Chris Masterjohn

Students who took notes by hand scored ~28% higher on conceptual questions than laptop note-takers. Writing forces your brain to process and compress ideas instead of copying them.

Oxytocin is more than the “cuddle hormone.” It may be a key regulator of aging and longevity. We've long known about oxytocin's role in translating social experiences into physiological health and stress resilience. New research identifies the biological mechanism. Oxytocin levels decline with age, leading to epigenetic remodeling, mitochondrial dysfunction, and chronic inflammation. Restoring oxytocin levels reverses these changes. This points to a profound idea: cultivating strong social ties throughout adulthood can mitigate this loss of oxytocin signaling and promote robust health and resilience against stress and disease. As sterile-sounding as it might seem, it's a strong argument to think about intimate bonds and social interactions as pro-longevity interventions. They're not optional.

Body fat storage is hormonally regulated. Body fat breakdown is hormonally regulated. Yes, the law of thermodynamics still applies. But the calorie model assumes your body can freely access stored energy. In metabolic dysfunction, that’s NOT the case. If your dysfunctional hormones trap fat in storage, your body increases hunger and lowers energy long before it burns that fat even while carrying 100+ pounds of stored energy. That’s not a willpower problem. That’s physiology. But we still tell people to “just eat less and exercise more.” 🤦🏻‍♂️

This has been well known for decades but it isn’t because writing makes you use your brain. It’s because writing is SLOWER than typing and efficiency and speed are the enemy of understanding. Slowness forces the student to reword what they are writing because they have no time to write down everything and rewording requires thinking about meaning. Typing is fast enough to write down direct quotes so it doesn’t require thinking about meaning. Use efficiency and speed for rote things that free up time to slow down for what you want to derive meaning from.

Students who took notes by hand scored ~28% higher on conceptual questions than laptop note-takers. Writing forces your brain to process and compress ideas instead of copying them.

There are a few people for whom BMI doesn't indicate obesity. Very few. Comparing BMI to body fat-based assessments, there's >98% agreement, with 97% for men and 99.9% for women. BMI works well at the population level!

Drinking just water in the morning, when blood volume is lowest, may dilute electrolytes and increase dehydration. Adding a pinch of sea salt can help retain water in the bloodstream and improve how you feel.

There are no magical training paces! VO2max, Lactate Threshold, Critical Velocity, etc. None of them are special. They all have their purpose. Think of training as a spectrum– from jogging to sprinting–not as zones. All paces are useful and at your disposal.

Linoleic acid seems to reduce rates of cancer and do nothing for heart disease.