I want to tell you about the last time I cried.
A few months ago, inside a little laboratory in Claremont, California, I was hooked up to a machine that measures your brain activity from an armband. The lab belonged to a neuroscientist named Dr. Paul Zak, and the brain machine is called the INBand, a new device that looks like an Apple Watch and goes on that part of your arm where a doctor would draw blood.
The INBand measures the downstream effects of the neurochemical Oxytocin, which causes changes to the rhythm of the Vagus, a nerve that runs between your heart and brain. Years ago, Zak’s lab discovered that Oxytocin acted as the brain’s mechanism for empathy. When you have a lot of it, you want to help and relate to others. When you don’t, you only think about yourself. After spending years drawing blood in order to measure Oxytocin levels, Zak had developed the INBand as a way to track it without poking anyone.
And I now had it strapped to me.
After Zak made sure the band was receiving my downstream brain signals, he queued up a video from the electronics company HP for me to watch.
In the video, a father tries to connect with his teenage daughter. She’s kind of a pill. She ignores him. She rolls her eyes when he tries to connect with her. At one point, he takes a selfie with her on an HP camera (product placement!), and puts it in her lunchbox.
After a long day of work, the father comes home, where his daughter once again doesn’t pay him much attention. (She’s a teenager; she’s not supposed to like her dad!) The father walks up to her empty bedroom and sees all the signs that his little girl is growing up. He…
