Month: February 2007

Two Ways of Thinking About Self-Experimentation

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

Self-experimentation (at least, mine) is an example of what larger category?

My self-experimentation was very practical: I improved my sleep, mood, and health (went from average number of colds/winter to no colds/winter), and lost weight. My omega-3 self-experimentation has improved my balance. From this point of view self-experimentation looks like engineering. > 99.99% of engineering is making things better. The entirely new thing (e.g., the transistor) is very rare. The connection with Eric von Hippel’s work (who finds that product users do a lot of innovative engineering) is pretty clear. I “used” (applied) scientific research — for example, mood research.

Yesterday, however, Tyler Cowen, who knows ethnic restaurants, posted this:

Four chairs, one table, A+ decor, and the best Asian food in D.C. Nothing nearby comes close. Staff = 1, so you must call not only for reservations, but indeed hours in advance with an actual order so he can start making your food. I loved the salmon in red curry sauce, the pad thai, the larb, and some amazing chicken dish with the guy’s last name on it; the drunken noodles are recommended as well. But I am not not not saying the other dishes are worse. 515 Florida Avenue, NW.

I’ll never view the theory of the firm in the same light again. Monitoring doesn’t work, and who needs division of labor anyway? The coolest place in DC right now, by far.

This is an example of what might be called the stunning single case — in this instance, drawn from everyday life. A stunning single case is an observation that casts doubt on a well-respected theory or leads to a new theory.

Another view of self-experimentation is that it is a way to learn from — take advantage of — stunning single cases in everyday life. Which is science (more precisely, theory building), not engineering. For example, one morning I woke up and felt much better than usual. This one event launched several years of self-experimentation that led to a new theory of mood.

The Shangri-La Diet was suggested by a single event (loss of appetite in Paris) but the theory behind the diet, which helped me learn from that event, was already there. (It was inspired by rat experiments.) The Paris event had a small effect on my theory but a big effect on how well I applied the theory. If all applications of theory count as engineering, the post-Paris development of SLD was engineering.

(Incidentally, I didn’t notice the “not not not” in Tyler’s post until the third or fourth reading, an example of repetition blindness.)

Omega-3 and Arithmetic

Seth Roberts5 Comments

After I posted my recent omega-3 results, Tim Lundeen, a Bay Area software developer, commented that his scores on an arithmetic test had improved after he had increased his omega-3 intake because of my results. I invited him to guest-blog about this:

For the last year [Tim wrote] I’ve been been working on feeling better, trying to recover some of the energy and mental acuity that (I like to think) I used to have. As part of my program, I got Dr. Ryuta Kawashima’s book, Train Your Brain. His MRI studies have shown that simple arithmetic problems, done with time pressure, improve overall brain function. His book has 60 problem sets, each with 100 simple arithmetic problems such as 7 x 9 or 13 – 5.

Here are my results from 90 days of tests, including several breaks of 1 to 3 weeks (lower numbers are better):

Tim Lundeen's arithmetic results

I started out at about 110 seconds per problem set, improved to 80-82 seconds per set, and got stuck there. Each time I took a break due to travel or other distractions, I would start up at about 95 seconds and quickly come back down to my 80-82 second range.

Until the last 4 days. As part of my program to feel better, I started taking a DHA supplement. (DHA is found in fish oil. It is an omega-3 fatty acid that is preferred by the brain). I started taking 200 mg/day of DHA about 4 months ago, and didn’t notice any effects, good or bad. So two months ago I increased the dose to 400 mg/day. Again I didn’t notice any effects. After reading about the effects of Seth’s omega-3 supplements, I increased my DHA by 400 mg/day to 800 mg/day. The supplements, plus omega-3 eggs, some flax oil (partially converted in the body to DHA), and some fish and oysters, put me well over the 1g/day recommended level. (When I have fish or oysters I take only 600 mg of DHA instead of 800mg.)

I do the arithmetic test about 8 am every morning. I take the DHA supplement about 9 am. The effect of the 400 mg increase was immediate: The next morning my score dropped to 76-77 seconds, about 5% better than I’ve ever seen on a regular basis. I made the change 5 days ago. The last 4 days are 4 of my 5 all-time best scores. It is fascinating to have another data point connecting brain function with omega-3 supplements.

The supplements I take are from iNutritionals. They are $0.58/200 mg capsule ($35/bottle). They are from algae and are tasteless/odorless. No aftertaste or unpleasant effects. I tried a fish oil supplement a couple of years ago and couldn’t take it because of the fishy taste and aftertaste.

About me: I’m CEO of Web Crossing, Inc. My best-known product is Microsoft Works for the Macintosh, which sold millions of copies.

The Secret History of Innovation

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In the 1960s, Eric von Hippel, now a professor of management at MIT, was a first-year graduate student in psychology at Berkeley. He had been having a hard time getting in touch with his advisor. One day, in Tolman Hall, he saw his advisor go into his office. This is my chance, he thought. He went into his advisor’s office. No one was there! He realized his advisor must be hiding behind his desk. It would have been too embarrassing to confront him, so he left the office (which might now be my office).

He left graduate school, too, became an inventor, and started a company. His company needed a certain type of fan. He went to a fan company and asked them to make it. It can’t be done, they told him. What you are asking for violates the laws of physics. So he went to engineers at Princeton, who designed the fan for him. He went back to the company with blueprints. They agreed to make the fan if he would pay all the new-equipment costs and buy 10,000 of them. To the company’s surprise, other people wanted this fan, too, and it became a popular product. The fan company placed ads in a trade publication with the headline “They said it couldn’t be done.”

Von Hippel studies where innovations — specifically, new products and services — come from. He argues that they come from users far more than manufacturers appreciate. Just as I believe self-experimentation is a more powerful source of biomedical progress than mainstream scientists appreciate. I learned of his work only yesterday (he gave a talk here) but I’m sure it has a lot to teach me.

Jane Jacobs on the Food Industry

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According to Paul Goldberger in the NY Sun,

[Jane Jacobs] regretted the construction of more and bigger buildings, and the enormous power held by the real estate industry, Mr. Goldberger said. “But she was also a realist,” he said. “She was not Utopian, and I think that was the thing that distinguished her from many other intellectual and urban thinkers. She believed that the world we had was actually pretty good, if only we would learn to understand it, appreciate it, and handle it right.”

Exactly. That is what I was saying in my comments on Michael Pollan (here and here). Our food world — which is mainly a processed food world, very little food is unprocessed — is actually pretty good. Some food processing is done according to wrong theories — the wrong theory that fat per se is fattening, for example. The newest food processing gets the most attention because it is still noteworthy (e.g., low-fat foods) but it is new theories that are most likely to be wrong. This is why “processed food” gets a bad rap. Most food processing, which is no longer advertised and we no longer notice because it is so common, is done according to correct theories — the main examples being cooking, refrigeration, freezing, and other forms of germ reduction. The germ theory of disease is correct. The poor health of many Americans reveals plenty of room for better understanding; I think the theory behind the Shangri-La diet is an example of better understanding. That theory suggests new types of food processing, as I explain in the last chapter of the book.

The Hidden Relevance of Experimental Psychology

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I used to teach introductory psychology. As I skimmed introductory psych texts, I could sense the disinterest that almost all the authors of these books had for my field — experimental psychology. Pavlov, memory — that was boring. What did that stuff have to do with everyday life? the authors seemed to be saying.

The Shangri-La Diet was built on thousands of experiments about Pavlovian learning. Empirical generalizations from that data helped me make the mental jump from experiments by Israel Ramirez to a new theory of weight control. A conceptual understanding of Pavlovian learning (what makes an association weak or strong) allowed me to use the new theory to find new ways of losing weight. Suddenly that boring stuff was relevant.

My omega-3 findings (such as this), if they hold up, would do the same thing for two other areas of experimental psychology. The experimental designs I use, such as ABA, are straight from Skinnerian psychology. Although I am now measuring my balance — not part of experimental psychology — my guess is that most of the measurements will eventually be more “mental.” I assume that omega-3s improve my whole brain, not just the balance-related part. Experimental psychologists have spent 100 years developing simple and effective measures of many mental functions; all that measurement work should help us figure out how much omega-3 and omega-6 we should consume. Too little omega-3 and too much omega-6 appear to cause a vast range of health problems, including the most serious. The problem is that it is extremely hard to measure the functioning of our immune system or our circulatory system or most other parts of our body. It is even hard to measure how well our mood-regulating system is working. (Too little omega-3 appears to increase the risk of bipolar disorder.) It is much easier to measure memory.

Experimental psychology can be divided into two parts — human (Part A) and animal (Part B). Part B can be subdivided into B1 (Skinnerian) and B2 (associative learning). Part B2 can be subdivided into B21 (Pavlovian learning) and B22 (instrumental learning). If you know the field you know these are the natural divisions. All my mainstream work has been in B22. I have managed (or hope to manage) to show the relevance of every area of experimental psychology except my own. Curious.

Science in Action: Omega-3 (more data)

Seth Roberts19 Comments

This experiment isn’t finished but these results are too fascinating not to share:

Effect of flaxseed oil on my balance

Each point is a mean of 25 trials. The bars are standard errors.

Every evening around 9-10 pm I drank 2 or 3 tablespoons of flaxseed oil (with my nose clipped shut). Every morning around 7-8 am I measured my balance — how long I could balance on one leg on a small platform. (My balance-ometer.) I drank 2 tablespoons of flaxseed oil for 7 days then switched to 3 tablespoons.

The morning after the first 3-tablespoon dose was magical. From the very first trial I could tell my balance was better. It had always been hard to balance for much longer than 4 seconds. Now, all of a sudden, I could balance for 6 seconds, and even longer. More impressive to me than the conclusion that omega-3 (flaxseed oil is high in omega-3) had improved my brain function is (a) how easy it was to detect the difference between 2 and 3 tablespoons and (b) a fairly high dose (2 tablespoons/day of flaxseed oil contain about 14 g ALA, the shorter-chain omega-3) was less than optimal. Flaxseed oil labels recommend 1-2 Tablespoons/day.

Earlier data.

Blogging and Stone Age Life

Seth Roberts4 Comments

“Blogging, of course, is one of the ultimate forms of self-experimentation,” Tyler Cowen wrote me. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. He explained: “Your blood pressure, how your brain is working, what new ideas you have, how your attention span has changed, how you now read other people’s work differently, who you find yourself liking more (and less), etc. I believe those effects [of blogging] are often quite striking.”

A fascinating idea. As I blogged earlier, James Pennebaker, a professor at UT Austin, has done many studies of the therapeutic effects of keeping a journal. A book on therapeutic journaling gives “examples of how expressive writing can improve the immune system and lung function,” according to its website. Do blogging and keeping a journal supply something important to human health and happiness present in Stone Age life but now usually missing? My self-experimentation about faces suggests Stone Agers had a lot more face-to-face conversations in the morning than most of us. Could they have been more listened to than most of us?

Addendum: Right after I wrote this, I read a post about interviewing people for a book. “They don’t have to be prompted; they’re utterly compelled to tell their stories,” the interviewer wrote. For a term project, one of my students interviewed homeless people. He noticed something similar. Whatever the solution to homelessness, he concluded, it would involve a lot of listening.

Omega-3 Facts of the Day

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1. In the 1960s, Greenland Eskimos ate a diet very high in omega-3s.

2. In the 1960s, Greenland Eskimos had very low rates of psoriasis. The Danish rate of psoriasis was 20 times the Eskimo rate.

3. High omega-3 intake reduces inflammatory intercellular signals.

4. Psoriasis is beginning to be considered an autoimmune disease.

It’s not the same type of fact but on the SLD forums spacehoppa reported her rheumatoid arthritis was in remission, apparently from omega-3s, for the first time in the 18 years since it was diagnosed. Her balance was also better.

What Should “Correlation Does Not Imply Causation” Be Replaced With?

Seth Roberts13 Comments

I shed an invisible tear whenever I hear “correlation does not imply causation” which the otherwise excellent swivel (a website about correlations) emphasizes. Of course, there’s truth to it. It saddens me because:

  • It’s dismissive. It is often used to dismiss data from which something can be learned. The life-saving notion that smoking causes lung cancer was almost entirely built on correlations. For too long, these correlations were dismissed.
  • It’s misleading. In real life, nothing unfailingly implies causation. In my experience, every data set has more than one interpretation. To “imply” causation requires diverse approaches and correlations are often among them.
  • It’s a missed opportunity — namely, an opportunity to make a more nuanced statement about what we can learn from the data.
  • It’s dogmatic (see “Jane Jacobs on Scientific Method”). Some correlations, such as those from “natural experiments,” imply causation much more than others. I suspect it does more harm than good to lump all of them together.

    • Eating Less

    Seth Roberts2 Comments

    Emily Yoffe has a fascinating piece in Slate about going on a “CRON” (calorie-restricted optimal nutrition) plan. She eats 1500 calories/day. I was struck by three things: 1. Roy Wolford, apparently the first person to try something like this for a long time, did not live to be unusually old. He was 79 when he died. This is very helpful self-experimentation: CRON didn’t work, at least for life expectancy. One data point is much better than none. 2. Hunger is a huge problem. 3. In spite of the hunger, Yoffe is continuing the plan after the allotted 2 months have finished. Her sleep is still poor, etc., but she likes being thinner.

    Yoffe mentions the UpDayDownDay regime studied by NIH researcher Mark Mattson. There is now a website for an associated book and diet. (My earlier comments.) A few weeks ago I asked Donald Laub, a Stanford professor of medicine who is doing this regime, if he was still taking olive oil to make the low-calorie days easier to endure. He said he was.