Author: Seth Roberts

Walking Meeting Update

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In a recent post, I described how much easier it was to meet with students while walking than while sitting. The content of the meetings stayed the same. I met with them after my Academic Writing class to help them with their writing.

I asked my students what they thought of these meetings. They had three complaints:

1. I walked too fast.

2. It wasn’t so easy to avoid bicycles and listen to me at the same time.

3. It was cold.

I told them that I found the meetings less tiring. They did not notice this.

I considered walking inside the teaching building but it turned out to be too dark. Instead, we walked outside the building in a nearly-deserted alley (solving Complaint #2). I walked more slowly (colving Complaint #1). I couldn’t do anything about Complaint #3.

The students could choose the length of the meetings. Last week all five of them chose 15 minutes. After 1 hour and 15 minutes of walking meetings, I felt entirely refreshed. As if I had done no work at all.

 

Saturated Fat and Heart Attacks

Seth Roberts26 Comments

After I discovered that butter made me faster at arithmetic, I started eating half a stick (66 g) of butter per day. After a talk about it, a cardiologist in the audience said I was killing myself. I said that the evidence that butter improved my brain function was much clearer than the evidence that butter causes heart disease. The cardiologist couldn’t debate this; he seemed to have no idea of the evidence.

Shortly before I discovered the butter/arithmetic connection, I had a heart scan (a tomographic x-ray) from which is computed an Agaston score, a measure of calcification of your blood vessels. The Agaston score is a good predictor of whether you will have a heart attack. The higher your score, the greater the probability. My score put me close to the median for my age. A year later — after eating lots of butter every day during that year — I got a second scan. Most people get about 25% worse each year. My second scan showed regression (= improvement). It was 40% better (less) than expected (a 25% increase). A big increase in butter consumption was the only aspect of my diet that I consciously changed between Scan 1 and Scan 2.

The improvement I observed, however surprising, was consistent with a 2004 study that measured narrowing of the arteries as a function of diet. About 200 women were studied for three years. There were three main findings. 1. The more saturated fat, the less narrowing. Women in the highest quartile of saturated fat intake didn’t have, on average, any narrowing. 2. The more polyunsaturated fat, the more narrowing. 3. The more carbohydrate, the more narrowing. Of all the nutrients examined, only saturated fat clearly reduced narrowing. Exactly the opposite of what we’ve been told.

As this article explains, the original idea that fat causes heart disease came from Ancel Keys, who omitted most of the available data from his data set. When all the data were considered, there was no connection between fat intake and heart disease. There has never been convincing evidence that saturated fat causes heart disease, but somehow this hasn’t stopped the vast majority of doctors and nutrition experts from repeating what they’ve been told.

Assorted Links

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Walking Meetings Much Better than Seated Meetings

Seth Roberts7 Comments

In an interview about his new book The JFK Assassination Diary, Edward Jay Epstein was asked how he, a Cornell undergraduate, managed to talk to the people who did the research behind the Warren Commission Report. “It was a different age,” he said. “People actually communicated by sitting across a desk from one another and talking.” When I heard this, I was amused. I had just discovered that it was much better to meet with students walking than seated. What Epstein considered the good old-fashioned way (seated meetings) was to me the crazy new-fangled way.

As I’ve blogged, this semester I am teaching a class about academic writing. I am trying to apply my no grading/no lecturing method that worked well last year in a much different class (Frontiers of Psychology). In the writing class, my plan was/is to meet with students one-on-one right after class, in the same room. They choose the meeting length. During the meeting they show me what they’ve written and I make comments. During the next class they give a brief talk (e.g., 10 minutes) in which they tell the rest of the students what I told them. The course is much easier to teach than usual: no lecture, no grading, no written comments. Yet the students get as much one-on-one feedback as they want. I think spoken (face to face) comments are much better than written ones because they allow the recipient to ask questions.

Right now we covering how to write a personal statement for graduate school applications. The first set of after-class meetings was a week ago. The class has 12 students. Five signed up for meetings, 10-15 minutes each, an hour total. At the end of the hour I was tired. It was hard to concentrate that long. I went home and rested.

The class meets once/week. I thought of my discovery it was much easier to study Chinese while walking than while sitting (more here). While sitting I got exhausted after 10 minutes. While walking (on a treadmill), I could easily study 40 minutes. Jeremy Howard discovered the same thing. He put it like this:

[On a treadmill] I can [study Chinese] for an hour. Normally if I’m just sitting down I can just do it 20 minutes. . . . And at the end of that hour I was ready to do something else. Whereas at the end of 20 minutes, normally I’d be totally ready for a rest.

This gave me the idea of meeting with my students while walking. I’ve done walking interviews many times — for example, with job candidates and fellowship applicants. I didn’t like sitting for long periods of time and I hoped that walking would reduce their anxiety. It seemed to work.

During the next class, I announced the change: Bring a printed copy of your work (while walking I could not read a computer screen). I said they didn’t need a printed copy today, just in the future. After that class, I had four meetings. In three cases, the student did not have a printed copy so I started with the one student who did. I was pleasantly surprised that the other three students had made printed copies of their work by the time of their meeting so I did all four meetings walking.

What a difference! The meetings felt like no work at all. At the end of them, I felt refreshed. Yet their details (who, when, what, how long, etc.) were very close to what had left me tired a week earlier.

Maybe in the future offices and meeting rooms will have side by side treadmills and you project what you want to look at together on the wall. Another advocate of walking meetings is Nilofer Merchant. She says she listens better, mobile phones are less distracting, and the mood is better.

Humans evolved to specialize and trade. Specialized knowledge needed to be passed down, so we must, under the right circumstances, enjoy teaching, just as a healthy diet must taste good.

 

 

 

Mo Ibrahim: How I Became a Teacher

Seth Roberts2 Comments

I met Mo Ibrahim, a high school teacher in New York, because of his Behind the Approval Matrix blog, which I admired. I interviewed him about his I Got Uggs! blog. Recently he has become interested in finding out if my ideas about teaching can help him teach better. This is the first in a series of posts by him about that.

I went to college at Chicago State University, a commuter school in Chicago. I started in the late 1980s. I considered a career as a teacher when I was there, but changed my mind after I visited the education department and learned about the student teaching requirement, which seemed like a drag. Later I visited the premed office. Mostly I studied biology and graduated with a degree in Independent Studies. By graduation, I had been accepted at University of Illinois School of Medicine, in Chicago.

I started there in 1995. The summer before I enrolled, I had been verbally promised a whopping three scholarships. One was from my State Representative, the other two from a non-profit organization that helps African-Americans get into medical school. I did get the scholarship from the State of Illinois, which covered my tuition. However, I never got the other scholarships, which meant that my living expenses weren’t covered. Between the time of the verbal promise and my enrollment, the organization had started a policy of only giving scholarships to students in the second and later years of medical school. Too many African-American students dropped out in the first year; the foundation reasoned it was wasting its money.

At the medical school’s financial aid office, I was informed that my only option was to take out a loan. This was something I had sworn I would never do. I’m Muslim; interest-based loans are against Islamic law. Despite being told that it was virtually impossible to be a medical student and work, I got a job during the graveyard shift at a seedy hotel on the North Side. I avoided drinking coffee to stay awake because I didn’t want to go to the bathroom and compete with the rats for a stall. Without coffee, I fell asleep. I was only there a week. A tenant who owed the hotel over $1,000 moved out while I was asleep. I was immediately fired. Three months later, I withdrew from medical school. I couldn’t afford it.

My first real job after medical school was in the medical records office at St. Francis Hospital. A co-worker was taking a computer repair class at a community center and suggested that I join him. I didn’t take the class, but I purchased a used computer, some computer repair books, and studied for the A+ Certified Computer Repair Technician exam. I passed the exam on the first attempt and got a job making five times what I was making at the hospital. I did computer repair and network engineering for five years. Unfortunately, the work seemed to be drying up. I started at $100/hour but after five years was making $9/hour. Toward the end of the five years, my wife and I took a vacation in New York City. In the subway, I noticed an advertisement for the New York City Teaching Fellows (NYCTF) Program. I liked the idea of being a teacher because of the job stability and the idea of giving back to the minority community. NYCTF automatically puts you in an “underprivileged” school. The deadline for applying to the program was quickly approaching and I filled in the online application as soon as I returned to Chicago.

I was invited back to New York for an interview. After I taught a sample lesson and did group and one-on-one interviews, I was accepted into the 2004 NYCTF program. That summer I enrolled in a Master’s degree program in in Education at the City College of New York. I also got a job teaching at an underprivileged high school near Columbus Circle. Ten years later, I am still trying to determine the best way to teach my students.

Our Need for Morning Faces: Does Isolation Cause Delusions?

Seth Roberts7 Comments

In 1995, I discovered that seeing faces in the morning raised my mood the next day. For example, seeing faces Monday morning improved my mood on Tuesday (but not Monday). Study of the effect suggested we have a face-sensitive oscillator that controls mood and sleep. The oscillator needs morning-face exposure to work properly — faces “push” the oscillator as you would push a swing. Long ago, this oscillator synchronized the mood and sleep of people who lived together. The synchronization helped them cooperate. It is much easier to work with a happy person than an unhappy person and, of course, much easier to work with someone awake than someone asleep.

My results suggested you need to see morning faces on the order of 30 minutes to get a big effect. The faces need to be similar to what you’d see in a conversation. Looking at people on the subway doesn’t count. Nowadays, as far as I can tell, hardly anyone gets the right input. In extreme cases, this causes depression, poor sleep, bipolar disorder, and anxiety disorders. What else might it cause?

A friend, whom I’ll call Ben, recently told me something that sheds light on this. Three years ago he was a graduate student at Columbia. He lived in a basement apartment, with no sunlight. It was between semesters. He had no regular contact with anyone. He was depressed. Then things got worse: He became delusional. He started thinking that every conversation he heard was about him. “Everything I heard or saw was directed at me,” he said. There was a boiler in the room next to his apartment. He believed it was a nuclear reactor.

Although Ben was isolated in terms of seeing other people, he had non-visual contact with people online. He told them about his strange thoughts. Some thought he had a problem, some didn’t. Some thought he sounded mystical. He felt physical discomfort — a “pulling inside”. His heart seemed to be beating differently. He called his parents. They were so alarmed that they contacted someone they knew in New York. Eventually an ambulance arrived at Ben’s apartment and took him to a mental hospital. At the hospital, he told them he thought he was dead. After a day or so at the hospital, on a locked ward, he felt much better. However, he wasn’t allowed to leave for two weeks because the doctors didn’t know what was wrong with him.

After leaving the hospital he took a break from graduate school and went to stay with his parents. He saw a psychiatrist and was prescribed Risperdal (an antipsychotic) and Depakote (for mania).

The pattern is okay during semester (when he sees others on campus), sick between semesters (when he doesn’t see others), okay in locked ward (when he sees others). Bipolar disorder sometimes includes delusions during mania, so the association of disordered internal rhythms and delusions is not new. But why should disordered internal rhythms cause delusions — in this case, paranoid ones? One possibility is that it is beneficial to be paranoid in the middle of the night. If someone wakes you up, you will wake up thinking they tried to wake you up, which will make you especially mad. The madder you are, the less likely they will do it again. I argued that the irritability associated with depression is beneficial in the middle of the night for just this reason: It protects sleep. If someone wakes you up you will get mad at them. This explanation predicts a circadian rhythm in paranoia, increasing in the evening. However, I’m not sure this explains why he thought a boiler in the next room was a nuclear reactor.

 

 

 

Harry Shearer Used My Joke

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I haven’t seen This is Spinal Tap but I am a big fan of Harry Shearer’s Le Show, a weekly podcast. For the last few months, one segment has been about the misuse of so: People use it to start sentences that aren’t about consequences (“So we were standing there minding our own business. . . .”). I wrote Shearer to say he should change the name from Le Show to Le So. Not long after that, he ended the so segment with “here on Le So“.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments
  • Probiotics reduce frequency of colds, Cochrane review finds
  • A dentist says prophylactic removal of wisdom teeth is a bad idea. “Ten million third molars (wisdom teeth) are extracted from approximately 5 million people in the United States each year at an annual cost of over $3 billion. . . . More than 11000 people suffer permanent paresthesia—numbness of the lip, tongue, and cheek—as a consequence of nerve injury during the surgery. At least two thirds of these extractions, associated costs, and injuries are unnecessary, constituting a silent epidemic of iatrogenic injury.”
  • Duke University trustees defend endowment secrecy in funny ways. “David Rubenstein ’70, the Trustee chair, [says] Duke can keep a student’s grades secret — available only to a few administrators — and the principle is the same with Duke’s money.”
  • Self-assembling robots

Thanks to Allan Jackson and Bob Levinson.

Omega-3 and Omega-6 in Common Foods and My Consumption

Seth Roberts13 Comments

Here is a graph (source) of the omega-3 and omega-6 content of common foods. Although walnuts are relatively high in omega-3, they are much higher in omega-6. This may be why eating them reduced the performance of my lab assistants on a brain test.

When I’m in China, I eat 60 g/day of ground flaxseed. According to this graph, this provides 1.2 g/day omega-3, far more than I would get from any ordinary diet. For example, eating lots of fish would provide much less. I chose this amount based on balance and brain speed results. Flaxseed is hard to get in Beijing. Surely I am the biggest consumer in the China. I am pretty sure I am the only person ever to have optimized my intake. The best amount turned out to be surprisingly high. ”We recommend one to two tablespoons [per day],” says a website that sells flaxseed. High consumption of omega-3 should protect me against bad effects of omega-6. For example, when I eat peanuts (high in omega-6), my brain test scores don’t change.

Experts say flaxseed is a poor source of omega-3 because it provides short-chain omega-3 whereas the brain needs long-chain omega-3. My results — plenty of brain benefit from flaxseed — suggest this is wrong. The experiments that measured short-chain-to-long-chain conversion did not take account of the effect of experience on enzyme production. If you eat more of a certain food, your body will produce more of the enzymes that digest it. The subjects in the conversion experiments may have had little experience. If your long-chain omega-3 supply is limited by what enzymes can produce, you will get a steadier supply of long-chain omega-3 from enzymatic production than you will from eating the same amount all at once. For this reason dietary short-chain omega-3 could easily be a better source of long-chain omega-3 than dietary long-chain omega-3 itself.

My Theory of Human Evolution: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Seth Roberts11 Comments

From Entertainment Weekly:

EW: Are you religious?

Jodie Foster: No. I’m an atheist. But I absolutely love religions and the rituals.

Perhaps everyone enjoys rituals. (Even scientists.) It’s a curious enjoyment because rituals are arbitrary and without useful result. No other species has rituals. One sign of the pleasure we derive from rituals is obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD takes many forms; one is excessive dependence on rituals, such as a need to do certain things, such as counting, tapping, or aligning, so often that it seriously interferes with being productive. The BBC program Am I Normal? did an excellent episode on OCD (no longer available). If you think of OCD (some forms) as addiction to rituals, the capacity of rituals to provide pleasure — or at least reduce anxiety — is clear.

Why do we enjoy rituals? I’ve already written about Christmas. Rituals and ceremonies, like Christmas and other gift-giving holidays, are a growth medium for fine craftsmanship. They encourage desire for fancy things – Christmas cards, special food, music, art, the special tools used in Japanese tea ceremonies. (Maybe the word fancy was invented to describe just these things, it fits so well.) They help support the highly-skilled artists and artisans who are advancing the state of their art. You can read my whole theory of human evolution here.