Author: Seth Roberts

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 13)

Seth Roberts15 Comments

When I talk about how standing on one leg has helped me sleep better, the inevitable question is how much standing? After I became sure the standing was making a difference, I started to record the durations. I always stood on one leg until it became a little hard to continue. As my legs have become stronger, this has taken more time, as this graph shows:

During the early days on this graph, I didn’t include time-of-day information. I usually stood on one leg three or four times per day. More recently, I have included time-of-day info and now stand on one leg only twice most days. In all of the cases shown on the graph, I was pulling my other leg back behind me at the same time, stretching the muscles. (If I don’t stretch the other leg, I can stand one-legged much longer.) In the very beginning, I only stood one-legged 2-3 minutes.

I’m sleeping better than any other period in my adult life. My sleep was pretty good before this period but the difference is still huge. Not only am I sleeping better, I suspect I’m also sleeping less (as happened when I improved my sleep by standing a lot).

I suppose one-legged standing counts as “exercise” — that source of so many claimed benefits (longevity, weight loss, less heart disease, etc.). I read today that exercise is supposed to improve your brain. But the differences between what I am doing and what is usually recommended are as large as the difference between the Shangri-La Diet and other diets:

1. Conventional exercise: Requires expanse (for walking) or, usually, special equipment (e.g., gym). Takes one hour or more, when you count changing clothes and showering, not to mention the drive to and from the gym. One-legged standing: Can do almost anywhere. Takes less than 30 minutes, so far.

2. Conventional exercise: Requires discipline if you want a decent workout in a reasonable amount of time. One-legged standing: Almost no pain involved. I can watch TV or read something at the same time.

3. Conventional exercise: Supposed to be aerobic if you want the main benefits. One-legged standing: The opposite of aerobic.

3. Conventional exercise: Some benefits accrue slowly, such as weight loss. Others are hard or impossible to detect, such as longer life. Runners’ high goes away, in my experience. One-legged standing: Benefit clear the next morning. Because I am strengthening muscles I use all the time (when I walk or stand) I notice my vastly increased leg strength all the time.

4. Conventional exercise: You want to get stronger. One-legged standing: You don’t want to get too strong or else it may take too long to get the effect.

5. Conventional exercise: Often difficult to measure increased strength. Hard to measure improvement in swimming, racquetball, or aerobics classes, for example. One-legged standing: Easy to measure increased strength.

6. Conventional exercise: Helped me fall asleep faster, but didn’t solve the problem of too-light sleep. One-legged standing: Utterly solves the problem of too-light sleep.

Could the benefits of conventional exercise have anything to do with the fact that it vaguely resembles one-legged standing?

Directory.

First Meeting of The Quantified Self Meetup Group

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Last night the first meeting of The Quantified Self Meetup Group took place at Kevin Kelly’s house in Pacifica. Here are my notes:

Five-Word Introductions
Kevin Kelly (KK) Magazine junkie science groupie host
Melanie Swan
Lisa Betts-LaCroix home schooling
Joe Betts-LaCroix now future earth people children
Nathan Myers software wind minerals
Lee Corbin software hobbies math chess history
David Kirby machine learning applications
Tim Ferriss athletic performance language acquisition cognition
Hor machine learning life extension
Graham Bullock product health effects
Dan Brown sleep monitoring for better rest
Paul Lindow film binaural language
Jerry Legert ontology unix physics
Peter Mortonsen design irrationality
David Duncan writer radio experimental man
Alex Bangs personal health
Alexandra Carmichael open-source health research
Daniel Reda open-source health research
Gary Wolf (GW) reporter utopian
Vivian Dissler new conceptions of health
Moor unwilling rebel leader
Rajiv Mehta tools for living
Seth Roberts sleep mood self-experimentation flaxseed
Ka-Ping Yee visualization democracy lambda graphics usability
Stephanie life-streaming ubiquitous ambient
Chris social constitution of self online
Steve complex systems accumulating evidence reflexively
Neal futurism python family jazz piano
Emil Gilliam

Kevin Kelly introduction
Like to keep broadening it, before we get to the idea of saying we’re not interested in this. Using data & measurement for self-knowledge. Revolving around numbers and measurement. And measuring ourselves. Here we’re interested in science upon yourself.

Stuff people are interested in
Actionable measurements
Mood
Self-measurements of health
Gadgets
Service providers
Using geocoding for self-analysis
How have you incorporated measurements into your life?
Where do you do your research? Where do you get your ideas?
When you have a lot of data, how do you extract something you can see from it?
What data people would be willing to share with others? What private?
Measuring the effects of measuring
Resources, other groups
Spheres beyond health – such as time use, learning, how quickly you acquire new items
How to measure learning
Aesthetics of self-documentation
What do to with the data that we gather
Can you learn too much about yourself?
Environmental data, brain scans
How quantified health can be used to collaborate w/ traditional medicine
The greater good of all this – what potential for doing good?

Stuff people are willing to talk about
I’ve tracked my time for 3 years – how to analyze
Things I’ve measured
What professional athletes do in this domain
Learning, how quickly you learn
Design principles for measuring oneself
Genes, brains, & body – the Experimental Man
Geocoding

Ka-Ping Yee: Time Tracking
Tracked use of his time. Felt like problem not making good use of time. By collecting data, would help. How much sleep. Where is my time disappearing? Wrote script that keeps little window open in screen. Types in whatever he’s doing. E.g., “at QS meeting”. Logged with time. [Question from audience: what have you learned?] not a lot. Hope to learn. Can measure how much sleep I’ve been getting. Turns out to be getting more sleep than I thought.

Roberts: this data useful if you change something. You can notice unexpected changes.
Ferriss: MeTimer: tracks web browser use
RescueTime: indicates active focus, & local applications. Fascinating. Making me more effective. Doing the right things.
Xobni: identifying email hotspots. Top 10 contacts.
???: made pie graph of where we’re spending our time & is it compatible with what we say we’re about? Do we spend our time on our kids, business, health?

Clickable menu to help track time.
Yahoo widget stopwatch. Tracking work hours.
Surprises: so much unstructured time, more time spent with kid bigger than expected. Agast to realize one project was taking so much time. I’m really doing a lot of things. Decided to focus my life more. Ultimately the most satisfying thing to me. Now I’m working on that company. Me figuring out where I’m putting my creative energy.

The challenge of assigning tags to things. Too much or too little detail. Just write in your own words.

David Kirby: time tracking mood, sent message at random times to cell phone, got a lot more honesty about activity. Extremely difficult to do in social environment. What are you doing, do you feel productive? What is the sampling period? And what is the associated honesty of the data? I became very afraid of wasting time when each message would come it.

Tracking leads to optimization. As soon as she gets people to track their diet, it massively improves. Helps with eating disorders. Nigerian lawmakers tracked by journalist. Just the fact of publishing it greatly improved voting records.

Tim Ferriss: Athletes
Recorded every resistance training workout since age 15. Now 31. Diet & so forth. Go back to notebooks to see how I looked in this or that photo. Related to performance enhancement. Athletes are v. interested in relative vs absolute measurements. Body fat percentage – many different methods. All have problems. Real benefit is in measuring progress – difference up or down. I measure VO2 max. BMI is waste of time. VO2max tends not to change much. Only tested twice. Very similar in spite of different regimens. Cyclists measure to see performance maximum – can I become professional? Lots of blood testing. Every 2 or 3 tests, plus saliva-basted testing. $500-$1000 per time. Complete metabolic panel. Cortisol, estradial. Done 1st thing in morning. [Someone else: 120 things I track.] Most athletes use a laundry list of drugs. They cycle off to compete. They look at ratios. E.g., free testosterone to epitestosterone. Steriods are like antibiotics. Many of them. Betablockers: used by Chinese archer, concert pianists, entire orchestras. Subject in expts related to body heat. When does your body shut down? How to best dissipate heat? Wanted the data, would have cost $100K. Found that my ability to dissipate heat is severey reduced. Surface areas of lungs compared to surface area of skin. Brain shut down at unusually low temperature. Heat stroke susceptible. Recovery time measure of fitness. Sets, Reps, rest periods. Within rest periods you can track several things. Return to basal body temperature, heart rate, muscle tonus (galvanic skin response). Don’t believe in general intelligence or general fitness. I measure sex hormones, metabolic panels, IGF-1, indirect measures of growth hormone, free testosterone, T3 T4 TSH insulin (wide diurnal variance). How much insulin is produced, how much remains after meal. Athletes only measure something if they can act on the data they gather. I don’t want 24/7 measurement – too much data. I take a lot of experimental supplements. I like watch the response of my autonomous nervous system. Ephedrine hydrochloride. Widely studied. Yohimbine HCL: proposed as safer alternative to ephedrine. Not a selective agonist. I wanted to measure my blood pressure very closely.

You can order blood tests online & go to local places that will draw your blood & send you the results. Don’t need doctor’s prescription. Look up symptoms for whatever would require that type of testing.

Any statistical tools that will help you calibrate measurements against each other?

Templates for analyzing small data sets: couldn’t find.

Statistics packages, such as R. Google Website Optimizer. Set up experiments for website visitors. Test different pictures on your page. Ramsey 2-color theory. The known Ramsey numbers. If you know there has to be a mutual group of 5 people that all know each other, you have to have at least 43 people in the room.

Suggests data tutorial for the self-experimenter. At future meeting.
If there were a easy to use tool set, if you wanted to run experiments, finding things that were harder to find or predictions. Good tool honeypot for data. Norbert Weiner talks about that.

RescueTime can take aggregate data of 30000 people, reducing data entry from 100 items to 2 items. Hope there will be communities that will follow protocol.

Gary Wolf: Learning/Knowing
Did long story for Wired about managing 5000-item dataset. Keeps track of what you’ve learned & haven’t learned. Makes prediction about what you need to practice something to remember forever. How deeply rooted it is. Street you’ve lived on when little kid. I’m measuring 2700 index cards. Spanish vocabulary. Modal sentences for grammar learning. Maintaining at 90% remembering. What 1000 words do you need to know? Super Memo. Pieter Wozniak, Polish computer scientist. When you do your tests every day, you get 85%-90% on every test. It shows you a set of cards. If you want to learn the most, maximum efficiency is 40% efficiency. Unpleasant. 5-point rating system. Implemented physically in the 1950s. Liter System. Pimsler implements spaced repetition in background way. Index cards a metaphor – all online. You want to learn constantly for short periods of time over long time spans. What’s the lifetime limit on what you can learn? Cabbies in London: larger hippocampus. There are some glitches: learning some things can interfere with knowing other things. Cards in Super Memo that often come up. You can figure out why you’re not learning them. Everyone knows that poor sleep impares learning. How much will your performance decrease? You need a lot of sleep data & lot of learning data. We’re on edge of being able to do that.

David Duncan: One of brain scan tests for my book has to do with memory. As we age, we don’t forget things, we have inability to filter out. Series of faces & landscapes. Then forget faces or landscapes. Can you filter out what you’re not supposed to remember? Compare young and old. Older people can remember as well as young people but can’t filter as well. I came out right in the middle.

I’ve been doing tai-chi for a number of years. Doing for 5 min/day better than 1 weekend/month.

How do you measure learning? Not just via standardized tests. Cognitive & batteries of tests that people take. Tell you what your brain age is. Column for Portfolio. Cognitive drug research. Did better than I expected, didn’t want to take again. On website. On wine, my timing was way off. Check comment stream, people who got younger thought it was a great test. Issues with speed of server.

Rajiv Mehta: Ways This Helps
Helping people take care of their health. Individual perspective. You have some regimen in mind: chicken soup or whatever. What gets in the way of people ttaking care of their health? We forget a lot, life gets busy. Keeping detailed records impossible for vast majority. Made prototype device. Gives reminders for thigns that are scheduled. Makes easy to record symptoms moods, etc. anything you think is important health. User tracking exercise. ZumeLife.com. Tracking her carbs, glucose, medications, symptoms, shortness of breath. Speak into it. Transcription service. Things that don’t lend themselves to charts get put into notebooks. USB connected to your PC. Every day or so. NY Time article about 42-year-old person w/ diabetes. Complicated case. Lots of drugs. [can you use any category?] Right now. 5 categories: meds, biometrics, exercise (name, duration), food (carbs, points), health-status questions (how much coughing, how did you feel). Most been using: 7 months. One person had sclera derma. Intense pain, cold hands. She started measuring her pain levels, realized she was having 3 or 4 intense episodes per week. With her printout, she & her doctor said: you have a problem. Over 6 week period she went from 3 or 4 intense to    1 mild episode/week. About $40-50/month. Can’t ask people to buy a special phone. I’m not waiting for United Health Care to say it’s interesting. Institutions don’t want to deal with smart phones, they want a special device. We’ve found everyone experiments. If anybody is going to figure out what works for her, it’s her. Doctors benefit from charts. The experimenter is her. Our doctors are at best good advisors. We cannot abdicate responsibility.

Peter Mortensen: Motivating Running
If you want to help people who are not enthusiasts. Need proud & constant presence. Nike Plus Sports Band. Wear all the time I’m awake. Not just a string around my finger. I can see how much running I’ve doine in last 3 months. Also have my last run. More successful than Nike Ipod. You should hide the change you want to make. Also USB key, syncs/ with NikePlus website. Graphs, etc. Even cooler it charges battery when plugged in. I only hear I’m interested I’m wearing a nice watch, never that I’m self-tracking. Chip on shoe, Bluetooth. Impact accelerometer. It’s an attractive watch, I’m proud to wear it. Aesthetic thing. An ugly watch would not have the same effect.

Raj: If you’re sick it means something bad. If there’s going to be a device they have to be proud of it. Before Ms. L got our device she was trying to use her Treo. It got in the way. It’s rude to answer your phone if you’re having a conversation. People would get upset. This device: It’s Ms. L taking care of herself.

Nice scales for tracking weight. Cable going off somewhere. Body composition Bluetooth scale. Tonita.

Seth Roberts: Sleep
Early self-experimentation about acne. Found out stuff doctor didn’t know: really useful. Maybe would help with sleep problem: Waking up too early in the morning. Tried many things for 10 years, everything failed. All ideas were wrong. Finally got a new idea due to analyzing data, noticing less sleep when lost weight, told class, student told him about another way to eat less, required changing breakfast. Change in breakfast caused early awakening to get worse. This was the first thing that had made a difference. Led to discovery that any breakfast hurts; supported by rat research. Later found that standing a lot improved sleep. Had to stand at least 8 hr to get effect; no effect of 6 hr of standing. Great sleep when stood 10 hr but really hard to do. More recently discovered that standing on one leg to exhaustion helps. Do twice in one day. Same effect, roughly, as many hours of standing but only takes a few minutes. Now working out the dose/response function.

KK: looking for people who want to blog on the blog itself. If you’d rather just share a comment or idea just mail it to us (GW & KK).

GW: lot of dry timber waiting for a spark here. Value of this meeting, can something bigger grow out of it?

Bodymedia.com making their gadget available to retail. Measures body temperature, galvanic skin response. $399 plus $20/month. 2. Body computing comfernece at UCSF Oct 25. internal 3. 23&me has dropped their price. Version 2. 1/3rd price.

Send stuff to KK & GW to post on blog.

More Gary Wolf’s account.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 12)

Seth Roberts11 Comments

Over the last week I’ve found that standing on one foot till it becomes difficult just twice during the day is enough to produce much better sleep that night. Maybe the effect is larger with three times but not enough to make much difference.

It now takes 8-10 minutes of one-leg standing (with the other leg stretched back behind me) before it gets difficult. When I started, it took 2-3 minutes.

Directory.

A Hidden Benefit of Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Today I met a Unix consultant named Jerry Lugert who has done a lot of self-experimentation. He made a point I hadn’t heard before: When you start to measure something carefully, you become a lot more motivated to improve it. In practice, this means when you start to measure something at home every day or often in contrast to having it measured every six months when you see a doctor. One of his examples was blood pressure. He became a lot more motivated to lower his blood pressure when he measured it himself. Another example involved using chemstrips to measure his urine. He used them to measure both his hydration and the amount of protein in his blood.

The usual idea is that knowledge is power. Sure, if you measure your blood pressure every day you can better control it than if you measure it once per six months. That’s obvious. This is different: knowledge is motivation. If you measure your blood pressure every day you’ll want to control it more than if you measure it every six months. That’s not obvious at all and way more important.

This idea is so close to my idea about connoisseurship (which Jerry of course hadn’t heard of) I wonder if the mechanism is the same. I believe connoisseurship arises from side-by-side comparisons of very similar items: close-in-time comparisons of two orange marmalades, for example. Or two vanilla ice creams. Or two cheddar cheeses. Or two merlots. Etc. It’s obvious that if you make these close comparisons you’ll become better at discrimination — e.g., better at discriminating varieties of vanilla ice cream. What interests me is the hedonic change: making these comparisons causes you to care more about the dimension. You get more pleasure from the good stuff and less pleasure from the bad stuff. Connoisseurs are basically people who will pay more for this or that than the rest of us. (When income or wealth is equated.) Not because they’re snobs or showing off — because they derive more pleasure from it. This is part of a theory of human evolution.

Rudy Guiliani, Sarah Palin and Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Sometimes I’m surprised how much there is to blog about. At the Republican National Convention, Rudy Guiliani bashed community organizers:

[Obama] worked as a community organizer. [Said with a disparaging emphasis on “community organizer”] . . . Barack Obama has never led anything, nothing, nada.

So did Palin:

In this world of threats and dangers, it’s not just a community and it doesn’t just need an organizer.

The interesting thing about community organizing is that (a) anybody can do it (no need to be elected) and (b) you can organize about anything. This wide net, this all-inclusiveness, makes it a way that new ideas can become powerful. Self-experimentation is very similar: (a) anyone can do it and (b) you can study anything. You don’t need anyone’s approval, the research can be very cheap, the ideas you test can be conventional or wacky. Only if you believe that the already-powerful know everything should you disparage activities that help new knowledge come to light.

Too Much Flaxseed Oil

Seth Roberts12 Comments

I recently got the following email:

I’d like to advise caution about the use of excessive omega-3s, such as flax and fish oil. I discovered that too much of these oils can induce an omega-6 deficiency, since both n3 and n6 oils compete for the same enzymes in the biosynthesis pathways of prostaglandin precursors. In susceptible people, of which I am one, this leads to insomnia, psoriatic lesions, and when combined with food avoidance (e.g. Atkins-like diets, etc.), can lead to loss of immunological tolerance to food antigens. It turns out that n6 arachidonic acid is critical for the development and maintenance of oral tolerance (Newberry, 1999).

I asked her for details. She replied:

I started taking 2 tablespoons of flax oil daily with meals, and this was my exclusive added fat source for several months; I also got fat from meat and dairy. This was back in 2001. The insomnia happened almost immediately, and the psoriasis and “cellophane-like” skin developed over several weeks. I quit the flax oil after 3 months, but this was around the same time that I learned of Atkins and the Weston Price foundation- so, I cut back on carbohydrates and added fish oil and “whole foods” to my diet. It’s not clear what exactly happened around that time, but I started to descend into chronic illness: chronic flu-like symptoms, blood-sugar fluctuations, disordered sleep schedule, arthritis in my wrists and toes, rapid weight gain, etc. (And I should mention that before that I was an invincible young woman grad student, an outdoorsy athlete, was proud to never get a cold, and only mildly overweight.) I dealt with it as best as I could, since I was also trying to do my PhD thesis in engineering. I also quit taking any dietary supplements, because nothing seemed to help and I would often get weird side-effects from simple things like calcium supplements. On the advice of a physician in 2004, I added more carbohydrate back to the diet (re-introduced wheat carbs) and got hit with some frightening digestive complaints (cramps, vomiting, IBS symptoms.) It looked a lot like celiac disease, but all of the tests were negative. I didn’t have the proper genetic markers for celiac disease, either, but a strict gluten-free and dairy free diet helped nonetheless.

The GI symptoms were much better by 2005 after going gluten and dairy free, but I was still not well. What gave me the “aha moment” was taking a random dose of fish oil during that time, and having an immediate relapse in symptoms. Then I started researching arachidonic acid (the “bad” n6), with the question of “well, what is it good for, then?” That’s when I found the Newberry paper, and it dawned on me that I had inadvertently created an n6 deficiency by overdoing it on flax/fish oil. I also became quite an expert on essential fatty acid metabolism. What I had likely done was impair my ability to tolerate the introduction of new foods. I knew that my problem wasn’t gluten per se, because I would develop symptoms soon after adding exotic foods (coconut milk, pork, tapioca flour, etc.) to replace the eliminated things like milk and wheat flour.

Here are the three things I did to get well:

1) After discovering the Newberry paper, I decided to focus on acquiring pre-made sources of arachidonic acid in the diet. I found that the best source of pre-formed arachidonic acid is egg yolks and poultry, and I looked to worldwide intakes of AA to gauge my dose. It turns out that the French get a good daily dose of AA (190mg for women), and I settled on 2 egg yolks per day (65mg each) plus incidental sources. This is where I really turned the corner on feeling well.

2) I avoided known problem foods temporarily. I consulted with Jonathan Brostoff on food intolerances, and he said that the immune system requires about 6 months to “forget” its hypersensitivity to a food antigen before it can be re-introduced. I did the gluten and dairy free diet for 3 years in total, and added back foods on an experimental basis once I had been on the egg-yolk regime for a year.

3.) Finally, a gastroenterologist called my problem IBS, which is a catch-all trash diagnosis. However, I had been thinking in terms of celiac disease for a long time, and after doing searches on IBS I came across some new information about a probiotic that was supposed to help with IBS. I tried Bifidobacterium infantis (Align) for 2 months last winter, and it put me over the top. This was around the same time that I tried gluten and dairy for the first time in 3 years, and I was able to introduce it with no problems.

Today, I feel that I’m back to 100% and cured, except for the weight that I acquired during the illness. (I stopped gaining after going gluten free, but could never lose anything.) My propensity to experiment on myself led to some serious consequences, but I discovered something that relatively few people know about the importance of omega-6s.

Keep in mind that deficiency of omega-6 is very rare and overconsumption very common (e.g., the Israeli Paradox). In 2002, the Japan Society for Lipid Nutrition recommended reducing linoleic acid (LA) intake; LA is the short-chain omega-6 fatty acid, found in high concentrations in many vegetable oils, such as soybean oil. LA is converted to AA in the body.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 11)

Seth Roberts15 Comments

I’m now sure it’s the one-legged standing that’s improving my sleep. The new way of seeing faces in the morning doesn’t seem to matter. In case you want to try this, I’ve found that if I just raise one foot slightly I can stand one-legged much longer (about twice as long) than if I stand one-legged and pull the other foot behind me (stretching my leg muscles). I think this means the stretching pose is twice as effective per minute as the non-stretching pose; it produces the same effect in half the time.

It’s only been a few weeks, but my legs are already much stronger. Walking long distances (such as 4 miles) is easier and so is standing for long periods of time. My notions about exercise are changing, too. Before this, I thought of exercise having three types:

1. Strength. Exercise a muscle, it gets stronger. Benefits: stronger muscles can do more, look better.

2. Flexibility. Improved by stretching, e.g., yoga. Benefit: less chance of injury.

3. Aerobic. The Cooper idea. Improved by running, swimming, etc. Benefit: apparently reduces risk of heart attacks, perhaps reduces risk of other diseases. (Some people do it to lose weight, of course.) To measure aerobic fitness, The Cooper Institute stress-tested executives and found that those with better stress-test scores had lower mortality in the following years. Stress-test fitness was a better predictor of mortality than obesity — some people were “fit but fat”.

The one-legged standing seems to be a whole new category:

4. Soporific. When you stress a leg muscle a lot, presumably one or more chemicals are released that both (a) cause the muscle to grow (the well-known effect of exercise) and (b) cause you to sleep more deeply at night (the effect that interests me). In contrast to Types 1-3, there’s no need for the concept of fitness here because you don’t slowly go up and down in a measure of effectiveness (i.e., become more or less fit). Rather each day you are high or low on this measure, and the next day you start fresh. In contrast to Types 1-3, where the benefits accrue slowly (over weeks and months), the benefits are obvious the next morning (you feel better-rested) and the next day (you’re less tired). In contrast to Types 1-3, there is no connection with athletics (such as Olympic events). Conventional exercise is integral-like: It’s the sum over days that matters. Whereas this exercise is derivative-like: The benefits derive from doing a little more today than you did on previous days. The psychology is different, too. The benefits are so large relative to the cost that there’s no motivation problem. Deciding to do it is about as hard as deciding to pick up a $!0 bill. Deciding to do conventional exercise is a lot harder.

Directory.

Two Books about Memory Research

Seth Roberts1 Comment

My mom said this:

Finished reading Can’t Remember What I Forgot: The Good News From the Front Lines of Memory Research [by Sue Halpern]. As far as I’m concerned, Carved in Sand [by Cathryn Ramin] is much the better book. Less science but better, more careful and detailed, description of remedies tried. Halpern personalizes each scientist she talked to in an irritating way, and then describes their theories in great detail, only to report their failures later. As a matter of fact, most of the news she reports, especially about Alzheimer’s, is bad news. The good news is that daily exercise appears to be beneficial to memory, as are a host of other things supposedly good for it. Earthshaking.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 10)

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Long ago, talking about scientific discovery, Pasteur said “chance favors the prepared mind.” In my case, I now realize, this generalization can be improved on. The underlying pattern can be described more precisely.

I’ve made several discoveries because two things came together, as Pasteur said, with one element a kind of chance and the other a kind of knowledge. The two elements were:

  1. I did something unusual.
  2. I knew something unusual.

Here are the discoveries and how they fit this pattern:

1. Breakfast. Discovery: Eating breakfast caused me to wake up too early more often. Did something unusual: I copied one of my students, who told me about his experiences during office hour. This eventually led me to vary my breakfast. Knew something unusual: I had detailed records of my sleep. The combination made it clear that breakfast was affecting my sleep.

2. Morning faces. Discovery: Seeing faces in the morning improves my mood the next day. Did something unusual: I watched a tape of Jay Leno soon after getting up. Knew something unusual: From teaching intro psych, I knew there was a strong connection between depression and bad sleep.

3. Standing and sleep. Discovery: Standing a lot reduces early awakening. Did something unusual: I arranged my life so that I stood a lot more than usual . Knew something unusual: I had detailed sleep records. They made the reduction in early awakening easy to see.

4. Sleep and health. Discovery: At the same time my sleep greatly improved, I stopped getting colds. Did something unusual: To improve my sleep I was standing a lot and getting a lot of morning light from a bank of lights on my treadmill. Knew something unusual: I had records of my colds going back ten years.

5. The Shangri-La Diet. Discovery: Drinking sugar water causes weight loss. Did something unusual: I went to Paris. Knew something unusual: I had developed a new theory of weight control.

6. Flaxseed oil and the brain. Discovery: Flaxseed oil improves my mental function . Did something unusual: One evening I took 6-8 flaxseed oil capsules. Knew something unusual: I had been putting on my shoes standing up for more than a year and knew how difficult it usually was. The morning after I took the flaxseed oil capsules it was a lot easier.

7. Standing on one foot and sleep. Discovery: Standing on one foot improves my sleep. Did something unusual: In order to stretch my quadriceps, I stood on one foot several times one day. Knew something unusual: I knew that if I stood a lot my sleep improved (Discovery 3).

The unusual actions ranged from things as common as foreign travel (Paris) and stretching to the extremely rare (watch a tape of Jay Leno soon after waking up). The unusual knowledge ranged from quirky and casual (knowing how hard it is to put on shoes standing up) to sets of numbers (sleep records) to generalizations based on numbers (what scientific papers are about) to the sort of stuff taught in science classes (a theory of weight control) to the sort of knowledge derived from teaching science classes (connecting depression and bad sleep). To call this stuff unusual knowledge is actually too broad because in every case it’s knowledge related to causality.

Only after Discovery 7 (more precisely, this morning) did I notice this pattern. Read the discussion section of this paper (which is about Discoveries 1-5) to see how badly I missed it earlier.

More on Discovery 6. Discovery 7.