Calm Meditation App Hits $2 Billion Value With Lightspeed, Goldman Backing (Bloomberg News):
Calm, maker of a meditation, sleep and relaxation app, doubled its valuation to $2 billion after raising capital from existing backers including Lightspeed Venture Partners, TPG and Insight Partners. [Read more…] about Calm raises $75 million, expands into corporate mental health and wellness
Decades from now when our augmented brains have enhanced our cognitive function and transformed nearly every aspect of our lives, many of us will look back and wonder why we didn’t do more to prepare for these inevitable changes. Government leaders may grapple with the runaway effects of AI and brain enhancement on geopolitics. Companies that fail to incorporate neurotechnologies and BCI into their operational flow could lose significant market share and be forced to scramble in an attempt to regain a foothold in an industry they once dominated.
Workers who don’t heed the warnings to re-skill or upskill may find themselves out of a job as entire industries disappear. Graduating college students may discover their field of study is no longer relevant in the business world, leaving them unprepared for the changing job market. Tech innovators could be caught up in fierce competition to snap up employees from a very limited talent pool, driving up the cost of innovation and hampering its development. And everyday citizens may be wrestling with the unexpected consequences of unintentionally giving away the rights to their neural data.
Rest assured, it doesn’t have to be this way. [Read more…] about Fast Forward to 2040: How to prepare for the new era in brain enhancement that will change the way we think, work, and heal
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Work these days often comes with long hours, emotionally draining colleagues, and complex problems that require an enormous amount of mental energy. So it’s no surprise that many of us have a hard time leaving work-related thoughts at the office.
“Surveys have shown that between 16 and 25 percent of the workforce have regular issues of not being able to switch off and are upset or distressed by work-related thoughts,” says Mark Cropley, a professor of health psychology at the University of Surrey. That can lead to a host of mental and physical health issues, including difficulty focusing and depression. [Read more…] about Study shows how online mindfulness interventions can reduce work-related rumination and fatigue, and improve sleep quality
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In 1908, Robert Mearns Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson designed an experiment that would begin to tackle the question, “How much stress is good for you?”
The researchers tracked mice to see how stress would affect their ability to learn. Simple—yet painful, because how do you stress out mice? [Read more…] about “I am excited”: Making Stress Work for You, Instead of Against You
This Outdated Approach To Productivity Is Bad For Your Brain (Fast Company):
“Your car has parts that perform specific tasks. The radiator cools the engine. The spark plugs ignite the gas. The intake manifold distributes air and gas evenly to the cylinders. We think of a car this way because a car is a machine.
For most of the 20th century, scientists mapped the brain in the same way [Read more…] about Managing brains, not bodies, in the knowledge economy
Summary of the report just issued by The Royal Society in the UK: “Although the impact of human enhancement technologies has been widely debated, until now they have not been considered in terms of their impact upon the nature of work…the Academy of Medical Sciences, British Academy, Royal Academy of Engineering and Royal Society came together to [Read more…] about New Report: Human Enhancement and the Future of Work
