January 25, 2011Subscribe
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on Twitter.My sister recently had her iPhone stolen, and it occurred to me that not enough people know how to help protect their iPhone/iPad from theft, what to do if it gets lost or stolen, and the steps to take even if they’re unable to get it back. Using a combination of security tips and geolocation, using Find My iPhone, you should have a much higher chance of recovering your device. Note that although this article is iPhone/iPad-centric… the principles apply to any smartphone!NEW! Please refer to my
for the answers to some frequently asked questions (especially before asking a question in the comments).Step 1 – Protecting Your DeviceFirst, a few relevant iPhone/iPad security points:Always use the passcode lock: Settings & General & Passcode Lock. This is the most basic of security features, and probably the one I also recommend the most. Most people tend to store emails, contacts, SMS, calendars, and all kinds of other info on their smartphones. In the event your phone is lost or stolen, you’re going to want to ensure that a random stranger won’t be able to get access to your personal information. Set Simple Passcode to off so that you can set a passcode with more than four digits (I recommend five or six). I also recommend setting it to Auto-Lock after 1 minute.Update your iOS devices: Keep your iPhone or iPad up to date by reguarly applying updated in iTunes. This will ensure you have the latest security patches, and fix bugs such as the numerous lockscreen bypass issues.Set a SIM PIN: Settings & Phone & SIM PIN & On. This is probably one of the most underused security features (which exists on any phone), and prevents someone from removing your SIM card, placing it in another phone, and making unlimited calls.[Optional] Erase Data after 10 failed passcode attempts: Settings & General & Passcode Lock. This feature allows you to make sure that someone won’t be able to brute force their way into your device. After ten attempts, the iPhone/iPad will erase itself. This one is up to you, as it does create two potential problems. Firstly, it could allow someone with enough time to erase your device (annoying); and secondly if the device gets erased, you won’t be able to track it. I still recommend using this.[Optional] Set a Customised Lockscreen Image: Create a custom image for your iPhone’s lock screen that displays your contact details in case someone finds your phone (and is honest enough to return it)! Don’t give too much info, but your first name and an alternate contact number will do. You can also put in your email address, but I don’t recommend doing so if it reveals your full name, or company name. I’ve thrown together an
to help you create your own lockscreen image.[Advanced] Use the Apple Configuration Utility: Apple provides a free iPhone Configuration Utility () that allows you to set higher security requirements. These include a longer passcode, less attempts (5) before an automatic wipe, and other security settings. This tool is normally used by Enterprise users to configure company phones, but advanced users may be interested in looking at the options provided.Next, find your device’s Serial Number and IMEI Number (phones only), and write them down somewhere (not on the device), as you may need these at a later date. The IMEI is a unique number used by GSM networks to identify valid phones, and can be used to block lost or stolen devices (this is explained further down).
On iOS you can find these in Settings & General & About. On any mobile phone you can get the IMEI by entering *#06# on the phone’s keypad.Step 2 – Setting up TrackingWhen , they announced that they were making their Find My iPhone service free to everyone. The service allows you to geolocate your device, send it messages, or wipe it remotely. To set up Find My iPhone on your iOS 7/8 device, follow these instructions:On the device, tap Settings & iCloud. Then, either sign in with your Apple ID (the account you use for iTunes or App Store purchases), or create a new Apple ID for free. Once signed in, activate Find My iPhone by turning it on at the bottom of the iCloud settings pane. On iOS 8 you also have the option to turn on ‘Send Last Location’ which makes the phone report its last location when the battery is critically low. This means that its last location would still show up in Find My iPhone should the battery die. ()For Find My iPhone to function properly, you will need to have Location Services turned On (Settings & Location Services). Once you have it set up, remember to
to make sure it’s working! You should see your device on a map:On a privacy side-note: If you enable Find My iPhone on your device, remember that anyone who can gain access to your iCloud account will be able to see where you are. If you ever want to disable Find My iPhone, you can do this in: Settings & iCloud & Find My iPhone & Off. If your device is lost or stolen when this is setting is off, you won’t be able to track it. Disabling Find My iPhone will also allow a thief to restore your phone without needing to know your iCloud credentials.Step 3 – Recovering Your DeviceSo, you’ve gone and lost your iPhone, or had your iPad stolen. Well done! Now we can have fun trying to get it back. First of all… if it’s your phone, have you tried calling it? If it’s a shiny iPhone 5S, , unless you’re really lucky. , I’m here to help! If you’ve followed the steps above, you should be able to geolocate your device. For this to work you will need to hope that your iPhone or iPad has an of internet connection (3G/4G or Wifi).As you hopefully tested in Step 2 above,
to see where your phone is. If you’re still in a bar and your device has just gone missing, or you want to be able to stalk the thief, you can install the free
onto another (friend’s?) iOS device. At this point you can try to track down and
(not recommended unless you have backup) – or – file a police report and get them to go pick it up for you. You can also send messages to the phone to try and convince them to return it.If you can’t track your iPhone on the first try, keep trying, as sometimes it may be out of signal range or out of power. Try putting your device into . A thief will probably need to plug the phone in prior to restoring it, so if you’re paying attention you may be able to get his home location just before your phone is erased!You can also get Find My iPhone to send you an email when your device is located! Note that the device’s location will be available in Find My iPhone for only 24 hours (presumably for privacy reasons).Check out these stories of a guy who , and another who , using Find My iPhone.Step 4 – Recovery Failed: What Now?So now your iPhone’s been missing for a while, and you haven’t been able to track it down. The thief may have turned the phone off, erased it or removed the SIM card. Or the thief is in another country, and you’re getting no help from the authorities (and don’t want to get it yourself). At this point tracking is unfortunately no longer an option, and many people give up. Do not despair, for there is yet hope!If, for some reason, you didn’t set a SIM PIN, the first thing you’ll want to do is inform your phone provider/carrier to disable your SIM and potentially save you many dollars of calls.Next, file a police report and give them your device’s serial number and/or IMEI. Thieves occasionally get nabbed with a whole bunch of stolen stuff, this way they’ll be able to return your device to you.You may want to consider wiping your device to ensure that your personal data does not fall into the wrong hands. You can remotely wipe your device from within Find My iPhone, but note that once your device is wiped, you will no longer be able to track it.If you’re a corporate user and your iPhone/iPad is configured to sync with Exchange, you can also remotely wipe your device through your Outlook Web Access (OWA). Simply log in, click Options in the top right, then Mobile Devices in the left-hand menu, and finally select the device you want to wipe and click Wipe All Data from Device.If you had Find My iPhone enabled, then you can rest easy knowing that a thief won’t be able to restore and use your device, effectively making it useless, as this would require knowing your iCloud credentials thanks to a feature called . iPhone and iPad thefts have already
worldwide (as much as 50%) thanks to this feature.The final step, to be taken when you’re pretty sure your phone will never return, is to disable it so that it will be useless to anyone else. In some countries can give your carrier your phone’s IMEI, and they can blacklist it, essentially rendering the phone useless (nice paperweight though). At that point if you do manage to get your phone back, however, you won’t be able to use it as it’s not possible to remove a device from the IMEI blacklist (to my knowledge). Note that not all carriers in all countries are willing to add devices to the blacklist ().Finally…I hope that this article will help at least one person to successfully recover a lost or stolen device. If you know anyone who may not be familiar the ways they can protect themselves, I encourage you to share this with them. If you have any questions please feel free to post a comment below, but first check out the ![Updated 10/05/2011] ![Updated 16/01/2012] [Updated 30/08/2012] Share this:Related posts:Read more from , , , Subscribe via EmailEnter your email address to subscribe to Security Generation, and receive notifications of new posts by email.
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As most of us know all too well, when you’re reeling from the finale of a romantic relationship that you didn’t want to end, your emotional and bodily reactions are a tangle: You’re still in love and want to reconcile, but you’re als simultaneously, you’re jonesing for a “fix” of the person who has abruptly left your life, and you might go to dramatic, even embarrassing, lengths to get it, even though part of you knows better.
What does our brain look like when we’re in the throes of such agonizing heartbreak? This isn’t just an academic question. The answer can help us better understand not only what’s going on inside our lovelorn bodies, but why humans may have evolved to feel such visceral pain in the wake of a break-up. In that light, the neuroscience of heartbreak can offer some practical—and provocative—ideas for how we can recover from love gone wrong.
Addicted to love
The earliest pairings of brain research and love research, from around 2005, established the baseline that would inform research going forward: what a brain in love looks like. In a
led by psychologist Art Aron, neurologist Lucy Brown, and anthropologist Helen Fisher, individuals who were deeply in love viewed images of their beloved and simultaneously had their brains scanned in an fMRI machine, which maps neural activity by measuring changes in blood flow in the brain. The fMRI’s vivid casts of yellows, greens, and blues—fireworks across gray matter—clearly showed that romantic love activates in the caudate nucleus, via a flood of dopamine.
Don Bayley
The caudate nucleus is associated with what psychologists call “motivation and goal-oriented behavior,” or “the rewards system.” To many of these experts, the fact that love fires there suggests that love isn’t so much an emotion in its own right—although aspects of it are obviously highly emotional—as it is a “goal-oriented motivational state.” (If that term seems confusing, it might help to think about it in terms of facial expressions: Emotions are characterized by particular, passing facial expressions—a frown with anger, a smile with happiness, an open mouth with shock—while if you had to identify the face of someone “in love,” it would be harder to do.) So as far as brain wiring is concerned, romantic love is the motivation to obtain and retain the object of your affections.
But romance isn’t the only thing that stimulates increases in dopamine and its rocketlike path through your reward system. Nicotine and cocaine follow exactly the same pattern: Try it, dopamine is released, it feels good, and you want more—you are in a “goal-oriented motivational state.” Take this to its logical conclusion and, as far as brain wiring is concerned, when you’re in love, it’s not as if you’re an addict. You are an addict.
Just as love at its best is explained by fMRI scans, so, too, is love at its worst. In 2010 the team who first used fMRI scanning to connect love and the caudate nucleus set out to . They gathered a group of individuals who were in the first stages of a breakup, all of whom reported that they thought about their rejecter approximately 85 percent of their waking hours and yearned to reunite with him or her. Moreover, all of these lovelorn reported “signs of lack of emotion control on a regular basis since the initial breakup, occurring regularly for weeks or months. This included inappropriate phoning, writing or e-mailing, pleading for reconciliation, sobbing for hours, drinking too much and/or making dramatic entrances and exits into the rejecter’s home, place of work or social space to express anger, despair or passionate love.” In other words, each of these bereft souls had it bad.
Then, with appropriate controls, the researchers passed their subjects through fMRI machines, where they could look at photographs of their beloved (called the “rejecter stimulus”), and simultaneously prompted them to share their feelings and experience, which elicited statements such as “It hurt so much,”& and “I hate what he/she did to me.”
A few particularly interesting patterns in brain activity emerged:
As far as the midbrain reward system is concerned, they were still “in love.” Just because the “reward” is delayed in coming (or, more to the point, not coming at all), that doesn’t mean the neurons that are expecting “reward” shut down. They keep going and going, waiting and waiting for a “fix.” Not surprisingly, among the experiment’s subjects, the caudate was still very much in love and reacted in an almost Pavlovian way to the image of the loved one. Even though cognitively they knew that their relationships were over, part of each participant’s brain was still in motivation mode.
Parts of the brain were trying to override others. The orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in learning from emotions and controlling behavior, activated. As we all know, when you’re in the throes of heartbreak, you want to do things you’ll probably regret later, but at the same time another part of you is trying to keep a lid on it.
They were still addicted. As they viewed images of their rejecters, regions of the brain were activated that typically fire in individuals craving and addicted to drugs. Again, no different from someone addicted to—and attempting a withdrawal from—nicotine or cocaine.
While these conclusions explain in broad strokes what happens in our brains when we’re dumped, one scientist I interviewed describes what happens in our breakup brains in a slightly different way. “In the case of a lost love,” he told me, “if the relationship went on for a long time, the grieving person has thousands of neural circuits devoted to the lost person, and each of these has to be brought up and reconstructed to take into account the person’s absence.”
Which brings us, of course, to the pain.
Love hurts
When you’re deep in the mire of heartbreak, chances are that you feel pain somewhere in your body—probably in your chest or stomach. Some people describe it as a dull ache, others as piercing, while still others experience it as a crushing sensation. The pain can last for a few seconds and then subside, or it can be chronic, hanging over your days and depleting you like just like the pain, say, of a back injury or a migraine.
<img src="/images/uploads/littlebookofheartbreak_cover-small.jpg" width="225" height="338" alt="This essay is adapted from
(Plume, 2012)." />
This essay is adapted from
(Plume, 2012).
But how can we reconcile the sensation of our hearts breaking—when in fact they don’t, at least not literally—with biophysical reality? What actually happens in our bodies to create that sensation? The short answer is that no one knows. The long answer is that the pain might be caused by the simultaneous hormonal triggering of the sympathetic activation system (most commonly referred to as fight-or-flight stress that ramps up heart and lung action) and the parasympathetic activation system (known as the rest-and-digest response, which slows the heart down and is tied to the social-engagement system). In effect, then, it could be as if the heart’s accelerator and brakes are pushed simultaneously, and those conflicting actions create the sensation of heartbreak.
While no one has yet studied what exactly goes on in the upper-body cavity during the moments of heartbreak that might account for the physical pain, the results of the aforementioned fMRI study of heartbroken individuals indicate that when the subjects looked at and discussed their rejecter, they trembled, cried, sighed, and got angry, and in their brains these emotions triggered activity in the same area associated with physical pain. Another study that explored the emotional-physical pain connection compared fMRI results on subjects who touched a hot probe with those who looked at a photo of an ex-partner and mentally relived that particular experience of rejection. The results confirmed that social rejection and physical pain are rooted in exactly the same regions of the brain. So when you say you’re “hurt” as a result of being rejected by someone close to you, you’re not just leaning on a metaphor. As far as your brain is concerned, the pain you feel is no different from a stab wound.
This neatly parallels the discoveries that love can be addictive on a par with cocaine and nicotine. Much as we think of “heartbreak” as a verbal expression of our pain or say we “can’t quit” someone, these are not actually artificial constructs—they are rooted in physical realities. How wonderful that science, and specifically images of our brains, should reveal that metaphors aren’t poetic flights of fancy.
But it’s important to note that heartbreak falls under the rubric of what psychologists who specialize in pain call “social pain”—the activation of pain in response to the loss of or threats to social connection. From an evolutionary perspective, the “social pain” of separation likely served a purpose back on the savannas that were the hunting and gathering grounds of our ancestors. There, safe exclusion of any kind, including separation from a group or one’s mate, signaled death, just as physical pain could signal a life-threatening injury. Psychologists reason that the neural circuitries of physical pain and emotional pain evolved to share the same pathways to alert p physical and emotional pain, when saber-toothed tigers lurked in the brush, were cues to pay close attention or risk death.
On the surface, that functionality wouldn’t seem terribly relevant now—after all, few of us risk attack by a wild animal charging at us from behind the lilacs at any given moment, and living alone doesn’t mean a slow, lonely death. But still, the pain is there to teach us something. It focuses our attention on significant social events and forces us to learn, correct, avoid, and move on.
When you look at social pain from this perspective, you have to acknowledge that in our society we’re often encouraged to hide it. We bottle it up. While of course it’s possible to be private about one’s pain and still deal with it, and it may not be so healthy to share your sob story with everyone you meet on the street, if you’re totally ignoring it and the survival theory holds true, then you’re putting yourself at risk because you’re not alerting others to a potential crisis.
The heartbreak pill?
Several studies, also using the hot probe + image + fMRI combo, have shown that looking at an image of a loved one actually reduces the experience of physical pain, in much the same way that, say, holding a loved one’s hand during a frightening or painful procedure does, or kissing a child’s boo-boo makes the tears go away. Science shows that love is effectively a painkiller, because it activates the same sections of brain stimulated by
moreover, the effects are actually quite strong.
On one level this suggests a wonderfully simple and elegant solution, albeit a New Agey one, to physical or emotional pain: All you need is love. And it bolsters the notion, faulty though it may be for some of us, that if you’re suffering from a broken heart, moving on fast can bring relief.
There’s a point, however, where this trend in fMRI research starts to enter a prickly realm: Because physical pain and emotional pain—like heartbreak—travel along the same pathways in the brain, as covered earlier, this means that theoretically they can be medically treated in the same way. In fact, researchers recently showed that acetaminophen—yep, regular old Tylenol—reduces the experience of social pain. “We have shown for the first time that acetaminophen, an over-the-counter medication commonly used to reduce physical pain, also reduces the pain of social rejection, at both neural and behavioral levels,” they write in their paper in the journal .
But some experts argue that the moment you put a toe on the slippery slope of popping pills to make you feel better emotionally, you have to wonder if doing so circumvents nature’s plan. You’re supposed to feel bad, to sit with it, to review what went wrong, even to the point of obsession, so that you learn your lesson and don’t make the same mistake again.
While they might not admit it, for biologists and psychologists, understanding love on a chemical level is tantamount to finding the holy grail. After all, the more we understand about love in terms of science . . . well then, the closer we are to understanding what makes humans human, an advance that might be on a par with physicists cracking the mystery of the space-time continuum.
Ultimately, all this progress points to one thing: treatment, with both painkillers and antiaddiction drugs. Perhaps recovering from heartbreak could be as simple as wearing a patch (Lovaderm!) or chewing a special gum (Lovorette!) or popping a pill (Alove!) that just makes the pain go away.
If you could take a pill that assured that you could fall in love, fall out of love, or stay in love on command, would you take it?
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About The Author
Meghan Laslocky is the author of the new book
(Plume, 2012), from which this essay is adapted. She lives in Oakland and is a graduate of Middlebury College and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
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