This guest post is authored by Janna Levin (@jannalevin), the Tow Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. Janna has contributed to an understanding of black holes, the cosmology of extra dimensions, and gravitational waves in the shape of spacetime. Janna is also director of sciences at Pioneer Works, a cultural center dedicated to experimentation, education, and production across disciplines, as well as Pioneer Works’ virtual home, The Broadcast.

Janna’s books include How the Universe Got Its Spots, the novel A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, which won the PEN/Bingham Prize, and Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, the inside story on the discovery of the century: the sound of spacetime ringing from the collision of two black holes over a billion years ago. In 2012, she was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant awarded to those “who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship.”

What follows is the third chapter from her new book, Black Hole Survival Guide. Accompanying artwork is by Lia Halloran.

Enjoy!

Enter Janna . . .

HORIZON

Light Falls Too

You should appreciate the hazards of encountering a black hole unawares. A black hole is invisible in the absence of any tracers, just darkness against darkness. You may well not realize the threat before your fate is secured. You must carry a powerful light source to reveal in backlight the clandestine black hole, an unilluminated disk, an absence in a bright world.

Light lives in space too and has to follow some path. If you shine a flashlight from your couch, you don’t notice the light beam falling toward the Earth. The lines appear straight. But they’re not perfectly straight. The comparative inflexibility of light’s route through space is attributable to its intrinsic speed. Light only travels at one speed, the speed of light. The free-fall curves for light—launched as light must be, at the cosmic speed limit—are straighter than the curves of slower objects. So the bend that the Earth’s gravity imparts to the path of light is more subtle, straighter, and more difficult to detect. 

The bending of light offered the first test of general relativity. On the twenty-ninth of May, 1919, the Moon eclipsed the Sun to allow a thin ray of light from the Hyades star cluster to fall into Arthur Eddington’s telescopes. With the blinding solar rays occulted, the faint image of Hyades could be collected. But at the time of the eclipse, Hyades was positioned directly behind the Sun from the Earth’s perspective. If light traveled along straight lines, none of the luminosity from Hyades should have made it to the Earth. The cluster would spray its rays in all directions, and those headed toward the Earth would fall into the Sun. If light traveled along the curved paths predicted by relativity, then the Sun would act like a lens and bend an image of Hyades our way.

The Sun was eclipsed in totality only from the point of view of a swatch of the Earth that cut through Brazil at dawn, across the Atlantic Ocean as the Earth turned, and fell off Africa by dusk. From any given vantage point between sunrise and sunset, totality would last less than seven minutes. Barely six months after the end of the First World War, on the small island of Principe off the coast of Africa, Eddington and his team waited out heavy rains and cloud cover until the Sun broke through, the eclipse already under way. Although behind the Sun, the star cluster was visible to their telescopes (glossing over some ambiguities in the data), proving that light did not travel on straight lines around our star, but rather curved ones that deflected the light toward Africa.

Eddington presented his analysis of the resultant photographic plates from the eclipse expedition in Principe, in conjunction with those from his team near the equator in Brazil, and his announcement made headlines, catapulting Einstein’s fame in the English-speaking world. Eddington became the conduit that transmitted these discoveries, discoveries that transcended political animosity and nationalism stirred up by the war. Eddington, unlike some of his compatriots, had no urge to denigrate Einstein’s accomplishments, though he was a citizen of a country so recently a bitter enemy. Einstein was born in Germany, Eddington in England.

Out of the shadow of the war into the shadow of the Moon, they were citizens of the same Earth, and the theory of relativity was heralded as one of humanity’s greatest achievements.

Eddington measured the slight deflection of light’s path around the Sun. Outside every black hole, there is a curve in space so sharp that light can fall around the hole in a circular orbit. You could jet-pack to the location of light’s circular orbit and hover there. You will need to fire engines to resist your fall into the hole. Once there, you could shine a light on your face. Your face will reflect some of the light (if we didn’t reflect light, we’d be invisible) and send the image of your face in a reverse orbit toward the back of your head. You could wait a few tenths of a millisecond for that light to reflect off the back of your head then circle back about and land in your eyes. You could watch your own back.

When you get near enough to a black hole, the curves are sharper and the free fall faster. It becomes harder to stop your fall. You will need a considerable payload of fuel to accelerate you to sufficient speeds. To escape from the Earth, a rocket launched from Cape Canaveral must reach more than 11 kilometers per second.

The escape velocity from the Moon is about 2.5 kilometers per second, the Moon being less substantial than the Earth. The escape velocity from the Sun is more than 600 kilometers per second, the speed of the plumes of plasma able to blow off the hot stellar atmosphere into the solar system in the form of ionized winds.

The nearer you approach a black hole, the faster you need to drive your spacecraft to resist falling. In the emptiness that surrounds a black hole, you can get closer and closer to the center until you hit a proximity outside the hole at which no amount of jet thrusters is sufficient to reverse your decline. You would need to reach a velocity greater than the speed of light to escape, a speed of almost 300,000 kilometers per second. And since nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, you would fail to escape. Extrication impossible, you plunge irrevocably.

That special location where the escape velocity climbs to the speed of light defines the infamous event horizon: “The region beyond which not even light can escape.” I’m using unattributed quotes because everyone seems to use that exact sentence. We all say it at some point in our lives: “The region beyond which not even light can escape.” I said almost these exact words at the opening of this guide.

Light shining from the precise location of the event horizon seems to hover there, traveling at its fixed speed and still unable to escape, a fish swimming against an insurmountable waterfall of space. Knock the light slightly and it loses the battle, falling down the hole. 

The event horizon is the extent of the black hole’s shadow. Anything that crosses the event horizon is forever lost to the outside. From the exterior, the black hole is dark. It is black. It’s a black hole. If you were to fall through that shadow, you’d find no physical, material surface. You’d just plummet in the dark emptiness, the moment of transition unspectacular, as unspectacular as stepping into the shadow of a tree. 

The essence of a black hole is the event horizon, the severe demarcation between events and their causal relationships. Events interior to the horizon can have no effect on the outside, can tolerate no transmission of any kind to the exterior of the horizon, although the reverse is not the case. Happenings outside the horizon can be transmitted to the interior. The world beyond the black hole can have consequences for the world within. The black hole is thoroughly opaque from the outside, utterly transparent from the inside.

Should the choice arise, you are advised to fall into as big a black hole as possible. If you are very small compared to the black hole, you will hardly notice that the horizon is curved, like you hardly notice that the Earth’s surface is curved. If you stood on a basketball, the curvature under your feet is more noticeable than the curvature of the entire Earth. The bigger the black hole, the less you’ll notice. Your feet and your head could more or less fall in unison. You’d find yourself compromised if the hole was so small that your feet fall across the horizon along their own path that diverges from that of your head. Your connective tissue would have to resist the fall of your feet away from your crown and eventually the ligaments would fail and rip and the consequences would be pretty gruesome. But traverse the event horizon of a big black hole, no problem.

So you could survive the fall across the shadow, although you’d never find your way out again. And once inside the black hole you will eventually get pulverized, a caution we’ll detail later. 

If you fall close to the center of the Sun, you could in principle escape the gravitational pull, but you’d be incinerated in the nuclear furnace of the core, a scenario that concludes with equally emphatic finality. At least you can get a million kilometers closer to the center of a black hole and live, in principle. 

Your ruination inside a black hole the mass of the Sun typically takes less than microseconds. You could prolong your life expectancy to as much as a year in a black hole trillions of times more massive. You should aim for a bigger black hole if you intend to survive long enough to reflect on your experience. You may not want to prolong your demise if you cannot tolerate the existential dread, the gnawing suspicions, the cogent predictions about your unstoppable departure from this adventure.

If you find yourself approaching an utterly dark shadow, visible only in contrast to a bright background of light, beware. Avoid at all costs. Maintain a safe distance. If you get too close you will need all the fuel in the universe to escape, and that will not be enough. It will be hard to assess if the shadow is small and nearby or big and far away. If you do cross the shadow, you will be the first human to be dismembered by spacetime and obliterated near the infamous singularity, prophesized to be an actual hole in the center of the black hole, a tear in the fabric of spacetime that leads nowhere.

Take solace in your observations, but they will be yours alone. None of your transmissions will make it out of the hole to home. All documentation of your demise will follow you into oblivion.

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Did you enjoy this chapter? Check out the rest of the book here.

Excerpted from Black Hole Survival Guide by Janna Levin. Copyright © 2020 by Janna Levin. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

The post How to Survive a Black Hole: Instructions and Other Brilliance from Astrophysicist Janna Levin appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

– Actual patient featured in “Trip of Compassion”

This post is about the most compelling movie I’ve seen in the last year.

I first watched “Trip of Compassion” about six months ago, when I was sent a link to a private video. The film had been broadcast once on Israeli television, but it wasn’t distributed or available anywhere else. This documentary affected me so deeply (and immediately) that I flew to Tel Aviv, met the filmmakers, and offered to help launch the film digitally worldwide. Everything I am doing for this film is 100% pro bono, and all proceeds go to the filmmakers.

Why am I doing this, and why is this film so exciting to me?

Tens of millions of people worldwide suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Millions more have suffered from emotional and physical abuse but never get diagnosed. I would put myself in the latter category for reasons I’ll explain another time.

“Trip of Compassion” documents one unusual approach to healing trauma that might astonish you, an innovative treatment involving the psychoactive drug MDMA (commonly known as “ecstasy”). As you will see firsthand, if the therapy is well designed, true rebirth and transformation can happen in a matter of weeks and not years.

If you’ve ever felt held back, felt defective in some way, or felt that you’re not living up to your full potential, this film will give you hope.

This is also the first feature documentary to show actual therapy session footage (to our knowledge), to which the patients consented because of the incredible results they experienced.

Filmed at the Beer Yaakov Mental Health Center in Israel, “Trip of Compassion” provides a rare glimpse into a treatment process that can restore optimism and even the will to live.

Thank you for watching this film (just click here to stream) and, if you find it as powerful as I did, thank you for sharing it or this post.

***

In addition to helping launch this movie, I am supporting broader access to MDMA-assisted therapy in the USA and elsewhere by donating to MAPS.org, a non-profit dedicated to making this treatment available to those who need it (e.g., phase 3 trials, regulatory work, scholarships for low-income patients).

If you also decide that this work is important, please consider visiting MAPS.org to donate. NOTE: Be sure to specify the following in the donation form (there is a field for this, as they have many initiatives): “Funds are restricted to MDMA phase 3 trials.”

***

Thank you so much for reading this far. I couldn’t be more excited to share this film.

And remember as you watch: this is possible now. To quote William Gibson, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

Let’s help make this treatment more evenly distributed.

More to come,

Tim

The post "Trip of Compassion" — The Most Compelling Movie I've Seen In The Last Year appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

To kick things off, what is foie gras?

It can be explained with a short missive from our friend Wikipedia:

The California foie gras law, California S.B. 1520, is a California State statute that prohibits the “force feed[ing of] a bird for the purpose of enlarging the bird’s liver beyond normal size”…

Former Senator John Burton called foie gras production “an inhumane process that other countries have sensibly banned.”

Given this outrage related to mistreating birds, you might be surprised to learn that human foie gras industries are booming.  Children’s livers are apparently particularly tasty. Not unlike veal, I suppose.

I’m putting $50K of my own money into related investments, but we’ll get back to that in a minute. First, some background…

For most of the 20th century, fatty liver and liver cirrhosis had two primary causes: drinking too much alcohol (e.g. Mickey Mantle) or hepatitis B or C (via IV drug use, unhygienic tattooing, tainted blood transfusions, etc.).

But in the last few decades, even infants are showing up with livers that should belong to hardcore alcoholics.  And the numbers aren’t small.

It’s estimated that one in ten American children now suffer from non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), alongside 40 million affected adults. If you’re an obese Mexican-American boy, the odds are 50-50 (!) that you have NAFLD, thanks to genetic predisposition (PNPLA3 gene).

15 years ago, this disease was unheard of.  In 10 years, it’s projected to be the #1 cause of liver transplants. Put another way — In 2001, NAFLD was the reason for 1 out of every 100 liver transplants; by 2010, it was up a ten-fold to 1 in 10; by 2025, assuming nothing stems this tide, there could be five million Americans who need new livers because of it.

Who are driving this trend?

Some point fingers at good folks such as Coca-Cola, juice “cocktail” manufacturers, and the like.  Given that many researchers blame fructose, it’s not a huge stretch. Personally, the whole thing makes me sick.  I’d like to sic the best scientists in the country on them.

Ah, and this is where the good news comes in.

There is a way, albeit an indirect way, to do this. I implore you to read on and bear with me.  This is where it gets exciting.

The NIH alone has spent $155 billion on cancer research since 1972, and cancer survival is up a paltry 3% as a result. The US government spends over $25 billion EACH year on HIV/AIDS. That’s a lot of money.

One might assume fatty liver disease would require similar sums. After all, more American adults have NAFLD than prostate cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, or type 2 diabetes.

That’s the disconnect…and the opportunity to be part of history.

Enter the “Manhattan Project of Nutrition”

The Nutrition Science Initiative—NuSI–has been called the “Manhattan Project of nutrition.” They are run like a lean startup, and I’m proud to be a part of their advisory board.

They don’t take industry money, so they have no interests to protect.

They believe the NAFLD epidemic can be curtailed for a total of $50 million, but the whole domino effect starts with just $1 million.  It is a rare day in science when fundamental questions about an epidemic can be answered with such little money (respectively). It’s an incredible Archimedes lever.

For context, NuSI argues that there are dietary triggers of diseases, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and fatty liver disease. To determine what the triggers are, NuSI assembles teams of the best scientists in the country (e.g., from Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, NIH, UCSF, UCSD, Emory, etc.) to fund and execute the kind of research nobody else is willing (or able) to perform.

For NAFLD, NuSI’s team of experts have designed three trials to determine the respective roles of too many calories, too many carbohydrates, and too much sugar–the leading three hypotheses–as dietary triggers.

In early 2015, this team will begin the first ever controlled clinical trial to see if removing sugars from the diet can reverse fatty liver disease in children.

40 kids with NAFLD will be split into two groups, with 20 simply observed on their normal diet as controls, and 20 provided with a diet that’s identical to what they usually eat, but completely devoid of added or refined sugars. The scientists’ hypothesis is that the sugar-free diet will at least stop the progression of NAFLD in these kids, and may even reduce the amount of fat in their livers.

If that’s the case, it’ll be the best evidence we have linking sugar to fatty liver disease.

My $50,000 Challenge…And How to Get Involved

I’m personally matching up to $50,000 for whatever is raised through this blog post, and every donation–big or small–makes a major difference.

[UPDATE: An anonymous donor — a generous reader of this blog — has offered to match up to another $150,000. That means that if you all help donate or contribute just $200,000, another $200,000 will be matched for a total of $400,000!]

Any donation is also a tax write-off, as NuSI is a non-profit organization (of course, speak with your tax advisor). Perfect for end-of-the-year giving.

NuSI is looking to raise $1 million dollars for the first of these three trials—the one that determines how the rest get done.  The snowball that starts the avalanche. There are few chances in the world to have this type of impact for this type of money.  Could it end up forcing labeling changes, product modifications, obligatory package warnings, policy shifts, and more?  I believe so.

Supporting this campaign very easy, and remember–I’m excited to be putting my own skin in this game.  I sincerely hope you join me.  Every bit counts.

There are three options:

1. Donate by credit or debit card. Visit: http://nusi.org/donate. Enter your donation amount, indicate “NAFLD — Tim Ferriss” in the message field, and click “Donate.”  Done.

2. Donate by check. Send your check to: NuSI, attention: Lacey Stenson, 6020 Cornerstone Court W. Suite 240, San Diego, CA 92121. Be sure to write “NAFLD – Tim Ferriss” in the memo line.

3. Donate by transferring securities (stocks, etc.). Email TimFerriss1million@nusi.org [remember the double “r” and double “s”] and they’ll do as much heavy lifting as possible.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for supporting if you’re able.  This is a good fight.

If you’d also like to hear a fascinating chat with Peter Attia, MD, co-founder of NuSI, I interview him here on radical sports experimentation, synthetic ketones, meditation, and more. He’s a competitive ultra-endurance athlete, MD, surgeon, and obsessive self-tracker, so we get along great

###

Relevant reading and citations:

Browning JD et al. Prevalence of hepatic steatosis in an urban population in the United States: Impact of ethnicity. Hepatology, 2004.

Welsh JA, Karpen S, Vos MB. Increasing prevalence of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease among United States adolescents, 1988-1994 to 2007-2010. Journal of Pediatrics, 2013.

Targher G, Day CP, Bonora E. Risk of cardiovascular disease in patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. The New England Journal of Medicine, 2010.

Dudekula A et al. Weight loss in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease patients in an ambulatory care setting is largely unsuccessful but correlates with frequency of clinic visits. PLoS One, 2014.

Kawasaki T et al. Rats fed fructose-enriched diets have characteristics of nonalcoholic hepatic steatosis. The Journal of Nutrition, 2009.

Sanchez-Lozada LG et al. Comparison of free fructose and glucose to sucrose in the ability to cause fatty liver. European Journal of Nutrition, 2010.

Best CH et al. Liver damage produced by feeding alcohol or sugar and its prevention by choline. British Medical Journal, 1949.

Ouyang X et al. Fructose consumption as a risk factor for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Journal of Hepatology, 2008.

Abid A et al. Soft drink consumption is associated with fatty liver disease independent of metabolic syndrome. Journal of Hepatology, 2009.

Abdelmalek MF et al. Increased fructose consumption is associated with fibrosis severity in patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. Hepatology, 2010.

Assy N et al. Soft drink consumption linked with fatty liver in the absence of traditional risk factors. Canadian Journal of Gastroenterology, 2008.

Stanhope KL et al. Consuming fructose-sweetened, not glucose-sweetened, beverages increases visceral adiposity and lipids and decreases insulin sensitivity in overweight/obese humans. The Journal of Clinical Investigation, 2009.

Maersk M et al. Sucrose-sweetened beverages increase fat storage in liver, muscle, and visceral fat depot: a 6-mo randomized intervention study. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2012.

Browning JD et al. Short-term weight loss and hepatic triglyceride reduction: Evidence of a metabolic advantage with dietary carbohydrate restriction. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2011.

Vos MB, Lavine JE. Dietary fructose in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. Hepatology, 2013.

Chung M et al. Fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, sucrose, and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease or indexes of liver health: a systematic review and meta-analysis. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2014.

The post Human Foie Gras — A Golden Opportunity appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Preface from Tim

Back in 2012, Gabriel Wyner wrote an article for Lifehacker detailing how he learned French in 5 months and Russian in 10, using mostly spare time on the subway.  That article went viral.

But don’t run off! That was nothing but version 1.0.  This post gives you version 2.0 and more.

He’s spent the last two years refining his methods and putting them on steroids. Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired, was the one who told me, “You have to check this guy out. His new book is amazing.” Keep in mind that I’d previously told Kevin that I thought most books on language learning were garbage.  I took his endorsement seriously, and I wasn’t disappointed.

This post gives you Gabe’s new blueprint for rapid language learning:

• A revised and updated version of his original post
• New techniques from the last two years of experimentation
• How he learned 6 languages in just a handful of years
• Tips and tricks you won’t find anywhere else

The “and never forget it” in the headline was Gabe’s idea. Read the article and let me know what you think. Is it possible? I, for one, hope it is.

And speaking as someone who’s studied 10+ languages as an adult, I can tell you: you’re much better at learning languages than you think.

Enjoy!

Enter Gabriel — An overview of what this is and why it works

Two Foreign Words

Let’s compare two experiences. Here’s the first one: you come into a language class, and your (Hungarian) teacher writes the following on the board:

Kitchen cabinet – konyhaszekrény

She tells you that this is going to be on your vocab quiz next week, along with forty other words you don’t care much about.

Experience two: You and your most adventurous friend are sitting in a bar, somewhere in Scandinavia. The bartender is a grey-bearded Viking, who places three empty shot glasses in front of you in a line. From behind the counter, he pulls out a bottle labeled Moktor and pours a viscous, green liquid into the three glasses. He then grabs a jar and unscrews the lid. It’s full of something that looks and smells disturbingly like slimy, decaying baby fish, which he spoons into each shot glass. He then pulls out a silver cigarette lighter and lights the three shots on fire.

“This – Moktor,” he says, picking up one of the glasses. The locals in the bar turn towards you and your friend. “Moktor! Moktor! Moktor!” they all begin to shout, laughing, as the bartender blows out the flame on his shot glass and downs the drink. Your friend – your jackass friend – picks up his glass, screams “Moktor!” and does the same. The crowd goes wild, and you, after giving your friend a nasty look, pick up your glass and follow suit.

As a result of this experience, you are going to remember the word “Moktor” forever, and if you still remember the Hungarian word for kitchen cabinet, you’re likely going to forget it within a few minutes.

Let’s talk about why this happens. Your brain stores memories in the form of connections. Moktor has a (bitter, fishy) taste, which connects with its (rotting) smell. That taste and smell are connected to a set of images: the green bottle, the jar of rotting fish, the grey-bearded barkeep. All of that, in turn, is connected to a set of emotions: excitement, disgust, fear. And those emotions and images and tastes and smells are connected to the writing on that green bottle and the sound of that chanting crowd: Moktor.

Konyhaszekrény, in comparison, just doesn’t stand a chance. In English, “kitchen cabinet” may evoke all sorts of multi-sensory memories – over the course of your life, you’ve probably seen hundreds of cabinets, eaten wonderful foods in their presence, and assembled your own cabinets from IKEA – but konyhaszekrény has none of these things. You’re not thinking about IKEA’s weird metal bolts or bags of Doritos when you see konyhaszekrény; you’re just associating the sound of the Hungarian word (which you’re not even sure how to pronounce) with the sound of the English words ‘kitchen cabinet.’ With so few connections, you don’t have much to hold on to, and your memory for the Hungarian word will fade rapidly. (For a more in-depth discussion about memory and language learning, check out this video excerpt)

In order to learn a language and retain it, you’ll need to build Moktor-like connections into your words. The good news is that if you know what you’re doing, you can do this methodically and rapidly, and you don’t even need to travel to Scandinavia.

The Components of a Memorable Word

If we strip a word down to its bare essentials, a memorable word is composed of the following:

• A spelling (M-o-k-t-o-r)
• A sound (MAWK-tore, or ˈmɑk.toʊɹ, if you want to get fancy)
• A meaning (A viscous green drink, served on fire with dead, baby fish in it.)
• A personal connection (Ick.)

If you can assemble these four ingredients, you can build a long-lasting memory for a word. So that’s exactly what we’re going to do. In addition, we’re going to use a Spaced Repetition System. This is a flashcard system that automatically quizzes you on each of your flashcards just before you forget what’s on them. They’re a ridiculously efficient way to push data into your long-term memory, and we’ll take advantage of that, too.

My language learning method relies on four stages: Begin by learning your language’s sound and spelling system, then learn 625 simple words using pictures. Next, use those words to learn the grammatical system of your language, and finally play, by watching TV, speaking with native speakers, reading books and writing.

Keep in mind that different languages will take different amounts of time. The Foreign Service Institute makes language difficulty estimates [Ed. note: scroll down to the heading “FSI’s Experience with Language Learning”] ​for English speakers, and I’ve found their estimates are spot on – in my experience, Russian and Hungarian seem to take twice as much time as French, and I expect that Japanese will take me twice as long as Hungarian. For the purposes of this article, I’ll assume that you’re learning a Level 1 language like French, and you have a spare 30-60 minutes a day to dedicate to your language studies. If you’re studying something trickier or have different amounts of spare time, adjust accordingly.

Here are the four stages of language learning that we’ll go through:

Stage 1: Spelling and Sound: Learn how to hear, produce and spell the sounds of your target language

1-3 weeks

One of the many reasons that Moktor is easier to memorize than konyhaszekrény is that Moktor looks and sounds relatively familiar. Sure, you haven’t seen that particular set of letters in a row, but you can immediately guess how to pronounce it (MAWK-tore). Konyhaszekrény, on the other hand, is completely foreign. What’s “sz” sound like? What’s the difference between “é” and “e”? The word is a disaster when it comes to spelling and sound, and it gets even worse if you were looking at Russian’s кухонный шкаф, or Mandarin’s 橱柜.

Before you can even begin assembling memories for words, you’re going to need to create a spelling and sound foundation upon which you can build those memories. So spend your first 1-3 weeks focusing exclusively on spelling and sound, so that the foreign spellings and sounds of your target language are no longer foreign to you.

To break down that process a bit, you’re learning three things:

•  How to hear the new sounds in your target language,
•  How to pronounce the sounds, and
•  How to spell those sounds.

We’ll tackle those in order.

How to hear new sounds

Many people don’t think about hearing when they approach a new language, but it’s an absolutely essential first step. When I began Hungarian, I discovered that the letter combinations “ty” and “gy” sounded basically identical to my ears.

Tyuk:

Gyuk:

If I had rushed ahead and started learning words and grammar immediately, I’d have been at a severe disadvantage whenever I learned words with those letter combinations, because I’d be missing the sound connection when trying to build memories for those words. How could I remember a word like tyúk (hen) if I can’t even hear the sounds in it, let alone repeat them aloud?

There are a few different ways to learn to hear new sounds, but the best that I’ve seen comes from a line of research on Japanese adults, learning to hear the difference between Rock and Lock.

I’ve made a little video summarizing these studies, but here’s the short version: to rewire your ears to hear new sounds, you need to find pairs of similar sounds, listen to one of them at random (“tyuk!”), guess which one you thought you heard (“Was it ‘gyuk’?”), and get immediate feedback as to whether you were right (“Nope! It was tyuk!”). When you go through this cycle, your ears adapt, and the foreign sounds of a new language will rapidly become familiar and recognizable.

For Hungarian, I built myself a simple app that performs these tests. In the end, it took me ten days at 20 minutes a day to learn how to hear all of the new sounds of Hungarian (of which there are quite a few!). It is a ridiculously efficient way to learn pronunciation; after experiencing it myself, I made it my personal goal to develop pronunciation trainers for 12 of the most common languages, a goal that – thanks to Kickstarter – is coming to fruition. These trainers will walk you through ear training tests and teach you the spelling system of your target language in ~2 weeks. As I finish them, I’ll be putting them on my website, here. But if I’m not covering your language yet, or if you prefer to do things on your own, I have an article on my site explaining how to make them yourself for free.

How to pronounce new sounds

With your ears out of the way, you can start mastering pronunciation. But wait! Is it even possible to develop a good accent from the start? I’ve long heard the claim that developing a good accent is only possible if you’ve been speaking a language before the age of 7, or 12, or some other age that has long since past.

This is simply not true. Singers and actors develop good accents all the time, and the only thing special about them is that they’re paid to sound good. So yes, you can do this, and it’s not that hard.

Once your ears begin to cooperate, mastering pronunciation becomes a lot easier. No one told you, for instance, how to pronounce a K in English, yet the back of your tongue automatically jumps up into the back of your mouth to produce a perfect K every time. Most of the time, your ears will do this for you in a foreign language, too, as long as you’ve taken the time to train them. That being said, there may be occasions when you can hear a foreign sound just fine, but it just won’t cooperate with your mouth. If that happens, you may benefit from a bit of information about where to put your tongue and how to move your lips. I’ve made a Youtube series that walks you through the basics of pronunciation in any language. Check it out here. It’ll teach your mouth and tongue how to produce tricky new sounds.

This gives you a few super powers: your well-trained ears will give your listening comprehension a huge boost from the start, and  your mouth will be producing accurate sounds. By doing this in the beginning, you’re going to save yourself a great deal of time, since you won’t have to unlearn bad pronunciation habits later on. You’ll find that native speakers will actually speak with you in their language, rather than switching to English at the earliest opportunity.

How to spell new sounds

Spelling is the easiest part of this process. Nearly every grammar book comes with a list of example words for every spelling. Take that list and make flashcards to learn the spelling system of your language, using pictures and native speaker recordings to make those example words easier to remember.

Those flashcards look like this:

Spelling Flashcard 1

(Trains individual letters and letter combinations)

Spelling Flashcard 2

(Connects a recording of an example word to the spelling system of your language)

And I have a guide to building them on my website.

Author’s note: For Japanese and the Chinese dialects, you’re going to be learning the phonetic alphabets first – Kana (Japanese) or Pinyin (Chinese). Later, when you get to Stage 2, you’ll be learning characters. You can find an article on modifying this system for those languages over here.

Stage 2: Learn 625 Basic Words: Learn a set of extremely common, simple words using pictures, not translations

1-2 months

To begin any language, I suggest starting with the most common, concrete words, as they’re going to be the most optimal use of your time. This is the 80/20 Rule in action; why learn niece in the beginning when you’re going to need mother eighty times more often?

On my website, I have a list of 625 basic words.  [Ed. note: This link now goes to an internet archive site. Please be patient with load times.] These are words that are common in every language and can be learned using pictures, rather than translations: words like dog, ball, to eat, red, to jump. Your goal is two-fold: first, when you learn these words, you’re reinforcing the sound and spelling foundation you built in the first stage, and second, you’re learning to think in your target language.

Often, when someone hears this advice, they think it’s a good idea and try it out. They pick up a word like devushka (girl) in Russian, and decide to learn it using a picture, instead of an English translation. They go to Google Images (or better, Google Images Basic Mode, which provides captions for each word and more manageably sized images), and search for “girl.” Here’s what they’ll see:

Google Images search for “girl” (Using Basic Mode)

It’s exactly what you’d expect. They look like girls, and you could pick out a couple of these images, slap them on a flashcard, and teach yourself devushka within a few seconds. Unfortunately, you’d be missing out on the most interesting – and most memorable – bits of the story. You already know what a girl is. What happens if you search for “девушка” (devushka) instead? 

Google Images search for “девушка” (Using Translated Basic Mode)

Russian devushki tend to be 18-22 year old sex objects. Devushka is not a word you’d use to describe your Russian friend’s 3-year-old daughter (That word is ‘devuchka’). And while knowing the difference between girl and devushka may keep you out of trouble with your Russian friends, it’s also a thousand times more interesting than simply memorizing “devushka = girl.” By searching for images in your target language, and by looking for the differences between a new word and its translation, you’ll find that the new word suddenly becomes memorable.

Devushka is not some random exception; it’s the rule. Nearly every new word you encounter will be subtly (and sometimes, not-so-subtly) different from its English counterpart. So your first step when learning a new word is to search for it on Google Images, look through 20-40 pictures, and try to spot the differences between what you see and what you expect to see. This experience is the learning process for your word. It’s the (often exciting) moment when you discover what your word actually means. Once you’ve had that experience, grab 1-2 images and put them on a flashcard to remind you of what you saw.

Note: This is why you can’t just download some flashcards and successfully learn a foreign language. If you do this, you miss out on the actual learning experience. The flashcards aren’t particularly effective, because they’re not reminding you of anything you previously experienced.

Armed with an image or two from Google Images, you’ve now managed to connect a spelling (k-o-n-y-h-a-s-z-e-k-r-é-n-y) and a sound (“konyhaszekrény!”) to a meaning (really old-fashioned looking kitchen cabinets).

At this point, the only thing separating konyhaszekrény from Moktor is a personal connection, and fortunately, you have plenty of personal connections to choose from. When’s the last time you encountered a particularly old-fashioned kitchen cabinet? Search your memories, and you’ll find that for nearly every word you learn, there is at least some experience you’ve had with that concept. In my case, my grandmother’s old house definitely was full of konyhaszekrények. Find your own personal connection with each new word, come up with a short reminder of it – in my case, I’d choose my grandmother’s name, Judith – and stick that on the back of your flashcards as well. When you include personal connections, you’ll remember your words 50% better.

Once you’ve built these connections, start making your flashcards (guide here)

Tip 1 – Regarding Word Order

When learning words, never learn them in the standard order you see in grammar books, where similar words are grouped together: days of the week, members of the family, types of fruit, etc. When you do this, your words will interfere with each other (is ’jeudi’ the word for ‘Tuesday’ or ‘Thursday’?), and on average, you’ll need 40% more time to memorize them, and they’ll last 40% less time in your memory compared to a randomized group of words. You can find more information about the effects of word order over here.

Tip 2 – Mnemonics for Grammatical Gender

If any of you have studied a language with grammatical gender, you know how much of a pain it can be trying to remember whether chairs are supposed to be masculine, feminine or neuter. Some of the friendlier languages may give you clues – perhaps masculine nouns usually end in ‘o’ – but those clues aren’t always trustworthy. So what can you do?

There’s a simple way to make abstract information like grammatical gender stick. Use mnemonic imagery, and for this particular case, use vivid, visualizable verbs. Make your masculine nouns burst into flame, your feminine nouns melt into a puddle, and neuter nouns shatter into a thousand razor-sharp shards. You’ll find that mnemonic imagery like this makes gender extremely easy to memorize, right from the start.

Stage 3: Learn the grammar and abstract words of your language

2-3 months

Now it’s time to crack open your grammar book. And when you do, you’ll notice some interesting things:

First, you’ll find that you’ve built a rock-solid foundation in the spelling and pronunciation system of your language. You won’t even need to think about spelling anymore, which will allow you to focus exclusively on the grammar. Second, you’ll find that you already know most of the words in your textbook’s example sentences. You learned the most frequent words in Stage 2, after all. All you need to do now is discover how your language puts those words together.

Grammar’s Role

So let’s talk about what grammar does, and how you should learn it. Grammar is a story telling device. It takes a few actors and actions – you, your dog, eating, your homework – and turns them into a story: Your dog ate your homework. This is a tremendously complex operation; not only can grammar tell you who’s doing what and when they’re doing it, but it can simultaneously tell you what the speaker thinks about the story. By switching from “My dog ate my homework” to “My homework was eaten by my dog,” for instance, we move from a story about a bad dog to a story about a sad, sad homework assignment.

In every single language, grammar is conveyed using some combination of three basic operations: grammar adds words (You like it -> Do you like it?), it changes existing words (I eat it -> I ate it), or it changes the order of those words (This is nice -> Is this nice?). That’s it. It’s all we can do. And that lets us break sentences down into grammatical chunks that are very easy to memorize.

How do you learn all the complicated bits of “My homework was eaten by my dog”? Simple: Use the explanations and translations in your grammar book to understand what a sentence means, and then use flashcards to memorize that sentence’s component parts, like this:

New Words (Front Side) – [Guide to construction]

New Word Forms (Front Side) – [Guide to construction]

Word Order (Front and Back Sides) – [Guide to construction]

You can memorize any grammatical form using this approach, and this has a few advantages over the standard sort of grammatical drills you’ll find in your textbook. For one, you’re learning each grammatical form in the context of a story, which allows you to connect images to abstract words. This makes them a lot easier to remember. What’s a “by” look like? For this story, it looks like a guilty dog.

Second, you’re learning grammar with the help of a Spaced Repetition System, which will provide you with the exact amount of repetition you need to definitively memorize any grammatical form. This lets you skip over the hundreds of grammar drills in your textbook. Instead, you can take just one or two examples of every new grammatical form and move on to the next section of your book. This lets you move very, very fast, and devour a textbook worth of information within a couple of months. It’s also a lot of fun; without getting bogged down with boring grammatical drills, you’re constantly learning new ways to express yourself.

Other Sources of Example Sentences

Occasionally, your textbook won’t give you the example sentences you need. Instead, it’ll throw a bunch of verb conjugations at you – I am, you are, he is – and tell you to simply memorize the forms. When this happens, you can turn to two wonderful, free resources to produce example sentences: Google Images and Lang-8.

On its surface, Google Images is a humble image search engine. But hiding beneath that surface is a language-learning goldmine: billions of illustrated example sentences, which are both searchable and machine translatable. If you mess with it just right (Instructions here), you get this (I’m searching for French’s ’peuvent’ ([they] can)):

And if you mouse over the text, you get this:

Google Images Basic Mode, jammed into Google Translate

(Mouse over to reveal original text)

Yup, that’s an effectively unlimited source of illustrated, translated example sentences for any word or word form in your target language. It’s the largest illustrated book ever written, and it’s both searchable and free. Gold.

Alternatively, you can write your own example sentences. Naturally, you’ll make mistakes, but with Lang-8.com, you can get those mistakes corrected for free by native speakers, in exchange for correcting someone else’s English. You can then take those corrected sentences, break them down into flash cards, and use them to memorize even the most complex of grammatical forms. I really like writing my own flashcard content. It makes my flashcards a lot more personal, it gives me practice using the words I already know to express myself, and the corrections show me exactly where I need additional flashcards to help push my grammar in the right direction.

Using these tools, you can easily memorize any word or grammatical concept you’d like to learn. I’d recommend using these tools to accomplish two things:

• Memorize the first half of your grammar book, since it’s the half that typically contains all the meaty, useful bits. (The second half often contains specialized stuff like reported speech, which you might not need.)
• Learn the top 1,000 words of your language. By this point, you’ve already learned many of these words from the original 625, and with your newfound ability to learn abstract words, you can learn the rest of them.

This part of the process is a lot of fun. You can feel your language growing in your head, and since you’re never using translations on your flashcards, you’ll frequently find yourself thinking in your target language. It’s a particularly weird and wonderful experience.

And by the end of this stage, you’re ready to start playing.

Stage 4: The Language Game

3 Months (or as long as you want to keep playing)

This stage is extremely flexible, and in many ways, obnoxiously simple. Want more vocabulary? Learn more words. Want to be more comfortable reading? Read some books. But there are some efficiency tweaks you can do here that will help you transition more easily from an intermediate level to full fledged fluency.

Vocabulary Customization: 

Learning the top 1000 words in your target language is a slam-dunk in terms of efficiency, but what about the next thousand words? And the thousand after that? When do frequency lists stop paying dividends? Generally, I’d suggest stopping somewhere between word #1000 and word #2000. At that point, you’ll get better gains by customizing. What do you want your language to do? If you want to order food at a restaurant, learn food vocabulary. If you plan to go to a foreign university, learn academic vocabulary. Get a Thematic Vocabulary Book, a book that lists vocabulary by theme (food, travel, music, business, automotive, etc.), and check off the words that seem relevant to your interests. Then learn those words using the methods from Stage 3.

Reading: 

Books boost your vocabulary whether or not you stop every 10 seconds to look up a word. So instead of torturously plodding through some famous piece of literature with a dictionary, do this:

• Find a book in a genre that you actually like (The Harry Potter translations are reliably great!)
• Find and read a chapter-by-chapter summary of it in your target language (you’ll often find them on Wikipedia). This is where you can look up and make flashcards for some key words, if you’d like.
• Find an audiobook for your book.
• Listen to that audiobook while reading along, and don’t stop, even when you don’t understand everything. The audiobook will help push you through, you’ll have read an entire book, and you’ll find that it was downright pleasurable by the end.

Listening:

Podcasts and radio broadcasts are usually too hard for an intermediate learner. Movies, too, can be frustrating, because you may not understand what’s going on until the very end (if ever!).

Long-form TV series are the way to go. They provide 18+ hours of audio content with a consistent plot line, vocabulary and voice actors, which means that by the time you start feeling comfortable (2-4 hours in), you still have 14+ hours of content. To make those first few hours a bit easier, read episode summaries ahead of time in your target language. You can usually find them on Wikipedia, and they’ll help you follow along while your ears are getting used to spoken content.

Speaking: 

Fluency in speech is not the ability to know every word and grammatical formation in a language; it’s the ability to use whatever words and grammar you know to say whatever’s on your mind. When you go to a pharmacy and ask for “That thing you swallow to make your head not have so much pain,” or “The medicine that makes my nose stop dripping water” – THAT is fluency. As soon as you can deftly dance around the words you don’t know, you are effectively fluent in your target language.

This turns out to be a learned skill, and you practice it in only one situation: When you try to say something, you don’t know the words to say it, and you force yourself to say it in your target language anyways. If you want to build fluency as efficiently as possible, put yourself in situations that are challenging, situations in which you don’t know the words you need. And every time that happens, stay in your target language no matter what. If you adhere to that rule whenever you practice speaking, you’ll reach fluency at a steady, brisk pace.

Naturally, you’re going to need practice partners. Depending upon your city, you may find friends, colleagues, private tutors (Craigslist.org) or large language practice groups (Meetup.com) for speech practice.

No matter where you are, you can find practice partners on the Internet. iTalki.com is a website designed to put you in touch with a conversation partner or tutor for free (if you’re willing to chat in English for half of the time), or for $4-12/hr (if you don’t want to bother with English). It’s a tremendous and affordable resource.

The more often you speak, the more rapidly you’ll learn. Speech practice pulls together all of the data you’ve crammed into your head and forms it into a cohesive, polished language.

Learning a foreign language is a fluid process; you’re building a lot of different skills that meld into each other. The more vocabulary you learn, the easier it will be to speak about a wide variety of topics. The more you practice speaking, the easier it will be to watch foreign TV and movies. So rather than be strict and methodical about this (“My reading comprehension skills are lacking; I must read 15 books to maximize efficiency!”), just do what you find most enjoyable. If you like writing about your day on Lang-8 and making flashcards out of the corrections, then keep doing that. If you like to chat with your tutor on iTalki, do that.

There’s a very simple way to figure out if you’re spending your time well: if you’re enjoying yourself in your target language, then you’re doing it right. In the end, language learning should be fun. It needs to be fun; you retain information better when you’re enjoying yourself, and the journey to fluency takes too much time to force yourself through using willpower alone. So enjoy yourself, and play around with new ways to think about the world. See you on the other side.

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Links:

• My book, Fluent Forever: How to learn any language fast and never forget it, is an in-depth journey into the language learning process, full of tips, guidelines and research into the most efficient methods for learning and retaining foreign languages.
• My CreativeLive Workshop is 18 hours of language learning insanity in video form. I go through everything I know about the language learning process, with detailed, step-by-step walkthroughs of every computerized and analog tool I recommend.

Related & Recommended Posts:

12 Rules for Learning Foreign Languages in Record Time

How to learn any language in 3 months

Why language classes don’t work: How to Cut Classes and Double Your Learning Rate

How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour

The post How to Learn Any Language in Record Time and Never Forget It appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

(Photo: Irina Souiki)

I’ve wanted to publish this post for years.

It will propose a few simple approaches for minimizing the occurrence of cancer.

With 19 billion capillaries in our bodies, on average, virtually 100% of us have microscopic cancers by the time we’re 70 years old, more than 40% of us by age 40. There’s a good chance you have pinhead-size cancers in your body right now. These “cancers without disease” aren’t typically a problem, as they can’t grow larger than 0.5 mm without a blood supply.

But if cancer cells get constant blood and glucose? That’s when you can end up dead.

That’s not where I want to be, and it’s not where I want you to be.

A Little Backstory…

While at the annual TED Conference in 2010, I learned that two close friends had been diagnosed with cancer. The year before, another friend had died of pancreatic cancer in his early 30’s.

This all made me furious and sad. It also made me feel helpless.

As luck would have it, TED in 2010 was abuzz about someone named Dr. William Li. His 24-minute presentation had introduced the crowd to “anti-angiogenesis therapy”: in plain English, how to starve cancers of blood. Dr. Li specializes in inhibiting cancer-specific blood-vessel growth, which ostensibly keeps abnormal growth in check. The simplest “drug” he recommended was tea. Drinking a daily blend of white tea (specifically Dragon Pearl jasmine) and green tea (Japanese sencha).

I started drinking the cocktail immediately, but it was just a first step…

In clinical trials, you see, anti-angiogenesis has been largely been unsuccessful. The father of the field, Judah Folkman, was brilliant, but his brainchild (Avastin) has been a disappointment. For about $100,000 a year of Avastin, one might extend lifespan by a month or so.

So, while I kept drinking my tea, I realized it probably wasn’t enough by itself. That said, it pointed me to new research.

I, for one, believe there are systemic causes of cancer with systemic treatments. This belief began with metformin experimentation in college (not recommended without doctor supervision), followed by reading the work and references of Gary Taubes, all of which has been reinforced by conversations with oncologists over the last decade.

All trails have led back to blood and glucose.

It’s also important to realize that killing cancer cells isn’t hard. Doctors have known how to do this for 100+ years. The real questions is: how do you exploit a weakness in cancer that is NOT a weakness in normal cells? Killing cancer is easy. Killing cancer while not killing non-cancer has proven almost impossible.

The below guest post is written by Peter Attia, M.D.. It explores a simple theory of cancer growth, which simultaneously shows how you can minimize it.

Peter is the President of the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI). Peter spent five years at the Johns Hopkins Hospital as a general surgery resident, where he was the recipient of several prestigious awards and the author of a comprehensive review of general surgery. Peter also spent two years at the National Institutes of Health as a surgical oncology fellow at the National Cancer Institute under Dr. Steve Rosenberg, where his research focused on the role of regulatory T cells in cancer regression and other immune-based therapies for cancer. Peter earned his M.D. from Stanford University and holds a B.Sc. in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

This post is designed to allow you to skim…or go deep. Here are the options:

• The quickie (10-15 min) – Read the post but ignore footnotes. Definitely a good start if you’re in a rush.
• The weekend warrior (30 minutes) – Read the post and footnotes, which provide an excellent intro to the science.
• The semi-pro (60 minutes) – Read the post, footnotes, and at least one top-10 suggested articles. This will give you more of a plan and put you ahead of 90% of the people who discuss cancer.

Enter Pete

One night Tim and I were having dinner and the topic of cancer came up.

Personally and professionally, I have a great interest in cancer, so when Tim asked if I could write something about cancer that was: (i) interesting to a broad audience, (ii) not technically over the top, (iii) not my typical 5,000 word dissertation, (iv) yet nuanced enough for his readers, I agreed to give it a shot, in about 1,000 words.

(Before reading this post, you may find some value in first reading a previous post which sets up the context for this one.)

So here it is, in roughly 1,000 words…

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In 1924 a scientist named Otto Warburg happened upon a counterintuitive finding.

Cancer ¹ cells, even in the presence of sufficient oxygen, underwent a type of metabolism ² cells reserved for rapid energy demand – anaerobic metabolism ³. In fact, even when cancer cells were given additional oxygen, they still defaulted into using only glucose ⁴ to make ATP ⁵ via the anaerobic pathway. This is counterintuitive because this way of making ATP is typically a last resort for cells, not a default, due to the relatively poor yield of ATP.

This observation begs a logical question: Do cancer cells do this because it’s all they can do? Or do they deliberately ‘choose’ to do this?

The first place to look is at the mitochondria ⁶ of the cancer cells. Though not uniformly the case, many cancers do indeed appear to have defects in their mitochondria that prevent them from carrying out oxidative phosphorylation ⁷.

Explanation 1

Cancer cells, like any cells undergoing constant proliferation (recall: cancer cells don’t stop proliferating when told to do so), may be optimizing for something other than energy generation. They may be optimizing for abundant access to cellular building blocks necessary to support near-endless growth. In this scenario, a cancer would prefer to rapidly shuttle glucose through itself. In the process, it generates the energy it needs, but more importantly, it gains access to lots of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms (from the breakdown of glucose). The atoms serve as the necessary input to the rate-limiting step of their survival — growth. The selection of cancer cells is based on this ability to preferentially grow by accessing as much cellular substrate as possible.

Explanation 2

Cells become cancerous because they undergo some form of genetic insult. This insult – damage to their DNA ⁸ – has been shown to result in the turning off of some genes ⁹ (those that suppress tumor growth) and/or the activation of other genes (those that promote cell growth unresponsive to normal cell-signaling). Among other things, this damage to their DNA also damages their mitochondria, rendering cancer cells unable to carry out oxidative phosphorylation. So, to survive they must undergo anaerobic metabolism to make ATP.

Whichever of these is more accurate (a discussion beyond my word count), the end result appears the same – cancer cells almost exclusively utilize glucose to make ATP without the use of their mitochondria. The point is: cancer cells have a metabolic quirk. Regardless of how much oxygen and fatty acid ¹⁰ they have access to, they preferentially use glucose to make ATP, and they do it without their mitochondria and oxygen.

So, can this be exploited to treat or even prevent cancer?

One way this quirk has been exploited for many years is in medical imaging. FDG-PET scans ¹¹ are a useful tool for non-invasively detecting cancer in people. By exploiting the obligate glucose consumption of cancer cells, the FDG-PET scan is a powerful way to locate cancer (see figure).

You can probably tell where I’m leading you. What happens if we reduce the amount of glucose in the body? Could such an intervention ‘starve’ cancer cells? An insight into this came relatively recently from an unlikely place – the study of patients with type 2 diabetes.

In the past few years, three retrospective studies of patients taking a drug called metformin have shown that diabetic patients who take metformin, even when adjusted for other factors such as body weight and other medications, appear to get less cancer.

And when they do get cancer, they appear to survive longer. Why? The answer may lie in what metformin does. Metformin does many things, to be clear, but chief among them is activating an enzyme called AMP kinase, which is important in suppressing the production of glucose in the liver (the liver manufactures glucose from protein and glycerol and releases it to the rest of the body). This drug is used in patients with diabetes to reduce glucose levels and thereby reduce insulin requirement.

So, the patients taking metformin may have better cancer outcomes because their glucose levels were lower, or because such patients needed less insulin. Insulin and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1) also appear to play an integral role in cancer growth as recently demonstrated by the observation that people with defective IGF-1 receptors appear immune to cancer. Or, it may be that activation of AMP kinase in cancer cells harms them in some other way. We don’t actually know why, but we do know that where there is smoke there is often fire. And the ‘smoke’ in this case is that a relatively innocuous drug that alters glucose levels in the body appears to interfere with cancer.

This may also explain why most animal models show that caloric restriction improves cancer outcomes. Though historically, this observation has been interpreted through the lens of less ‘food’ for cancer. A more likely explanation is that caloric restriction is often synonymous with glucose reduction, and it may be the glucose restriction per se that is keeping the cancer at bay.

Fortunately this paradigm shift in oncology – exploiting the metabolic abnormality of cancer cells – is gaining traction, and doing so with many leaders in the field.

Over a dozen clinical trials are underway right now investigating this strategy in the cancers that appear most sensitive to this metabolic effect – breast, endometrial, cervical, prostate, pancreatic, colon, and others. Some of these trials are simply trying to reproduce the metformin effect in a prospective, blinded fashion. Other trials are looking at sophisticated ways to target cancer by exploiting this metabolic abnormality, such as targeting PI3K ¹² directly.

To date, no studies in humans are evaluating the therapeutic efficacy of glucose and/or insulin reduction via diet, though I suspect that will change in the coming year or two, pending outcomes of the metformin trials.

EDITOR’S NOTE:Though it might seem premature to some, let’s make this actionable. To reduce glucose, consider following a diet (way of eating, really) such as The Slow-Carb Diet, Paleo, or any diet that induces ketosis. Many of the most influential researchers in the US, in addition to following ketogenic diets, take slow-acting metformin as a preemptive measure. NOTE: This should NOT be done without medical supervision.

Influences

I’ve been absurdly blessed to study this topic at the feet of legends, and to be crystal clear, not a single thought represented here is original work emanating from my brain. I’m simply trying to reconstruct the story and make it more accessible to a broader audience. Though I trained in oncology, my research at NIH/NCI focused on the role of the immune system in combating cancer. My education in the metabolism of cancer has been formed by the writings of those below, and from frequent discussions with a subset of them who have been more than generous with their time, especially Lewis Cantley (who led the team that discovered PI3K) and Dominic D’Agostino.

• Otto Warburg

• Lewis Cantley

• Dominic D’Agostino

• Craig Thompson

• Thomas Seyfried

• Eugene Fine

• Richard Feinman (not to be confused with Richard Feynman)

• Rainer Klement

• Reuben Shaw

• Matthew Vander Heiden

• Valter Longo

Further Reading from Tim — A Top-10 List

There is a deluge of writing about cancer.

Below, I’ve suggested a top-10 list of articles as starting points. Some are for lay audiences, some are technical, but all are worth the time to read. Here you go:

Looking for articles to pass to your parents, or to read as a lay person? Read these, in this order:

1. Non-technical talk by Craig Thompson, Pres/CEO of Sloan-Kettering

2. Science piece written about cancer (for non-technical audience) by Gary Taubes

Have a little background and want the 80/20 analysis, the greatest bang for the buck? Read this:

3. Relatively non-technical review article on the Warburg Effect written by Vander Heiden, Thompson, and Cantley

Peaking on modafinil during a flight to Tokyo? Want to deep dive for a few hours? Here are three recommendations, in this order:

4. Detailed review article by Tom Seyfried

5. Review article on the role of carb restriction in the treatment and prevention of cancer

6. Talk given by author of above paper for those who prefer video

Want four bonus reads, all very good? As you wish:

7. Moderately technical review article by Shaw and Cantley

8. Clinical paper on the role of metformin in breast cancer by Ana Gonzalez-Angulo

9. Mouse study by Dom D’Agostino’s group examining role of ketogenic diet and hyperbaric oxygen on a very aggressive tumor model

10. Mechanistic study by Feinman and Fine assessing means by which acetoacetate (a ketone body) suppresses tumor growth in human cancer cell lines

Afterword by Tim

It’s my hope that this short article offers hope. Moreover, it’s intended to offer actionable directions for those dealing with cancer or fearful of it.

Note a few things:

• I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on the Internet. Make medical decisions with medical supervision.
• This is a 1,000-word primer and therefore simplified. It’s not incorrect, but it is not comprehensive either, as it would impossible to digest for most people. Be sure to read the “further reading” above if you’re serious.

Have you stumbled upon any novel science/treatments related to cancer? Please share in the comments below, if so, as I’d love this post to become a living resource.

Many thanks for reading this far.

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Footnotes:

The post Potential Tactics for Defeating Cancer — A Toolkit in 1,000 Words appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

This is my favorite documentary of one of my favorite people, Richard Feynman.

His lectures and books—such as Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character)—have greatly inspired many of my best decisions in life. He also inspired me to teach.

I hope you enjoy the film as much as I did. Whether you like bongo drums, safe cracking, go-go dancers, or physics, there’s something for everyone.

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Question of the day: If you had to pick your favorite documentary, which would it be and why? Let me know in the comments!

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