Jeff Mentch retweeted
more bts from our launch video shoot bc every inch and second of this process had a human touch and it was so rewarding and exhilarating to witness it all come to life. soma is a feeling more than anything tangible so the challenge of making the invisible visible deems this even more meaningful
Jeff Mentch retweeted
humming is basically a long, slow exhale with your vocal cords buzzing. the slow exhale is the part with real evidence for calming you down, it's when your heart rate naturally eases off and your larynx is wired into the vagus nerve, so how you breathe and how you sound are tangled together. stress leaks into your voice for the same reason
The healing power of HUMMING. Fucking hell, the more you learn about the human body, the more you realise how much we still don't understand about the simplest things.
Did you know that humming for just 60 seconds can help calm you down when you're stressed? There's a nerve called the vagus nerve, which runs from your brainstem down through your body and plays a massive role in your nervous system. Slow breathing and humming can help you settle yourself when your head's going a hundred miles an hour.
And this is where it gets interesting, fam. Researchers actually found that humming increased nitric oxide in the nasal passages by around FIFTEEN TIMES compared with quiet breathing. FIFTEEN FUCKING TIMES. Now, nitric oxide is involved in blood vessel function, and the vibrations from humming help move air between your sinuses and nasal passages. That's what the research was measuring. Mad when you think about it.
Now, funny enough, I was reading Jane Roberts, I believe it was The Nature of Personal Reality, and she was talking about something called inner sound values. The idea that the sounds we create internally, even our thoughts and beliefs, have an influence on our physical reality, right down to the cells in our body.
And that got me thinking about something else.
Why do you think Buddhist monks have been chanting OM for centuries? Mmmmm. Ommmm. That deep vibration you can actually feel in your chest and head. People have been using chanting and humming in spiritual practices for a very long time, often to settle the mind and bring themselves into a calmer state.
It's funny, isn't it? We've got people spending a fortune trying to relax, buying every fucking gadget under the sun, and meanwhile you can sit in your kitchen humming like a broken fridge for absolutely nothing.
Try it yourself. Close your mouth, breathe gently through your nose and hum for 60 seconds. Don't force anything. Just notice how you feel afterwards.
And if somebody walks in and asks what the fuck you're doing, tell them you're having a meeting with your nervous system.
The more you know, fam. 😊
Jeff Mentch retweeted
i studied memory for my phd and remember being blown away by all the things that happen during sleep like memory consolidation and replay
skip sleep and that writing step gets much weaker, so you study longer and keep less. it shows up in your voice too: slower, flatter, more pauses
tired brains sound tired ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
An all-nighter doesn’t just leave you tired. It switches off the part of your brain that’s supposed to store what you’re studying.
Is pulling an all-nighter a smart idea? Matthew Walker’s lab tested it. Without sleep, the brain’s memory centers stopped taking in new information, like an inbox that’s full and bounces everything.
Sleep matters on both sides of learning. Before you learn, it gets your brain ready to take things in. After you learn, it moves what you learned from short-term memory into long-term storage. Skip it on either side and you lose something.
Most people treat sleep as the time they give up so they can study more. It’s actually when the studying gets saved.
Jeff Mentch retweeted
silly soma score for a silly sounding voice
never! felt! so! alive! @jshoonm
Fascinating work, and extraordinary dataset! I spent a few years wrangling children’s speech recordings, so the detail I noticed: the agent learned from TTS resynthesis of transcripts. the acoustic problems a baby actually solves still wide open and would be a great next push
What does it take to learn language from everyday experience?
Our new study, published today in Science, offers a new way to answer this question.
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Jeff Mentch retweeted
getting lots of questions about how soma works and our science so kicking off an ask me anything session every friday
open to anyone who wants to learn more or share product feedback
come hang!! luma.com/askanything
Jeff Mentch retweeted
i studied memory and cognition with brain scans and implants, but turns out your voice is an incredibly rich signal for your mind
yes!!! the gallery reveal all over again. still the best thing anyone’s made for capturing the vibe of soma, it just gets the feeling exactly right
some days you feel off but don’t know why
introducing the world’s first non-wearable fitness tracker, built for your mind
Soma reads 200+ signals from your voice to show you when you’re sharpest and what slows you down
it runs alongside meetings, voice notes, and dictations to bring you insights when they matter most
make your best days your everyday, join our private beta now: soma-health.co
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At SANE 2026 today, fascinating research being presented and great to catch up with some @SHBTHarvard and @mcgovernmit friends!
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Jeff Mentch retweeted
bryan johnson measures almost everything his body does, but not much about his mind, so decided to take a look through a signal he hasn’t measured yet: his voice
your voice is one of the few things your brain does out loud. every sentence is your brain retrieving memory, focusing attention, planning, timing, and steering dozens of muscles in real time, which is why we think it's one of the most underrated windows into how your mind is doing
we ran 28 public recordings of him through soma, from his 2015 braintree and os fund interviews all the way to content he posted last month. all in all, this was about 48,000 words.
we learned that across 11 years, not much in his voice moves with time. not his pitch, not his pace, not how much he hedges. in his solo videos we tracked 115 different signals and not one drifted, which is honestly the most bryan johnson result possible. though to be fair, we can't give blueprint the credit, his voice was already this steady before it started
he's remarkably clear. his precision score sits at 96 out of 100, higher than every soma user we compared him with. and his voice print is fern, same as andrew huberman. these are two people who've spent years thinking out loud about their brains
tbf, these results may be skewed by his public persona. his true cognitive fluctuations would be much easier to surface if soma captures his day-to-day voice off camera, bc this may just be the affects of his public persona
@bryan_johnson we'd love to see what your voice looks like day to day, not just on camera. your voice is a dataset you’re already generating every day, so if you ever want to put it to work @try_soma
Jeff Mentch retweeted
what happens when you genuinely believe what you're saying?
been thinking about this since the elizabeth holmes doc came out. it's 3 hours long and still did $15M opening weekend, and everyone i know who saw it walked out asking whether or not elizabeth holmes is actually a master manipulator
in the doc you see her at home with her family, which is wild on its own. but every time she’s alone with nathan fielder she keeps reassuring him she’s being honest. you don’t usually have to say that this much
we ran 16 of her old voice recordings through soma. on stage she was slow and polished and basically never said “i don’t know.” in her deposition she hedged way more, stumbled a lot more, and said “i don’t know” all the time
so which one was the real her? i honestly don't know
you'd think believing something would make you sound confident, but she was really good at sounding confident. i think it's more that your voice doesn't change much depending on who's in the room. hers changed a lot
should i run her clips from the new doc through it? starting to think i should run nathan fielder's too
Jeff Mentch retweeted
your SF @Techweek_, wrapped.
this is what a week of panels, coffee chats, and afterparties did to 500+ brains.
@a16z @try_soma
woww, after 2 days of @RogueFitness echo biking, my mental energy is at a 2 week high!!! i def feel it
Jeff Mentch retweeted
if you're heading to sftw you're about to run a mental marathon, so we're here to help you pace yourself
running a daily leaderboard to help you check-in on your clarity, energy, stress and more
come plunge with us to kick off and close out the week, or stop by our popups around the city to grab a brain-friendly snack
rsvp in comments <3
Jeff Mentch retweeted
been in the @try_soma private beta and it's a crazy tool. it reads your cognitive fitness from your voice - baseline, load, acuity, all from how you speak. no wearable, no extra hardware. speech is the most cognitively demanding thing we do all day and @jialiiiz + team built an instrument around it. health tracking that lives in something you already do. big fan.
phonetic convergence ! one of my favorite things in speech science. you really do drift toward whoever you talk to most
you sound like the people you feel socially close to
since @try_soma's voice prints are like myers-briggs for your voice, see if your voice prints are the same as your friends' :^)
for the next 7 days, every user gets unlimited referrals
i'm still looking for more of my wildflower crew, lmk if that's you <3
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