Category: self-experimentation

Self-Experimentation as Legal Gambling

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Listening to Freakonomics Radio on lottery-like savings accounts reminded me of a big reason I self-experiment: it resembles buying a lottery ticket. Whenever you collect data I believe there is a power-law distribution of benefit: large chance of little benefit, small chance of large benefit. (Your sophistication and other things affect the slope.) Almost all data confirms what you already knew — small benefit. A very small fraction of data gives you a new idea — large benefit. Because self-experimentation is about oneself, new ideas can have tangible benefits, just as winning the lottery provides tangible benefit (money)

Basically I hope for outliers — a sudden jump up or down in something I’m tracking, such as arithmetic speed or sleep duration. This may give me a new idea about what controls that measure. Self-experiments are also valuable because something I’m not deliberately measuring may change. When I started watching faces on TV in the morning to see if it would affect my sleep, my mood, which I wasn’t deliberately measuring, suddenly improved.

It really does feel like playing the lottery for free. To not make a measurement I could easily make feels like walking by a perfectly good lottery ticket lying in the street. Loss aversion sets in.

Walking Creates A Thirst For Dry Knowledge

Seth Roberts12 Comments

A few weeks ago I got a treadmill for my Beijing apartment. Two days ago I was walking on it (I try to walk 1 hr/day) while watching Leverage to make the activity more palatable. But Leverage bored me. It was too simple. So I took out some Chinese flashcards (character on one side, English and pinyin on the other) and started studying them. I was astonished how pleasant it was. An hour of walking and studying went by . . . uh, in a flash. In my entire life I have never had such a pleasant hour studying. The next day it happened again! The experience appears infinitely repeatable. I’ve previously mentioned the man who memorized Paradise Lost while walking on a treadmill.

I’ve noticed before that treadmill walking (by itself boring) and Chinese-character learning (by itself boring) become pleasant when combined. So why was I astonished? Because the increase in enjoyment was larger. The whole activity was really pleasant, like drinking water when thirsty. When an hour was up, I could have kept going. I wanted to do it again. When I noticed it earlier, I was using Anki to learn Chinese characters. Now I am using flashcards in blocks of ten (study 10 until learned, get a new set of 10, study them until learned . . . ). The flashcards provide much more sense of accomplishment and completion, which I thinks makes the activity more pleasant.

My progress with Chinese characters has been so slow that during the latest attempt (putting them on my wall) I didn’t even try to learn both the pinyin and the meaning at the same time; I had retreated to just trying to learn the meaning. That was hard enough. I have had about 100 character cards on the walls of my apartment for a month but I’ve only learned the meaning of about half of them. No pinyin at all. In contrast, in two one-hour treadmill sessions I’ve gotten through 60 cards . . . including pinyin. For me, learning pinyin is much harder than learning meaning.

It’s like drinking water when you’re thirsty versus when you’re not thirsty. The walking turns a kind of switch that makes it pleasant to learn dry knowledge, just as lack of water creates thirst. Not only did studying dry materials become much more pleasant I suspect I also became more efficient — more retentive. I was surprised how fast I managed to reach a criterion of zero mistakes.

I had previously studied flashcards while walking around Tsinghua. This did not produce an oh-my-god experience. I can think of three reasons why the effect is now much stronger: 1. Ordinary walking is distracting. You have to watch where you’re going, there are other people, cars, trees, and so on. Distraction reduces learning. If the distractions are boring — and they usually are –Â the experience becomes less pleasant. 2. Ordinary walking provides more information than treadmill walking (which provides no information at all — you’re staring at a wall). The non-flashcard info reduces desire to learn what’s on the flashcards. 3. On these Tsinghua walks I had about 100 flashcards which I cycled through. Using sets of 10, as I said, provides more sense of accomplishment. I’ve also had about 20 Chinese-speaking lessons while walking around. The walking made the lessons more pleasant, yes, but it wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as the treadmill/flashcard combination. And because lessons with a tutor are intrinsically more enjoyable than studying flashcards, the increase in enjoyment was less dramatic.

As I said earlier I think there’s an evolutionary reason for this effect: The thirst for knowledge (= novelty) created by walking pushed us to explore and learn about our surroundings. One interesting feature of my discovery about treadmill and flashcards is that it may take better advantage of this mechanism than did ordinary Stone-Age life — better in the sense that more pleasure/minute can be derived. In the Stone Age, novelty, new dry knowledge, was hard to come by. You could only walk so fast. After a while, it was hard to walk far enough away to be in a new place. Whereas I can easily switch from flashcards I’ve learned to new ones. An example of a supranormal stimulus.

The Decline Effect

Seth Roberts14 Comments

A new article in The New Yorker by Jonah Lehrer is about declines in the size of experimental or quasi-experimental effects over time. For example, Jonathan Schooler, an experimental psychologist, found that if subjects are asked to describe a face soon after seeing it their later memory for the face is worse. As Schooler continued to study the effect, it appeared to get weaker. The article also describes examples from drug trials (a anti-psychotic drug appeared to become weaker over 15 years) and ecology (the effect of male symmetry on mating success got weaker over years).

It’s nice to see an ambitious unconventional article. I blogged a few weeks ago about difficulties replicating the too-many-choices effect. Difficulty of replication and the decline effect are the same thing. I could do what Jared Diamond does in Collapse: give a list of five or six reasons why this happens. (Judging by this paper, the effect, although real, is much weaker than you’d guess from Lehrer’s article.) For example, the initial report has much more flexibility of data analysis than later reports. Flexibility of analysis allows researchers to increase the size of effects.

A long list of reasons would miss a larger point (as Diamond does). A larger point is this: Science (search for truth) and profession (making a living) are not a good fit. In a dozen ways, the demands of a scientist’s job get in the way of finding and reporting truth. You need to publish, get a grant, please your colleagues, and so on. Nobody pays you for finding the truth. If that is a goal, it is several goals from the top of the list. Most jobs have customers. If a wheelwright made a bad wheel, it broke. Perhaps he had to replace it or got a bad reputation. There was fast powerful feedback. In science, feedback is long-delayed or absent. Only long after you have been promoted may it become clear anything was wrong with the papers behind your promotion. The main customers for science are other scientists. The pressure to have low standards — and thus appear better to promotion committees and non-scientists — is irresistible. Whereas if Wheelwright Y makes better wheels than Wheelwright X, customers may notice and Wheelwright Y may benefit.

There are things about making science a job that push scientists toward the truth as well, such as more money and time. When science is a job, a lot more research gets done. Fine. But how strong are the forces against finding truth? I was never surprised by the replication difficulties Lehrer writes about. I had heard plenty of examples, knew there were many reasons it happened. But I was stunned by the results of my self-experimentation. I kept finding stuff (e.g., breakfast disturbs sleep, butter improves brain function) that contradicted the official line (breakfast is the most important meal of the day, butter is dangerous). Obviously I had a better tool (self-experimentation) for finding things out. The shock was how many things that had supposedly been found out were wrong. Slowly I realized how much pressure career demands place on scientists. It is no coincidence that the person most responsible for debunking man-made global warming, Stephen McIntyre, is not a professional climatologist (or a professional scientist in any other area). Unlike them, he can say whatever he wants.

Thanks to Peter Couvares.

More In his blog, failing to see the forest for the trees, Lehrer says we must still believe in climate change (presumably man-made): climate change and evolution by natural selection “have been verified in thousands of different ways by thousands of different scientists working in many different fields.” Charles Darwin, like McIntyre, was an amateur, and therefore could say whatever he wanted.

Slate Covers Self-Tracking

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Slate has recently published several articles on self-tracking. “How should we use data to improve our lives?” is a nice way to frame it. By data, the author, Michael Egger, means data we collect ourselves — leaving the traditional collectors of data, such as government and scientists, out of the loop (act –> collect data –> act). The first person to close the loop like that was Richard Bernstein, who measured his own blood sugar levels several times/day — omitting his doctor, who had measured Bernstein’s blood sugar level once/month, out of the feedback loop. The consequences were huge. Bernstein’s health got much better. And the treatment of diabetes changed forever when what Bernstein did became common. Hanna Rosin wrote about tracking her blood sugar levels in an article with a completely misleading subtitle (“Diabetes has forced me to become a self-tracker, and I can’t stand it”).

Another article — titled ”Living the Quantified Life: Some of the most inspiring self-tracking projects” but promoted as “The guy who eats a half-stick of butter a day and other strange ‘self-trackers’ ” — is about three examples of self-tracking: my butter research, the benefits of categorizing one’s possessions, and Jon Cousins’s discovery that telling other people his mood greatly improved it.

Slate is running a contest about this:

We are looking for great ways that we can collect and analyze data to improve our lives. You can submit your idea by clicking the button below. The deadline for submitting ideas has been extended until Wednesday, Dec. 8. We’ll be tracking your most interesting ideas throughout the month. And don’t forget to vote on the proposals you like best. We’ll take a closer look at the three top-vote-getting ideas and write about them.

Cold Shower Report

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Blogging about the effect of cold showers on mood made me want to try them. I’ve taken cold showers before. They had no obvious effect beyond mild invigoration. But I learned that the showers need to last at least 5 minutes to get the mood benefits. My earlier showers were much shorter than that.
So far I’ve taken 4 cold showers, one per day, each 5-7 minutes long. Water temperature 56-60 degrees F. The first was unpleasant for maybe a minute. For hours afterward I felt warm inside — that was obvious. Maybe a slight rise in mood, but not an obvious one. With subsequent showers the unpleasant part at the start grew shorter. Now it’s maybe 20 seconds. The warm feeling inside is less obvious but maybe that’s because it’s constant. My apartment started to feel too warm. I opened windows to cool it off. Outside I was more comfortable (it’s close to freezing here in Beijing). I wear fewer layers of clothing.

I like the warming effect and will continue. Maybe colder water would produce more of an effect. I live on the sixth floor. Even if outside a minute ago it has traveled through warm pipes. Perhaps I can get greater effects walking outside loosely clothed.

Food For Thought

Seth Roberts6 Comments

A perfectly good Economist article about food and brain function includes the following:

Many studies suggest that diets which are rich in trans- and saturated fatty acids, such as those containing a lot of deep-fried foods and butter, have bad effects on cognition. Rodents put on such diets show declines in cognitive performance within weeks.

Whereas I found butter improved my cognitive performance within a day. And pork fat improved my sleep within a day. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if foods deep-fried in plant oils, such as corn oil, are bad for the brain.

Cold Showers Raise Mood

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Todd Becker pointed me to this post which is negative about the notion that cold showers raise mood (“empty science”) but you can ignore the negativity and go to the comment that gives a long list of studies that support the idea. Todd has blogged about his use of cold showers.

Todd calls this hormesis. About the mood-raising aspect of cold showers, I’m not so sure. There is a broad correlation between being sleepy and being in a bad mood.  So anything that wakes us up is likely to improve our mood. But if cold showers improve one’s response to stress of all sorts — which is less clear — it does seem like hormesis in other contexts. When I think of hormesis I think of two sorts: intra-cellular (e.g., x-ray-like radiation breaks stuff, activating repair systems — radiation hormesis) and extra-cellular (microbes in fermented food activate the immune system). But there are other examples of similar stuff: exercise breaks muscle fibers (which is why you shouldn’t exercise the same muscles two days in a row) and longer-term increases them; bones when broken grow back stronger. If we need a certain amount of thermal or other stress to properly respond to stress that would be another example.

Examples of MS Liberation Therapy

Seth Roberts10 Comments

This story from the Globe and Mail describes what happened to ten Canadians who left the country to get liberation therapy for their multiple sclerosis (MS). The therapy consists of widening veins that drain blood from the brain. The therapy does not always work, but it usually does. The improvement is so fast and large — comparable to giving someone with scurvy Vitamin C — that the thing being changed must be the source of the problem.

Mainstream MS researchers missed this completely. The mainstream view is that MS is an auto-immune disease (e.g., according to Mayo Clinic staff). This view would never lead you to the liberation surgery. Doctors not only have the wrong idea, they are unwilling to defend it. A woman in the Globe and Mail story tried to get the anti-liberation argument from neurologists. She couldn’t:

Unfortunately the neurologists are all hysterical. You can’t talk to them.

Remember this the next time someone tells you that ulcers are not caused by stress but are actually caused by bacteria — as several contributors to this EDGE symposium claim.

The vast improvement in understanding of MS came about because someone with the necessary expertise (a professor of surgery) cared more than most MS researchers because his wife had MS. I think this is why my self-experimentation found such different solutions than mainstream science: because (a) I cared more than the professional researchers who studied the subject (e.g., sleep) and (b) I had the necessary expertise to do research. I discuss this here.

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

Epilepsy’s Big, Fat Miracle …

Seth Roberts3 Comments

… is the title of a New York Times Magazine article about the ketogenic diet, a treatment for childhood epilepsy, which I’ve blogged about several times (here, here, here, here, here). It’s a very-high-fat diet. It interests me for two reasons: (a) It connects a high-fat diet with proper brain function, as my self-experiments have done. A curious feature of the ketogenic diet is that it isn’t permanent. After several years the child can go off it. My self-experimentation suggests that Americans eat far too little of certain fats. Perhaps eating enough of these fats would prevent childhood epilepsy. (b) It shows how someone who cares enough — in this case, Jim Abrahams, whose son had epilepsy — can be more effective than professional researchers and doctors. Abrahams rediscovered the diet. He saw its value, the professionals didn’t. I’ve argued that this is part of why my self-experimentation found new solutions to common problems: because I had those problems. I cared more about finding a workable solution than researchers in those areas, who had several other concerns (publication, funding, acceptance, etc.).

The details of the article reminded me of something I learned in the BBC series The Story of Science. For hundreds of years, medical students were told, following Aristotle, that the liver has three lobes. It doesn’t. You might think that examination of thousands of actual livers would have dispelled the wrong idea, but it didn’t. The article contains many examples of doctors ignoring perfectly good evidence in favor of nonsense they read in a book or heard in a lecture. Epilepsy is easy to measure. If a child has 100 seizures per day, and has been having them at this rate for years, and this goes down to 5 shortly after he starts the ketogenic diet, and goes up again when the child goes off the diet, there is no doubt the diet works. As early as the 1930s, this had been observed hundreds of times. This was overwhelming evidence of effectiveness. Doctors ignored it, probably based on the modern equivalent of the three-lobed liver. They complained, according to the article, that there was “no evidence it worked” or that the evidence wasn’t “controlled” or “scientific” (whatever that means). A study published in 2008 “answered doubts about keto’s clinical effectiveness” — as if doctors needed the equivalent of a very-large-type book to be able to read what most of us can read with normal-sized type.

According to the article, “by 2000, more people were asking about keto, but most pediatric neurologists still would not prescribe it” — as if the parents needed the approval of their doctor to try it. You don’t need a prescription to buy food.

Thanks to Tim Beneke, Michael Bowerman, Alex Chernavsky, David Cramer, and Peter Couvares.