My theory of human evolution (paper, talk) is that our brains changed in several ways to build healthy economies — in particular, to increase specialization, trade, and technical know-how. For example, collectors and connoisseurs pay more for finely-made things than the rest of us; the extra payment helps skilled craftsmen advance their art. Collectors and connoisseurs come to value small improvements, I believe, through side-by-side comparisons. Obviously side-by-side comparisons help us notice small improvements; it’s the predicted hedonic change that’s interesting.
After listening to Jordin Sparks sing “Woman in Love” on American Idol last night, I wondered what other singers had done with it. YouTube was happy to help.
Jordin Sparks
Barbra Streisand
Liz McClarnon
Lili Ivanova
Young Divas
Leticia
Shiela Rodriguez
Regine Velasquez
After you listen to several of these performances, I predict you will respond more strongly — more fully? — to future performances. The better ones will bring you more pleasure, the worse ones more pain. You will be willing to pay more for the better ones. Saul Sternberg has also been interested in the effect of side-by-side musical comparisons.
Science is a form of systematic innovation, right? A particular way of learning more about the world. The design firm IDEO has a systematic way of coming up with new designs, illustrated in this hospital visit. My guess is that IDEO and science don’t have much in common in spite of the surface similarity. The product design done by IDEO is a form of engineering. Science and engineering are like two phases in the lives of ants: random search (science) and path following (engineering).
When I co-taught a course about office design, we visited IDEO (in Palo Alto). Most of their work was contract (design a new X for Client Y) but they also had a small group of toy designers who came up with new toys on spec. Their mail room was lush, with magazines, food, and a TV. Its purpose, said the CEO, was to cause people to interact. It was the big shady tree of an African village.
At the Shangri-La Diet forums, several people are trying a new way to lose weight: Drinking a flavored calorie-free drink between and with meals. The first few weeks of experience suggest it works at least short-term. Here’s what Jenn does:
I am drinking about 1 1/2 to 2 litres of splenda sweetened kool-aid or iced tea/juice mix in water. You know those little packets that you add to a 2 cup water bottle. I have them with meals and then sip on them all day in-between. Sometimes I actually drink the whole bottle in a 1/2 hour (cause it tastes so good). I also add some olives and an occasional pickle to some of my meals and then if I want a little snack, I have a few of them between meals. This seems to really work too. . . . I never had that kind of AS [appetite suppression] or success with oils or SW.
Jenn has lost 6 pounds in a few weeks.
Why might this work (assuming my theory of weight control is true)? Flavor signals must linger in the brain because it takes several minutes (15 or more?) to get a some idea of how many calories a food contains. To forget the flavor in a few seconds wouldn’t work. If you eat a piece of ham and follow it with a sip of raspberry lemonade, the lemonade may reduce (erase) the memory of the ham flavor. This should have two effects: (a) reduce how much the ham flavor raises your set point and (b) reduce how much the ham flavor is associated with calories. You can think of the lemonade soaking up the associative energy that the ham calories produce. If the lemonade is also drunk (a lot) between meals, any lemonade-calorie association will disappear.
The interesting prediction: To get the effect, you must drink the calorie-free flavored drink with meals and between meals.
My long self-experimentation paper (Example 2) describes how I discovered that seeing faces in the morning improves my mood the next day. At the time I used TV faces. I tried different-sized TVs and found that the TV that produced the most life-size faces also produced the biggest effect. I also found that distance mattered: A conversational distance produced better results than a larger distance. The faces need to be looking at the camera. Clearly the TV faces were replacements for what our Stone-Age ancestors saw when they chatted with their neighbors soon after getting up. The faces/mood effect, I believe, is produced by a mechanism whose function was to synchronize the sleep and mood of people living together. It is hard to work with someone who is (a) asleep or (b) in a bad mood.
I needed 30-60 minutes of faces to get a big easy-to-notice effect. At first I used a variety of talk shows, then concentrated on two C-SPAN shows, Booknotes and Washington Journal. However, Booknotes is only once/week and Washington Journal is pretty boring. Soon after I wrote to C-SPAN suggesting they re-air old Booknotes, they started doing just that. Encore Booknotes was a regular feature of Book TV. But I still had to watch a lot of Washington Journal and I wasn’t as interested in politics as Brian Lamb.
Then I realized I could look at my own face in a mirror. This had the advantage that the face was exactly life-size. I listened to books or interviews or other stuff at the same time. Lately I have been listening to Authors@Google talks.
Today I realized I could also use the vlogs on YouTube, the ones where people speak right at the camera. I’ve known about them — who doesn’t, I suppose — for a long time but there have always been two problem: 1. Boring. 2. Too small. Today I came across a long series done by LucyinLA (a struggling actress named Laura Segura) and discovered that some of them were not boring, such as this one. There was still the problem that her face is a little too small. Then I realized I can increase the size of anything on my screen by increasing the display resolution (go to the Display icon on Control Panel).
I still need to find enough non-boring vlogs but that shouldn’t be too hard. Whether I will switch to YouTube faces I don’t know but you, Dear Reader, can now see for yourself without any special equipment. You should look at the faces soon after you wake up in the morning.
Addendum: Nansen’s comment about using a cheap mirror shows that I think of a $5 mirror as “special equipment” and an internet-connected computer as not special. It’s true, I do. As for the best time to see faces, all I know is it’s quite early. I figured it out for myself by trial and error.
we can’t think of a single person who, since the invention of the washing machine, practices “laundry for fun.”
Look no further: I do. And not just laundry: For my tenth high school reunion I listed my hobbies as “doing the dishes.” Yes, I enjoy doing the dishes. Long ago I hired someone to clean my apartment (including laundry) not because it was dirty but because I was spending too much time cleaning it. More recently, because of the growing success of The Shangri-La Diet (which Dubner and Levitt have everything to do with), I decided I could go back to cleaning a bit more so I hired someone to clean my apartment but not do my laundry.
Before watching faces in the morning I suppose I was as messy as a typical guy. The mood elevation produced by faces suddenly changed me: I discovered I enjoyed cleaning, and I started to spend lots of time (about an hour/day) doing it. It would be harsh to say that messiness is a sign of depression but I think that a very messy room or office — not to be confused with extreme hoarding — is a indication of the sort of problem that when it becomes extreme we call depression.
Several weeks ago I compared flaxseed oil (high in omega-3) and olive oil (low in omega-3). I’ve posted results from a balance task and a memory-scanning task. I also measured what is called digit span — the number of digits you can remember perfectly after one presentation. It is a widely-used measure of short-term memory. In my test, the digits were shown one by one for 1 second each on my computer screen. A few seconds after the last one, I had to write them down in order. If I was 100% correct the next trial had one more digit than the last. If any of my answers were wrong, the next trial had one fewer digits than the last. The test continued until there had been six “reversals” — right answers after one or more wrong answers, or wrong answers after one or more right answers. The measure of performance is the mean of the six reversal points. It estimates the list length at which I have a 50% chance of being correct.
Here are the results:
Performance was better with flaxseed than olive oil (t = 2.5, one-tailed p = 0.01). The difference — the omega-3 effect, you might say — was quite a bit weaker than what I saw with balance and memory scanning. My guess is that the relative insensitivity of this task comes from two features: 1. Binary measures. Each trial is measured right or wrong; whereas with the memory-scanning and balance task, each trial yielded a duration (many-valued). 2. Slow. Each trial takes about 30 seconds; it takes about 10 minutes to get six reversals.
The paperback edition of The Shangri-La Diet was published last week. The feedback I’d gotten, mainly from the forums, suggested many changes, so I was glad to be able to revise it. The main revisions are:
1. A foreword about events since hardback publication.
2. More emphasis on flavorless oil, less emphasis on unflavored sugar water.
3. New case studies (to match the emphasis on oil).
4. Data from the Tracking Data forum about how fast people lose.
5. New sidebars about omega-3, combining SLD with other diets, and how to drink oil.
6. Nose-clipping as an important new way of doing the diet.
My thanks to all SLD forum contributors and others who provided feedback.
1. Now (a UK celebrity magazine) ran a 2-page article titled “Goodbye Atkins, Hello Shangri-La”. It said celebrities have been sighted with rapeseed oil and normal-sized portions of food.
2. Yesterday the SLD forums got more than 13,000 hits, the most since November.
1. “I don’t teach passing, I teach teamwork,” says a Professor of Ball Handling at an elite university.
2. The more prestigious the school, the taller its students and professors.
3. The Bell Curve is about the advantages of being tall. Taller people have better life outcomes, the authors discover via analysis of a large data set. Curiously, the authors — both tall — conclude that tall people should be favored even more.
4. The better students say that at college they learned how to learn. They mean they learned how to learn to play a sport.
5. At “research” universities the professors spend more time playing basketball than teaching.
6. A Princeton, New Jersey company develops and sells a fast standardized way to measure basketball ability.
7. Sports Illustrated publishes an essay titled “What Every Educated Person Should Know.”
8. By graduation, students know very well how good at basketball they are but know almost nothing about their ability in other areas.
A Palo Alto resident found SLD so effective (lost 10 pounds in 1.5 months) that he told others about it. “Everyone I speak to about the diet laughs at me or just shakes their head,” he wrote. (Which is good.) A tenant of his, a Stanford medical student, asked his nutrition professor how such a crazy diet could possibly work. The professor, Dr. Clyde Wilson, replied:
Fats and sugars reduce hunger when consumed in moderate amounts. Fructose stimulates less of an insulin response than glucose, putting you at less risk of subsequent hunger. Flavored foods result in a greater caloric consumption. Unflavored fructose and olive oil would therefore reduce hunger during a subsequent meal. Any small healthy snack will provide the same result. A small healthy snack would be, for example, a whole grain cracker with some peanut butter and half an apple.
The interesting thing about SLD is not that the oil or sugar water reduces hunger — most food does that — but that it causes easy weight loss. This is what needs explaining. Why does X calories of sugar water cause you to reduce future consumption by more than X calories? This paragraph doesn’t explain this.
Since fructose, sucrose, and unflavored oils all have the same effect, it cannot be due to a special property of fructose.
As for the prediction that a small healthy snack will have the same effect, that has not been my experience. I’m pretty sure that weight loss would not be such a big problem if one could lose substantial weight (such as 10 pounds in 1.5 months) by eating as many small healthy snacks as you want.
