Tim Ferriss: Private Conference Call Info

July 12, 2011 by Dave Asprey

I just got off a private conference call with Tim Ferriss, NY Times best seller and author of one of the newest books on hacking your body. He spent an hour and a half answering questions from entrepreneurs like me, on topics as diverse as how to drive traffic to your site (he likes StumbleUpon), to workouts, to nutrition.

Tim’s written the book that’s closest to accurate of any book I’ve seen in the last 10 years. I’ve read literally hundreds of health and nutrition books, and researched 1300 articles on metabolism and brain function and food for my book on how to have a higher IQ baby starting in the womb. (baby hacking just isn’t a nice image, so it’s called The Better Baby Book) I run a non-profit anti-aging group that brings in world-class researchers every month to speak to an audience that includes some of the smartest biochemists and physicians I know.

And Tim got it right in The 4-Hour Body. We probably disagree on a few points – I like supplements more than he does – and the slow carb idea (beans) is just not as quick for weight loss or muscle mass as a high healthy fat diet. But overall, Tim talks about stuff that you just don’t read in any mainstream magazine. He knows the temperatures that oils go rancid at and recommends cooking with high temperature stable oils, for instance. The list goes on and on.

Bottom line: if you’re into looking and feeling better in less time, Tim’s odyssey as described in his book closely mirrors mine, and he comes to very similar results. Highly recommended!

Coffee, Chi, and Me: Coffee Replaces Chi-Gong Exercises

July 10, 2011 by Dave Asprey

“Previously, we found that qi-stimulating events exerted similar frequency-specific effects on the blood pressure pulse spectrum. Because coffee and qi induce similar stimulatory psychological responses, we aimed to determine whether they would induce similar pulse effects. Such a relationship would suggest a close linkage between the physiologic mechanisms underlying the psychostimulatory responses and vascular effects of coffee and qi. Therefore, the profound investigations into the mechanisms underlying the effects of coffee on the central nervous system and the vascular system may help to elucidate the underlying physiology mechanisms of qi.”

via greenmedinfo.com

This is one of the coolest studies I’ve come across in a while. Some creative biohackers in a biophysics laboratory in Taipei just showed that coffee causes the same changes in pulse rate that come from practicing Chi Kung, Chi Gong, Qi-Gong, Qi-Gung (or one of the other dozen ways to spell it). They just linked coffee to your life-energy.

In Eastern practices, chi is the life force that is strengthened by a variety of exercises, breathing techniques, visualization, and meditation techniques (collectively called Chi Gong). Chi is measurable as an electrical field, as a magnetic field, and through its effect on your pulse rate.

Some of my biohacking techniques use computer-assisted feedback to help me consciously change my pulse rate, which raises my chi levels and lets me sleep less (among other things). Chi is not a religion or a fairytale. It’s as measurable and repeatable as your heartbeat.

Biohacking and coffee are two of my favorite passions and topics for blogging. It is simply awesome that scientists were able to link the two and show that coffee and chi have very similar effects on the body.

For years, I’ve felt a remarkable similarity between a great cup of coffee and the “buzz” I get from practicing Eastern breathing techniques, or some forms of biohacking-assisted meditation. This is the first time I’ve seen evidence they are related.

What’s not included in the research I cite here is the fact that caffeine (or perhaps coffee, the research is unclear) reduces alpha waves in the brain. Alpha is the relaxed, alert state that is an antidote to stress. Chi meditation improves alpha, but coffee does not.

Nonetheless, I’m going to have to see what happens if I do a cup of Bulletproof® Coffee with butter and MCT, immediately followed by chi exercises. If you see a tall guy bouncing down the street, that will be me.

Study: J Altern Complement Med. 2008 Nov ;14(9):1145-50. PMID: 19055336

Kerrygold Introduces A Questionable New Butter

July 8, 2011 by Dave Asprey

Press Release: Kerrygold Introduces Reduced Fat and Naturally Softer Create New Functional Category for Real Butter

Kerrygold is creating a new functional category for real butter with the introduction of Kerrygold Naturally Softer Pure Irish Butter for easy spreading and Kerrygold Reduced Fat Irish Butter, with 25 percent less fat and 50 percent less sodium. Unlike current butter-type spreads, these premium butters contain no additives.

Kerrygold Reduced Fat Butter

Luxuriously rich-tasting, Kerrygold Reduced Fat Irish Butter, with 25% less fat and 50% less sodium than traditional butter, tastes like full-fat butter, retaining the same unctuous mouthfeel and luscious flavor qualities. Research shows that consumers want healthful, indulgent, premium food products. Kerrygold Reduced Fat Butter meets these conflicting demands without resorting to the use of additives such as vegetable oil blends or butter flavoring, ensuring a delicious, natural, functional butter option.

Hmm…”conflicting demands” indeed.

There are a lot of different kinds of butter out there, companies create products to meet the demand of their customers. This demand in particular comes from customers who are under the false assumption that butter is bad. Sometimes the customer (and even the USFDA) isn’t always right.

Low-fat is not the Bulletproof answer. A low-fat version of grass-fed butter is not healthier, and way less efficient for eating that grass-fed buttery goodness. Unsalted grass-fed Kerrygold contains 82% butter fat, whereas their lower-fat version only contains 60% butter fat.

There are many benefits of full fat grass-fed butter. Check out this infographic for why not all butter is created equal:

Kerrygold butter that is most Bulletproof® compliant is their unsalted, cultured, silver label. Their salted, uncultured, gold label butter is fine too and is good for cooking, but not good for coffee, because salted coffee is a crime (although it will do in a pinch). All Kerrygold butter (the new lower-fat option included) is better than standard grain-fed better. Grass-fed butter has a more robust nutrient profile, as well as improved texture and taste.

And if standard grain-fed butter isn’t great, fake butter like margarine is a disaster. Margarine is typically made of industrial vegetable oils that have been superheated and pressurized until they hydrogenate, becoming solid at room temperature. Margarine usually has dangerous trans fats and is oxidized and inflammatory. It also often looks and tastes disgusting after hydrogenation, so manufacturers add artificial butter flavoring and yellow coloring. Yuck. Why go to all that trouble when you could just eat good old Kerrygold or an equally reputable grass-fed butter?

How I Killed Jet Lag and Got More REM Sleep Too

June 28, 2011 by Dave Asprey

This post is about a very unlikely but very effective technique to increase performance. I predict it will be remembered as one of the more elegant biohacks of the decade for its simplicity and its broad effects. It could also be ignored completely, but I’m betting on Quantified Self data to make it hard to ignore. The technology is called electrical grounding or “earthing.” Before you (yes, YOU – the engineers) tune out, which is what I almost did, read the rest of this post. That’s all I ask.

In 2005, I was flying from the West Coast to Cambridge, England every month because I was an executive for a startup based there. Even with Virgin’s awesome seats, the jet lag from flying east was painful. I could kill it with a variety of chemical techniques and more complex nutritional approaches, but it was inconvenient and sub-optimal. I had heard about the idea that if you grounded yourself by walking barefoot on grass for 20 minutes, it made jetlag go away. I laughed at the idea. [Read more…] about How I Killed Jet Lag and Got More REM Sleep Too

How To Add 2.75 IQ Points Per Hour of Training

June 15, 2011 by Dave Asprey

The Wall Street Journal just publicized a scientifically proven technique you can use to increase your IQ. I have been recommending dual N-back exercises. I not only recommend it to my clients, but I have also been using it myself (since 2009) and I have had excellent results boosting my IQ at least 18 points (I took standardized IQ tests before and after).

From an efficiency perspective, that’s incredible. I gained 2.75 IQ points for every hour of brain training I did.

N-back exercise is simple – a grid of 9 squares is presented on screen:

Every few seconds one of the 8 squares of the grid (center one isn’t used) lights up with a colored box and a letter is spoken aloud. In each session, you are given twenty visual blocks, and twenty auditory letters. Your goal is to press the “L” key when a location (visual) match is presented, or the letter “A” when a spoken (audio) letter match is presented. The “N” value corresponds to the number of presentations you have to think back to in oder to compare the newly presented visual and audio with what occurred “N” turns ago. When your accuracy meets or exceeds eight percent, the software increases the difficulty by raising the value of N by 1. This forces you to remember more information at a time. You start with N = 2, or 2-back. Each session takes about twenty minutes to complete. It doesn’t really matter how high of “N” you reach–as long as you’re challenged, you’re raising your IQ.

Here’s a graph of my N level for my first 20 sessions (total of just 6.5 hours of training):

See how long I was stuck at N = 4? It took my brain a few days to adapt and forge new neural pathways, but once I broke beyond 4, I was immediately able to process far more information–look at the graph skyrocket as my brain adapted to handling more information at once.

The best part about N-back training is that it’s permanent. After the 20 sessions you see above I did no training for a full 8 months to see if I’d forget the skill and have to start over. The results were an astounding OPPOSITE of what I expected, as if my brain had further optimized itself during the 8 months off. Here are my scores for another 14 sessions 8 months after I started the training:

My max N level is currently 9–a level I would not have dreamed of reaching when I was stuck between 3 and 4 for days and days.

I’ve used a Zeo to track my sleep patterns after N-back training to see what my brain was up to the following night. The result? Drastically higher REM sleep percentages, often between 30-40% of sleep–proof enough that the N-back training boosts brain optimization significantly. One night my REM even exceeded light:

So what does a higher IQ get you?

1. Faster problem solving
N-back training teaches your brain to juggle more factors at the same time than it could before. If you’re trying to solve a problem, it’s extremely useful to be able to remember all the factors you know at once. A classic example would be running through look ahead moves in a chess game. If you don’t remember the 2nd and 3rd moves you planned, how can you design a strategy 5 moves ahead? N-back training is the answer.

2. A more insightful synthetic imagination
In Think And Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill talks about two kinds of imagination–synthetic imagination and creative imagination. Synthetic is the one we use the most. It’s when our brains combine existing known information and derive new insights from it, or see new patterns. Creative imagination is a bit different and involves flashes of insight that aren’t necessarily related to what we already know. (More on creative imagination later). I’ve noticed N-back training boosts my synthetic imagination significantly. After N-back training, you’ll be able to solve every day problems and tasks faster and more easily because you’ll “just see the answer,” and your academic or career performance will soar.

3. A better memory
I first noticed the effects when I unconsciously memorized restaurant take-out orders for 10 family members so I could call them in. My family was floored but I didn’t realize why. I thought it was normal until my family members told me they couldn’t do it without writing things down. Chalk it up to dual n-back training!

How do you start?

There’s an open source version of the software called Brain Workshop. I was actually one of the beta testers and found it difficult to use, and the default parameters are not Jaeggi, but it’s free!

You will find that any brain hacking you do is far easier when you’re on the Bulletproof Diet. The Healthy fats boost neurological development and brain mitochondrial function. The Bulletproof Diet along with Bulletproof Coffee is used today by artificial intelligence researchers to keep their brains sharp! While you can develop your mental powers on any diet, we found it was much easier and faster on an optimized diet.

Make IQ Hacking Easy

Make it easier on yourself and start eating more healthy fats and less performance robbing sugars and carbs. Its one of the best things you can do for yourself and it will make IQ hacking far more easier. I could not have upgraded my IQ as much as I did if it wasn’t for Bulletproof Coffee. The healthy fats in Bulletproof Coffee helps feed the energy hog in your head. The brain, by far, consumes the most amount of energy, more than any other organ in the human body, never mind IQ hacking, if your brain is hungry or not getting enough energy, you will find IQ hacking very frustrating.

For more IQ hacking tips check out Step 6: Upgrade Your Brain, Increase Your IQ and learn about all the awesome, cool toys you can use to upgrade your brain as well as supplements you can take (including nootropics), and the best foods for increasing IQ.

That’s it! If you give this a try, please let us know how you do in the comments here, or head to the Bulletproof Forums for community support. We appreciate all the feedback, its what keeps me going and it helps me help you 🙂

TEDxSF – Nicole Daedone Hacks the Female Orgasm

June 14, 2011 by Dave Asprey

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TEDxSF – Nicole Daedone – Orgasm: The Cure for Hunger in the Western Woman YouTube – TEDxSF – Nicole Daedone – Orgasm: The Cure for Hunger in the Western Woman.

Tim Ferriss wrote about the 15 minute female orgasm in the New York Times bestselling Four Hour Body and described Nicole Daedone’s work at OneTaste. In this TED video, explaining how her work came about, she also illustrates how biohacking and self quantification techniques helped her arrive at a teachable form of Orgasmic Meditation. At the end of this post, I describe some upcoming posts about orgasm and performance.

Watch the TED video above and listen to the process Nicole Daedone went through to create Orgasmic Meditation (OM). She made an observation – a mysterious man did something to her that she didn’t expect and couldn’t explain with her existing model of orgasm. She could have acted like most people and picked herself up, dusted herself off, and acted as if nothing had happened, but she didn’t. She did some things that smart biohackers do.

1) She set a goal for gathering data – to figure out how to consistently have more extended spiritual orgasms.

Many people, including Quantified Self biohackers like me, are guilty of gathering data when they don’t have a good reason for it. This is a good thing when the data gathering cost is zero and you have computing available to crunch unlimited near-meaningless data to tease out patterns. Nicole didn’t have those things, so she set a goal and gathered data relevant to it.

2) She relied on experts and existing research to point her in the right direction.

In this case, she looked into her own interest in Zen Buddhism, mystical Judaism, and semantics. Buddhists and Taoists are some of the original biohackers who have collected detailed accounts of biological and cognitive human behavior over generations, and boiled them down into a set of practices. As someone who used technology to reach an advanced, Japanese, Buddhist, Zen state that normally takes 20-40 years to attain in one week, I can attest to the Buddhist awareness of orgasm and sexual energy. It’s woven throughout many Buddhist practices and texts, depending on which branch.

How hard would it have been for Nicole to invent her practice without knowing about Zen as a starting point? Much of my biohacking would have been a waste of time if I hadn’t had existing research to help guide my data-driven efforts.

3) She tweaked, tested and measured.

She worked with, by her own account, thousands of women, tested, and refined her Orgasmic Meditation process until it was reliable. Note that she didn’t just measure, she tweaked her protocol, observed differences, and measured outcomes. Too many data-driven types fail to tweak protocols nearly often enough, making the mistake of measuring consistently but changing too infrequently. Nicole’s data is awesome – she can tell you more than 90% of women are most sensitive at 1:00, slightly above and to their left of the clitoris. It’s classical Quantified Self data-gathering, applied to a most sensitive (and fun) topic.

I’m writing about Nicole’s work for several reasons, including the fact that I have done some long-term research and testing on orgasms and productivity as well as how to biohack the orgasm.

Here on The Bulletproof® Executive, you’re about to see an analysis of orgasm on productivity for both men and women. (Hint: The results are not what you think!)

Plus, why do women get 15 minute orgasms while men get “several seconds” according to Wikipedia? Leave it to biohackers to fix the problem. Another upcoming post will shed some light on techniques that have produced male orgasms ranging from 5 minutes to at least 8.5 minutes.

Another upcoming post will explain why I chose to not have 8.5 minute orgasms anymore, and what affect that decision had on mood and performance.

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