Memory Palaces and the Walking/Learning Connection

Seth Roberts1 Comment

In this excellent article, Joshua Foer describes how he got really good at competitive memory tests, such as remembering the order of a deck of cards. He competed in the national championships.

Foer writes a lot about using “memory palaces” to remember stuff. You take a familiar building or neighborhood and vividly imagine what you want to remember at different places within it. To retrieve the memories, you mentally visit each place.

This is an ancient and famous method. I knew about it but had not realized until I read the article that it sheds light on my discovery that treadmill walking makes learning Chinese pleasant. (A commenter named Tom also noticed the connection.) Foer gives the obvious evolutionary explanation for why the memory palace method works so well: long ago, we needed to remember where to find important stuff (water, food, special plants, useful materials). So we evolved a memory system well-suited for doing so.

Less obvious is another evolutionary idea: why stop there? It’s a system. When you design a car for a certain sort of driving, you don’t stop with the engine. You adjust the drive train, the tires, and so on. If evolution shaped our brains for a certain sort of data (things in places), surely it also shaped our brains to collect that data. Pointless to design a car no one drives.

Two more changes would help make use of the system:

1. Hedonic. Make it pleasant to fill the system with data. This is what I noticed — dry knowledge (such as the order of cards in a deck) became pleasant to learn. Long ago, the hedonic change I noticed would have pushed people to walk in new places rather than old ones.

2. Efficiency. Make learning more efficient (= more learning per unit time). Several confounded comparisons point in this direction. For example, I found that 15 minutes studying flashcards while riding the subway was a lot less help than spending 15 minutes while walking on my treadmill. Of course there are many differences between the two situations. Likewise, using Anki is working much better now than in the past, when I used it sitting down. I will try to study this more carefully.

Years ago, evolutionary explanations such as these were mocked as “just so stories” by prominent scientists, such as Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky, and Richard Lewontin. It’s now clear they were wrong.

Beijing Smog: Good or Bad?

Seth Roberts13 Comments

I am in Beijing. The smog is bad. It is more humid than usual and the air is dirtier than usual. At his blog, James Fallows, who is also in Beijing, has posted pictures and pollution measurements. (Incidentally, Eamonn Fingleton, an excellent writer, will be guest-blogging there. In Praise of Hard Industries is one of the best business/economics books I’ve read.)

The effect of smog on health isn’t obvious. Maybe you know about hormesis — the finding that a small dose of a poison, such as radioactivity, is beneficial. It has been observed in hundreds of experiments. It makes sense: the poisons activate repair systems. Even if you know about hormesis, you probably don’t know that one of the first studies of smoking and cancer found that inhaling cigarette smoke appeared beneficial: inhalers had less cancer than non-inhalers. R. A. Fisher, the great statistician, emphasized this (pp. 160-161):

There were fewer inhalers among the cancer patients than among the non-cancer patients. That, I think, is an exceedingly important finding.

This difference (a negative correlation) appeared in spite of two positive correlations: Heavy smokers get more cancer than light smokers; and heavy smokers are more likely to inhale than light smokers. It is far from the only fact suggesting the connection between smoking and health isn’t simple.

So I am not worried about Beijing smog. The real danger, I think, is not eating fermented foods. Which, thankfully, is infinitely more under my control.

Meat-Only Diet: Crave Carbs. Meat + Egg: No Craving

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Joseph Buchignani, a businessman in Shenzhen, has suffered from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) since he was a teenager. He is now in his 20s. By trial and error, he discovered that a meat-only diet eliminated his IBS. However, it also caused craving for carbs. Because carbs caused IBS, he couldn’t simply eat carbs. He tried many ways of getting rid of the craving for carbs: eating more animal fat, eating less animal fat, eating oil, eating lard, and eating different kinds of animals and cuts of meat. He varied how he cooked the meat, eating especially fresh meat, and eating fresh whole fish. All of these attempts failed. He did not try taking a multivitamin pill.

Finally he tried adding egg to the meat. That eliminated his craving for carbs. It made his diet much more sustainable.

This is fascinating for four reasons.

1. Sure, some cravings reflect nutrient deficiencies. (Not all cravings: An alcoholic craves alcohol.) But in the cases I know about, there is an obvious or semi-obvious connection between the craving and the deficiency. For example, people who chew too much ice (pagophagia) crave ice to chew. They are iron-deficient. Eating iron eliminates the pagophagia. Long ago, a craving to eat something crunchy would have led you to eat bones. Bone marrow is high in iron. So the craving makes sense. In contrast, there is no obvious or semi-obvious connection between carbs and eggs.

2. It suggests that a paleo diet is a good place to start looking for the ideal diet. Paleo ideas suggest a high-meat diet. But no matter how long you study what Stone-Age people ate, you will not figure out that eggs will eliminate carb cravings.

3. Like many people, especially those doing paleo, I eat mostly meat and vegetables (a conventional low-carb diet). Unlike most low-carbers, I also eat lots of fermented foods. I don’t crave carbs, perhaps because of the lactose in yogurt or the sucrose in kombucha. It hadn’t occurred to me to start eating eggs regularly but Joseph’s discovery suggests I should try it.

4. Joseph’s personal science led him to discover something highly useful and completely non-obvious.

Educational Testing Service: Stupid or Smart?

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Since the Educational Testing Service is responsible for measuring intelligence, it is disturbing when they appear . . . not intelligent. A Chinese student of mine sent me the following question, which appears in a set of study questions. You are supposed to identify the “flaw” in the argument.

The article entitled ‘Eating Iron’ in last month’s issue of Eating for Health reported that a recent study found a correlation between high levels of iron in the diet and an increased risk of heart disease. Further, it is well established that there is a link between large amounts of red meat in the diet and heart disease, and red meat is high in iron. On the basis of the study and the well-established link between red meat and heart disease, we can conclude that the correlation between high iron levels and heart disease, then, is most probably a function of the correlation between red meat and heart disease.

By “is a function of” I suppose means “is due to”. Sure, there are several imperfections, unstated assumptions, in every argument, including this one, just as every piece of research has several imperfections. But are there obvious important flaws in this argument? I think it is reasonable to assume that red meat is the main source of iron.

Since many scientists have trouble interpreting correlations (they think “correlation does not equal causation” is not misleading) presumably an ETS question writer has even more trouble. And this question reflects that. But maybe not.

“Do a Small Thing”: Good Advice For Revolutionaries and Scientists

Seth Roberts4 Comments

This is the best magazine article I have read in a long time. The subtitle is “What Egypt Learned from the Students Who Overthrew Milosevic”, a good description. The Serbian students who overthrew Milosevic had several lessons for budding revolutionaries in other countries, such as Egypt and Burma. One was/is:

Do a small thing and if it is successful, you have the confidence to do another one and another one.

Much like my advice about science: Do the smallest easiest thing that will tell you something. You will learn more from it than you expect. If someone criticizes a study for being “small” they are saying “1 + 1 = 3″. If someone does a large study that fails, they are saying the same thing.

Via Long Form. I knew little about the author, Tina Rosenberg, before this. I am looking forward to reading the book about peer pressure from which this article was taken.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Our Niche in Life

Seth Roberts7 Comments

A Chinese teacher in Los Angeles named Yang Yang, whom you can see in this video, wrote this on her website:

I believe that we all have our own niche – something so unique and innate to us that we enjoy every second of it and can naturally do better than others. Teaching Chinese is my niche.

I think this is the beginning of wisdom about human diversity — a big improvement over judging people by how “smart” they are, as so often happens. (To a college professor, smart = able to imitate a college professor.) My theory of human evolution emphasizes the need for diversity of occupations. In ancient times, occupational diversity arose because different people enjoyed doing different things.

But I also think Yang Yang is wrong in two ways. First, I don’t think your niche is innate. I think it can be changed. I think we can come to enjoy and excel at many jobs that we do not enjoy at first. This is the other side of procrastination. Just as we dislike doing things simply because we haven’t done them in a long time, we like doing things simply because we did them yesterday. Habits are pleasant.

I also think that where you fall on a pro-status-quo/anti-status-quo (conformist/rebel) dimension is not innate. I think it has a lot to do with your birth order (first-borns are more pro-status-quo), as Frank Sulloway says in Born to Rebel. I didn’t read Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother expecting to think about birth order and rebelliousness but that’s what I ended up thinking about.

Walking and Learning Update

Seth Roberts16 Comments

I discovered a year ago that walking makes it pleasant to study boring stuff — as I put it then, boring + boring = pleasant. I am still a little amazed.

Like any scientific discovery, I suppose, I had to do serious engineering to make good use of it. In particular:

1. Make walking easier. I use a treadmill in my apartment, which eliminates travel time (to where I do it), eliminates distractions, provides climate control, and allows me to walk barefoot.

2. Steady stream of study materials. Now I am using an Anki deck of Chinese characters put together by someone else. This saves a lot of time. (Anki is an open-source version of SuperMemo, a flashcard program that tries to optimize repetition.)

3. Figure out how much new stuff to study each day. Without plenty of repetition, you are wasting your time — you will forget what you’ve learned. Most of a study session is repetition. This means it’s not obvious how much new material to introduce each day. I found that 10 new Chinese characters is about right.

4. Put laptop on treadmill. To use Anki while on my treadmill, I need to use my laptop on my treadmill. At the Beijing Wal-mart, I found a piece of Sunor metal shelving that works perfectly. I put the shelf (about 90 cm long) across the arms of the treadmill, put the laptop on the shelf.

5. Minimize complications. I first noticed the effect using Anki. But Anki had several features I disliked, so I switched to ordinary flashcards. But they were too complicated — hard to schedule appropriately (you need to slowly expand the time between tests), time-consuming to keep track of progress. I had to keep stopping to make marks on the cards. So I am back to using Anki. Anki lacks a graph of progress — a graph that shows amount of learning versus date. But it is better than flashcards.

Each improvement made things better. With all of them, I lose track of time. Study, study, study, walk, walk, walk. Then it’s over. Not just painless, pleasant — different than any pleasure I have felt before. It feels a little like a new energy source (I imagine it can be used to learn many things), a little like teleportation.

The science aspect of it also interests me. Learning is the core topic of experimental psychology. Thousands of experiments have been done about human learning, thousands more about animal learning. Experimental psychologists are good methodologists; the average experimental psychology experiment makes the average medical-school experiment look retarded. But the walking/learning effect (walking makes learning pleasant) is outside anything anyone has ever reported. Only Michel Cabanac (not an experimental psychologist) has studied how variation in pleasantness regulates action (e.g., eating). Experimental psychologists lack good ways to find new effects. By missing this effect, they are missing a bigger idea:Â learning is regulated, just as a thousand other things inside our bodies are regulated.

Chairs: The Carbohydrate of Furniture

Seth Roberts6 Comments

In the excellent BBC series about the history of design (The Genius of Design), chairs played a large role. Perhaps a fifth of the show is about them, far more than any other product. Yet I rarely use them and own only a few. I sit while socializing but otherwise usually work reclining (on a bed or in a rocking chair) or standing up. Long ago I discovered that if I stand a lot I sleep better. Since then I’ve spent a lot of time on my feet for someone whose job doesn’t require it.

My self-experimental discoveries led me to avoid about 99% of the food sold in a typical store — granola, cake mixes, flour, rice, breakfast cereals, and so on. Most of what I avoid is carbohydrate. Just as we are pushed to sit in chairs, we are pushed to eat carbohydrate. I don’t think carbs cause obesity — it’s more complicated than that — but they raise blood sugar (making diabetes more likely) and rarely supply essential fats. They are also poor source of microbes, which I’m sure you need to eat.

Over the last 30 years, designers have focused more and more on sustainability, “green design”, and so on. I think of this as the second half of the industrial revolution — cleaning up the mess. As far as I can tell, designers have not yet started to understand that we need certain things from our environment just as we need certain things from our food. Here are some things I think we need from our environment: 1. Sunlight in the morning. Some buildings have daylighting to save energy. 2. Faces in the morning. 3. Absence of fluorescent lights at night. 4. Movement throughout the day. 5. An hour of walking per day.