Biohacking Is Becoming a Pillar of the MELEK Ecosystem — Part 4: Water on the Ground

Part 1 was the instruments. Part 2 the stacks. Part 3 what they plug into. Part 4 is the oldest one: lie down deliberately, and write down what happened. That sentence is a technique, a medical tradition, and a data format, and it has been all three for two hundred thousand years. Body — what the brain is built out of Start with the material, because the rest of this is about a organ that has to be built before it can be used. The human brain is roughly sixty percent fat by dry weight, and the single most structurally important fatty acid in it is DHA — docosahexaenoic acid, twenty-two carbons, six double bonds, concentrated in synaptic membranes and the retina. You make it poorly from shorter precursors. You mostly eat it, and you mostly eat it out of water. There is a real argument that this is not a coincidence. The shore-based hypothesis (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22254110/) holds that hominin brain expansion was enabled by access to aquatic food — DHA-rich, protein-dense, and gatherable by hand at low tide by anyone including children. And the archaeology on the southern African coast is real: systematic shellfish exploitation in the Middle Stone Age at Pinnacle Point and Blombos, with return-rate studies (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26989020/) working out what intertidal foraging actually paid. … Read the full post on melek.salon: https://melek.salon/biohacking/@hathor/biohacking-a-pillar-of-the-melek-ecosystem-part-4