This week we present two stories of people who spiraled out of control in their minds.
Part 1: Computer vision researcher Virginie Uhlmann struggles to send an important email.
Virginie Uhlmann is fascinated by life sciences but feels more comfortable surrounded by equations and code than by pipettes. With her research group at the EMBL-EBI, she thus develops mathematical tools and algorithms to analyse biological images. Besides science, her true loves are mountains and birds.
Part 2: After a panic attack, Shane Saunderson questions the role of technology in his life.
Shane Saunderson received a B.Eng. in mechanical engineering from McGill University in 2005 and a M.B.A. in technology and innovation from Ryerson University in 2011. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate studying social Human-Robot Interaction under Prof. Goldie Nejat within the Autonomous Systems and Biomechatronics Laboratory (ASBLab) in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. Shane holds a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and is a Junior Fellow with Massey College. His research focuses on psychological influence caused by robots during social interactions with particular interest in topics such as persuasion, trust, and leadership.
Episode Transcript
Part 1: Virginie Uhlmann
I keep on reading my book as I walk up the stairs, enter the building and take the elevator to the fourth floor. I know my path to the lab so well I don't even have to lift my eyes up. My brain is usually not fully awake in the morning, so I keep serious science for the afternoon.
My PhD project is a mix of mathematics and image analysis and it's clearly too early for that, so I start the day with emails, browsing through announcement of talks and seminars on campus. I noticed that, today, one email has been specifically sent to me.
“Dear, Virginie. Thank you very much for helping us with our image analysis problem. As discussed between Michael and my supervisor, the data to be processed are attached.”
I don't know the sender, but judging from his automatic email signature, he's a PhD student like me. I also have no idea what he's talking about, but this is only a mild surprise.
Michael is the head of the laboratory I work in and my PhD advisor. He's a very enthusiastic person and he tends to emphatically describe the work that we, his team, do when he talks to other people. So I guess he met and talked with that other student’s supervisor. That's the kinds of things professors do.
So anyway, working on that was not really on my to-do list for today, tomorrow or ever, but I guess that now it is. So I open the attachment, start looking at the images and think of an analysis strategy. I quickly figure out that no kickass algorithm development is going to be needed here. Good old methods would just do. But a lot of software development will have to be done, and that's not fun, if you know what I’m talking about.
So I have my own research to pursue, a paper deadline at the end of the month, a thesis to write, and writing code that implements solution from the ‘60s for someone I didn't know before 8:30 this morning is not really a priority. So I politely reply that I might look into that later but I'm now busy with other things, and peacefully resumed the initial plan for the day.
I don't have to wait long to get another email, but this time the name rings a bell. This is the local celebrity here at the university, a famous and influent professor.
“Dear Virginie, please look at the data.”
Virginie Uhlmann shares her story with the Story Collider audience at the Junction at J3 at Cambridge Junction in Cambridge, UK in December 2019. Photo by Mark Danson.
Okay, okay. This makes me feel a bit tense. I don't know what Michael discussed with them and what they have agreed on. I know that he's a senior faculty and he's involved in several big consortia that imply an equal share of politics and research. I also now remember that this other famous scientist is a big player in some of the collaboratory projects that my colleagues are working on.
I really don't want to mess up with anybody. I don't want to get in trouble. I just want to do my science, finish my PhD thesis and move on. So that's making me feel a bit stressed.
In a mix of anxiety and frustration, I put aside the work I was doing and start working on this data. I can do something quick then they'll leave me alone, no trouble, no stress.
After two days, I have put together a short analysis pipeline that I sent to them ahead along with a bunch of examples on how to use it. Peacefully, my mind is clear. I dig back into my math.
A few days of happy research like that then comes a new email. “Dear Virginie, thank you for your code. We spotted that it fails in and follow a lengthy list of bugs and requests of features to be added.”
Once the initial exasperation is gone, I succinctly reply that I have a paper deadline at the end of the month and no time for that.
Right on time, morning after the deadline. “Dear Virginie, now that your deadline is passed could you give us an estimate on when you'd have time to work on our data?” Signed, that influential professor.
Upon reading this, my nerves almost break down, so I try to breathe, calm down and analyze. What are my options? One, ignore. Not reply at all. Two, make up another deadline just to gain time. Three, well, politely escape with the usual “I will look at that when I have time,” meaning never. Four, explicitly say like, “Your data are of no interest to me. I really don’t want to work on that, seriously.” Five, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
I realized that I'm facing a complicated graph of possibilities full of branches that keep on ramifying with consequences I can't fully see. I feel completely paralyzed. So I go for option one, ignore.
This is clearly not the best option. I feel the shadow of this issue over me, and from this point on, things escalate.
The emails become more regular and more demanding. Every morning, I start getting the usual, “Virginie, did you work on our data?” Ignoring is just not working at all.
The pressure builds up to the point that it becomes like a constant voice in my head. It gradually starts to be more difficult to focus on my work, then to read my book, then to just think about anything else at all. I realize that it can't work like this. I can't work like this, or even just live. I need to do something. I need to reconsider my options.
There is a clear solution that involves an obvious, “I won't work on your data,” but this is also the scariest thing to do because I dramatically lack information to hypothesize on the consequences it will have. Michael has assigned to me this task in the first place. How would turning it down impact all lab relationship with that other lab? My colleagues’ work? My own relationship with Michael? Maybe opportunities in my scientific career or even my chances of getting a PhD degree at all.
I guess there must be a way to phrase things so as to minimize collateral damage, but what exactly is at stake? What do I need to be careful with? I guess I need to be diplomatic somehow but what does that mean to be diplomatic here?
I realized that this graph is more complicated than the previous one and it has missing parts. It's all blurry. I can't really think straight. I’m actually seriously entering panic mode. This is bad. I need help.
Michael is the one who put me in this and he's also the one who has a clear view of the whole situation so I guess he's the one I should ask for help. But he's a busy person, like most professors. So if I want to ask for his advice, I need to be able to clearly state the problem, explain what I thought of already, why this is not satisfactory, and list the requirement of the unknown solution I'm looking for.
Virginie Uhlmann shares her story with the Story Collider audience at the Junction at J3 at Cambridge Junction in Cambridge, UK in December 2019. Photo by Mark Danson.
I'm afraid that if we misunderstand each other from the start, it will get really hard to get us back both together on the same page and get anything useful out of the conversation. So the first time I would talk to him about this whole story is going to be the most important. I need to make sure that whatever I say is crystal clear and understandable.
So I start exploring. I list all the possible emails formulation I can think of, along with the pros and cons. I rehearse explanations for my reasoning until I find the set of words that most precisely capture my points. I make sure that the script I have and I will follow to put words and what's in my head is extremely clear. I rehearse like I would for a scientific presentation except that I don't prepare PowerPoint slides this time.
A few days like that and I feel ready, so I walk down the corridor and knock on his office door. There is a table full of scientific manuscript and empty coffee cups surrounded by two chairs occupied by books. I remove a pile of books and sit on the chair in front of him. I'm both extremely stressed and relieved that since I'll be able to explain the situation, he will probably be able to help.
I deliver my explanatory speech. “This guy is putting me under too much pressure. I can't even work like that. It has to stop. How do I get out of here?”
Then I stop and switch my brain to high attention mode, ready to absorb all the subtleties of the diplomatic knowledge he has acquired over his academy career and that he might share now with me.
Michael stares at me in silence. It feels like time stopped and this moment lasts forever. Did I say something wrong or is he processing what I said? Maybe he's trying to read my mind or he just never really stopped thinking about the math he was doing before I entered the office.
Finally, he speaks. “Well, have you tried not to care?”
Upon hearing this, I mentally fall off the chair. It feels like the operating system in my brain stopped working and I burst out laughing. He has a really good point. I clearly did not try not to care. As a matter of fact, I had not considered this an option, ever, in 27 years of life.
As I walk out of his office, I feel puzzled. With this puzzling sensation I feel after a weight is suddenly gone. I'm not really relieved yet. More puzzled by the absence of that big thing that used to be there. Then it fades out slowly and I feel incredibly light.
The morning after, I lightheartedly compose a lengthy email to Mr. Influent Professor explaining that while I thank him for his interest in my work, I choose to prioritize my own research and apologize if there has been a misunderstanding in the amount of time I can dedicate to this project.
“Dear Virginie, no problem at all. I totally understand. Feel free to get back to us anytime if you want to work on this data.”
Years passed. I finished my PhD thesis, done more science and I'm now leading my own research group. Something deep inside me has changed, though. Now, at every moment in life, the graph of all possibilities has a new branch, the one where I don't care. Choosing this branch clearly does not resemble me at all and it objectively is not the best option most of the time anyway. But I am now able to consider not caring as a valid option and realized that the world would keep on turning and nothing too dramatic will happen if I ever chose to follow that path.
This has been one of the most powerful trick in my life when it comes to difficult decisions.
Part 2: Shane Saunderson
So I'm going to tell you a bit of a story that I kind of have to dig back for a fair ways, all the way back to my first teddy bear, which was actually not a teddy bear at all but it was a robot. I'm not even kidding.
I was four years old and I remember ripping open this present and just seeing this box with a Radio Shack Robie Junior robot. I'm dating myself here but this thing was the most incredible piece of machinery I had ever seen in my entire life.
I quickly unboxed it, shoved batteries in it, turned it on and watched it scurry around my kitchen and like apologize, which was so beautifully Canadian, as it bumped into the kitchen table. I absolutely fell in love with this thing.
I call it my teddy bear because I literally used to take this to bed with me at night. I would sleep with a hard plastic shell robot because I love this thing so much. This would be my first, but far from my last, obsession with technology.
So time goes on. I grew up on a farm so there was no end of things for me to take apart and have my dad scream at me for. I started to learn more and more about technology, about machines. Eventually, decided to go into engineering. Got the t-shirt, got the ring and then suddenly I found myself in my 20s designing all kinds of crazy technology. I'm working on robotics, control systems, connected devices. You name it, I've done it.
It was around this time that technology also started to shift for me. You see, I think what I loved about technology was that I viewed it as toys. It was a set of tools that I could bodge together and create cool things. I was in control and I could make amazing stuff out of all these little parts.
But around the time that we started seeing smartphones and social media and other tech like that, they felt a little different to me. Whereas previous tech felt like I was in control of it, suddenly these were things that I didn't feel like I could control. In fact, sometimes they kind of felt like they controlled me.
Shane Saunderson shares his story wtih he Story Collider audience at Gladstone Hotel in Toronto, ON in January 2020. Photo by Kevin Ma.
Now, around the time that these technologies started becoming more and more prevalent, I ended up in what I kind of called the perfect storm of shit in my life. So after I did the engineering thing for a while, I did the MBA so that I could go higher and faster and stronger. Yeah, I was a bit of an overachiever. Farm boys, we do that. And I got to this point where I was suddenly leading a team of 35 people and really didn't want to let them down.
I was in consulting so I had clients all over the world who anyone who's in consulting knows clients are usually assholes. I was trying and failing to deal with all kinds of personal issues. Both of my parents, this isn't the point of the story but were dealing with cancer and so I was trying to be a good son and failing miserably at it.
I was traveling all over the place. I think there was one month where I spent four nights in my own bed. My calendar was just stacks upon stacks of things and yet I felt so isolated and disconnected. This basically set the stage for what wonders would come next.
I look at my hands and suddenly they're shaking. All of a sudden, the shaking starts working its way down my arms and into my torso and then down my legs. All of a sudden, without even realizing what's happening, my entire body is shaking uncontrollably. It's as though every atom of my being has started resonating to some same frequency like my body is about to explode.
At this moment I don't actually even know where I am. For the record, I'm in a cab. I have no idea what I'm doing. I was on my way to LaGuardia Airport to fly back to Toronto. The only thing in this moment that I knew was fear. And what set this whole chain of events in motion was a simple little buzz.
Now, granted that buzz was the straw that broke the camel's back, the match that lit the fuse to the powder keg that was my life. I had let technology become so ingrained in my being that, suddenly, I found myself inescapable from a life that I built up that I didn't really feel a part of and this notification bombardment that kept hitting me was just destroying me.
So here I sat, a husk of a human being in the back of a taxi in New York not really even able to move, let alone form coherence sentences. It took me a solid 10 minutes to build up the ability to pull up my phone, call my friend Paul, and actually have to put him on speaker phone ecause when I held it up to my ear it was still shaking too much.
I started to explain in broken words to Paul what had happened and he started to talk me down a bit. He said, “Okay. Can you get out of the cab?”
And I said, “No, we're on the freeway. That'd be a bad idea.”
He went, “No, that's not what I meant. Can you turn the cab around?”
And I fought with him for a bit because I was like, “No, I have to keep going. I have to keep doing. I have to keep pushing forward.” But he eventually got me to turn the car back around, check back into a hotel and disappear for three days. And I don't just mean disappear from Paul or other people. I mean disappear from everything including myself. If you ask me what happened on those three days, I don't think I could tell you.
I have glimpses of pulling out my phone and turning it back on for a second, only to shut it off immediately because I've got bombarded with more notifications, more emails, more calls. “Where are you?” “What's going on?” “How in the hell are we supposed to survive without you?”
But all I could think is how am I supposed to survive. So finally, after three days, I realized there were people that needed me and I felt like I had to be there for them, so I had to find a way to get back.
So I pull up my computer, I book a flight. I get back to LaGuardia and I fly back to Toronto. I actually didn't even turn my phone on until I got back to Toronto. I start slowly getting in touch with people, bosses, co-workers and explaining what happened and realizing that we need to take this seriously.
I learned I had a bit of a nervous breakdown. These things happen. And that to fix it, I decide what I need is a bit of a sabbatical back on the farm. Simpler time, comfortable place. It's where I know I can be me.
Shane Saunderson shares his story wtih he Story Collider audience at Gladstone Hotel in Toronto, ON in January 2020. Photo by Kevin Ma.
So I go home to my awkward, emotionally distant, conservative parents who are walking on eggshells around me because they don't really know how to deal with their broken little wunderkind, but I'm okay with this. I've dealt with enough awkwardness with my parents that I can move through.
So I start a regimen of trying to piece myself back together. Start getting into mindfulness and meditation and yoga and all these different band-aids and fixes on how I can hold my brain together a little bit better. I start realizing that technology is a huge source of problem, so I start saying, okay, well what can I tear down?
I get rid of Facebook and other social media, start deleting apps like mad. Left, right and center they're gone. Turn off all these notifications on this phone until, by the end of it, my phone is just a phone. Suddenly, technology has been contained. And I don't feel bad, I don't feel weird, I'm not suffering FOMO or anything like that. I'm just living and I'm cool with it.
So I spend some more time on the farm. I start getting comfortable and back on my feet and I say, okay. I can do this. I can go back. I have the rules. I needed my structure, but I can go.
So I come back to Toronto and the thing that I thought was going to really mess with me wasn't so bad. The crazy Toronto hustle, the rat race, it was just here. It was no big deal. I think the meditation had helped with that to just sort of let it all pass. I find myself periodically, when people talk to me and stress me out, just sort of closing my eyes and going [inhales].
And in my head I'm just saying, “You're not here. Go fuck yourself,” but we move on. The surprising part, though, is the part I wasn't cool with was my own life. I just essentially jumped right back into where I was before but with a few more band-aids in place and it wasn't working. It felt inauthentic. I didn't really know or like what I was doing. I kid you not, so obviously I'm about to quit my job.
And I kid you not, the last project that I worked for at this consulting firm was a connected hydration system. It's a smart water bottle that sends you a text whenever you should drink a sip of water. The competitive product to this is you getting thirsty. So I just felt like there was nothing that I was doing that was of value and that I needed a change.
So I quit my job and I did what anyone suffering mental health issues would do. I enrolled myself in a PhD program. We won't go down that route. I heard that the louder laughs with a bit of pain come from the people doing high level academia.
But actually, I've always dug academia. It's kind of a place that I can retreat back into. it's safe and I can figure my stuff out. I can say, well, what do I want? What do I like and what do I need? And in that moment I decided that what I needed was to find joy in technology again. I didn't want to be afraid of it. I wanted to take it back. I wanted to control it again, make it mine. I wanted to find what that four-year-old boy in love with a robot had.
So for those who don't know, a lot of your first year of academics is just really digging into paper upon paper upon paper so that you can find your niche. And so late one night in the lab, I'm reading through tons of papers and I find what I consider my ground zero or my OG paper.
It's a study done in the mid ‘90s at Stanford called the media equation. Super simple. I'll lay it out for you. Participants are asked to come into a room and interact on a desktop computer where they're basically doing a really boring like file renaming task. And the computer is popping up these little social messages, so ‘Go us’ or ‘Keep up the good work’ or ‘Aren't we a great team’. Stuff like that.
At the end of this, that person then does a short survey about their experience in one of two conditions. They either finish the survey on the same computer they just worked on or they go to a second identical computer a meter away and finish the survey there. What the researchers found was that when people finish the survey on the second computer, they're far more critical of the first computer. Think about that. That means that you won't talk shit to a computer's face but you're cool talking about it behind its back.
My poor little engineering brain was broken. Like what the hell was this? What was going on? Why were people treating computers, these machines like they were social? So I kept reading and I dug more and more and looked at this phenomenon and I found that we humans are so hardwired for social interaction that will anthropomorphize just about anything and will play into this phenomenon.
So I found it. This was my thing. This was something that I could really get behind. Instead of creating some technology that was getting in the way of our social interaction and jumping in front of us, I actually found that maybe there's a technology that, in and of itself, we can feel social with. Maybe this was a way that we could have interactions with technology that didn't feel so gross and so distant and so forced.
So this is what I do now. I'm studying human-robot interaction and I'm trying to figure out what makes people happy or sad or awkward or shameful when they interact with robots. There's some good parts of my research, like figuring out that when you make a robot do this and dance around everybody gets happy and smiles and in the same way that you're all smiling right now because you saw some idiot dancing on a stage. No different there.
There's some weird parts to my research, like the time I figured out that I could emotionally manipulate people with a robot, but what's important is that no matter what I'm doing, it's honest.
I publish this work. I put it out there, and people can make their own informed decisions about what they want to do. And this is really important to me, because I spent a lot of time thinking about the future. And when I think about the future of the kinds of technologies I work on, I realize that the types of social technologies that we have going on right now that are emerging over the next 10 years, they're going to be social in ways that we can barely even understand. After everything I've been through, my goal now is to make sure that they're not anti-social like some of the last ones. Thank you.