L-serine serine-dipity

Label: L-Serine serindipity?

TL;DR

Aging brains always get worse, and they get worse faster if we don’t take action. Ever since I read “The Brain that Changes Itself”, I’ve been taking action.

I wrote about it here: 70 Years Old. WTF!: Cognitive decline

L-serine is an inexpensive FDA approved food supplement that may have neuroprotective effects for normal aging and people at risk for Alzheimer’s. It’s currently in Phase II clinical trial due to complete in August. But why wait? You can get it on Amazon in bulk.

Dale Bredesen, MD is a researcher with 224 peer-reviewed papers on PubMed and book called “The End Of Alzheimer’s” and a website that provides a program for assessing and improving cognitive health—including but not limited to Alzheimer’s. He claims that he has reversed Alzheimer’s and other forms of cognitive decline in many patients. Maybe he has.

As aging changes my brain in unavoidable ways, I check my cognitive ability with interest. Hey, I can’t remember that name. I think. How interesting! I wonder how I can get it back. Whenever I forget something, I see it as an opportunity to learn something about my brain.

Bobbi, on the other hand, checks hers with worry approaching terror. Her Dad died (younger than she now is) with advanced Alzheimer’s disease. Seeing him was somewhere between tragic and horrific. Closer to horrific, actually.

Out of general fascination with all things science and to make sure that we both are doing the best we can reasonably do to protect our brains I dive into the literature on cognitive health periodically.

The state of the literature

ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) is a neurodegenerative disease. It’s not Alzheimer’s, but it’s mentioned in the same breath in lots of research

Here’s an article from Brain Chemistry Labs that makes the connection:

Neurodegenerative diseases all share a common problem, proteins accumulate in the brain. We have found that an environmental neurotoxin can trigger two kinds of protein build up known as brain tangles and amyloid plaques.

So what can be done about it?

The Institute for Ethnomedicine discovered the dietary amino acid L-serine as a possible new ALS drug through careful studies of the mechanisms of protein misfolding

The principal researcher at the Institute is Paul Cox. This long, long article in Fortune details his research. Well worth the read:

Here’s what we now think is astonishing about ­L-serine,” Cox said. “It appears to be neuroprotective against all possible protein misfolding. It basically turns on a system in our brains that looks for unfolded proteins and is quickly poised to act on them.”

They have mouse models, in vitro experiments to support their research. Ethnological investigation of the Ogimi, a group on the island of Okinawa backs the hypothesis. The Ogimi are extraordinary long-lived people who don’t seem to suffer much cognitive decline.

This peer reviewed paper summarizes some of their research.

Our hypothesis that the high l-serine content of the Ogimi diet is related to the paucity of tangle diseases among villagers is buttressed by in vivo results with non-human primates where dietary l-serine slowed development of neurofibrillary tangles and β-amyloid plaques by up to 85% and a human clinical trial finding that l-serine at 15 grams/day twice daily slows functional decline in ALS patients. Analysis of the Ogimi diet suggests that l-serine should be evaluated for therapeutic potential as a neuroprotective agent.

This article in Pharmacy Times summarizes research findings, and points to a Phase I trial to assess safety. The trial demonstrated safety (and also reported significant improvements in the people with ALS.

Astrocytes in the human body produce L-serine, and the average American diet consists of about 3.5 grams of L-serine a day. The FDA states L-serine is generally regarded as safe, as long as it consists of no more than 8.4% of total protein in the diet (CFR Title 21 Section 17.320.18). A 6-month phase I randomized double-blind (pharmacist unblinded) trial was conducted to assess safety of doses 0.5, 2.5, 7.5, and 15g twice a day.

There’s now a Phase II trial in progress, due to report in August.

15 grams of L-Serine (15 gummies containing 1g of L-serine) orally twice daily for 246 days

So Bobbi and I are doing our own non-double-blinded non-placebo-controlled study of l-serine. I ordered 500 g from Amazon, and we’re each taking 15 g twice a day.

I’m not a person who goes for vitamin and food fads, but the research here seems solid and promising, and what the hell else are we going to do with our money?

I now buy this supplement from here

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The hero's journey

What does it take to be a hero?

What’s come to be called “the hero’s journey” is a pattern of behavior typical to hero myths across cultures and over time.

Follow that pattern, and you can be a hero, Many of us are heroes, without knowing we are.

The way I see it, I’m surrounded by heroes.

From time to time, I’ve been a hero.

Now it’s time to up my game and spend more time in hero mode.

What makes a hero?

Joseph Campbell’s book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” documents and analyzes the cross-cultural pattern of the hero’s journey. Campbell’s work was known to scholars and popularized when Bill Moyers interviewed Campbell and discussed his work and the way that George Lucas had used it to guide his story-telling in the Star War series.

According to Campbell, the hero’s journey can take as many as 17 distinct stages. Not every hero-story covered all seventeen and “some myths may focus on only one of the stages, while others may deal with the stages in a somewhat different order.”

In “Maps of Meaning,” Jordan Peterson distills the hero’s journey this way:

The world is made up of explored territory and unexplored territory—of order and chaos. The hero who voluntarily leaves explored territory to confront chaos, gain something valuable and to bring it back.

The hero’s goal is to reduce the scope of chaos and expand the realm of order.

The hero doesn’t do it for personal gain but in service to something greater than himself (or herself.)

The hero undertakes the journey voluntarily.

Success is not guaranteed. But it’s not success or failure that makes one a hero: it’s voluntarily going on the journey.

We’re surrounded by heroes

Many unremarkable take the hero’s path. They surround us.

Everyone who joins the military is on a hero’s journey. They leave home and family and face the unexplored territory of their new career. If they volunteer for duty in an alien and hostile land, they are even more heroic. They might hope to gain peace and order, or defeat an enemy who threatens their community or to grow as individuals by voluntary sacrifice to face danger. That’s the hero’s journey.

It doesn’t always work out well. Some heroes die. Some are wounded and come back addicted or crippled. But even when the journey fails, it’s still the hero’s journey.

Heroism is not just for the military. When young people leave home to go to college or embark on their careers, they’re also on a hero’s path. They leave the safety of the familiar, head into the unknown and come back changed—for the better if they succeed, and sometimes for the worse. But they are heroes for undertaking the journey.

Anyone who starts a new career or a new business is on a hero’s journey. The fact that the unexplored territory is entirely within the boundaries society’s well-explored territory doesn’t matter. It’s unexplored by the person setting out. If the hero succeeds, then society is better off. The entrepreneur’s family is better off. The new business’s customers are better off.

Falling in love is a hero’s journey. You must leave the explored territory of your old life and face the unexplored territory of The Other. You must meet problems in the relationship, negotiate good agreements, make sacrifices for the sake of your partner and the greater good of the relationship. All are common, yet heroic acts.

When a couple has a baby (the old fashioned way) the woman is always on a hero’s journey—the man may join her, or not. When women choose to bear a child, they face death. It’s less frequent than in the past, but the threat is always there. Women sacrifice their bodies to a nine months-long journey into unexplored territory. They face increasing discomfort that may end with hours of pain or with someone cutting open their bodies to bring a new life into the world,

In the old days when most jobs were dangerous and held by men, a man had to be a hero to provide. Today, men don’t need to be heroes—but they can choose to be. Most men can’t be as heroic as every woman has to be—but if they want to be heroes, they can try.

The unheroic

What’s not heroic? People across time and cultures agree.

People who live ordinary lives, who never venture into the unknown, who never take on challenges are not heroes. There’s little that’s heroic about being a bureaucrat.

Criminals venture into the unknown and face challenges, but they bring nothing back to the community. They take from it. There’s nothing heroic about criminality.

People who act responsibly and those who defend their lives and property because they must are not a hero. To be a hero you must to willingly venture into the unknown, and to take on more than necessity dictates. You have to make a sacrifice to be a hero. We need people who are responsible and maintain the status quo, but they are not heroes.

People who stand up for their friends and neighbors are heroes. They willingly take on an unnecessary burden. People who stand up for themselves are virtuous, but not heroes.

I want to be a hero

I want to be a hero to my kids, my community, my friends. Even if they don’t call me a hero, I will know I am a hero if I follow the hero’s path.

I’ve been a hero in the past. I can be one again.

I quit my job and started my business so that I could work from home and support my wife and kids. It was a leap into the unknown. It was nearly twenty years of continuous struggle, some failures, and some success. And now, I see that struggle as heroic.

I’ve had other episodes of heroism and different periods that were not so heroic.

Then came retirement, greater ease and not so much heroism.

That’s going to change.

Doing what is meaningful

Jordan Peterson’s Rule 7: “Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient.” That points toward living a heroic life.

I still take on challenges, but not as many as I could. I still bear burdens, but not as many as I can carry.

My life has meaning, but there are parts of my life that can have more meaning if I connect them to a hero’s journey.

I can be more courageous and challenge myself to get back on the hero’s path.

I can look at the work that I’ve started doing in my community as a small exercise in personal heroism. I’ve been stepping out of familiar territory and venturing into the unknown to benefit others. That’s hero work.

I can see other places where I can be more of a hero.

Written with the help of StackEdit, Grammarly, Markdown Here,Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus other stuff.

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Today's meditation

A couple of hours ago I finished a meditation session, the second of the day. Each was a 10-minute meditation, guided by Sam Harris, then 20 minutes of timed meditation. Just me and my conscious experience.

Wow.

It started this way:

So take your seat and close your eyes and bring your attention to the sensation of sitting. Notice how the body appears in consciousness and see if you can relinquish the shape of the body. If you feel its shape, pay closer attention to each sensation as it arises.

He’s given instructions like before, something like “experience the body as a cloud of sensations.” and this time I got it. The “tension in my neck” changed. It was the same feeling of tension, but a “tension in my conscious experience.” There was no neck.

Words don’t convey the feeling of suddenly being a not-quite-embodied consciousness. It was strange, and it was freeing. I know there’s more to come.

It was exciting.

Going to France

Imagine that you’ve always wanted to go to France—Paris, in particular. You’ve read everything you could about it—geography, history, culture. You learned the language. You’ve spent hours looking at pictures and reading guidebooks. You know all the facts.

You’ve read what people who have been to France have written. You’ve learned about their feelings—the ones they say are unique to being in France and being in Paris.

You’ve heard them describe the emotions that they associate with no other place on Earth.

You yearn to see those sights and feel those feelings.

You have similar emotions—you think. You’ve been to places that have evoked feelings similar to what they’ve described—you think. So you have a kind of understanding of what they might have felt—you think.

You can imagine what you think the experience might be.

But you’ve never had the experience.

And then, one day, you close your eyes, and when you open them, it seems to you that you are in what is unmistakably a small French village. Not Paris, but still.

What you experience is part of what you’ve read about and heard about. Everything is familiar. It’s what you’ve been seeking.

You know that you’re closer to Paris than you’ve ever been—and the next time you open your eyes, you might be there.

Today

Today was like that.

I’ve read a lot about meditation, about the kinds of experience that people have.

I’ve read what people have said about their feelings when they’ve experienced the things I’ve read about.

I understand the theory.

But the closest I’ve come to the experience I’ve sought has been occasional momentary flashes of “waking up.”

They’ve been a foretaste.

And today I found myself that much closer to what I had been seeking.

As I sat—without a body, in a cloud of sensations—the sensations of sitting and of breathing were more precise than ever.

Thoughts arose—and almost always passed away within the space of an in-breath or an out breath.

And my mind never wandered after my thoughts carrying me along as is usual.

I present. I was not entirely clear-minded for the entire twenty minutes, but I was present for more extended moments than ever before.

Written with the help of StackEdit, Grammarly, Markdown Here,Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus other stuff.

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Morning routine, what and why

I started building my morning routine before I took the 30-day Stoic challenge. The challenge added to it. In my year-end retrospective, I wrote about how I’d gotten there.

Since the first of the year, I’ve improved my routine and also the way I manage it. I use Google Keep to keep track.

The night before

My morning routine starts the night. I have a checklist that I run through, so everything’s ready when I wake up.

Due to a magic keep feature, the checklist repeats every day at 8 PM.

Here’s the list. The annotations say why I do each thing:

•  Heat bed [so I can fall right to sleep]
•  Modafinil [put out, so it’s handy next morning]
•  Vasoline [keep CPAP from drying nostrils, also ready for next day]
•  Underwear, shirt, shoes [Ready for next day]
•  Coffee [Ready for next day]
•  Meditate [Better sleep, more insight]
•  Brush [Of course]
•  Pick music [I’ll play this in my shower in the AM-2 to 5 minutes long]
•  Charge phone [So it’s handy when I get up and charged]
•  Feet [Athlete’s foot, a constant challenge]
•  Ready for bed [Pajamas, and phone]

I have a phone with a vibrating alarm, set for 5:30

Lights out around 10;00 or 11:00. I usually wake up once or twice to pee.

And then, at 5:30

On Waking

At 5:30 my vibrating alarm goes off, and keep delivers this list to my phone.

I want to bounce out of bed and get going, but it’s usually more like a stagger.

Here’s the list:

•  Take modafinil [Which has been left out]
•  Cold shower [Playing the music I picked the prior night through water-resistant Bluetooth earbuds. 2 to 5 minutes, depending on mood and music]
•  Brush my teeth
•  Pee
•  Weigh myself [Same time every day, same empty bladder]
•  Dress
•  Athlete’s foot,
•  Clean up [because I make messes, and have to remember]

I’m done between 5:45 and 6:00 depending on how focused I am.

I’d like to do it in 15 minutes, then get it down to 5 + shower duration

After waking

At 5:45 Keep will have delivered me this list. I’ve set it up with links (motivated by writing this post) so that so I can go down the list, clicking links to other apps or pagers and then going back and completing this list.

•  Check calendar [Link to calendar]
•  Check todos [Link to Keep ToDo label group]
•  Gratitude [Hangout message to God to say thanks!]
•  Affirmations [Link to Keep Affirmations note]
•  Say hello [Hangouts to say hello to a couple of people]
•  Nag JL [WhatsApp to Nag my friend to write his book]
•  Meditate

My morning meditation is in two parts. I listen to a 10 minutes Sam Harris guided meditation, and then do a longer, timed meditation Culadasa style.
I emerge, clear-headed and ready to seize the day.

Seize the day

The next list takes care of my body

•  Burpees
•  Walk [up and down the driveway twice]
  •  Shave [while I’m walking]
•  Plan the day [Back to my todo list and make one for the day]
•  Set alarms [to check in and make sure I have not gone to sleep.

How it works

I’m rock solid on the first three lists, inconsistent, but getting better on the last one.

I’m still working on a reliable way to keep myself on task during the day, but I think I may have figured out what I need.

To be continued.

Written with the help of StackEdit, Grammarly, Markdown Here,Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus other stuff.

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Breaking out

I’m in a rut. It’s a nice rut. A comfortable rut, but a rut. It might even be an upward-trending rut. But…

A rut is a rut.

Get out of the rut is not a goal. It’s a constraint or a criterion. It’s a condition to apply to a goal or strategy: “does this get me out of the rut.”

So what’s the goal? And what’s the plan for getting there.
My goal has two parts. What do I do and how does that impact the world.

What I do: First Draft

I do things, and I write about what I do.

The writing is essential. If I’m doing things and I’m not writing about what I do, then what I do is just about worthless. Not completely worthless, but almost. Because I’m relatively worthless.

Hear me out. I’m not down on myself. But in a world with 7.5 billion people, compared to the worth of the whole, each of us is not worth much. If I do something privately, then what I do might be valuable to me, it’s worthless to the world.

But I have potential! My potential impact on the world is unbounded. Look at Buddha. Look at Jesus. Look at Einstein, Freud, Marx, Hamilton. All nearly worthless individuals who made a difference to the world.

Writing is my chance to make what I do potentially worth a lot.

Writing is my chance to make what I do meaningful.
Jordan Peterson: “Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient.”

RIght, Jordan. I’m signed up.

What I do: the second draft

I do stuff and produce a record of what I did and how I did.
It doesn’t have to be writing, but it has to be something.
Video, podcast, software, along with blog and book.

If I don’t produce something, then I’ve wasted that part of my life.

By Deutsch’s definition, every such product is an embodiment of knowledge.

So what I do is create embodied knowledge.

The meaning of my life

I’m a collector, organizer, disseminator, and creator of knowledge.

I’ve made collecting knowledge “for future use” an end in itself. Setting that goal has been an error.

In my analysis, the only reason to gather knowledge is to disseminate it. I can spread it in its original form, or organized with other knowledge, or as part of a new creation.

Collecting, organizing and creating knowledge may be satisfying, but they are not meaningful. Getting knowledge out where it can make the world better is part of what I define as meaningful.

Dissemination is the goal.

Are there other sources of meaning?

Yeah, I guess.

Solving a problem—which means applying knowledge to the conditions that create and maintain a problem is at least a little meaningful.

Having a conversation and communicating some knowledge is meaningful.

But the potential is limited.

Creating something and sharing knowledge is had unbounded potential meaning, but its actual meaning depends on what I do to spread that knowledge.

Do what is meaningful: Part II

This line of thought leads me somewhere I’m not happy to go.

Once I’ve produced something, then promoting it is one of the most meaningful things I can do.

What?

Writing is hard enough, but promoting what I’ve written?

Where do I even start?

Stay tuned.

Written with the help of StackEdit, Grammarly, Markdown Here,Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus other stuff.

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Criteria for failure

Jordan Peterson says that every ideal is a judge. He says that goals establish the criteria for failure.

That’s why I’ve avoided setting well-defined goals.

In “Maps of Meaning” he argues that the unknown always produces fear.

It might seem logical, he says, that we should not react to the unknown until we have enough information to know how we should feel about it. It is unknown. It might be good. Or it might be bad.

But that’s not the way animals respond, including human animals.

Faced with the unknown, we react with fear, unless we have good reason to think otherwise.

Setting goals

I set vague goals—like “improving myself.” But that’s cheating. I can count anything that I do—even random shit that does not matter—as an improvement.

But if I announce goals—like blogging every day, or getting my weight below 175 in a month—then it’s pretty clear that I’ve failed.

And the bigger the goal, the bigger the failure.

Let’s be clear: a goal is not a wish, and it’s not a dream. It’s something that is not impossible to attain—just very hard.

Failure is hard. But so is an unprecedented success.

A writing goal

I want to write things. And I do. I want to write things that are read by people. And they are. I want to write things that are read by lots of people. How much is lots?

Last month this blog had 640 pageviews. I’d like it to be in the tens of millions.

My most popular post last month had 24 views. My most popular post of all time had 456. I want my most popular posts to be in the millions.

It’s possible that I could achieve that. There’s no reason—other than discomfort—that I couldn’t try.

I might fail.

Or I might succeed.

The threat of the unknown

Let’s suppose that I write a post that gets a million page views.

Let’s ignore the unknown and unfamiliar and scary things that I’d have to do to get a million page views. Let’s imagine success.

Success on that scale is unexplored territory—unknown and therefore frightening.

I know how I deal with my current life. I know how I’ve dealt with setbacks. I even know I’ve dealt with some pretty rough failures.

I pulled through. I behaved with less than perfect integrity, but I wasn’t a complete asshole.

But how would I deal with massive success?

I don’t know.

Other people have had had enormous successes and turned into assholes. I might be one of them. I’ve never been a huge success. I’ve never been tested. So how would I know?

Huge failure sucks, too. But failure to meet an audacious goal is not failure the way failure to keep something valuable.

I’m comfortable with modest failure and modest success. I’ve been there. I’m comfortable with failure to achieve a big goal.

But huge success? That’s the one that bothers me.

Running away

I can see it.

I’ve been writing and posting with regularity, and my anxiety has been growing. Unpublished drafts are building up. Ideas for content have been piling up.

This is not new. I see that it’s part of the pattern—the pattern of running away.

When I have small successes that betoken much greater success, I get anxious.

I start to run away.

I break the pattern and exchange the dangerous unknown for the comfortable—if annoying—known.

Can I change this one

I see the pattern. Perhaps I can change it. I can certainly be on guard.

My goals—the dangerous successes that I want to avoid—are getting clearer.

I’ll write about them in the next post.

Written with the help of StackEdit, Grammarly, Markdown Here,Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus other stuff.

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