Thanks to Gerry Mandel, Casey Manion and Jeff Winkler.
This graph shows my brain test reaction times over roughly one year. Each point is a different test; I usually do two tests per day back to back. I assume faster = better. In February 2013 I returned to Berkeley from Beijing. In August 2013 I went back to Beijing. When I returned to Berkeley, my scores got worse (slower). I was shocked. Surely Berkeley is healthier than Beijing. At first I thought it was jet lag, but the scores stayed worse long after that made sense. Then I thought it might be some difference in diet, even though I eat similar food in the two places. I tried to make my Berkeley diet closer to my Beijing diet. This might have helped. I noticed accidentally that chocolate improved my score and started eating chocolate frequently. This artificially reduced the difference since in Beijing I had not been eating chocolate. In Berkeley I started doing two things I hadn’t done in Beijing: alternate-day fasting and whole-body vibration. I don’t know if they made a difference. When I returned to Beijing in September, my scores got better, even though I was not eating chocolate. Eventually I improved my sleep in Beijing but that seemed to make little difference. The comparison is far from perfect — many things varied — but by and large my scores got worse when I went from Beijing to Berkeley and improved when I went from Berkeley to Beijing.
What might have caused this? There are a hundred possibilities but one stands out. In both places, I brew and drink several cups of tea every day. In Beijing, everyone, including me, drinks water from big plastic bottles that are delivered to your house. You can choose pure water or “mineral” water, which has added magnesium and potassium. In Berkeley I use tap water (Brita filtered). I don’t think potassium affects brain function — for example, eating bananas makes no difference — but there is plenty of evidence that magnesium improves brain function. In Beijing I had tested a magnesium supplement and found no effect, consistent with the idea that I was already getting enough. Magnesium is also believed to improve sleep. In Beijing I seemed to sleep better than in Berkeley. Again, this is consistent with a difference in magnesium levels (more in Beijing). If ordinary magnesium-enriched water improves brain function, it would be significant because it is so easy, in contrast to other ways of increasing magnesium levels.
Stephen Hsu mentioned the documentary At Berkeley. In response, someone who had graduated from Berkeley long ago and recently returned commented:
One thing hasn’t changed much though, most professors still hate, and with studied contempt, having anything to do with undergraduates.
My mom was an undergraduate at Berkeley. I asked her what she thought of this comment. She didn’t agree, but she didn’t exactly disagree:
I got absolutely no sense of “studied contempt” or dislike from profs. Some were dull, one went on my forever hate list because he humiliated a student in public, some were difficult, one was very conservative but provoked me into doing good work. More or less enjoyed my economics courses, including one on “labor” taught by Clark Kerr. Maybe the sociology professors were like that. I’d declared it as my major, but didn’t like a single sociology prof I had, and barely escaped thru to graduation with them.
As I’ve said, Ken Jowitt, a political science professor at Berkeley, humiliated students who came in late. At one point he was Dean of Undergraduate Studies.
When I got a job at Berkeley, I remembered my mom’s comment that she’d had only three good professors (Kerr, Robert Nisbet, and David Mandelbaum, an anthropology professor). I wondered if I would be her idea of a good professor. It turned out that quite a few professors treated undergraduates badly, as Hsu’s commenter says. One professor told me that when a student came to him with a grading complaint, he made the student put the complaint in writing — just like in post-Soviet Russia, where paperwork obstacles were placed in front of those who wanted to start a political party. Another professor, I was told, did not look at students who came to see him during office hours. He sat with his back towards them. A third professor, when I asked when the assigned reading would be available (I was auditing his class), wouldn’t say. “Sometime,” he said.
With few exceptions, the profs I knew avoided students, as Hsu’s commenter says. One of them, when a student asked to see him, told the student, “I’ll be around.” It was easy to see why they avoided students (students bored them, wanted stuff, were full of complaints, “wasted” their time, and had nothing to do with what they really cared about, their research) but it said a lot about the situation, such as how much the professors learned from the students — not much, apparently.
Yet I learned an enormous amount from my undergraduate students, especially two of them. One student, in response to an open-ended term project assignment, chose to give a talk to a high school class about depression. Yet she had stage fright! It was extremely difficult for her to give that talk. But she did. Based on more conventional assignments, she had seemed a mediocre student. After I read her paper about what she’d done, I saw how much I had underestimated her. And it wasn’t just her. I suddenly saw how much the whole system — which judges undergraduates by how much they resemble professors — grossly underestimates almost all of them. What a tragedy. This is the fundamental thing to realize about undergraduate education, that students are judged by how closely they resemble professors. Excellence in other ways is ignored. It is an incredibly wasteful system. It is like “evidence-based medicine” reviews that ignore 1000 papers on a topic to focus on 4 papers that meet their restrictive criteria. And then claim to have summarized the subject.
She wasn’t even the most extreme case. I taught introductory psychology for a few years. One of my lectures was on weight control. I showed a graph of how I had lost weight when I had started eating less processed food — oranges instead of orange juice, for example. At the same time as the weight loss, I had started to sleep less (40 minutes less per day). One of my students came to my office hour. He said he knew another way to lose weight and need less sleep: eat food high in water content. He showed me a thick book that promoted this. The book looked bad — no data, just words. But he said it had helped him.
So I tried it. At first I ate four pieces of fruit per day. Nothing happened.
I ran into the student. Hey, I’m eating four piece of fruit every day, nothing’s happened, I said. He said, “I eat six pieces of fruit a day.”
So I went from four to six. I was already eating so much fruit that to eat two more pieces meant I had to change my breakfast. I changed it from oatmeal to two pieces of fruit. Exactly then my sleep started getting worse. I had been waking up early about half the time; I started waking up early all the time. Eventually I discovered that any breakfast caused early awakening. Oatmeal was simply better than fruit.
This experience was the turning point in my whole scientific life. It made me begin to realize that personal science — or self-experimentation, as I called it then — was a powerful tool.
My views about both teaching and research, in other words, were greatly shaped by contact with undergraduate students. The influence wasn’t passive — I did a lot more than simply listen to them — or simple. I did my part: gave unusual assignments, gave students much more freedom, tried student suggestions. In both cases, I ended up with a point of view very different than my colleagues and very different from the point of view I started with. I think professors can learn a lot from undergraduates because some of them are so different than professors. They are challenging and inspiring in ways graduate students are not.
Janet Rosenbaum, a professor of epidemiology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, writes:
Has anyone mentioned the connection between the honey/banana before bedtime and the advice to have an ounce of simple carbohydrate without protein before bedtime? There have been at least two books on this idea: Potatoes, not Prozac by Kathleen DesMaisons and The Serotonin Power Diet by Judith Wurtman. The first book suggests a small baked potato and bans alcohol and sugar during the day. The second book allows an ounce of any carbs such as pretzels. The proposed mechanism is that eating protein during the day, and carbs before bed without protein increases serotonin production over night, and my own experience is that it improves sleep and creates more vivid dreams.
I cannot easily get the Serotonin book here in Beijing but I found this related to the Potatoes book:
Now that you are having three meals a day at regular intervals, let’s add Mr. Spud to your routine. Have a potato (with its skin) every night three hours after dinner. It will help your body raise your serotonin level and make you feel more confident, competent, creative and optimistic. You can eat your potato baked, mashed, roasted, cut into oven fries or grated into hash browns. Just be sure you eat the skin. And you can top it with anything you like except foods that contain a protein. (Protein eaten along with the potato at bedtime will interfere with your serotonin-making process.) Good toppings are butter, salsa, mustard, spices, or olive oil. Toppings you should NOT use are cheese, sour cream, bacon bits, or cream of chicken soup.
I found when I ate honey with cheese the sleep-improvement effect of the honey was much reduced, in agreement with what is said here about avoiding cheese.
Here’s what happened when one person tried this. I am quoting only the parts about sleep:
[Day 1] I had the infamous potato at the recommended time. That potato really kept me up. I barely slept. What was this about her saying that a potato helps you get a good night’s sleep? But I’m willing to give it some time. I never get a good night’s sleep so it will be nice to see what that’s like again. [Day 2] This night, I could not sleep at ALL. I was up till around 4 am. How can a little potato keep a person up so much? [Day 3] I finally had that promised sleep that the author was talking about. WOW. I haven’t ever felt quite like this before. [Day 4] A blissful night’s sleep. [Day 9] Those potatoes really work on making one’s sleep much better. [Day 23] I am not eating potatoes at night most of the time, which is part of the PNP [Potatoes Not Prozac] diet, but not something that you start from the beginning. [Nothing about sleep.]
Maybe she stopped the bedtime potato because she wanted to lose weight faster.
A potato near bedtime will surely increase blood glucose during sleep, supporting the idea that a better supply of blood glucose is what improves sleep. Presumably it’s important to do this without (a) triggering too much insulin production or (b) increasing brain activity so much you wake up. Whether glycogen, in the liver or elsewhere, has anything to do with this I have no idea. Glycogen is one source of new glucose as the brain burns thru blood glucose but another is not yet digested carbohydrate in what you’ve recently eaten (e.g., potato).
Stephen Hsu, who has an excellent blog, recently became Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at Michigan State University. Before that, he was a professor of physics. At a dinner for faculty promoted to full professor, he said:
When an attorney prepares a case it is for her client. When a Google engineer develops a new algorithm, it is for Google — for money. Fewer than one in a thousand individuals in our society has the privilege, the freedom, to pursue their own ideas and creations. The vast majority of such people are at research universities. A smaller number are at think tanks or national labs, but most are professors like yourselves. It is you who will make the future better than the past; who will bring new wonders into existence.
In this blog, in thousands of posts, I have argued a much different view: everyone can make the future better than the past in the way Stephen is talking about, by adding to our understanding. In particular, anyone — not just professional researchers, such as professors at research universities — can increase our understanding of how to be healthy. This has already started to happen. Some examples:
1. Stuart King (a musician) commented how much bedtime honey helped him sleep better. Learning about this effect is a big step forward in knowing how to be healthy — good sleep is at the center of good health. No professional researcher has come close to Stuart’s insight.
2. Katherine Reid (trained as a protein chemist but not a professor) discovered that if she removed all glutamate from her daughter’s diet, her daughter’s autism disappeared. This is more progress than any professional researcher has made. None of them has made even one case of autism disappear.
3. Many people told me about how various treatments they learned about from this blog have helped them — for example Vitamin D3 in the morning and bedtime honey. I recently posted a comment about bedtime honey, for instance. These treatments are so new and surprising that these experiences are meaningful. They help others decide if these treatments should be taken seriously. (For anyone who dismisses these reports as “anecdotes”, I have one question: What have you discovered?)
4. I have used a brain tracking test to find out new things about how my environment affects my brain, including the benefits of butter and the bad effect of tofu. At least a billion people — everyone in China, for starters — eat tofu regularly. You might think that such a popular food would have been extensively tested for safety but, shockingly, other research supports my conclusion that tofu is bad. Anyone can do the sort of tests I did. Let me repeat my offer to give my brain tracking R software (which only works under Windows) to others who want to use it. There is an associated Google Community to join.
5. Although I am a professor, my self-experimental discoveries about sleep, mood and weight were outside the area of my graduate school training (animal learning). For example, I am not a sleep expert. I made my discoveries without expensive equipment or university resources beyond the library — that is, I made them with resources to which almost anyone has access.
I am sure these examples are the beginning of something important. They are easy to explain. Who is better equipped to discover important stuff about health, professional researchers (e.g, professors) or non-professionals (the rest of us)? Although professional researchers have big advantages over the rest of us — this is the usual view — non-professionals have big advantages over professionals that few people seem aware of. Sometimes the non-professional advantages outweigh the professional advantages and the non-professionals get there first. For example, a professional autism researcher could have done what Reid did (measure the effect of removing all glutamate on autism), but Reid did it first.
The advantages of non-professionals over professionals, a topic I have discussed many times, include:
1. Ability to self-track and self-experiment. This is too humble for many professionals. In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen emphasized that professors like to show off via their work. This is a disaster for science, where small (low status) and fast is much more effective than big (high status) and slow — a lesson that few health scientists have learned.
2. Freedom. Non-professionals can study anything, consider any crazy idea, test any treatment. Professionals must be respectable. Institutional rules and committees also constrain them.
3. Time. Non-professionals can study any problem for as long as they want. Professionals must publish regularly.
4. Motivation. Because they study their own problems, non-professionals are highly motivated to find the truth. For example, no one cares more about the safety of your food than you do. Professionals usually study problems whose solution gives them no practical benefit. While non-professionals care only about their own health, professionals care a great deal about their career, which makes it quite a bit harder to do the best thing for other people’s health.
5. IQ (which Stephen often blogs about). If you randomly select one professor who studies health, and compare him/her to a thousand randomly-selected non-professionals, the top IQs among the non-professionals will be much higher than the professor’s IQ.
I keep writing about this — hardly saying anything new — because it is so important, so non-intuitive (in almost every other area of knowledge, such as physics, only professionals make lasting contributions) and no one else says it.
Chronic right-side sinusitis came as a shock in November 2008, at age 42. For weeks both sides (left and right) were blocked. I lost my sense of smell even after my left sinus cleared. An incapacitating headache lasted months. My right sinus was often totally blocked. I had previously been in very good health. I had never been to a hospital, never taken medication, no drugs, slender, athletic, normal blood sugar and pressure, no dental fillings, etc. Some hay fever, but no other allergies.
The breakthrough was finding out about baby shampoo. In less than a week of shampooing my nose, a six-month headache was gone. It recurred occasionally until I fixed environmental causes. I tried many things, but the two that mattered were replacing the household carpet and vacuuming my mattress every couple of weeks. A couple of years later, my sense of smell returned. When you regain a sense you thought was lost forever, you appreciate even the stinkiest odors!
I found out about the use of baby shampoo to treat sinusitis from the website of a UCSD professor of medicine named Terence Davidson, who died recently. [Use of baby shampoo to treat sinusitis seems to have been recently rediscovered by an Omaha journalist named Michah Mertes.] The website no longer exists, but is archived in the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine shows that Dr. Davidson added mention of shampoo in summer of 2008, but by the summer of 2009 had removed it. Why remove mention of the only treatment that seemed to matter?
Sinusitis treatment in the U.S. is doubly silly. First, nearly all chronic sinusitis is fungal (said the Mayo Clinic in 1999), yet antibiotics are universally prescribed, with no effect on the primary infection. Second, no one ever looks for environmental causes.
More
Remember how baby shampoo disappeared from the UCSD prof’s website? Something similar happened at NeilMed’s website, and the reason may be a nasty side effect. This post says some people lost their sense of smell after using Neilmed’s surfactant additive. Neilmed makes my favorite sinus rinse product, which uses a squeeze bottle instead of gravity feed. A few years ago they briefly began selling a surfactant additive, but then pulled it off the market, and now have only an undated post saying the re-release is 2 to 3 years away. Maybe risk of side effects is why the UCSD guy removed it.
Thanks to Dave Lull.
Martin Feldman, a Harvard professor of economics and former advisor to President Reagan, is against a hike in the minimum wage. One of his arguments:
When low-skill labor becomes more expensive, employers have a greater incentive to mechanize or outsource their work.
He — like most economists — ignores the point that an increase in the minimum wage, by forcing employers to reexamine familiar practices, will increase innovation. (I have seen non-economists make this point.)
How you can hope to understand economics without understanding innovation is beyond me. I realize that economics is a job — that academic economists try to write papers that make incremental improvements in understanding and innovation is not always important. Yet the whole profession seems stuck in a world where it is okay to ignore innovation and okay to try to increase productivity yet not acknowledge that productivity and innovation are often at odds. (For example, almost all foreign aid programs ignore innovation.) I have never heard or read an economist make this simple and obvious point. The situation reminds me of a friend of mine. When she was in first grade, she had a lot of pennies. Now and then she would spend some. She knew how to add but not subtract, so after she spent some she had to count them all again. At least she got the right answer eventually. Economists, not understanding the effect of Policy X on innovation, really cannot predict the effects of any policy that affects innovation.
It isn’t just economists. Epidemiologists seem stuck in a world where it is okay to ignore the immune system. They act as if the immune system does not exist, except perhaps when someone asks them why smoking is so bad and they reply “maybe it reduces immune function”. Statistics professors seem stuck in a world where it is okay to ignore the question of how to generate an idea worth testing, except to grant that making graphs is helpful.
Psychology professors, at least the ones who do experiments, are also stuck that world. With few exceptions, they have no idea how to generate ideas plausible enough to be worth testing. You can read a thousand psychology textbooks and ten thousand psychology papers and end up knowing no more about how to do that than when you started. It is a methodological question, yes, but maybe you have to be a psychology professor to grasp how disabling it is to not have a good way to generate ideas (ideas plausible enough to be worth the cost of testing). It is like having a car — psychology professors know a lot about how to do experiments to test ideas — but no fuel.
Something is making a lot of very smart very capable people ignore the obvious. I have a theory of why these vast areas of ignorance — easily noticed, yet rarely acknowledged — exist. It is because science is slow and difficult and in several ways incompatible with careerism. Science is innovation, careerism is productivity. You, a professional scientist, are trying to climb up a wall of rock (= discover stuff) but you have to lift your career at the same time. Really really hard. If you can pretend to climb, that’s much easier. (My solution was to ignore my career, which suffered great damage.) Distant observers, including granting agencies, university administrators, journalists and the general public, have a hard time telling the difference between real climbing and pretend climbing.
In the New York Times, a writer named Kira Piekoff, a graduate student in Bioethics, tells how she sent her blood to three different companies, including 23andMe, for genetic analysis and got back results that differed greatly. As usual, none of the companies told her anything about the error of measurement in their reports, judging from what she wrote. So she’s naive and they’re naive (or dishonest). Fine.
I’m unsurprised that a graduate student in bioethics has no understanding of measurement error. What’s fascinating is that the experts she consulted didn’t either, judging by what they said.
A medical ethicist named Arthur L. Caplan weighed in. He said:
The ‘risk is in the eye of the beholder’ standard is not going to work.We need to get some kind of agreement on what is high risk, medium risk and low risk. [Irrelevant — Seth] If you want to spend money wisely to protect your health and you have a few hundred dollars, buy a scale, stand on it, and act accordingly.
As if blood sugar and blood pressure measurements aren’t useful. A good scale costs $15.
A director of clinical genetics named Wendy Chung said:
Even if they are accurately looking at 5 percent of the attributable risk, they’ve ignored the vast majority of the other risk factors — the dark matter for genetics — because we as a scientific community haven’t yet identified those risk factors.
She changed the subject.
J. Craig Venter, the famous gene sequencer, does not understand the issue:
Your results are not the least bit surprising. Anything short of sequencing is going to be short on accuracy — and even then, there’s almost no comprehensive data sets to compare to.
The notion that “anything short of [complete] sequencing” cannot be helpful is absurd, if I understand what “short on accuracy” means. He reminds me of doctors who don’t understand that a t test corrects for sample size. They believe any study with less than 100 subjects cannot be trusted.
I told a friend recently that I have become very afraid of doctors. For exactly the reason illustrated in these quotes, from well-known experts who are presumably much more competent than any doctor I am likely to see. The experts were unable to comment usefully on something as basic as measurement error. Failing to understand basics makes them easy marks — for drug companies, for example — just as the writer of the article was an easy mark for the experts, who managed to be quoted in the Times, making them appear competent. Surely almost any doctor will be worse.
A reader writes:
The bedtime honey treatment has been a godsend for me. I had been sleepless for several months when you first wrote about the honey, waking up many times every night and staying awake for long periods. I immediately began trying the honey, and the first night, though I still woke up a few times, I had dreams for the first time in ages. After a couple more nights I was sleeping all night. I usually wake up once a night for one reason or another, but wonderfully, get back to sleep which was impossible for so long before the honey. Sleep deprivation is so miserable, I cannot thank you enough!
In case you haven’t tried it. What did I blog about before? I can’t remember.