Alcohol, vasopressin & monogamy | Tim Ferriss
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Vasopressin, a pituitary hormone that acts to promote the retention of water by the kidneys and increase blood pressure, is also a social bonding hormone in males — similar to oxytocin in females. Tim recounts his experiences taking vasopressin in college to boost his short term memory. He ponders whether alcohol might counteract vasopressin and be considered an anti-smart drug. In this clip, Tim Ferriss and Dr. Rhonda Patrick discuss vasopressin and its effects on pair bonding in both animals and humans.
- Rhonda: Great. I kind of want to start off with the self-experimentation.
- Tim: Sure.
- Rhonda: We were actually just having this interesting conversation that we've stopped so that we can continue it live and that has to do with a little bit about the night you just had and what you're doing to recover from that night. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
- Tim: So I had, like a lot of people on Saturday nights, a little more booze than intended or anticipated. We were talking about mineral excretion. I was talking about some of my pregame tactics, whether that's consuming carbohydrates. I tend to drink the most booze on cheat days for that reason because I'm retaining whatever it is, I guess 4 grams of water per gram of carbohydrates, something like that. So it helps to counteract the effects of inhibition of vasopressin because vasopressin is an anti-diuretic hormone, which means it prevents you from peeing or minimizes peeing. So it's used in children who bed wet past a certain age. I think they use desmopressin. I became, jumping around a little bit, but I became interested in vasopressin first because when I was in college, I was reading up on the smart drug literature at the time and it was purported for being very effective for boosting short-term memory. So you would take hits in each nostril, study whatever you had to study and then quickly scurry off to the test before it evaporated.
- Rhonda: Right.
- Tim: But then you had some very interesting comments on vasopressin.
- Rhonda: Yes.
- Tim: So I did use vasopressin for a period of time, found the headaches and side effects ultimately not worth it for me the way that I was using it. But it is something that's kind of stuck with me when someone says, "Oh my god. I was at the bar and then all of a sudden I time traveled and I was at Denny's." I'm like, "Aha, it might have something to do with vasopressin because you just gave yourself sort of a reverse smart drug."
- Rhonda: Very interesting. Yeah. I'm familiar with vasopressin because it's also a hormone. It's a social hormone. And it's particularly important. It's kind of like the counter, or not the counter, it's the male version of oxytocin. So in females, oxytocin is this notorious love hormone. When you produce oxytocin, you feel good, you bond, social bonding, things like that. Well, in males, vasopressin serves a similar role to oxytocin in females. Vasopressin is associated with pair bonding and specifically with monogamy. So they've done studies in prairie voles where they actually genetically engineer them to not be able to respond to vasopressin. So they like engineer their vasopressin receptor to be non-responsive. And these prairie voles, which are monogamous become polygamous like that. So it's very interesting. Also, they've done human studies where they've looked at gene polymorphisms which are just variations in the sequence of DNA of a gene that changes the function. We all have various polymorphisms. You're familiar with that. So there's a particular variety of this polymorphism in the vasopressin receptors that males have that make them less responsive to vasopressin. These males are more likely to be either divorced or never been married, whereas males that don't have this polymorphism are more likely to be happily married.
- Tim: Surprise, surprise.
- Rhonda: So yeah, alcohol, there may be actually a mechanism through vasopressin that leads to polygamy or being more promiscuous, I guess.
A change in one nucleotide DNA sequence in a gene that may or may not alter the function of the gene. SNPs, commonly called "snips," can affect phenotype such as hair and eye color, but they can also affect a person's disease risk, absorption and metabolism of nutrients, and much more. SNPs differ from mutations in terms of their frequency within a population: SNPs are detectable in >1 percent of the population, while mutations are detectable in <1 percent.
A pituitary hormone that acts to promote the retention of water by the kidneys and increase blood pressure.
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