You had me at neural synchronization.
Every person looks at their partner and occasionally wonders what on earth they’re thinking. But odds are that at least some of the time, the two of you are on the same wavelength. When professor of psychiatry Vinod Menon gave heterosexual, married couples a battery of personality tests and surveys, he and study co-designer Xujun Duan found no significant association between relationship satisfaction and age, sex, length of marriage, or personality traits. So they scanned the couples’ brains while they watched movie clips. During scenes that related to marriage (couples talking about their relationship, kids, or sex), the pairs who reported higher relationship satisfaction had greater neural synchronization—their brains lit up the same way at the same times. This did not happen during clips depicting nonmarital topics, such as flowers or food. (In the name of science, the Loop would like to request a follow-up experiment to test scenes of people doing the dishes.)
The synchronization suggests that each member of the couple is processing information similarly, Menon told Stanford Medicine’s Scope blog. But he can’t yet say which came first—the marriage or the neurological sparks. Regardless, take a moment today to say those 12 little words every lover longs to hear: “I want to develop similar anticipatory and predictive brain representations together.”
Talking the talk, for scientists.
Not long ago, research scientist Nicholas Coles gave a presentation. He thought it went pretty well; a friend disagreed. She told him that “academics are experts at making interesting stuff boring and inaccessible,” and that they should all be required to take a public speaking course. So Coles, who works at the Center for the Study of Language and Information, did. In Nature, he advises anyone speaking on scientific subjects to woo their audience, including by varying their tone and speaking volume, as well as by cutting back on detail. “Adding information to a presentation is like adding salt to food,” he said. “Not enough and it comes out bland, but too much creates something unpalatable. Unfortunately, many presenters seem to dump in the whole spice rack.”
You don’t need a stage to start working on your speaking skills. Ancestry.com CEO Deb Liu, MBA ’02, told CNBC that in any profession, a person’s ability to speak up and connect with others can influence success. As an introvert who views extroversion as a learnable skill, Liu suggests starting by scheduling regular chats with a colleague in a casual setting, and by working toward small goals, like speaking up once per workday.
Roll out the welcome hat.
Photo: Andrew Brodhead
There were proud parents, cheering RAs, and President Marc Tessier-Lavigne donning a cowboy hat. Some 1,700 first-year undergraduate students and 47 transfer students moved in Tuesday, armed with suitcases and smiles. At Wednesday’s Convocation, Tessier-Lavigne encouraged students to explore broadly. Encountering different fields of study and ways of thinking during these years, he said, “will help you develop the ability to continually take in new information and to adapt to new ideas throughout the course of your life.”
How to blow up your life.
When Sylvia Jones graduated in 1993, chasing a Hollywood dream was not an option. “I knew I couldn’t come from the South Side of Chicago, make it through Stanford, and tell my mother I was going to wait tables in L.A.,” she told STANFORD magazine. Journalism seemed safer, more academic. But after 15 years as a broadcast news producer (with two Emmys and an Edward R. Murrow Award, mind you) and a string of personal hardships, she asked herself, “If money weren’t a factor, if fear weren’t a factor, if what people think weren’t a factor, what would you want to do with your life?” The answer was—still—in Tinseltown, where enrolling in the screenwriting program at UCLA started her on a new path. Her list of credits includes a Satellite award for Best Motion Picture Made for Television as well as a storyline pitch that made the man behind the Scream franchise shiver.
Save the town
Perhaps nobody knows better than Michelle Wilde Anderson how quietly an American town can disappear, at least on paper. As a professor at Stanford Law School, Anderson studies local government and poverty, often in places where the American Dream seems to have ceased. In 2012, Anderson revealed a startling trend of small U.S. cities voting themselves out of existence.
But erasing a city’s legal existence isn’t the same as erasing its problems, she explained to Stanford magazine. A community with broad poverty, limited industry, and minimal assets still staggers on, regardless of its municipal status. And those problems have effects beyond individual communities. So Anderson wanted to know how to save a town as a living thing—no simple task at a time when American prosperity and opportunity have receded from many blue-collar communities. The question took her to four U.S. communities to discover what they’ve done to turn their towns around. She talked with alumni about her work earlier this month.
But wait, there’s more.
Emmanuel Mignot, professor of sleep medicine, won a 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for discovering the causes of narcolepsy (yes, he worked with those dogs that conked out during Sleep and Dreams) and paving the way for new treatments of sleep disorders. Mignot, who will share the $3 million prize with the University of Tsukuba’s Masashi Yanagisawa, is credited with forever changing the field of sleep medicine.
It’s OK to want a volunteer role that has something in it for you, Jessica Blackshaw, ’13, MA ’15, told Stanford magazine. Blackshaw is the executive director of YCore, which partners young professionals with community-based organizations. Her tips for finding a satisfying volunteer gig include not thinking too much about your individual impact, which could be quite small. “What you’re really trying to do is to be part of a solution to a problem.”
Climate change is bringing scientists into the fold of fashion. Yi Cui, professor of materials science and engineering, and director of the Precourt Institute for Energy, leads a team that has produced clothes made from infrared-transparent fabric. The cloth better allows your body heat to escape, creating a continuous cooling effect. (There’s also a winter line of clothing that heats things up.) The fabric could help you shave a few degrees off of your thermostat settings and cut air conditioning and heating use by up to 12 percent per year, which would be cool.
For those who are deaf and hard of hearing, the masked faces of strangers have presented an unprecedented communication challenge during the pandemic. In an essay in the Atlantic, Rachel Kolb, ’12, MA ’13, adds that the loss of lip reading has fostered new (and at times better) methods of conversation.
Measuring the changing size of tumors may soon be as easy as putting on a Band-Aid. Stanford engineers have developed a stretchy, stick-on device to measure tumor size to one one-hundredth of a millimeter, and thus test the efficacy of cancer drugs frequently, rapidly, and noninvasively.
Think asking for help makes you appear incompetent or burdensome? You're wrong. According to a recent study by psychology research scholar Xuan Zhao, we underestimate how willing friends and strangers are to help us. In fact, “people often feel happier after conducting acts of kindness,” Zhao said.
When Amanda Stacey, ’16, a physician assistant student at the School of Medicine, read a New York Times article titled “Why Women Can’t Do Pull Ups,” she set out to prove them wrong. Really, really wrong. She now holds the Guinness World Record for most pull-ups by a woman in one minute—that’s 36, folks. (Watch her set a high bar here.)
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