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A boundary-pushing federal health research program has secured thousands of electronic medical records as it aims to plug gaps in its data, through an innovative use of patient data-sharing networks primarily used to coordinate clinical care.

Since 2018, the All of Us program has collected health and wellness data on nearly 750,000 participants. The precision medicine research program, run by the National Institutes of Health, has collected genome sequences, Fitbit data, family history surveys, and real-world medical records that can span a patient’s entire health journey — all available for researchers to dig into.

But those real-world records often are missing big chunks of patient data. Even though 98% of All of Us participants agree to share their electronic health records for research, more than 300,000 have no EHR data at all in its database. In the program’s latest data release, announced on Tuesday, All of Us is attempting to fill in those holes — offering a potentially easier path to acquire real-world data for clinical research.

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It’s dusk in the backyard, and I’m juggling a soccer ball, counting: 40, 41, 42. Then the ball clips the outside of my boot and skitters into the bushes. Time to start over. I could go inside and call this practice done. But I don’t. Because a voice in my head has decided that 42 is not a number a serious person stops at, and that stopping at all, ever, is the first soft symptom of becoming someone who loses.

I was maybe 14.

For most of high school and college, this inner monologue ran on a constant loop: harder, faster, better, more. Whether it was soccer, school, or working out, there was no quota it would ever sign off on. Not enough service hours. Not enough time in the gym. Not enough sprints, not enough free kicks bent at the top corner of the net, not enough A’s, not enough hard classes stacked on the hard classes I was already drowning in. I’d hit the target. And then the target would move.

It seemed to work. The voice opened doors, so I never questioned it. You don’t audit the thing that’s winning. And because I credited every good outcome to that perfectionist voice, it got to take a bow each time, whether or not it had done any of the actual work.

That’s the question I couldn’t answer for a long time: Did the achievement happen because of that voice, or in spite of it?

Inner voice vs. chatter

Ethan Kross runs the Emotion and Self-Control Lab at the University of Michigan, and he has spent much of his career on the thing in your head that talks. Kross, a psychologist and neuroscientist, calls the useful version the inner voice : the ability to use language, silently, to think. This inner voice lets you rehearse a hard conversation before you have it. It keeps a phone number alive in your head while you find a pen. It’s the thing that says don’t you dare send that text a half-second before your thumb presses down.

And then there’s the other version that’s less helpful and less healthy. Kross calls it chatter : “the cyclical negative thoughts and emotions that turn our singular capacity for introspection into a curse rather than a blessing.” This kind of negative self-talk can create friction in your relationships because you’re ruminating on your problems instead of listening to others, and it may lead you to become more irritable or to displace your aggression.

The stress caused by chatter can also lead to negative physical health effects.

“What makes stress toxic is when it remains chronically elevated over time,” Kross says. “This is precisely what chatter does. We experience a stressor in our life, it then ends, but in our minds, our chatter perpetuates it. We keep thinking about that event over and over and over again. And that keeps that stress response active in ways that can predict things like cardiovascular disease, chronic inflammation, and even cancer.”

Chatter, in case you could not tell, is a near, dear friend of mine. Your sharpest mental functions (focusing, planning, regulating how you feel) run on a limited supply of attention. When chatter sets in, you end up doing two things at once: the task in front of you and the running commentary of the pained voice narrating it. Kross describes it as jamming your executive functions with a “dual task.” It’s the same wiring that gives athletes the yips .

A working inner voice solves a problem and then lets you close the loop. Chatter, on the other hand, never lets the loop close. So a voice that generates a lot of output but never, not once, lets enough be enough is a drive that has slipped its leash. During high school and later in college, I mistook the constant refrain of “do better and more and do it now” to be my source of work ethic. But my achievements came from the work, not the beration. Chatter’s whole trick was to fuse the two so tightly I couldn’t tell them apart, so that the thought of dropping the lash felt like dropping the achievement. Lose the cruelty, lose the results. That was the implied threat. It was also a lie.

Turning down the chatter

You can’t out-argue chatter from the inside. You’re standing too close. Many of the tools in Kross’s “chatter toolkit” boil down to: step back far enough to see the voice as one voice instead of the only voice that speaks the unquestionable gospel truth.

I’ve written before about this tool: talking to yourself by name, in the second person, the way you’d talk to a friend who was running himself into the ground . Danny, what do you actually need to do here? It sounds fairly ridiculous. But temporarily shifting perspectives from ‘I am experiencing’ to ‘someone else is experiencing’ lowers the temperature and creates enough objectivity to take a clinical, calculating eye to the situation.

The above is a tactic, and the long-term strategy is to undercut the story underneath it . “Harder, faster, better, more” was a narrative I downloaded at some point and then never questioned whether or not it was true. I unwittingly welded my sense of self-worth with my achievements, and it took a lot of work to learn and then believe that I didn’t have to lash myself bloody to do good, hard, serious work. That I didn’t have to obey the voice casting me as Sisyphus, demanding I roll the boulder up the hill one more time to prove I was worthy of it.

I would love to tell you the chatter is gone for me. I really would. But chatter still shows up in my life, usually right before something that matters. It comes in whispering its old line about how this, finally, is the moment I’m exposed as someone who doesn’t do enough. The difference is that now I can hear it land and I can name it: there it is again. That half-second of recognition is the whole skill. It buys just enough distance to notice the chatter and decline to listen to its monologue. To quote Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic : Chatter, you are allowed to be a passenger in the vehicle of my life but “above all else, my dear old familiar friend, you are absolutely forbidden to drive.”

I’m still in the backyard some nights, counting. The difference is that now I can hear the counting for what it is. And some nights — not all, but some — I let myself stop at 42.

This article What a psychologist taught me about the cruelest voice in my head is featured on Big Think .

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Pitched to me by a Nintendo UK rep as the first truly single-player Splatoon adventure, I sit down to play Splatoon Raiders feeling pretty hyped. While undoubtedly the sizzling side dish to the multiplayer main course, Splatoon 3 's single-player campaign was a surprisingly fun-filled romp. This unexpectedly meaty mode teemed with invention, having players paint ink-strewn pathways across floating blocks one minute, before doing battle with a DJ-ing Octopus the next. It was a brilliantly bombastic first attempt at a proper Splatoon campaign (or Splataign, if you will) that suggested that this series' single-player offering could go on to capture some of that 3D Mario magic.

It turns out, however, that I'll have to wait a little longer for my Super Squid-io Bros. dream to become reality. After spending two ink-tastic hours with Splatoon Raiders, it appears that Nintendo's taken its inklings in a completely different direction. Splatoon 3’s fiendishly creative platforming sections? Gone. Those gloriously Super Mario Sunshine-esque puzzles? Dumped into the bottom of the ocean. Instead, this squid-tastic Switch 2 spin off doubles down on action, seeing players splat wave after wave of enemies in an offering that's closer to an offline extraction shooter than a traditional single-player adventure.

Raiders of the lost ink

(Image credit: Nintendo) Key info

Developer: In-house

Publisher: Nintendo

Platform(s): Nintendo Switch 2

Release date: July 23, 2026

Initially, Splatoon Raiders looks poised to deliver the platforming goods. As your helicopter filled with Splatoon celebs – Big Man, Frye, and Shiver – suddenly hits a violent storm, the three find themselves marooned on a remote island. As the tenacious trio panic at their predicament, they soon realize that they have a competent pilot and mechanic on hand to save them: me . Players tweak hairstyles and skin tones in order to make their custom pilot suitably squiddy, before setting about building the group's new island home.

As I navigate across this perky peninsula, an early sequence sees me riding on a wooden board to sail me from shore to shore. Steering my way through a collection of fluffy hoops, I'm reminded of the dino-riding water levels in Super Mario 3D World . It's a fun, narrative-led introduction. Yet, once I've gathered all the relevant equipment to help reinforce my new homestead, the exploration sections come screeching to a halt. Selecting my levels from a map screen, Splatoon Raiders appears to drop the narrative throughline and precision platforming altogether.

While you will still swim your way up walls and leap across the odd platform in each stage, blasting angry fish is very much the focus here as I splat my way through different levels of wave-based action. In order to live up to the 'Raiders' subtitle, you won't be heading into each mission alone. Accompanied by a diving pod with leagues, each raid sees a metallic explorer bot plodding alone beside you, which you can use to propel through the air, allowing you to leap through the aforementioned fluffy floating onion rings. While you're busy splatting angry salmon, you can command your robotic pal to drill through larger crystals.

(Image credit: Nintendo) In a nice touch, these bots are piloted by one of your three famous friends. Collecting salmonid balls – power eggs – allows you to use a special ability once you've filled up your showstopper gauge, summoning one of your three island-dwelling pals to deal massive damage. Shiver's showstopper has her ride the saddled Master Mega shark in a straight line to deliver a big bite. Frye's Moray Storm showstopper summons a hoarder of eels Pied Piper-style in a devastating AOE attack. Big Man's showstopper, Manta Dance, meanwhile, allows you to ride him with a burst of invincibility to slam and shoot enemies from a safe distance.

Visually, Splatoon Raiders is a very sharp and clean looking game, sacrificing intricate environmental detail for high resolution. While shadows and water underwhelm, the glorious goo, inklings, and salmonids all look suitably shiny, glistening in their glory. It's comparable to Splatoon 3 following its Switch 2 update, likely using the same engine that's powered the past two Switch titles.

Yet, it's in the final portion of my preview where Splatoon Raiders' finally locks into place. Hurled into a raid with three other players, we race against the clock to defeat a slew of screeching salmonids and collect their power eggs. With each completed run we drill a layer deeper into the Earth, where even more fearsome foes await… and we get our arses absolutely handed to us.

(Image credit: Nintendo) Luckily for our pathetic posse, whether you win or lose a level you gain resources that upgrade your build, upgrade your different 'tanks', and you choose which stats to upgrade. These power tanks contain different abilities, and mixing and matching them is key to not only holding your own on the salmonfield, but in settling on a loadout that suits your playstyle. One power tank called splatchet, for example, does a forward dash attack, allowing you to dash into the midst of danger and deal damage. Whereas a tactical tank is better for those who like to keep a distance spawning, a turret-like companion that spews paint.

You can also customize your gadgets with different resources. As you raid, uncover powerups, and tweak and expand your loadout, the core game loop feels recognizably compelling. Yet my concern – from this two hour preview at least – is that it seems there is little blubber on the bone in this crustacean-led caper.

Nintendo may be marketing Splatoon Raiders as a single-player game, then, but in reality it's a co-op horde mode with some light narrative wrapping. While it may be mismarketed so far, the core Splatoon mechanics still feel utterly brilliant, making the simplistic act of swimming, leaping, and shooting predictably enjoyable. With a Splatoon-focused Direct airing today, there's still hope for a little more depth to be discovered at the bottom of this ocean-set offering. Yet, thanks to this demo's overly simplistic series of shooting galleries, I'm left wondering if Splatoon's true tentacle-stretching innovation is being saved for the next numbered sequel.

Keep an eye on our upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 releases list for what else to put on your calendar.