Author: Seth Roberts

Science in Action: Exercise (15-minute walk)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Exercise reduces reaction time, I’ve found. What’s the threshold? I wondered — how little exercise do you need to get the effect? I wanted to know so that in my omega-3 experiments, I could be active — e.g., walk to a cafe — without distorting the results. Also, for practical reasons, I wanted to produce the effect as easily as possible.

To learn more about the threshold, I walked on my treadmill for 15 minutes at a comfortable speed (2.8 miles/hour). Here’s what happened:

effect of 15-minute walk

If anything, the short walk increased reaction time. Thirty minutes of walking produced a clear (and repeatable) decrease, so the the effect appears to require between 15 and 30 minutes of walking.

I did this experiment three days ago. Self-experimentation is many times easier than conventional science; blogging is many times easier than conventional publishing. A powerful combination, I hope.

Modern Veblen: Flight From Data

Seth Roberts1 Comment

I read The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen during college and was very impressed. One of the book’s main points is that wealthy people advertise their avoidance of “dirty” work. Long fingernails on women. Obscure and elaborate phrases in academic articles. “The advantage of the accredited locutions lies in their reputability; they are reputable because they are cumbrous and out of date, and therefore argue waste of time and exemption from the use and the need of direct and forcible speech,” wrote Veblen.

A friend of mine does research for an oil company. Several years ago, the oil company he worked for (Company X) was bought by another oil company (Company Y), which merged their research departments. Company X’s research group moved to the research campus of Company Y. Following the move, each Company X researcher was asked to give a talk about his recent work. My friend wrote an abstract for his talk. The seminar coordinator — from Company Y — came into my friend’s office with his abstract and said to him, “Could you deemphasize the parts involving real data? We don’t deal with real data here.”

This was true. The Company Y researchers included many theorists, heavily into abstruse mathematical models. Others were coding new algorithms and relied on model “data” for testing, but not actual data. In contrast, many of Company X’s researchers, including my friend, “got their hands dirty.” After my friend’s talk, several people told him how nice it was to hear about real data.

You can see this tendency everywhere at UC Berkeley, from English to Statistics to Engineering to Psychology. Disciplines that began closely connected with reality and everyday concerns moved farther and farther away. A few days ago someone complained to me about a class where students graded each other’s papers. That’s academia, I said.

Modern Veblen: Theory Testing.

Science in Action: Exercise (more confirmation)

Seth Roberts4 Comments

How little exercise will produce the reaction-time-lowering effect I’ve found (here and here)? I decided to measure the effect of a 10-minute walk from a BART stop to a cafe. (Nicely integrating work and work.) But I got off BART at the wrong stop and my 10-minute walk took 40 minutes.

Here is what happened:

effect of 40-minute walk

Just as with a 30-minute treadmill walk, the effect was delayed.

This is more support for the idea that exercise temporarily improves brain function. The novelty in this particular experiment is that the exercise was “real” rather than on an indoor treadmill.

For comparison, here are earlier results from much more strenuous exercise (30 minutes walking uphill on a treadmill):

effect of 30 minutes on steep treadmill

The effect of more strenuous exercise was larger and lasted longer. With the easier exercise (the stroll) there was a downward spike in reaction time; with the more difficult exercise (the climb) there was a more crater-like effect. The spike shape suggests the effect was sub-maximal; the crater shape suggests that the maximum effect was reached. Which makes sense because the climb was close to maximum effort, whereas the stroll was far below it.

A kind reader pointed to a NY Times article on the brain effects of exercise. “Exercise can, in fact, create a stronger, faster brain,” says the article. “Create” refers to neurogenesis. The effects I’ve observed are more temporary — more like adding better fuel to a car.

“The human brain is extremely difficult to study, especially when a person is still alive,” says the article. Not entirely true.

SLD on consumerist.com

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Here is a nice endorsement of the Shangri-La Diet by Ben Popken. A very interesting aspect of what he is doing is the use of photographs to fool himself — or not — that he is being watched.

The taking and uploading of photos helps keep me honest. I know that if I fall behind, I have to announce it. Not many people are watching it but just seeing a few views here and there helps reinforce the idea that I’m being monitored.

Photos of his weight, for example.

how much he weighed

All his photos.

Thanks to CalorieLab.

Modern Veblen: Theory Testing

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In 2000, Hal Pashler and I published a paper called “How persuasive is a good fit? A comment on theory testing.” For more than 50 years, psychologists had supported mathematical theories by showing that the equations of the theory could fit data. We pointed out that this was a mistake because no account was taken of the flexibility of the theory. A too-flexible theory can fit anything. However obvious this may sound to outsiders, the practice we criticized was common (and continues).

Recently I asked Hal: Is the problem we pointed out an example of something more general? Neither Hal nor I had a good answer to this. Both of us thought the practice we had criticized was what Feynman called cargo-cult science — looks like science but isn’t — but that was more of a derogatory description than anything else.

Now I think I have a helpful answer: What we pointed out was an example of the general point Thorstein Veblen made in The Theory of the Leisure Class: The growth of worse-than-useless practices among the well-off. Foot-binding. Hood ornaments. Long words and bad writing in scholarly articles. Conspicuous waste. The last chapter of Veblen’s book is about academia.

A Student’s Unlovely View of UC Berkeley (part 2)

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At the Huffington Post, some commentators on my post “A Student’s Unlovely View of UC Berkeley” denounced what they called “coddling”:

That’s Berkeley. No coddling.

Berkeley still is a sink or swim place, with no coddling or significant support system. So what? Grow up.

Coddling? Having your nails done, sleeping on a super-soft bed, being served a fancy dessert — that’s coddling. No one needs coddling, true. But what about basic nutrition? Is being served food with enough Vitamin C coddling? I don’t think so.

The student who spoke to me said that UC Berkeley did nothing to help her find out (a) what she was good at and (b) what she enjoyed. That speaks volumes about UC Berkeley, of course. Students need to learn these things about themselves — everyone does. To go through life without learning these things is a tragedy. It is not asking to be coddled to want these things.

To serve up an education that fails to provide these crucial ingredients is just as unfortunate as a parent or an orphanage serving food that fails to provide essential nutrients. The effect in both cases is the same: Development is stunted. If students weren’t forced to go to schools like Berkeley in order to get a good job (”I’m here for the name” the student told me) it would be less unfortunate. But they are.

Some commentators said Berkeley was somehow better for resembling “the real world” where no one holds your hand. Huh? College students are still growing. Growing things need special environments to grow properly.

One commentator said there are ways to learn on your own: “Go to a library, surf the net, watch TV.” True, there are. But UC Berkeley makes it hard for students to do this because classwork is so time-consuming. Not only does the school serve its students bad food, it makes it hard for them to find good food.

The original post.

Science in Action: Exercise (confirmation)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

During my omega-3 tests, I noticed that exercise seemed to be reducing reaction time (= better brain function). When I tested this, the results surprised me: Reaction time wasn’t lower immediately after exercise but became lower later. Did exercise have a delayed effect or was the shower I took soon after exercise responsible?

To find out, I did a little experiment. The earlier exercise was 30 minutes on a flat treadmill at about 2.8 miles/hour; this time I walked 30 minutes on a steep treadmill at higher speed (about 3.7 miles per hour). Here are the results:

exercise results

Vertical lines show when the exercise started and stopped. This time there was improvement immediately after the exercise (unsurprising, given that it was much more intense) but even more improvement a half-hour later. I took a shower several hours later; it had no clear effect. The improvement lasted several hours before starting to diminish.

The data are very clear. They imply the earlier results can be believed: Exercise does improve brain function in an unanticipated way. Losing weight with exercise is hard; improving brain function with exercise appears easy. I want to study this effect in detail. Not only should it teach me how to improve brain function, it should also suggest the best dose of exercise for the rest of my body.

Loneliness and National Security

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This story — about an NSA employee named Gene Carson — by Igor Vamos is so strange and affecting I would have thought it made up (like Truman Capote’s snakes story) except that almost every detail rings true.

I remember when you used to tell me that fruit from the supermarket is tasteless. I agree with you. If small markets work, why do we need the super markets? I miss you.

This is one of Carson’s diary entries. “You” is Imogene Campbell, whom Carson wiretapped daily but never met.

Given how little I can learn about Gene Carson and Imogene Campbell via Google, maybe it is fiction. If so, Igor Vamos is a genius.

Addendum: I guess it’s fiction.

How Things Begin (Oakland Art Murmur)

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The Oakland Art Murmur is an art-galleries-open-late event that happens the first Friday of every month. It is about a year old. It started when two galleries in a cheap-rent district of Oakland got together. Soon other galleries joined them. There was a meeting at which “nothing happened” (according to a gallery manager) but they got together on paying for advertising and printing. How much did it cost each gallery? I asked. “Not much.”

Each month it has grown larger. More galleries and more people. Recently the City of Oakland began a shuttle bus to take people around and a few galleries now participate that are not close to the original ones. The event has a new name, too: First Fridays Art Night. This is not as weird as it sounds; I learned that there are many First Fridays events at cities all over the country, including Richmond, Virginia, and Washington, DC, but Oakland’s is unusually large — around 40 galleries, whereas in Washington DC there are about 30.

In honor of Freakonomics I visited the Rock Paper Scissors Collective, which turned out to be the most crowded art gallery I have ever seen. People were practically lining up on the street to get in. (Inside was a show of cartoon art and a few racks of clothes.) It felt like every artist in Oakland was there. Across the street was the opening of an exhibit of work by Timothy Brown, which consisted of food or food-related things (such as spoons) in blocks of transparent plastic. I really liked some of it. Upstairs at another gallery a dozen people were finishing a meal. Each person had been given $100 (play money?) which they used to bid for the various dishes.

I learned about the Murmur because a week earlier I had met one of the three founders of The Moon, a nearby art store that opened that night. I was surprised that a senior in college (Mills) is starting a small business, much less an unusual one. At the Murmur I met a woman who had just started a preschool. It was two days old. Craig’s List was involved. She had three partners. “I’m very impressed,” I said. “Most people never start anything.” “You’re starting to walk across the street,” she said.

It was way fun not only because most of the art was quite different than what I see in big-city higher-rent galleries (New Orleans, San Francisco, New York) but also because the people I met were friendly and easy to talk to. Not every conversation went well, however. I saw a guy who sells at the Farmers’ Market. “Are you an artist?” I asked. Yes, he said, but that might be misleading because he was a lot of things. “What else are you?” I asked. He was too tired to answer my question, he said, “but thanks for saying hello.”