I wonder how many bloggers know about this — research about the beneficial effects of journal writing. James Pennebaker, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas Austin, has done a lot of research in this area. Here is a list of studies. This article sums it up nicely: “Writing about important personal experiences in an emotional way for as little as 15 minutes over the course of three days brings about improvements in mental and physical [!] health. This finding has been replicated across age, gender, culture, social class, and personality type.”

I’m guessing this research started as a search for the crucial ingredients of psychotherapy. What happens during psychotherapy that helps people? Early research found that the therapist’s training made no detectable difference. This suggested that just telling one’s story was therapeutic. Journal writing is another step in the same direction: You tell your story without anyone listening. Next step: studying the health effects of blogging.

The next issue (Oct 3) of Woman’s World, already available many places, has a lovely cover story (pp. 18-19) about the Shangri-La Diet with the funny title “Instant Willpower!” The article is very accurate and reasonable but I have a few comments.

“Lose 7 lbs a week!” (cover and p. 19). Average weight loss is 1-2 lbs/week.

“Makes your body release stored fat!” (cover). Clever. I would have said something plodding like “lose body fat.”

“Roberts says refined walnut oil and light olive oils are best” (p. 18). Refined walnut oil is hard to find. I buy Spectrum refined walnut oil at Whole Foods. The Spectrum Organics store locator will find stores that carry Spectrum products but not all carry refined walnut oil. In Berkeley, most don’t. You may want to call ahead.

“When reading scientific journals to prepare for a lecture, Roberts had a eureka moment. . . Turning this interesting idea into practical weight-loss advice took lots of trial and error. . . . In short order, he was 35 pounds slimmer” (pp. 18-19). I lost 35 pounds using sugar water, not oil. It took three months. The turning point in going from theory to practice was a strange experience in Paris, described in the book. Also crucial was Emily Mechner’s observation that if my theory was correct, flavorless oils should work as well as sugar water. All in all, though, this is a good summary.

[to make this plan work even better] “Stick with your normal foods” (p. 19). No, I think the diet works better if you start eating foods that are new to you — foods with unfamiliar flavors.

“Avoid flax, unrefined walnut and extra virgin olive oils, which have strong flavor, says Roberts” (p. 19). You can drink these oils if you close your nose (using a noseclip for example) while drinking them. That will eliminate the flavor.

In an interview, Seymour Benzer, the great Caltech biologist, told a story that I think explains a lot about medical-school research, including UCLA medical school professor John Ford’s complaint about The Shangri-La Diet:

Harold Brown [president of Caltech 1969-1977] made himself quite conspicuous by . . . trying to develop a medical school relationship. . . . His idea was for Caltech to pair up with UCLA to make a medical school. We would do the first two years of basic education of the medical students, and afterwards they would be guaranteed two more years of clinical experience at UCLA. And then they could be doctors. . . . In the Biology Division, it went over like a lead balloon: Why should we be knocking ourselves out teaching these guys, and then they go away elsewhere and don’t even do research — they become doctors? What’s in it for us?

Some things are hard to learn by reading. Saul Sternberg, now a professor of psychology at Penn, once spent a quarter at Berkeley and was around when Stanford grad students and faculty in cognitive psychology came up to Berkeley to present their research. One of the grad students told Sternberg about a reaction-time experiment she had done about mental something or other (mental rotation?) in which the conditions compared varied in what the subject saw. Sternberg pointed out that it would be better to keep constant what the subject sees. This is the beginning of wisdom in the design of cognitive psychology experiments, but you won’t find it written down anywhere.

One of the most fascinating stories in Benzer’s oral history interview is about construction of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California:

Benzer: Louis Kahn [the architect] asked Salk, “How much money have you got to put into the building?” And Salk said, “Ten million for endowment” — this was all from the commitment from the March of Dimes — “and a million dollars a year for operating expenses in perpetuity.” So Kahn went home and designed a building for $20 million. In fact, he bragged about this at some dinner he had in La Jolla. He talked about other buildings he had designed and he said it was always his policy to make the building for twice as much as the money available, because you could always count on the fact that people scurry around to find the extra money.

Salk went for that idea on the argument that later on it would cost much more to build it. That was absolutely true. But at the time it had the effect of liquidating the endowment. And everything suffered from then on. The institute . . . was always worrying about where the next buck was coming from.
. . .
Interviewer: So they liquidated their entire endowment to construct a more expensive building?

Benzer: Yes.

Kahn knew a general principal about human nature that I do not. Why do backers reliably “scurry around to find the extra money”? Something powerful is at work here.

I found a long interview with Seymour Benzer, a biologist at Caltech, who is one of my favorite scientists — lots of creative and important work. I was pleased to learn he is a foodie. During a 1956 trip to Japan he had sushi for the first time. “One of the greatest things about the trip,” he said in 1990 (when the interview took place), presaging a future in which every upscale American supermarket sells sushi. (For dinner tonight I made salmon tartare.) When I was a student at Caltech I knew the other students liked him, but I never met him.

Benzer began the use of fruit flies to study behavior. At Woods Hole I took a course called Neural Systems and Behavior with a fruit-fly segment taught by Laurie Tompkins. She had met Benzer at a party. When she told him she studied fruit-fly mating, Benzer asked if they have orgasms. Very early in his work on behavior, he gave a talk to Roger Sperry’s lab about his plans. After his talk there was a lot of debate about it. Some people thought it was very promising; others thought it was nonsense.

Interviewer: Why were people so skeptical?

Benzer: Why? A lack of imagination.

Excellent answer. I would have said: People are always skeptical.