Is a bris a biohack?
Ritual male circumcision, sadistic dentists, and the importance of operational definitions.
Back in the 80s I was ahead of the curve when it comes to biohacking. This was way back when vaporwave wasn’t ironic retro postmodernism, it was on the bleeding edge of the new wave. I had a body hacking procedure that directly manipulated my somatic nervous system that plugs directly into the emotion centers of my brain and made me less susceptible to certain transmitted infections.
I got the skin around the tip of my little wee wee hacked off.
Our family was neither culturally nor practicing Marine, Jewish, or Muslim. But we were culturally ‘Merican! who are really hung up on masturbation and looking like everyone else.
That’s the only permanent body modification I’ve had done without consent. I did have one done under duress when an angry wisdom tooth had to be popped out of my lower mandible (stupid evolution…) Somehow my dentist Dr. Julie knew I was into dark humor and maybe a touch of pain so when left to lay in the chair waiting for the pre-pop local anesthesia to kick in, she had that scene from Castaway cued up on the ceiling TV, forcing me to watch Tom Hanks pop a tooth out with an ice skate like some twisted Clockwork Orange x BDSM scene.
I’ve also had a ton of facial piercings and some artistic scarifications caused by a modified medical cautery device. So much metal accoutrement my friends called me Cage Face. Hey, don’t laugh- I was a 90’s raver kid. Half that shit is cool again, bee tee dubs. I’d show you a cringepic, but trying to keep this anon and all.
Anywho… what the fuck is a biohack? When does a modification or effort or changing your cognition or behavior become a hack?
Were my above acts of terror against my mom’s sweet little baby’s face biohacks? One could argue they served no purpose aside from fashion so probs not. Well, the three tongue rings definitely had another purpose. Call me, Dr. Julie! What about my vasectomy? Big purpose there. Is that a biohack? Or when I used nicotine patches to help me quit smoking cigarettes? Or the tens of thousands of times I’ve hacked my brain for increased performance at work and exercise using the adenosine antagonist caffeine, or increased sociability and decreased stress using the GABA agonist alcohol? Not to mention all the other psychotropic interventions I’ve enjoyed. But I’ll get to those in a subsequent article.
None of this was “biohacking” regardless of their purpose. Why not? Based on what I see in that world, it’s just because I haven’t marketed it as such! Slap that label on there and sell sell sell. See, in science we expect what we call ‘operational definitions’ where we define all of our variables (which are whatever we are collecting data on) in clear and measurable qualities that are based in the context of the thing and how we are measuring it. For example, ‘blood pressure.’ It’s a definable variable that may not be the entire essence of your cardio health but it’s a measurable one using that little squeezy pressure thing they put on your arm. A clear red flag in pseudoscience and marketing bullshit is the lack of these definable variables and an inability or unwillingness to define them. Like so-called ‘toxins’ in your body. What exactly are they and where the hell are they…? You can also see that ‘blood pressure’ it not the full essence of what the Doc is looking at. It’s only what we call an ‘indicator variable’. This means that it’s just an indicator of general cardio health and not the health itself. Again, pseudoscience and marketing bullshit tends to over focus on these easy measures, treating them like the be-all-and-end-all. This helps make things seems simple and easy. Get your performance scores up, weight down, or whatever. But nothing about health or behavior is that straightforward. The world and we organisms in it are too complicated for simple solutions.
What then do I mean by biohacking? While biohacking has many overlapping definitions, I’m talking mostly about the stuff where people promote some “hack” to your health, performance, or behavior. And by “hack” they generally mean something that’s supposedly super-duper easy, that is once you buy something.
What this newsletter intends to do for the foreseeable future is to lampoon and call out the bullshit around the idea of biohacking that is just trying to capitalize on real and fake body interventions. Since I am a professor of biological psychology armed with peer reviewed databases, a colorful lexicon, and a fuckton of opinions I’ll also be looking to the social and psychological causes for such a large ecosystem of marketable bullshit. So, thank you for coming to my TED Talk and Mazel Tov!
-Your favorite Whackologist.
p.s. don’t forget to subscribe! How else are you going to know when the next newsletter sporadically drops? Everything will be free to you but debunking costs me a fucking fee. I have to get reference books and biohack my neurochemistry with coffee so become a paid subscriber if you can and if you think this is worth it.
p.p.s. Be sure to check out my working list of topics and comment there telling me which ones I should prioritize and optimize to its fullest potential!