WIL Weekly 5-Point Review #16

Testosterone and action taking, Posture, Cistanche and more...

This is my free weekly newsletter covering 5 interesting points from the week. Subscribe if you’d like to get it in your inbox each week!

1. Book about Testosterone and Behavior

Here’s a quote from Heroes, Rogues and Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior by James McBride Dabbs

“Action also counts in long-term helping. In 1961, David Rosenhan, who was studying altruism, interviewed a group of civil rights activists. Some were more fully committed to the civil rights movement than others. Fully committed activists had done more, including going on more freedom rides in the South, but when they were interviewed, they talked less about what they had done. Partially committed activists had done less, but they talked more. Their talk drifted from what they had done to the philosophy of civil rights. Their insights were good, but thinking so much seemed to interfere with their acting. The action orientation of high-testosterone individuals makes it easier for them to help where others hold back. Perhaps the extra risk works out to their advantage in the long run, keeping them from becoming extinct, because potential males find their action attractive and thrilling.”

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2. Postural Restoration: How your feet and teeth are fucking up your skeleton

Lately I’ve been really interested in Neal Hallinan’s videos. Basically they say that the position and rotation of the femur, feet, shoulders, ribs and even the lower jaws are going to affect each other. Meaning that if your feet don’t make contact with the floor in the proper balanced way, it can for example affect your diaphragm and neck muscles and therefore your breathing. That is, in order to maintain balance, the body will reposition other parts of the body in response to how it senses certain parts of the body. So for example, even the position of your lower jaw can affect your balance because if the body doesn’t sense your teeth touching in a specific way, it will likely slightly reposition or induce tension in other parts of the body to achieve balance.

If that sounds bonkers, consider this: This paper explains that the alignment of your bite - your teeth, will affect your posture. They even say that if your molars touch such that one side is higher than the other, that this will tilt the head to one side and …over time this can in some situations even lead to scoliosis, a condition where the spine is totally bent out of shape. Teeth messing up the spine might sound hard to believe, but this review paper looking at multiple papers from 1970 to 2010 concluded that their investigation indeed revealed plausible evidence for bite alignment affecting spinal alignment. This 2003 paper found specifically that if you can’t sense your teeth touching on one side, then your body weight shifts to the other side. Another paper found that messing up people’s bite by putting a mere 0.6mm thick tin foil on their teeth affected the position of their lower  back.

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3. New Interview! Escaping the dopamine treadmill with Dr. Ruben Laukkonen

I’ve written about Ruben and his research before in my post Why the Mind makes you Suffer.

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4. Obscure alleged testosterone booster

Cistanche, the special parasitic plant used in Mongolian medicine, is recorded in classical works(S) and was allegedly a favorite virility-booster of Genghis Khan’s. It’s apparently also known as “cistanche in your pants” and “the stalk enlarger.” Rat studies have shown it to increase sperm quality and testosterone, increase erection quality, as well as increase testosterone (that would have otherwise decreased) in response to high intensity exercise. It has also shown to prevent testicular damage from bisphenol A in rats.

According to Herba Cistanche (Rou Cong-Rong): One of the Best Pharmaceutical Gifts of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Within Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Herba Cistanche is applied as a tonic and/or in a formula for chronic renal disease, impotence, female infertility, morbid leucorrhea, profuse metrorrhagia, and senile constipation.

I couldn’t find any studies on humans yet.

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5. Miyamoto Musashi Quote

“Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm. Meet the situation without tenseness yet not recklessly, your spirit settled yet unbiased. Even when your spirit is calm do not let your body relax, and when your body is relaxed do not let your spirit slacken. Do not let your spirit be influenced by your body, or your body be influenced by your spirit. Be neither insufficiently spirited nor over spirited. An elevated spirit is weak and a low spirit is weak. Do not let the enemy see your spirit.”

“In the Way of the Martial Arts, do not let your frame of mind be any different from your everyday mind. In both everyday and military events, your mind should not change in the least, but should be broad and straightforward, neither drawn too tight nor allowed to slacken even a little....Do not let your mind stand still even when you are in repose, but do not let it speed up even when you are involved in quick actions. The mind should not be distracted by the body, nor the body distracted by the mind.”

This tempering of the spirit to make it most useful in the moment made me think of the TWIM meditation technique I got into. Setting aside insight, awakening and any of the deep level stuff that TWIM alleges their technique confers, I think the technique teaches practitioners to hone a very useful skill. The meditation is a loop of:
・Focusing on your meditation object
・Noticing if when you become distracted
・Relaxing any tension in the body (and mind)
・Return your focus to the meditation object
That is, by the end of a single meditation session, you will have put in dozens and dozens of reps of noticing your agitated mental state, relaxing it, and then re-aiming your focus.

After 300+ hours of this, I find it much easier to diffuse a bored and distracted mental state and return my focus to my work, or to diffuse even the mental state of ‘I’m tired and don’t want to finish my workout’ and load up the barbell, or to diffuse frustration and focus on a solution when some unexpected barrier presents itself. Whether I can pull this off in a sword fight is yet to be seen.