help do some layout, but you have human placement and routing experts work with those design tools to kind of iterate many, many times over. It’s a multi-week process to actually go from the design you want to actually having it physically laid out on a chip with the right constraints in area and power and wire length and meeting all the design roles or whatever fabrication process you’re doing.

So it turns out that we have early evidence in some of our work that we can use machine learning to do much more automated placement and routing. And we can essentially have a machine learning model that learns to play the game of ASIC placement for a particular chip.

VentureBeat: That’s pretty cool.

Dean: Yeah, and we have, you know, good results on some of the internal chips that we’ve been experimenting with.

VentureBeat: One of the things that’s come up a lot lately, you know, in the question of climate change — I was talking with Intel AI general manager Naveen Rao recently and he mentioned this idea [that] compute-per-watt should become a standard benchmark, for example, and some of the organizers here are talking about the notion of people being required to share the carbon footprint of the model that they trained for submissions here.

Dean: Yeah, we’d be thrilled with that because all the stuff we trained in our Google Data Center — the carbon footprint is zero. Because … basically, all of our energy usage comes from renewable sources. So that would be great. I think other people might not be as excited.

VentureBeat: I guess a criticism of larger models like XLNet or models of that nature is the amount of energy required to make and deploy them. I guess if it’s in a Google datacenter it would be carbon neutral, but outside of that context if somebody was using a large model …

Dean: Yes, I think there’s a general point, which is [that] some of these large models are computationally intensive, and they’re reasonably expensive in terms of energy usage. And so I think it’s important for the community to look at what are more efficient algorithmic techniques we can have that make a particular model or outcome that we want … be achievable with less compute and less … energy input.

I think things like multitask learning and transfer learning are actually pretty effective algorithmic tools that we have that can improve energy usage, because you can train one model and then fine-tune it, or do multitask learning on a relatively small number of examples for a new task that you want to be good at. And that’s much better than starting from scratch every time, which is sort of mostly the current practice.

VentureBeat: Something I know you’re passionate about is making sure that researchers from Africa or Asia who were having issues with travel visas getting here are able to do so, and the organizers talked a little bit about that earlier. But I was talking to someone who was still unable to get here earlier this week, and he suggested the idea of having at least one of the major conferences — like ICML or CVPR — in open border-type countries, places that have fewer issues as relates to getting a visa. What are your thoughts on that idea?

Dean: I think we actually do want these conferences to be accessible to more people. I think there are sometimes issues with — no matter where you put a conference, there’s always going to be constraints on that. For example, sometimes students studying in the U.S. have trouble leaving the U.S. to go to a conference. So if you hold it outside the U.S. in a particular place, that sometimes creates complications.

Different countries have different policies, but I think having the major conferences rotate around where they’re held is a pretty sensible thing, so that not everyone is facing the same visa issues from the same places. But also, I think [we need to be] helping inform governments about why scientific exchange is important and why they should be willing to let people come to scientific conferences for a week or whatever.

VentureBeat: This was a big year for BERT. BERT all over the place, and all different kinds of BERT. What are some of the variations of BERT that people should expect to see next, or what’s on the horizon?

Dean: BERT is interesting because it builds on sort of a progression of other research results. So, BERT sort of depends on the Transformer work that was done the year before. Transformer work is really kind of a take on the same problem that the earlier sequence LSTM-based models were looking at. And that whole research thread I think has been, you know, quite fruitful in terms of actually yielding machine learning models that [let us now] do more sophisticated NLP tasks than we used to be able to do. And the fine-tuning of BERT that’s pretrained on a bunch of text — arbitrary text — and then fine-tuned on a particular NLP task you care about is a nice paradigm for a lot of NLP problems that we would like to be able to solve. And so within Google, we’re sort of looking at lots of different kinds of applications in our products. You know we just rolled out some in the search stack to improve search quality.

And I think you’re seeing that in the broader community, as well. We’d still like to be able to do much more contextual kinds of models. Like right now BERT and other models work well on hundreds of words, but not 10,000 words as context. So that’s kind of [an] interesting direction. I think multimodal kinds of models are pretty interesting — like can you combine text with imagery or audio or video in interesting ways? That’s something we’ve done a little bit of work on, the rest of the community has done a little bit of work on, but I think that’s going to become more important in the future. And I’m sure people will find improvements to the basic approach that BERT is taking. We have some minor or maybe even major improvements.

So the basic research thrusts will continue. The use of what we now know how to do will continue to be sort of a good set of applications, both within Google and outside. We’re pretty excited.

VentureBeat: Yeah, I followed a lot of the sort of MT-DNN, RoBERTta, all that.

Dean: Yeah, everyone has a cute play on the name. It’s hard to keep them all straight and remember exactly what wrinkle is here or there. I do kind of think there’s a bit of an overemphasis on — in the community — on sort of achieving ever-so-slightly better state-of-the-art results on particular problems, and a little underappreciation of completely different approaches to problems that maybe don’t get state of the art because it’s actually super hard and a pretty explored area.

VentureBeat: Like robustness?

Dean: Yeah, or like “What are completely different ways of solving a problem that we think is important, and show promise?” And if people then pursued those kinds of rough directions, it would be interesting.

VentureBeat: Instead of trying to get to the top of the GLUE leaderboard?

Dean: Yeah.

VentureBeat: What do you feel are some of the technical or ethical challenges for Google in the year ahead?

Dean: In terms of AI or ML, we’ve done a pretty reasonable job of getting a process in place by which we look at how we’re using machine learning in different product applications and areas consistent with the AI principles. That process has gotten better-tuned and oiled with things like model cards and things like that. I’m really happy to see those kinds of things. So I think those are good and emblematic of what we should be doing as a community.

And then I think in the areas of many of the principles, there [are] real open research directions. Like, we have kind of the best known practices for helping with fairness and bias and machine learning models or safety or privacy. But those are by no means solved problems, so we need to continue to do longer-term research in these areas to progress the state of the art while we currently apply the best known state-of-the-art techniques to what we do in an applied setting.

VentureBeat: What are some of the trends you expect to emerge, or milestones you think may be surpassed in 2020 in AI?

Dean: I think we’ll see much more multitask learning and multimodal learning, of sort of larger scales than has been previously tackled. I think that’ll be pretty interesting.

And I think there’s going to be a continued trend to getting more interesting on-device models — or sort of consumer devices, like phones or whatever — to work more effectively.

I think obviously AI-related principles-related work is going to be important. We’re a big enough research organization that we actually have lots of different thrusts we’re doing, so it’s hard to call out just one. But I think in general [we’ll be] progressing the state of the art, doing basic fundamental research to advance our capabilities in lots of important areas we’re looking at, like NLP or language models or vision or multimodal things. But also then collaborating with our colleagues and product teams to get some of the research that is ready for product application to allow them to build interesting features and products. And [we’ll be] doing kind of new things that Google doesn’t currently have products in but are sort of interesting applications of ML, like the chip design work we’ve been doing.

VentureBeat: Like everyday robots?

Dean: Yeah, we have a pretty extensive robotics research effort. I think robotics is a really hard problem — to make robots that operate in sort of arbitrary environments, like a big conference room with chairs and stuff. But, you know, the fact that we’ve been making a fair amount of progress on that in the last few years, I think that’s an interesting research direction as well. We have a pretty big research effort.

The post Google AI chief Jeff Dean interview: Machine learning trends in 2020 appeared first on Actu Trends.

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talhaghafoor2019-blog · 6 years ago

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Optimisation is the enemy of creativity in marketing and music

No, you are not becoming crankier as you approach middle age – music is indeed getting worse every year. And the marketing industry’s obsession with optimisation is to blame.

In late 2017, the YouTube channel Thoughty2 published a video exploring how music has changed over the decades. After starting with The Beatles, the narrator continues with an example of classic British understatement: “Fast forward to 2010, when Justin Bieber released his hit single Baby. This is generally considered to be a bad move.”

According to the research in the video, lyrical intelligence, harmonic complexity, and timbral diversity have decreased while dynamic range compression has been used to make music louder and louder. In short, songs are becoming stupider – especially since every hit now includes the “millennial whoop” as well.

“Instead of experimenting with different musical techniques and instruments, the vast majority of pop music today is built using the exact same combination of keyboard, drum machine, sampler, and computer software,” Thoughty2’s narrator states. “This might be considered as progressive by some people, but it truth it sucks the creativity and originality out of music – making everything sound somewhat similar.”

As a rule, businesses do not like risk. The video states that record companies today must spend anywhere from $500,000 to $3m to sign and market a new artist. That is a lot of money to spend on a band without being fully confident of success.

To minimise the risk and maximise the potential return, these companies optimise the music to do whatever seems to have worked in the past. Same set of instruments? Check. Simple lyrics? Check. Is it loud? Check. Simple melody? Check. Can you dance to it? Check. Millennial whoop? Check check.

But that optimisation process is a downward spiral that will result only in songs that will make Rebecca Black’s Friday sound as brilliant as Led Zeppelin's Kashmir. It is creating music by paint-by-numbers. It is ticking boxes rather than being creative. And the same thing is occurring in the marketing industry today.

The rise of optimisation

After my first career in journalism years ago, I went into marketing and at one point met with a recruiter who was looking for a digital marketer. “I need an expert in SEO, ASO, and SMO,” she told me, further rattling off a lengthier list of random acronyms.

“Optimisation” became all the rage after companies discovered in the 2000s how much traffic websites could attract from search engines. After the birth of search engine optimisation (SEO), marketers tacked on the latter word to create “app store optimisation” and “social media optimisation” as well as countless other uses where the term also made little sense.

App store optimisation (ASO) looks for hacks to increase a mobile application’s ranking and findability in places such as the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store – rather than, you know, creating and promoting a real, useful app that people will like. Social media optimisation (SMO) is a useless term because social media is simply a set of channels and tools that can be used for any specific promotion tactic.

Now, businesses have always discussed general best practices. My last job in journalism in the 2000s was serving as the editor-in-chief and executive director of the Boston non-profit newspaper Spare Change News. (It is one of the newspapers in the United States that are modeled on The Big Issue in the UK.)

In that role, I once attended an annual convention of the North American Street Newspaper Association that was held in Halifax, Canada. There, the assembled staffers discussed the best practices in terms of pricing, circulation, and countless other topics. Today, marketers talk about optimisation, which often means the best practices in line with someone else’s algorithms or what has purportedly worked for others.

Buffer has published studies on the ideal lengths of everything from blog posts to tweets to headlines to Facebook updates. HubSpot has reported the best times to post on social media. But in the end, both best practices and optimisation come down to the same thing: doing what everyone else is doing.

The perils of optimisation

Once, I was in a meeting where people were discussing how to get more traffic from blog posts spread on Facebook. The ideas focused on using psychology and gaming the social network’s algorithm: “Let’s ask people to comment on posts to increase engagement!” and “Let’s change the posts so that they are lists whose headlines start with numbers!”

“Make a funny, creative video advertisement instead,” I suggested, noting the reach that humorous videos receive on Facebook. But no one listened. Everyone cared so much about optimising the form of the creative that no one thought about the creativity of the creative. They prioritised the form over the function.

The perfect example of this is when marketers see studies on which headlines get the most “engagement.” In June 2017, Buzzsumo analysed 100m headlines and found this information on which headlines receive the most clicks, “likes,” and shares on Facebook:

Too many digital marketers use such information and focus on producing whatever marcom is cheapest and then optimising it. Here is a sample of recent blog posts on Medium from a certain prolific marketing writer:

5 Strange But True Habits of the World’s Richest People

5 Smart Reasons to Create Content Outside Your Niche

5 Simple Hacks to Sharpen Your Emotional Intelligence

10 Insanely Good Reasons You Should Publish On Medium

3 Unusual Hacks to Completely Up Your LinkedIn Game

Bored now.

Too many marketers go overboard and focus on optimisation to produce rubbish marketing such as clickbait blog posts with the same headline format such as this: [number] [unnecessarily strong adjective] [noun] to [achieve some goal].

The internet will continue to be flooded with boring, optimised posts that all have the same title formats in an effort to get clicks or satisfy other short-term metrics. But optimisation is the enemy of creativity and leads to worst long-term results. (Just look at how many reboots of successful TV shows from the 80s and 90s have failed today. The studios likely thought that copying what was done before would guarantee another success.)

Redundant optimisation quickly becomes cliched, hurts the brand, and is obvious to consumers. If Oxford Academic were to title journal articles in the above manner, the Oxford brand would become laughable. The only way for BuzzFeed News to be taken seriously – and the publication is indeed doing excellent journalism – has been to decouple its brand from the notoriously clickbait parent company.

Optimised reflects only short-term thinking. Using clickbait to get people to a website is the same as knocking people over the head and dragging them into your store. They may be there, but they will not buy anything because they will hate your brand.

When everyone optimises for everything, it is no longer a competitive advantage. The only true competitive advantage that people will have is what rests in their brains – creativity. Without that, you will only be as good as everyone else.

The benefits of creativity

According to an updated study in Admap magazine by Data2Decisions founder Paul Dyson, creativity is – by far – the second-best profit multiplier after market size:

Optimisation and best practices aim to do what someone else defines or the best of what everyone else does – but nothing more than that.

"Best practice is like training wheels – it keeps you safe whilst you're learning how to excel in your industry,” Helen Pollitt, head of SEO at the British digital marketing agency Reflect Digital, said. “To really differentiate yourself from the competition you need to be open to experimentation and growth, true optimisation requires facing failure. The issue with sticking to the safe zone of best practice is it stifles creativity."

The best depiction of the benefit of being different that I have seen comes from this BBH ad:

People notice what is different. And if your marketing does not get noticed in the first place, nothing else you do matters. As BBH London strategy director Lucian Trestler recently put it:

“‘Difference’ isn’t just a two bob philosophy or a frivolous creative penchant. It is the most powerful communications tool there is to deliver commercial results. We have a vast amount of data to support that. Evidence from neuroscience, marketing science and creative effectiveness data all agree on this point; difference is commercially safer than ‘safety.’”

Optimising based on data or algorithms is easier than being creative – but it is not always better, according to Wistia co-founder and chief executive Chris Savage.

“Today, everyone scores their leads with Marketo and A/B tests thirty different varieties of their landing page. You can’t get a competitive advantage doing that stuff anymore. You could say that as the percentage of marketers with a certain tech stack or using a certain tool approaches 100%, the competitive advantage you reap from it approaches zero,” he once wrote. "Using data to scale your marketing is critical. But when we all have access to the same types of data, it won’t be the data that differentiates us — it’ll be the art.”

Tom Goodwin recently said something similar: “A/B testing seems to be getting out of hand. Seems to be a way to offload decision making, not have a strategy, or gut or courage. What great art/music/products would ever be made this way?”

But tell that to those digital marketers who think only in terms of optimisation. Tell that to high-tech chief executives who want to mimic the marketing of competitors and think that they need only a differentiated product to be successful. (Just like record companies, startups are risk-averse because they do not want to lose the millions of investor dollars.)

In a quote attributed to John Ward from B&B Dorland in England, “advertising is a craft executed by people who aspire to be artists but is assessed by those who aspire to be scientists. I cannot imagine any human relationship more perfectly designed to produce total mayhem.”

At Digital Annexe University in 2015, Dave Trott gave a classic speech on creativity. Effective communications, he said, needs to have an impact, needs to communicate, and needs to be persuasive. “Impact” is the most important part.

“Impact will get you on the radar,” he said. “Without impact, there’s nothing there. There might be a bloke outside on the street right now telling us the secret of all life, and we’ll never know because we can’t hear him. Without impact, nothing happens.”

Now, take the desire of so many marketers to optimise all collateral to match some alleged universal standard. How will their work be different from that of everyone else? How will their work stand out? How will their work have an impact?

“Optimisation might work for certain businesses for a certain amount of time,” Steve Daniels, an independent graphic designer in the UK, said. “This course of action may feel safer, but it only remains safe if there are no competitors who disrupt the market or start playing the brand game in a strong way. As soon as that happens, focusing on creativity is a great a way to play the long game – and to invest in your future success.”

If your business wants to remain safe, no one will notice you. Taking creative risks is how you become memorable.

A quick recommendation

So, if you want to listen to an album where the musicians wrote their own material, played dozens of instruments, and created songs that are lyrically intelligent, harmonically complex, and timbrally diverse, I have an assignment for you.

Listen to records or remastered CDs of the Moody Blues album In Search of the Lost Chord (1968) and The Smiths’ song How Soon Is Now? (1985) with a good pair of noise-cancelling headphones and some refreshment of your choice. Maybe it will kickstart some creative inspiration.

After all, the Beatles will be remembered forever. Justin Bieber will not.

The Promotion Fix is an exclusive biweekly column for The Drum contributed by global marketing and technology keynote speaker Samuel Scott, a former journalist, consultant and director of marketing in the high-tech industry. Follow him on Twitter. Scott is based out of Tel Aviv, Israel.

This content was originally published here.

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djsamaha-blog · 7 years ago

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New Neuroscience Reveals 2 Rituals That Will Make You More Mindful

***

Before we commence with the festivities, I wanted to thank everyone for helping my first book become a Wall Street Journal bestseller. To check it out, click here.

***

You want to get to work but instead you surf the internet. You want to diet but instead you eat enough candy to give an entire 2nd grade classroom type 2 diabetes. Why?

You might think you lack self-control. Or that you make bad decisions. But none of these explanations ever seems to get to the bottom of why what-you-think and what-you-do all too frequently don’t line up.

What the heck is going in your brain that causes these inconsistencies? Sometimes it’s almost like you’re 2 different people. Or 3. Or 19.

There’s a very simple answer: you are 19 different people. Or 4. Or 107. But what you aren’t is one person. Yeah, sounds crazy, I know. Stay with me…

Over 1000 years ago Buddhism — where mindfulness techniques come from — said that there is no singular “you.” The “self” does not exist. Sound like crazy nonsense? I’m with you. (All 27 of you, actually.) But here’s the thing…

Both neuroscience and psychology are starting to agree. Sometimes you don’t act like you because there is no singular “you.”

And this positively perplexing proposition holds the answer to why you do dumb things, procrastinate, can’t follow through on your goals, and why some days it seems like everyone – including you — is a total hypocrite.

Strap in — we’re gonna turn everything you know about your grey matter upside down and give you a completely new way of looking at your mind and how it works. Of course, we’ll also cover how to address this issue and start getting your act together.

Alright, enough foreplay. It’s time for me and you (and you, and you and you) to get to work…

Walt Whitman, You Do Contain Multitudes

There is no “you.” There are a lot of yous in your head. But do legit scientists really agree with such a seemingly ridiculous statement? Here’s Duke psychology professor Dan Ariely:

…our models of human behavior need to be rethought. Perhaps there is no such thing as a fully integrated human being. We may, in fact, be an agglomeration of multiple selves.

What we’re talking about is the cutting edge theory of the “modular mind.” (Okay, it’s old news to Buddhist monks but cutting edge to the rest of us.)

The human brain wasn’t built top to bottom as a single project like Apple builds a computer. It evolved over millions of years in a very messy fashion. Various systems (or “modules”) came about to drive you to accomplish different tasks like seeking food, fighting, reproduction, etc. But here’s the problem…

They were never integrated. So these systems compete to steer the ship that is your brain. Your mind is less like a single computer operating system and more like a collection of smartphone apps where only one can be open and running at a time.

Here’s noted science author Robert Wright:

In this view, your mind is composed of lots of specialized modules—modules for sizing up situations and reacting to them—and it’s the interplay among these modules that shapes your behavior. And much of this interplay happens without conscious awareness on your part. The modular model of the mind, though still young and not fully fleshed out, holds a lot of promise. For starters, it makes sense in terms of evolution: the mind got built bit by bit, chunk by chunk, and as our species encountered new challenges, new chunks would have been added. As we’ll see, this model also helps make sense of some of life’s great internal conflicts, such as whether to cheat on your spouse, whether to take addictive drugs, and whether to eat another powdered-sugar doughnut.

So you want to diet but you see donuts and your brain’s hunger module (like the “Grubhub” app) hjacks control and says, “Food! Eat it. Now.” Or you want to be nice but your mind’s anger app (“Angry Birds”) takes charge and you’re saying things another app is really going to regret tomorrow. You’re like a walking live performance of Pixar’s “Inside Out.”

Now this isn’t as alien as it might sound. When you do something while drunk or tired what’s the phrase you often pull out? “I wasn’t myself.”

Yeah. Exactly. Upside: you can now use the royal “we” to describe yourself.

(To learn more about the science of a successful life, check out my new book here.)

So how do we prevent hijacking by the wrong module at the wrong time and make better decisions? First we need to learn how those inappropriate modules get hold of your steering wheel…

Feelings. Nothing More Than Feelings.

Whichever module has the most emotional kick attached to it at any point wins the competition to be “you.”

You see a pizza commercial and it stirs up feelings of hunger and that “Grubhub” app hijacks control. Then you see someone attractive, feelings stir in your nether regions, the “Tinder” app takes charge and your brain is under new management yet again.

Under this lens, many of the confusing and frustrating things about human behavior start to make a lot of sense:

Of course people are hypocritical. They’re made up of competing “selves” with very different goals and different information. Uncle Al is the most reasonable guy in the world — unless his “politics module” takes charge.

Are people good or bad? They’re both. The metaphorical angel on one shoulder and devil on the other are just different modules in the brain with different motivations.

Those emotional persuasion techniques? They’re an attempt to switch the other person’s dominant module. To get them to go from that competitive Chess app to something more friendly like Facebook.

Why do you lack self-control? Because now the word doesn’t make any sense. It’s actually “selves-control.” Your behavior isn’t inconsistent; the “you” in charge is inconsistent.

Is it starting to click now? Here’s University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Robert Kurzban:

Some modules are designed to gather benefits, others are designed to deliver benefits, and they exist in the same head, sometimes in conflict. In the same way, this analysis does away with the question of whether individual acts are “really” self-interested. Different kinds of acts advance the goals that some, but not other, modules are designed to bring about. So, both meanings of “self-interest” seem to be a problem because different modules have different designs, and are therefore built to bring about different outcomes.

You’re often a slave to your emotional reactions to the world around you. You react to your context with feelings, those give one module more power than another, and that one hijacks decision-making in your brain…

Until new feelings are stirred up and another module takes charge. And this happens over and over and over all day long.

Here’s Robert Wright:

The human brain is a machine designed by natural selection to respond in pretty reflexive fashion to the sensory input impinging on it. It is designed, in a certain sense, to be controlled by that input. And a key cog in the machinery of control is the feelings that arise in response to the input. If you interact with those feelings… via the natural, reflexive thirst for the pleasant feelings and the natural, reflexive aversion to the unpleasant feelings—you will continue to be controlled by the world around you.

But you have this horrendous automatic transmission and so often your brain is in 1st gear on the highway and in 5th gear backing out of a parking spot and the results are far from what you desired.

(To learn the 3 secrets from neuroscience that will make you emotionally intelligent, click here.)

So how can we replace your automatic transmission with a nice stick shift? How do we prevent your grey matter from being continually hijacked by whatever emotions well up inside you?

How To Prevent Brain Hijack

Buddhism recognized this problem over 1000 years ago. And it also came up with a solution: mindfulness meditation.

But wait a second — Buddhism is a religion, right? Hold on. You can improve your body with yoga without being Hindu. And you can improve your brain through meditation without being Buddhist. Meditation is a secular tool for strengthening mental muscles.

And neuroscience gives it a big thumbs up. Studies show meditation trains your brain to be less reactive to emotional swings and can prevent the wrong module from hijacking control of your brain.

From

The meditators’ brains were scanned while they saw disturbing images of people suffering, like burn victims. The seasoned practitioners’ brains revealed a lowered level of reactivity in the amygdala; they were more immune to emotional hijacking. The reason: their brains had stronger operative connectivity between the prefrontal cortex, which manages reactivity, and the amygdala, which triggers such reactions. As neuroscientists know, the stronger this particular link in the brain, the less a person will be hijacked by emotional downs and ups of all sorts.

And this helps you make better decisions.

Here’s Robert Wright:

After all, one virtue of mindfulness meditation is that experiencing your feelings with care and clarity, rather than following them reflexively and uncritically, lets you choose which ones to follow—like, say, joy, delight, and love.

(To learn the 4 rituals from neuroscience that will make you happy, click here.)

Great. So how do you meditate to get those powerful brain benefits?

Meditation 101

Dan Harris wrote the most accessible — and most entertaining — book on meditation out there: 10% Happier. And when I spoke to him, here’s how he explained the dead simple way to build those brain biceps:

It really involves three extremely simple steps.

One: Sit with your eyes closed and your back straight.

Two: Notice what it feels like when your breath comes in and when your breath goes out, try to bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out.

Third step is the biggie. Every time you try to do this, your mind is going to go crazy. You are going to start thinking about all sorts of stupid things like if you need a haircut, why you said that dumb thing to your boss, what’s for lunch, etc. Every time you notice that your mind is wandering, bring your attention back to your breath and begin again. This is going to happen over and over and over again and that is meditation.

By the way, you’re going to suck at this. Meditation is the hardest simple thing you’ll ever do. Dan agrees:

It’s not easy. You will “fail” a million times but the “failing” and starting over is succeeding. So this isn’t like most things in your life where, like if you can’t get up on water skis, you can’t do it. Here the trying and starting again, trying and starting again, that’s the whole game.

But do you need to be in the midst of meditation to get the improvements? Nope. Neuroplasticity to the rescue! Over time, meditation produces trait changes in the brain so that the effects persist.

From

…there are hints in the research that these changes are traitlike: they appear not simply during the explicit instruction to perceive the stressful stimuli mindfully but even in the “baseline” state, with reductions in amygdala activation as great as 50 percent. Such lessening of the brain’s stress reactions appears in response not simply to seeing the gory pictures used in the laboratory but also to more real-life challenges…

I get it. What’s truly fascinating is that recent research has shown a tiny bit of meditation can actually be used acutely — in the moment when you’re having a push-the-red-button-level emergency.

From

As these stressful thoughts were presented, the patients used either of two different attentional stances: mindful awareness of their breath or distraction by doing mental arithmetic. Only mindfulness of their breath both lowered activity in the amygdala— mainly via a faster recovery— and strengthened it in the brain’s attentional networks, while the patients reported less stress reactivity.

(To learn more about how to meditate from Dan Harris, click here.)

We’ve covered a lot. Time for the yous to gather ’round. Let’s pull it all together and learn how the modular vision of the brain along with mindfulness can lead to that little thing called wisdom…

Sum Up

Here’s what you and you and you need to know about how to be more mindful:

There are many yous: Like apps on a smartphone, different systems in your brain with different goals can take control at different times, which is why you can behave so inconsistently.

Feelings are what give a module control: You get worked up by what your buddy said and suddenly your brain is hijacked by “Angry Birds” instead of “Words With Friends.”

Meditation can prevent hijacking: Over time, meditation can rewire your brain to be less impulsively reactive and allow you to thoughtfully respond to your feelings.

Mini-meditations help in the moment: By focusing on your breath during a tense moment you can get some of the long term effects of meditation right when you need them.

Less reactivity means fewer hijacks which leads to better decisions and more alignment between thought and action. Over time, that leads to wisdom. Neuroscience PhD and meditation advocate put it best:

On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one’s own advice.

Observe a couple breaths. Stay calm so you can get back to your home screen. Choose the right app for the situation.

Trust me: you don’t want Natasha running the show.

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Posted On: October 5, 2017

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talhaghafoor2019-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Optimisation is the enemy of creativity in marketing and music

No, you are not becoming crankier as you approach middle age – music is indeed getting worse every year. And the marketing industry’s obsession with optimisation is to blame.

The rise of optimisation

The perils of optimisation

5 Strange But True Habits of the World’s Richest People

5 Smart Reasons to Create Content Outside Your Niche

5 Simple Hacks to Sharpen Your Emotional Intelligence

10 Insanely Good Reasons You Should Publish On Medium

3 Unusual Hacks to Completely Up Your LinkedIn Game

Bored now.

The benefits of creativity

According to an updated study in Admap magazine by Data2Decisions founder Paul Dyson, creativity is – by far – the second-best profit multiplier after market size:

Optimisation and best practices aim to do what someone else defines or the best of what everyone else does – but nothing more than that.

The best depiction of the benefit of being different that I have seen comes from this BBH ad:

People notice what is different. And if your marketing does not get noticed in the first place, nothing else you do matters. As BBH London strategy director Lucian Trestler recently put it:

Optimising based on data or algorithms is easier than being creative – but it is not always better, according to Wistia co-founder and chief executive Chris Savage.

If your business wants to remain safe, no one will notice you. Taking creative risks is how you become memorable.

A quick recommendation

After all, the Beatles will be remembered forever. Justin Bieber will not.

This content was originally published here.

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djsamaha-blog · 7 years ago

Text

New Neuroscience Reveals 2 Rituals That Will Make You More Mindful

*** Before we commence with the festivities, I wanted to thank everyone for helping my first book become a Wall Street Journal bestseller. To check it out, click here. *** You want to get to work but instead you surf the internet. You want to diet but instead you eat enough candy to give an entire 2nd grade classroom type 2 diabetes. Why? You might think you lack self-control. Or that you make bad decisions. But none of these explanations ever seems to get to the bottom of why what-you-think and what-you-do all too frequently don’t line up. What the heck is going in your brain that causes these inconsistencies? Sometimes it’s almost like you’re 2 different people. Or 3. Or 19. There’s a very simple answer: you are 19 different people. Or 4. Or 107. But what you aren’t is one person. Yeah, sounds crazy, I know. Stay with me… Over 1000 years ago Buddhism — where mindfulness techniques come from — said that there is no singular “you.” The “self” does not exist. Sound like crazy nonsense? I’m with you. (All 27 of you, actually.) But here’s the thing… Both neuroscience and psychology are starting to agree. Sometimes you don’t act like you because there is no singular “you.” And this positively perplexing proposition holds the answer to why you do dumb things, procrastinate, can’t follow through on your goals, and why some days it seems like everyone – including you — is a total hypocrite. Strap in — we’re gonna turn everything you know about your grey matter upside down and give you a completely new way of looking at your mind and how it works. Of course, we’ll also cover how to address this issue and start getting your act together. Alright, enough foreplay. It’s time for me and you (and you, and you and you) to get to work…

Walt Whitman, You Do Contain Multitudes

There is no “you.” There are a lot of yous in your head. But do legit scientists really agree with such a seemingly ridiculous statement? Here’s Duke psychology professor Dan Ariely:

…our models of human behavior need to be rethought. Perhaps there is no such thing as a fully integrated human being. We may, in fact, be an agglomeration of multiple selves.

What we’re talking about is the cutting edge theory of the “modular mind.” (Okay, it’s old news to Buddhist monks but cutting edge to the rest of us.) The human brain wasn’t built top to bottom as a single project like Apple builds a computer. It evolved over millions of years in a very messy fashion. Various systems (or “modules”) came about to drive you to accomplish different tasks like seeking food, fighting, reproduction, etc. But here’s the problem… They were never integrated. So these systems compete to steer the ship that is your brain. Your mind is less like a single computer operating system and more like a collection of smartphone apps where only one can be open and running at a time. Here’s noted science author Robert Wright:

Now modules aren’t physical structures in the brain, just like apps aren’t hardware in your phone. They’re software; the human nature algorithms that Mother Nature coded over thousands of generations of evolution. So you want to diet but you see donuts and your brain’s hunger module (like the “Grubhub” app) hjacks control and says, “Food! Eat it. Now.” Or you want to be nice but your mind’s anger app (“Angry Birds”) takes charge and you’re saying things another app is really going to regret tomorrow. You’re like a walking live performance of Pixar’s “Inside Out.” Now this isn’t as alien as it might sound. When you do something while drunk or tired what’s the phrase you often pull out? “I wasn’t myself.” Yeah. Exactly. Upside: you can now use the royal “we” to describe yourself. (To learn more about the science of a successful life, check out my new book here.) So how do we prevent hijacking by the wrong module at the wrong time and make better decisions? First we need to learn how those inappropriate modules get hold of your steering wheel…

Feelings. Nothing More Than Feelings.

Whichever module has the most emotional kick attached to it at any point wins the competition to be “you.” You see a pizza commercial and it stirs up feelings of hunger and that “Grubhub” app hijacks control. Then you see someone attractive, feelings stir in your nether regions, the “Tinder” app takes charge and your brain is under new management yet again. Under this lens, many of the confusing and frustrating things about human behavior start to make a lot of sense:

Are people good or bad? They’re both. The metaphorical angel on one shoulder and devil on the other are just different modules in the brain with different motivations.

Those emotional persuasion techniques? They’re an attempt to switch the other person’s dominant module. To get them to go from that competitive Chess app to something more friendly like Facebook.

Why do you lack self-control? Because now the word doesn’t make any sense. It’s actually “selves-control.” Your behavior isn’t inconsistent; the “you” in charge is inconsistent.

Is it starting to click now? Here’s University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Robert Kurzban:

I had a girlfriend named Natalia who, whenever she got caught doing something naughty, would smirk and say, “That wasn’t me. That was Natasha.” I would roll my eyes but it turns out Natalia knew a lot more about neuroscience than I did. (Um, or Natasha did. Whatever. You get the point.) You’re often a slave to your emotional reactions to the world around you. You react to your context with feelings, those give one module more power than another, and that one hijacks decision-making in your brain… Until new feelings are stirred up and another module takes charge. And this happens over and over and over all day long. Here’s Robert Wright:

Your brain is like a car with a terrible automatic transmission. Any car fanatic knows if you want total control, you want a stick shift. You want to be able to choose which gear is engaged to best suit the current challenges ahead. But you have this horrendous automatic transmission and so often your brain is in 1st gear on the highway and in 5th gear backing out of a parking spot and the results are far from what you desired. (To learn the 3 secrets from neuroscience that will make you emotionally intelligent, click here.) So how can we replace your automatic transmission with a nice stick shift? How do we prevent your grey matter from being continually hijacked by whatever emotions well up inside you?

How To Prevent Brain Hijack

Buddhism recognized this problem over 1000 years ago. And it also came up with a solution: mindfulness meditation. But wait a second — Buddhism is a religion, right? Hold on. You can improve your body with yoga without being Hindu. And you can improve your brain through meditation without being Buddhist. Meditation is a secular tool for strengthening mental muscles. And neuroscience gives it a big thumbs up. Studies show meditation trains your brain to be less reactive to emotional swings and can prevent the wrong module from hijacking control of your brain. From Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body:

And this helps you make better decisions. Here’s Robert Wright:

When you’re better able to cope with feelings and not just instinctively reacting to them, you’re able to stay calm and resist hijacking. And astronauts, samurai and Navy SEALs all agree that the key to making good decisions — especially under pressure — is keeping your cool. (To learn the 4 rituals from neuroscience that will make you happy, click here.) Great. So how do you meditate to get those powerful brain benefits?

Meditation 101

It really involves three extremely simple steps. One: Sit with your eyes closed and your back straight. Two: Notice what it feels like when your breath comes in and when your breath goes out, try to bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. Third step is the biggie. Every time you try to do this, your mind is going to go crazy. You are going to start thinking about all sorts of stupid things like if you need a haircut, why you said that dumb thing to your boss, what’s for lunch, etc. Every time you notice that your mind is wandering, bring your attention back to your breath and begin again. This is going to happen over and over and over again and that is meditation.

By the way, you’re going to suck at this. Meditation is the hardest simple thing you’ll ever do. Dan agrees:

But do you need to be in the midst of meditation to get the improvements? Nope. Neuroplasticity to the rescue! Over time, meditation produces trait changes in the brain so that the effects persist. From Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body:

But getting your grey matter to seriously change itself takes time. A lot of time. Hundreds or thousands of hours of meditating. I know what you’re thinking: I don’t have 10 years to sit cross-legged on a mountaintop. I have a job, pal. I get it. What’s truly fascinating is that recent research has shown a tiny bit of meditation can actually be used acutely — in the moment when you’re having a push-the-red-button-level emergency. From Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body:

When you’re feeling stressed out, when it seems like a hijack might be coming, just do a “mini-meditation.” By focusing on your breath for a few moments you can get some of the long term benefits of meditation right when you need them. (To learn more about how to meditate from Dan Harris, click here.) We’ve covered a lot. Time for the yous to gather ’round. Let’s pull it all together and learn how the modular vision of the brain along with mindfulness can lead to that little thing called wisdom…

Sum Up

Here’s what you and you and you need to know about how to be more mindful:

There are many yous: Like apps on a smartphone, different systems in your brain with different goals can take control at different times, which is why you can behave so inconsistently.

Feelings are what give a module control: You get worked up by what your buddy said and suddenly your brain is hijacked by “Angry Birds” instead of “Words With Friends.”

Meditation can prevent hijacking: Over time, meditation can rewire your brain to be less impulsively reactive and allow you to thoughtfully respond to your feelings.

Mini-meditations help in the moment: By focusing on your breath during a tense moment you can get some of the long term effects of meditation right when you need them.

On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one’s own advice.

You don’t want your internal Grubhub app taking charge when you’re on a diet. And you certainly don’t want that Tinder app active when you’re with someone you know isn’t right for you. (Swipe left!) Observe a couple breaths. Stay calm so you can get back to your home screen. Choose the right app for the situation. Trust me: you don’t want Natasha running the show. Join over 315,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Rituals That Will Make You Happy New Harvard Research Reveals A Fun Way To Be More Successful How To Get People To Like You: 7 Ways From An FBI Behavior Expert The post New Neuroscience Reveals 2 Rituals That Will Make You More Mindful appeared first on Barking Up The Wrong Tree.

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