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Are you really the ‘real’ you? | Life and style | The Guardian

Alex was a bouncer when he changed his mind about who he was. Or maybe he wasn’t a bouncer. Maybe he was only pretending.

In the year 2000, “reality TV” still sounded to most people like an oxymoron, a bizarre new genre that was half entertainment and half psychological warfare, where neither audience nor participants were quite sure which of them were the combatants.

The show Alex appeared on, Faking It, had a simple set-up: each week a participant with an archetypical identity would be tasked with learning a skill that jarred with that identity. The participant had four weeks to perfect that skill before being sent to a real event where they would have to pass undetected by experts asked to spot the imposter.

Are you really the ‘real’ you? | Life and style | The Guardian

Hitting the right nerve: the electronic neck implant to treat depression | Life and style | The Guardian

Steve Collins is a 45-year-old unemployed architect who has been living with severe depression for 15 years. “I’m like a hermit crab hiding under rocks, crouching in dark spaces and only venturing out occasionally; there’s no light, no hope, no way in or out. I’ve been in therapy for years and must have taken at least six different antidepressant drugs. I had ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) and that literally shocked me out of it for a bit, but the depression came back – and the idea of ECT was so shocking for my family. People say: ‘Well, at least you haven’t got cancer.’ But, honestly, I’d rather have almost anything than live like this.”

A new type of treatment, vagal nerve stimulation (VNS), may offer hope for people like Collins who don’t improve with conventional depression treatment. A small battery-powered device like a pacemaker is inserted under the skin in the neck, from where it emits pulses of weak electical current to stimulate part of the vagus nerve. The vagus normally monitors our vital functions; it collects information about our breathing, heart rate and joint position, and sends signals back to the brain that tell it to respond if there are fluctuations.

No one fully understands how VNS works in severe depression that has been unresponsive to other treatments, admits psychiatrist Prof Hamish McAllister-Williams, of Newcastle University. “We don’t know exactly how lots of treatments work in psychiatry, including antidepressant drugs. I’m more interested in whether something works and, in the case of VNS, I’m persuaded that it does.” He cites two recent studies supporting the role of VNS, in addition to the usual treatment options of drugs, talking therapies and ECT. He says it’s likely to be a true effect, not just a placebo, because a placebo tends to kick in quickly – and wear off quickly – whereas VNS takes six months to work, but at least half of those who respond, remain well. It may be particularly effective with people like Collins, who have improved after ECT, but whose depression keeps on returning.

Hitting the right nerve: the electronic neck implant to treat depression | Life and style | The Guardian

How capitalism captured the mindfulness industry | Life and style | The Guardian

On the internet is an image of Ronald McDonald, the McDonald’s hamburger icon, seated in a lotus position. Some Thai Buddhists see this in literal terms as disrespectful to the Buddha; others are rightly critical of the colonialist and harmful cultural appropriation of Buddhism by the west and the lack of regard for Asian Buddhism in the US and Canada.

The technical, neutral definition of mindfulness and its relativist lack of a moral foundation has opened up secular mindfulness to a host of dubious uses, now called out by its critics as McMindfulness. McMindfulness occurs when mindfulness is used, with intention or unwittingly, for self-serving and ego-enhancing purposes that run counter to both Buddhist and Abrahamic prophetic teachings to let go of ego-attachment and enact skillful compassion for everyone.

Instead of letting go of the ego, McMindfulness promotes self-aggrandizement; its therapeutic function is to comfort, numb, adjust and accommodate the self within a neoliberal, corporatized, militarized, individualistic society based on private gain.

How capitalism captured the mindfulness industry | Life and style | The Guardian

A strong libido and bored by monogamy: the truth about women and sex | Life and style | The Guardian

What do you know about female sexuality? Whatever it is, chances are, says Wednesday Martin, it’s all wrong. “Most of what we’ve been taught by science about female sexuality is untrue,” she says. “Starting with two basic assertions: that men have a stronger libido than women, and that men struggle with monogamy more than women do.”

Martin pulls no punches. Her bestselling memoir Primates of Park Avenue cast her as an anthropologist observing the habits of her Upper East Side neighbours. She claimed among other shockers that privileged stay-at-home mothers were sometimes given a financial “wife bonus” based on their domestic and social performance. The book caused a furore, and is currently being developed as a TV series, with Martin as exec producer. Her new book, out this week, should be equally provocative. Entitled Untrue, it questions much that we thought we knew about women’s sexuality.

A strong libido and bored by monogamy: the truth about women and sex | Life and style | The Guardian

Can’t sleep? Perhaps you’re overtired | Life and style | The Guardian

Nerina Ramlakhan remembers when her daughter was a toddler, and how if she got too tired she would be unable to switch off. “There was a healthy level of tiredness,” she says. “But if she went beyond that, she would be running on a kind of false energy. And then she wouldn’t be able to switch off when she went to bed.”

Overtiredness is recognised the world over in young children – but it is seemingly more and more common in adults. Dr Ramlakhan should know: she is a sleep psychologist and is increasingly seeing people who remind her of her little girl when she was younger.

There’s certainly an irony that in our sophisticated, hi-tech, busy world we appear to be reverting to behaviour that we recognise and know how to treat in kids, but are somehow failing to deal with as adults. Overtiredness, sleep experts agree, is down to our always-on existence. In the past, says Ramlakhan, the author of The Little Book of Sleep, our days had naturally built-in downtime that gave us short snatches of rest. Today, that has disappeared for many of us. “We have become restless as a society – and that places more demands on us when we get into bed at night,” she says. “We have lost the rituals and practices that gave us little respites during the day. In the past, you would go to the supermarket and, while you were waiting in the queue, you’d daydream, be a bit bored, look around. Now, any window like that will be filled by looking at your phone, answering some emails, sorting out your Amazon account.”

Can’t sleep? Perhaps you’re overtired | Life and style | The Guardian

‘I was shocked it was so easy’: meet the professor who says facial recognition can tell if you’re gay | Technology | The Guardian

Weeks after his trip to Moscow, Kosinski published a controversial paper in which he showed how face-analysing algorithms could distinguish between photographs of gay and straight people. As well as sexuality, he believes this technology could be used to detect emotions, IQ and even a predisposition to commit certain crimes. Kosinski has also used algorithms to distinguish between the faces of Republicans and Democrats, in an unpublished experiment he says was successful – although he admits the results can change “depending on whether I include beards or not”.

How did this 36-year-old academic, who has yet to write a book, attract the attention of the Russian cabinet? Over our several meetings in California and London, Kosinski styles himself as a taboo-busting thinker, someone who is prepared to delve into difficult territory concerning artificial intelligence and surveillance that other academics won’t. “I can be upset about us losing privacy,” he says. “But it won’t change the fact that we already lost our privacy, and there’s no going back without destroying this civilisation.”

‘I was shocked it was so easy’: meet the professor who says facial recognition can tell if you’re gay | Technology | The Guardian