The same device that is driving you crazy could hold the keys to solving our mental health crisis.
Early in her career, when she was a junior researcher building artificial intelligence systems at the MIT Media Lab, Rosalind Picard was unsure what to do with data she encountered on the impact of emotions on human perception and cognition. The findings were compelling — but they also made her uneasy.
Bringing up the “e-word” as a serious research topic, she says, was “a great way to end your career” — and she was trying to get tenure, Picard told me. “I kept bumping into all these roles emotion was playing and trying to figure out how to fit that into my mathematical models of the brain. And I did not want to jump into that because I was a woman in science.”
Nevertheless, she persisted, writing a “thought piece” that she circulated among colleagues at the Media Lab, arguing that building truly intelligent machines required insights about the role of emotions and feelings. She eventually submitted these ideas to a journal and got a prompt rejection. “One of the reviews,” she wrote recently, “indicated that the content was better suited to an in-flight magazine.”
She was lucky in one way, she says: The Media Lab was “probably the only place where the more loony and ridiculous and crazy your ideas are, the more they liked you.” She ended up shaping her ideas into a book whose title, Affective Computing, gave a name to a whole new field that she essentially invented. She also got tenure.
Now Picard, who heads a program on affective computing at the Media Lab, is at the forefront of a radical new idea: that your emotional state can be objectively measured using wearable devices or by tracking patterns in the way you type and talk on your mobile phone. Emotions and feelings — once seen as fuzzy and ill-defined — have physical correlates that can be measured and described, she says. The resulting data can help predict whether a person is becoming depressed or anxious, experiencing other mental challenges — or starting to improve.