Hello and welcome! My name is Jay and I’m the main author and creator of The Human Operating Manual. A monstrously ambitious project that will probably keep getting updated until either I or the internet meets its untimely demise.

The Human Operating Manual was originally intended as a tool for my own usage. The drive to create it started when I discovered that no matter how hard I tried, I could never find an all encompassing human health book that had the objectivity of a textbook and a list of actionable tasks that the average person could carry out. At least without first buying the author’s expensive supplements or becoming indoctrinated into their cult, so that belief in their ideas would overpower the desire for truth.

My answer to this issue was to study neuroscience and to read as many books about human health as possible. Unfortunately, the neuroscience degree part of my journey made me realize that our brains have extremely limited capacity for retaining information. A crucial function of the human brain is to forget things that are no longer considered useful, in order to improve energy efficiency and to optimize memory function. Not entirely pleased with this revelation, I figured that the best way to overcome this limitation was to summarize any useful information that I came across so that I could return to it later.  

Hence my decision to build a website that isn’t bound to perceived perfection, but is constantly striving to get better. That way, when the facts change, the website can reflect that without having to backtrack on the printed words of a book.  

Our current goals for the website are to publish a bunch of easy-to-read “meta-analyses”, alongside documented experimentation, and cheat sheets, to make every day living a whole lot easier.  

Right now the project is already well beyond the capabilities of one person, so we’ve begun the hunt to collaborate with new authors, experts within each field/discipline, and reviewers to ensure we don’t screw up too bad. In saying that, we would also love any useful feedback or information you may have to offer. No matter how confident we get, sometimes all it takes is a single piece of revolutionary information to blow our whole worldview to pieces.