"Panting, breathing heavily, after a series of well-coordinated plyometric exercises" you might think uniquely describes some recent incarnation of Crossfit or P90x. I was actually talking about a workout that I was run through by seasoned trainers back in 2004. Unfortunately, "new to you" has become the new innovation. But even the most cutting edge of exercise principles aren't just old, they're archaic.

The foundations of exercise science were laid in prehistory and haven't changed since. There are a finite number of joints in the body; and so there are a finite number of movements it can do. In reference to progression, matters are equally straight-forward. Taking a block of time, increasing the demand in a systematic manner within that time, and all in order to produce a desired performance or physiological output is what's known as periodization. It works on a principle of progressive overload within a prescribed timetable. No matter what late night infomercials or clever web advertisements tell you, it's not new. 

Russian strength coaches created complicated, intellectually rigorous and highly effective sports periodization for Olympic athletes more than 50 years ago. In fact, the ideas of homeostasis and adaptation in the context of athletic domain come directly in fully refined format to us from the late 19th century. Thank you, Walter Bradford Cannon, and (later) Hans Selye.

So what's the commotion all about when a new craze hits the scene? I can't tell actually. Every ancient society with a military had codified, effective exercise periodization AND an equally demanding and stratospherically potent mind-training. They needed the fastest, most powerful, most agile, most enduring force of human beings possible. Why wouldn't they?

I'm not trying to take anything away from anybody so much as put our modern practices in their proper historical context. Does anyone really believe that ANY gym is producing athletes who could go toe to toe with the AVERAGE Spartan hoplite? 

From the perspective of strength training, progressive overload has been around about as long as we can tell in written history. The sixth century BC figure, Milo of Croton, was allegedly capable of picking up a grown bull on his shoulders because, since childhood, he had daily lifted a baby calf, it ever growing bigger while he was ever growing stronger. 

Even after removing storytelling embellishment, it doesn't appear that our highest performing athletes have broken any ground that someone else didn't break thousands of years ago.

From the perspective of endurance training, all modern feats are a joke. Ultra-marathon, you say? Cute. The Native American Raramuri would run 200 miles through deadly canyon terrain, barefoot, without a break, and without someone handing them a goo packet or Gatorade every few miles.

Ironman or Tough Mudder? Read Xenophon's Anabasis. Over ten thousand Greek infantrymen traveled over 2000 miles on foot, over frozen mountain ranges, AFTER running out of food, with the added weight of supplies and arms, while being constantly hounded by a bloodthirsty army ten times larger.

MMA? Just a rehash of the ancient Pankration. Ever hear of the Colosseum, gladiators or Greco-roman wrestling? Almost three millennia ago there were commentaries detailing the intricacies of one school's technique on a heel hook or arm bar versus another. Frankly, just think about the name "martial arts." Their eastern forms long ago created what people are just now doing in Pilates, Barre and Yoga. If the Indus Script is ever agreeably deciphered, we may find that certain poses or breathing techniques in vogue now at your local studio date to 2600 BC. Rest assured that even before that Egyptian Pharaohs were learning what stance dealt the most powerful blow to an assassin without risking injury to oneself.

So what's the breakthrough? I don't know. In every other time and place, incredible physical feats were accomplished by the everyman. So our parle of fitness to the everyman isn't a breakthrough either. We do seem to have gotten a better hold on injury prevention, perhaps. Although, one wouldn't know this from reading any of the thousands of posts on Insanity Workout Injury forums.

And thus, the matter stands settled. Any movement that the human body can do has been done. I mean, really, each muscle group has only ever done what it has always done. Nearly every manner of progress has already been devised. Slap whatever label on it you like. As you try to create the impression that you just today innovated what the ancients long since invented, those who read this know the truth.

Except...

There does seem to be something somewhat new. I hesitate to say it, but it appears completely novel: you can grow stronger as you grow older. For the most part, all of the incredible feats of old were largely done by the young. In the modern era there are young feats being done by the old. In fact, our concepts of what constitute "age" are having to be rethought. A recent study showed that even 90 year olds will IMPROVE, not just maintain, when executing strength training.

You see, simply put, there are two types of muscle fibers. Type I is for endurance. It is trained by and responsible for long bouts of low level exertion. This is why "older" people can generally manage to stand or walk for relatively long periods of time if they haven't become completely sedentary. Type II is responsible for everything else: strength, power, speed and balance. It is trained most safely by strength. This is why "older" people might spontaneously lose their footing even if they're relatively active but don't do strength training.

And we now know that Type II muscle fibers aren't predetermined to deteriorate as the years go by, but only if they're left unchallenged. So challenge them. That means "heavy" resistance.

Strength: that is the measure of value for any new fitness fad. Not newness. There's nothing new under the sun anyway. Forget about who is endorsing it or whether or not it's an inventive technique from researchers at the such-and-such Institute. Does it challenge Type II muscle fibers, safely, effectively, with some sensible form of periodization? If so, then it could give you a shot at reversing aging. And if old can become young, that would actually be new.

The jury is in. In fact, it has been in for a very long time. No one was born irrevocably predetermined to become fat or anything else. Sorry. 

Thanks to the Enlightenment, humans could begin blaming all of their faults on the deterministic actions of matter in the universe. Thanks to Freud, humans could begin to blame their failures on being stuck in a developmental stage. And, much more recently, thanks to the Human Genome Project, we have all begun to update the Medieval "the devil made me do it" to "my genes made me do it." I mean, after all, taking responsibility sucks, right?

However, despite all of our hopes and dreams that we could blame everything on inherited genes, it just isn't so. First off, genetic expression changes throughout your life and is dependent on your every act, choice and environmental change. Second, various discoveries disproved that malarkey: http://dmm.biologists.org/content/6/1/236.abstract. After all, it is pretty preposterous, since no matter what your genetic makeup, people stranded on an island with almost no food don't grow fatter. 

Hey, it sure would be great. Imagine if you couldn't help yourself from having piles of cash stacked in scattered safety deposit boxes. Being a bank robber is just in your genes, so you couldn't help but collect all this money. But, alas, we all have to take responsibility for our actions and their outcomes, no matter how much we just want to believe that our taboo is externally induced.

Humans haven't become any more sophisticated in their fundamental desire to absolve themselves of all accountability. Point to the gods or the Higgs Boson. Your argument is the same. Headlines read "evolutionary biology discovery explains prevalence of rape." Really? If only we could prove that the most heinous acts in the universe were incontrovertibly fixed to happen, we could feel a lot better about our own little sins. Nope. You should've zagged when you zigged; and you had total control to do so. And you know it.

Yeah, yeah. I know. "Influence." Yes, genes, family, peers, mental disorders, addiction, etc. exert INFLUENCE. But influence is only influence. Influence isn't even potential. And potential isn't even actualized reality. It is scary. It's scary to say "I caved to these influences." It's an admission of weakness. And we all know admitting to weakness of character is much more difficult than blaming a condition. But you have to start somewhere to begin the change. And why not start with the only thing you can control: your reaction. You can't control others. You can't control who your parents were. So, why are you starting your change (or lack thereof) with talk about totally uncontrollable variables? Instead, let's focus on the empowering. You've got 168 hours of influence this week. Now go pick what you'll fill it with and how you react to it.

Have you ever thought, "I could cure my mind by getting my stomach in order?" Probably not. But a growing body of research is teaching us that gut health and intestinal flora may help explain and be the key to fixing psychological disorders. It could mean that better bacteria might make you become a better student, business person, wife, husband, athlete, speaker, or a happier, better human.

Though you have about a trillion cells making up your body, you have about 100 trillion bacteria. In fact, we are more "other biological creature" than we are ourselves. So, giving short shrift to caring for your microbial makeup will lead to some unhealthy living. More and more research efforts are aimed at uncovering the clear role that our microbes play in everything we encounter biologically, including cancer. Now, we are launching into the effect these critters have on our minds.

Want to be smarter, more powerful, less anxious, more dominant? Take a probiotic. Stop eating inflammatory foods. Maybe get a poop transplant. It sounds crazy. However, that is precisely what several teams have been working on. The last option, scientifically termed fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), has already been in extremely experimental medicine in hopes of curing a variety of diseases. However, recently researchers at McMaster University in Ontario confirmed that FMT even alters brain chemistry and behavior. Basically, when you take the intestinal flora from fearless mice and give it to anxious mice, the anxious mice become fearless.

The discovery isn't that shocking really, as the developing field of neurogastroenterology has already found a great number of our feelings and emotions originate in the gut, not the brain. Our post-enlightenment ideal of a pure machine of 1s and 0s sitting inside our skulls is simply not accurate. And Dr. Michael Gershon wrote "The Second Brain" in 1998 to let us all know it.

As you ponder what all this could mean, you may be wondering how exactly you change your own gut bacteria in order to become all you can be. Unfortunately, that answer is not entirely clear, yet. A few teams, like Ubiome, are working on mapping out gut bacteria in order to find the correlations between disease pathology, personality characteristics and specific strains of flora. But it's a long process. One day we may be able to select all the specific strains which make us live longer, healthier, less stressful and better lives and deselect the opposing ones.

In the meantime, what you can do is try to take as good care of your second brain as possible in three simple ways:

1.) Don't destroy your gut

- limit or eliminate all the offenders which irritate or damage gut lining and bacteria (this includes most grains)

2.) Rebuild your gut

- grassfed butter or ghee contains a compound which is uniquely productive for reducing pathogenic gut bacteria while engendering the growth of beneficial bacteria

3.) Repopulate your gut properly

- unfortunately, the strain of probiotic does matter a lot (far more than the count); and this is a complex subject which is not well-known or understood by even the most advanced nutritionists and medical practitioners; as already indicated in the article, each bacterium species and even subspecies is unique and acts differently in your body and interacts differently with other bacteria

- the short explanation is to avoid yogurt (i.e. - many fermented foods contain bacteria which paradoxically enough increase histamines and inflammation in the body, potentially even increasing your risk of certain cancers) and ensure that whatever supplement you do take includes these three: Lactobacillus plantarum, Bifidobacterium infantis, and Bifidobacterium longum (unless you plan on learning all the intricacies of microbiological bacteriology and dozens of different strains, just memorize "long infant plants" to remember these three for checking labels)

Billy Joel had it wrong when he exclaimed "Only the Good Die Young."

Analysis of over 16,000 individuals again confirms that the best predictors of mortality overall are sense of purpose and sense of community/family. This  recent research finding, published in the American Journal of Public Health, found that risk factors for mortality were being unmarried, infrequent involvement in religious activities, and being socially isolated.

This dovetails perfectly with what I've already written about in terms of managing perception of stress. Yes, nutrition and activity play a role, but ultimately are borne out of, reinforced or negated by one's sense of higher purpose and connection to community and/or family.

The National Geographic Blue Zones project began digging into these same factors now for over a decade, and I think that Dan Buettner's article on "The Island Where People Forget to Die" helps put a fine point on it: have incredible meaning in your life and have incredibly meaningful relationships.

Recently I visited a gym environment where I hadn't been in three years. Every single "regular" was more or less doing the exact same routine, complaining about the exact same shoulder issues and looked worse than they did when I last saw them. The skinny lean guys were still complaining about how they cannot gain 5 pounds of muscle; and the big guys were marching about with more belly fat than ever. You might be thinking, "well, Jonathan, you have to understand that as people age..." AND I'm going to cut you off right there. Not true. Have you ever read Martin Luther King Jr.'s letter from Birmingham Jail? Time is neutral. What are you going to fill it with? More of the same unevolved waste, because your pride is higher on your priorities than improvement? Or are you going to get a coach? You need one. We all do.

I get it. You already know everything. That's why surgeons just practice on pigeons at home. That's why music schools don't exist. That's why universities have never played an important role in the progress of anything. Sounds ridiculous? That's what my ear hears when people talk about not needing help in any area of their lives, especially fitness. I've seen the same people aimlessly pounding out endless hours in the gym to basically no avail for a decade. And this depressing fact is highlighted more every day as I age and continue improving, and as my clients and colleagues age and continue improving.

We have to start with your head and your pride. A good friend of mine used to daily paraphrase Henry Ford, saying, "whether you think you can or can't, either way you're right." So if you believe you have to devolve as time passes by, you're right. Except, you aren't right. How do you explain people like Dana Torres? They aren't just genetic freaks. I've worked with lots of people like this. The examples exist, challenging your paradigm. Now, you have to do something with that cognitive dissonance. You can either let it change your mind, or you can cynically come up with some excuse for why it doesn't apply. And then, again, whether you think you can or you can't, either way you're right. This is the number one reason why you need a coach. You need at least one person in your life showing you the "impossible" is possible on a regular basis.

A couple years ago NPR ran a segment on Sandy Palais (http://www.npr.org/2011/02/21/133776800/seniors-can-still-bulk-up-on-muscle-by-pressing-iron). For the first 63 years of her life she knew everything. It netted her osteoporosis. Never having done serious strength training before, she swallowed her pride, worked with some trainers and at 73 she could Deadlift 165 pounds. Does that sound like we're predetermined to degenerate as we age? We aren't. You can put away whatever equivocations you're already building in your mind about her, because she didn't have a very fit starting point and her routine isn't even that streamlined. It's just decent.

But your pride is still there, keeping you depressed, disempowered, making excuses, thinking no one could possibly have something different that's helpful.  You've built up all kinds of slick coping mechanisms so that you won't listen to anyone about anything: "I don't want to get too bulky;" "I don't want to get too skinny;" "everyone in my family has high cholesterol;" "I know what to do, I just don't do it." You know what? Save it. I've done over 10,000 consults and I've heard it all. A coach is someone there to help you go through the deep internal change about which you're unwilling, unwitting and incapable of doing efficiently on your own.

Yes, there are all of the fundamentals: your program design and form is garbage; your workout regimen is based on thirty year old wisdom that was wrong back then; your chiropractor, nutritionist, last trainer, orthopedic surgeon, gp, and physical therapist all told you the wrong advice; you don't know about food sensitivities, inflammation, controlled ketosis, nutrient timing, biorhythms, effective supplementation, citizen medicine, and the like. Obviously, you need a coach because you don't even know enough to know that you don't know anything. However, I'm not even talking about that. Let's say you are extremely advanced, you've worked several thousand hours in the wellness industry and you KNOW what you are doing. The second you stop seeking coaches and new mentorship your skill set is passé and your knowledge base outside of your troubleshooting experience is obsolete. Sorry folks, that is just status quo in every industry nowadays.

So, again, I get it. Good coaches are expensive and you're broke. That's why the trillion dollar tobacco industry is primarily funded by the lower third of the  socioeconomic ladder. That's why the porn industry yearly revenue tops $57 billion. Guess what. People have, are and will continue to spend tons of money on vices and pointless purchases, oftentimes with money they don't even have (the AVERAGE American credit card debt is almost $16,000). So why do we still have this stigma about seeking help with fitness, nutrition, wellness and stress management? Without these pillars, people can't even function. But yet we have to shame ourselves and each other about going to a trainer or a therapist. Should I chide you for paying "just to have someone keep you company while you play the piano"? Should I chide you for paying someone "just to keep you company while you read your Calculus text book"? I mean, why bother even letting assisted self-improvement enter the conversation when it's so much easier to act self-righteous and self-medicate with a variety of dirty little secrets? The reality is that every person who hasn't admitted they needed help and paid for it in healthy ways has paid for some really unhealthy ways to cope instead. But they keep it a secret.

Listen, I don't have any health issues because I take care of myself and I have been fortunate. Yet I have to pay top dollar on premiums, health care and taxes because you don't. So, let's not play the "expensive" game. Your pride costs you AND others more than several years of working with the most elite professionals in the world.

Everyone needs a coach. Even the best coaches need coaches. Even you. Even me. But if you think you can't learn anything new and it's not worth it and you don't have time, either way you're right.

Infants (the demographic with the lowest incidence of chronic disease and most positive central nervous system regulation) do best when they drink breast milk. There are some rare abnormalities, like chylothorax, wherein this isn't the case; but generally it's true. Breast milk content varies, but on average the macronutrient content in energy (as opposed to volume) is about 50% fat, 10% protein and 40% carbohydrates. Babies are growing rapidly, thus their carbohydrate needs are relatively high.

How does this instruct us as adults? Well, if you're in a rapid growth cycle like babies, which really only pertains to bodybuilders or people trying to accelerate their cancer cell production, then you want to move your carbohydrate intake up to 40% or more. It will raise blood sugar, stimulating the pancreas to produce insulin which grows ALL TISSUE especially those cells which are upregulated for growth. Upregulated cells would include muscle cells after a workout, or cancer cells if you have cancer, or fat cells if you are sedentary. Also, insulin creates insulin resistance, leading to degeneration and aging.

What does all that mean? If you are trying to maintain or have moderate increases in strength or muscle, carbohydrate intake other than fiber should be severely limited, except immediately following some workouts and/or in the evening when fat cells are most difficult to grow. If you are really active, like a 90 year old Okinawan karate teacher on his feet all day, then you might benefit from a little more white rice in the diet.

By virtue of decreasing carbohydrate percentage, this means that your fat and/or protein intake will go up. If you want to grow fat at half the rate of a baby, there is a strong argument that a good balanced diet should look like 60% fat, 20% protein, 20% carbohydrates (again, not including fiber).

If you don't want to grow fat at all, especially if your activity level isn't very high (keep in mind, kids move a lot more than you, and nature doesn't peg their carb needs higher than 50% of total calories), then dietary fat most likely should be higher. If you haven't done any heavy lifting, 15% or fewer calories coming from protein is probably fine, meaning fat percentage could go as high as 80+%.

If you still think that dietary fat intake increases your risk of heart disease or some other ideas pulled from 1950s American nutrition science, please please please watch Gary Taubes' Googletech talk for free online and read my earlier blog posts.

Prevent Dementia

http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/09/high-blood-sugar-linked-to-dementia/?_r=0

One of my clients sent me this link to a very recent Times article. In case it's news to anyone, I thought I might share it, along with some notes.

Basically, these data gatherers found that the overall lower your blood sugar trends, the smarter you'll be and the more protected your brain will be forever. It's not news. There have been a number of studies finding that insulin resistance, thus neural cell death, occurs 10-20 years before you have any fasting sugars or A1c reading that trend high. By the time you have a diagnosis of Alzheimer's or dementia your were pulling fasting blood sugars in the high 90s and low 100s for 30 years and never did anything about it because you weren't diagnosed with diabetes. Sugar and insulin cross the blood brain barrier and contribute to dysfunction of receptors within the cells of your central nervous system.

A fat burning metabolism, insulin sensitivity and controlled carbohydrate intake are absolutely essential to living the best life you can.

Imagine troubleshooting and coaching a client to get solid sleep when she has a specific disorder. The relationships within physiology are so complex that the sharpest sleep disorder medical professionals typically throw up their hands even after data gathering in a sleep study. They might put a patient on a CPAP and/or a sleep aid drug. But imagine your client wants to re-instruct her body on how to sleep solidly naturally. No drugs. No machines. Try the usual suspects: black out curtains, white noise, breathing techniques and meditation, melatonin, 5-HTP, theanine, licorice root, tea, elimination of night time alcohol, mineral balance and hydration issues, reduction of stress, elimination of inflammatory foods, balance of estrogen dominance, etc. Would you have stricken the ratios just right or figured out that pre-bedtime consumption of modified slow-absorption carbohydrates would be the linchpin? I wouldn't have either, until about a year ago. But I've been getting smarter.

Understanding extremely complex relationships and problem solving within them is the product of many things. There is a baseline of knowledge needed, an inquisitive nature, but also a handle on how to fit various abstractions in their "proper place." Believe it or not, spatial intelligence plays a major role.

Now I wouldn't say I was a spatial relationship idiot who has become a savant. I built things when I was a kid; and I've always been able to perform the abstract version of spatial intelligence: logic, reasoning, argumentation. But the quintessential measure of concrete spatial intelligence
(http://www.iqtestexperts.com/iq-rubik.php) always eluded me.

I could never crack the Rubik's cube. I just couldn't quite get a handle on how to move what out of the way in order to achieve symmetry and completeness in a finished design. I'd get a side or two, maybe three or more. And I wouldn't want to mess it up to get to the next place. And I wouldn't understand how to temporarily "mess it up" to un "mess it up."

I tried the cube a few times as a child and once as a teenager. After quitting, I presumed I was born without that particular capacity, which suited me just fine, since I was an artist and musician.

However, in my heated endeavor to expand my brain over the past 7 months, I decided I needed to take on mental skills which I just never seemed to have. Well, solving the Rubik's cube was one of them.

So, I bought a standard Rubik's brand 3x3x3 cube and committed myself to getting a handle on the darn thing without ever removing and replacing a single sticker.

Yes, I did consult tutorials, which, by the way, do not do a bit of good for someone who hasn't played with a Rubik's cube in 18 years. The tutorials made no sense. Even watching videos in slow motion didn't help... at first. You've got to figure, most of these things are made by people for whom the skill is intuitive. So their teaching method sucks; and their ability to make this foreign language into something native is more or less worthless.

But then... something happened. As I studied this impossible matrix of colors, the relationships eventually became transparent. Moving a piece several times through an x axis, y axis and z axis in order to reach a new pattern of organization just became fluid.

So how long does it take to acquire the skill? I'd say prepare yourself for 20-60 minutes a day for a week or two. But then, it's a cinch. And you will notice that your mental faculty for abstract spatial relationship does improve. I can reason better than I did before getting into cubing; and I can certainly look at physical configurations and much more rapidly get a handle on their relationship.

Hold yourself to realistic standards, recognizing that the world record holders for cubing have spent over 10,000 hours on this; and a cube solve for them has converted to pattern recognition followed by involuntary finger dexterity. It pretty much isn't even an exercise in spatial relationship intelligence anymore for them.

Once you "get it," initially you'll find that your solve times vary, until you learn how to attack different "problems." When I finally thought I had a good hold on things, it might take me 10 minutes once and 15 the next. Once I finally was consistently getting 90 second solves, I moved onto the Rubik's revenge, which is a 4x4x4 cube. Unlike every doofus on the internet says, it is not "pretty much" like the 3x3x3. You have to learn a whole new set of skills. Some transfer over. When I consistently was getting sub 5 minute solves on that, I moved onto the Professor's Cube, which is 5x5x5. It also has a few parities which muss things up a bit. I could solve it consistently around 15 minutes, and have now moved on to the 7x7x7 and up and the Gigaminx, which is not a cube at all but a 12 sided dodecahedron with layers of odd shaped pieces.

Again, I want to impress upon the reader that I had never solved a simple cube before the age of 31. Now I work on the big ones. We are able to build new neural pathways and change ourselves dramatically.

Want to find out how else you can expand your mind and self? Stay tuned for Get Smarter, part 3 and on.

Imagine sitting at a stop sign and a vehicle turning too widely scrapes its rear corner against yours. As you begin to realize what just happened, you look in your rear view mirror to see the same car smash headlong into the front driver side of the car behind you. The offender flees the scene almost hitting a line of cars all now swerving out of his reckless way; and he is off in the distance out of sight all in an instant. Are you ok? Is the lady in her van behind you ok? You call 911 and have to describe the white dodge caravan with license plate... the license plate which was barely visible and for only a second or so. It was flipped, because you saw it in your mirror and you weren't "paying attention" to that seemingly inconsequential detail. Would you remember it? I wouldn't have, prior to February. But I just did. I would like to think my focus, cognition and memory were generally above average through most of my life. However, since February, I've expanded into some new and interesting areas which, from time to time, showcase themselves in real world execution like the example above.

Brain training has become a bit more in vogue with programs like Lumosity, and a little farther back with Brain Age on the Nintendo DS. There are apps. There are huge bodies of research on how to expand the mind and keep the brain young by exploring and pursuing new mental challenges: new languages, sudoku, crossword puzzles, logic puzzles, art, music, math, history, speaking, writing, reading - you name it. And I've already written a little about how much improvement I've seen in intensity of focus over long periods of time by getting one's fitness and nutrition dialed in. Every day there is a growing body of evidence mounting to show how you can stop, prevent or reverse central nervous system disorders with really simple regular exercise and dietarily controlling inflammation. Think how much more can you optimize a healthy CNS by practicing some of the same AND directly training the brain.

So, I decided I'd share, more specifically, a few of these "brain hacks" insomuch as I have personally experienced them in a Get Smarter series.

Part 1: Active Memory

Active memory is applicable to a lot of different cognitive tasks; and arguably it is the best measure of intellect. Frankly, there is no totally agreed upon metric of intelligence. There are different IQ tests with different emphases and different scaling. I like Piagetian and non-piagetian ideas of cognitive development. Thus the debate over if an adult can improve IQ substantially or if it's even a valid talking point or how speed of processing plays into all this I'm leaving for another time. Provisionally, I think it's safe to say that active memory (aka - primary or short-term memory) is an important indicator nonetheless. And improvement is possible for those who believe it is possible. So we'll consider this in part 1.

Over a year ago I became aware of a program which measures and builds active memory. It is available as an app, called Dual N-Back. At each level it visually lights up a square and via audio says a letter in randomized sequences wherein the sound and the picture are not synched AND follow disconnected sequences. So, simultaneously you must remember an unconnected sound and an unconnected  visual cue. Over each level you have to remember these two streams of disconnected information over longer and longer sequences, learning to hold onto the information as long as you need it and throwing away the old sequence when it is no longer applicable. My description is actually much less complicated and confusing than the actual game. The game is difficult, frustrating, maddening, but ultimately works.

Your brain fights the game, wanting to do something else. Only the dedicated will reap the benefits. Various Internet experts have worked on a protocol of 21 days in a row of dedicated 20-40 minute daily Dual N-Back training. Instead, starting in February I tried a few months of two or three days a week at 2-12 minutes.

As I played the game I noticed that "how" you think changes. I began learning different ways and skills to encode information. The brain's neuroplastic resistance is interpreted as boredom, frustration or anger.  I found that, at first try, even simultaneously remembering three letters and three unconnected visual cues which keep changing and recognizing them fluidly and accurately seemed impossible. I could not understand how I would "get it". But through force of will, my mind changed. And eventually 4-back became effortless.

Then 5-back became natural. And so on, up to 10. If you haven't experienced the game, it will be extraordinarily difficult for you to understand just how hard it is, or just how rewarding progress in it feels. So I encourage the reader to download the app or one of the related ones and at least give it a couple tries.

The most profound effect I found was an increase in my ability to juggle lots of incoming information and interpret the honesty or dishonesty, logical or illogical in people's words, body language and intonation and delivery synthesized at the same time. That is, you will find you just think more clearly, much less influenced by distracting emotion. Other not-immediately recognized benefits were, like during the hit and run, the ability to imprint important information while experiencing something stressful.

I've included this graph of my performance, and more or less what you can expect with even limited bouts of training it. I'm currently taking a year off of this program to see if after 12 months I retain program specific performance. The down ticks in the graph are days when I opened the program but was interrupted before playing more than a couple minutes.

If you're wanting to increase your ability to remember people's names or something similar, what you're looking for is long term memory enhancements, only the beginnings of which (via improved focus) will you get from Dual N-Back. For that and more, stay tuned for part 2 and on.

Yep, it's that time of year again, when a group of researchers tries to challenge the status quo. Good for them. However, the takeaway summary of the findings has no connection to the actual findings. Shocker.

Headlines read "Fish Oil May Increase Risk of Prostate Cancer." Based on a study published on July 11th in the Journal of The National Cancer Institute, sensationalism is sweeping the media. And of course this makes total sense because prostate cancer is out of control in Okinawa, the Mediterranean and among Arctic Natives who have a diet with 100 times more fish oil than the rest of us. Oh wait,  those people have the lowest incidence of prostate cancer in the history of mankind.

So what's going on? It's the classic case of find a correlation, make an inductive leap and then draw the line of causation the wrong way. It's been happening with cholesterol, red meat, and Fish oil. However, this isn't the first time fish oil has come under scrutiny. About a year ago a study found that fish oil doesn't work because "high risk cardiovascular disease individuals aren't magically cured when they take ultra low fish oil intake for six months." Again, shocker.

So back to the subject. It's simple really.  Whenever humans are in a growth cycle, they make more Omega3s. Yes, that's right, we make Omega3s. It's not entirely clear if this is to help with homeostasis (countering inflammation with anti-inflammation) or if it's to improve sheaths and cell membranes as they grow. Either way, whenever your body grows, whether taller, bigger, stronger, pregnant or tumorous, you're likely to see a statistically significant increase in Omega3s.

What the actual study measured was, among men with prostate cancer, did their bodies have higher Omega3 blood serum levels? Yes. Some did. This is not a surprise as the body will automatically do this. It has nothing to do with what their consumption of fish oil was, or if some genetic mutations could take fish oil and use it to create a cancer.

To maybe put it in better perspective, certain cancers also cause increased blood serum levels of antibodies. Does this mean that vitamin C gives you prostate cancer? These headlines would have you think so.