Month: April 2007

Where Do Useful Discoveries Come From?

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From Andrew Gelman’s blog:

On page xxi [of Nassim Taleb’s new book The Black Swan], Taleb says how almost no great discovery came from design and planning.

I said something similar to a graduate student last week: Really useful discoveries are almost never the result of trying to do something useful; they are almost always due to accidents. Penicillin, for example. If you notice something by accident, it must be a big effect otherwise you wouldn’t have noticed it. That’s a great place to start: A big effect you didn’t know about.

I’ll have to see what else The Black Swan says about this. It makes self-experimentation look really good: (a) It’s much easier to to do a self-experiment than to do a conventional experiment so there is more chance of accidents; and (b) because we pay close attention to ourselves, it’s much easier to notice the unexpected with self-experimentation than with conventional research. Every useful finding in my long self-experimentation paper — breakfast, morning faces, standing, morning light, sugar water — came from an accidental discovery. In four of the five cases, the accident happened during a self-experiment; I varied something to see if X would change and noticed that Y changed. The exception was sugar water, whose appetite-suppressing effects I noticed while traveling. Hmm. Maybe travel is a type of self-experimentation. Or self-experimentation a type of travel. Certainly they are closely related.

Injury-Causing Falls: The New Scurvy?

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In an article about aging in this week’s New Yorker, Atul Gawande writes:

The single most serious threat she faced was not the lung nodule or the back pain. It was falling. Each year, about three hundred and fifty thousand Americans fall and break a hip. Of those, forty per cent end up in a nursing home, and twenty per cent are never able to walk again. The three primary risk factors for falling are poor balance, taking more than four prescription medications, and muscle weakness. Elderly people without these risk factors have a twelve-per-cent chance of falling in a year. Those with all three risk factors have almost a hundred-per-cent chance.

Could the cause of so much falling be too little omega-3? My omega-3 research suggests that more omega-3 quickly improves balance and that current levels in most places are far below optimal.

Blogger Alert: Paperback SLD Available

Seth Roberts4 Comments

If you have a blog, would like a copy of the paperback edition of The Shangri-La Diet — which is substantially better than the hardback, I like to think — and are willing to review the book on your blog, please contact Katherine Wasilewski (X.Y@ us.penguingroup.com where X = katherine and Y = wasilewski). She has 50 copies available. Please put “SLD review copy” in your subject line.

Addendum: The earlier version of this notice failed to say that these copies are for bloggers who will review it. I will soon post how the paperback is different from the hardback. The main difference is it incorporates lessons learned from forum feedback.

Guest-Blogger Timothy Beneke on Self-Experimentation (part 1 of 2)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

[Timothy Beneke, an Oakland, California writer, was one of the first to try Shangri-La Diet. — Seth]
First, let me say that just as Seth can list a remarkable number of positive effects — related to sleep, mood, weight, balance, and even gum health — from surprising methods of self experimentation, I can do something similar. Here are the two biggest examples:

  • Following Seth’s advice, by getting sunlight in the morning and going to bed earlier — around midnight instead of 3:30 a.m. — my mood has gotten better; I’d estimate a 2 point improvement on a 10 point scale — which is a lot. It led to an awakened passion for music and dancing, better functioning, and to put it mildly, a lot more joy in my life. That baseline improvement has formed the basis for other improvements of mood as well.
  • Using Seth’s weight loss theory, I’ve lost about a third of my body weight — from 280 to 190. I’ve kept 30 pounds for 6 and a half years; 70 for 3 years, and 90 for approaching 2. I went from 280 to 250 eating weaker tasting low glycemic index foods; from 250 to 210 consuming about 350 calories of extra light tasting olive oil a day, and trying to avoid strong tasting high GI foods. Then, applying Seth’s theory, I invented a way to get as many calories as I wanted taste free. I liquified lots of fruits and vegetables in a blender, added rice, bean, nut, soy, non-fat milk, flax, oat, and at times other powders to the liquified fruits and vegies, added water, cooked it in a microwave until it’s moderately hard — not crusty, but not liquidy either. And then take spoonful of the mush, put it in my mouth, and gulp down water and float it down my throat.

    Using this method, I went from 210 to 177 going about 70-80% tasteless for 4 months; in the last 20 months, my weight has oscillated between 177-190, perhaps a little higher — I don’t weigh myself often for strategic reasons.

    • A Professor Complains Loudly

    Seth Roberts2 Comments

    Generalization #1: Everyone likes to be listened to. Being a professor is being paid to be listened to. It’s like being a restaurant reviewer or a professional athlete — your job is doing what others do for fun. Generalization #2: American colleges are run more for the benefit of professors than for the benefit of students, as I have intimated earlier.

    That’s why this complaint is noteworthy:

    This has been an excruciating term, because for the first time I had students who resented having to think, to work, to meet expectations, who seemed to really believe that showing up was all it took . . . As hard as I’ve tried, I haven’t been able to salvage any time for my own research, so I feel as though — in addition to wasting my efforts and care and concern on students who wouldn’t even grasp that I was doing them some favors (yes, I’ll teach extra evening sessions to help you understand the material that was a prerequisite for the course, but, um, yes, you need to do the reading) — I made absolutely no progress toward tenure. . . . This term has taken too much out of me, and right now, the thought of teaching again — ever — makes me want to sob. So here’s my secret: I don’t want to go back. I never want to see these people again — colleagues or students — and I think I made a terrible mistake.

    A comment was “AMEN!”

    I’m sure we’re genetically wired to teach and learn but that doesn’t mean the process can’t go badly wrong. We’re genetically wired to eat, too, and lots of ways people eat are very unhealthy. I have compared formal education to agriculture. Sure, agriculture is more efficient than hunting and gathering but agriculture caused nutrient deficiencies that reduced human health for a very long time. (My weight-control research and omega-3 research suggest it is still doing so.) We barely know how to eat. This complaint suggests we know even less how to teach.

    Does Omega-3 Affect the Brain?

    Seth Roberts3 Comments

    The last three data sets I’ve posted — one from Tim Lundeen, two from me (here and here) — provide evidence that omega-3 affects the brain. The evidence has several good features:

    1. Two people.

    2. Three tasks.

    3. Two ways of varying omega-3.

    4. Strong effects (that is, large t values).

    5. Easy to obtain.

    Does omega-3 affect the brain? This is a good place to start a research project because there is a reasonable chance the answer to the question “does omega-3 affect the brain?” is yes.

    The placebo/expectations explanation — which, based on the lack of effect of placebos in most studies, is implausible to begin with — has trouble with several facts: 1. The initial discovery was a surprise. 2. Tim’s results involved comparison of two plausible doses. 3. Tim had earlier found that dose increases had no effect. 4. Tim’s results had a pattern I have never seen (and thus Tim couldn’t have expected). 5. My results had two different time courses.

    Even more interesting than the idea that how much omega-3 we eat might affect how well our brains work are two more subtle ideas that are also becoming plausible: (a) the average diet (very low in omega-3) is very suboptimal and (b) improvement can be noticed quickly and easily.

    In the latest U.S. government nutrition guidelines, there is no omega-3 requirement.

    Directory of my omega-3 posts.

    Introductions to Jane Jacobs

    Seth Roberts1 Comment

    Nice summaries of her ideas here (shorter) and here (longer).

    Why is an experimental psychologist (me) so interested in Jacobs’ work — which on the face of it has nothing to do with experimental psychology? Four reasons. From big to little:

    1. I enjoy her books and articles. They are very well-written, discuss the stuff of everyday life — what I see when I walk through any city — and have lots of ideas that I hadn’t previously encountered.

    2. Jacobs is essentially an economist. Psychology and economics are very close. Economics is psychology writ large, psychology is economics writ small. I came up with a theory of human evolution based on economics learned from Jacobs.

    3. Jacobs wrote about something that fascinates me — how things begin. My longest paper is about how scientific ideas begin.

    4. Self-experimentation had led me to conclusions outside experimental psychology — for example, conclusions about weight control and sleep. Jacobs, with no Ph.D. in anything, was even more an outsider.

    Science in Action: Omega-3 (flaxseed oil vs. olive oil, continued)

    Seth Roberts3 Comments

    I posted a few days ago about the different effects of flaxseed oil (high in omega-3) and olive oil (low in omega-3) on my balance. There was a big difference. If omega-3 affects one measure of brain function (balance), it should affect many other measures of brain function. The whole brain is made of the same stuff (neurons, etc.).

    Which brain measures are most sensitive to omega-3? The more processing/time the better, I assumed; so I looked for tasks that, like balance, involve continuous processing for most of the test period. This led me to try a paper-and-pencil version of Saul Sternberg’s memory-scanning task. (Sternberg’s use of this procedure is described here.) On each trial I memorized a list of three digits (e.g., 2, 3, 7); then as fast as possible marked each of 100 digits (20 digits/row in 5 rows) according to whether they were in the list or not. I made a line under the digit if it was in the list, through the digit if it was not. I did five trials per day.

    Here is an example of the test materials and my marks:

    example of memory-scan test

    The other side of the page had two more sets of digits.

    Here are the results from the same flaxseed/olive oil experiment I discussed a few days ago:

    flaxseed oil vs. olive oil

    There was a huge difference between the flaxseed oil and olive oil condition: t > 7.

    Curiously the time course is different from the balance results. In the case of balance, when I switched from flaxseed to olive oil my balance slowly got worse. Nothing like that is apparent here. This might reflect a different mechanism or it might be due to the vast difference in how much practice I had had with each task. When this experiment began, I had had far more practice with the balance task than with the memory-scanning task.