From the natural world to outer space, Inverse offers timely journalism and interesting points of view for people who want to know what's next. Health research, updates on SpaceX and NASA, sleep psychology, pseudo-science debunks, nightmarish robots, advancing A.I., shifting cultures, more sustainable energy, and those never-ending studies on caffeine and beer: The Abstract delivers weird facts straight to your brain, three times a week, two stories at a time.
Virtual reality can dramatically alter how we perceive ourselves -- and even how we treat others.
And artificial intelligence, when fed enough data, can correctly identify something dramatic -- and a little private -- about how we see ourselves.
Today, we’ll explore each of those big ideas, via two mind-expanding pieces of research.
It’s time to better understand the mind.
Welcome to the Abstract podcast from Inverse. I’m Tanya Bustos, your host.
Our first story is about how virtual reality can change the human brain to make people more empathetic. Some of us have less capacity for empathy than others, but virtual reality therapy could change that. We’ll hear from neuroscientists who have discovered how the feelings of embodiment experienced in VR can positively affect feelings of connection to a virtual character. And that can translate to feelings of connection to real people.
Our second story reports on how artificial intelligence was shown to correctly predict something we think about privately — our own self-image. A.I. was shown in new research to identify a person’s self-described personality from their selfie alone. Scientists hope human personality perception can one-day help A.I improve human-to-human and A.I.-to-human interactions.
Read more at Inverse.com:
Find links to all the stories discussed in today’s episode at inverse.com/the-abstract
VR INCREASES EMPATHY:
https://www.inverse.com/innovation/vr-increases-empathy
A.I. SELFIES:
https://www.inverse.com/innovation/ai-photo-judgment
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