Month: March 2008

Calorie Learning: First Results

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I made random flavors by mixing 4 randomly-chosen spice mixtures into butter. I spread the butter on 2 pieces of Wonder Bread. I used each mixture more than once — twice in a row (1st mixture), three times in a row (2nd mixture), four times in a row (3rd mixture). Each trial consisted of a flavor-calorie pairing — flavor from the spices, calories from the bread. Each trial also provided a rating, which measured the learning.

Here are the ratings of how good the bread tasted.

flavor-calorie learning results

This was good. 1. The ratings started near 50 (neutral) each time. I’d like to have a large supply of flavors so that I can start fresh each time. These results suggest that randomly mixing 4 spice mixes provides this. The 4 spice mixes were randomly chosen from 10 spice mixes — so there are a lot of possible combinations. 2. The learning per trial was substantial.

More in the category Calorie Learning.

Useless Data and Me

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

Odd Numbers, an excellent blog by Jubin Zelveh at Portfolio.com, recently listed a few findings from the American Time Use Survey, which is in danger of being ended. They included:

– First-born children receive 20 to 30 minutes more quality time each day from parents than second-born children.

– Married couples have very little influence over each other when it comes to how much time each spends on leisure, child care, and chores.

A comment was:

Valuable information?

You can’t be serious. What can possibly be done by anybody about these “observations”?

This seems like a welfare program for economists.

Time use data — from 13 countries, including America — had a huge effect on my research and I suppose my life, since I applied my research to my life. The time use data I’m referring to showed that Americans were awake an hour later than people in the 12 other countries. They also watched TV an hour later. In other words, America was an outlier in two distributions: time of going to sleep, and time of stopping TV watching. I knew about research that showed that exposure to other people controls when we sleep. The time use data suggested that watching TV can substitute for ordinary human contact in the control of when we sleep. I wondered if seeing faces in the morning would improve my sleep; so I tried watching late-night TV early in the morning (via tape). I did that on a Monday morning. On Tuesday morning, I felt exceptionally good. Thus began the self-experimentation behind my pretty-face post. My best work. (The self-experimentation, not the post.)

Thanks to Marginal Revolution.

The New Yorker 2.0

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

I read this excellent article by Michael Lewis in the print version of Portfolio. Then I looked at it online. The online version was much better: It had reader comments.

When will The New Yorker online follow Portfolio‘s lead and allow comments? Comments on fiction should be especially interesting.

I suppose I’m especially sensitive to this issue. Spy had a regular feature called Letters to the Editor of The New Yorker. (At the time, The New Yorker did not publish reader letters.) I wrote two of them, here and here.

Internet Addiction

Seth Roberts2 Comments

… is likely to become a recognized psychiatric disorder via inclusion in the next edition of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) of the American Psychiatric Association. From an editorial about it:

[There are] at least three subtypes: excessive gaming, sexual preoccupations, and e-mail/text messaging. All of the variants share the following four components: 1) excessive use, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives, 2) withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension, and/or depression when the computer is inaccessible, 3) tolerance, including the need for better computer equipment, more software, or more hours of use, and 4) negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and fatigue. . . Some of the most interesting research on Internet addiction has been published in South Korea. After a series of 10 cardiopulmonary-related deaths in Internet cafés and a game-related murder, South Korea considers Internet addiction one of its most serious public health issues . . . . The average South Korean high school student spends about 23 hours each week gaming.

Stop reading this!

Why Are Games Powerful? (Part 3)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

My observations:

1. The first task I used to measure my mental function at frequent intervals (e.g., every 30 minutes) resembled an typical cognitive psych task. It wasn’t fun and I had to push myself to do it.

2. I made another test to do the same thing based on the lessons I drew from bilboquet. It consisted of tracking circles around the screen. It was mildly fun.

3. Trying to improve the second test, I made a third test, which consisted of “tossing” the cursor from one point to another — like throwing darts. In spite of its simplicity, it was/is a lot of fun. Slightly addictive.

My theory of human evolution places great emphasis on hobbies (which at first were varieties of tool making) and job specialization. Hobbies must be fun. So that we will do them — or at least so our Stone Age ancestors would do them — they must provide pleasure. Where does this pleasure come from? The third task suggests a source: We enjoy simple hand-eye tasks with feedback where there is plenty of room for improvement. The Stone-Age hobbyist is trying to get this or that stone or piece of wood to do what he wants. The importance of job specialization — people must be able to enjoy a wide range of jobs, and the first jobs derived from hobbies — implies that the pleasure derived from hobbies must be “free-floating.” It cannot be closely tied to any particular hobby; to encourage a wide range of hobbies (= a wide range of tools) it must be generated by a wide range of hobbies. Because it is free-floating, we should be able to generate it from something quite different from a Stone-Age hobby, such as my third test. The Stone-Age hobbies we’re talking about, ur-technology, involved making things — which involves hand-eye coordination. The third test was more fun than the first two because it was closer to a Stone-Age hobby.

I don’t yet know if the third test is sensitive to flaxseed oil. I have doubts because it seems to involved only a small amount of mental computation per minute of testing. I believe flaxseed oil improves all brain function, but this test may require too much time (e.g., 20 minutes per session) to see the effect clearly. The other tests show the effect and take about 3 minutes per test. One reason balance clearly showed an effect of flaxseed oil is, I think, that it is computationally very intensive. A huge amount of computation goes on at once. A kind of averaging goes on, making systematic differences larger relative to noise.

Part 1. Part 2.

Why Are Games Powerful? (Part 1)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Drug addiction, sure. The first pleasurable drugs were probably discovered hundreds of thousands of years ago, if not much earlier. All cultures use drugs. Drugs physically reach the brain. But video game addiction? Video games are a millisecond old, compared to drugs. How did they get so potent so fast?

Self-experimentation made me ask. Using an ordinary psychological test and a speeded arithmetic task, I discovered a fast-acting effect of flaxseed oil. About two hours after ingestion of 4 tablespoons, my brain worked detectably better. The effect wore off over several hours. To properly study this effect, and exploit it to learn more about what fats we should eat (which has been very hard to figure out), I would have to test myself many times per day for many days. Thousands of tests. It would be a lot easier if the tests were fast, portable, and fun — especially fun. Many computer games have these traits. But they don’t provide the data I need, which is a measure of how well my brain is working, and they take too long.

After talking with Greg Niemeyer, I came up with four properties, shared by many games, that might be why they are fun: 1. Right difficulty level. Neither too easy nor too hard. This is a variable emphasized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Flow. 2. Feedback. You learn how well you are doing. 3. Variety. Not the same thing over and over. 4. Color. I constructed a task with all four features. To my dismay, it wasn’t fun! (So much for the placebo effect.) I had to force myself to do it.

I had no idea what was wrong. Then, as I’ve written, a friend gave me a bilboquet, which led me to think that there were two principles of fun-making I’d left out: 1. Hand-eye coordination. We enjoy tasks that involve this. 2. Completion. We enjoy tasks where something is cleared up or put neatly together.

I used these ideas to construct a new test. It consisted of moving the cursor around the screen from one colored circle to the next. I move the cursor to a circle and click on it. That circle disappears and a new circle appears somewhere else. It’s a bit like shooting one circle after another. Aim, click, aim, click. Each circle is effectively a new trial. The speed at which I moved the cursor to the new circle and click on it is the main measure. There is trial-by-trial feedback: the color of the next circle depends on how quickly I got to the last circle. Here’s a screen shot (cursor not shown):

circle game

I did this on a Thinkpad. I used the trackpoint to move the cursor. This had the pleasant feature that there was no obvious learning curve — I didn’t improve with practice. Presumably because I have years of practice with the trackpoint

Eventually I got around to the big question: Was this test sensitive to the effects of flaxseed oil? I’ve done two series of measurements to answer this. Here are the results from the first series:

1st test of flaxseed oil with circle game

The green line shows when I drank 4 tablespoons of flaxseed oil (without lignans). Here are the results from the second series:

2nd test of flaxseed oil with circle game

Again, the green line shows when I drank 4 tablespoons of flaxseed oil.

Both times the results resembled my previous results. The flaxseed oil appeared to cause a decrease (= improvement), which reached a maximum around 2 hours after ingestion and declined. The results were far from beautiful but because of the similarity to earlier results (here, here, and here) I found them fairly persuasive. They certainly suggest doing more with this test.

Then I made a different game…

My visit to Greg’s class.