You know the usual approach to innovation in a corporation. Hold an offsite for brainstorming and to stimulate creativity. Get a big-name consultant. Team comes up with an idea, makes a plan. Does a public relations blast announcing their breakthrough idea. Fails. Do again. Fail again. If that wasn’t the case the vast majority of organizations would have no problem innovating right? The approach du jour is to go with a check the boxes approach based on a big-brand name theory. But here’s the rub. It doesn’t matter how many approaches you follow, it’s likely that all or most will fail. That’s because there’s no innovation without innovators. Corporations resist the idea that someone is indispensable. It’s much better to think that if you get someone smart with the right education, they will be an innovator. It totally forgets that innovators are a breed apart. If you have them, they will innovate no matter what because it’s in their genes. If you get a suit, they can never innovate in a million years, no matter how much theory and support you throw at them. One of the problems with corporate innovation efforts is that they tragically confuse creativity and innovation, as I have pointed out before. Another is that they also confuse entrepreneurship and innovation. These problems arise because the vast majority of corporate types aren’t innovators. And the main difference between innovators and everyone else is not one of intelligence. It’s a cognitive difference. So it’s really difficult for a non-innovator to recognize an innovator, even if he’s hit in the proverbial face by one. So to help you recognize these rare types, here is a list of the differences between innovators and everyone else. Innovators always overestimate the ease of achieving the target: the target always looks impossibly close to an innovator. To a normal person it looks realistically far. That’s because innovators focus on the reward, not the risk, and their perceptual field sees rewards as being much larger than they are from an achievability perspective because the innovator factors in the psychic value of achieving the reward which for him is always huge, as long as the idea is big enough Innovators always radically underestimate risk: for them the risks always look very low and easily overcome, for normal people they realistically assess the risk so it looks large; an innovator is someone who has a warped view of risk, discounting it so much that a huge risk always looks very attractive Introversion; most, but not all, innovators are introverts. That is shown clearly from our psychometric research in this area; this happens because introverts prefer to spend time alone which gives them more time for the thinking involved, they don’t care what others think, so they aren’t deterred by having a bad social image from being different. One of the many reasons extroverts are usually not innovators is that they are very sensitive to the views of others about themselves and if they think that view will be bad, they won’t do it. An introvert on the other hand might even do it precisely because others will think less of him; it’s the introvert’s way of sticking it to other people and showing they don’t care about them. An innovator wants to destabilize things and make wholesale change; innovators want to break things especially the status quo; that’s because in the established world, they have no power. However if they can destabilize the status quo, the world changes so m much that they might be the only people who understand it which gives them power. In addition, they often have a high sense of insecurity which makes them want to show people that they are powerful, which they can only do if they change the world in their favor. Innovators are so motivated they are prepared to risk being fired; innovators are so highly motivated to achieve their vision that they will risk being fired for their belief and actions. If someone is not prepared to get fired for pursuing an innovative course it’s almost certain that they are not an innovator. Lone wolf; innovators like to be on their own. They hate to have a boss (OK, who doesn’t?) but an innovator differs in this area by often being prepared to go out and do it themselves in their own company because they hate so much having to do what someone else tells them. Energy, fire in the belly: OK you don’t have to be an innovator to have fire in your belly but if you don’t have that fire you certainly aren’t going to be one since otherwise you will never have the energy to go through with an innovation that everyone else thinks is stupid and is going to resist as strongly as they can. Innovators don’t necessarily have original ideas: Did you notice that I didn’t say one difference is that innovators have original ideas but normal people don’t? Yes, that’s the case. Innovators find their ideas from anywhere and often they just pick up an idea that’s "in the air" that they didn’t originate themselves but that they see represents a huge opportunity that no-one else is taking up. So one of the differences is not that innovators have original ideas and others don’t. The difference is that innovators see and leverage opportunities that others don’t or can’t. The message: find innovators, not innovations. The innovators will then find the innovations for you.    Read More

Was doing some coaching last week and met a young lady who had impressive skills in arranging events. She’s a leader but doesn’t know it yet. And her lesson is a good one for all of us. She arranges conferences for her company. But although young she has already migrated to making these conferences into experiences. People at her conferences don’t sit; they stand. That makes them mix things up and talk to people they would never talk to otherwise. They have to move, instead of sitting down and going to sleep. Movement is good; sitting is bad, just about always. There’s a broader lesson here. When we talk about leadership we tend to talk about the importance of the message, how to use talent and so on. But there’s another dimension that only the flopheads in Hollywood really understand. That is that leadership is about creating experiences for people that will motivate, excite and inspire them. The reason that people get inspired is not usually that they believe. It’s that they are inspired. And if you give them an experience that impacts them at the emotional level, no matter how cheesy, you will win a convert over to your cause that you won’t by giving them a briefing to read. I hate using Steve Jobs as an example because he’s so hackneyed as an exemplar. But you had to give it to him. Whether it was with his press conferences, his jeans and T-short, his impresario-like acts berating his employees, he always provided an experience. And he knew the value of choreography using it all the time to create effects, even though we didn’t know he was choreographing all of them. The best leaders are natural choreographers. Often they are impresarios like Richard Branson or Larry Ellison. And you don’t have to be a flaming extrovert like them to do it. Even Warren Buffett in his older age has assumed choreographer-like tendencies even though he is a deep introvert. And being a choreographer-leader doesn’t mean that you have to be into son et lumiere, although it might well help. Choreographer-leadership might also include some of the following: Bringing employees together in unexpected but choreographed ways Bringing natural innovators into bastions of stability to shake them up a little Integrating walking environments with working environments Doing planned but choreographed simulations for your employees with them, either acting out situations or otherwise I think that one of the big problems in modern leadership, especially in large organizations is that it is over-intellectualized, too structured and over-analyzed. Unless you can meet people at an emotional level and give them an experience rather than just a lesson, you probably won’t get the compelling leadership impact you actually want. So the lesson is, if you want to be a better leader, you also have to think like a choreographer.             Does choreography provide us with a new more effective leadership model?Read More

Much of the talk about leadership is about how the leader looks and how he should act to be seen as being most effective by her followers. But I think there’s another perspective; that the best leaders, to paraphrase the old saying about children in Victorian times, are best not seen, and not heard. That might seem a bit heretical. Isn’t the job of the leader to be seen and heard so that people know what she wants and can see an image of direction that they would like to follow? Well yes, but only sometimes. A good leader knows when to be seen and heard, and maybe even more importantly, when not to be seen and not to be heard, at least not through the normal senses. I call them invisible leaders. I have known many leaders who had mastered the skill of being invisible. Moreover many of these leaders had also mastered the skill of knowing when to be visible or when to be invisible. Most of them, I have to say, were invisible most of the time and only came up for air occasionally. Maybe that’s not the classic conception of leadership but I can also say that in almost all of these cases, these leaders were extraordinarily effective. So much so that one of the most frequent questions asked about them was: "How does everything work so well here even though were never see Joanna?" So here’s a partial answer to that question. It’s partially because I think invisible leaders have many skills and approaches that are not well understood, even by the leadership literati. In many cases I think that invisible leaders cultivate this lack of understanding because they don’t want their secrets of invisibility to be well understood, lest they become less effective. So here are some of the strategies followed by invisible leaders: They rarely issue edicts; instead they let their wishes be known to be merely suggestions and let people decide for themselves whether or not they want to follow them. If they don’t, the leaders let well enough alone and go on to the next idea. If enough good people don’t think it’s a good idea, either he will drop it or try another suggestion. They rarely tell people to actually do something. Instead they divine what a person really likes doing, or something he really wants to do now, and then they let it be known that she would have no objection that the person does it. Of course then the person does it very well because they own the idea, not the leader. When taking many decisions, instead of making the decision themselves, they allow the decision to bubble up from below and then they follow it. In this case it appears they have followed the team rather than led it so their people feel that their views have been respected and followed which increases the level of engagement by the followers. They frequently set up informal committees or groups to look at and suggest decisions. They are careful not to direct these groups and even to tell the groups what their own view or recommendation is, but still allow enough - but not all - of their thoughts to be known so that the group will not stray too far off the reservation. As I mentioned, these are only some of the techniques followed by invisible leaders. But these four are the basics. Even when they are visible, invisible leaders still use these techniques to a greater or lesser extent. You might think that some of these techniques are manipulative. So be it. The questions are: are they any more manipulative than conventional techniques for command and control? Are they worse than straight commands? Is understanding your people so well that they do things that you don’t tell them a do bad way of leading? I wouldn’t necessarily think so. An invisible leader might seem to have a lot in common with the Level 5 leaders talked about by Jim Collins in his famous book "Good to Great". I’m not a great fan of the science behind the book but I think that a Level 5 leader comes closest in the popular imagination to what I see as an invisible leader. But I think Jim Collin’s Level 5 leaders still had PR guys and the full panoply of the public company CEO albeit more muted than in the usual case. My invisible leaders are far more muted and far more subtle than I think Jim Collins’ Level 5 leaders ever were, especially when you consider the well-known less-than-stellar epilogs to many of them. In any case, I think the techniques of invisible leaders are well worth studying. In this leadership-obsessed age, sometimes the focus is on the overt signals of leadership rather than being simply effective. And taking on the mantle of invisible leadership is surely one guard against leaders whose power goes to their heads, or who are destructively narcissistic. Or think that being publicly decisive is the only way to be a good leader. Next time you see an organization where things seem to be going well, but you can’t see how the leader is doing it, ask whether they are one of the best types of leader, the invisible leader.                Read More

Over the last couple of weeks I have been conducting coaching for innovators identified using our psychometric assessments. This has reminded me of an important issue that usually gets overlooked in discussions on innovation. In the conventional wisdom, an innovator is someone who thinks up an idea and then (maybe) does something with it. I have blogged before on this confusion. Steve Jobs filched the Apple GUI from Xerox. Bill Gates bought DOS from tiny company Seattle software for a song. Neither created the products for which they were later, justly, seen as being the innovators. They didn’t create the products; they spotted them. Many innovators are incredible spotters of opportunities that everyone else has missed. In many cases, that’s what makes them the innovator, not that they created the idea, product or service, which as I have said, in many cases they didn’t. Last week I was coaching a young lady with an incredible idea which she is already putting into practice in a project which could become a company. In discussing it with her she told me that she had got the idea from her husband. But that doesn’t make me think any the less of her innovative capabilities. Her husband threw out an idea which she spotted as an opportunity. No doubt this isn’t the first time an idea like hers has bene mentioned somewhere. The difference is she immediately saw the opportunity and picked it up and ran with it. That’s the difference between most innovators and most of the rest of us. However I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all innovators are spotters. Some are indeed creators. Einstein clearly created his own ideas. But there many others who were quick to see their importance and who say how they could be used, for example in navigation, timekeeping and so on. Einstein was a scientific innovator. Most innovators in business are commercial innovators. Scientific innovators do something like Einstein and dream up something new. Commercial innovators usually spot something that already exists but has lain dormant since no-one saw the enormous possibilities of the idea. Discussions about innovation and innovators have tended to confuse the two types of innovation. The result is that commercial innovation, where someone spots an existing idea, is somehow looked down upon as inferior. Of course, when it’s by an icon like Steve Jobs, we overlook the fact that he got it illegally. But that’s a very narrow-minded view and overlooks the source of most commercial innovation. So in working with innovators you have to be very careful that you don’t say something like "You didn’t make up that idea; I heard it before somewhere else so the you didn’t make it up and therefore you aren’t an innovator." Because that misses the whole point and would have missed Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and innumerable others. It’s another tweak on the true meaning of innovation. Those of you have kept up with this blog know that this is another of my pet peeves (right up there with thinking that anyone can be an innovator). Spotting the unspotted is just as socially valuable as creating the uncreated. If you don’t want to end up missing something really important, you need to keep that firmly in mind.                            Read More

Did you see the research that shows that the descendants of Holocaust survivors have elevated stress levels compared with others? It seems that trauma can be inherited. It's starting to look like that goes for a lot of other things. For example recent research shows that breast cancer risks acquired in pregnancy may pass to the next 3 generations. Another way of seeing this is that what happens to you in your life isn’t just a function of your own genes and those of your parents; it is a result of the combined experience of your forbears and even bloodline. We’ve known for some time that most of our DNA doesn’t seem to do anything, the so-called junk DNA. That’s mystery number 1. But now it’s clear that the unimaginably complex interplay between gene expression and environmental influences results in biological outcomes that were formerly thought to be impossible, such as evolution occurring within one generation, a theory put forward by Lamarck, formerly ridiculed for centuries. So it’s starting to look like our DNA does vastly more than we understand. In fact it has uncanny similarities to dark matter. You know, the type of matter (and dark energy) that scientists now believe makes up the vast majority of all matter. They can’t see it directly and they don’t know what it does (except hold the universe together). But they do know that the matter we see is relatively inconsequential in the overall scheme of things. Just like only a tiny fraction of our DNA does anything useful. So what does the dark DNA do? The research I quoted above shows one perspective on the role of DNA namely the collective biological experience of our forebears. The history of science does give us another. Jung and others proposed the idea of a collective unconscious. Dreams allowed us to see into this. We could be encoding this into memories stored in our DNA. So it could be our DNA is a distributed mechanism for storing the collective memories of all humans, kind of cloud-sharing for the human family history. Another possibility is that the DNA controls quantum communication processes between brains everywhere, as I have proposed previously. You would think that would use up at least some of the dark DNA, right? In this perspective the brain itself is a universe. Peer inside and you can see your own biological destiny, albeit this is only an infinitesimal sliver of the total DNA. You can see the genetic history of your own bloodline right back to the beginning. And you can see the collective history of the human experience. Now that’s really a decent-sized universe. That’s worthy of more consideration. Can we take this analogy further? You have probably heard about the theory of multiple or parallel universes, courtesy of author Brian Greene. If the theory about the collective team of our brain and our dark DNA holds any water, our brain is actually a collection of universes. Go into any one and you get a totally different view: of yourself as an individual: your relationship to the human race: an insight into human collective experience: maybe communication with brains everywhere. That’s a lot of work for a piece of jelly weighing around 4 pounds. Could it be that our brain is actually a wormhole to those multiple, parallel universes? Could it be, taking the analogy even further, that we don’t need a warp drive to get to Alpha Centauri? That the ticket to ride has actually been within us all along? That our brain is a wormhole cunningly camouflaged as a control module for a single body so we can’t see its true purpose? That we can actually use this wormhole to penetrate the mysteries of existence, not just here on Earth but elsewhere? That getting to the stars might actually be easier than getting to Mars?                                        Read More

Uh oh, I guess this is really a sacred cow. I’m a runner (road, not gym) too. But it looks to me like there’s a big problem in this area of gyms. Not only that, by using a gym, exercisers are actually denying themselves some much greater health benefits. First of all the bad news about gyms. Past research shows that they often have a serious problem with bacteria. It occurs in most areas of the gym including exercise equipment, hot tubs, swimming pools, showers, towels and so on. One analysis of a site showed that it harbored 132 million bugs in an area the size of a 2p coin, while the average count was 16 million, compared with 500 for the average toilet seat. You’ve got a lot of sweat, warm and moist conditions, maybe with a few ill people thrown into the mix. Kind of like being in heated airplane breathing recycled air. Or a hospital. Either way, not good. And there’s no state or federal health regulations for gyms. You are totally dependent on the gym itself to keep things clean. Most gyms do take considerable efforts to keep things clean. But it’s clearly an impossible environment from an antibacterial perspective. You are exercising in a bacterial soup and no amount of hand sanitizer is going to change that. It’s not just the bacteria. It’s also the air. One recent study in New York showed that "Almost all of the gyms in the study had levels of these substances (dust and formaldehyde" that significantly exceed European standards for healthy indoor air standards." You’re breathing in the exhalation products of a lot of sweaty exercisers as well as the remains of the cleaning and deodorizing products that are used to try to remove the smell of human existence. But here’s what I think is the bigger problem. That is that gym-goers are denying themselves the immense value of sunlight by exercising indoors. Most everyone is sublimely unaware of the importance of that lack. It’s well known that most of us lack vitamin D but that it’s essential to good health so many people take vitamin supplements. The major benefits of vitamin D are prevention of osteoporosis and positive impacts on our immune system and heart health. You can also get your daily shot of vitamin D by being out in the sun. But we now know that vitamin D supplements do not replace the health benefits you get from real sunlight. In other words, you really have no choice than to spend some time in the sun if you want to have the best health. But now there’s more fascinating research about the impact of sunlight on human health. It turns out that sunlight promotes the production of nitric oxide in your skin and that this in turn lowers blood pressure and has positive impacts in strengthening the immune system. But now there’s even more research that links regular exposure to sunlight to reducing obesity and diabetes through both the notice oxide effect and other linkages that we don’t understand yet. Of course, now that researchers can smell blood in the water, there’s even more good stuff coming out. One is the finding that "outdoor physical activity had a 50 percent greater positive effect on mental health than going to the gym" through its effect of reducing stress. And of course, when you are exercising outside, you are getting the benefits of breathing air that has been sterilized by the effects of the sun’s ultra-violet rays so you are breathing clean air (unless you are in a big polluted city, and especially if you are overseas such as in Beijing or New Delhi). That’s got to count for something right? The irony is that many people (me included) have tended to support our non-gym-going habits with our contention that exercise machines don’t give you the same workout as running outside where you don’t get all that help from the machine. But guess what; we’re all wrong. It turns out that it’s basically the same. So that’s one argument you can’t use for throwing brickbats at gym-going. Of course, if you are exercising, that’s a good thing. It has enormous positive health benefits. I don’t think they are being totally negated by going to a gym. Let’s say they are just being significantly reduced. In some cases that bacterial load you are receiving is going to have much more pernicious effects, so be warned. The commonsense thing would be just to exercise outside. That might not be possible for many people. So the nest best thing is if you have to go to a gym to exercise, make sure that you spend at least an hour a week in sunlight, maybe walking or cycling. There is an answer although the gyms might think it’s too radical. That is that the best antibiotics are fresh air and open roofs to let in the sunlight. This was what Florence Nightingale used to recommend and one of the ways she brought down the huge infection rates that existed in Victorian hospitals at the time. You might think that’s kind of old-fashioned. But there’s a new realization that modern hospital designs, using windows that can’t be opened, no fresh air and a lack of sunlight is actually one of the best environments for infectious bacteria including some of the baddies like staph and MRSA. We need to redesign hospitals to allow lots of fresh air and real sunlight as the best way to reduce these hospitable conditions for deadly infections. That’s how those "old-fashioned" Victorian sanitariums were built, you might remember. The problem is that modern gyms are designed like modern hospitals with sealed windows and no direct sunlight. The answer is that gyms must be totally redesigned so that they are genuinely healthy places in which to work out instead of breeding grounds for the worst bacteria. We’ve collectively forgotten that our bodies were designed specifically for a lot of sunlight and fresh air. I have little doubt that in the near future researchers will demonstrate a strong link between cognitive performance and sun exposure. In our modern age we have also collectively forgotten that fresh air and sunlight are the best antibiotics. Until gyms are extensively redesigned my advice is exercise outside as much as you can.                               Read More

Have you heard about the scandal with cheating on the SAT? It’s particularly prevalent in Asia with Chinese and Korean students being repeat offenders. The organizations behind the cheaters go to some considerable lengths to get the SAT questions. They send questions to phones by text and other means. The stakes are rising though. Some cities in China are actually using drones to intercept these signals. So there’s actually a bit of an arms race going on between the cheaters and the gamekeepers with both using more innovative means to outsmart the other side. If there wasn’t the ethical dimension here I am sure that the organizations supplying the cheating test-takers would otherwise be called innovative. Even the cheaters might be called innovative too. Of course it might offend many sensibilities to say that but nonetheless, it’s probably accurate. I often cite Steve Jobs in this regard because he’s a really good example. He purloined his Mac interface from Xerox without distribution or payment. It worked and he got away with it. It was definitely innovative but it was almost certainly wrong or at least ethically challenged. For some time all those millions of people who were using stolen downloaded music were lauded as heroes of the digital age even though what they were doing was criminal, as courts later ruled. If you called them criminals at that time you were seen as being old-fashioned or just plain stupid. But they were probably hopping on the innovation bandwagon in their own misguided way. Grooveshark was lauded as an innovator with its Napster-like downloaded music model (it was actually located in my hometown until its demise). Yet it was basically engaged in a criminal enterprise. It thrived for some years on this model, and managed to stave off the companies whose music it stole until the courts closed it down recently. But while they were alive they were the darlings of the digerati. Innovators are as innovators does. Finally of course ethics won, after a long hard fight though. Yet it was precisely this moral victory of ethics over fashion that allowed Taylor Swift to cock her snoot at Apple recently. Without this fight to defeat unethical innovators from the downloaded music area , stealing music might have become legal by default and artists like Taylor Swift would have lost their livelihood.. Frank Sinatra strikes me as being another example in this category. He was as innovative as they get in the music sphere. But he was a fellow-traveler of the Mafia and was basically a criminal himself, a story that Kitty Kelley tells in her pathbreaking biography of him "His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra." To say he was tawdry and a very nasty person is an understatement. But he was certainly innovative. The lionization of celebrities means we often turn a blind eye to their peccadilloes. If they are innovative, then we tend to remember the innovation part and forget about the rest. I suspect that the problem with the cheating Chinese students and the organizations behind them is that they are Chinese so it’s pretty easy to target them as cheats - which they are. But the innovation part is brushed under the carpet because they don’t have any redeeming celebrity status which would probably get them off the hook. If you are an innovative celebrity or you have money it’s quite easy to do unethical things but fool everyone to think otherwise. You can pay public relations people to pull the wool over the eyes of the press and the public, as Steve Jobs did for so long. Or you can pay lawyers to hold things up in the courts, like Grooveshark did (and Napster before it), and enter into a long war of attrition that you might even win, thanks to the vagaries of the US legal system. You can be innovative both inside and outside ethical constraints. It happens a lot in wars, tragically. But it’s still innovative even if it’s tragic and totally immoral. ISIS has clearly been enormously innovative even though without any doubt it is guilty of war crimes and the most terrible, inhumane and ugly acts possible. We tend to equate the term "innovative" to being morally good. That’s one of the reasons it gets so much press. It’s so good to be an innovator right? Innovativeness is next to Godliness maybe? But we forget that are brains are plastic. Our mental skills are often used as much for innovating in the darkest ways possible as well as in the greatest ways. We just have to be careful that we don’t let our flawed, unconscious decision processes take over and confuse innovation with "the good". When a celebrity or anyone else’s does something innovative that’s bad, we need to call them out. Otherwise we will end up extolling bad or even terrible acts by using a perversion of the term innovation. Unfortunately that’s what’s trending these days.                  Read More

I’m sure you have heard of the microbiome? That’s the trillions of bacteria in the human gut whose functions we still only dimly understand. But one thing has recently become very clear. That is that the microbiome has a huge impact on our feelings, moods and mental functioning generally. Here’s the interesting part. It’s also become clear that the microbiome produces many of the same chemicals that are used by the brain such as dopamine and other neurochemicals. And these chemicals can pass through the blood-brain barrier. So many of the chemicals in your gut could be used to change your moods and behavior, and even to address mental disease. The new name for these chemicals is psychobiotics. Think of them as the fancy successor to probiotics. Right now health and medical experts are licking their chops at the potential these chemicals have to do good. But there are other people who are probably licking their chops too. That’s the marketing guys and the spooks, amongst many others. The marketing guys now have a brand new way to manipulate and mislead you that’s radically more sophisticated than traditional marketing and advertising. How about psychobiotics in your cereal which make you eat more of a sister brand of cereal? What about snack bars that make you want to buy more expensive doodahs? How about a frappuccino that makes you much more likely to download a Starbucks movie? We've just discovered the next big leap in neuromarketing folks. But this is the tip of the iceberg. What if I can find details of the exact composition of your individual microbiome and link it you your personal data? Sound impossible? Just ask the Chinese and they can give you the information on at least 18 million Americans from the monumentally incompetent Federal Office of Personnel Management. What’s the odds that they have also purloined the medical records of millions of Americans too? And not just the Chinese. How about the NSA which has records of everything including no doubt your own personal medical records? Did you know that the Federal Consumer Financial Protection Board, ostensibly set up to protect the privacy of US citizens, has actually instead collected data on 600 million credit card accounts? The Government Accounting Office has just released a report saying that the CFPB doesn’t have sufficient security to protect this data either. So there’s now enough data lying around unprotected to allow US spooks, foreign governments and hackers and private companies to link your private financial and other data to your medical data, including the data on your microbiome. That’s once hospitals start to collect it, which you can guarantee they will soon, partly for some very good reasons. Just imagine how that data can be abused. For example I could now link your private financial data with your IP address and microbiome data to figure out how best to impact your mood and mental functioning using a combination of advertising and special offers (e.g. for food or medicines). Maybe I want to do this because you are the senior executive of a competitor and I want to nobble you to make you less effective. Or I am a romantic rival of your boyfriend and I access hacker data to target his financial and medical data to figure out ways to destabilize him mentally and emotionally so that you switch your attentions to moi. No-one would ever think of doing that, right? Maybe I am the commanding officer of the armed services of an unnamed Slavic country that has decided it wants to unnerve the entire population of the US so that it won’t attack it if it invades several nearby countries. The commanding officer also has deep information on the moods and emotions of our troops near his country and can gain secret access to the supply chain that provides the food supplies of the defending troops. So he can change their mood to one of defeatism and despair so that when he attacks we won’t defend. I guess no-one would ever think of something so nefarious right? Of course one can also think of some really beneficial uses of microbiome data. It could help society, government and business in innumerable ways, and it probably will. The unfortunate thing is that they guys who want to abuse this information for bad purposes are probably already way ahead of the good guys. Some of the bad guys are ours too. We tend to think of weapons of mass destruction as being physically massively destructive ones like nuclear bombs, chemical and biological weapons and poisons in the water supply. But the ultimate weapons of mass destruction are lying right inside you right now just waiting for someone to come along and activate them. We’re almost there.                  Read More

Have you ever seen the TV show "Naked and Afraid"? A man and a woman go (naked) into the wild with no food or tools and have to survive for 3 weeks. If they make the full 3 weeks it they usually come back emaciated. Guess what? That’s the norm for mammals, humans included. When you live in natural state, you don’t get 3 meals a day. Maybe 3 meals a month is more like it, and then if you’re lucky. Those are the conditions for which mammalian bodies were designed. To live without food for long periods and then maybe once in a while gorge on something if you are lucky enough to find it. In other words, the human body was designed for sporadic eating and drinking. It’s very good at that. It’s terrible at getting fed regularly because it just was never designed for that. If you are eating 3 meals a day, doing a lot of snacking to boot, then things get really ugly. As we are seeing now with the global epidemic of obesity. The current fashionable remedies for obesity are diet and exercise. But the diet part still assumes you eat 3 meals a day. I think the problem is less the amount of calories you take in, and more so how regularly you do it. In other words I think that regularity rather than just calorie count is the real culprit. Not that calories aren’t a problem either. There’s a mountain of evidence now that shows conclusively that calorific reduction extends lifespan and leads to better health outcomes. This can even be seen at the molecular level where we now know that the more calories you take in, the shorter are your telomeres (OK look here) which are a powerful indicator of remaining longevity. But the 3 meals a day problem is a difficult one to get rid of. Moms everywhere insist that you have breakfast because their reptilian brains know as only a mom can know that in the coming days you are certain to experience a famine and won’t survive it. If you have breakfast that insulates you from this extremely common occurrence. If your mom has the slightest inkling that these repeated breakfasts will make you obese or overweight, no matter, damn the torpedoes. There’s several million years of evolution backing her up and she’s not about to dump this certainty now in favor of some new-fangled theory that says you shouldn’t eat 3 - or more - meals   day. I’m a runner and I usually run every day. I rarely have breakfast and I will never run a long run, like a half-marathon, after having breakfast. That’s because it saps my energy. I would like to think I'm abnormal, but, sad to say, I definitely am not. We also have another snippet of knowledge doing the rounds. That is, that when you eat food regularly, especially if it’s rich or sugary food, it makes you want to eat more. The idea that much of modern eating is a symptom of addictive behavior is now well-established. Eating 3 meals a day aids and abets global food addictions; basically giving alcohol to an alcoholic. But we have a modern food industry and modern supply chains that are themselves addicted to the business of supplying 3 or more meals a day to people. In fact, these industries see it as their bounden duty to keep us eating essentially continuously. That’s why we now have things like protein bars and frappuccino that are meant to allow us to graze continuously no matter what activity we happen to be engaged in at that particular time. It certainly isn’t in the interest of food vendors, supermarkets, restaurants, fast food joints and the like to tell you that eating their food several times a day is actually regularly poisoning yourself. No-one wants you to realize that regular food is a toxin that your body wasn’t designed to tolerate. And so is going to lead to disease and a shorter life. Food in limited quantities is food. In quantities of 3 meals a day or more it’s essentially a toxin. The body treats it as such. That’s why it revolts against the excess by going into obesity, shutting down essential organs and processes and giving you diabetes. That’s why diabetes type 2 is still increasing rapidly in every country of the world. What our bodies worldwide are telling us is not that we are just eating too many calories, but that we are eating way too many meals and that is overloading all of our mammalian physiological processes. The world is very slowly waking up to this gargantuan problem. People are starting to realize that fasting is useful, although it’s still not the complete answer. You might have heard of the 5/2 diet; that’s where you eat normally for 5 days and have minimal calories for the remaining 2 days a week. It’s a step in the right direction but here’s my tip. If you want to do it properly and enjoy fantastic health and a great figure, you should go on a 2/5 diet (invented by yours truly) that is 5 days a week with minimum calories (300-500 calories a day depending on your size and age) and for 2 days a week you can eat "normally", that is, be a glutton. The side benefit is that you will assuredly become a millionaire. Something to console you for an annoying gain in health and fitness and the loss of all that deliciously toxic "food". It could be worse. Like going on "Naked and Afraid".Read More

I guess you’ve all been reading about MERS, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. It’s hit South Korea and we don’t know where it will go next. It’s not an epidemic though. For the media that’s kind of a pity, they all love to talk about an impending epidemic, preferably a pandemic. Of course, there’s not too many of those. Or are there? The Economist just ran an article on mental illness last week. Seems like, if you include things like depression and ADHD, it affects 20% or so of the population. That’s a lot. Just to put that into perspective, the Centers for Disease Control estimated that in 2014, around 10% of the US population had diabetes. Diabetes is the gold standard for measuring the scale of an epidemic. On that scale, mental illness is twice the size. That sounds like a pandemic to me. So why aren’t the literati and the policy wonks cottoning on to that? The amazing thing is that for all our modern technology and all the sophisticated medical research that is being done, we still have little or no idea as to how mental illness is caused. We’ve moved on from the idea that it’s self-inflicted or purely genetic. But other than that we are none the wiser. There are some intriguing findings that the cause of some diseases like schizophrenia could be bacterial (as in chlamydia) or viral and that OCD could be caused by other bacteria. This has led to some speculation that mental disease could be infectious. The increasing evidence of the importance of the microbiome is leading some to think that gut bacteria are one cause. There is evidence as to links with parasites, especially those carried by cats which are responsible for toxoplasmosis and mental disease. Antibiotics have also been implicated, both as a direct cause and through their impact on the microbiome. In other words, we don’t have a clue. At present the state of the art is to treat the symptoms, mostly with drugs. They can certainly help but they rarely cure. One widely misunderstood treatment is ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) which is surprisingly effective, but we have no reason why, and it’s only useful sometimes. Behavioral cognitive therapy) BCT, aka talking, is also sometimes effective but it’s no use with most psychoses and we don’t even understand how it works either. Mental illness has enormous social impacts. A huge proportion of all inmates in the "corrections" systems are estimated to be suffering from mental illness. A US Department of Justice report in 2005 estimated that 56% of State prisoners, 45% of Federal prisoners and 64% of jail inmates had a mental health problem. A similarly high proportion of police arrests are for people with mental health problems. It’s now becoming tragically clear that a disproportionate number of mass shootings are committed by people with mental health problems. And we also know that a high proportion of the homeless, together with the (mostly but not always) petty crime that is associated with this, have mental illness of some kind. And that doesn’t even include the many people amongst us who also suffer from mental illnesses that are not visible to others, except when they break out. These illnesses include attempted suicide, depression, and pathological behaviors such as OCD and bipolar disease. Many of these are subclinical for much of the time but can suddenly become alarmingly clinical. There are many problems in families, which might appear to be caused by poverty, that are actually caused by mental disease of a family member. And it’s not just at home. The invisible millions who suffer from mental illness mostly go to work. So many of the problems we see in organizations might not be due to sloth, incompetence (although some most assuredly are) but to mental health issues. How about the German pilot of the plane that crashed into the side of a mountain in the Alps not so long ago? How many other work "crashes" happen without us knowing the true cause? What about vehicular suicide? Given the pandemic nature of mental illness, why isn’t it being given the attention it most assuredly deserves? Well by its very nature, it’s invisible. There aren’t any lesions, tumors, obvious physical manifestations, no visible scars. And it’s still stigmatized, albeit things are improving. But most people still don’t want to talk about it, whether it’s concerning themselves or a relative or loved one. It can cause problems with employment and there are knotty legal issues. But mostly it’s just not fashionable. HIV got its start because just at that time being homosexual had become part of the avant-garde counterculture. Ironically when homosexuality was considered a mental illness, mental health as a social cause might have received more attention. But now that LBGT lifestyles are becoming part of the mainstream, that aspect isn’t going to help either. Obamacare requires parity in health insurance between physical and behavioral health needs. But that side of ObamaCare just isn’t working out as it was supposed to. So mental health is still an orphan in the health systems of the US. Mental illness simply hasn’t become a cause celebre. It doesn’t have the raw public relations firepower of HIV, Ebola, Alzheimer’s or even MERS. So it isn’t getting the political support, and therefore the funding that comes from being one of the fashionable medical causes. When will the world actually see the pandemic that is going on right in front of its face?                    Read More