Science in Action: Mysterious Mental Improvement (part 4)

Seth Roberts21 Comments

I blogged earlier how I suddenly got better at an arithmetic task. The apparent causes of the improvement were butter and standing. I’m not sure this is right; I will do more tests.

While I was trying to figure out the cause something even more extreme happened:

Notice the last two points. The previous anomaly was slightly below 600 msec. The new one is close to 550 msec. After observing it, I repeated the test 20 minutes later and got essentially the same result.

I’m blown away. I’ve been doing tests like this — simple measures of mental function — for about two years. Nothing like this happened during those two years.

My scores on this particular test averaged about 640 msec. Sometimes they’d be lower (as low as 610) but I had no idea why. The average stayed around 640. Now, within days, the average goes down to about 600 (presumably because I was eating butter regularly) and then down to almost 550. In other words, that 640 could be improved almost 20%! The improvement has nothing to do with practice; I was extremely well-practiced on this task. (And practice doesn’t produce such a sudden improvement.)

This is something we care deeply about — how well our brains work. Unless I’m a lot worse at arithmetic than everyone else, this suggests that for many people great improvement is possible. In an astonishingly small way. (I didn’t make any big changes during this time.) In a week.

Terrible Dreamhost Support

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Don’t ever use Dreamhost to host your website. I’ve had trouble with them in the past but the current problem is way over the top.

The Shangri-La Diet forums were hacked. A file was replaced and caused the forums to malfunction. It was easy to figure out what happened. To fix it, I merely needed to replace the two bad files with the correct ones.

And I had a recent backup. No problem, right?

Yet I have now exchanged six emails with Dreamhost Customer Support and have yet to figure out how to use the backup they automatically made for me and which I downloaded. I suggested that I send them the backup so they could figure out how to use it and in response they said I should make another backup! They would work with that one! They’re willing to work with a backup I don’t want but not with one I do! Ridiculous.

More No wonder I couldn’t extract the file I wanted. It wasn’t there! And the tech support people had — judging from their emails to me — no idea this was possible!

Science in Action: Mysterious Mental Improvement (part 3)

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Previously on Seth’s Blog: A few weeks ago, during a brief test, I did simple arithmetic (e.g., 3+8, 4*0) substantially faster than usual. The next day, under the same conditions, it happened again. I thought of four possible reasons for the improvement:

  • 30 g of butter I’d eaten a few hours earlier.
  • A cobblestone mat I’d stood on earlier for 5 minutes.
  • Walking for 10 minutes before the test.
  • Standing (rather than sitting) during the test.

I guessed it was the walking.

Since then I’ve been gathering data to choose between these possibilities. I’ve been eating butter regularly to see if there’s a chronic speed-up. And I’ve been doing pairs of tests 20 minutes apart. The first test provides a baseline against which to judge the results of the second test. To measure the effects of the cobblestone mat I stood on the mat between the tests. To measure the effect of walking, I walked during the time between the tests. To measure the effect of standing, I stood during the second test but not the first.

The results so far suggest, to my surprise, that two of the four factors helped: butter and standing. How wrong I was!
At Berkeley, one of my students did a self-experiment that compared different ways of studying. She measured how long she stayed awake while studying foreign vocabulary. Worst turned out to be the conventional way: sitting at her desk in silence. Best was lying on her bed listening to hard rock. My new results are sort of a bigger version of the same thing: conventionally we avoid butter and sit while doing intellectual work.

Millennium Village Evaluation

Seth Roberts1 Comment

When I started college, I started reading harder books. I noticed something no one had told me about: Only some of them made sense. In some cases (e.g., Theory of the Leisure Class), there was a general statement I could understand and examples that clearly supported it. In other cases (e.g., Freud), I had difficulty understanding what was being said. I stopped reading the puzzling stuff.

I thought of this experience when, thanks to Marginal Revolution, I read Michael Clemens’s comments on how the Millennium Village project should be evaluated. This makes sense, I thought. His points are clear and he has evidence for them. (I wish he hadn’t used the words scientific and scientifically, which confuse me, but that’s minor.)Â In contrast, when Jeffrey Sachs explains the absence of comparison villages like this:

he [Sachs] does not like the idea of going into a village, subjecting poor people to a battery of questions and then leaving them empty-handed.

I’m confused. In grad school I learned that a good way to test for causality in an experiment is to test different dosages of the treatment; if the treatment has an effect, different dosages should have different effects. (And the two groups will be more alike than a treated group and an untreated group.) Other villages could have been given small amounts of aid in return for cooperation.

The whole Millennium Village Project reminds me of a 7th-grade science-class demonstration I mentioned earlier. Our teacher, Mr. Tanguay, put a bunch of ingredients (water, sodium, calcium, etc.) mimicking the composition of the human body into a big graduated cylinder. This is what the human body is made of, he said. When we put them all together let’s see if we get life. The final ingredient he added caused the whole thing to swirl around for a little while but needless to say there was no life.

The easy way to create life is to connect new ingredients with existing life. (As I do when I make kombucha and kefir.) Likewise, the easy way to create new economic life is to connect dead economies with existing economic life. It can be as simple as people in poor villages moving to cities, as is happening in China. No one is paying them to move. To pump money into this or that poor Chinese village could easily delay the migration — which is why the long-term effects of the Millennium Village Project could easily be negative.

Chairman Mao’s Brain Food

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Hoping to learn why Chairman Mao, like me, considered pork belly “brain food”, I found just this:

The local government in Hunan [where Mao was from] has sought to standardize the cooking of the dish [Mao’s favorite pork belly dish], in order to stem the tide of imitations that crowd Chinese restaurants.

According to stringent instructions from the government’s food quality supervision and testing institute, true hong shao rou [red braised pork] can only be made with the meat of rare pigs from Ningxiang county. Officials have designated the pig, which has been bred for nearly 1,000 years, as an “agricultural treasure”.

I tried pork belly from different sorts of pigs (e.g., black pigs) but never noticed a difference.

Hunan Province is also the location of West Lake restaurant, one of the largest restaurants in the world. I’ve been watching “The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World,” a wonderful BBC documentary about it. The owner attributes her success to her first husband, who made her furious.

Natto is Nothing . . . Try Funazushi

Seth Roberts3 Comments

From a travel guide to Hikone, a town near Osaka:

But natto is nothing. The real test of gastronomic mettle in [Japan] is funazushi.

News photo
A challenging plate of funazushi.

This forerunner of all sushi comprises fish that have first been salted and then had the salt soaked out before being packed into large crocks between layers of cooked rice and left to “mature” for two or three years. The resulting utterly ungodly stench from this finny fare is enough to make a grown man practically keel over.

But, reflecting that some fine-tasting cheeses have a rancidity not unlike that of diaper contents, I tried it. And of course the stuff tastes exactly like it stinks. The official guide to Hikone cheerfully observes that funazushi is often referred to as the “king of delicacies.”

Assorted Links

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Thanks to Dave Lull.

Eczema, Nighttime Cough, Antibiotics, and Fermented Food (more)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

This comment was made recently on an earlier post:

I am so glad I found this blog.

My daughter has had coughing fits for 24 months (she’s 5 1/2 yo).

Inhalers, several doctors, nothing helped. She routinely coughed until vomiting. After one 10 hour coughing fit I reached my limit and scoured the web.

After putting in her whole medical history as search qualifiers I found this [post]. The prior eczema and antibiotics were key indicators.

After 3 days of drinking 1 probiotic shake a day, she showed very marked improvement. After 1 week, no symptoms. This is a girl who’s been unable to run and play for 2 years. Who woke up coughing and gagging most nights.

After 6 weeks of the same regimen, she still shows no symptoms and is running and playing full blast.

The pulmonary specialist discounts the results we’ve seen as a fluke . . . we’ll see. Previously my daughter’s lung capacity was measured at 47% of expected.

“Unable to run and play for 2 years”! I’m impressed. Not only (a) the improvement is huge, but also (b) it resembles verification of a prediction, not just something a theory can explain, (c) it wasn’t obvious to “several doctors” or (d) the rest of the Internet, and (e) after it happened it was dismissed by an expert, even though the evidence for causality is excellent. The verification aspect reminds me of Pale Fire:

If on some nameless island Captain Schmidt
Sees a new animal and captures it,
And if, a little later, Captain Smith
Brings back a skin, that island is no myth.

Learning Chinese (update)

Seth Roberts7 Comments

I’ve spent seven months living in Beijing. Since that started (October 2008) I’ve wanted to learn Chinese. I’ve tried many things. Now, finally, I think I’ve found a method that works for part of it (written vocabulary).

There are four aspects:

Content. I’m learning the basic 800-odd words covered in Learning Chinese Characters by Alison and Laurence Mathews, which are those required by a certain standard Chinese Language test (HSK Level A). I use their make-a-story method for each character.

Study Method. I use Anki. It’s like flashcards, but with a near-optimal mix of old and new cards. Comparison of Anki with similar software. When I used actual flashcards, I didn’t do a good job of mixing old and new cards. I found a Anki deck already made for the Mathews book. The Mathews will be glad to know that the (free) Anki deck plus (free) Anki software make their book more valuable. I constantly consult it for help.

Catalyst. I walk on a treadmill to make studying pleasant.

Minimalism. When I told a Chinese friend I was just learning the meaning of each character, not the pronunciation, she frowned. After that I tried to learn the pronunciation, too. But now, trying to learn the pronunciation at the same time, the whole thing goes too slowly. The pronunciation is much harder than the meaning and less useful. Learning just the meaning is much faster and makes the whole thing seem more doable.

More The origin of Anki-like programs. An approach similar to the Mathews’s.