Our rational neocortexes are the most recent arrivals on the block, and can at best ride shotgun and politely suggest routes while the  hypothalamus got its primitive, emotional and irrational hands on the wheel. Our motivations, drives and desires rules our lives, and if one is to communicate effectively with people this is the first lesson.

Case in point:

In fall quarter 2007, researchers posted messages in the bathrooms of two DU undergraduate residence halls. The messages said things like, “Poo on you, wash your hands” or “You just peed, wash your hands,” and contained vivid graphics and photos. The messages resulted in increased handwashing among females by 26 percent and among males by 8 percent.

All the medical textbooks in the world can not get the message across as powerfully as a picture in vivid colors that makes us distinctly queasy. Marketers know this of course, and that is why they put naked women on everything from sports cars to soup cans.

Gene Expressions sums it up:

Most human cognition is implicit, and we’re really not as amenable to rational appeals we like to think we are.

Take that one, Ayn Rand!

Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men. In fact, she equips many fellows with very little armament for the struggle. An average man has just one, outside chance: he had better be able to make the lady laugh. Making them laugh has been one of the crucial preoccupations of my life. If you can stimulate her to laughter—I am talking about that real, out-loud, head-back, mouth-open-to-expose-the-full-horseshoe-of-lovely-teeth, involuntary, full, and deep-throated mirth; the kind that is accompanied by a shocked surprise and a slight (no, make that a loud) peal of delight—well, then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression. I shall not elaborate further.

While we certainly can appreciate funny women – the same way we can appreciate beautiful men – humor seems to be a less potent competitive advantage in women when it comes to the cut-throat mating marketplace.

Why is this so? Firstly we should ask, why are humor so powerful in generating attraction in the first place?

I defer to Geoffrey Miller in virtually all things, and this is not one of the exceptions. Miller suggests that humor works as an honest mental fitness indicator.  An honest fitness indicator is an indicator that is hard to fake: a bright peacock’s tail that is costly to grow   and attracts predators for example. An inferior peacock will not be able to fake this, because to sport such a tail requires expert hunting skills to obtain all the necessary nutrients, and surviving with it demands the strength and speed to escape predators.

Humans do not grow tails of course. As a social specie, we put a high premium on social skills and intelligence, not plumage. Miller thinks that since humor often is cognitively complex to produce and is easy to get wrong – who of us haven’t experienced a joke bombing –  a sense of humor displays high intelligence.

If so, you’d expect smart people to be funnier. According to this fascinating article entitled Humor as a Mental Fitness Indicator by Daniel P. Howrigan at University of Chicago at Boulder, this is indeed the case.

To explain the pervasive role of humor in human social interaction and among mating partner preferences, Miller (2000a) proposed that intentional humor evolved as an indicator of intelligence. To test this, we looked at the relationships among rater-judged humor, general intelligence, and the Big Five personality traits in a sample of 185 college age students (115 women, 70 men). General intelligence positively predicted rater-judged humor, independent of the Big Five personality traits. Extraversion also predicted raterjudged humor, although to a lesser extent than general intelligence. General intelligence did not interact with the sex of the participant in predicting rating scores on the humor production tasks. The current study lends support to the prediction that effective humor production acts as an honest indicator of intelligence in humans.

 

Homer Simpson got it right people: Be more funny.

The funniness gender gap is readily explained in this light. Sense of humor indicates intelligence which is strongly correlated with social status. Women place a high premium on social status in a mate, because historically their own social status – and thus their safety and access to resources – is to a large extent determined by that of their partner. Men’s status are on the other hand wholly dependent on their own efforts and relationships to other MEN of high status, so these attributes are less important in their mate choices.

This is a fallacy. No matter what the world is, it is what it is, and to command it you have to  know how it works. Only by getting a deep understanding of the fascinating machinery in our own minds can we hope to discover ways to maximise our potential. I deal with this in the blogpost Self Improvement in the Era of the Chromosome on this blog.

Which brings me to the second article of the day from edge.org, the title of which summarized my position on these matters so well that I saw fit to steal it for this blogpost.

It is written by Dean Ornish, a clinical professor of medicine at UCSF, and deals with primarily with preventing or healing disease, but the lessons are widely applicable.

Some exerpts:

J. Craig Venter has shown that one way you can change your genes is by making new ones. We are finding that another way you can change your gene expression is simply by changing your lifestyle.

In May of this year, we published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Craig was the communicating editor). We found that changing lifestyle actually changes gene expression. In only three months, we found that over 500 genes were either up-regulated or down-regulated—in simple terms, turning on genes that prevent many chronic diseases, and turning off genes that cause coronary heart disease, oncogenes that are linked to breast and prostate cancer, genes that promote inflammation and oxidative stress and so on.

These findings may capture people’s imagination—so often, people think there is not much they can do, what I call genetic nihilism: “Oh, it’s all in my genes, what can I do?” Well, it turns out you can do a lot, more quickly than we had once realized and to a much greater degree than had been thought possible.

Ornish goes on to detail a study of women suffered from stress due to taking care of chronically ill children. Under the microscope it torned out that these women as a result of that stress had lower levels of telomerase. Telomerase is en enzyme that repairs and lengthens telomeres, the part of our chromosomes that control how long we live.

In my experience, most things in biology go both ways. If stress reduces telomerase and makes telomeres shorter, perhaps stress management techniques, exercise, improved nutrition, and social support might increase these?

Well, that’s what we found. After just three months, telomerase increased by almost 30 percent and thus telomere lengthening is likely to have occurred as well. In this context, comprehensive lifestyle changes not only work as well as pharmaceutical drugs, but even better, as no drug has yet been shown to increase telomerase or to lengthen telomeres.

Sorry little Johnny, “my genes ate my homework” won’t do.

By the way, it gets even better. This Ornish is a very smart guy.

There are lots of ways we have of numbing ourselves and distracting ourselves from our pain, literally and figuratively bypassing our pain.

But the pain is not the problem. The pain is a messenger. It is saying, “Hey, listen up! Pay attention, you are not doing something that is in your best interest.” Our goal is to help people connect the dots between when we suffer and why. Then, the suffering becomes information, a teacher, a catalyst for change rather than something to be numbed out.

I wish I could quote it all, but it is probably better you go and read the whole article. Warmly, whole-heartedly recommended.

Odin

Some excerpts:

Our happiness is determined by a complex set of voluntary and involuntary factors, ranging from our genes to our health to our wealth. Alas, one determinant of our own happiness that has not received the attention it deserves is the happiness of others. Yet we know that emotions can spread over short periods of time from person to person, in a process known as “emotional contagion.” If someone smiles at you, it is instinctive to smile back. If your partner or roommate is depressed, it is common for you to become depressed.

We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%. For comparison, having an extra $5,000 in income (in 1984 dollars) increased the probability of being happy by about 2%.

This article deals with happiness, but the same probably applies equally well for other desirable character traits. And, quite likely, less desireable traits.

Decide what kind of human being you would like to become, then surround yourself with people who are like that.

The world of pickup and social dynamics has been taking a turn away from scripts and routines towards natural game the last few years. This was a very healthy development, and about time. I’ve seen better things come out of the community the last two years than in all the preceding years together.

The very name of this blog is a play on the puzzling fact that the ultimate destination of this journey is when you find yourself having gone full circle. You don’t feel you’re “doing” anything anymore, you break all the rules, yet it still somehow works.

If I was gonna sum it up as briefly as I can, being natural is being centered. Where scripted game is endlessly polishing the facade, going natural is developing an actual solid core. Once what is on the inside is indeed attractive, what one says and does doesn’t require much thought at all. What’s inside always shines through.

The problem with all the thought and discussion about being a natural is that it is – as the above – kinda vague and airy fairy. This development is still in its infancy, so everyone is still kind of running around like headless chickens, trying to find the way to “center oneself” and “finding core confidence”. How the hell do you do that? Some seem to turn to spirituality, some to religion.

While I certainly can appreciate spirituality, I have a scientific mind, am an atheist at heart and find faithbased and new agy answers unsatisfying. Oracle is the same, so I was not even surprised when we had a discussion recently and it turned out that despite living on different sides of the planet, we’d had many of the same thoughts the last few weeks. Of course, he is as always without equal in clearity of thought and application of the relevant science.

On the top of my wish list for this Christmas is a purely secular unified field theory that bridges the gap between structured game and natural game without invoking ghosts in the machine or chakras. I predict that Oracle of Sweden will be the one providing it.

I will here explain why it is mistaken to believe that the lessons of evolutionary psychology imply that we are doomed to endure a genetic faith which is beyond our control.

Enjoy.

Self-Improvement in the Era of the Chromosome

I was recently in a club when a guy I know from the community came up and greeted me. He had been working for a few years on becoming better with women and nurturing the connected personality traits in himself; confidence, sense of humour, social intelligence and so on.

As we talked, it became clear that he wasn’t entirely satisfied with the results he had been getting, and had become a bit disillusioned with regards to whether at all it is at all possible to change yourself.

“Look man,” he said. “Sometimes I think we largely fool ourselves in this community. We study all this stuff about evolution and genetics. Well, guess what? If everything is genetics and the behavioural and emotional circuitry of women is hardwired and beyond their control, as Mystery says, then the same must be true about us, men, too. Most of the guys I have met that do well seem to have been fairly confident most of their life. So maybe some of us have just been hardwired to be awkward beta males and there isn’t jack shit we can do about it, because it is all genetics.”

I am quoting from memory, but this was basically how he felt. He was obviously frustrated, but I could see where he was coming from. For a subculture that focus so much on inalterable behaviour patterns (“if you do this right, she can’t help being attracted”), genetics, emotional circuitry and hardwiring, this might seem to contradict the other central tenet of belief: that no matter how much of a chump you are, this can be changed and you can be transformed into a swashbuckling ladies man.

Indeed, it has been established that there is a significant genetic component in all of the five major dimensions in which psychologists define personality: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

So, that’s it right? Some guys are just naturally extraverted and confident whereas others are shy and introverted and there is not much to do about it? Damned genes! Maybe we should just drop our hard science focus because it is too depressing and embrace pseudo-science, new age and start yapping on about chakras and energies?

Hell no. The idea that genes = determinism stems from a misunderstanding of what the life sciences truly teaches us. My friend’s frustration was an unfortunate yet understandable effect of a community that often embraces a simplistic, folk-version of evolutionary thinking with very few of its members having a real understanding of the theories. This article will briefly explain not only why genes doesn’t prevent you from changing and improving yourself, but why your genes are the only mechanisms through which change is at all possible.

First, what are genes? A gene is a recipe in your DNA for making a protein. What kind of a protein depends on the information in the DNA. The ASPM gene, for example, contains the code for the amino acids isoleucine and glutamine that are vitally important for brain size.

Now don’t worry, I won’t get too technical here. All you need to understand is, firstly, that DNA codes for proteins that have vital functions in your body and mind. Some genes produce proteins that contribute to personality traits such as aggression, sexual assertiveness, pair-bonding and so on. A gene on chromosome 20 in humans, for example, regulates the production of the hormone oxytocin, which is central in pair bonding.

Secondly, you need to understand that the fact that your personality is affected by proteins which in turn stems from your genes, do not mean it is set in stone. A lot of people seem to believe that if there is a gene “for”, say, confidence or libido, it is decided at the moment of conception whether you’ll be confident or have a high sex drive and that environmental influences will not matter. The genes you have will provide a set personality by producing a given level of “confidence” or “horniness” hormones, and that’s that.

Not so. The genes are not blind Soviet Union factories, mindlessly producing the pre-set proteins according to some rigid central plan. To the contrary, they depend on your experiences and outside stimuli to know when to “switch on” production. It would be better to compare them with, say, skill full and savvy capitalists who keep a close eye on what the market demands and what “season” it is to turn on and off the production of various proteins accordingly (puberty is the most important “season” any human being will go through, where all kinds of genes dormant since conception suddenly are switched on).

I guess an example is in order here. In the 1950’s, an eager birdwatcher named Daniel Lehrman discovered that the male ring doves courtship dance triggered a change in the hormones of the female doves. What this means is that the mere act of observing a male dance caused dormant genes in the female to be switched on and producing proteins that made her want to mate.

I have now used the term “switched on” three times, you didn’t read it wrong. Genes are not always operating on some set capacity, they get switched on and off according to outside stimuli. How this happens is a complicated process and not important to outline here, all you need to know is that it happens (strictly speaking, genes are more like thermostats than switches, but for our purposes the switch metaphor works fine).

The flipside of the coin: if you are not exposed to the right stimuli, many genes will not switch on. They will stay dormant, some times forever.

Another example: an experiment was done with a pack of chimpanzees in a zoo. Chimps naturally form social hierarchies that are dominated by an alpha male. Beta males and females show their subordination by making submissive gestures towards the alpha male. Experimenters took the alpha male out of the pack, tested his testosterone level, and placed him in a room of his own, separated from his pack by a two-way mirror. He could see them, but they couldn’t see him. Every time another chimp came by he tried to intimidate them into displaying submission to his status, but was duly ignored. After a while the absence of submissive displays made him drop his dominant behaviour patterns and he became shyer and more reserved. When his testosterone levels were then tested again, they had plummeted.

It was as if his body had concluded he had been dethroned as the leader of the pack, and then duly switched off the genes that produce hormones conducive to dominant behaviour. In fact, that was exactly what had happened.
This makes perfect evolutionary sense: dominant behaviour is good as long as you are strongest guy on the block – and whether you are is determined largely by analysing the feedback others give you – but if you are not it will only get you killed, and being submissive and agreeable is a healthier tactic.

If you feel bad for our alpha-chimp, don’t. When he was let back into the room with his pack, true, he thought he was now a mere beta and tried not to bring much attention to himself. But the rest of the pack did not know of these recent developments and thus immediately started showing him the same reverence as before. He quickly picked up on this – or rather, his genes did – and he was soon back to throwing his weight around like a school bully.

Talk about etched in stone, eh?

The point of all of this is that your body will search for your relative status in society based on the feedback it gets. Then it will literally switch on and off genes accordingly. So, if you have been a virgin or been picked on all your life (and access to females is the primary indicator of your relative status in species’ similar to ours), there have been no reason to suggest that anything could be gained by switching on the genes that produce proteins contributing to sexually and socially confident behaviour. Again, as far as the evolutionary logic is concerned, that is more likely to get you killed than anything else.

Of course, we live in a completely different environment today, where your chances of getting your head kicked in for getting uppity and trying to climb in the social hierarchy is virtually nil. First of all, the rule of law has replaced nature red in tooth and claw (thank you Romans). Second of all, there are so many people running around that most people are strangers, and thus have no preconceived notions of who you are or how you should behave.

So it has never been so easy to change yourself, and the way you go about it – in a way so real it can be not only experienced emotionally but measured chemically – goes through changing the feedback the world gives you. Unfortunately, that can only be done by changing the way you behave. That sounds like a catch-22, and in a way it is, but it is far from out of reach.

How this is done in detail will be touched upon at some length on this site, but for now you can start by focusing on changing your appearance, consciously changing the way you act and talk. Fake it until you make it. Gradually, the feedback you get from the outside world will change in a more positive direction, cementing your newly adopted behaviours as “naturally” yours. From here it will only spiral upward, with every success and positive experience making the next easier to obtain.

Yes, there is no getting around it for those of us who cares about cold, hard truths as opposed to fairy-tale illusions propagated by snake-oil salesmen; some people are naturally more extroverted and confident than others. Bo-fucking-hoo, woe is me. That might not feel fair, but it is the way the world works. That is no excuse not to go the extra mile, because you have dormant strengths you weren’t even aware of. They are sleeping because the impulses and environmental feedback you have exposed yourself to wasn’t conducive to waking them up. Start changing that. Now.

Over the years I have posted a lot on various online forums, but never taken the time to create a web page where this endless stream of thought (non-sensical or not) can be collected in one place. So I will post some of my old stuff here, as well as put up whatever pops into my head on the topics of women and sexuality.

Stay tuned my friends.

Much love

- Odin