Month: May 2011

Highlights of the First Quantified Self Conference

Seth Roberts4 Comments

The First Quantified Self Conference happened last weekend in Mountain View. It resembled a super-duper QS meetup: more talks, more varieties of expression (short talks, long talks, booths, posters, breakout sessions, panels), people from far-flung places, such as Switzerland, and more friends.

Above all, it felt sunny, after a long overcast. Something I’d done most of my life was now enthusiastically being done by many others. Other highlights for me:

Talking with Steve Omohundro, an old friend I hadn’t seen in years. After I saw him on the attendee list, I aimed it at him. After it, he came up and said he really liked it. Mission accomplished :-) . Like so many smart people, he has started to eat paleo.

Meeting John de Souza. I really admire what he has done at Medhelp (“the world’s largest health community”). I like to think that, in the future, the first thing you’ll do when you have a serious health problem will be to contact others who’ve had that problem.

Christine Peterson‘s poster. She measured her sleep with a Zeo for three months. Her poster showed how various things, such as caffeine consumption, correlated with sleep measurements, such as REM time. I believe the most important Zeo measurement is how long you are awake during the night (less is better). Christine’s data showed a strong correlation between her score on Zeo’s Sleep Stealer‘s index (you get points for all sorts of things, such as alcohol consumption, that studies have shown disrupt sleep) and how long she was awake at night. With a high score, she was awake twice as long (about 1.5 hours) as with a low score. This shows the practical value of the Zeo. Assuming that the correlation reflects cause and effect, it’s now clear how she can improve her sleep (reduce her Sleep Stealer score). It also shows that what’s true for other people is true — in the sense of helpful – for her.

The difference between two breakout sessions. Robin Barooah and I ran two breakout sessions about self-experimentation. In the first (many attendees), we talked about 15% of the time. In the second (six attendees), we talked about 5% of the time. In the second, but not the first, it became clear that everyone had something they wanted to talk about. If they could talk about it, they were pleased.

Migraines. I met a woman who used self-experimentation to figure out that her migraine headaches were due to common household chemicals. Doctors had repeatedly told her she had a brain tumor. One doctor had proposed trying twenty-odd medicines one by one until one of them worked.

Speaking advice. Melanie Cornwell, a friend of Gary Wolf’s, gave me advice about my talk. I’m sure her advice will help me in the future.

Mood improvement via sharing. At an excellent mood measurement breakout session run by Margie Morris, I learned how Jon Cousins had tracked his mood for several years and then started to share it with a friend. The sharing had a huge positive effect. He has started a website called Moodscope to help others do this. At the same session Alexandra Carmichael told about sharing mood ratings with someone who, at first, was not an especially good friend but who became her best friend. The sharing improved her mood ratings and curiously their moods become more synchronized.

So I enjoyed the conference on several levels: socially, professionally, and intellectually. Above all, as I said, it was a relief to finally meet others with similar values and goals.

 

Why Does Personal Science Matter?

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

“Why does personal science matter?” is the title of my talk at the First Quantified Self Conference, which I gave two days ago. My answer to that question is personal scientists are more likely to make useful discoveries than professional scientists. Relative to professional scientists, personal scientists have two big disadvantages (less resources, less knowledge) and three big advantages (more time, more freedom, and more desire to be useful). Over the last half-century, the disadvantages have been getting smaller — the personal scientists have been catching up — causing them to overall move ahead of (= have a greater likelihood of making useful discoveries than) professional scientists.

The data behind this answer fall into two groups: (a) the profound stagnation in health care and, by contrast, (b) innovation from personal scientists. A self-serving example is obesity. Mainstream treatments for obesity are ancient. The “eat less, move more” advice was common in the 1950s. Low-fat diets became popular starting in the 1960s. The first popular low-carb diet was introduced in 1864. In contrast, the Shangri-La Diet is based on new ideas. It took far longer to develop (about 15 years) than any professional weight-control researcher would have time for.

I worked harder on this talk than any talk I have ever given. I gave a kind of rough draft a month ago and more recently I practiced it three times. After that I tried to memorize a few sections, such as the beginning and the end. The feedback has been the best I’ve gotten for any talk I’ve given so the whole thing has been great. I feel strongly about the overall message, which I don’t think is obvious, especially to me. It took me a very long time to have a good answer to why I was finding useful stuff (about acne, weight, sleep, and mood, for example) that the experts didn’t know.

 

Snoring and the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Over at the SLD forums, Newbie Numpty has lost about 50 pounds in four months. His starting weight was 320 pounds. Recently he reported:

My wife tells me that I have stopped snoring – this is something I’ve done for years (decades) so it could actually mean that I am now at a lower body fat that I have been for a number of years – no way to tell. But a great thing for sleep quality – I’ve spent money on nose strips and mandibular extension devices to help with this, SLD is again a cheaper fix!

The Romance of Tracking

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I am at the First Quantified Self Conference in Mountain View. The attendees are much more relaxed and cheerful than at the academic conferences I’ve attended, presumably because they chose to come. Some are from Europe. My overall take is that the conference’s theme is the romance of tracking, in the sense that the typical presentation is something like: isn’t it wonderful that I’m measuring this? Or hypothetical. (Of course, the research presented at typical academic conferences is almost never shown to have practical value.) I think this is entirely reasonable. In my experience, it is very hard to learn something clearly useful and takes a long time. For example, I measured my sleep for about 10 years before figuring out how to improve it.

Sean Ahren‘s presentation was one of the best I heard, and illustrated the difficulty. He has Crohn’s Disease. He wondered if hookworms would help. Day by day, he measured how much pain he felt, and for some of the time took hookworms. There was no clear difference between the two periods (with and without hookworms). He learned plenty of useful stuff — how easy/difficult it was to do the measurements, what the data look like, the apparent ineffectiveness of one brand of hookworms – but when contrasted with the goal of learning how to reduce pain from Crohn’s, it doesn’t seem like much. Perhaps the average Crohn’s sufferer would say it’s great you’re doing this but think how does this help me? I think his observations lasted about 8 months. Perhaps if he continues for 6 years, by then the amount of learning will be larger and more tangible. Overall it’s a good example of the way scientific progress and job don’t mix well. When you have a job, you make tangible progress quickly: you fill someone’s order, for example. They wanted something, you gave it to them. Tangible. Whereas trying to clearly improve one’s Crohn’s Disease might take ten years. Too long if your motivation is connected to making a living. Too long for professional scientists.

At a breakout session on sleep experiments, I learned that someone had great success wearing blue-blocking glasses (which look orange) after 9 pm. Something I want to try. I’ve heard about these glasses before but these results were especially impressive. The glasses quickly reduced how long it took him to fall asleep. Someone else was told he had sleep apnea. But when his acid reflux got better, so did his sleep.

You can read about many talks, including mine, in great detail at Ethan Zuckerman’s blog.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments

“Stuff of Seth”: Faces/Mood and Anticipatory Waking

Seth Roberts5 Comments

After trying the Shangri-La Diet, Jazi yechezkel zilber found that other aspects of my research (“stuff of seth”) were relevant to his life:

Years ago, I was part of a community where people would be up early praying etc. For an hour and then eat together. I noticed that going there in the morning was good for me, but was puzzled by the effect. I hypothesized it was the social effect per se.

At some point, I stopped this (what the hell do I have with religion and prayer?) and noticed that I got depressed. I remember that the depression came with a delay. It was funny to see it, as I could not make sense of it. But this I remember well. The depressive effect was not the same day as not going to the prayers but tomorrow (or later?).

I was not having early awakening then. Afterwards, I started having periodically early awakening, I cannot remember the frequency, but it was there and annoying. Now when going to the community, I had two hours between awakening and eating. Whereas at home I would eat immediately after waking. Another thing that puzzled me was how I came to wake up naturally *before* my scheduled wake-up time. I used to wake up much later. With food anticipation it makes perfect sense. I woke up two hours before conditioned feeding.

The Amish have extremely low rates of depression — and eat communal breakfasts. The story about early awakening reminds me of a student who told me when you told us this in class I didn’t believe it but lately I started waking up too early and was puzzled until I realized I had changed my breakfast.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Health Care Stagnation: Sleep

Seth Roberts8 Comments

The January 2011 issue of Bottom Line/Health has an article called “Dirty Drugs” about popular drugs with bad side effects. It is based on an interview with an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard named James Rudolph. It contains the following:

Insomnia. Most OTC drugs taken for insomnia, including the allergy medicine Benadryl and sleep aid Sominex, contain diphenhydramine. It can cause constipation, difficulty concentrating, urinary retention, and trouble with eye focus — and stays active in the body for 12 to 18 hours, which can cause next-day grogginess.

My advice. Avoid taking diphenhydramine for insomnia.

Better. Practice good sleep habits. Examples: Go to bed at a reasonable hour, and maintain the same schedule every night. Exercise regularly but not within two hours of bedtime — it will make falling asleep more difficult. Take a warm bath before bed to help you relax.

I agree, insomnia drugs are bad news. But the “better” advice could be a hundred years old.

Effect of one-legged standing on sleep. Six signs of the profound stagnation in health care.

Morning Faces Therapy For Bipolar Disorder: A Story (Part 1: Background)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In the mid-1990s I discovered that seeing faces in the morning raised my mood the next day. If I saw faces Monday morning, I felt better on Tuesday — not Monday. This discovery and many other facts suggest that we have an internal oscillator that controls our mood — in particular, how happy we are, how eager we are to do things, and how irritable we are. For this oscillator to work properly, we must see faces in the morning and avoid faces and fluorescent light at night.

In rich countries, almost everyone gets nothing resembling the optimum input. One of the problems this may create is bipolar disorder. A week ago I posted how a friend of mine used my faces/mood discovery to control his bipolar disorder. After that post, a man I’ll call Rex wrote to me thanking me — that post had inspired him to try to control his own bipolar disorder that way. Before knowing anything about whether he would be successful, I decided it would be good to follow and record what happens. Either way — successful or not — it should be revealing.

I am going to post his story in several parts. The first few parts are background.

My first full-blown bipolar episode was at 29 years of age. (I am now 37.)

I was a civil engineer working for the government in an Eastern State. I had self-diagnosed myself as having Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), also known as the morning blues. The symptoms are mild to severe depression, lethargy, apathy and weight gain. A form of treatment for SAD is the light box. Mine is an Apollo GoLite Box. As soon as I read about this device, I was excited. It came via UPS. I plugged it in during my lunch break soon after it arrived. By the end of the work day my mind was in overdrive. I was a total motor mouth, with racing racing thoughts and unusual activities such as inventing things, writing songs and books for the first time. Friends knew I was totally not myself. I went without sleep for days at a time. I began drinking heavily and not going to work. My mind could not rest. Alcohol or extreme exercise were the only medicine. I stopped eating, lost about 30 pounds in 30 days. I became paranoid and shut everyone out of my life including my friends, family, and co-workers. I was buying hundreds if books and dozens of bottles of supplements. Overall I was turning into a different person with new interests.

Finally my parents stepped in because of my isolation and irresponsible behavior. This led to a three week outpatient clinic stay in Illinois. Right away I was diagnosed as Bipolar I. I was vaguely familiar with it, but was quite stunned I had it. On the other hand, it was a huge relief to have a name to this craziness I was feeling. I was put on four medications and went through extensive therapy, including talk therapy, group therapy, family talks, and letter writing. It was a wonderful experience that helped me to deal with painful past experiences. It had an excellent scheduled program with early-morning group therapy and prayer. [Note the morning exposure to faces.] This was a Christian-based psychiatric clinic. Then daily small classes on mental health issues, then one-on-one discussions with a licensed therapist and plenty of other group activities and meals on the town. Lots of love, support and scheduled work.

That was an ideal setting. After three weeks I came home. I slowly went back to those sad, frustrated days. The drugs seem to stop working. My moods began turning sad or mad, for no particular reason. [Note that this downturn happened soon after exposure to morning faces — via group therapy — stopped.] The frustrations of an unfulfilled, boring and dead-end career grew worse. Maybe the worst was a lonely life. Silence in the mornings and only late-night television before bed.

The disappointments of my life were bad, but the bipolar manifestations of the highs and lows seemed to magnify all emotions to the nth degree. My medications were replaced by the new ones, without expired patents. Perhaps I have been prescribed ten different anti-depressants overall, sometimes in combinations, but I only found relief in narcotics such as prescription xanax or klonopin.

They truly numbed the pain, but led to regrettable behavior. I took to cutting myself as a sort of punishment for the unwarranted guilt and self-absorption (for feeling depressed and angry) and to ease the pains with the endorphin releasing that was given by cutting with a razor blade. It seems insane now, but at the time it was the quickest release. These cuttings not only led to my first surgery, but led me back into a different psychiatric hospital in Vanderbilt at age 31. I had a tendon transfer surgery from my the top of my wrist to closer to my thumb, where I had severed my tendon. It was very embarrassing to my family and myself. I came clean to my employer and became eligible for FMLA (The Federal Medical Leave Act).

During these last couple of years, my manias have been much rarer and weaker. I faithfully take my medication daily. I still experience mild depression, but to a lessor extent, a more numbing feeling. I still feel sad but not the weepy, nostalgia I felt overwhelmed with previously.

To be continued.