00:00

Greg Gage: Mind-reading. You've seen this in sci-fi movies: machines that can read our thoughts. However, there are devices today that can read the electrical activity from our brains. We call this the EEG. Is there information contained in these brainwaves? And if so, could we train a computer to read our thoughts?

00:17

My buddy Nathan has been working to hack the EEG to build a mind-reading machine.

00:24

So this is how the EEG works. Inside your head is a brain, and that brain is made out of billions of neurons. Each of those neurons sends an electrical message to each other. These small messages can combine to make an electrical wave that we can detect on a monitor. Now traditionally, the EEG can tell us large-scale things, for example if you're asleep or if you're alert. But can it tell us anything else? Can it actually read our thoughts? We're going to test this, and we're not going to start with some complex thoughts. We're going to do something very simple. Can we interpret what someone is seeing using only their brainwaves?

00:56

Nathan's going to begin by placing electrodes on Christy's head.

00:59

Nathan: My life is tangled.

01:02

GG: And then he's going to show her a bunch of pictures from four different categories.

01:06

Nathan: Face, house, scenery and weird pictures.

01:08

GG: As we show Christy hundreds of these images, we are also capturing the electrical waves onto Nathan's computer. We want to see if we can detect any visual information about the photos contained in the brainwaves, so when we're done, we're going to see if the EEG can tell us what kind of picture Christy is looking at, and if it does, each category should trigger a different brain signal.

01:28

OK, so we collected all the raw EEG data, and this is what we got. It all looks pretty messy, so let's arrange them by picture. Now, still a bit too noisy to see any differences, but if we average the EEG across all image types by aligning them to when the image first appeared, we can remove this noise, and pretty soon, we can see some dominant patterns emerge for each category.

01:50

Now the signals all still look pretty similar. Let's take a closer look. About a hundred milliseconds after the image comes on, we see a positive bump in all four cases, and we call this the P100, and what we think that is is what happens in your brain when you recognize an object. But damn, look at that signal for the face. It looks different than the others. There's a negative dip about 170 milliseconds after the image comes on.

02:13

What could be going on here? Research shows that our brain has a lot of neurons that are dedicated to recognizing human faces, so this N170 spike could be all those neurons firing at once in the same location, and we can detect that in the EEG.

02:27

So there are two takeaways here. One, our eyes can't really detect the differences in patterns without averaging out the noise, and two, even after removing the noise, our eyes can only pick up the signals associated with faces.

02:38

So this is where we turn to machine learning. Now, our eyes are not very good at picking up patterns in noisy data, but machine learning algorithms are designed to do just that, so could we take a lot of pictures and a lot of data and feed it in and train a computer to be able to interpret what Christy is looking at in real time?

02:57

We're trying to code the information that's coming out of her EEG in real time and predict what it is that her eyes are looking at. And if it works, what we should see is every time that she gets a picture of scenery, it should say scenery, scenery, scenery, scenery. A face -- face, face, face, face, but it's not quite working that way, is what we're discovering.

03:26

Director: So what's going on here? GG: We need a new career, I think.

03:30

OK, so that was a massive failure. But we're still curious: How far could we push this technology? And we looked back at what we did. We noticed that the data was coming into our computer very quickly, without any timing of when the images came on, and that's the equivalent of reading a very long sentence without spaces between the words. It would be hard to read, but once we add the spaces, individual words appear and it becomes a lot more understandable.

03:55

But what if we cheat a little bit? By using a sensor, we can tell the computer when the image first appears. That way, the brainwave stops being a continuous stream of information, and instead becomes individual packets of meaning. Also, we're going to cheat a little bit more, by limiting the categories to two. Let's see if we can do some real-time mind-reading.

00:00

Greg Gage: Who wouldn't love acing a geography exam, remembering all the locations of the countries on a map or avoiding embarrassing situations of suddenly forgetting the person's name standing right in front of you. It turns out that memory, like other muscles in the body, can be strengthened and enhanced. But instead of practicing with flash cards, there may be an interesting way that we can hack our memory while we sleep.

00:26

Why do we sleep? This has been a question asked since the early days of civilization. And while we may not know the exact answer, there are a number of really good theories about why we need it. Sleep is when the brain transfers short-term memories experienced throughout the day into long-term memories. This process is called memory consolidation, and it's the memory consolidation theory that has scientists wondering if we can enhance certain memories over others. There was a paper recently in the journal "Science" by Ken Paller and his colleagues at Northwestern that seemed to show that this may be true, and that piqued our curiosity. Joud has been working on a DIY version of this task to see if we can improve memories through the use of sound in sleep. So Joud, how do you test if we can improve our memories with sleep?

01:06

Joud Mar’i: We need a human subject.

01:08

[Step 1: Play a game] We have a memory game that we have on an iPad, and then we make our subject play this game and remember the images and where they appear on the screen.

01:18

GG: So this is like a memory game you used to play as a child, which picture was where. And we tie each picture with a sound that represents it.

01:25

JM: So, if you can see a picture of a car, for example, and you would hear the car engine.

01:29

(Car engine starting)

01:31

GG: Just before you go to sleep we're going to test you. We're going to see how well you remember where the pictures are. Every time you see the picture, you're going to hear the sound. And now comes the experiment. You're going to go take a nap. [Step 2: Take a nap] And while you're sleeping, we're going to be recording your EEG.

01:49

JM: And then we wait for them to go into what's called the slow-wave sleep, which is the deepest phase of your sleep where it's really hard for you to wake up.

01:56

GG: OK, pause. So, here's some information on sleep. There are four stages: we have lighter stages of sleep and REM, but what we're interested in is called slow-wave sleep. And it gets its name from the electrical signals called Delta waves that we record from the brain. This is the part of sleep where scientists believe that memory consolidation can happen. In this deep period of sleep, we're going to do something that you don't know we're going to do.

02:19

JM: Here's where the tricky part comes, and we start playing our cues.

02:23

(Car engine starting)

02:24

GG: Do you play all the cues?

02:25

JM: No. We only want to play half of them to see if there's a difference.

02:29

GG: So your hypothesis is the one that they were listening to while they're sleeping they're going to do better at.

02:35

JM: Yes, exactly.

02:37

GG: When you wake back up and play the game again, do you do better or worse than before a nap? What we found is that if we played you a cue during your sleep, for example, a car -- You would remember the position of that car when you woke back up again. But if we didn't play you the cue during the sleep, for example, a guitar, you'd be less likely to remember that guitar when you woke up. The memories that were cued they remembered better than the ones they weren't, even though they don't remember hearing those sounds?

03:07

JM: Yes, we ask them.

03:08

GG: We know they're sleeping, they can't hear it, they wake up, they do better on those than the ones you didn't play.

03:13

GG: That's amazing. JM: It's like magic.

03:15

GG: Joud ran this experiment on 12 people and the results were significant. It's not that you remember things better; it's that you forget them less. I was a huge skeptic when I first heard that you could do better at a memory test just by playing sounds during sleep. But we replicated these experiments. The facts and memories we collect throughout the day are very fragile, and they are easily lost and forgotten. But by reactivating them during sleep, even without us being aware, it seems like we could make them more stable and less prone to forgetting. That's pretty incredible. Our brains are still active even when we're not. So if you're like me and a bit forgetful, perhaps a solution is a pair of headphones and a soft couch.

00:00

Growing up in Missouri, they would kind of take us out into the woods, and they would give you a map, and they would give you a compass, and you had to find your way home. And without the compass, you can't even read the map. That's what I'm here to tell you. The compass is the key.

00:20

A compass is most simply a piece of metal that has been magnetized, so that it will turn towards the Earth's magnetic pole. The one that we all think of is the pocket compass. It looks like a watch, right? You can hold it in your hand and watch the little needle bounce around until you find north.

00:38

Magnetism is still a pretty mysterious force to physicists, but what we do know for sure is that a compass works because the Earth is this giant magnet. And when you use a compass, you are in touch with the very center of our planet, where this kind of roiling ball of molten iron is spinning around and creating a magnetic field. Just like a magnet you can play with on your tabletop, it has a north pole and a south pole, and we use compasses to find our way north because of that fact.

01:08

The earliest known compass comes from about 200 BC in China. They figured out that some of the metal coming out of the ground was naturally magnetic, and so they fashioned this magnetized metal into this kind of ladle-looking thing, put it on a brass plate and then it would point north. It seems to have been primarily used to improve feng shui, so they could figure out what was the best way for energy to flow through their living spaces.

01:34

Sailors were probably the early adopters of the more portable versions of it, because no matter where the sun was, no matter what the condition of the stars were, they would always be able to find north.

01:45Now, much later, the Europeans are the ones who innovate and come up with the compass rose. It essentially laid out what north, south, east and west looked like, and it also enabled you to kind of create new directions, like northwest, southeast, what have you. And for the first time, they knew where they were going. 

02:05

But also, I think it was part of this general reinvigoration of European science. You might know it as the Renaissance. Lots of new tools were invented, from the telescope to the microscope.

02:16

Maps got better because of compasses, right? Because then you start to understand which direction is which, you get a lot more detail, and that just kind of changes the human relationship to the world. The compass with a map is like a superpower. Everything that we think of as world history would not have taken place without the compass: the age of exploration, Magellan circumnavigating the globe, even the fact that we know it is a globe.

02:41

The compass ends up getting embedded in all these other tools, because it is such a functional object. So you might have it embedded in your multi-tool, you might have it embedded in your phone. The compass is everywhere, because it's literally how we find our way across the face of the Earth. So you can go off and explore, and find out what is over that next hill or that next horizon, but you can also reliably find your way home.

00:00

You're sitting at your computer, about to apply for your dream job, but then thoughts start to go through your head that this is a waste of your time.

00:07

Maybe you're thinking, "My parents didn't go to college," or "I have a learning disability." "When I went on their website and I looked at the folks in the most senior level roles, I didn't see anyone who represented my race or my gender." "There's just no way I'm going to get this job." So you don't even submit the application.

00:25

But I'm here to tell you that your self-doubt about your experiences can be the key to driving your career success.

00:34

[The Way We Work] [Made possible with the support of Dropbox]

00:39

Most of us experience self-doubt at high-stakes moments, especially if they're people of color, first generation college student, or they don't have a traditional background, so they don't fit "the mold." If that's you, you're a part of my community.

00:53

What I've realized is that these experiences that seem like a liability are actually your differentiating strength. The secret is to transform how you perceive your own story. Even if you've been on an untraditional path, you've accrued some skills over time that are really valuable in the workforce. Your task is to identify those experiences and trumpet them, because it's likely that story, that is your ticket to a great job.

01:23

I know this, because I had my own self-doubts that I had to overcome. I didn't have top-notch internships in college. I also wasn't an extraordinary student. By the time graduation came around, I was definitely the thank you, laude, versus the cum laude. What I didn't realize was that I was really good at connecting with people, and now as a talent nerd and a CEO, I've watched thousands of graduates, who actually had a lot of self-doubts, overcome those and accomplish goals they never thought were imaginable, and here's how.

01:54

Ask yourself two questions. The first is, why do you want to do this work? Maybe you already know the kind of job or work environment that makes you happy, or maybe you haven't quite figured that out yet. Usually, your personal experiences can help give you clues. For example, did your grandmother do manual labor, and it made you really worry that she didn't get access to high quality healthcare? Did your brother have to overcome his dyslexia, and you helped him with his reading? And so, you became really attuned to education policy. When you're in an interview, go ahead and talk about them, because it will show your passion and your dedication to the work.

02:34

One young person I know, Dylan, was not sharing his personal story about filling out immigration papers for his parents when he was younger. Often when he told it, people would think that his parents weren't sophisticated. Dylan realized that he needed to harness the power of that incredible story, along with his academic talents. He told it in a way, when he was applying to law school, that made it clear why he wanted to go into advocacy law. He is now in his third year at Georgetown Law.

03:02

The second question you have to ask yourself is, how can I share my story to showcase the unique strengths I will bring to the work? For example, did you have to work multiple jobs while you were in college that did not at all align with your major? That shows an employer that you have time management skills and a strong work ethic. Did you need to drop out of college because one of your parents was sick? Fill in the gap, talk about how you administered their treatment plan. Talk about how you had to work around their complex schedules. That shows that you're thoughtful, that you're compassionate, and you know what, that is what makes a great teammate.

03:39

Reframing the hardship in your story can remake your confidence over and over again, but it takes time. It's like running a marathon. You have to train and practice.

03:51

Go back and reflect on those tough questions that you need to answer. The answers are what makes you you, and I have to tell you, when you learn to practice that story, tell it with conviction. I am sure that the hiring manager is going to hear the strength in it too.

00:00

You know how your partner likes their coffee, what love language they speak and even their medical history. But how much do you know about their finances?

00:08

[Your Money and Your Mind with Wendy De La Rosa]

00:12

Chances are, you and your better half are among the 78 percent of people who would rather share their full dating history and all of that drama and all of that baggage that comes along with it, rather than to disclose your full financial history. And yet research shows that your significant other has a large influence on a whole host of your behaviors. Understanding how they handle money is a great way to prevent strife and misunderstandings. In fact, financial disagreements rank as the strongest predictor of divorce. So my tip here is that if you want to strengthen your relationship, it's time to talk about the money.

00:49

You might be thinking, "My partner and I don't need to talk. My partner takes care of the money," or vice versa. But a 2018 study of heterosexual couples shows that in these situations, the partner who takes on all of the responsibility, the one who manages all of the financial tasks, they become more and more proficient at financial management over time. But the other person, the person who has given up all of their financial responsibilities, their financial management capabilities decline over time. And what if something happens? Maybe you break up, maybe it doesn't work out, or, God forbid, maybe your spouse dies too early. If the person who wasn't responsible for the money management ends up on their own, that person oftentimes struggles to regain their financial skills, making it more and more difficult for them to navigate the world alone. And 75 percent of the time, it's the women who outlive the men.

01:41

For the partner who hasn't taken on the money management role, it's like forgetting a foreign language: when you stop using it, you lose some of your ability to understand and communicate in it. But if you keep that financial immersion going, so does your fluency. Being open about your finances can be very scary, but it can also be very rewarding. Experiments have shown that shared vulnerability establishes a greater sense of trust, cooperation and intimacy in relationships.

02:09

So to get you started, I, along with a couple of colleagues, developed a list of 10 conversation starters. Here are just three. Number one: What are your long-term financial goals? What do you want to accomplish together? Number two: How do you measure your financial success? Is it a house with a white picket fence, or is it having the ability to live anywhere around the globe? Number three: What's the one thing you wish your parents would have done differently financially? As a university study found, it's important to answer these questions together because joint decision-making, making decisions as a couple, oftentimes results in taking fewer risks that in turn can lead to higher savings.

02:49

Now, I'm sure you intuitively understand that open, honest conversations with your better half are beneficial. And I understand that it's difficult to get started, especially when talking about money. But a great first step is just to put some time on the calendar so that you two can have a nice financial chat. Take out your phone right now, set the calendar invite. Your future self will thank you.

00:00

The basic problem with working in an office is you're just not in control of your work environment.

00:08

Howdy, my name is Matt, and I'm the CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Jetpack and WooCommerce. We're coming up on over 800 employees, and they live everywhere, from California to Alabama, Mississippi, to where I live in Texas. They're also in 67 countries. Canada, Mexico, India, New Zealand. Some of them choose not even to have a home base, they're nomads. Whether they are in RVs or traveling through Airbnbs, they are in new places every day, week or month. As long as they can find good Wi-Fi, we don't care where they are.

00:38

Our focus on distributed work didn't happen accidentally. It was a conscious choice from the very beginning. Notice I don't use the word "remote," because it sets up the expectation, that some people are essential and some aren't. I use the word "distributed" to describe what we do, where everyone is on an equal playing field.

00:53

I think a distributed workforce is the most effective way to build a company. The key is you have to approach it consciously. When we started WordPress, many of the first 20 hires were people I'd never met in person. But we'd collaborated online, sometimes for years. I wanted to continue that for one simple reason. I believe that talent and intelligence are equally distributed throughout the world. But opportunity is not.

01:15

In Silicon Valley, the big tech companies fish from essentially the same small pond or bay. A distributed company can fish from the entire ocean. Instead of hiring someone who grew up in Japan but lives in California, you can gain someone who lives, works, wakes up and goes to sleep wherever they are in the world. They bring a different understanding of that culture and a different lived experience.

01:35

At the base of the decision to go distributed, there's a desire to give people autonomy over how they do their work. Unless you're in a role where specific hours are important, you can make your own schedule. Everyone can have a corner office, their windows, the food they want to eat, you can choose when there's music and when there's silence. You can choose what temperature the room should be. You can save the time you'd spend commuting and put it into things that are important to you.

01:59

A distributed workforce is ideal for a technology company. But people often ask me, "This works great for y'all, but what about everyone else?" If you have an office, you can do a few things to build distributed capability.

02:10

First: document everything. In an office, it's easy to make decisions in the moment, in the kitchen, in the hall. But if people work remotely and some members of the team are having those conversations they don't have access to, they'll see these decisions being made without understanding the why. Always leave a trail of where you were and what you were thinking about. This allows others to pick up where you left off. It allows people in different time zones to interact, it's also great to think about as an organization evolves, people leaving and people joining.

02:38

Try to have as much communication as possible online. When everything's shared and public, it allows new people to catch up quickly. You also need to find the right tools. There are so many apps and services that help with day-to-day communication, video conferencing, project management. The things that changed how you work probably aren't objects anymore. They're things you access through your computer. So experiment with different tools that enable collaboration, see what works.

03:05

Create productive, face-to-face time. In a traditional office, you're in the same place 48 weeks out of the year and you might have three or four weeks apart. We try to flip that: we come together for short, intense bursts. Once a year we do a grand meet-up where the entire company comes together for a week. It's half-work, half-play. The primary goal is connecting people. We want to make sure everyone's aligned and on the same page, and they have a deeper connection with their colleagues. When they work together the rest of the year, they can bring together that understanding and empathy.

03:34

And the final practice: give people the flexibility to make their own work environment. Every person at Automattic has a co-working stipend that they can put towards a co-working space or just to buy coffee, so they don't get kicked out of the coffee shop. One group in Seattle decided to pool their stipends together and rented a workspace on a fishing pier. Each person who joins the company gets a home-office stipend. This is money they can invest in getting the right chair, monitor, the right desk setup, so they can have the most productive environment for them.

00:00

Biologically speaking, I am right in the middle of my reproductive age. That's the years between 15 and 49, when most people with ovaries are able to have children. Socially speaking, that means I'm right in the middle of roughly 30 years' worth of public commentary, suggestions and judgments about my fertility. Whether it’s regular pleas from my mum to give her grandchildren, or depictions of desperate females in movies and TV, it's a reality that is hard to escape. And let's not forget about the ads that have been following me around the internet since the age of roughly 25, promising to track my ovulation, confirm a pregnancy or let me know about places nearby where I can freeze my eggs.

00:37

But what about the sperm? Why have none of my male friends or the guys I've dated been exposed to this same pressure?

00:44

[Am I Normal? With Mona Chalabi]

00:47

Well, we know from historical data that for generations, research into fertility has focused on poking and prodding uteruses, while our understanding of male fertility has continued to lag behind. For example, in the US, there was a 50-year gap between the founding of the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology in 1927 and the formation of the American Society of Andrology in 1975. And today in the US, there are an estimated five reproductive endocrinologists who mostly specialize with female patients, for every one male fertility specialist.

01:20

Research into male fertility really only began to make waves in the 1990s. And since then, research has started to chip away at the persistent myth that a man's sperm is viable over his entire life.

01:33

A study from 2013 found that there is a big change that happens in male fertility after the age of 34. At age 35, their sperm count begins to drop. At 40, the sperm concentration, as well as the percentage of sperm with a normal shape, begins to decline. At 43, sperm motility decreases, And from the age of 45, semen ejaculate volume begins to go down. What all of this means is that from the age of 34, there is a declining likelihood that a man will father a child through intercourse. And that probability continues to decline as they get older. Crucially, that decline exists independently of the age of their female partner.

02:10

Because of research like this, a growing number of physicians are arguing that men have biological clocks, too. This is really important because most fertility research did not control for the age of the father. What this means is that so much of our understanding about how women in their late 30s are struggling to get pregnant has not taken into account that many of them are trying to get pregnant with men in their 40s.

02:32

Imagine the other fertility breakthroughs that could come about with even better research -- and the effect that all of that would have on our culture and our behavior. Young couples might be able to better prepare when to have children. Guys would be hounded by ads on when to freeze their sperm, and I would have even more reason to continue to date young hot men.

02:51

We've always known that it takes two to tango. Now it's time for research to give both partners equal billing.

00:00

When we think about data, we usually think about averages. Average height, average salary, average number of hours spent on video calls. It’s tempting to focus on these neat little summaries of our world.

00:11

But the world is a lot messier than these averages can make it out to be. So instead, I look for the outliers. They can offer a better reflection of this chaos we call life. And they can offer a different perspective on the things that we think we understand.

00:25

[Am I Normal? with Mona Chalabi]

00:27

Take, for instance, the stats around teens and cigarettes. According to the CDC, between 1997 and 2019, the percentage of American high school students who smoked plummeted from 36 to just six percent. That seems like a pretty big win, but when you break apart the data and look at the outliers, it is a totally different picture. Among American Indian and native Alaskan students, cigarette usage is much higher than that six percent average. It comes in at a sizable 21 percent. All other racial and ethnic groups were in the single digits.

00:57

So what first seemed like this great success story is actually an indicator of how much work we need to do to reach some of the most marginalized communities.

01:06

In general, when we present data as a scatterplot, the average would usually look like this. And where there are outliers, the typical approach is to undervalue them, to see them as a deviation from the average or from what society thinks is normal.

01:19

But I like to call these outliers “lost birds.” It's a nickname I use for something or someone who has gone astray. If you look hard enough, you'll find that these lost birds pop up everywhere.

01:32

Like my mom, for example. She doesn't like being on camera, so this puppet will have to do. She's a soft spoken, hijabi woman who isn't much bigger than this puppet. Because of that, it's easy for some people to underestimate her. But don't let those first impressions fool you.

01:46

“In my generation, we used to listen and accept what they tell us. 'Do what you're told.' But when I got older, I just changed and I started to argue my point and get what I want."

02:01

My mom's a retired doctor, an avid ugly-dress maker, a mother of two and a grandmother of none. Though she spends a fair amount of time trying to speak that into existence,

02:10

"I think for every mother, for her daughter, she wants a grandchild."

02:15

(Laughter)

02:18

"Sorry, Mona."

02:19

Moving on.

02:20

My mom is also a lost bird.

02:22

"Me?"

02:23

She has, statistically speaking, gone astray.

02:26

"Yeah, but it was a good deviation."

02:28

Back in the late '70s, my mom left Iraq and moved to the UK to further her medical training and practice. She's among the four percent of people born in Iraq who now live abroad. By the early 2000s, just three percent of UK doctors with her experience were non-white and practicing in her speciality. My mom is a lost bird because she is an outlier. She's one of the rare few to leave her home country and even rarer still among her medical peers.

02:52

We all think that the people that we love are special, and there is some truth to that. But it’s worth considering the ways that we are all lost birds. Because when we focus on the average and we ignore the outliers, we lose all of the richness and insights that those stories provide.

03:05

But when we dig into the deviations, we get to see the bigger picture. One from a bird's-eye view.

00:00

I've moved about 20 times in my life. And each time that I move to a new neighborhood, a new city, a new country, it seems to get harder and harder to sustain the friendships I left behind. But right now, sustaining those friendships seems especially important and especially difficult. So I'm wondering what is manageable? How can I keep those friendships afloat without getting overwhelmed?

00:25

To find out, I turned to my two most trusted sources: data and my mum. Now, since she hates being on camera, this puppet is going to be as good as it gets. But before she weighs in, I wanted to look at the studies on how friendships fall apart in the hopes that I might be able to avoid some of those pitfalls.

00:42

According to one study, friendships often dissolve because of a lack of opportunity to meet, hang out and connect. Which may explain why, after a year of isolation, some of my friendships feel like they're hanging on by a thread. The same researcher made headlines with the finding that we lose half of our friendships every seven years.

01:00

Now, before you start doomscrolling through your contact list, you should know that's not quite as severe as it sounds. Over those seven years, the size of our friendship group actually stays pretty stable. So if you have 20 or 30 good friends now, seven years later, you still probably have 20 or 30 good friends. The catch, though, is that 52 percent of those faces will be different. Over seven years, we will replace many of the people in our network with new ones.

01:25

As someone who has had to work more and more from home, the opportunity to go out and make new friends is pretty limited. It's a luxury I don't often have. And the research on the formation of new friends suggest that this takes time. A lot of time.

01:38

A recent study found that you have to spend between 40 and 60 hours with someone before they can go from an acquaintance to a casual friend. They get upgraded to a fully fledged friend around 80 to 100 hours, and get elevated to a best friend after you spend at least 200 hours of quality time together.

01:58

And the emphasis here is on quality time. You might say "hi" to a barista every morning or be polite to a coworker, but you wouldn't necessarily invite either one over for dinner.

02:08

I was feeling a little bit daunted by all of these numbers until I spoke to my mum, who has a more optimistic take on all of this. "A friendship is essential in your life. How does friendship start? The first thing is to know that person. If you don't want to know these people, if you don't open a window of communication, you will never become friends of them. You have to start. If you want to be isolated, you just shut your windows and look at them, and they don't look at you."

02:38

OK, so yes, if I really, really want to make a new friendship, I could go out and make the effort to make a new friend by, say, knocking on my neighbor's door, who plays really good music a bit too loudly. But what about my current group of friends? Are we all doomed just because we don't get the chance to hang out like we used to?

02:56

"I think yes, with the friends, the distance gets further and further if you are not meeting them. But it also shows you the ones that don't disappear because of the time or the distance. They will be there for you if you need them. So the special friends. And this difficult time shows you who cares and who is a good person or a good friend."

03:24

I think she's right. I don't think there's a magical formula or a mythical number of hours to chase. This just takes time and effort. So if you'll excuse me, I have a good friend that I need to call.

00:00

How long does it take to get over a breakup? The good news is I've done the research for you. The bad news is that you might not like the answer.

00:07

[Am I Normal? with Mona Chalabi]

00:10

See, a few years back, a number of publications were touting a study telling their readers that it takes 11 weeks to get over a breakup. That's nearly three months spent listening to depressing music while putting on a brave face. It might feel longer than it is, but it's only a few swipes on the calendar app. No big deal, right?

00:26

Well, unfortunately, it's not so straightforward. See, those articles drastically misrepresented that study. In fact, the study never said anything about how long it takes to get over a breakup. It only focused on the aftereffects of ending a relationship, specifically among undergrads, which is a whole other can of worms. To really answer that question of how long it takes to get over a breakup, you would need to do a longitudinal study, a study that would basically follow a ton of people from the moment of their breakup and track their progress year after year after year. But studies like that are expensive and complicated to carry out.

01:02

So with no adequate data, I decided to seek professional help. I went to couples therapists, Dr. Hod Tamir. He has anecdotal experience with countless people in relationships and, full disclosure, he was my couple’s therapist, too. So I asked him how long he thinks it takes to get over a breakup. "I don't think there is a magic number …

01:22

If we feel like we can express ourselves in how we're feeling, we don't have to keep it bottled up. Once you're doing other things that you're engaged with and distracted by, then at some point you look back and like, 'Oh yeah, that's my ex.' And you notice that the feelings that you have are not as raw. You can bump into each other and not feel pain."

01:39

And the data supports Dr. Tamir's theory. One study looked at different strategies for love regulation. In other words, can a few simple methods change how much you love someone? The study found that when participants were distracted into thinking about something other than their ex, like, their favorite hobby or ideal career, their love feelings for their ex stayed the same, but it did make them feel more pleasant. Using distractions to start to feel better is exactly what Dr. Tamir has suggested. The study also found that a negative reappraisal strategy, essentially remembering all of the shit things your ex said and did, does decrease love feelings for your ex. But it also makes you feel "unpleasant," and I'm guessing that means sad. Finally, a third, more zen strategy known as reappraisal of love feelings. For this, participants had to muse over statements like "Love is part of life" and "It's OK to love someone I'm no longer with." Yeah, that changed nothing at all for them.

02:37

Overall, the researchers concluded, and I'm not using the scientific language here, that concentrating on the bad things about your ex can help you to feel less in love. While distracting yourself with other subjects, as my therapist suggested, can actually make you feel better. However, the research and Dr. Tamir would both tell you that while distraction is good in the short term, it is not a long-term solution.

02:58

"Taking that time to process and understand it is actually a much quicker way to heal than ignoring it."

03:04

Eventually, for the sake of ourselves and our future partners, we're going to have to face up to our feelings.

03:11

So how long does it take to get over a breakup? Well, we don't have enough long-term studies to know. But more importantly, I’ve learned that instead of counting down the days, we're much better off reconnecting with the things we love to do. Finding something to distract us and unpacking our feelings when we're ready. If we can do all that, then one day hopefully we'll come out of it feeling OK. And in the end, isn't that what we're really after?