Or, The Ultimate Egregore Fighting Championship of the
Philippines

It turns out my country isn’t what I thought it was.

In May of 2022, my countrymen elected Bongbong Marcos as president. BBM’s father, Ferdinand Marcos, was the villain of the world I grew up in. And now the son of the dictator is the choice of the people.

This is very perplexing to many of us.

I had conversations with BBM supporters, including some friends. The most common explanation — that they were victims of disinformation — just didn’t sound complete. It felt like there was something deeper going on.

I sought answers by writing this essay. I used the concept of “egregores” (explained in Part I) to uncover our deepest dividing line. That, along with a lecture by Manuel Quezon III and a framework by a scholar named Mina Roces, felt like a better explanation for the recent elections.

Whether we like it or not, we need to live with BBM supporters. They are our colleagues, our relatives, our neighbors. And if we want more people to share our ideals for this country, the first step is to understand the ideals of those who elected Marcos.

Here’s a quick overview of this journey:

I. The Egregore of EDSA, where we make our journey easier by treating ideas as persons, or better yet, gods and demons. Then we check on the egregore that nurtured many of us in our youth: EDSA. This helped me understand why this election felt like a battle between good and evil to me and to many supporters of BBM’s rival, Leni Robredo.

II. The Ancient Egregore, where we get to know the egregore behind BBM’s supporters, and where we try to walk in their shoes. I found this model to fit better with my conversations with those who back BBM.

III. Sociopath Power Players Through the Eyes of Our Egregores, where we look at political power players through the lens of our two egregores, and see how different they look to each side.

IV. “The Real World”, where we question why the righteous message from our side could sound holier than thou to the other.

V. Why I had to write this.

I. The Egregore of EDSA

Imagine that ideas are beings who desire to survive and grow. These ideas live through the minds of people. The more people believe in the idea, the stronger and bigger it becomes. Many of these big ideas are in conflict with each other. They need to fight for space in people’s minds. As Carl Jung said, “people don’t have ideas, ideas have people.” These clashing titans are egregores.

With this viewpoint, history can be read as an ultimate fighting championship of egregores. For instance, around the Mediterranean, Paganism was overthrown by Monotheism. Later on Christianity and Islam battled it out. Christianity won in the West, and Islam won in the Middle East.

For our purposes, it does not matter whether these egregores are actually real (it depends how you define “real”). What matters is that it allows us to ask this question: what egregores have been battling in the Philippines?

The best answer I’ve found to this question is a lecture that Manuel L. Quezon III gave to people who study Philippine politics for a living, and tucked three hours deep in a Facebook video recording.

In the lecture, Quezon recounts the moves and countermoves of two egregores, and the communities of Filipinos they possess (without using the concept of egregores). In one corner is the egregore that animates the grassroots movement behind Leni Robredo. Quezon traces this egregore to the 1950s’, when President Magsaysay built a “middle-class republic” founded on Church, clubs and schools.

The rival egregore got the upperhand through the leadership of Ferdinand Marcos. According to Quezon, the key maneuver was Marcos’ domination of the 1971–1973 constitutional convention. This eventually led to the decade-long reign of the dictator.

In that decade, the people of the defeated egregore saw growing impunity and corruption. Righteousness strengthens this egregore. It was finally roused to action after the 1983 assassination of Ninoy Aquino, Marcos’s rival. This culminated in the peaceful revolution of EDSA. The foundations established by Magsaysay in the 50s’ — Church, clubs and schools — led massive rallies in the streets. Marcos was deposed and eventually died in exile. Ninoy’s wife, Cory, was elected as president.

This was the creation story of the Philippines I grew up in. I have an uncle who was there in EDSA, and once in a while, in some of our family get-togethers, he would retell the story of People Power to the kids in family.

If this were a film, we would see a transition from a black-and-white memory to the present day in full color, and little kids morphing into adults.

It is hard to believe that 36 years has passed since EDSA. Life happened in the meantime. Like many of my peers, I was too busy with my own pursuits and problems to notice the country changing. In May of 2022, we woke up to a different nation. It turns out that for many, EDSA was no longer the focal point of history, and its ideals no longer the axis of our country’s unity.

What happened? In the same lecture, Quezon explains the decline and fall of our egregore.

In 1998, the country elected Erap Estrada as president. To the the EDSA crowd he was just a womanizing former actor. We even invented a genre of jokes for him, our equivalent to the dumb blonde jokes of the US. When asked to comment about the Monica Lewinsky affair, he said that both he and Clinton have sex scandals, but he gets all the sex while Clinton gets all the scandals.

In 2001, the old trio of Church, clubs and schools had enough after learning about his corruption, and once again came together for EDSA, part II. It was another victory for People Power (pyrrhic, it turned out). The vice president then, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, was sworn into office at the monument that commemorates the original EDSA, a gigantic image of the Blessed Virgin in between the highway of EDSA, a huge mall and a gated community for the rich.

Four months later, the supporters of Erap staged their own People Power, which they call EDSA Tres. Mainstream media called them “The Great Unwashed.” The EDSA II folks quipped that while the battle cry of EDSA I and II was “free the country from a thief!”, the battle cry of EDSA Tres was “free sandwiches, free juice and free meth.” One broadsheet commentator wrote, “Isn’t it amazing that in this day and age there still exist undiscovered islands in our archipelago? In early May we discovered one such island: a colony of smelly, boisterous and angry people. They are the poor among us.”

Quezon says that these two latter EDSAs broke the unity brought about by the first one. The poor felt betrayed by the removal of the president they elected. The rich of Manila freaked out after seeing their worst nightmare come to life: an urban insurrection that threatened their properties.

It seemed like the egregore of EDSA still had a lot of life in it with the election of Noynoy Aquino in 2010. Noynoy is the son of Cory and Ninoy. Cory died shortly before the elections. Commentators opined that sympathy for the grieving son helped bring him to the presidency. His term appears to be the last chapter of the EDSA era. The final blow to our egregore happened during his presidency.

In 2015, 44 officers from the police’s elite group, Special Action Force (SAF), were killed in an operation against an Islamic rebel group. When the remains of the officers arrived in Manila, Noynoy was not there to receive them (he was in an inauguration of a car manufacturing plant). This, to Quezon, led to what he calls “The Great Divorce.” According to him, the sentiment of the people was something like this: “we accompanied you as you mourned for your father in ’86 and as you mourned for your mother in ’09. Yet you cannot not make time for us in our mourning.” (The Tagalog “nakikiramay” captures it much better.) Egregores live and die with powerful symbols like this.

In 2016, the Philippines elected Rodrigo Duterte to the presidency. He was the opposite of the ideals of Church, clubs and schools. He called both Pope Francis and US President Barrack Obama SOBs. He made rape jokes. He was condemned by the UN for human rights violations. Yet by the end of his term he had the highest approval rating of outgoing Philippine presidents. His daughter, Sara, dominated the vice presidential election of 2022. Her partnership with BBM helped the latter win the presidential elections.

What the hell is going on? Let’s see if we could get answers by getting better acquainted with the egregore in the opposite corner of the ring.

II. The Ancient Egregore

Scholars have noticed these egregores and the battle they have been waging in Philippine history. For instance, below are some excerpts from Kinship Politics In Postwar Philippines: The Lopez Family 1946–2000 by Mina Roces (via Quezon’s Tumblr). Since it is taboo for academics to talk about egregores, she calls this epic battle of titans “a framework.”

This book proposes a framework for such an analysis. It argues that a contest between two competing discourses — traditional social idioms embedded in kinship politics or politica de famila and Western values (here interchangeably used with the term “modern”) inculcated in the colonial period — accounts for these political oscillations.

Roces calls the egregore behind EDSA “Western,” because it came from the West. But that’s like saying Marxism is German or that Buddhism is Indian.

The colonial period introduced a number of Western idioms (the term Western idioms or Western institutions is used for lack of a better term to refer to non-indigenous influences introduced externally into the society from the West from the 16th century onwards) which were eventually incorporated into the cultural milieu and thus of political behavior.

Roces then gives three examples of these idioms or institutions we got from the West.

First, a new set of ethics and morals, introduced in the Spanish period through the vehicle of Catholicism, provided a novel standard with which to conduct and judge behavior, often intruding into the established methods of comport.

Secondly, bureaucratic professionalism inculcated in the American colonial period emphasized a different method of participating in politics and business — that of utilizing impersonal norms, the assessment of people on the basis of achievement, and maintaining objectivity in major decisions involving personalities.

Finally, the concept of loyalty to a nation-state, an entity far surpassing the specific confines of the family or village, began to emerge as nationalist ideas spread throughout the archipelago from about the second half of the 19th century to the movement for independence in the 20th century…

If you have reached this point of the essay, you’re most likely Westernized, in the sense that you take these three ideas for granted. You think slavery is bad; you vote for a public servant, not a ruler; and you believe that these 7,000 islands of dozens of languages is one nation.

If your reaction to these examples is “duh, of course,” let me share this parable by American writer David Foster Wallace.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

One way to recognize this water that has enveloped us all our lives is to ask how we came to believe these ideas. I’m able to write these thousands of words and you’re able to read them because we were brought up in an English-speaking world. We were reared with Sesame Street or Nickelodeon, our formal education was mostly in English, and our favorite books and films are mostly created by Europeans and Americans. Knowing a language means viewing the world through its lens.

Now, imagine a world enveloped by a different kind of water. Imagine if you did not receive the education you have, if you had parents with a different set of values, if you never heard of the story of EDSA, if you had no access to the books and films of the West. What will your world look like?

To Roces, this is the world of the other egregore.

Traditional, or pre-European, political organization is seen as being based on the politica de familia or kinship politics. This concept is used here to mean political process wherein kinship groups operate for their own interests interacting with other kinship groups as rivals or allies. Politica de famila thrives in a setting where elite family groups and their supporters compete with each other for political power. Once political power is gained by one family alliance, it is used relentlessly to accumulate family wealth and prominence, pragmatically bending the rules of the law to gain access to special privileges.

If we imagine undoing the Western influence in our country, how would the relationship between those in power and ordinary folk look like? We have our history to look at, as well as the pre-Western, pre-democratic, and pre-modern peoples around the world. On top would be the datu and his immediate family. Next in the hierarchy would be his allies and their families. Then their dependents and slaves. Roces is describing the dynamics of power in modern Philippines, but she might as well have described politics in these islands before 1521. If it’s any consolation, the West had the same structure before the Enlightenment. This egregore is very old.

Disinformation is a convenient scapegoat. But it cannot explain why the senator with the most votes in 2022 is Robin Padilla, a former action star universally disdained by the educated. It cannot explain the popularity of Duterte and of Erap. Many of our countrymen are choosing a datu, a king, not a public servant.

What about those who had the same upbringing and education as we had and who still supported BBM? They see the ideals we hold (some of them held them in the past), but they have rejected it — not only because of the failed promises of EDSA, but also because of a pragmatism stemming from experience of “the real world.” We explore this in part IV, but to do that, we need to first need to enter the dark world of power players.

III. Sociopath Power Players Through the Eyes of Our Egregores

Professional mixed martial artists need to turn off a part of their brain to do well in their sport. Most of us have an innate hesitation in beating the hell out of someone. That hesitation is an obstacle to reaching the highest pinnacle of the fight game.

It’s the same with doctors. You can’t let squeamishness prevent you from doing surgery, or prudishness from examining genitals.

It turns out it is also like that in politics. I grew up in a bubble of middle-class decency, so my first encounter with the real world power was through books. “An Anarchy of Families” would be my top recommendation. I have a couple of posts about this world:

• Rent-Seeking: the Dirty Secret of the Richest Political Families in the Philippines
• The Evil Business Model Canvas

To thrive in the world of power, politicians need to turn off parts of their brain when playing their game. Since you are competing with other power players, there tends to be an arms race of leverages. In modern Philippines, the main leverage is popularity and the ability to create alliances with other datus. Some turn off the parts of their brains to access more kinds of leverage. If you are unhindered by morality or by the law, you have more weapons in your arsenal.

These sociopathic power players look very different from the two worldviews we looked at. For those of us who look towards the liberal democracies of the West as models, they are evil parasites. For those who seek a datu to lead this tribe called Pilipinas, the leader’s sociopathy is seen as a necessity for operating in a world of power players. If our authoritarian neighbors, like China, have slightly evil leaders, it will be a disadvantage if ours plays by the rules.

From the former viewpoint, Ferdinand Marcos was a thief, a cheat, a monster. From the latter viewpoint, not only was he not a villain. He was Apo Lakay, the supreme datu who outplayed all other datus. To quote Mina Roces again:

In this framework, the Marcos regime (1972–1986) represents the epitome of pure kinship politics as one family alliance alone had monopoly of political power and owning most of the country’s major corporations…

The wise man, Randy David, recommends a pragmatic approach to dealing with power players. Not all of them are sinister. For instance, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela also fit our definition of a sociopath. Heck, the martyr of EDSA, Ninoy, willingly walked into his assassination. You’ve got to turn off parts of your brain to do that.

Randy David thinks the movement led by Leni can continue with its ideological high road—as a movement. But it needs a separate political party that can operate toward a single goal: to win elections. You need sociopaths to play this game. There needs to be space for ambitious, cunning, power players in our side.

IV. “The Real World”

I’ve heard both BBM and Leni supporters divide themselves through class lines: BBM supporters tend to fall in the lower income brackets, while Leni supporters in the higher brackets. However, all available surveys do not reflect this delineation.

This is what I see among the people I know. Tell me if you see this pattern as well.

My Leni friends tend to come from professions with little contact to sociopaths in power. For instance, doctors, teachers or managers in multinational corporations. My BBM friends, on the other hand, work with power players everyday: public works and military, or entrepreneurs who need to work with the government.

My Leni friends tend to be ones who succeed in life by playing by the book. To them, Leni’s immaculate righteousness is a key reason for their support. She is the light amid the darkness.

But life is not always black and white. Let’s walk in the shoes of those who live in the grey. My BBM friends tend to be ones who had to hustle — diskarte — to survive and move up in the world. They also have kids to feed and to send to school. They also have dreams of a better life. And they have grown up with this game.

It is debatable whether their game is actually dirty or just unavoidably symbiotic with dirty sociopaths. Imagine that this is the real world to you. If these sanctimonious idealists succeed, the rules of the game will be tilted to their favor, at our cost. Why would you want to do that?

V. Why I had to write this

After the elections, I found out that I was living in an echo chamber: most of my friends were and are Leni supporters. To discover that we are actually the minority was a bewildering surprise. I had to write to understand what was going on.

I looked back at my conversations with BBM supporters, including those with friends. I read and watched analyses by scholars like Manuel Quezon III. And I used the concept of egregores to make sense of what I’ve heard and seen.

Even with the length of this essay, there’s no way it can represent all motivations of all supporters of BBM. Yet writing it gave me a model much better than assuming they are all ignorant or corrupt.

If you are a BBM supporter, I hope this effort to make visible the water that surround us helps you understand where we, the daughters and sons of EDSA, are coming from.

And to Leni supporters: it may be true that EDSA has run its course. Yet you have shown that its ideals continue to live on, especially in the youth.

This is bigger than EDSA and bigger than Leni. We have a shared vision for this country. Since part of that vision is democracy, our only choice is to spread that vision to those who don’t share it yet. I honestly have no idea how to do this in the scale of millions. However, at least for my friends, I know what the first step is: to see the world through their eyes.

Thanks to Jay Fajardo and everyone who read and gave feedback to earlier versions of this essay.

I wrote this in 2016:

Can Search Volume Predict the Next President of the Philippines (and USA)?

Using Google Trends, I looked at the election results of countries with populations and internet penetrations similar to the Philippines. I checked whether the winners were the same as the most searched candidates for those countries. I found that search volume correlated with the winner, except for two:

Aside from past elections during that time, I also included data for candidates of the 2016 Philippine and US elections. Search volume predicted the victory of both Duterte and Trump.

That old article explores whether search volume is truly predictive of election results. Aside from the actual correlation (it might represent notoriety instead of voting intent), my key concerns were the influence of internet penetration and level of corruption. A lower internet penetration means that only a small fraction of the population is represented in the report. Corruption might skew the results with vote-buying and cheating.

Internet penetration is no longer an issue, at least for the Philippines. The current percentage of Filipinos with internet access is estimated to be 75%.

The table above shows that even in countries perceived to be corrupt, search volume correlates with election results most of the time.

So how does it look like for the upcoming Philippine elections? Here’s the latest:

Marcos and Robredo are tied when looking at the average since September 2021 (because of Pacquiao’s fight on August 2021, the lines are flattened if we include previous months). Marcos was higher from October 2021 up to the beginning of 2022. They were neck-to-neck until February 2022, when Robredo’s lead increased. This lead has continued up to the time of writing.

Let’s focus on the top two contenders, Marcos and Robredo

The report also shows where each candidate has the highest share of searches. As expected, the candidates got the highest share of search volume in their home provinces.

The report also shows who dominates in each region. The first map is color-coded based on who has the highest search volume in each region for the last 8 months. The second map shows the same for the last 30 days.

Let’s also look at the vice presidential candidates

It’s dominated by Sara Duterte

Solid Mindanao:

Play around with the data yourself: https://trends.google.com/

Advenient.co is entering a partnership with a European company. They handle sales and strategy; we provide marketing technology talent. This is classic offshore service delivery. I cut my teeth in corporate tech back in P&G/HP by running a 24x5 30 person operation servicing a global clientele. That was IT service delivery. This is the marketing technology version of it. And the Philippines probably has one of the deepest experience pools in business process outsourcing.

So I asked this question in a local business group:

I summarize the answers and added my own in this risk register. I scored them and added contingency and mitigation steps.

The showstoppers are the following:

• One-sided contract
• Non-viable pricing (both sides)
• Undiversified client base
• Disagreements between parties

Among these, having an undiversified client base is the biggest risk from our side. Especially if this partnership grows and becomes our dominant revenue source, losing the partnership could cripple the company.

We need to either diversify our client base or share ownership of the company with our partner. I prefer the latter approach. Co-ownership of the Philippine company would also mitigate or circumvent the following risks:

• One-sided contract
• Pricing disagreement / non-viable pricing
• Delayed payment

We will work together in 2021 to prototype the partnership. By the end of the year, I’ll sell part of the company to them (cash or stock swap). If we grow by 5x before the end of the year, I’ll propose to advance the sale. I’ll have to work on the legal solution within the year.

Disagreements between parties is also a key risk. 2021 as prototype year will mitigate this. This will require both work chemistry and trust. Chemistry is not only work personality and culture, but process. Our partners are also a young company. We should help them with evolving their processes.

We need to be more direct and open than Filipino culture prepared us for. This is key to working with Europeans and Americans. This is sort of my native work culture (I also work with the garage door open — this article you are reading is an example), but I need to actively train my teammates and consciously pull our culture toward this direction.

On the financial side, my main guides are ensuring 12 months of operational runway (never forget 2020) and paying the team top salaries. Here’s my benchmark:

In Pinoy Tech? What should your salary and hourly rate be?

Ultimately, this partnership is founded on our capability in marketing technology / growth engineering. Personally, this means:

• Hiring well
• Training well
• Removing obstacles

I like Netflix’s analogy of work teams with athletic teams. I’m hiring top athletes for the team. My job is to ensure they perform at peak levels (training, mindset, equipment, environment). This is the key to winning, individually, as a Philippine team, and as a bigger global team.

Winning is not only about preventing failures, but maximizing the upside. The next article will be on that.

Rather than philosophize, I’ll try out some new kinds of work, and possibly start a new business this year. The current one is stable, so I think it’s time to grow in totally new areas.

Here are the things I’m considering:

• Productize the “mastermind” and bring it to corporate Philippines
• Be a corporate coach focused on people early in their careers
• Offer the Mesa Method to Philippine corporations

Below I explain what these are, what problems they solve and what value they could create.

If one or more of these sound like a solution to a problem in your company, I’d love to hear from you. Since I’m already in the second half of life, I’ve resolved to only work on things that have clear demand and that I am uniquely capable of delivering.

The Mastermind

I have tested all sorts of techniques to improve my work in the past years. Improvement here does not only mean productivity, but also better decision-making and job satisfaction (which turns out to have a huge impact on productivity).

If you ask me what technique worked best, my answer is clear: the monthly meeting I have with three or four other entrepreneurs. At this point, it has been running for more than three years. We meet in a coffee shop and follow a simple agenda, which takes us 2.5 to 3 hours:

• Wins since the last time
• Top challenges
• Goals
• Cool things you discovered

This is called “mastermind” in business circles. It is one of the best things that happened to me in the past years, so naturally I’ve always wondered why it works so well. I think Sebastian Junger’s book, Tribe, touches on the answer. The book explores joy amidst suffering among soldiers and primitive societies, and the alienation and depression amidst the comforts and security of modern city life.

My takeaway from the book is that for most of our history, humans operated in small groups. There is thus a deep need for the experience of achieving goals with and for a small troop of people we care about. This may be why sports teams and platoons of soldiers end up forming lifelong friendships.

I experienced this in corporate Makati. It was great to belong to a small team that meshed well and produced results that made an impact to customers worldwide. I did not mind the long hours, the late night conference calls and the occasional crisis, because all of us were in it together, and we were winning.

I also experienced the other side. One of the advantages of hitting 40 is realizing that you don’t have to wear your armor all the time: I have to confess that there were times when the corporate world was just hollow, lonely, meaningless.

I discovered that this was not because of the corporate environment. I also experienced this emptiness in the academe and in entrepreneurship. Having a tribe outside of my work team and outside of my household was part of the solution. It also surprised me with other benefits:

• Many of us tend to focus on problems. Celebrating wins is a great way to remember the many things we should be grateful for. Gratitude is linked to physical and emotional well-being, as this Harvard article presents. And according to a study by the University of Oxford, happiness increases our productivity.
• Explaining top challenges to people who are outside of our work team, but at the same time familiar with our domain, forces us to zoom out and get a clearer view of our current landscape. We question each others assumptions and tease out our hidden biases. We share experiences relevant to the challenge, which opens up a wider array of creative solutions.
• Sharing our goals to people we respect increases our motivation to achieve them. Studies have confirmed that likelihood of hitting goals increases with accountability.
• Sharing cool things is just a great way to conclude. Personally, it helped me discover so many great films, books, apps and events.

Can this work in the corporate environment? What is preventing companies from doing this? What is the best way of introducing this system and facilitating its execution? I have so many questions. The best way to answer them is to help corporations do it, learn and iterate until we have a solid solution. Tell me if you want to be an early adopter.

Corporate coaching

I’m also grateful to all the friends, family and mentors throughout the years that sat down with me for some serious conversation. I appreciate the accompaniment, the advice, and the way they helped reframe the stories I got stuck in.

It turns out the latter is called “cognitive reframing,” and it is one of the tools that corporate coaches use to bring the best out of the people they coach.

Companies could view their employees like cogs in a machine that convert salary into work output. At the other end of the spectrum, companies could treat each member of their team like athletes whose performance brings about victory. Corporate coaching makes sense with this perspective.

I was happy to find out that there are enough companies in the latter category to support an industry of professional coaches here in the Philippines and all over the world. The world’s biggest coach training and certification body is the International Coach Federation (ICF). There are two companies in the Philippines that deliver ICF-accredited coach training, Benchmark and Haraya.

Since I got so much from my one-on-ones, I naturally tried to pay it forward in my conversations with my teammates, students, and former students. Accompanying people in their personal and professional growth through these sessions has now become my top priority. It feels so natural to me, so I’m wondering now if I should get formally trained in coaching and extend my scope beyond my teammates and communities.

I’m serious about this. I talked to six ICF coaches in the past few weeks: the founder of Haraya, two coaches trained by them, and two coaches trained by Benchmark. Plus, I had a coaching session with a friend of mine from Hong Kong who had been doing this for years.

It appears that the economics are better the more senior the clients are. This makes sense, given the higher development and training budget for more senior employees in most companies. However, I feel the biggest impact come from coaching people at the start of their careers, as I have experienced firsthand. Another problem is that one has limited hours per day for coaching conversations. How can you remove time as a limiting factor?

My guess is that combining the mastermind with coaching could be a solution. One of the coaches I interviewed mentioned that the goal of coaching is not to simply give people fish, but to teach them how to fish — to eventually learn to manage their own psychology. To extend the metaphor, helping people build a mastermind could equip them with a team of fisherfolk that could haul in a catch greater than the sum of their individual efforts.

Again, I’ll have to actually do this to see how this works, and to adapt as we discover the many inevitable kinks that arise when an idea hits real life. Tell me if you would be interested in a pilot project.

The Mesa Method

After the corporate Makati and the academe, I spent some years in the world of tech and internet startups. The startup world is not only a laboratory for new businesses; it is also where experiments in new ways of working are conducted.

The ones I experienced firsthand were Startup Weekend, Lean Startup Machine and Design Thinking workshops. The writer Tiago Forte calls these “accelerated working experiences” or AWEs. The AWE first adopted by the corporate world was probably Agile software development. More lessons from the startup trenches could be brought to corporations. In fact, the groups behind the three examples above have started offering solutions to large, established companies after they stress-tested their workshops among startups.

The AWE that I’m studying right now is called the Mesa Method, developed by a Brazilian firm called Mesa. Like the other AWEs, it involves several days of deep intense work, using prototyping and real-life experiments to produce out-of-the-box solutions. Unlike the AWEs I’ve attended, the participants are a mix of people from inside the company and outside.

I have been doing Project Management workshops for companies and communities in the past years. This is another method I can add to my arsenal. But what really piqued my interest was this quote from Kobe.

Learning it would only be worthwhile if this could be implemented in multiple companies (this is overkill to just use internally), so I’d love to hear from you if this looks like something that could solve a problem in your organization.

Which should I prioritize?

Focus is the key to execution, so I need to choose which one of these I should work on in the next 6 to 12 months, and if needed, in the next years.

I’ll make a choice based on the feedback I get in the next few weeks.

Pandemic Career Musings was originally published in Occasional Blogging by Kahlil Corazo on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What we get done in life largely depend on how we make decisions, how we persuade and how we execute. These things stem from our minds and our brains—the quality of our software and our hardware.

My upbringing and education focused on training the mind: knowledge, wisdom, pattern-recognition, emotional self-mastery, mental models. Is this also your experience? History had the same bias. Ancient philosophers to 20th century psychologists neglected brains in favor of minds.

It is likely that this is simply due to technology. Our ability to see the physical inner-workings of the brain is very recent. For instance, these physiological techniques for managing emotions only came about in the past few decades:

14 Tools for Better Work and Relationships from the Neuroscience of Emotions

Brain optimization is also in its infancy. Silicon-Valley-type biohackers are ingesting everything from coconut oil, to cacao to microdoses of psilocybin, just to get an edge in productivity and creativity.

These are called nootropics, substances that enhance brain function. Despite the new name, the practice is ancient. Our ancestors have been consuming coffee, tea and tobacco for their nootropic effects. Humanity has been in constant search for the Limitless pill.

If we liken the brain to a car, what should you focus on to increase its performance? Testing out different kinds of superfuels or ensuring each part is in optimal condition?

The biggest investments on brain research has been for the search for the cure to Alzheimer’s disease. Interestingly, the search for a pill has been the biggest strategic disappointment in Alzheimer’s research.

Could the approach of fixing each component of the brain work better than a pill with a single target? This is the solution presented in The End of Alzheimer’s, the bestselling book by Dr. Dale Bredesen, MD.

In this post, I relay the nutrition approach and supplements recommended by the book, and I share my plan of doing an N=1 using these. In the appendix, I decide how trustworthy this book and its author are.

For the science, the history, and the results, please refer to the book, or these:

• Dr. Dale Bredesen on Preventing and Reversing Alzheimer’s Disease — interview with Dr. Rhonda Patrick
• Case studies by Dr. Bredesen

(Motivations beyond brain optimization: years ago, I lost my grandmother to Alzheimer’s long before she passed away. Today, many in my family — including my mother— are entering their senior years. Could this approach lessen the risks of cognitive decline, or at least delay it?)

The trio appears again

One reason for my interest in this approach is my experience with mental optimization through nutrition. A couple of years ago, I started using the ketogenic diet for productivity. It is still one of my most effective productivity techniques.

Since experiencing the productivity gains from keto, I have doubled down on this domain. Around half the books and articles I’ve read, and the podcasts I listened to since then, were about health and nutrition. In my deep-dive into this world I encountered the following trio again and again. They also appear in the book:

• Sleep
• Exercise
• Nutrition

Just wanted to put that out there. I will revisit sleep and exercise in the future. For now, let me focus on nutrition.

Nutrition Guidelines from The End of Alzheimer’s

The nutritional approach promoted by the book has three broad strokes: it is ketogenic, flexitarian and incorporates fasting. They call this the Ketoflex 12/3 diet.

• It is ketogenic — which means it is low-carbohydrate, moderate protein and high in fat. Why? “Mild ketosis, it turns out, is optimal for cognitive function: beta-hydroxybuterate increases production of the important neuron- and synapse-supporting molecule BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), among other effects.” A quick check in PubMed shows that there are lots of research on using the ketogenic diet for Alzheimer’s disease:

• It is flexitarian — which means it is largely plant-based, with an emphasis on vegetables, particularly non-starchy ones. Meat is treated as a condiment, not the main course (max of 1 gram per kg of bodyweight per day).
• It incorporates fasting — the book suggests at least 12 hours of fasting per day, which contributes to ketogenesis.

Details include:

• When eating carbs, chose those with low glycemic index (below 35) — mostly non-starchy colorful vegetables with lots of fiber. The worst are simple carbs like sugary drinks (most sodas and juices), most baked treats, and breakfast cereal.
• Fruits are optional, but if you’re going to eat some, go for whole fruits, not juices.
• The worst combination: when simple carbs meet saturated fat and lack of fiber (eg, cheeseburger, fries and soft drinks).
• Avoid gluten and dairy. Gluten is implicated in leaky gut and dairy causes inflammation which some people can’t handle.
• Eat detoxifying plants like “cilantro, cruciferous vegetables (cauliflower, broccoli, various types of cabbage, kale, radishes, Brussels sprouts, turnips, watercress, kohlrabi, rutabaga, arugula, horseradish, maca, rapini, daikon, wasabi, bok choy), avocados, artichokes, beets, dandelions, garlic, ginger, grapefruit, lemons, olive, and seeweed.”
• Good fats: avocados, nuts, seeds, olive oil and MCT oil.
• Whole foods, not processed foods
• The book also warns against the mercury content of large fish — it suggests SMASH instead: salmon, macarel, anchovies, sardines and herring.
• Probiotics and prebiotics: kimchi, sauerkraut, sour pickles, miso soup, kombucha, jicama, onions, garlic, raw leeks, raw Jerusalem artichoke, dandelion greens. Helpful yeast: Saccharomyces boulardii.
• Digestive enzymes: if you experience acid reflux, if your lab values indicate inflammation, if you are under chronic stress, if you have reduced stomach acid, or if you are older than 50.

Supplementation recommended by The End of Alzheimer’s

Dr. Bredesen recommends these “daily for everyone with cognitive decline or risk for cognitive decline, unless their laboratory values are optimal for each parameter.”

• Vitamin B1, 50mg (important for memory formation)
• Pantothenic acid (Vitamin B5), 100–200mg (especially if focus or alertness is an issue)
• B6/B12/folate combination (as described in the book for conversion of homocysteine to methionine or cysteine) for those whose homocysteine is above 6
• Vitamin C, 1g, for those with suboptimal vitamin C levels or who have copper:zinc ratios greater than 1:2
• Vitamin D, starting with 2500 IU per day, until serum levels reach 50 to 80
• Vitamin E as mixed tocopherols and tocotrienols 400–800 IU, for those with vitamin E levels less than 13
• Vitamin K2 as MK7 100mcg, for those taking vitamin D
• Resveratrol 100mg, for all.
• Nicotinamide riboside, 100mg, for all.
• Citicoline, 250mg tice per day, to support synaptic growth and maintenance
• ALCAR (acetyl-L-carnitine), 500mg, to increase levels of nerve growth factor
• Ubiquinol, 100mg, to support mitochondrial function in everyone.
• Pyrroloquinoline quinone (PQQ), 10 to 20 mg, to increase mitochondrial number for everyone
• Omega-3 fatty acids
• Whole coffee fruit extract (WCFE), 100mg once or twice per day for three months, then withdraw slowly over one month. This increases BDNF.

Herbs that support synaptic function

• Ashwagandha, 500mg, twice per day with meals. This helps in the reduction of amyloid, as well as handling stress.
• Bacopa monnieri, 250mg, twice per day with meals, to improve cholinergic function, one of the brain’s key neurotransmitter systems.
• Gotu kola, 500mg twice per day with meals, to increase focus and alertness.
• Hericium erinaceus (lion’s mane), 500mg once or twice a day, to nerve growth factor.
• Rhodolia, 200mg once or twice per day, for those with anxiety and stress.
• Shankhpushpi (skullcap) taken 2 or 3 teaspoons or 2 capsules per day, to enhance branching of neurons in the hippocampus.
• For those with the toxic type of Alzheimer’s (see book), mild cognitive impairment (MSI) or subjective cognitive impairment (SCI), tinospora cardilifolia (guduchi) is helpful to boost immune support. It is taken at a dosege of 300mg with meals, 2 or 3 times per day. Along with boosting immune support, consider guggul, which removes toxins in the gut, typically taken as capsules of guggul extract, 350 or 750mg per day.
• For those with the inflammatory type of Alzheimer’s (see book), MCI, SCI, or with bowel symptoms, triphala — a combination of of amalaki, haritaki, and bibhitaki — is useful to reduce inflammation. This is best taken on an empty stomach, either as a capsule or by making tea from powder.

If you follow the Ketoflex 12/3 diet and still have insulin over 4.5, hemoglobin over 5.5% or fasting glucose is over 90, try these one at a time and measure again:

• If your zinc levels are below 100, try 20mg to 50mg of zinc picolinate daily, then recheck glucose after two months
• If your RBC magnesium is less than 5.2, try magnesium glycinate (500mg per day) or magnesium threonate (2g per day)
• 1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon, sprinkled on food or as 1-gram capsules to improve glycemic control
• Alpha-lipolic acid is an antioxidant— 60mg to 100mg daily
• Chromium picolinate lowers blood glucose — 400 micrograms to 1mg daily
• Berberine lowers blood glucose — 300 to 500mg 3 times per day

N=1 Plan

• First, I’ll measure my baseline cognitive performance using one of the apps recommended here: https://www.braintropic.com/how-to-properly-track-the-effectiveness-of-nootropics/
• Next, I’ll start taking each supplement and measure daily mental performance
• Output: supplement, price, local availability, mental performance measurement, subjective notes. Decide on a regimen moving forward.

If you’d like to do this together with me, email me at bio@corazo.org.

Appendix 1: Should I trust Dr. Dale Bredesen, MD?

I’m serious about measuring trustworthiness when it comes to nutrition and health. I have a list of 25 mental models I use.

Mental Models for Nutrition and Health

For this book and this author, let’s use the following:

• What do people I trust say?
• What are the top criticisms and who are the top critics?
• Probabilistic upsides and downsides

What do people I trust say?

On one hand, Rhonda Patrick had him in her podcast and she seems to trust him.

On the other hand, Peter Attia casually mentioned in his Alzheimer’s prevention episode with with Richard Isaacson that his team looked at the references that the Bredesen protocol is based on and discovered that the conclusions of about 30% did not actually support the part of the protocol it referred to. Dr. Attia mentions Resveratrol in particular. However, when I checked the book or this 2016 case study by Dr. Bredesen et al, I could not find references for Resveratrol. I’m a paying member of his podcast, so I’ll ask about this in the member-only Q&A.

(If you really want to get into the weeds of measuring trustworthiness in pop heath, check out this criticism of Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep. Peter Attia appears be a bigger advocate for Walker than Rhonda Patrick is for Bredesen. Just putting this out there to show how complex and multi-dimensional this is.)

What are the top criticisms and who are the top critics?

First, let’s look at Dr. Bredesen’s background from a pro source:

• “internationally recognised as an expert in the mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases”
• MD from Duke University Medical Center
• Chief Resident in Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)
• NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at Nobel laureate Stanley Prusiner’s laboratory at UCSF
• Faculty positions at UCSF, UCLA, and the University of California, San Diego
• Directed the Program on Aging at the Burnham Institute
• Founding President and CEO of Buck Institute
• End of Alzheimer’s is a New York Times Bestseller

Here are the top results when searching for “End of Alzheimer’s criticism” or “End of Alzheimer’s scam”:

• Harriet Hall, MD, a retired army surgeon who has a column about quackery and alternative medicine in Skeptic magazine, includes Dr. Bredesen in her review of Alzheimer’s doctors and researchers interviewed in a series of paywalled videos by Peggy Sarlin (book version). Dr. Hall concludes that there is no consensus among the doctors interviewed, and that they are making false claims.
• Orac (David Gorsky, MD, PhD) who considers functional medicine to be quackery, asks whether the Bredesen protocol is “functional medicine on steroids.” He highlights the shortcomings of Bredesen’s publications and his undisclosed conflicts of interests.
• Some pros and cons at Quora. Cons highlight the lack of proof. Pros feel the protocol warrants some consideration, given the initial results and the lack of alternatives.

Here’s my estimation of this bet:

• My experience has convinced me that lifestyle (mainly sleep, exercise, nutrition) have a huge impact on cognition.
• The downside is that this will cost some money. There appears to be minimal health risks.
• The upside is that I could have a better-functioning brain, for a longer span, and could potentially help my loved-ones also extend their cognitive health span.

I think this is worth doing an N=1.

If you want to do this together with me, email me at bio@corazo.org

Can this Anti-Alzheimers nutrition and supplementation enhance brain function for normal people? was originally published in Food equals Health on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The same thing happened earlier today at 5g Coffee House. I brought the owner, Ricardo, a couple of single origin cacao liquor, to see if he would like to serve it in his cafe. The goal was to use the espresso machine to create sipping chocolate, similar to what I saw in Singapore (see video).

We first tried melting the cacao liquor with the hot water spout, then added steamed milk. It failed to bring out the flavor.

I’ve encountered crazy serendipities in this journey multiple times. It happened again today. It just so happened that one of Ricardo’s mentors, Tido, was hanging out in the cafe. It turns out Tido is a food pro and have tried single-origin sipping chocolate in several countries.

Tido placed the cacao liquor, sugar and milk in a frothing pitcher, then steamed the entire mixture. The result was the same as the best we have made in the kitchen and what I’ve tried in Singapore. I don’t have footage but the procedure is the same as what I’ve seen at The Dark Gallery.

What’s the science behind this? Here’s my guess. Cacao liquor and chocolate, whether tempered or not, is a mixture of cacao butter and cacao solids.

When mixed with milk without applying enough heat, a lot of the flavor is trapped in “microclumps” of cacao butter and solids swimming in a sea of milk. The taste buds could only sense the outer surface of these clumps.

If heat is applied, the clumps of cacao butter and solids are dispersed, allowing the taste buds to sense more of the butter and more of the solids, giving that silky and more complex flavor.

The one on the left is simply a suspension. While there may be stronger bonds between water molecules of the milk and some solids, most of the interactions are the weak bonds between water molecules, thus producing an inviscid liquid.

On the right, the cacao solids or the casein in milk may act as an emulsifier between the water molecules in milk and the fat molecules of the cacao butter. The water-to-emulsifier and fat-to-emulsifier bonds are stronger than water-to-water bonds, thus the greater viscosity of the resulting fluid.

In the past I thought that viscosity may have some primal nutritional signal in human taste. After writing this, I think it may be just correlation. When cacao butter and solids are dispersed through high heat, more of the flavor can reach the taste buds. At the same time, this same process just happens to produce viscosity.

Conclusion: use the steam wand.

Conclusion: coffee art is for coffee, chocolate art is for chocolate.

What’s the science behind flavor and viscosity in sipping chocolate? was originally published in Flowstate Chocolate on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the past, I taught entrepreneurship in college and high school. So I always wanted to capture what actually happens in a startup. I attempt to do that here, while things are fresh. I’m also old enough to not care about looking stupid, and to realize that no one actually cares.

Except perhaps if you are doing something similar — if you are building a business a la Steve Blank / Lean Startup / Evidence-based entrepreneurship — then I hope you enjoy the gory details.

I guess we could set the official start of Flowstate June 12, 2019, when I pitched the idea to my brother Peter Corazo and my cousin Jom Gonzales. The same day, Carlo Villarica and I recorded a podcast, where I mention the plan:

How Zerothreetwo Approaches Online Marketing with Kahlil Corazo - Zerothreetwo: We share what we like

Here was the initial business model canvas:

We prototyped two business models in the past 6 months:

• Consumer subscription
• Distribution via coffee shops

Before sharing our experience on those, let me share product development lessons:

• We developed some recipes that we liked and people seem to like: Milk chocolate, vegan (coconut milk chocolate), dark chocolate
• For most, the bottled dark chocolate (250ml) is “too much”. But it works as a shot, especially as part of a flight.
• Product development is fun
• Takes a lot of experimentation to know how a certain raw material behaves in the processing

Consumer subscription

We tested customer acquisition via Instagram ads. Here is the ad:

We spent PhP 1,000 advertising this on Instagram targeting people in Cebu who like chocolate. On the second half of this budget we targeted only women, based on the responses we were getting. Here are the results:

• 10,800 views
• 242 likes (I don’t know why it is only 18 in the embedded view above)

They convert through our website. We only accepted orders via Paypal. We got 4 customers. It seems only 1 was through the ads. 2 were people in our network. One was through the posting of one of our customers.

We lost one customer, most likely due to product (she was the only one who ordered the dark chocolate, she probably found it “too much.” She did not reply when I asked for feedback.). Two suspended their subscription while they are outside of Cebu for a vacation.

Thoughts

• There are too few Paypal users in Cebu to make this viable (credit card penetration is still at 6%).
• Paypal charges around 12% of the recurring fees
• Recurring fee options outside of Paypal are too messy or expensive to setup
• FB does not let me target the intersection of Paypal users and chocolate lovers
• The folks who have Paypal also seem to travel, and it makes sense that they suspend the subscription while they are out
• We can do cash on delivery with Lalamove, but that’s not a business I want to go into
• We can do one-time purchases instead of subscriptions, but that’s also not a business I want to go into
• If the prototype does not work, it is unlikely for the optimized, better executed version to work.
• I’ve been doing conversion-driven digital marketing for a decade, so I trust my gut feel on this. Cost of customer acquisition is too high.

Distribution via coffee shops

• We pitched to 3 coffee shops
• We did chocolate tasting meetups in 2 of them. They went well. Super rich in consumer insight (the kind where you see their eyes dilate)
• We tested charging for the 1st charging $10 for the first one. 2 signed up. They did not convert to subscribers.
• After a tasting session, one coffee shop wanted to resell our bottles.

Some footages from those chocolate tasting events:

Tasting meetups - @flowstate.ph

Thoughts

• The tasting probably works better as a sales tool instead of a paid gig (plus I get super anxious when it is paid)
• Margins appear to be too thin via coffee shops (I’d rather do other kinds of business)
• Coffee shop owners see an incoming trend of chocolate

Conclusions

This is what my intuition tells me: it makes better sense to train coffee shops to make the drinking chocolates themselves. We can be distributors of the raw material, cacao liquor. This is unseen but main business Linear Coffee Roasters. We can be the Linear for drinking chocolate.

The economics also makes better sense. There is no additional labor cost for coffeeshops to create the drinks, as they already have barristas in their payroll.

We can then expand to distributing the same products to restaurants (ie, couverture).

We can also try selling other products from the same suppliers (eg, craft chocolate bars, cacao butter, etc)

This also makes sense considering Peter’s and my plans for 2020. Peter might spend some time in the US. I’ll move to Davao, but will be in Cebu perhaps one week a month. We can’t build a manufacturing and retail business with these constraints. But these constrains might even be beneficial to a distributor.

Plus, we enjoy the R&D (we could do this, as well as training, as part of our service to customers). I enjoy the selling to businesses more than end-users. I like building relationships with suppliers.

Perhaps most importantly, this makes it more likely for us to have varieties of whole drinking chocolate in Cebu. Each cafe can develop its own style and its own fan base.

So it looks like this is the right business model to prototype next. Will keep you posted. Perhaps in another 6 months.

Here’s the updated business model canvas.

Brutally Sincere Business Model Lessons after 6 Months of Flowstate.ph was originally published in Flowstate Chocolate on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Do you remember this episode in The Simpsons?

I predict that within 10 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them. — Dr. Frink

When this aired, many of us had our personal computers at home. We found this funny because we were living in the future, where Moore’s law had marched relentlessly — and continues to do so up to this day.

In the world of biology, the same joke could have been made with DNA sequencing. When the human genome was sequenced in the early 2000s, it cost $2.7 billion. Even if Dr. Frink predicts that the cost of sequencing will fall following Moore’s law, the logic of the joke will still work (but perhaps not its effectiveness) because the price per Megabase of sequenced DNA has fallen much faster than the price of computing power.

Despite the falling cost of DNA sequencing, the capital cost of a sequencer was still in the hundreds of thousands of USD — up until a few years ago, when the Oxford Nanopore MinION came out. It is the size of a mobile phone and you plug it in your computer.

At the time of writing (2019), the startup package, which includes a sequencer, flow cells and reagents, only costs $1,000. You need to buy more flow cells and reagents once they are used up. Flow cells costs $500 to $900 (cheaper at volume) and can produce up to 30 Gigabases of sequenced DNA per flow cell. Cost of reagents per sequencing is around $100.

Not yet something everyone will have in their homes, but affordable enough for an MS Biology student like me to consider for a thesis. I read a couple of papers to see how this could be done for my organism of interest. This led me to conclude that I would need to learn bioinformatics. The numbers below might also convince you to do the same. I also share my learning plan. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Here are the two papers. As you can see, my organism of interest is cacao. The first paper used a PacBio sequencer and the second one used the MinION.

• The cacao Criollo genome v2.0: an improved version of the genome for genetic and functional genomic studies
• Low-cost assembly of a cacao crop genome is able to resolve complex heterozygous bubbles

At the bottom of this post, I share the 39 bioinformatics software and databases I gleaned from these two papers. For comparison, below is the part of the materials and methods section of the second paper (Morrissey et al) that describe the library preparation. Judging with just the lengths of the sections, it appears that bioinformatics comprises the majority of the work in this paper. If you happen to have some actual experience in this kind of research, would you agree with this observation?

Furthermore, check out this graph of DNA sequencing data produced over time. The blue line is Moore’s law: doubling every 18 months. The red line is the historical growth rate: doubling every 7 months. By mere volume, it is looking like there is a lot of value in learning bioinformatics.

The Cover Band Learning Strategy

How do I learn bioinformatics? Well, there’s this specialization track in Coursera:

Bioinformatics

I plan to start this next month, as I have an online course I’m currently finishing. On top of this, I think the tried-and-tested learning pathway for bands might also work for would-be bioinformaticians: do covers first before writing your own songs.

Morrissey et al, the authors of the paper on sequencing cacao using the MinION, shared their sequencing data at NCBI: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/?term=PRJNA421343

So in theory, I could recreate the journey through their bioinformatics pipeline. Interested in collaborating to make a Morrissey et al cover band? Email me at bio@corazo.org

39 Bioinformatics Tools and Databases

To stretch the analogy, here’s our playlist. I culled them from the two cacao sequencing papers that use long reads, Argout et al (2017), which uses PacBio, and Morrissey et al (2019), which uses the MinION. For someone without a bioinformatics background, I found learning about each tool gave me a clearer idea of what work this kind of project may entail. Interestingly, not one of their tools overlapped.

BIOINFORMATICS SOFTWARE AND DATABASES IN ARGOUT ET AL (2017)

1. Newbler Assembler — the software package for de novo DNA sequence assembly that came with the discontinued Roche/454 sequencer. Argout et al used the Roche/454 sequencer and Newbler for their 2011 sequencing of the cacao genome (first ever!) https://omictools.com/newbler-tool
2. Cacao Genome Hub — repository of genomics data from the whole genome sequenced T. cacao, both V1 (Argout et al, 2011) and V2 (Argout et al, 2017). https://cocoa-genome-hub.southgreen.fr
3. Cutadapt — software that finds and removes adapter sequences, primers, poly-A tails and other types of unwanted sequence from your high-throughput sequencing reads. Argout et al (2017) used it for cleaning of short reads. https://cutadapt.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
4. fastx_clean — a command in fastxtend, an extension of FASTX-Toolkit package, a collection of command line tools for Short-Reads FASTA/FASTQ files preprocessing. The fastx_clean command allows cleaning (adapters, N, quality) of the reads in fastq files. FASTQ format is a text-based format for storing both a biological sequence (usually nucleotide sequence) and its corresponding quality scores. Argout et al (2017) used this function to perform trimming steps to their output from their new sequence of T. Cacao using Illumina HiSeq 2000. http://www.genoscope.cns.fr/externe/fastxtend/
5. bowtie2 — a tool from Johns Hopkins university for aligning sequencing reads to long reference sequences, particularly for aligning reads of about 50 up to 100s or 1,000s of characters, and at aligning to relatively long (e.g. mammalian) genomes. Argout et al used bowtie2 for trimming the contigs of Cacao genome V1 http://bowtie-bio.sourceforge.net/bowtie2/index.shtml
6. BLAST — The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (hosted by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) of the US National Library of Medicine) finds regions of similarity between biological sequences. The program compares nucleotide or protein sequences to sequence databases and calculates the statistical significance. Argout et al used BLAST to identify chloroplast and mitochondria contigs. https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi
7. SSPACE — A stand-alone program for scaffolding pre-assembled contigs using NGS paired-read data. SSPACE was the tool used by Argout et al for scaffolding. https://omictools.com/sspace-tool
8. GMcloser — Closes gaps with a preassembled contig set or a long read set (i.e., error-corrected PacBio reads). Argout et al used GMcloser as the first step in closing gaps in scaffolds. https://omictools.com/gmcloser-tool
9. GapCloser — This was the second step in closing gaps in scaffolds. The GapCloser is designed to close the gaps emerging during the scaffolding process by SOAPdenevo or other assembler, using the aundant pair relationship of short reads. https://www.westgrid.ca/support/software/gapcloser
10. Tassel 5 GBS v2 pipeline — TASSEL is a Java program used to evaluate traits associations, evolutionary patterns, and linkage disequilibrium. The GBSv2 analysis pipeline is an extension of TASSEL. Argout et al used this software to analyze sequencing fragments. https://bitbucket.org/tasseladmin/tassel-5-source/wiki/Tassel5GBSv2Pipeline
11. VFCtools — a program package designed for working with VCF files, such as those generated by the 1000 Genomes Project. The aim of VCFtools is to provide easily accessible methods for working with complex genetic variation data in the form of VCF files (eg, filter out specific variants, compare files, summarize variants, convert to different file types, validate and merge files, create intersections and subsets of variants.) Argout et al used VFCtools to filter out variant call data after SNPs were called. https://vcftools.github.io/index.html
12. JoinMap — Software for the calculation of genetic linkage maps in experimental populations of diploid species. Argout et al used JoinMap for calculating pairwise linkage recombination frequencies. https://www.kyazma.nl/index.php/JoinMap/
13. Blastn — Blastn (also part of the NCBI’s BLAST), searches nucleotide databases using a nucleotide query. Argout et al used Blastn to transfer the structural annotations from the previously annotated reference genome to the new assembly. https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?PAGE_TYPE=BlastSearch
14. Exonerate — a generic tool for pairwise sequence comparison. It allows you to align sequences using a many alignment models, either exhaustive dynamic programming or a variety of heuristics. Argout et al used Exonerate for quality checks for the genes that were not transferred from V1 to V2. https://www.ebi.ac.uk/about/vertebrate-genomics/software/exonerate
15. NCBI Eukaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline — provides content for various NCBI resources including Nucleotide, Protein, BLAST, Gene and the Genome Data Viewer genome browser. Argout et al used the NCBI Eukaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline to perform new de novo RefSeq structural annotation. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/annotation_euk/process/
16. Blastp — Blastp (also part of the NCBI’s BLAST) searches protein databases using a protein query. Argout et al used Blastp to perform functional annotation for each predicted coding sequence against UniProtKB/ Swiss-Prot and UniProtKB/TrEMBL databases. https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?PAGE=Proteins
17. Uniprot — a comprehensive and freely accessible resource of protein sequence and functional information. This is where Argout et al sourced the protein databases they used for functional annotation (see Blastp entry). https://www.uniprot.org/
18. InterProScan — allows you to scan your sequence for matches against the InterPro protein signature databases. Argout et al used InterProScan to compare sequences with the InterPro database to obtain additional protein signature information. http://www.ebi.ac.uk/interpro/search/sequence/
19. BlastKOALA — KOALA (KEGG Orthology And Links Annotation) is Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG)’s internal annotation tool for K number assignment of KEGG GENES using SSEARCH computation. KEGG GENES is a collection of gene catalogs for all complete genomes generated from publicly available resources, mostly NCBI RefSeq and GenBank. SSearch uses William Pearson’s implementation of the method of Smith and Waterman (Advances in Applied Mathematics 2; 482–489 (1981)) to search for similarities between one sequence (the query) and any group of sequences of the same type (nucleic acid or protein) as the query sequence. Argout et al used BlastKOALA to reconstruct KEGG pathways. https://www.kegg.jp/blastkoala/

BIOINFORMATICS SOFTWARE AND DATABASES IN MORRISSEY ET AL (2019)

1. minimap and miniasm — minimap is a mapper and miniasm is a de novo assembler. Both are designed specifically for Oxford Nanopore long reads. Morrissey et al used minimap and miniasm as one of their assembly strategies. https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01801
2. Canu — a fork of the Celera Assembler designed for high-noise single-molecule sequencing (such as the PacBio RSII or Oxford Nanopore MinION). Morrissey et al used Canu as another assembly software https://canu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
3. SMARTdenovo — another de novo assembler designed for Oxford Nanopore and PacBio long reads. This another assembly strategy employed by Morrissey et al https://omictools.com/smartdenovo-tool
4. BUSCO v3 — provides quantitative measures for the assessment of genome assembly, gene set, and transcriptome completeness, based on evolutionarily-informed expectations of gene content from near-universal single-copy orthologs selected from OrthoDB v9. Morrissey et al used BUSCO v3 for evaluating the contigs of their assembly. https://busco.ezlab.org/
5. Pilon — a software tool which can be used to automatically improve draft assemblies, as well as find variation among strains, including large event detection. Morrissey et al used Pilon to polish and improve their BUSCO statistics. http://software.broadinstitute.org/software/pilon/
6. Albacore — provides a docker file base caller from Oxford Nanopore. Morrissey et al used Albacore for basecalling of their raw sequencing. https://omictools.com/albacore-tool
7. LepMap2 — can account for achiasmatic meiosis to gain linkage map accuracy. It includes features for creating ultra-high-density linkage maps and for constructing two high-density linkage maps for nine-spined sticklebacks based on large single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) panels. Morrissey et al used LepMap2 to construct a maternal genetic linkage map from the SNP genotypes. https://omictools.com/lep-map2-tool
8. Racon — Generates high quality consensus sequences with a single instruction multiple data (SIMD) accelerated. Racon is based on tests with PacBio and Oxford Nanopore datasets. Morrissey et al used Racon in conjunction with minimap and miniasm for their first de novo assembly strategy. https://omictools.com/racon-tool
9. nucmer — NUCleotide MUMmer is a part of the MUMmer package, for the rapid alignment of very large DNA and amino acid sequences. Morrissey et al used nucmer to identify contigs representing the chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes, by comparing post-refinement contigs from the minimap assembly to the published cacao organelle genomes. http://nebc.nox.ac.uk/bioinformatics/docs/nucmer.html
10. Circlator — A tool to circularize genome assemblies. Morrissey et al used Circlator to reassemble contigs representing chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes that they identified using nucmer. https://sanger-pathogens.github.io/circlator/
11. Nanopolish — The purpose of nanopolish is to improve the consensus accuracy of an assembly of Oxford Nanopore Technology sequencing reads. Morrissey et al used Nanopolish to correct coverages for organelle genomes. https://nanopolish.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickstart_consensus.html
12. GraphMap — Analyses nanopore sequencing reads. GraphMap progressively refines candidate alignments to robustly handle potentially high-error rates and a fast graph traversal to align long reads with speed and high precision (>95%). Morrissey et al used GraphMap to align the MinION reads from the chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes to the circularized assemblies. https://omictools.com/graphmap-tool
13. BWA MEM — one of the algorithms under BWA, a software package for mapping low-divergent sequences against a large reference genome, such as the human genome. Morrissey et al used BWA MEM to remap Illumina short reads to the contigs, as one of the steps in creating a final set of polished contigs. http://bio-bwa.sourceforge.net/
14. ALLMAPS — A method capable of computing a scaffold ordering that maximizes colinearity across a collection of maps. Morrissey et al used ALLMAPS to compare nonredundant contigs with six published SNP-based linkage maps. https://omictools.com/allmaps-tool
15. BLAT — part of the UCSC Genome Browser tools, BLAT on DNA is designed to quickly find sequences of 95% and greater similarity of length 25 bases or more. Morrissey et al used BLAT and other UCSC tools to lift over the SNP loci from Matina v1.1. by Argout et al (2010) previously genotyped with an Illumina Infinitum array to the Pound 7 contigs. https://genome.ucsc.edu/
16. Augustus v3.3.1 — a program that predicts genes in eukaryotic genomic sequences. Morrissey et al used Augustus to predict gene models ab initio on the final draft contigs. http://bioinf.uni-greifswald.de/augustus/
17. RepeatMasker — is a program that screens DNA sequences for interspersed repeats and low complexity DNA sequences. Morrissey et al used RepeatMasker to identify repetitive elements using the Viridiplantae library. http://www.repeatmasker.org/
18. Geppard — allows the calculation of dotplots even for large sequences like chromosomes or bacterial genomes. Morrissey et al used Geppard to visually compare Pound 7 contigs from the MinION assembly to both of the unpublished BAC-based haplotypes. http://cube.univie.ac.at/gepard
19. Mauve — a system for constructing multiple genome alignments in the presence of large-scale evolutionary events such as rearrangement and inversion. Morrissey et al used Mauve to align the Pound 7 contigs to their corresponding BAC haplotype. http://darlinglab.org/mauve/mauve.html
20. Biostrings package in R — allows manipulation of strings in R. Morrissey et al used in-house scripts based on the Biostrings package in R to summarize alignments created with Mauve. https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/Biostrings/versions/2.40.2

Join the Morrissey et al cover band! Email me at bio@corazo.org

I’ll be organizing sipping chocolate tasting sessions for Flowstate, my new side gig with my brother Peter Corazo. Signup here.

Since this is technically a business, I was able to override my stingy Cebuano soul and enrolled in this course on Mastering Chocolate Flavor. It is an investment, I told myself.

The course requires consuming a variety of chocolates. Sometimes you need to make sacrifices for the sake of education.

Which chocolate bars do I use for the different lessons? Here are the requirements:

1. Two identical chocolate bars of any sort or any percentage.
2. Two high-quality fine chocolate bars from the same origin country or region and two more from a different country or region. If possible, choose bars from different makers.
3. Two high-quality fine chocolate bars from the same chocolate maker and two more from a different chocolate maker.
4. Four to six different bars of dark chocolate to taste and compare with each other for a group tasting session.
5. Six bonbons from each of three to four different chocolatiers.

What immediately comes to mind are Rosario’s and Cacao & Beyond — probably because I’ve visited their production area and talked to the people behind them.

Rosario’s is a brand by Nhel and Eyeth Belviz. Nhel is a second generation chocolate maker and Eyeth got her chocolate training in Belgium. We have been testing out cacao liquor from different sources (officially for business research), and theirs have been the fruitiest we’ve tried, at 7 days fermentation and roasted mild.

The chocolate maker behind Cacao & Beyond is Ressie Dicon. She will be one of the representatives from the Philippines in an upcoming chocolate event in Paris. I’m hoping her chocolates will win. Her cacao liquor is roasted higher than that of the Belvizes and is fermented for 5 days, and has been most “chocolatey” among the ones we have tried.

Both are located in Davao, Rosario’s in Calinan and Cacao & Beyond in Compostella Valley. Their beans are Trinitario (for cacao nerds: UF18, BR25, PBC123 and W10, according to Nhel). Trinitario beans originated in the cacao labs of Latin America in the past decades, a fruit of breeding the most robust and most generous varieties of cacao.

I’ll visit Davao next week, so I’ll have to stock up (for the sake of education!). Rosario’s and Cacao & Beyond are part of Cacao City, so I might as well get to know the other chocolates there as well.

I’d also love to use Criollo bars as well for this tasting class, but they are so hard to find! Criollo is what we call the cacao varieties we got through the Galleon trade with Mexico, and which our forebears propagated in backyards across the country in the past 400 years (there’s an effort to brand them as “Filipino Aromatico” perhaps inspired by the Nacional of Ecuador?).

I was so fortunate to have visited Chris Fadriga’s Criollo farm in Bago, Negros, early this year, when he just got his first batch of chocolates from his first harvest of cacao. At the time of the visit, Chris had collected 14 cultivars from families across the Philippines (Criollo scions which he grafts into Trinatario rootstocks).

Perhaps it was because of the atmosphere of the farm and our conversation. Perhaps it was the long absence of non-commercial chocolate in my experience of food. But perhaps it was the Criollo flavor that gave me a Ratatouille moment as I tasted Chris’s Criollo bar (the one with the black packaging).

That specific chocolate flavor was like a tunnel through decades, connecting me to my 10 year-old self, who was one lucky boy, having had a supply of sikwate made from Criollo beans from his lola’s garden in Balamban, Cebu.

Remember that scene in that movie with the rat chef? At the climax of the film, the hardass food critic tasted the chef’s Ratatouille, a simple dish of rural France. When it hit his palette, he was transported back to his childhood, and his dour face transformed into one of pure joy.

Time travel via chocolate. Freakin’ insane. My Filipino machismo is preventing me from writing more about the inner drama that ensued.

I tried another Criollo bar some months after. It was from Krak Chocolade, and used Mexican beans. The common note I remember is citrus. That was probably a coincidence. The only way to confirm this is to try out more Criollo bars.

No Ratatouille moment for this one. That time travel was probably a one-off thing. I’ve consumed — mostly drank — so much chocolate since then, that my brain is probably saturated with fresh neural connections around the flavors of chocolate, burying that gateway to my childhood.

But I continue to seek that secret portal. Perhaps this is ultimately why I’m doing this.

There’s a continuing debate whether Criollo is truly superior in terms of flavor, or if well-fermented Trinitarios could achieve the same or greater quality and complexity. I’d love to find out myself. If I could only get hold of Criollo bars!

I’m in Makati as I write this, 12 minutes or 3.5 km away from Auro’s main store, according to Google Maps. Might as well get some bars there. Then I should probably get some Malagos when I’m in Davao. For the sake of education and business research!

And that, my friends, is how you convince your stingy calculating left brain to let you buy bars of glorious chocolate.

Which Philippine chocolate bars did I miss and that you recommend I try out?

Special thanks to Kenneth Reyes-Lao of Cacao Culture Farms and to Vassily Lissouba for the cacao connections that are making this journey happen.

Are these the Best Craft Chocolate Bars in the Philippines? was originally published in Flowstate Chocolate on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A few weeks back, I attended a seminar on “Educating the Emotions.” I’m involved in a non-profit tackling leadership and character formation of young people. Educating the emotions is a key part of that formation.

I was also personally interested. I’ve gone through lots of ups and downs in business. Part of the game has been to tame the hunter-gatherer in me, that part of my mind which overreacts to business threats as if it were 10,000 BC, fighting for survival as a tribesman in the jungle.

I’ve written in the past about 3 techniques that worked for me:

3 Ways to Master the Monkey Brain

I would add sleep, nutrition (including fasting) and exercise to these set of tools. When these are on point, I am less perturbed by the setbacks and surprises of entrepreneurship.

One exercise stands out. Lifting barbells near or over the limit of my strength works like magic. Here’s my theory. Under the barbell — near or at your max — your body thinks it is going to die, all systems are on red alert, and it has no time all other concerns. Then your body celebrates your survival and physical activity by flooding your brain with happy hormones.

(If you want to explore strength training with barbells, I recommend this essay, program and app: Stronglifts 5x5. If you like it, go deeper with this book: Starting Strength.)

How could we use neuroscience to influence our mental and emotional states?

The molecular biologist who first taught me how to lift was also in the seminar. After exchanging some bro science, we went on and looked at the science of emotion.

He recommended this book: “The Emotional Life of Your Brain” by Richard J. Davidson. It explains the neuroscience behind emotions and ways to influence it toward specific states.

Here are the behavioral extremes of the book’s framework. Even if you don’t find yourself (or the person you are trying to help) in these extremes, they give you an idea on what kinds of emotional defaults the tools listed here are useful for.

• It takes you too long to recover from sadness, anger, anxiety, envy, insecurity and other unwanted emotions
• It takes you way too fast to recover from these emotions, and you’re like a robot lacking empathy
• You’re too pessimistic to get anything done
• You’re too optimistic and can’t anticipate and plan out for setbacks
• You find it hard to read people
• You care too much of what people may say that it is paralyzing
• You’re not sensitive enough to your emotions that you are sometimes surprised by explosions of anger and other unwanted emotions
• You’re too sensitive to signals from your body and emotions that you get paranoid about illnesses or you get panic attacks
• You react out of context (eg, laugh when it is inappropriate or have overreactive fears)
• You adjust yourself too much to whoever you are with that you lose your identity
• You don’t know how to focus and thus have very low productivity
• You cannot turn off your focus and sometimes lose the bigger picture

Below, I summarize the science, then I list and explain the tools the book recommends for the situations above. All quotes are from the book.

The science of emotions

After brain imaging technology got invented, scientists started correlating emotions with brain activity. Their findings point toward certain parts of the brain specializing in producing specific emotions. More interestingly, each of us has a default configuration (as usual, influenced by both nature and nurture) on the intensity of each of these emotion-producing parts of the brain.

This is similar to age-old categorization of personalities — from Galen’s four temperaments to the Big Five — but now based on measurable biological signals.

The book lists six dimensions in this model of personality. In each dimension, we have a default tendency set in our brains. Here is a random example I got from Googling. You can make a graph for your self by completing the test in chapter 3 of the book. The tools listed below are for nudging these default settings to the left or right.

I’ll explain each of these dimensions in relation to the tools below.

11 Tools to Influence Your Emotional Defaults

1 and 2. Too slow to recover from setbacks? Try mindfulness meditation and cognitive reappraisal training.

If it takes you a long time to bounce back from sadness, anger, anxiety and other unwanted emotions, you probably fall nearer the “Slow to Recover” side of the Resilience spectrum.

What’s the neuroscience behind this? “The brain signature of being Slow to Recover from setbacks is fewer and weaker signals from the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala, as a result of either low activity in the prefrontal cortex itself or too few or less-functional connections between the prefrontal and the amygdala.”

“To cultivate greater Resilience and faster recovery from setbacks, I recommend mindfulness meditation.” Good thing that the most popular meditation apps like Headspace, Calm and Waking Up are based on the traditions of mindfulness meditation or Vipassana. Meditation has shown to increase the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.

“In this form of mental training, you practice observing your thoughts, feelings and sensations moment by moment and nonjudgementally, viewing the simply as what they are: thoughts, feelings, sensations; nothing more and nothing less.”

The book recommends mindfulness training from the University of Massachusetts Medical School: https://www.umassmed.edu/cfm/

The other technique recommended by the book is “cognitive reappraisal training.” It is a reframing technique, also called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). “Instead of thinking the mistake reflects something consistent and fundamental about you, you consider the possibility that you made the mistake because you were having a bad day, or didn’t get enough sleep the night before, or because everyone is fallible.” The book suggests getting help from a professional, a skilled cognitive therapist.

3. Too fast to recover from setbacks? Sorry, not enough research at this time, but you can try this.

Greater resilience is better for most cases, but there may be professions that benefit from staying longer in the dark realms. Perhaps an emo song writer? Also, recovering too fast may blind you to the emotions of other people. Sometimes sadness or anger is the appropriate emotion to experience.

Unfortunately, the books says that there is very little research on how to move toward the Slow to Recover end of the Resilience spectrum, or weakening the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. However, it recommends focusing “intently on whatever negative emotion or pain you are feeling as a result of a setback.”

4 and 5. Want to make your outlook more positive? Delay gratification and try well-being therapy.

Most work require a mix of positive outlook and negative outlook. You need some positive outlook to envision and work toward a better future. You need negative outlook to manage risks, a key part of execution.

Is your default setting Little Miss Sunshine or Eeyore? It turns out that this configuration is set in your nucleus accumbens, located in the ventral striatum, and in the prefrontal cortex. The higher the activity in these areas, the more positive your outlook.

How do you increase activity in the prefrontal cortex? Delay gratification. “When you find yourself in a situation in which you are tempted by an immediate reward but you know the smarter, safer, healthier, or otherwise better choice is to wait for a future reward of higher value, pause and focus on the more valuable future reward.” Start with the little things. The more you do this, the better you become at it, even with the big things.

“Another way to strengthen connections between the prefrontal cortex and the ventral striatum is a technique called well-being therapy, developed by Giovanni Fava, of the University of Bologna in Italy.” Official website: http://www.well-being-therapy.com

6. Want to make your outlook more negative? Practice risk management.

An extreme level of positive outlook makes you complacent. To reach your goals, you need to anticipate obstacles and plan for them. In the profession of Project Management, this is done in systematically:

• Identify risks
• Score risks (prioritize based on probability and impact)
• Plan mitigation
• Plan contingencies

7. Design your environment to move you towards the outlook you need

The book suggests surrounding yourself with upbeat images and reminders of happy memories to make your outlook more positive. Change the images frequently, as often as weekly, to not get habituated with them.

“If you’d instead like to dial down your Positive Outlook, you might fill your home and work space with reminders of threats to your well-being, such as descriptions of natural disasters or news about environmental or economic threats.” Or just spend more time in Twitter.

8. Want to increase your social intuition? Practice reading people and do mindfulness meditation using social signals.

If you are like most people, you’d want more social intuition (exception below). According to the book, “research on emotional and social intelligence argues that greater skill in these areas presage better success in love, work, and life in general.”

“The brain of someone who falls at the Puzzled end of the Social Intuition dimension is characterized by low activity in the fusiform gyrus plus high activity in the amygdala.”

To increase fusiform activity, the book recommends first to practice in paying attention what is (socially) going around you: tone of voice, body language, facial expression. You can do this by putting more focus on the people around you, guessing what they are saying with their body language, then try confirming your guess.

The book also recommends this social intuition / microexpression training from renowned psychologist Paul Ekman: https://www.paulekman.com/micro-expressions-training-tools/

9. Overwhelmed by social signals? Use focusing techniques toward objects and the future, instead of people in the present.

People whose social intuition is too high may feel overwhelmed and get paralyzed by social signals. The book suggests the following: “Avoid looking at people’s eyes. Use your Attention training to pull your focus back from intense concentration on people’s body language and tone of voice.” (See how to train Attention below).

10. Design your social interactions to fit your desired level of Social Intuition.

“There are a few ways you might alter your environment to accommodate your degree of Social Intuition. If you are at the Puzzled end of the dimension and content to stay there, arrange your routine so you spend relatively little time with people, particularly strangers. That will limit the situations in which you misread or are puzzled by social signals. Working from home can achieve the same thing.”

“If on the other hand, you are at the high end of Social Intuition and easily distracted by social cues, limit your social interactions to specific times of the day when they cannot knock you out for a loop. Interacting with people during scheduled work breaks and meals, rather than off and on throughout the day, can limit this kind of disruption.”

Too Self-Aware? Try cognitive-behavioral therapy and mindfulness meditation. (Tools 1 and 2 again).

The book defines Self-Awareness as sensitivity to ones body and emotions. Like the other dimensions, there is debilitation in the extremes.

Too much self-awareness overwhelms one with signals. Examples in the book are hypochondriasis (irrational paranoia of being sick) and panic attacks.

According to the book, “individuals with high levels of Self-Awareness (emotional or physical) have greater activation in their insula, while those with little Self-Awareness have decreased activation.”

I turns out there has been a lot of research on panic disorder, and the “best validated treatment for panic disorder is cognitive-behavioral therapy. In this approach, patients learn to reframe or reappraise the significance of internal bodily cues.”

“An alternative to becoming less Self-Aware of your body, thoughts, and feelings by decreasing insula activity is to decrease the rest of the brain’s reactivity to the insula’s signals.” One way is to do this is to reduce activation of the amygdala and orbital frontal cortex (part of the prefrontal cortex). A proven way to do this is mindfulness meditation (see 1 and 2 above).

Not Self-Aware enough (Self-Opaque)? Mindfulness meditation also helps.

The other side of the spectrum of Self-Awareness also has its downsides. “Being blind and deaf to what your body is trying to tell you is a good way to miss important signs of illness, whether a fever that signals infection or a tightness in the chest that means a heart attack.”

“Being Self-Opaque has consequences for relationships, as well: If you cannot tell that your blood pressure is rising and your heart rate is increasing because you are angry, then you do not have a chance to walk it off before you have a crucial meeting, attend a conference with your child’s teacher, drive home during rush hour, or do anything else that anger can cause to go off the rails.”

“Paradoxically, one of the most effective strategies for increasing activity in the insula, and thus becoming more Self-Aware, is to also practice mindfulness meditation.” It turns our mindfulness has a regulating function in the mind, preventing extremely low and extremely high activity in the insula — extreme self-awareness and extreme self-opacity.

Want greater focus? Mindfulness meditation helps (again).

Similar to the spectrum of outlook, you’d want to control your level of focus depending on the work you need to do. Getting things done requires focus. Creative thinking requires letting go of focus — to be open to what is beyond your current worldview.

Here’s the neuroscience. “The Focused extreme of the Attention dimension is the result of enhanced activation in brain regions, including the prefontal cortex and parietal cortex, that constitute a circuit for selective attention. The prefrontal cortex is critical to maintaining attention, while the parietal cortex acts as the brain’s steering wheel, pointing attention to particular places and thereby focusing attention on a specific target.”

To improve focus, Dr. Davidson again recommends mindfulness meditation.

11. Want lesser focus? Try open-monitoring or open-presence meditation

“If you feel that your attention is excessively focused and wish to broaden it in order to take in more of the world, then open-monitoring or open-presence meditation can nudge you toward that end of the Attention dimension. In open-monitoring meditation, your attention is not fixed on any particular object. Instead, you cultivate an awareness of awareness itself.”

3 Tools Based on a Different Theory

Here’s a book based on a different theory of emotions: “How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain” by Lisa Feldman Barrett.

I have not read it yet, but here’s an interesting video about it:

Emotions are not simply outputs from signals from different parts of the brain. To create emotions, the mind instantaneously constructs meaning from bodily signals based on past experiences. The video quotes from Dr. Barrett:

you are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. If you did not have concepts that represent your past experiences, all you sensory inputs would just be noise. With concepts, your brain makes meaning of sensation, and sometimes that meaning is an emotion.

Here’s a follow-up video that focuses on the application.

The video recommends these 3 for improving mood:

• Cold exposure
• Heat exposure (eg, sauna use)
• Reduce inflammation (get enough sleep; get enough exercise; keep a healthy weight; don’t spike your blood sugar; cut out refined carbohydrates, sugar, processed vegetable oils, transfats and artificial sweeteners).

This theory also highlights the importance of tools #1 and #2, mindfulness and cognitive reframing.

That gives us a total of 14 tools from the neuroscience of emotions. If you have your own set, please share in the comments below!

14 Tools for Better Work and Relationships from the Neuroscience of Emotions was originally published in Life Tactics on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.