Now, Cognixion is bringing its AI communication app to the Vision Pro, which Forsland says has more functionality than the purpose-built Axon-R. “The Vision Pro gives you all of your apps, the app store, everything you want to do,” he says.
Apple opened the door to BCI integration in May, when it announced a new protocol to allow users with severe mobility disabilities to control the iPhone, iPad, and Vision Pro without physical movement. Another BCI company, Synchron, whose implant is inserted into a blood vessel adjacent to the brain, has also integrated its system with the Vision Pro. (Apple is not known to be developing its own BCI)
In Cognixion’s trial, the company has swapped out Apple’s headband for its own, which is embedded with six electroencephalographic, or EEG, sensors. These collect information from the brain’s visual and parietal cortex, located at the back of the head. Specifically, Cognixion’s system identifies visual fixation signals, which occur when a person is maintaining their gaze on an object. This allows users to select from a menu of options in the interface using mental attention alone. A neural computing pack worn at the hip processes brain data outside of the Vision Pro.
“The philosophy of our approach is around reducing the amount of burden that is being generated by the person’s communication needs,” says Chris Ullrich, Cognixion’s chief technology officer.
Current communication tools can help but aren’t ideal. For instance, low-tech handheld letterboards allow patients to look at certain letters, words, or pictures so that a caregiver can guess their meaning, but they’re time-consuming to use. And eye tracking technology is still expensive and not always reliable.
“We actually build an AI for each individual participant that is customized with their history of speaking, their style of their humor, anything they’ve written, anything they’ve said, that we can gather. We crunch all that down into something that is a user proxy,” Ullrich says.
Anna Kai believes in self-gaslighting. On TikTok, as @itsmaybeboth, she markets beauty products for Garnier, Nivea, and Nexxus Hair Care while dispensing relationship advice to her 1.3 million followers. “If you can gaslight yourself into believing the man that doesn’t love you actually loves you, then why can’t you gaslight yourself into believing you will find a man who actually does?”
For Blaine Anderson, finding the right partner is all about savvy marketing, which “great guys often SUCK at,” a note on her website exclaims. She has hacks for every possible scenario that could, and will, arise during the dating process: how to text like a “high-value man,” what first-date mistakes to avoid, how to make women obsessed, and the best ways to attract them without talking. In case you were curious, it starts with good posture and grooming. “If you haven’t been shopping since the Obama administration, it’s time,” she says in a video uploaded to TikTok in May.
“As a relationship therapist, I’ve literally spent my career studying the art of attraction and human psychology, so I know that these things work,” Kimberly Moffit, a Toronto-based psychotherapist said in a TikTok video from 2022. Maybe your crush is shy and you want to know if he is “micro-flirting” with you? One tell-tale sign: Dirty jokes. “An aggressive guy is just gonna hit on you,” she said, “but a shy guy is really gonna test the waters first.”
If you haven’t heard, it’s boom times for dating influencers. According to a new survey of single adults ages 18 to 62 conducted by the app Flirtini, one in four people rely on TikTok as their primary source of relationship information, and almost 50 percent of people surveyed turn to social media for dating advice.
This phenomenon has created an ecosystem of thoughtful, overzealous, trend-chasing dating influencers who think they know what’s best for you. The marketplace is now overrun with gurus offering up romantic hacks and how-tos to anyone who will listen. Everyone from credentialed therapists and life coaches to that annoying friend who just discovered bell hooks’ All About Love and wants to share everything they learned, brands themself a dating influencer these days. The effect has been seismic. On TikTok, the hashtags #datingadvice and #relationshipadvice have upwards of 16 billion views.
And it’s not all bad advice per se. Kai’s self-gaslighting tip is actually quite clever. (Kai and the other influencers mentioned in this story did not respond to messages seeking comment.) There’s just one problem: relationship misinformation is spreading fast.
A growing number of young adults now get their news from TikTok, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center study, “so it makes sense that they’d turn to the app for relationship advice too,” says Liesel Sharabi, a professor at Arizona State University who specializes in the effect technology has on interpersonal relationships. The increased reliance on the platform as a go-to source for romantic guidance has led many users to form parasocial relationships with advice-giving influencers. Unlike face-to-face, IRL relationships, these tend to be one-way. But emotionally, they feel like the real thing.
“Someone might feel like they’re getting dating advice from a trusted friend because they’ve developed such a strong sense of familiarity and connection with that person,” Sharabi says. “The problem is that when it comes to dating, there are plenty of people who call themselves experts on TikTok without any sort of training or qualifications, which can make it difficult to separate fact from opinion.”
Not all advice is created equal. As dating influencers gain more traction across social media, the proliferation of relationship misinformation becomes harder to contain. This, Sharabi describes, is “false or misleading information about relationships that can’t be evaluated using scientific data and which may perpetuate harmful stereotypes.”
In recent decades, neuroscience has seen some stunning advances, and yet a critical part of the brain remains a mystery. I am referring to the cerebellum, so named for the Latin for “little brain,” which is situated like a bun at the back of the brain. This is no small oversight: The cerebellum contains three-quarters of all the brain’s neurons, which are organized in an almost crystalline arrangement, in contrast to the tangled thicket of neurons found elsewhere.
Encyclopedia articles and textbooks underscore the fact that the cerebellum’s function is to control body movement. There is no question that the cerebellum has this function. But scientists now suspect that this long-standing view is myopic.
Or so I learned in November in Washington, DC, while attending the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, the largest meeting of neuroscientists in the world. There, a pair of neuroscientists organized a symposium on newly discovered functions of the cerebellum unrelated to motor control. New experimental techniques are showing that in addition to controlling movement, the cerebellum regulates complex behaviors, social interactions, aggression, working memory, learning, emotion, and more.
A Crack in Dominant Wisdom
The connection between the cerebellum and movement has been known since the 19th century. Patients suffering trauma to the brain region had obvious difficulties with balance and movement, leaving no doubt that it was critical for coordinating motion. Over the decades, neuroscientists developed a detailed understanding of how the cerebellum’s unique neural circuitry controls motor function. The explanation of how the cerebellum worked seemed watertight.
Then, in 1998, in the journal Brain, neurologists reported on wide-ranging emotional and cognitive disabilities in patients with damage to the cerebellum. For example, in 1991, a 22-year-old female college student had fallen while ice skating; a CT scan revealed a tumor in her cerebellum. After it was removed surgically, she was a completely different person. The bright college student had lost her ability to write with proficiency, do mental arithmetic, name common objects, or copy a simple diagram. Her mood flattened. She hid under covers and behaved inappropriately, undressing in the corridors and speaking in baby talk. Her social interactions, including recognizing familiar faces, were also impaired.
This and similar cases puzzled the authors. These high-level cognitive and emotional functions were understood to reside in the cerebral cortex and limbic system. “Precisely what that cerebellar role is, and how the cerebellum accomplishes it, is yet to be established,” they concluded.
Despite these clues from clinical studies that conventional wisdom was on the wrong track, leading authorities still insisted that the function of the cerebellum was to control movement and nothing more. “It is kind of sad, because it has been 20 years” since these cases were reported, said Diasynou Fioravante, a neurophysiologist at the UC Davis, who co-organized the conference symposium.
Other neurologists have noticed neuropsychiatric deficits in their patients all along, said the neuroscientist Stephanie Rudolph of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who co-organized the symposium with Fioravante. However, there was no hard anatomical evidence for how the cerebellum’s unique neural circuitry could possibly regulate the reported psychological and emotional functions, so the clinical reports were overlooked.
