Quote of the Day

Most Americans today are sleep deprived, which may be a contributing factor to declining testosterone levels in men. See, our body makes nearly all the testosterone it needs for the day while we’re sleeping. That increased level of T that we experience at night is one of the reasons we wake up with "Morning Wood." (If you don’t have Morning Wood on a consistent basis, you might have low T).

But if you’re not getting enough quality sleep, your body can’t produce testosterone as efficiently or effectively. In one study, researchers at the University of Chicago found that young men who slept less than five hours a night for one week had lower testosterone levels than when they were fully rested. The drop was typically 10-15%.

- Doubling Your Testosterone

Hologenome - The Other You

Back in the 1980s, Richard Jefferson used the enzyme to develop a powerful technique now relied upon by thousands of genetic engineers around the world. At the same time, he was intrigued by the enzyme's normal role. Its recycling effect helps determine the blood levels of many compounds, including important substances such as sex hormones. Jefferson realised that the bacteria within us, far from being passive hangers-on, must affect us in profound ways.

In the past decade, this view has started to become mainstream. Study after study has shown how the microbes living in us and on us - the microbiome - can affect our health and even happiness. But back in the 1980s, Jefferson took this idea even further. If microbes are so important, he reasoned, they must play a big role in evolution too. He came up with what he called the hologenome theory of evolution. "The hologenome is the biggest breakthrough in thinking I've had in my life," he says.
A couple of decades later, another researcher come up with much the same idea, even giving it the same name. And although this approach is only starting to be explored, hints are beginning to emerge that symbiotic microbes can indeed play a much bigger role in evolution than anyone thought.

What struck Jefferson is that our microbiome plays a critical role in some key processes. Levels of sex hormones obviously affect us in many ways, for instance - and yet as much as 65 per cent of circulating testosterone cycles through microbes, according to one study Jefferson came across at the time.

It's gets more interesting....

Early in the 19th century, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck devised a theory of evolution incorporating the then-popular idea that organisms could pass on adaptive traits acquired during their lifetime. Thus, giraffes evolved their long necks because they were in the habit of stretching their necks. Darwin believed something similar, but such ideas became discredited with the development of modern genetics. The hologenome theory does suggest that animals can sometimes evolve via the inheritance of acquired characteristics, Rosenberg says, but it does so in a way that can be verified by experiment.

After he published his ideas, he and his wife Ilana Zilber-Rosenberg began combing the literature to find related studies. They stumbled across a 1989 paper by Diane Dodd, then a postdoc at Yale University, who had found that changing the diet of a fruit fly could alter the flies' mating choices after just two generations.

"When I read this, I started jumping up and down," Rosenberg said. "It had to be the microbes. I just knew it. Nothing else could explain such a rapid change."

To prove this, Rosenberg got his PhD student Gil Sharon to try replicate Dodd's results. Sure enough, after two generations, flies fed on molasses would no longer mate with flies on a regular starch. Next, Sharon gave the flies rifampicin to kill off their bacteria. Afterwards, starch flies happily copulated with molasses flies, showing that bacteria were indeed responsible.

- More Here

Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are - Amy Cuddle

"So this is what we find. Risk tolerance, which is the gambling, what we find is that when you're in the high-power pose condition, 86 percent of you will gamble. When you're in the low-power pose condition, only 60 percent, and that's a pretty whopping significant difference. Here's what we find on testosterone. From their baseline when they come in, high-power people experience about a 20-percent increase, and low-power people experience about a 10-percent decrease. So again, two minutes, and you get these changes. Here's what you get on cortisol. High-power people experience about a 25-percent decrease, and the low-power people experience about a 15-percent increase. So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress-reactive, and, you know, feeling sort of shut down. And we've all had the feeling, right? So it seems that our nonverbals do govern how we think and feel about ourselves, so it's not just others, but it's also ourselves. Also, our bodies change our minds.

The last thing I'm going to leave you with is this. Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes. So this is two minutes. Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes. Before you go into the next stressful evaluative situation, for two minutes, try doing this, in the elevator, in a bathroom stall, at your desk behind closed doors. That's what you want to do. Configure your brain to cope the best in that situation. Get your testosterone up. Get your cortisol down. Don't leave that situation feeling like, oh, I didn't show them who I am. Leave that situation feeling like, oh, I really feel like I got to say who I am and show who I am."

- More Here

Testosterone and Difference between Men and Women

Review of Rebecca Jordan-Young's new book Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences - here:

"Jordan-Young argues that the science of prenatal hormones, gender, and the mind "better resembles a hodgepodge pile than a solid structure." And she knows of what she speaks.

An expert on measures and study designs, Jordan-Young has spent the last 13 years combing the literature on brain organization, unpacking assumptions, questioning methods and statistical practices, holding one paper up against another. She stresses that fetal hormones must matter to the brain—somehow. But after picking apart more than 400 studies that try to understand the genesis of particular psychological sex differences (real or supposed), she concludes that fetal T looks like an awfully anemic explanation.

This matters because the obsession with prenatal T can easily become a distraction. It can make us forget how much gender norms have changed—think of all those female accountants, lawyers, and doctors who weren't around 50 or even 30 years ago—and how remarkably similar men's and women's brains and minds actually are. All this unwarranted hammering away at difference (and its putative explanations) causes real trouble, too. As a growing body of research shows, cues that foreground gender and bring stereotypes to mind can dampenmen's performance on tests of social sensitivity, women's scores on math tests, and women's stated interest in quantitative pursuits Jordan-Young has done an enormous amount of work to untangle the gender claims. We ought to read her, cite her, thank her. And then, let's move on."

Testosterone, Aggression... Confusion

This study (and here) debunks the stereotype that usually applies to Testosterone. A typical stereotype goes like this - Testosterone makes us aggressive which can lead us to lose rationality (matter over mind). This study induced unwarranted dissonance than the researches would have ever expected and clearly paving the way to include umwelt (yes, we are not alone inside our body), social and cultural significance (and so on ad infinitum) in lot of future studies. Until personalized medicine, research et al enters the zone, these dissonances are bound to happen. One size never fits all but that doesn't mean we should stop trusting these experiments. It instigates us to develop an innate tendency to be skeptic but also to applaud and laud the scientifc process and in time we will find a way to balance between the two, enabling us to move forward as a civilization.

"This is a game for two players. One, the Proposer, is given some money, and then has to offer to give a certain proportion of it to the other player, the Receiver. If the Receiver accepts the offer, both players get the agreed-upon amount of money. If they reject it, however, no-one gets anything.

The Proposer is basically faced with the choice of making a "fair" offer, e.g. giving away 50%, or a greedy one, say offering 10% and keeping 90% for themselves. Receivers generally accept fair offers, but most people get annoyed or insulted by unfair ones, and reject them, even though this means they lose money (10% of the money is still more than 0%).

What happened? Testosterone affected behaviour. It had no effect on women playing the role of the Receivers, but the Proposers given testosterone made significantly fairer offers on average, compared to those given placebo. That's not mind over matter, that's matter over mind - give someone a hormone and their behaviour changes.

The direction of the effect is quite interesting - if testosterone increased aggression, as popular belief has it, you might expect it to decrease fair offers. Or, you might not. I suppose it depends on your understanding of "aggression". For their part, Eisenegger et al interpret this finding as suggesting that testosterone doesn't increase aggression per se, but rather increases our motivation to achieve "status", which leads to Proposers making fairer offers, so as to appear nicer.

But where did the BBC get the whole "all in the mind" thing from? Well, after the testing was over, the authors asked the women whether they thought they had taken testosterone or placebo. The results showed that the women couldn't actually tell which they'd had - they were no more accurate than if they were guessing - but women who believed they'd got testosterone made more unfair offers than women who believed they got placebo. The size of this effect was bigger than the effect of testosterone.

Is that "mind over matter"? Do beliefs about testosterone exert a more powerful effect on behaviour than testosterone itself? Maybe they do, but these data don't tell us anything about that. The women's beliefs weren't manipulated in any way in this trial, so as an experiment it couldn't investigate belief effects. In order to show that belief alters behaviour, you'd need to control beliefs. You could randomly assign some subjects to be told they were taking testosterone, and compare them to others told they were on placebo, say.

This study didn't do anything like that. Beliefs about testosterone were only correlated with behaviour, and unless someone's changed the rules recently, correlation isn't causation.
Overall, this study provides quite interesting data about hormonal effects on behaviour, but tells us nothing about the effects of beliefs about hormones. On that issue, the way the media have covered this experiment is rather more informative than the experiment itself."