Technically Incorrect

We stagger around for most of our lives desperately hoping that someone, somewhere will actually understand us.

Not in the "what the bloody hell is he saying?" kind of way. But in the "Oh, I totally realize why he just took his trousers off and did a handstand while singing the national anthem of the Congo" kind of way.

When you go around trying to explain yourself, it can be extremely tiring. Both for you and for the person who has to listen. Thankfully, scientists at University College, London, have taken significant steps in, well, mind-reading.

If I were to choose someone to read my mind I would hope for someone like Pink, Mila Kunis or, at a pinch, the great Italian author, Andrea Camilleri, to be able to see just what is inside my head.

But if I have to tolerate a scientist for just a short while, I suppose I can make myself look forward to it.

The University College experiment consisted of normal humans wandering around a virtual world, while the boffins bored into their hippocampus with a fMRI scanner. (You mean they didn't have one of these things in Guantanamo?)

The project leader, Eleanor Maguire, seemed a little astounded at just how easily the experiment went. She told the "Financial Times": "Surprisingly, just by looking at the brain data, we could predict exactly where they were in the virtual reality room."

Because I do not have the technology at hand, I can only guess that this man is thinking about marzipan.

(Credit: CC Carbon NYC)

This appears to be the first time that it has been shown that memories are kept in very tidy compartments in the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that is very fond of drugs. Well, what I really mean to say is that it's the part of the brain that imagines future joys, remembers stuff and steers you from one nightmare to the next.

The experiment fills me with giant, tingling relief.

Far too often, people have decided I thought one thing when I thought something entirely different and, indeed, opposite. Yes, at times, their utter myopia, lack of incisiveness and sheer dearth of basic human sense drove me to a distraction from which not even my hippocampus could help me return.

Now, at least, I can hope for an independent scientific referee and factotum. One who lays bare the interpretation with just a brief squint at my hippocampus. One who can explain me without my having to ever explain myself. One who makes the very idea of a shrink entirely redundant. One who has Pink's cell phone number.

Now if this technology has been widely available before we might have been able to prevent Bernie Madoff, Jim Cramer and the new U2 album. Or at least to understand their existence.

That's all every one of us wants. Just to be understood. Oh, it's always such a giddy relief when science does something useful.

My friend Harriet called me in a bit of a state today. No, of course Harriet isn't her real name. No one is really called Harriet.

Anyway, Harriet had just experienced a shock. Her shrink had tried to friend her on Facebook. Perhaps those of you who go to see a mental health professional to gain a little work/life balance, or merely to tell the shrink all those hateful and embarrassing things you just can't tell anyone else, will appreciate the dilemma.

It's one thing if some business associate (your money launderer, your dealer, your mother) tries to friend you.

It's surely quite another when the person who knows about the dream featuring the rabbi, the whip and the wardrobe tries to enter the inner circle of your closest 5,000.

Harriet was in two minds. (Her shrink, apparently, believes she has seven)

"Now, about that Werewolf..."

(Credit: CC Delta Mike)

If she declines the shrink's cozying gesture, the shrink might feel she doesn't trust her. If she accepts the friend request, just think of the juice the shrink will have to drown her in.

You see, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg never considered the huge personal nightmares he was creating by building a site that tries to allow all people to be all people to all people.

So what was I supposed to tell Harriet? That she should accept the friend request, but find another shrink? That she should contact Zuckerberg and ask him how he deals with mental health professionals?

Suddenly, I sensed a whole new market gap opening before my very eyes. Yes, I could be the first Facebook Freud. I could deal only and exclusively with emotional problems arising from Facebook activity. That way, my patients would have to agree to friend me, because that would be part of my professional expertise.

What do you mean I'd need training? The Facebook folks are learning on the job. Why can't I?

You sleep with your boss' lover. You steal a stranger's dog. Or you win the lottery. Who is the first person you tell? And who is the second?

I ask only because I came across this utterly depressing conclusion about humanity from John Cacioppo, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago: Americans have fewer people to confide in now than they did 20 years previously.

Apparently, it's down to two from three.

In 2004, 25 percent of people claimed that they had not been able to confide in anyone for six months. Twenty years previously, that figure had only been 7 percent.

For some people, this might explain at least one of the attractions of Twitter--or any other social-networking contraption. You feel you have to tell someone. So you tell, well, everyone. Or at least everyone that you can friend, name, follow, stalk, or badger into accepting your offer of association.

Jacqueline Olds, a psychiatrist from Harvard Medical School, suggests that loneliness somehow doesn't sit comfortably with American ideals such as independence and striving and extremely large burgers. (I may have come up with that last one.)

Yet if you can get a bunch of neuroscientists into one McDonald's, most will agree that vital parts of our brains became so developed precisely because they had to deal with all of the social stimuli and coding that swirl around us.

This photograph is entitled: "its such a lonely day and i can see the sky coming to kill me." Wonder if he's twittered that.

(Credit: CC Not So Good Photography)

So might Twitter be a pathetic cry of comfort for those who truly feel the need for something even vaguely approaching human intimacy and understanding? An intimacy and understanding most people believe that they can't demand any more because everyone else is busy, successful, stressed, or simply fabulously self-centered?

There is something inherently poignant about people feeling good about bothering others with their tweets, while being entirely reluctant to bother them with real and justified needs.

Professor Cacioppo seems to see hope in, of all things, the economic recession. You might almost believe that he was praying for a great and lasting depression when the San Francisco Chronicle quoted him as saying, "People can't go out, and they have to be home together. It's nice to be able to depend on one another."

Twitter as a form of virtual human interdependence? Now there's a concept to which some enterprising college can dedicate research funds.

There are those who believe that computer games cause trauma rather than soothe it.

Scientists from Oxford University would like to spank that theory with a shovel, throw it to the ground, and kick it till it's unconscious.

In a piece of research that would not seem out of place on an episode of House, Oxford psychologists believe they have taken the first steps in showing that a concerted finger-waggle of your Tetris could help you forget the maniac who plowed straight into you at 60 miles an hour, the contorted features of the insane lover who just smashed your skull with a frying pan, and the one-night stand you should never have had after leaving Dan's Oyster Bar and Lapdancing Club.

Because I know readers of Technically Incorrect are an unruly, skeptical crowd, I should be clear about the Oxfordians methodology. The researchers showed their researchees ugly images of nasty accidents, crushed-up skulls, and bloody entrails from various sources.

Then they asked half of them to play Tetris, while the other half apparently did nothing. In Oxford, that probably means reading a little Dostoyevsky while sipping a Pimms.

The Tetris players apparently suffered significantly fewer nasty memories of those ugly images than did those who were left idle. The researchers are extrapolating that this might help people deal with post- traumatic stress disorder.

I cannot be sure that this woman, who is playing Tetris DS, has suffered a head trauma. But, yes, those are socks on her head.

(Credit: CC Mache)

The logic, according to Dr. Emily Holmes of Oxford University's psychiatric department, may be that Tetris simply blocks the mind from storing painful memories.

There is, however, a small catch. You must play immediately after your car accident or encounter with the frying pan.

The Daily Telegraph quoted Holmes as explaining that "Tetris may work by competing for the brain's resources for sensory information. We suggest it specifically interferes with the way sensory memories are laid down in the period after trauma and thus reduces the number of flashbacks that are experienced afterwards."

If you're wondering why they chose Tetris rather than, say, World of Warcraft or Grant Theft Auto, apparently Tetris requires the use of a significant chunk of the mind.

Of course, some could argue that Grand Theft Auto--where you are actually, in some instances, left for dead--might demand a rather larger portion of mindspace than moving a few colored building blocks with a sound effect more annoying than your serially-divorced history teacher from high school.

Still, all of us have traumas: some work-related, some relationship-related, and some inflicted upon us by a world that just doesn't understand us. We spend every day wishing we could put this stuff behind us.

I therefore fully expect Tetris sales to triple within days of this post appearing.

Is being an astronaut really all that much fun?

You get otherworldly for a while, but, as some children on vacation will tell you, floating can get old very quickly.

While a few astronauts become heroes, some seem to come back to earth and never come back to earth. Their behavior becomes eccentric. Their utterances become bizarre. Some even claim they have seen aliens.

A question worth asking is whether many of these astronauts were already a bit weird before they floated off into space. And I'm not even including the ones who wear diapers whenever they slip into a jealous rage.

Now NASA has had a brainwave that it hopes will send soothing waves through astronauts' brains.

The idea, sponsored by the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, is to have a therapist on video inside the spaceship. No, not a live therapist available 24 hours a day for a cut-price fee. Instead, this is recorded video with voice, perhaps not entirely dissimilar to the one at your local energy provider that tells you "por Espanol oprima ocho".

The presumably soothing recorded voice will be clever enough to help astronauts work out what is making them miserable, employing a technique called problem-solving treatment.

Dear Computer, I only became an astronaut because I thought it would please my Mommy.

(Credit: CC Dullhunk)

As I understand it, the astronaut types into his computer: "I just don't know what the meaning of it all is" and the computer will ask useful questions such as "Meaning? What do you mean?"

This will help the astronaut, in absolute privacy, come to terms with him (or her) self and his (or her) negative state of mind.

I am all for helping astronauts. Given that space missions will increase in length as we explore our galaxy of water-bearing planets, it will take a peculiarly robust mind and body to tolerate the sheer inhuman stress of the task.

Which is why a digitally shrunk shrink is an extremely worrisome idea. I know there are advertisers who claim that the computer is personal again. But no computer can be quite personal enough.

No, it seems quite clear that NASA should provide a personal shrink (and perhaps masseur, too) in the spacecraft for every long-haul astronaut. Yes, it would increase the numbers on the trip. But it would also increase the possibility of positive human interaction leading to a life-affirming atmosphere beyond the atmosphere.

America has long been able to prove that constant and open-hearted conversation with a stranger is the way to truly lasting and holistic mental health.

And there surely must be a plethora of psychologists, especially given these recessionary times, who would be prepared, in the interests of scientific progress and a fabulously healthy fee, to be an astronaut's little mental helper in his (or her) and our quest for the ultimate discovery.

Machines can't do everything. Really they can't.

How can anyone, let alone an astronaut, possibly reveal the dream about the goat, the golf club, Copacabana Beach, Anne Hathaway, Alan Greenspan, Hillary Clinton, Ari from Entourage, several of the cast from 300 and an open-top Chrysler Sebring to a mere computer?

In any case, there is one other little problem. Because of privacy issues, no one will know which astronauts used the computer shrink and which didn't.

Please forgive me, this is making me miserable. I need to lie down now.

What do your email habits say about you?

Do you feel fine when you wait a day or two to reply to an email? Do you feel driven to reply within 30 seconds of the message hitting your inbox? Or are you one of those people for whom email has simply become a source of stress akin to, oh, traffic on the 405? Or marriage.

Some recent research by Dr. Karen Renaud at the University of Glasgow and Dr. Judith Ramsay of Paisley University suggests that for some people the emailing thing has become all too much.

38% of people claim that they're pretty relaxed about the role of email in their lives. 28% drive through the pressure of email communication as if it were a Nascar race with Tony Stewart grazing their rear.

But the members of Problem Group, an alleged 34%, feel that email is overwhelming them to the point of derangement. They feel that those who have sent them emails have certain expectations.

(Credit: CC JasonRogers)

In their heads they hear the whispered demands to reply immediately. They fear that if they don't, they will be ostracized by some social bosom. This Problem Group is comprised of people pleasers. And we all know what an onerous task people pleasing can be. The majority of this Group, according to the researchers, is female.

Apparently, many people check their emails 30 to 40 times an hour. More times than David Beckham looks in the mirror.

And research from Loughborough University in England has suggested that it takes the average mind 64 seconds to readjust to the task at hand after being interrupted by an email. Add a few seconds more if you have one of those annoying beeps that tells you the lost soul in Accounts has sent you a fourth reminder to fill in your timesheets.

"The problem is that when you go back to what you were doing, you've lost your chain of thought and, of course, you are less productive," said Dr. Renaud.

In essence, she feels, all this email checking is just a virus for the brain. Before you know it, your mind is listless and you cannot muster the enthusiasm to create another PowerPoint.

Perhaps the strangest thing in all this is that those who are driven to answer emails within a nanosecond and those who psychologically sink beneath the deluge of their inbox have a common emotional characteristic. They just don't like themselves much.

Yet no one has discovered what happens to trigger a 'driven' person to suddenly become overwhelmed. Some scientists, including Dr. Tom Stafford from the University of Sheffield, are suggesting that email behavior is very similar to that exhibited by large Vegas tourists who have been sitting at the same slot machine for three days.

"Both slot machines and email follow something called a 'variable interval reinforcement schedule'," he told The Guardian newspaper, "which has been established as the way to train in the strongest habits. This means that rather than reward an action every time it is performed, you reward it sometimes, but not in a predictable way. So with email, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there's something wonderful - an invite out, or maybe some juicy gossip - and I get a reward."

If I put all this research together I have to conclude that gamblers really don't like themselves very much. And that Twitter users are, at least in part, escapees from this psychological emailing Guantanamo.

My biggest problem is that the pressure for a swift reply results in one writing emails that perhaps weren't meant to be written at all. Your physical reflexes work so quickly that your mind only catches up 64 seconds after you have pressed 'send.'

And then you sit there, oaf-like, suddenly realizing that you've agreed to attend a Hannah Montana concert with the folks from Procurement.