Category Archives: new media

New media is comprised of video blogging, podcasting, blogging, micromedia, and other new technologies which are leading the way for global connectivity on both personal and professional levels.

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Using VR to Detect Psychological and Neurological Conditions

NewPathVR spends the major portion of its time conducting research and development. We read and follow as much research as we can about the psychological, neurological, psychoacoustic, and affective scientific behavioral changes that can be made using immersive technologies. Simon Chandler at Wired recently wrote in an article titled “Virtual Reality’s Latest Use? Diagnosing Mental Illness” that VR is a promising diagnostic tool, researchers say, because it generates scenarios and experiences that can’t easily be produced in a traditional clinical setting. The question the article asks “What is it about VR that makes it a promising technology for detecting neurological and psychiatric conditions?”

Early applications of the technology were in designing vehicle simulators. The technology was mainly used for training military personnel, pilots, and astronauts; but largely remained out of the public eye. The first applications of VR in medical teaching occurred in the 1990s with colonoscopy and upper gastrointestinal tract endoscopy simulation. Today, VR is being used to detect and treat psychological and neurological conditions and the questions are why and is it better than current methods. The answer is yes, and here’s why.

First, VR simulates real life very “convincingly”, so convincingly that your brain remembers VR as if it were real life. A notable 2009 Stanford study showed that preschool students surveyed 5 days after a VR experience of them swimming with whales believed that the experience was a real memory. They believed they actually swam with whales. Younger minds tend to be more impressionable but this begins to show you how powerful VR is.

Jeremy Bailenson’s Four Reasons to Test in VR

Jeremy Bailenson, founder of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab and author of “Experience on Demand”, states four reasons for testing something in virtual reality. He says you should build something in VR if otherwise, it would be:

1. Dangerous
2. Expensive
3. Impossible
4. Counterproductive

If something were dangerous like spiders or the plank experience, VR would make sense. To address the fear of flying, or reproducing an auditorium of people to practice speaking in front of would be quite expensive compared to a VR experience you could do again and again. To create a game where you shoot frogs in space would be impossible. Finally, it may be counterproductive to recreate role-playing between domestic abuse partners.

However, there are many other reasons to build in the immersive environment and many reasons why you would diagnose psychological and neurological conditions using VR.

VR for Real-Time Observation and Modification

One of the benefits of virtual technologies is that of the therapist’s ability to monitor the patient’s activity. Some systems can be used to identify emotional facial expressions in patients with psychosis, or how to pick up other visual cues by watching the user or using heat mapping software. In this way, the therapist can be responsive to the patient and adjust the therapy in real-time in some cases.

VR for Testing Consistency

Virtual reality allows one to create a consistent, error-free environment or environments that can be customized for your assessment conditions. In the VR environment, you have complete control and can repeat simulations with finite accuracy and consistency. This combined with the real-life likeness of surroundings and objects provides control in order to make assessments.

VR for Privacy and Removing Fear of Personal Judgment

There is some evidence to show that people will divulge more information to an AI or scripted avatar than they will to one embodied by a person or to a person directly. They also prefer to interact with an avatar of their own sex. This has to do with the feeling of being judged, which patients feel less of when dealing with an AI avatar.

VR for Gamification During Research

VR can provide patients with added motivation by adding gaming factors. This motivational aspect can lead to more accurate results and deeper engagement by participants. Gamification in VR is especially compelling, again because of the realism. For generations, game theory has been developed and refined and this psychology can transfer to VR, particularly in the dynamics surrounding how to keep the user engaged through each step or stage and for gathering emotional feedback.

VR for Safe Psychological Activation

There are other reasons, too, ie many therapeutic methods in vivo encourage you to put yourself in a state of stress, anxiety or PTSD, such as exposure therapy for agoraphobia or fear of crowds which include actually exposing yourself to crowds of people, perhaps activating a panic or anxiety attack you can’t escape easily. If you were doing this therapy in VR, you could immediately remove the headset and address the emotions.

Creating Specialized Scenarios in VR to Detect Psychological or Neurological Conditions

To answer more on detection, Greek researchers in 2015 built a cognitive training game for patients with mild cognitive impairment, something that comes before Alzheimer’s. This can detect memory loss by presenting scenarios that are increasingly complex such as financial planning.

When compared with existing cognitive tests, VR is showing great promise in helping to diagnose and help with memory. Cambridge University’s Dr. Dennis Chan tested participants’ spatial navigation and memory by having them don an HTC Vive headset, follow an L-shaped path in a virtual environment (initially mapped out by cones), and then trace their footsteps back to their starting point without the help of any markers. Chan’s team reported that the VR-based navigation test was more accurate in diagnosing mild Alzheimer’s-related impairment than traditional “gold-standard” cognitive tests, such as figure recall and symbol tests.

Here at NewPath we are also inspired by Adam Gazzaley’s work at UCSF’s Sandler Neuroscience Center. Some of this research says that essentially as we get older, we lose the ability to ignore distractions. Adam’s research has shown that you can train the elderly brains to concentrate and focus, through gaming mechanics, improving memory. His research has also shown that video games can increase cognitive ability.

VR and Biometrics to Determine Psychological and Neurological Conditions

Both neurological and psychological conditions may present themselves physically, hence the warranted excitement about biometrics and certainly those are being utilized for detection, but there are many issues to consider in this area.

Cubicle Ninjas used the heart rate tracking in concert with their VR meditation application called Guided Meditation VR. Users would attempt to lower their heart rate while using their app and a biometric headband. Some of the issues with using these devices together become evident right away — privacy, user education, sizing, consistent results, and shared data across both apps. Well, it’s not a closed loop, right? The VR application is not integrated, not HIPAA-compliant. Companies need to think these things through. Cubicle Ninjas removed this feature in 2018 due to “increased regulation around biometric data.” they said. Another problem is the specificity to the hardware. An app that is specific to a headset, specific to a biometric device for the app? That’s like a spoon that only works for hot carrots.

Detection of Psychological Conditions Through AI

NewPathVR is working on an AI-enabled AR/VR product that assesses your depression level upon intake of your therapy session. Currently a cold, numeric assessment, we’ve taken an avatar, meant to be one of many you could choose from, who asks you questions using natural language and a more personable interaction that we believe will generate more accurate answers and engaged patients, helping patients and clinicians and decreasing healthcare costs.

We also just held our 2nd Annual VR Wellness Hackathon, and one team created a prototype for an app that allows you to externalize and identify visually your anxiety or depression or the emotion you are experiencing with colored and textured brushes in VR and then interact with it by lighting it on fire, pushing it far away, erasing it, or just giving it a hug. By seeing your emotions as external notions rather than as ourselves, as we sometimes say “I am anxious”, and that is an identifier, but by seeing the emotion outside of ourselves, we are better able to act upon feelings.

Many people are excited about facial recognition. The problem with facial recognition at this time is that the VR headsets inhibit recognition of the full face. Eye tracking is something that you might see come out now incorporated into some of the headsets, but again, we’re edging into the business of your bodily health information. Pupillary dilation, for example, says a lot about people and we are definitely headed into Minority Report territory — it’s the merging of these two that is a delicate weaving we’re seeing.

VR Compared to Other Methods of Research Recording Methods

VR is certainly more accurate than human recording methods, because of pilots errors and more. But beyond that, beyond say a computer program, why is a VR environment better at diagnosing than a mobile app, for instance? It’s because of the touch points. It has the potential to be a better diagnostic tool because of this, a better education tool, a better change tool.

Put it this way. If TV was a seal, and computers were maybe an octopus, VR is a jellyfish. It can touch you everywhere!

Because you are PART of the experience of VR, VR can connect to you in so many more ways. You are IN it. VR is experiential.

The reason we believe that VR is such a powerful tool for psychology is that memories and behaviors are formed from experiences. And VR is the first “experiential” medium. We can present experiential environments and present experiences for people and form memories, writing neural networks to change behaviors once people remove the headset. That’s a major driving principle and theory for us at NewPathVR.

Our team built an app here for role-playing in which you choose actors and scenes and role-play past memories to do just this. Users record dialog and then role-play conversations from those memories to reform memories and change narratives in their lives to which they may have formed maladapted behaviors and coping mechanisms that don’t suit their present-day relationships and healthy behaviors.

Dr. Brian Chau, a physician who writes about new medical technology, says, “The key here is data — we need validated measurements” to show VR is comparable to or better than traditional methods, he says. Continued partnerships between clinicians and VR developers are needed to move the technology” from the lab bench to the clinical bedside. NewPathVR agrees.

Why Psychological and Neurological Conditions Go Undiagnosed

Mental Health is a silent epidemic. For example,1 in 5 people have depression, 70% of these are between the ages 18–25 per the CDC in 2018. Eight (8) million people die each year due to mental illness. Mental health is not spoken about or given as much funding as physical illness, so it is harder to find research and support and find new more effective, ways to solve problems for this area.

Traditional techniques do not always work. It is difficult to diagnose mental illness due to issues of stigma, lack of mental healthcare workers, expense, and the nature of the illnesses themselves which pose inconsistencies and challenges. Individuals vary in responses to traditional treatments and for some people it is a lifelong commitment (e.g. there are many patients who cannot afford to keep up long term therapy, especially people who are more disadvantaged, most at risk and most in need, and government counseling services cannot possibly reach everyone) and although through community outreach programs it is possible to deliver these services to many more people, some people tend to be more closed off and find it difficult to connect with traditional processes or it can take them a while to do it.) In these situations, VR could offer a better solution as it addresses issues such as expense, accessibility, and stigma.

The Psychological Dangers of VR

Yes, there are dangers to consider. As one example, I mentioned the strategy of “activation” in order to practice skills during your stress state so you will readily be able to call up those skills during your next stress state. This is often done under the supervision of a therapist. Developers need to consider how to contain a user’s experience in this regard when a therapist is not present.

When subjecting individuals to tests intended to bring out symptoms associated with panic or psychosis, there is a danger that VR could provoke or cause these symptoms in people who would have otherwise never exhibited them. In other words, there is, in fact, the risk that VR could cause psychiatric symptoms, such as PTSD, in healthy individuals.

There are several other important things to consider when adding VR to a clinician’s toolkit. Practicality, privacy, safety and more. NewPathVR teaches courses on these topics precisely. We are the only company approved to teach accredited courses on VR Psychology for the practical and clinical use of VR with patients. We teach practitioners about the guidelines for the different headsets, the research behind conditions being treated with VR successfully and areas that are still gray. VR applications available for each headset, pricing and options and solutions that suit individual or organizational scenarios are also covered. We teach safety, what population will be using the technology, app insurability, sanitization, we cover all of this. Importantly, which applications are for use with a clinician and which apps people can use at home on your own.

We also believe that standards and guidelines need to be developed for XR across the board, usability, and ratings, for example, and we are familiar with some associations working on this.

I wrote an article about the responsibility of VR developers in 2016 to try to shed light on this topic. This indicates that the tool has to be used with care and caution, particularly with the entering and exiting of an application (the “handling”, I call it, or “containing” some people say) however, the fortitude of the platform also translates to its positive effects, and when using it to treat and enhance mental health, it can have enormous benefits for an individual.

In summary, VR provides an excellent opportunity for optimized testing and detection of psychological and neurological conditions. There are important things researchers and clinicians must keep in mind with this incredibly powerful technology when doing so, and working with experienced professionals is a good way to avoid some of the pitfalls inherent in this newly emerging, but very promising, technology.

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Garden of Emotions

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I visited the Floating Garden of Emotions at the Village Artist Corner (corner of Larkin and Fulton) last weekend with friends.

Inspired by The Eckmans’ Atlas of Emotions, the public was invited to explore their own personal journey of emotions through a whimsical participatory experience. It started with rolling a large-scale ‘emotional die’ to reveal what emotions to explore; this corresponded to a spectrum of Anger, Sadness, Joy, Disgust, or Fear. We were then asked to write on three labels 1) what is something in our life that could prompt an emotion (a trigger), 2) how it feels in the body (a physiological response), and 3) what we might do as a result (action).

Then, our labels were attached to a color corresponding balloon in the Floating Garden of Emotions. At any point, visitors could explore the emotional episodes represented throughout the space and learn how others experience their emotions. There was also a station in which people could pinpoint where in their bodies they felt sensations during an emotional episode so they could learn to listen to their bodies through life. By better understanding their own and others emotions through this creative exercise, the hope is that the community will become more compassionate beings.

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Analysis of a Scene: Building Our First VR Prototype

by Guest Author Eiran Shalev, CTO, NewPathVR

When Lisa Padilla first approached me with her vision for NewPathVR, I was immediately inspired by what we could achieve. Imagine the possibilities to not only unlock the hidden power of the brain but to empower our users to look inside themselves and find a way to improve. To feel better. Gain the strength to refine, and then to share that with others. While VR may be many things, to the folks at NewPath, it is the best tool to reprogram the brain for success. We huddled around and researched hundreds of papers where studies demonstrated how positive reinforcement, perception, and sensory filters can influence our behavior, as well as our memories.

Research and Design Phase
We knew we needed a prototype to prove VR as the right medium for spiritual growth, but what platform could serve us best?. Was this going to be a seated experience? How much interaction should it have? And what to build? For instance, did you know that if you perceive yourself as taller in VR, it actually makes you feel more confident during and after you remove your head-mounted display (HMD)? As it turns out, this is very true. Our discussions turned towards identity, and how to connect our users with their VR self. In gaming, this is called your “player self”. You have three “selves” actually. The first self, the real you, is what you do outside of games or VR experiences – ie your life: work, job, family, etc. The second self is the you that plays the game using peripherals, and experiences the content through the point of view of one or several characters in the game. You become a “player self” and share characteristics with the “game self”, but you are not the character. The third self, the “game self”, is the content’s avatar that represents you, and has a role to play in the content’s story or scenarios that your avatar experiences. By witnessing the story, and in some cases, by making choices for your avatar “game self”, your “player self” gets to experience those same emotions, and thus, share those same experiences. The cool thing about VR is that the player and the game self boundaries become blurred, such that you feel as if you are literally inside the content, and you feel much closer emotionally to the experience then you would be if you were observing the content through a monitor or TV screen. Keep in mind that taking an experience designed for a flat screen does not merit porting it to VR. All content in VR should be unique and specifically designed to transform and empower the user.

When building a VR experience, game mechanics that are based on challenge-reward systems create much more value for the user if they incorporate your senses. Adding a 360 visual experience may not be enough to trigger personal, real-world change. Adding 360 audio to that experience brings us closer, but is still not enough. By adding the ability to use your body, such as walking around and touching virtual objects, to influence the content, our team realized that we could create a world where consequences could have just as much impact on the “player self” as incentives. What’s more, if we incorporate at least 3 senses, this combination activates the memory centers or the brain. With the right experience, a player may create an association between something he/she experiences in VR, and a similar experience in his/her real life.

So, we knew we had to make a room-scale experience, and we knew we wanted it to leverage game mechanics that could change a player’s mood. The obvious choice for platform was the HTC Vive. But what about the content? I volunteered that for a prototype, we should keep things simple and demonstrate that we could achieve a basic goal. We wanted to transform a user’s mood from a negative or an indifferent position into a positive one. However, going through a sequential experience in VR, will usually not improve your life on exposure alone. In the real-world (or what we perceive to be our reality), we can usually learn any skill and master it, by practicing it over and over again. In our VR prototype, we needed to do the same. We decided that if we could create content that would teach our players some moral or zen-like lesson. A takeaway. But then also provided an opportunity to apply it, then we could create real personal growth.

Our “Self-Compassion Buddy” vision was born. In our prototype, we essentially introduced our users to their avatar self by literally creating a virtual mirror. The system tracked each of the user’s arms and mimicked his/her movement through the avatar that was reflected in the mirror. Our research showed that in order to strengthen the bond between the player-self and the avatar game-self, our users would need to interact with their mirrored reflection for approximately 70 seconds. This seems like a long time for a prototype, but in a future, commercial version of our product, the interaction could involve a game mechanic with a reward incentive. Next, we focused on the story ingredient. We did not require an elaborate story to demonstrate our vision; only a simple scene based on some narrative context. I believe that in order to create positive change or at least to invoke positive feelings, you need to have contrast, and that means placing the user into a negative situation – for a very short time of course. Then, follow it up with a positive environment filled with good energy. By placing the user into a slightly distressed state, and then moving him/her into a comfort zone, you can generate a sensation of emotional gratification. Games also apply a similar approach when they create a difficult challenge, in which a player must learn a new skill to overcome it. Once the skill is learned, the obstacle is easily navigated, and the player moves on to claim his/her reward. But more importantly, in your own life, when you undergo challenging times, and not only survive them, but learn to be stronger as a result of them, you then undergo positive change within yourself. Through overcoming these challenges, you may either improve your level of independence and self-sufficiency, or you may grow more carefree by successfully navigating stress and becoming familiar with it.

The Prototype Phase
We applied this to our “self-compassion” prototype. Imagine being immersed in a dirty, poorly-lit, virtual environment that exhumed negativity. You find yourself staring at your reflection in a mirror. You move, it moves. After a lengthy exposure to your reflected avatar, your avatar aka “buddy”, starts moving independently of you. It steps out of the mirror. Charges at you, invading your personal space. The result. You start feeling threatened. Your “inner bully” points his red finger at you and verbally abuses you, calling you “a loser…and a failure in life”. After a few moments of this, your brain switches to panic mode – a sort of fight-or-flight response. We kept the user in this state for about 7-10 seconds before interrupting the experience with another friendlier avatar. Any longer than that and we would have risked spoiling the whole experience and alienating our user.

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The friendlier avatar, a nurturing female guide appears and rushes to your rescue. Freezing the bully in action, she explains to you that the bully is you. Recap: by belittling yourself, you lose confidence in yourself. The female guide then offers words of encouragement to rebuild your confidence. Her words manifest in a new scene in which soap bubbles shower from the sky. Some of the bubbles contain cute gifts such as adorable stuffed animals and pets. We introduced a bit of the fun factor in this scene. When the user pops one of these soap bubbles containing a gift, the female avatar aka your “guide” offers words of encouragement with a positive message, ie: “Lots of people care about you.” Each time you pop a bubble, the gift item inside goes into your collection, and new positive words materialize. In the next scene, you have an opportunity to apply these gifts and redeem yourself. We call this the “pay-it-forward phase.” You observe three couples, standing at surrounding points around you. These couples each reveal a virtual buddy figure matched with his respective inner-bully avatar. Similar to your initial case, the bully verbally terrorizes his victim. This continues in an endless cycle, until you interrupt the buddy, and hand out gifts from your previous scene’s collection. Each time your gifts are received, the words that were initially associated with the gift, retrigger audio playback again. The buddy’s inner-bully vanishes and the buddy then begins playing the ukulele. When all three avatar buddies receive their gifts and play the ukulele, a well-known song begins playing, lifting the mood even more and embracing a sense of relief and closure. The three playing buddies merge into one buddy enclosed behind a giant mirror. And you are once again faced with your own buddy reflection. The simulation ends when the environment cross-fades into a sunny sky, and you find yourself standing on Cloud Nine. Literally.

Post-Analysis Phase
We quickly discovered that when a user goes through this VR experience, they feel better coming out, then going in. Our research also suggests that if we had ended simulation after the initial soap bubbles were popped, gifts received, and words of encouragement heard, then the effect would have been short-lived. By adding the “pay it forward” scene, where the user returns the favor and gives a gift to his surrounding buddies, we essentially teach our users to apply their acquired skills and pay them forward. To share. Therefore, our users resolve to help themselves, feeling a sense of contribution and meaningful value. Generosity in VR impacts our users in the real world and has longer lasting effects on their mood. It builds confidence and self-love.

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Our biggest challenge in building this first prototype was testing it. I relied on using Unity as our main game engine development tool. Unity not only has established partnerships all over the world, and is compatible with 27 target platforms, but it is also free to use for development. Due to our limited resources and limited access to the HTC Vive, I ended up building our prototype using game object placeholders to represent both the HMD and the two game controllers. I then parented OpenVR’s game controller objects under these placeholders. When I repositioned the placeholder game objects in Unity’s simulator, I was able to estimate fairly accurately how the HTC Vive’s game controllers’ movement would impact the VR environment around them. On a weekly basis, under limited time and limited test access to the shared hardware, I methodically validated and tested our experience on the Vive hardware, tweaking and improving our prototype step by step. Unity is not quite WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) when it comes to the built-in development simulator. That’s why end-to-end testing is so important, especially in VR. I set up a mode that would allow me to switch between my mocked game objects and the hardware game objects in the scene project. Doing so, allowed me to execute a series of tests on our shared hardware device while continuing development in our mocked Unity environment.

Our second challenge was getting our 3D buddy avatar to move correctly in our initial mirror reflection scene, used to build an identity association with your inner buddy. I solved this by building a mimic-engine that tracked the delta positions of the mocked, game-controller-object placeholders. The engine then inverted these vectors and applied the new deltas to a basic, rigged stickman model. I added constraints on the limbs of the stickman and locked the lower limbs so that only the upper body would be affected to move freely. And it worked. Additionally, since the Vive is a room-scale experience, the position and orientation of the stickman (aka our buddy reflection) needed to map to my HMD game object’s position, such that when I moved left or right, my reflection (facing me) would move in the opposite direction. And because the mirror image itself has borders all around, our 3D stickman was piped through a render-texture camera, that projected the image onto a 3D mirror game object as a texture. The mirror game object itself had no reflection, but projecting the stickman as a texture on top of it, gave the illusion of a mirror reflection.

No matter how you choose to implement your own VR project, remember that VR is highly immersive. Due to VR’s transformative nature, the underlying purpose of your content should support a key responsibility for contributing to social goodness, and hopefully, empower our users to live more fulfilling lives.

Eiran Shalev is an experienced technical, hands-on leader with 18 years of professional expertise overseeing top teams on mobile, social, and web technologies for products ranging from multi-player mobile & social games, to streaming video ads to interactive television and more. He comes from Disney Interactive, where he established the technical vision, and helped to scale and deliver Disney’s mobile technology platform to all game studios. Before that, he spent time at Koolbit, Kabam, and RockYou! He has built more than 50 games. He joins NewPathVR as CTO.

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Mindfulness and Technology

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Originating in Buddhist philosophy, mindfulness is becoming increasingly popular in the West as the incidence of anxiety, depression, and stress-related disorders plague the undercurrent of our fast-paced industrialized way of life. Recent scientific research on mindfulness has demonstrated beneficial effects on several holistic aspects of personal health, including the mind, the body, and behavior.

Mindfulness meditation has been proven medically effective to decrease stress and improve well-being when practiced consistently. Yet many people still struggle with the concept or application of mindfulness-based therapy. A new wave of delivery is emerging which is combining this ancient practice with modern technology to bridge the gap and appeal to a modern generation of meditators. Studies show not only relaxation, but important shifts in cognition, emotion, biology, and behavior that may work synergistically to improve health. There is also emerging evidence that mindfulness training is associated with greater meaning and peace in one’s life (spirituality), as well as enhanced relationships with others (Carmody et al., 2008; Carson et al., 2004)

Imagine you are sitting peacefully on a beautiful beach. You can hear seagulls against a backdrop of pebbles clinking together with each breaking wave. You take deep belly breaths and listen to your meditation teacher as she sits beside you and guides you through the film roll of anxiety and consciousness unfolding behind your eyes. Now imagine that you take off your virtual reality headset to discover you in fact never left your own living room (and saved hundreds of dollars on a flight to a meditation retreat in India.) This is an example of one scenario that modern entrepreneurs are envisioning the marriage of mindfulness and technology to enhance the effectiveness of well-being and relaxation intervention. Virtual reality devices can be combined with health tracking technology such as Provada Health‘s iOS app; “…incorporated into (the) app (is) the ability to link health-tracking wearables, such as the Apple Watch, to quantify the effects of a meditation session on, for example, your resting heart rate. Or look at how your sleep is being affected by taking time out to meditate.”

Modern gaming technology is another avenue where it seems there is potential for mindfulness to be cultivated. Take for example one gaming app available via Play Store called ‘Pause,’ which was created through the principles of mindfulness meditation and Tai Chi. The creator Peng Cheng explains, “It started with my own severe experience of stress and depression. I gave myself 6 months, I practically didn’t do anything but I meditated and practiced Tai Chi with the goal to do nothing but staying in the here and now as much as possible.” The simple game involves a little blob which follows your finger across the screen and facilitates focused awareness by growing in size as you maintain a slow concentrated speed. “Most of our stress only exists in our head and absorbs all our attention. To break this pattern, I need to focus on what is physical and tangible and actively put my attention in the moment.”

Cultivating focused attention in the present moment is the core foundation of mindfulness practice preached hundreds of years ago, in ancient India, and today via a squiggly blob on a hand-held screen or through a high-tech headset. Proper use of technology has the capacity to transform the quality of our lives and the delivery of ancient therapies such as mindfulness which are being lost on a section of the modern generation unaccustomed or afraid of ‘spiritual mumbo jumbo.’ Many trials of research have found that people with higher levels of mindfulness – even without “formal” meditation training – report feeling less stressed, anxious and depressed, and more joyful, inspired, grateful, hopeful, content, vital, and satisfied with life (Baer et al., 2006; Brown & Ryan, 2003; Cardaciotto et al., 2008; Feldman et al., 2007; Walach et al., 2006).

Another benefit of mindfulness is the ability to recognize and accurately label emotions (Analayo, 2003). More mindful people appear to have a greater ability to control emotional reactions in the middle part of the brain (the amygdala and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex [ACC]) by engaging the front part of the brain (the prefrontal cortex [PFC]), which is associated with attention, concentration, and emotion regulation. This means when you’re practicing mindfulness you’ll better be able to control your emotions and correct unpleasant mood states.

Believe it or not, there is increasing scientific evidence to support the therapeutic effect of mindfulness meditation training on stress-related medical conditions, including psoriasis, type 2 diabetes, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic low back pain, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Several new technologies, including brain imaging, wearable tech. and virtual reality, are being used to look at and extend the potential health benefits of mindfulness. Finally, research is beginning to prove what mindfulness practitioners have known for centuries…that greater focus, awareness, acceptance, and empathy can make for more flexible, adaptive responses to stress, which, in turn, can help free us from suffering and realize greater well-being & happiness.

Original article

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Managing Television Choices (or “The 17 Things I Watch on TV”)

The Future of TV

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While it’s great to have many choices, we also need to be able to quickly hone in on those to exactly what you want, when you want it, and how.

Last I checked, the U.S. TV home received, on average, 189 TV channels. Despite this, the number of channels we actually watch each day is just about 17.

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So we’ve narrowed it down to 17 channels, that’s only 408 hours a day of programming to weed through. Some of that you have to pay for, some is free — a differentiation I think is pretty important. When you already pay a hefty fee for your cable bill, and you probably do, the incidentals of renting movies each month, and buying series and seasons and trilogy collections you must have are not insignificant. Some is on Apple TV, some in Amazon, some on your cable provider, don’t forget Google Play, Hulu, Netflix and so on…just to complicate things, searching those services is different depending on which one you use:

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Different search results for “Amy Schumer” depending on service

Is the future consolidation or more fragmentation? While there will continue to be buyouts there are still so many opportunities for content producers so I see more fragmentation. But the providers, the TV manufacturers and Netflix’s need to iron out the discovery process to optimize for customers.

Form Factor

In the not-too-distant future, stand-alone TVs will be a thing of the past and wall screens will be commonplace. I’m looking forward to this as my husband and I cannot agree on what color to paint the walls, so someday we’ll just have floor to ceiling screens that we switch as we like…blue….yellow….blue….yellow….blue. I’m starting to see a flaw in my plan, but anyway.

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(Photo credit: Imagination Technologies Blog)

Here is a flexible TV screen from LG, pretty crazy, huh?

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LG Display

Suddenly this doesn’t look so far off, does it?…

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TV All Around Us

What else happens with TV in the future? Netflix aired a series called Black Mirror and specifically Episode 2 called “Fifteen Million Merits” about a future world where media and attention are currency and TV is all around us.

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Black Mirror is a strange but thought-provoking show and Episode 2 shows us a scenario where media has taken hold like cement, binding us superficially and forcing us into ways from which we can’t effectively evolve, let alone remain sane within it all. What else do I watch?

“The 17 Things I Watch on TV”

Don’t give up your TV just yet. Some programming is pretty great. Plus there are some things I’ll always go back and watch again, and again. Here are 17 things (in no particular order) I suggest you watch on TV or streaming wherever you want.BaBlack Mirror

  1. Saturday Night Live
  2. House of Cards
  3. Game of Thrones
  4. Family Guy
  5. Boardwalk Empire
  6. Person of Interest
  7. Breaking Bad
  8. Mr. Robot
  9. Orange is the New Black
  10. Mike & Molly
  11. The Colbert Report
  12. Silicon Valley
  13. The Big Bang Theory
  14. Battlestar Gallatica
  15. Louie
  16. I Love Lucy

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For more about the future TV, here’s a landscape snapshot from Venture Scanner and their recent post:

future-of-tv-visual-map5

Other big news from Nielsen was that music streaming was up 93% over last year. 93%!