Joyce Cohen on hearing protection beyond earplugs. I often wear noise-cancelling headphones on BART; now I will wear them more often. Does the New York subway damage hearing?
Month: October 2007
Should Mark Twain Have Won a Nobel Prize?
Of course. He didn’t. And dozens of writers you have never heard of, much less read, much less quoted in everyday conversation, have. These wrongs are corrected in an alternative universe described here. The Biology/Medicine Prize has also been fairly ridiculous, although at least Robert Gallo hasn’t gotten one:
Mistakes of commission: 1. Frontal lobotomies. 2. Eric Kandel. If you think he deserved it, read Explorers of the Black Box.
Mistakes of omission: 1. The scientists who discovered that smoking causes lung cancer. 2. The scientists who discovered that folate deficiency causes birth defects.
Several years ago, at a big Thanksgiving dinner in an Oakland loft, I told the woman sitting next to me, a genetic counselor, what a travesty the Biology prizes were. The discovery that smoking causes lung cancer had improved the lives of millions of people, I said; the discovery of so-called oncogenes hadn’t improved the life of even one person. She replied that she was the sister of one of the oncogene discoverers. The next day I learned she complained I had been rude!
Games and Self-Experimentation
On Friday I had tea with Greg Niemeyer, a Berkeley art professor whose medium is games. I wanted to “gamify” the task I have been using to measure brain function. It is a letter-counting task: I see 4 letters and respond as fast as possible how many are A, B, C, or D. This takes about 600 msec — I’ve gotten a lot faster. Each session has 4 blocks of 50 trials and lasts a few minutes. From each session I get an average reaction time. I have been doing experiments to measure the effect of flaxseed oil (high in omega-3) on this task.
The task is quick, portable (requires only a laptop) and provides 200 fine-grained measurements (reaction times) per session. Flaxseed oil, I have found, not only produces long-lasting improvement in brain function (lasting weeks) but also a short-lived improvement that starts an hour or two after ingestion and lasts several hours. I developed the letter-counting task to measure the time course of the short-lived improvement. To measure the time course, I do the task every half-hour or so. The task has also turned out to be good for discovering other everyday events, such as exercise, that affect brain function. So far I have data from about 450 sessions.
It hasn’t been hard. It could be more fun. The more fun, the easier the research and the more likely other people will do it. Games are fun. Can I make the task more fun by making it more like a game? I asked Greg what makes games enjoyable. In rough order of importance (most important first), he mentioned four things:
1. The right amount of difficulty. Too easy we get bored; too difficult we get frustrated. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has made this point.
2. Lots of feedback.
3. Varying problems to solve.
4. Color and sound.
I will try adding these to the letter-counting task. I made a simple RT task with elements of #2 (feedback) and #4 (color & sound). It was much too easy but I am sure that #2 and #4 made it more pleasant.
A London Times article about medical self-experimentation.
Culture Shock! Palo Alto
Please, I want to read Culture Shock! Palo Alto. Michelle Nguyen, who does healthcare software consulting, recently moved to Palo Alto from the East Coast.
On the East Coast, she said, one of the first questions she was asked was about her education. If you have a Ph.D., they take you seriously.
In Palo Alto, among the first questions are (a) where did you go to school? and (b) do you have a blog? It doesn’t help to have a Ph.D. It does help to have gone to Stanford or an Ivy League school. And — most encouragingly — it helps to have a blog. Having a blog, said Michelle, shows that you think and have ideas. Yes, it does.
Michelle’s new blog is “a place for thinking about all things tech, web, and gadget.” Her first entry reviews Microsoft’s HealthVault, which allows you to store your health info online.
Is It Time to Revise Ancient Philosophical Questions?
If I didn’t blog it, I didn’t think it. Nonsense, right? Well, let’s rephrase the ancient question “if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?” Of course this is true:
tree makes sound –> someone hears
where –> indicates causality. X –> Y means X causes Y.
But what about
someone hears –> tree makes sound?
This had always struck me as boring. Who cares? But I am noticing that while this is obvious
I think of something –> I blog about it
this is not so obvious, but true:
I blog about it –> I think of something
Because I blog about my thoughts, I have more of them. I blog, therefore I think.
This post and others about blogging, for example. Posts about the twilight of expertise in areas other than science. I’d be doing omega-3 self-experimentation blog or no blog but blogging about it divides the research into small and more doable parts (making the graphs, for example). It is encouraging to get feedback and have others, such as Tim Lundeen, contribute their observations. Blogging is a kind of tinder. It doesn’t create the initial spark but it amplifies it.
In terms of book and scientific-paper writing, blogging plays the role I give art in the growth of technology: It provides a slope in place of a step. It divides a big task into tiny tasks.
Gary Taubes Interview
From the Los Angeles Times:
What is the evidence that the low-carb Atkins diet is healthy?
First, all you’re doing is not eating foods that none of us ate up until a few hundred or thousand years ago.
That’s a good way to put it. However, I wonder about processing: What about a food eaten thousands of years ago processed in a new way that increases speed of digestion? E.g., applesauce, orange juice. I believe fruit juice that tastes the same each time is very fattening, for example. Taubes says he lost about 12 pounds doing Atkins that he has kept it off. I lost and kept off the same amount of weight by reducing how much my food was processed. Oranges instead of orange juice. The whole interview is a summary of Taubes’ new book Good Calories, Bad Calories.
More Taubes links. Taubes on Larry King Live. Radio interview with Taubes about epidemiology. In this interview, around the 22:00 mark, Taubes makes some very interesting comments about the evidence against trans fats. He says all the evidence against trans fats comes from a data set (the Nurses Health Study) in which trans fat intake is completely confounded with processed-food intake.
Thanks to Dave Lull.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
SLD Side Effects
On the SLD forums, you can read about many positive side effects of drinking oil. (One of them — better sleep — caused me to start studying the effects of omega-3.) Today three people posted some more:
I conclude that a big nutritional deficiency has been corrected.
What fraction of people with (a) dry or cracked skin, (b) asthma, and (c) irritability have been told to consume more fat, I wonder? Zero? In the case of the asthma and irritability, I expect the improvement comes from a fat high in omega-3.
A Modern Microscope
Reading this legal complaint — suing a florist who gave the plaintiffs far less than agreed-upon at a very expensive wedding — I feel I am peering into a kind of microscope. Something far away and very small in the big scheme of things — the plaintiffs’ frustration — is made very clear. It reminds me of The Devil Wears Prada (no art but lots of emotion) but the legal complaint is even more evocative.
Why Do We Like Warm Food?
Yesterday I cooked some chicken. Today I reheated the leftovers. While eating them, I had a gruesome thought: Warm food is more pleasant than food at room temperature. Could the evolutionary reason be that it is better to eat freshly-killed meat (warm) than meat killed yesterday (room temperature)? Or did a preference for warm food evolve because it caused us to prefer cooked food (sterilized) to uncooked food (unsterilized)?
Sure, thermoregulation is involved. We like warm food more when we’re cold; we like cold food more when we’re hot. Michel Cabanac has done brilliant experiments about our changing preference for hot and cold environments. But there is an overall preference for warm food. We like warm food even when we’re not cold.
In spite of thousands of books and articles promoting this or that “natural” diet, it has been incredibly hard to determine what our ancient ancestors ate, the diet that presumably fits us best. One way has been to ask what modern-day hunter-gatherers eat. Not only do their diets vary widely but also they are clearly not typical: They live in meager environments. So that is hopeless, although Weston Price showed that there was a lot to be learned by studying earlier foodways. Price was surprised to find how much those ancient foodways differed from each other yet all produced good health.
The most basic questions about our ancient diet remain unanswered. Did our ancestors eat lots of meat (savannah evolution) or lots of fish (aquatic ape theory) or neither (vegetarian proponents)? In spite of looking, Price never found a group that ate little meat that was in the best health, so I doubt the vegetarians. I suspect ancient peoples ate lots of fish at first and then started eating lots of meat as they spread away from the coasts. My main evidence for the fish is my omega-3 results that imply our brains work best with lots of omega-3. My main evidence for the meat is the huge popularity among boys of video games that contain elements of hunting. It’s hardly great evidence, of course, since the popularity of those games, and of actual hunting, has other plausible explanations.
This is why my omega-3 self-experimentation interests me so much. It is a way to figure out the best diet for our brain. It relies on fast simple cheap easy-to-control experiments that anyone can do, rather than on epidemiology (correlations) or expensive slow hard-to-control clinical trials that often involve unusual people.