Category: Makes You Think

This category covers things that relate probably require some reflection and some time to allow your brain to process more completely. It will be the largest category because the aim of this site is to get people to shift their thinking in some way and to create a new “normal” state. It is safe to say that any post that is included in this category will probably present you with a new piece of information, a new way of looking at something, or a different take on what is already considered common sense or common knowledge.

Out Of Body Experiences Induced By VR

Studies Report Inducing Out-of-Body Experience by SANDRA BLAKESLEE of the New York Times gets me thinking about how we manufacture our experience of reality.

Using virtual-reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside of one’s own body — in ordinary, healthy people, according to studies being published today in the journal Science.
The research reveals that “the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said one expert on body and mind, Dr. Matthew M. Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University.
Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one’s body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Dr. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.
The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.

This is another example of how the brain can interpret information and perceive something that doesn’t exist. Not necessarily a big deal but if it can make these types of mistakes with sensory stream information, what is the error potential for thought stream information?

Anti-aging Drugs And Performance

Drug Test – A Cautionary Tale is a first hand account to see the impact that taking anti-aging drugs has on long distance cycling and performance. Over an 8 month period, and a price tag of over $7000, the author uses a combination of human growth hormone, EPO, deca and testosterone and finds the boost he was looking for.

The entire experience was done under doctor supervision and is completely legal in the US.

… I remained skeptical about all the drugs until March 29, when I rode an event along the central coast of California, the Solvang Double Century, at what for me was a fast and hard pace, finishing in around 11.5 hours. About ten hours in, it dawned on me that something was definitely happening. Sure, I’d been training hard, but I’d done enough of that to know what to expect. All around me were riders—good, strong riders—who looked as worn out as you’d expect after ten hours in the saddle. I was tired, but I felt curiously strong, annoyingly talkative and fresh, eager to hammer the last 40 miles.
The last time I’d ridden 200 miles, I felt awful the next day, like I’d been hit by a truck. After the Solvang race I woke up and felt hardly a touch of soreness. I also felt like I could easily ride another 200, and I realized that I’d entered another world, the realm of instant recovery. I’ll be frank: It was a reassuring kind of world, and I could see why people might want to stay there.
When I checked in with the good doctor soon after the race, he wasn’t surprised about what I’d experienced. “With your hematocrit levels higher, you don’t produce as much lactic acid, which means you can ride harder, longer, with less stress. The growth hormone and testosterone help you recover faster, since you’re stronger to start with and recover more quickly. All those little muscle tears repair much more quickly.”

My Thoughts On Facebook

I signed up for a Facebook account in May and I deleted it last Thursday. I had it for about 12 weeks although I didn’t log into it in July or August other than to delete it. The site is fantastic; it’s very easy to use and offers a lot of features to make the experience simple and straightforward.

What it is good for:

1) Social networking for people who like being online. If you are one of these people you will really enjoy it because a lot of your present and past peers are on there.

2) Helping to remember your past. Initially my brain came alive because I saw the names and faces of so many people I used to go to school with. Given that I didn’t keep in contact with many of my high school friends, I haven’t had the chance to reminisce these memories into my long-term conscious awareness. At the beginning, it was fun to remember the parties, trips and random acts of my youth.

3) Reconnecting with old friends and acquaintances. Being able to exchange emails with people I used to know was fun. Seeing how their lives have evolved and what they have become was eye opening. It was shocking to see just how few of them DIDN’T end up doing what you thought they’d be doing – it seems that people don’t change, even as they continue into their mid 30’s they remain very much the same.

4) Creating a visual and interactive time line of your past through life experience mapping. Probably the best thing about facebook was the ability to look at your social time line and see how you knew the people you did. It was particularly good to see when and where I worked, whom I lived with and how and when someone came into my life.

Why I deleted my account:

1) It is time consuming. They call it “facebook crack” because it is so easy to lose yourself in it. When you are engaging the site, it feels like you are doing something important because your brain is very active. While not real work it does have the feeling that it is improving the quality of your life. After a while I started to become aware that it was taking up more of my time than I had really intended to give it. After that, I stopped logging in.

2) It fosters a sense of obligation to people who I may never come in contact with otherwise. I’m used to getting email from people I know or work with, so I’m used to spending time replying to them because there is a pre-existing relationship that needs to be maintained or because my job depends on it. I had fewer interactions with my close friends on facebook than I did with people I hadn’t seen in years. While I have implicitly agreed to engage my friends and co-workers, I never agreed to engage strangers. When I began for feel a sense of obligation to interact with people I haven’t known for more than a decade, I made the call that it was time to eliminate this potential source of stress from my life.

3) I stopped enjoying it. The shine wore off very quickly. As cool as it was to see how my old peers were doing, voyeuristic glancing at their life has a short shelf life. In fact, after I recreated my life time line, I got very little else out of the experience. I am not a facebook pro and I’m not particularly social. My best and most rewarding interactions are face-to-face conversations, usually one on one and about something that requires a lot more communication than a 5-line message. They tend also to rely heavily on non-verbal communication and immediate feedback. For these reasons, I wasn’t going to enjoy facebook for every long.

Shortening Your Life By Too Much Exercise?

I was hanging out with Tony and I mentioned that I figured I was going to die young from a heart attack. Tony agreed so quickly that it kind of scared me. “You think I’m right?” He says “yeah. There’s a cost to all the adaptation that you are forcing your body to go through.” We riff off of that for a while before the conversation returns to something I don’t recall because I was too busy thinking about my rapidly approaching death.

He’s right, there is a cost to adapting to the physical stress I put my body under. Any environmental change forces the body to maintain homeostasis or adjust and create a new stasis, both of these responses require energy. Anytime your body liberates energy from food (digestion and absorption) and anytime it utilizes energy for biological functions, a chemical reaction occurs that gives off pollution in the form of free radicals and other chemicals. We can conclude that anything a person does to increase the amount of energy they use will increase the amount of pollution that is released within the body.

The inverse is also true, anything you do that lowers the amount of energy you utilize will decrease the amount of pollution that is released. The significance of this comes to light when we consider the claims of health practitioners that participating in frequent exercise will increase your health and will increase life expectancy. If their claim is true, exercise must do something to the body that causes it to eventually use less energy as a consequence to having performed the exercise than it uses directly to perform the exercise. Most people experience this benefit as a lowering of the resting heart rate.

Finite Beat Life – I’m not sure about the science behind the belief that the hearts life span is measured in beats vs. age – once it beats that predetermined number of times, it stops working. If this is the case, you should try to lower the amount of work that the heart does. You can either do less work or, you can make the heart stronger so it does more work per beat.

For example, I have a resting heart rate of about 48 beats per minute (BPM). The average resting heart rate is about 72 BPM. At rest, my heart beats 24 fewer times than an average persons – every 2 minutes my heart is saving 1 minute worth of work. My math may be a little off, but that is a saving of about 33%. At rest, I am using 33% less energy because I have trained my heart to work more efficiently. To me, that’s a huge saving of beats; given that most of my day is spent in a resting type state.

It takes a lot of effort to make your heart stronger, but all in all, the amount of beats that are required to lower you resting heart rate to 48 BPM is probably equal to the amount of beats the you save because your heart rate is lower. Lets call it a wash. You are no better off from the finite beat perspective but you do have better overall health due to your more active state. There is a net gain and you are healthier.

However, it requires a lot less to maintain the fitness required to have a resting heart rate of 48 BPM – 3 X 30 minute working segments of working the heart at 150 BPM per week. That works out to be 13500 heart beats (150 X 90). 90 minutes of rest for an average heart = 6480 beats.

When we calculate the daily heart beats for a trained heart and an average heart we get 78300 for trained and 103680 for the untrained. That is a difference of 25380 beats per day. From a finite beats perspective, you are WAY better off having a trained heart because even with the work required to maintain its health, your heart will work about 25% less. This is all good provided your finite beat life is long.

Shortening your life by working out too much – Am I shortening my life by teaching 5 cycling classes and taking two 3 hour bike rides a week? Yes, absolutely. Sure, I’m aging at 2/3rds the rate when I’m at rest, but since I’m exercising 8.5 hours more than I need to maintain a lower rate, I’m created way more internal pollution and excess heart beats than I would if I just worked out at the maintenance level.

The Most Dynamic Shift

At the beginning of May I read Shama Hyder’s blog post The Most Dynamic Shift.

Here is a quick beliefs check:
The last time that something went wrong, your first reaction was…
a) To go into super hero mode. Who needs saving?
b) To take some time out and create a strategic plan of action.
c) To ask-What in me is causing this distress or this situation?
If you chose C, then you are building on solid ground. Until you realize that you are 100% responsible for EVERYTHING in the world, you continue to use the law of attraction in vain. You can create only when you have power, and the only way you can have power is to realize that the world is a reflection of yourself….The outer world is a reflection of your internal state.

I didn’t choose C (I went for A) so the post stuck with me. I stared it in my news reader and came back to it a couple of times to make sure I understood why C is a better choice.

This week when I heard myself telling a friend that the stress they are experiencing in their life is a result of the world that they are creating around themselves I realized that I finally understood what Shama was getting at. The objective experience of the world is usually very different from the subjective experience of the world. You are free to create your subjective experience – you have been doing this since you became consciously aware. If you find yourself in a victim role, you have created this role and made the decision to fill it. If you find yourself as a VP of a company enjoying all the success you deserve, it is because you have chosen to experience the world as a place that allows you to achieve your success potential.

This lesson is only valuable when you actually start viewing yourself as responsible for what you are experiencing and take appropriate actions to control it. My first urge to try to save people may be altruistic but it isn’t pragmatic so it isn’t going to yield the greatest positive result. Seeing yourself as responsible for the situation immediately is going to increase the likelihood that the situation is avoided in the future; which in the long run should decrease negative outcomes.

Too Much Liquid Diet, Not Enough Whole Food

At the end of April I set the goal of achieving my race weight of 168 pounds with a body fat percentage of about 8-9%. I hit this mark a few weeks before my first race at the end of May, but got a new job which took away from my training a little so that was the weight I competed at.

I rode lighter at the Summer Solstice – about 165 with a body fat percentage of around 8%. I felt strong and really enjoyed the increase acceleration that being lighter affords a rider, but it wasn’t the most comfortable race because I over did it with the liquid diet a little.

I eat a lot of oatmeal. I mix water, raw quick oats with whey protein powder and dextrose and drink it for breakfast, before working out or riding and a couple of other time throughout the day. My issue during the race was that I had eaten too much whey powder in the days leading up to the race and not enough whole food. At night I have a protein shake beside my bed that I’ll sip during the night to make sure there is a steady supply of protein during the night-time rebuilding phase.

My like consuming liquid meals because they do not tax the digestive system nearly as much and allow for gastric emptying to occur more quickly than it would with whole food; gastric emptying needs to occur before the bulk of the nutrients can be absorbed into the blood stream to refuel or repair the body. The problem was that I went for a cheaper quality whey powder because I was eating so much of it instead of buying my normal powder which is enriched with digestive enzymes. A decrease in the amount of available digestive enzymes when coupled with an increase in the amount of whey powder being consumed, lead to incomplete digestion of much of the protein. The consequence was a dramatic increase in gas. While this did not impact my riding to any degree, it was kind of uncomfortable and a little unpleasant for those around me.

The cure is simple, eat whole food and lay off the protein powder so I gorged on chicken, ribs and French fries the evening after the race and everything went back to normal. After taking a couple of days away from the protein powder my natural ability to digest and process whey protein has returned to normal so I’ve started eating it again, but less frequently. The issues are gone and the lesson has been learned. Having gas is not a natural state for the body and should be taken as an indication that something is going wrong.

An Interview with Dr. Christopher Mohr

You may not have heard of him before but you’ve likely seen some of his work – he was the nutrition consultant for LL Cool J’s book “Platinum Workout”.

T-nation’s Chris Shugart asks Dr. Mohr to weigh in on a number of topics on this thread. I really liked his advice about low carb vs. low fat.

When looking at carbs vs. fat for weight loss, let’s look at some of the research. First, any reduced calorie diet is necessary for weight loss, whether that reduction comes from carbs or from fat. I understand that there are some intricacies with each, so I’m not recommending a blind reduction in calories, as long as it’s a reduction. I’m all about nutrient quality and would rather have folks focus on eating a high nutrient diet rather than looking for anything that remotely resembles a carbohydrate and acting as if it’s kryptonite.
Now, there are data supporting both lower carbohydrate approaches and lower fat approaches. That basically means whatever you want to believe in can work — and there’s data to support it. However, what’s most important, and this data has been shown most recently in a publication in JAMA, is adherence to a program. It’s not as much about carbs or fat as it is about you following something… anything!

Pick one, stick with it and you’ll get results.

Personal Integrity And Giving Advice

When I read the following (I first saw it in the book “Way of the Peaceful Warrior”) I am reminded of the importance of modeling the advice we are giving:

A mother brought her son to Mahatma Ghandi. She begged, “Please, Mahatma. Tell my son to stop eating sugar.” Mahatma paused, then said, “Bring your son back in two weeks.”
Puzzled, the woman thanked him and said that she would do as he asked. Two weeks later, she returned with her son. Ghandi looked the youngster in the eye and said, “Stop eating sugar.”
Grateful but bewildered, the woman asked, “Why did you tell me to bring him back in two weeks? You could have told him the same thing then.” Ghandi replied, “Two weeks ago, I was eating sugar.”

People Aren’t Lucky, They Make Their Own Luck

My second boss with GoodLife Fitness clubs was a women named Julie, a very bright person with a very easy way about her – everyone likes her because she gives off a positive genuine vibe. She understands people, she doesn’t keep them waiting and she is brutally honest in the most caring way. She called me on my crap when she needed to but in a way that made me realize I could do better.

One thing Julie doesn’t have time for are excuses that factor in luck as a reason for ones success. She doesn’t believe in luck. “Frankly,” she said, “when someone blames their lack of success on a short coming of luck they are really saying that they haven’t worked hard enough to be successful.”

She cited an example of a cheap trip she found on line. The price was really low and the vacation was great value. When she mentioned to some of her friends that she finally got the deal she was looking for some of them said that she was lucky. She didn’t think it was luck at all. In fact, she knew exactly how she came to get the trip so cheap.

Once she decided that she wanted to take the trip, she would check 3 or 4 on line retailers for their specials. It took almost no time and she was already logged into the Internet to check email. The first thing she did in the morning and the last thing at night was to check these sites. After just less than a month she finally found what she was looking for and bought the tickets immediately.

All tolled, it probably didn’t take more than about 15 minutes to check 4 sites on 50 separate occasions, but it did require her sustained effort. Her point is that she wasn’t lucky, she was determined. Her view is that there is a huge difference between the two. You can control your determination, you cannot control your luck. Any reference to luck immediately places you in role of victim and removes your control of a situation.

Breaking-Up – The Fundamental Attribution Error

A friend recently broke up with her boy friend of a couple of years. It had been obvious to all those who knew them that the split was inevitable but when it came, he seemed to take it a little harder than she did. He’s a really dedicated and hard worker and directed a lot of his energies into his career. As a consequence, he hadn’t taken the time to deal with the impending break-up as she did – while it didn’t take him completely by surprise, he was a little annoyed that she didn’t seem to be hurting as much about it as he did. In truth, she had been morning the loss in her own way for a long time before the actual break-up.

In his pain he lashed out at her with some hurtful words, stormed out, and drove away. When I talked to her about it, she said that while it was a little out of character, she wasn’t going to hold it against him because the situation is one that is completely out of the norm. Their relationship had been good, it had run its course and it was time to move on. His behavior at the end struck her as being completely different that she concluded it had to have more to do with the situation than the individual thus avoiding the fundamental attribution error..

We make the fundamental attribution error anytime we assume that dispositional or personality traits play a great role in determining someones behavior than situational factors do. There are many examples of this, but one of my favorite deals with two basketball players shooting free throws. With one of them, the lights are on high allowing them to make more baskets and with the other one, the lights are much dimmer which prevents them from making as many. When people are asked which player is better, they almost always say that the one who made the most hoops, IRRELEVANT of the obvious disadvantage that having less light creates.

There are many reason why human being would be prone to commit the fundamental attribution error, all of which stem from our desire to predict others behavior because this will give us a survival advantage. As a tendency, however, it may have run its course in being evolutionary advantageous given that diversity of the modern world.

Regardless, when someone is thrust into a completely new situation EXPECT to see them acting out of character because behavior can be very dependent on environmental or situational factors. Keeping this in mind can help prevent the fundamental attribution error and allow you to stay closer to the truth of the matter.