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If you could better connect your current self with your future self, you would muster up the motivation you need to accomplish the task now, and not then.

Half of the participants were to consider that their “children” would begin college in 18 years, the other half in 6,570 days. Of course, this was the exact same amount of time. But did the way they counted time influence when would they start saving for that education? Interestingly, the “parents” who looked at matters from a “days” perspective planned to start saving four times sooner than parents planning from a “years” perspective. This experiment illustrated a valuable lesson: Procrastination can be overcome by finding a way to connect to your future self, now.

If you’re tempted to procrastinate, find a way to visualize your future self. Focus on the pain that results from putting things off, contrasted with the relief of having completed your task.

Many psychologists believe that in order for patients to recover from trauma, they often need to be able to recall what happened to them. The second study, published in Nature Neuroscience, investigated how the brain stores negative memories, known as “state-dependent learning.” The study, conducted in mice at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, suggests that negative memories caused—and then “lost”—by traumatic experiences may be retrieved by re-creating the state of the brain in which the memory first occurred.

The study suggests that in response to trauma, the brain activates this extra-synaptic GABA system, which appears to encode memories of fear-inducing events and hide them away from consciousness, rather than the glutamate system, which helps to store all memories, positive and negative. This research may provide a window into how to access these traumatic memories when needed for therapeutic reasons.

Recent episodes have focused on mainstream tech stories — the crypto crash, the Netflix bubble bursting — but others go down truly weird rabbit holes, like the mysterious world of Katie Couric CBD scams on Facebook.

Begun during the early days of quarantine in March 2020, this affable show feels like eavesdropping on a conversation between two internet-savvy friends

“One Click” explores the stories of other young DNP victims, whose deaths were all caused by a combination of predatory marketing, toxic diet culture and unregulated online pharmacies. It’s upsetting but vital listening.

Delving into the deepest recesses of the dark web, “Hunting Warhead” follows a monthslong investigation by Einar Stangvik, the hacker, and Hakon Hoydal, the journalist, that ultimately led to the downfall of a local politician.

In a bizarre twist, the hack turned out to be motivated by the impending release of a movie named “The Interview,” (starring Seth Rogen and James Franco), which depicted a fictional plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un of North Korea.

This wry, richly reported podcast from the BBC World Service chronicles every twist and turn of the saga and its implications far beyond Hollywood.

Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson, told stories inspired specifically by the quixotic virtual communities Reddit creates and the everyday mysteries it spotlights. (One classic episode focuses on a Reddit thread about a man who stumbled on a huge, inexplicable pile of plates in rural Pennsylvania.)

Cybercrime has snowballed so rapidly that the world has been caught off guard; last year’s ransomware attack on a major U.S. pipeline highlighted just how vulnerable many of our institutions are, not to mention our individual data.

The hosts, Dave Bittner and Joe Carrigan, are cybersecurity experts who emphasize solutions as they unfurl tales of social engineering, phishing scams and online con artists of every stripe.

The Pew Research Center survey asked people different questions but found similar doubts about AI. Just 15 percent of respondents said they were more excited than concerned about the increasing use of AI in daily life.

“It’s fantastic that there is public skepticism about AI. There absolutely should be,” said Meredith Broussard, an artificial intelligence researcher and professor at New York University.

Broussard said there can be no way to design artificial intelligence software to make inherently human decisions, like grading students’ tests or determining the course of medical treatment.

Most Americans essentially agree with Broussard that AI has a place in our lives, but not for everything.

Most people said it was a bad idea to use AI for military drones that try to distinguish between enemies and civilians or trucks making local deliveries without human drivers. Most respondents said it was a good idea for machines to perform risky jobs such as coal mining.

Roman Yampolskiy, an AI specialist at the University of Louisville engineering school, told me he’s concerned about how quickly technologists are building computers that are designed to “think” like the human brain and apply knowledge not just in one narrow area, like recommending Netflix movies, but for complex tasks that have tended to require human intelligence.

“We have an arms race between multiple untested technologies. That is my concern,” Yampolskiy said. (If you want to feel terrified, I recommend Yampolskiy’s research paper on the inability to control advanced AI.)

The term “AI” is a catch-all for everything from relatively uncontroversial technology, such as autocomplete in your web search queries, to the contentious software that promises to predict crime before it happens. Our fears about the latter might be overwhelming our beliefs about the benefits from more mundane AI.

if this were any normal product we’d assume that people love it and are grateful to the companies that provide it to them — without charge, no less.

Turning to their own lives, 52 percent of the total sample say social media has benefited their lives, and 29 percent say it has hurt them personally.

Is it more like walkie-talkies, where hardly anyone wished they had never been invented? Or is it more like cigarettes, where smokers often say they enjoy smoking, but more than 71 percent of smokers (in one 2014 survey) regret ever starting?

So what does Gen Z really think about social media?

We recently collaborated on a nationally representative survey of 1,006 Gen Z adults (ages 18-27). We asked them online about their own social media use, about their views on the effects of social media on themselves and on society and about what kinds of reforms they’d support.

First, the number of hours spent on social media each day is astonishing. Over 60 percent of our respondents said they spend at least four hours a day, with 23 percent saying they spend seven or more hours each day using social media.

Second, our respondents recognize the harm that social media causes society, with 60 percent saying it has a negative impact (versus 32 percent who say it has a positive impact).

This is especially painful for adolescents, whose social networks have migrated, since the early 2010s, onto a few giant platforms. Nearly all American teenagers use social media regularly, and they spend an average of nearly five hours a day just on these platforms.

Although the percentage citing specific personal benefits was usually higher than those citing harms, this was less true for women and L.G.B.T.Q. respondents

For example, 37 percent of respondents said social media had a negative impact on their emotional health, with significantly more women (44 percent) than men (31 percent), and with more L.G.B.T.Q. (47 percent) than non-L.G.B.T.Q. respondents (35 percent) saying so. We have found this pattern — that social media disproportionately hurts young people from historically disadvantaged groups — in a wide array of surveys.

And even when more respondents cite more benefits than harms, that does not justify the unregulated distribution of a consumer product that is hurting — damaging, really — millions of children and young adults

Our survey shows that many Gen Z-ers see substantial dangers and costs from social media. A majority of them want better and safer platforms, and many don’t think these platforms are suitable for children

If any other consumer product was causing serious harm to more than one out of every 10 of its young users, there would be a tidal wave of state and federal legislation to ban or regulate it.

Turning to the ultimate test of regret versus gratitude: We asked respondents to tell us, for various platforms and products, if they wished that it “was never invented.”

Five items produced relatively low levels of regret: YouTube (15 percent), Netflix (17 percent), the internet itself (17 percent), messaging apps (19 percent) and the smartphone (21 percent).

We interpret these low numbers as indicating that Gen Z does not heavily regret the basic communication, storytelling and information-seeking functions of the internet.

responses were different for the main social media platforms that parents and Gen Z itself worry about most. Many more respondents wished these products had never been invented: Instagram (34 percent), Facebook (37 percent), Snapchat (43 percent), and the most regretted platforms of all: TikTok (47 percent) and X/Twitter (50 percent).

We’re not just talking about sad feelings from FOMO or social comparison. We’re talking about a range of documented risks that affect heavy users, including sleep deprivation, body image distortion, depression, anxiety, exposure to content promoting suicide and eating disorders, sexual predation and sextortion, and “problematic use,” which is the term psychologists use to describe compulsive overuse that interferes with success in other areas of life.

Forty-five percent of Gen Z-ers report that they “would not or will not allow my child to have a smartphone before reaching high school age (i.e. about 14 years old)”

57 percent support the idea that parents should restrict their child’s access to smartphones before that age

Although only 36 percent support social media bans for those under the age of 16, 69 percent support a law requiring social media companies to develop a child-safe option for users under 18.

This high level of support is true across race, gender, social class and sexual orientatio

it has important implications for the House of Representatives, which is considering just such a bill, the Kids Online Safety Act. The bill would, among other things, disable addictive product features, require tech companies to offer young users the option to use non-personalized algorithmic feeds and mandate that platforms default to the safest settings possible for accounts believed to be held by minors.

imagine if walkie-talkies were harming millions of young people. Imagine if more than a third of young people wished that walkie-talkies didn’t exist, yet still felt compelled to use them for five hours every day.

We’d insist that the manufacturers make their products safer and less addictive for kids. Social media companies must be held to the same standard: Either fix their products to ensure the safety of young users or stop providing them to children altogether.