A few months ago, I found myself deep in a conversation about Mars colonization timelines.
Sigmund Freud, when asked what a psychologically healthy person should be able to do, reportedly gave an answer so simple it almost sounds like a non-answer: lieben und arbeiten— to love and to work.
Last week, while preparing a presentation for my PhD studies on AI-human connections and human dependence on technology, I fell down a research rabbit hole that caught me completely off guard.
Six years of studying emotion regulation has not given me what people tend to assume it would.
Today, I came across a note on Substack by Karly V Studio that stopped me mid-scroll.
The first sign was never a thought. It was visual. Something in the way the room looked.
Think about the last time you were genuinely, uncomplicatedly bored. No, I do not mean that low-level restlessness that arrives when a meeting runs long — I…
Let's do the timeline first, because the timeline is doing a lot of work here. On May 22nd, OpenAI filed confidentially for a public listing targeting a valuation of up to one trillion dollars.
It didn't start with a paper. It started with a classroom. I was teaching a unit on classic social psychology — the foundational studies that most of us in the field absorbed as canonical truth.
I grew up in a house where sugar was simply furniture. Pastries on the counter, cakes for no particular occasion, chocolates in bowls within arm's reach, processed sweet things tucked into drawers like they were office supplies.
I want to be clear about something before I start, because the premise of this article could easily be misread: I am not someone who stumbled across AI tools recently and was surprised they existed.
The adult human brain contains somewhere between 86 and 100 billion neurons. Each of those neurons can form thousands of synaptic connections.
I study how people form emotional relationships with places and ideas. Which means I notice when those relationships quietly break.
Part of my research involves teaching machines to read emotion from faces, voices, and text.
Calorie tracking works. That part is not the controversy. As a weight management tool, the logic is sound and the evidence broadly supports it.
