Category Archives: Body Optimization

How to make the body you were meant to have

New study proposes expansion of the universe directly impacts black hole growth

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Over the past 6 years, gravitational wave observatories have been detecting black hole mergers, verifying a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity. But there is a problem — many of these black holes are unexpectedly large. Now, a team of researchers from the University of Hawai?i at M?noa, the University of Chicago, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, have proposed a novel solution to this problem: black holes grow along with the expansion of the universe.

Since the first observation of merging black holes by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2015, astronomers have been repeatedly surprised by their large masses. Though they emit no light, black hole mergers are observed through their emission of gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Physicists originally expected that black holes would have masses less than about 40 times that of the Sun, because merging black holes arise from massive stars, which can’t hold themselves together if they get too big.

The LIGO and Virgo observatories, however, have found many black holes with masses greater than that of 50 suns, with some as massive as 100 suns. Numerous formation scenarios have been proposed to produce such large black holes, but no single scenario has been able to explain the diversity of black hole mergers observed so far, and there is no agreement on which combination of formation scenarios is physically viable. This new study, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, is the first to show that both large and small black hole masses can result from a single pathway, wherein the black holes gain mass from the expansion of the universe itself.

Astronomers typically model black holes inside a universe that cannot expand. “It’s an assumption that simplifies Einstein’s equations because a universe that doesn’t grow has much less to keep track of,” said Kevin Croker, a professor at the UH M?noa Department of Physics and Astronomy. “There is a trade-off though: predictions may only be reasonable for a limited amount of time.”

Because the individual events detectable by LIGO — Virgo only last a few seconds, when analyzing any single event, this simplification is sensible. But these same mergers are potentially billions of years in the making. During the time between the formation of a pair of black holes and their eventual merger, the universe grows profoundly. If the more subtle aspects of Einstein’s theory are carefully considered, then a startling possibility emerges: the masses of black holes could grow in lockstep with the universe, a phenomenon that Croker and his team call cosmological coupling.

The most well-known example of cosmologically-coupled material is light itself, which loses energy as the universe grows. “We thought to consider the opposite effect,” said research co-author and UH M?noa Physics and Astronomy Professor Duncan Farrah. “What would LIGO — Virgo observe if black holes were cosmologically coupled and gained energy without needing to consume other stars or gas?”

To investigate this hypothesis, the researchers simulated the birth, life, and death of millions of pairs of large stars. Any pairs where both stars died to form black holes were then linked to the size of the universe, starting at the time of their death. As the universe continued to grow, the masses of these black holes grew as they spiraled toward each other. The result was not only more massive black holes when they merged, but also many more mergers. When the researchers compared the LIGO — Virgo data to their predictions, they agreed reasonably well. “I have to say I didn’t know what to think at first,” said research co-author and University of Michigan Professor Gregory Tarlé. “It was a such a simple idea, I was surprised it worked so well.”

According to the researchers, this new model is important because it doesn’t require any changes to our current understanding of stellar formation, evolution, or death. The agreement between the new model and our current data comes from simply acknowledging that realistic black holes don’t exist in a static universe. The researchers were careful to stress, however, that the mystery of LIGO — Virgo’s massive black holes is far from solved.

“Many aspects of merging black holes are not known in detail, such as the dominant formation environments and the intricate physical processes that persist throughout their lives,” said research co-author and NASA Hubble Fellow Dr. Michael Zevin. “While we used a simulated stellar population that reflects the data we currently have, there’s a lot of wiggle room. We can see that cosmological coupling is a useful idea, but we can’t yet measure the strength of this coupling.”

Research co-author and UH M?noa Physics and Astronomy Professor Kurtis Nishimura expressed his optimism for future tests of this novel idea, “As gravitational-wave observatories continue to improve sensitivities over the next decade, the increased quantity and quality of data will enable new analysis techniques. This will be measured soon enough.”

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Why sugary drink taxes aren’t effective — and how to change that

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Several U.S. cities have instituted taxes on drinks with added sugar in order to reduce consumption, but new research suggests these policies currently have one fatal flaw.

The study found that sugary drink taxes only reduce purchasing if price tags at stores mention that consumers are paying that tax when they buy the drink.

“If cities want these policies to be effective, they need to regulate how these sugary drinks are labeled at the stores where they are sold — and they currently don’t do that,” said Grant Donnelly, lead author of the study and assistant professor of marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

The findings suggest that price tags should mention the tax, but not the amount, because consumers tend to overestimate how much the tax is, Donnelly said. If they know the true size of the tax, they are more willing to pay it.

Among the cities that currently have a tax on sugary drinks are Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Boulder.

The study was published online recently in the journal Psychological Science.

The research included a field study at two convenience stores in San Francisco, which currently has a tax on sugary drinks of 1 cent per ounce — an added 12 cents to a 12-ounce drink.

Researchers varied the price tags placed on the sugary drinks over the eight-week study. There were three price tags that were rotated: One that simply said the price for the 12-ounce drink ($1.52); one that had the price and the message “Includes SF Sugary Drink Tax”; and one that included the same message and added that the proceeds of the tax would support local university student programs.

All non-sugary drinks, which were not subject to the tax, simply had the price of the drink, which was $1.40.

The researchers compared sales of the drinks during the study period to the two immediately preceding weeks. During this time, the sugary drink tax was in effect, but there were no price tags on any drinks. They also compared sales to the two years preceding the tax.

Results showed that sales of sugary drinks were not lower during the two weeks before the study began, compared to sales in the two years before the tax. In other words, the tax itself did not reduce purchases of sugary drinks.

The researchers then looked at the effects of the three different price tags during the course of the study.

Results showed that the share of sugary drinks bought when the tags simply showed the price (47%) was not significantly different from the two-week period before the study.

But the share of sugary drinks purchased did decline slightly (45%) when the tags mentioned the price included the added tax.

Results showed that most consumers who chose to avoid sugary drinks with the added tax chose a drink that was not subject to the tax.

“Consumers are averse to taxes, so when they learn that their favorite drink has this sugary beverage tax, some are less interested in buying it,” Donnelly said.

“They generally substitute for healthier beverages, like bottled water. So the taxes do not seem to hurt the stores that sell drinks.”

Tags that noted where the taxes would be spent had no significant effect beyond the tags that simply noted the added tax.

In a separate online study, the researchers asked participants who drank sugary beverages to estimate what the tax would be on a 12-ounce can of their favorite beverage that cost $1.52. The average estimate was 40 cents — much higher than the 12 cents actually levied in San Francisco.

Another study found that when consumers were told the tax was only 12 cents, they reported they were much more likely to still purchase the drink.

“People don’t like taxes, but they think this tax is much higher than it actually is,” Donnelly said. “If you tell consumers the true cost of the tax, it is no longer effective in reducing purchases.”

The bottom line, he said, is that if cities want these policies to be effective at reducing consumption of unhealthy beverages, they must mandate that tags mention the added tax — but not reveal how much it is.

Co-authors on the study were Paige Guge and Ryan Howell of San Francisco State University and Leslie John of Harvard University.

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Impaired wild mice survive and thrive as well as unimpaired counterparts

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White-footed mice are able to survive and thrive with physical impairments. A new study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B assessed 26 years of monitoring data on wild populations of white-footed mice — representing more than 27,244 animals — and found that mice with missing or deformed limbs, tails, or eyes persisted at a rate similar to their unimpaired counterparts.

Co-author Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, comments, “Results of our long-term study on wild white-footed mice do not support the long-held assumption, sometimes applied to vertebrates more broadly, that physical impairments reduce measures of fitness such as survival, movement, and mass.”

The research team analyzed 26 years of data from a long-term mark-recapture program that Ostfeld initiated on Cary Institute’s Millbrook, NY property in 1991. Small mammals were trapped at six plots in deciduous forest dominated by oaks and maples. Catch-and-release trapping occurred every 3-4 weeks over 2-3 consecutive days between May and November using live traps baited with oats.

Mice were given metal ear-tags upon first capture, and data on sex, age, mass, ectoparasite load (e.g., bot fly larvae, ticks), and location were recorded. In addition, trappers took detailed notes about the physical features of each animal.

Lead author Francesca Rubino of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine was a former Project Assistant in the Ostfeld Lab. She explains, “White-footed mice are survivors. We know they thrive in degraded forests and can tolerate high parasite loads. We were interested in determining if this tolerance extended to physical impairments.”

To assess the impact of physical impairments on the fitness of mice, trapping notes from 1991 to 2016 were reviewed. Mice with the following impairments were included in the study: missing, partially missing, or broken tails; missing, partially missing, or broken/deformed limbs; and missing eyes or cataracts. Survival was estimated by persistence time on the trapping plots. Body mass, movement, and ectoparasite burden (larval bot fly and ticks) were also analyzed.

“To our knowledge, no prior study has included as big a sample size of individuals or as long a time series. Having mark-recapture records on a large number of mice both before and after their impairment provided us with a unique opportunity to distinguish cause-effect relationships from mere correlation.” Ostfeld explains.

Of the 27,244 mice, 2% (543) had visible physical impairments. Although tail and limb impairments were associated with more black-legged ticks and mice with cataracts had more bot fly larvae, mice with impairments were just as likely as their unmpaired counterparts to survive on the trapping plots. Mice with eye and tail impairments had greater mass than unimpaired mice, and mice with tail impairments had larger home ranges.

Rubino explains, “We found no evidence that physical impairments in white-footed mice were associated with decreased fitness. On the contrary, looking across standard measures of fitness, mice with impairments performed at least as well, on average, as mice without impairments.”

With Ostfeld adding, “Mice appear able to compensate for broken or missing major appendages and for partial or total loss of vision in ways that generally avoid compromising longevity, body condition, movement, or protection from ectoparasites.”

The authors note that this resilience is consistent with prior studies revealing the ability of mice to tolerate infection by some parasites. Whether this tolerance to injury and infection is shared with other species, and if so, what mechanisms might underlie high tolerance, are unknown, but worthy of further study.

“This study is both powerful — more than 27,000 wild mice over 26 years — and surprising,” says Doug Levey, a program director in NSF’s Division of Environmental Biology, which provided grant support for the work. “Until now, few ecologists would have said that impaired mice live as long as mice that are free of impairments.”

“Our findings challenge broader assumptions that physical impairments reduce the fitness of their bearers and are inconsistent with the devaluation of impaired individuals that pervaded early thinking in evolutionary biology,” Ostfeld concludes.

This research was supported in part by the US National Science Foundation’s Long Term Research in Environmental Biology (LTREB) program (grant numbers: DEB 0075277, DEB 0444585, DEB 0949702, and DEB 1456527).

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Upgrading the Healing Frame

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One thing that seemed to keep me stuck for quite a while when I was younger was the healing frame, i.e. layering a desired area of improvement with the perspective that I needed to “heal” something within myself.

The healing frame remains a popular way to frame various aspects of self-development, addiction recovery, human relationships, and more. It also carries some major downside baggage though, so it can bey very risky to use it, not just for yourself but for others you interact with.

How the Healing Frame Slows Us Down

With healing physical wounds, the body largely does that for us, so healing basically means waiting or resting or taking it easy, so the body can do the healing part. When we transplant this frame to something mental or emotional, it’s easy for the mind to link up with the association that we’re in waiting mode, which is a pretty passive stance. So in that sense it’s almost a frame of anti-investment, like we’re clinging to the pre-transformation state.

With physical healing we also have a pretty good idea of what the healed state looks like. For many injuries or conditions we can clearly see or feel the difference. The “solved” state is pretty crisp. The wound is closed up. The bone is mended. The sniffles are gone. Our energy is back up again. We’ve stopped coughing. The scans detect no more tumors. The COVID test is negative. So we have some good ways to measure progress when using this frame for physical ailments.

On the mental and emotional side, what does the healed state look like, especially if we feel we’re dealing with some pretty old trauma? I think many people who use the healing frame aren’t really clear about how to state the destination in a way that makes much sense, even to themselves. So it’s very easy for this frame of healing to become an endless quagmire of circular thinking. I think many would agree that they don’t see a clear path to the healed state, and I wonder how many realize that this endlessness is a predictable consequence of using the healing frame. You’ve entered a game world with no actual ending, and the only way to “finish” is to exit the game and stop using that frame.

It’s also pretty easy to use this frame to deflect investments or offers that could be rapidly transformational because the healing frame will likely make you feel skeptical of anything that seems too quick and easy. I think we tend to expect that inner healing must take a long time and that we just need to be patient and go slow. But in the real world, there are plenty of opportunities for inner shifts to come through quickly and effectively, just as some medical problems can be cured with ease today.

We tend not to frame the quick medical procedures as “healing” but rather as something else like a “procedure.” And when you think that inner healing is the answer, you can easily miss opportunities for simpler actions that could speed you along because they don’t align with the healing frame. But if a simple procedure would work even better than your slow-paced healing efforts, why not use it?

The Healing Frame Is Inaccurate

The more I read about neuroscience and how the brain works, the more the healing frame seems outdated. There are many ways for our brains/minds to improve, including ways to recover from major emotional trauma, but a neural network doesn’t really “heal,” unless perhaps you’re dealing with a physical injury to it. So this model doesn’t align so well with the realities of how our brains process experiences.

No matter which direction we bend the healing frame – emotional, mental, spiritual, social, etc – it carries significant drawbacks, except when we limit it to the realm in which it works well, which is physical repair. And if we do apply this frame just in the physical realm, we can even find other useful ways to apply it which can create positive mental and emotional ripples too, such as by leveraging detoxification and physical exercise to improve the health and resilience of our brain cells.

I like and appreciate the healing frame for its usefulness in the physical realm, but outside of that realm, I tend to think of it as pretty messed up and problematic, with a major risk of keeping one trapped for a long time.

Another very real risk of the healing frame is that it can be used manipulatively as well. When someone invites you to heal a relationship or to heal some part of you, take a step back and notice how you might be getting invited into a trap with a risk of giving your power away for someone else’s benefit for a considerable amount of time.

More Effective Frames to Use

Instead of using a healing frame and supposing that same part of my thoughts and feelings are wounded or damaged, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense neurologically speaking, I find other ways of framing mental and emotional issues much more effective if I actually want to solve problems and release them.

One way to think of such problems is to see the brain as an input-output box. Like any neural network, the brain is trained on experience. For any sort of input, it will generate output. That output could be thoughts, feelings, words, actions, behaviors, etc.

So a “problem” can be defined as a situation where some form of input is creating undesirable output. Once I can admit that my brain isn’t behaving as I’d like, then I can clarify what output I’d like to see instead, giving similar input patterns. So if my brain is doing X, and I don’t want it to do X, then what do I want it to do instead?

This framing helps me step into a frame that gives me a solid grasp on a solution path, instead of trapping me in endless dialog with my inner child. I love talking to my inner child (and many other parts of myself), but for such dialog to be effective, we have to first get on the same page about what we’d like the overall mind to be doing.

Once I know what kind of output I’d like to see, I can leverage the brain’s strengths. It’s very good at learning from experience. That’s real-world external experience, not endless inner probing. So then I need to give my brain some fresh input of various forms to modify its training, such that I retrain its output patterns to get closer to the desired results.

Hence instead of using a healing frame, one significantly more effective frame is to use the frame that you’re retraining, retooling, or refactoring your brain’s outputs. If you want to steer this in a more spiritual direction, call it retraining your consciousness; it works just as well.

Retraining Habits

For instance, if I want to get up at 5am, and my brain is generating “sleep in” thoughts and feelings of tiredness, that’s an input-output mismatch. So then I would need to retrain my brain to generate different thoughts and feelings when the alarm goes off, including the behavior of getting up.

I don’t just want to force my groggy self out of bed when the alarm goes off. I want to awaken feeling well-rested, energized, motivated, and enthusiastic for the coming day. Note that I’m clearly defining the total output package I want to see.

Using this framing leads to much faster results than if I tried to “heal” my relationship with the pre-dawn hours or something like that.

Retraining Anxiety

Suppose I feel anxiety, fear, or some other negative emotion in a situation where I’d rather feel differently. Then I can retrain my brain through different kinds of experiences to create different output there too.

Many years ago I used to feel high anxiety, nervousness, and dread when I’d have to speak in front of an audience, even for days or weeks in advance if I knew it was coming up. My thoughts would dwell upon the pending doom, draining my mental resources. Instead of preparing well in advance, I’d procrastinate, which would just increase the stress levels.

Eventually I thought about the output I wanted, which was to feel relaxed, confident, and excited before speaking and to feel safe, comfortable, playful, trusting, connected, compassionate, and in the flow while speaking. I also wanted to feel well-prepared. And I wanted to feel that the audience and I were on the same side because we’d all benefit from a good outcome. That gave me something to train towards.

Action-wise this involved six years in Toastmasters and a variety of other speaking experiences that retrained my brain to create the desired output. I kept chipping away at the mental and emotional retraining by adding layers of small successes to teach my brain that public speaking could be fun and rewarding. Basically I gave my brain a lot of new experiences to learn from, so it could update its internal connections.

My childhood training in this area was dreadful in that it trained my brain to produce feelings of anxiety and pressure, as well as associations with grades and competition. I can blame my teachers and the school for that because they did a terrible job there, but I was still stuck with the after-effects. As an adult I was able to recognize this deficiency and responsibly retrain my brain to serve me well in this area instead of leaving the poorly trained model in place.

That was a resounding success, and now I love doing public speaking in a variety of forms. Instead of generating fear and dread, my brain now automatically generates very positive feelings when I do public speaking, as well as leading up to it. For instance, I very much enjoyed delivering The Octo Intensive 3-day workshop at the end of October.

While I can of course continue to make improvements, I’m delighted with the part of my neural network that now processes anything related to public speaking. It’s a highly functional part of my brain now, and I cherish what it does for me. Moreover, I appreciate it even more because I know what I had to invest to “train up” this part of my brain to work the way I wanted it to work.

Retraining Mental and Emotional Patterns

Now the retraining process can go in all sorts of different directions, and it can involve many of the same methods you might also apply with a healing frame. But in this case those methods are applied with a much crisper direction in mind. It’s easier to see real progress being made, and there’s a light at the end of the tunnel when you can call the transformation completed, which is basically when you’re getting the output you want to see from your own mind.

What exactly is your standard for measuring progress when you use the healing frame for mental and emotional issues? Do you measure progress by how many therapy sessions you’ve had? By how much you’ve paid for therapy? By how many journaling entries you’ve made? It’s really easy to mistake busywork for progress here. How much time you’ve invested doesn’t matter since that time can easily be wasted on activities that don’t move the needle forward.

If you’re going to use the healing frame, it’s important to clearly define the healed state. How is your brain output different in the healed state? What will you think, feel, and do differently? Are your healing investments clearly shifting your brain’s output patterns towards the healed state? Are you seeing obvious signs of progress in the span of a few weeks?

If I focused on healing my relationship with my inner child to reduce my nervousness with public speaking, I’d still need to get up and speak now and then to assess if those efforts are working. Do I feel less anxiety than before? Can I speak more easily this month than I could last month? If there are no signs of progress, then my healing efforts aren’t worth much. I’m basically just navel gazing and pretending that I’m getting somewhere.

How about healing your money wounds? Is that approach working if you step back and measure the results? Is your income going up? Is your net worth rising? Can you earn the same money you used to earn but in less time, with greater ease, with more fun, etc? Or are you just filling up journals with endless thoughts and feelings? What if you retrained your brain to generate abundance-producing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors? No healing is needed. It’s just money, not a broken bone.

Feed Your Brain the Experiences It Needs to Grow

While there are many ways to make progress towards changing your brain’s outputs, I think the simplest way is to give my brain the input, i.e. the direct experience, it needs to learn what I’d like it to learn.

This is a very flexible frame that helps point me towards actionable solutions.

For instance, when I wanted to retrain my brain to think and feel differently about human touch, I spent time connecting with non-judgmental, compassionate, touch-friendly people, so I could gain plenty of practice. I fed my brain enough positive experiences to shift its output patterns. That helped me transition from an affection-starved life into an affection-abundant one – and with a relationship partner who revels in the joy of touch as well.

When I’m going through a retraining process, I want to focus on positive experiences, meaning that I want experiences that teach my brain what I want it to learn. Consequently, if I want to feel good and safe with touch, I’m not going to practice with people who aren’t at least leaning in that direction themselves, and ideally it’s best if I engage with people who are already where I want to be mentally and emotionally.

I got better faster at public speaking by practicing with people who were way better at it than me – and who were super comfortable with it. Some of the people I trained with, and was trained by, had been speaking for decades. I recall having a 2.5-hour sit down talk with a guy who’d been on stages since he was 3 years old. His parents were skilled comedic performers, so he grew up in that world. Thanks to spending time with people like him, my brain tuned into more effective mindsets for thinking about public speaking. But I still needed to practice plenty, so my brain could really “get it” internally.

If I approached public speaking with a healing frame, I might have wasted years trauma-bonding with people who were just as anxious about it, or worse, and I don’t see how that would have helped much at all. In fact, that approach incurs the huge risk of strengthening the very patterns I want to retrain.

If I want to recover from some kind of trauma, it’s more effective to connect with other people who’ve successfully retrained their trauma responses. I want to learn from other brains that are working the way I want mine to work. It’s not going to be as helpful if I wallow in the trauma pit with people who are in endless healing mode but never healed.

Using this kind of framing has really sped me along through some transformations that might never have happened if I used the healing frame.

Is the Healing Frame Effective for You?

I invite you to question whether the healing frame is really helping you or if it’s actually getting in your way. Are you really wounded or damaged? Are you checking off healing issues as done and cured at a healthy pacing?

I do a lot of coaching, and I don’t normally regard people as wounded, even if they use that frame on themselves. I consider instead that their brains may be outputting patterns that aren’t serving them well. I can still feel compassion for them, knowing how easy it is for ineffective patterns to be trained into us, especially from childhood. There’s no blame or shame in that. But my role isn’t to heal them since I’m not a doctor, and there’s no wound to treat. My role is to invite and encourage them to retrain these patterns, so their brain shifts towards generating the output patterns they’d really like to see.

Like many human beings, I have had to retrain my brain a great deal. I entered my 20s with many messed up mental and emotional patterns which, if left uncorrected, would surely have held me back from accessing and appreciating so much of life’s beauty and deliciousness. I’ve been investing in this kind of retraining for 3 decades now, and it’s still ongoing. And I can tell you that these efforts have been paying off wonderfully. I’m happy. I’m highly motivated. I’m experiencing the best creative flow of my life. I enjoy lovely high-trust relationships. I give and receive hugs, kisses, and cuddles daily. I contribute to the world. My finances are in great shape and keep improving. I have a lifestyle that I appreciate. Nice home. Yadda yadda yadda.

Perhaps my most powerful starting point was in a jail cell back in January 1991. I remember that it was Superbowl Sunday because people were watching the Superbowl from their cells (barely though since it was playing on a small TV a bit far away). I’m glad that even back then, I didn’t use the frame that I needed to heal myself. I started with the frame that I needed to grow, really to grow up. That was a start. I feel lucky that I began by creating a clearer picture of the kind of person I wanted to be, which gave me a standard to move towards.

It was some years later that I discovered and explored the healing frame, and while I’m glad to have explored it a lot because I do love exploring, those were among my slowest and most stagnant years in terms of measurable progress. Relevant to how fast the gains came during other years, it seemed like I was standing still during those times. So using the healing frame was a bit like pushing the pause button on growth, even though I still felt like I was busily occupied with growth-like activities.

Outgrowing “Poor Me”

Another issue with the healing frame is that it doesn’t help unless you perceive yourself as wounded or damaged. What if your life is going well and you feel great? How do you keep healing beyond that? The healing frame is pretty much guaranteed to hit a plateau sooner or later. I don’t want to plateau, and with the retraining frame I don’t have to. Even when life is really good, I can keep reaching for more growth and improvement. I can upgrade endlessly, which I love.

This month I’m doing a 30-day challenge to improve my divergent thinking skills. I’m generating 100+ ideas per day to improve my life and business. Then I assess and figure out how to apply some of the best ones. Divergent thinking is already a strength of mine, so I definitely don’t need to heal it. I’m training my mind to get better at generating even more wildly creative ideas. By the end of the month, I’ll have generated 3000+ ideas. I know most of them won’t be practical, but I can say that after just 2 days of this so far, I’m super optimistic about it. I’ve already implemented some fabulous ideas that were quick to do.

What’s your relationship with the healing frame? Has it done wonders for you and flowed you into a bountiful new phase of life? If so, that’s wonderful, and I applaud you for it. The purpose of this article isn’t to dissuade you from using that framing if it’s truly effective for you. Rather I want to nudge those who find themselves feeling stuck to consider if the healing frame could be a potential reason for that stuckness. The healing frame has some major shortcomings, so my intention here is to caution you about using it. I think it’s highly likely that you’d get better and faster results with a different framing, such as retraining your brain or upgrading your mental and emotional output patterns.

A simple way of thinking about the approach I find more effective here is to ask: What kinds of experiences do I wish I’d had growing up, such that I would have learned much more effective patterns? Getting clear about how I wish life had trained my brain (in contrast to the training I actually received) gives me so much clarity about the solution path.

The overall benefit to having been poorly trained in some key areas is that it was a powerful invitation to learn how to consciously train my brain. If my early mental and emotional training had been much better, I might not have developed this skill set nearly as well. So that helps me appreciate anything traumatic from my past, knowing what an amazing invitation it really was. And this appreciation just compounds when I flow these personal gains into sharing lessons to benefit many other people as well. So even though it was hard going through some of those early experiences, in retrospect I think it was a fair and generous offer from reality, and I can respect and even admire how it set that up. Instead of spending so much of my life resenting or resisting the past, I expect that sense of appreciation will only deepen in the years ahead.

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The brain sensor discovery behind humans getting taller

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Scientists say they’ve worked out how the body knows when to grow and start puberty.

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How to get a Covid test

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Lateral flow tests are more accurate than first thought, according to new research.

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Covid: Hard months to come in pandemic for UK, says Van-Tam

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Too many people believe the pandemic is over, England’s deputy chief medical officer warns.

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Will complacency damage Covid booster rollout?

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Millions of over-50s and others have had a third jab – but could they have been rolled out more quickly?

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Covid-19: Sage scientist Sir Jeremy Farrar steps down from role

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He says levels of Covid transmission in the UK are “concerning” as he leaves the advisory group.

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Artificial intelligence to detect colorectal cancer

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A Tulane University researcher found that artificial intelligence can accurately detect and diagnose colorectal cancer from tissue scans as well or better than pathologists, according to a new study in the journal Nature Communications.

The study, which was conducted by researchers from Tulane, Central South University in China, the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Temple University, and Florida State University, was designed to test whether AI could be a tool to help pathologists keep pace with the rising demand for their services.

Pathologists evaluate and label thousands of histopathology images on a regular basis to tell whether someone has cancer. But their average workload has increased significantly and can sometimes cause unintended misdiagnoses due to fatigue.

“Even though a lot of their work is repetitive, most pathologists are extremely busy because there’s a huge demand for what they do but there’s a global shortage of qualified pathologists, especially in many developing countries” said Dr. Hong-Wen Deng, professor and director of the Tulane Center of Biomedical Informatics and Genomics at Tulane University School of Medicine. “This study is revolutionary because we successfully leveraged artificial intelligence to identify and diagnose colorectal cancer in a cost-effective way, which could ultimately reduce the workload of pathologists.”

To conduct the study, Deng and his team collected over 13,000 images of colorectal cancer from 8,803 subjects and 13 independent cancer centers in China, Germany and the United States. Using the images, which were randomly selected by technicians, they built a machine assisted pathological recognition program that allows a computer to recognize images that show colorectal cancer, one of the most common causes of cancer related deaths in Europe and America.

“The challenges of this study stemmed from complex large image sizes, complex shapes, textures, and histological changes in nuclear staining,” Deng said. “But ultimately the study revealed that when we used AI to diagnose colorectal cancer, the performance is shown comparable to and even better in many cases than real pathologists.”

The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve or AUC is the performance measurement tool that Deng and his team used to determine the success of the study. After comparing the computer’s results with the work of highly experienced pathologists who interpreted data manually, the study found that the average pathologist scored at .969 for accurately identifying colorectal cancer manually. The average score for the machine-assisted AI computer program was .98, which is comparable if not more accurate.

Using artificial intelligence to identify cancer is an emerging technology and hasn’t yet been widely accepted. Deng’s hope is that the study will lead to more pathologists using prescreening technology in the future to make quicker diagnoses.

“It’s still in the research phase and we haven’t commercialized it yet because we need to make it more user friendly and test and implement in more clinical settings. But as we develop it further, hopefully it can also be used for different types of cancer in the future. Using AI to diagnose cancer can expedite the whole process and will save a lot of time for both patients and clinicians.”

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Materials provided by Tulane University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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