In November I learned about benefits of cold showers. So I tried them. I took cold showers that lasted about 5 minutes. I liked the most obvious effect (less sensitivity to cold).

Maybe a bigger “dose” would produce a bigger effect. Maybe the mood improvement cold showers were said to cause would be clearer. So I increased the “dose” in two ways: (a) more water flow (I stopped holes in the shower head) and (b) lower water temperature. After a week or so with the stronger dose, I saw I was gaining weight. It could be the cold showers, I thought. Fat acts as insulation and I couldn’t think of another plausible explanation. So I went from cold showers back to warm showers (48 degrees C.) — this time with greater water flow. My warm showers were 5-10 minutes long.

I began to lose weight, suggesting that the cold water did cause weight gain. More surprising was that my arithmetic speed (time to do simple arithmetic, such as 7-3, 8*4) began to decrease. Here is a graph of the results.

Before the cold showers started my arithmetic speed was roughly constant. The mild cold showers had no clear effect. I had noticed the increase during the strong cold shower phase but hadn’t paid it much attention — I suppose because it seemed implausible. These results, however, are excellent evidence for cause and effect: cold showers made me slower, warm showers made me faster. The arithmetic tests weren’t done soon after the shower. There seems to be some sort of brain-speed adjustment that takes place over ten days or more.

I’ve never heard of anything like this, whereas I’ve heard many times is that cold showers are good. There is one complication, which is that December 3rd I stopped eating walnuts. I believe walnuts are bad for the brain, in contrast to the usual belief. I came to believe that because of results from two students of mine who had tried eating them. Improvement due to no longer eating walnuts would explain why line fitted to the strong cold data starts below where the weak cold line ends. The final days of the strong warm phase may be the same as the weak warm phase when adjusted for the walnut difference.

What explains this? Maybe the weight change. When gaining weight, maybe fat was taken from the blood to be deposited in fat cells, thus lowering the fat content of the blood reaching the brain and thus degrading brain performance. Losing weight, the opposite happens. Eventually the weight loss will stop; this explanation predicts when that happens the warm-water effect will go away.

In a previous post I wondered why I had gotten faster at arithmetic over the previous six months. These data suggest that warm showers may be at least part of the reason. In Berkeley I take baths, not showers.

The website I Paid A Bribe is a great great idea. It is enormously promising as a way of reducing corruption. India and China, the two biggest countries in the world, both have immense corruption problems.

I Paid A Bribe is so promising because it takes small bits of anger (mental energy) and aggregates them. Anger causes people to take the time necessary to complain. The aggregated results can be used to: 1. Focus correction. Anti-corruption efforts can start with the biggest offenders. 2. Embarrass offenders. 3. Help measure the effect of anti-corruption measures. Without long term records, those initiatives have great difficulty measuring effectiveness.

It is hard for most people to grasp the corruption of medical science, which connects I Paid a Bribe to what I usually write about. The corruption isn’t exactly on the surface: Only medical school professors take something close to bribes. (The pervasiveness of the problem is shown by the fact that all med schools let them do this or don’t enforce rules against it) The corruption consists of this: Some lines of research are more profitable (e.g., more grant money, more prestige) than other lines of research. That is inevitable. What isn’t inevitable is that this is allowed to obscure honest investigation of which lines of research are the most beneficial. The most visible sign of the corruption is that the Nobel Prize in Medicine is usually given for research that hasn’t helped anyone. The 2009 award for telomere research was an egregious example. Even in China and India, you can find government officials who have helped people.

The anger or fear felt by someone asked to pay a bribe is mental energy. In the case of medical science, the corresponding mental energy is much greater — it is the suffering caused by a condition for which medical science has no cure or a poor cure. Depression, acne, autism, poor sleep, diabetes, obesity . . . the daily suffering caused by these and other health problems is staggering. I believe that self-experimentation is a way of doing something useful with that suffering. When aggregated via the internet, it is a way around the failure of mainstream medicine to deal with these problems.

Via Aleks Jakulin.