Category: self-experimentation

Two Faces Better Than One?

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Here I describe my discovery that seeing faces on TV in the morning improved my mood the next day. The details of the effect suggested that the ideal stimulus is what you’d see during a conversation. For a long time I used the C-Span show Booknotes as the main source of the faces. I watched it on a 25-inch TV. More recently I used my own face in a mirror. It was readily available and perfectly life-size. I listened to a podcast or book at the same time.

A few months ago, Caleb Cooper commented saying that he’d found that looking at two faces every morning seemed to work better than looking at one face. He found that Bloggingheads.tv expanded to full screen on a 24-inch monitor (measured diagonally) produced close-to-life-size faces, which is what he wanted.

This interested me for several reasons: 1. It might make the effect stronger. 2. Bloggingheads.tv has a big selection, offering control over size. 3. I disliked looking at my face for long times. 4. It seems more naturalistic than looking at my own face.

I’ve been trying this with a 22-inch monitor (which I already had). Perhaps 24-inch would be better. The effect does seem stronger, as Caleb said.

I asked Caleb several questions about his experience.

How did you get started doing this?

I think it started when I read your posts about standing and sleeping. This led me to read your paper on self experimentation and sleep. Like you, I often suffered from early awakenings where I would wake up around 2-3 hours early, still feeling tired but having a hard time going back to sleep.

Based on what I learned from you and other sources, I tried out the following; got a pair of blue blocker clip-ons for my glasses which I put on about two hours before bed; ordered an Apollo goLite blue light emitter that I use for about an hour in the morning, I would sometimes take 1/3 mg of melatonin nine hours after waking up, and 3mg half hour before bed, and I started standing on a high difficulty Thera-Band balance pad on one leg while looking into a mirror for 30 minutes in the morning.

What made you think it was worth a try?

Well, why not:) Most self experimentation can be easily done for practically no cost, while the potential upside is significant. There’s also satisfying curiosity, expanding self knowledge, gaining mastery over your mind and body… You had a plausible theory, had collected suggestive data, and I’d already found the appetite suppression effect of the Shagnri-La was very real, so you had a track record of introducing ideas worth paying attention to.

What happened at first?

It felt to me like my sleep modestly improved, sleeping through the night longer and having the energy to get up and go much sooner after waking. This was awhile ago though, I didn’t keep any data, and I was adding and dropping different things, so my experience doesn’t have a high enough confidence interval for drawing any general inferences.

When did you make those changes?

I’d guess around sixteen months ago.

After you made those changes (“got a pair of BlueBlocker glasses…”) did your mood change?

It improved in as much as waking up feeling rested makes you feel a lot better than trying to get up while still tired.

Tell me something about yourself (job, age, etc.).

I got into medicine through Clinical Massage Therapy. Being a high school dropout I wanted something I could get into quickly, then sink or swim on my own. Massage is one of the few fields the university-accreditation complex hasn’t sunk its tentacles deeply into (a mixed blessing; for an autodidact it lets you quickly start a great career, but the field really needs a bifurcated certification track to separate medical massage from relaxational spa massage). I live in the Pacific Northwest, near the site where they developed the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Despite all the lingering nuclear waste, it’s a nice, mid sized metro area. I’m in my mid twenties.

Chinese Mystery Explained: Humorous Names

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Describing my first day of teaching at Tsinghua, I wrote:

The students did brief introductions. Many students appeared to think that one student’s Chinese name was humorous. This was briefly explained to me but I still have trouble believing it.

I don’t remember the brief explanation. At the time I didn’t know that my Chinese name sounds exactly like the word for eggplant, which has different characters. As the Tsinghua story suggests, this isn’t rare. I met a girl whose name sounds the same as China’s ruler. (Different characters, of course.) Anyway, it seems a blessing that my name has a humorous side and perhaps that’s what the parents in this case were thinking.

Law Guardians and Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts5 Comments

In my recent Medical Hypotheses paper, I argue that scientists care a lot about status display and this interferes with good science. Failure to self-experiment is an example. I think the main reason self-experimentation is unpopular is that it looks low-status. Here I explain how sleep researchers would benefit from the self-experimentation they don’t do.

In a May New Yorker article, Janet Malcolm gives another example of status display getting in the way of doing a good job:

Not speaking to their clients [children] is almost a badge of honor among law guardians [lawyers assigned to look after the interests of children in the legal system, such as the child of divorcing parents]. In a 1982 study by the New York State Bar Association, this practice was found to be ubiquitous. . . . Judges continue to turn a blind eye to what the Bar Association called the “phantom” attorney.

Good Sleep on Long Flight

Seth Roberts18 Comments

Today I flew from Beijing to San Francisco, an 11-hour flight. For the first time ever on a long flight, I slept well even though I had to sleep in my seat. (When I’ve been able to stretch out on several seats or on the floor, I’ve slept okay.) I slept so much the flight felt short — like it was four hours long. When we landed in San Francisco, I felt great. As if I hadn’t traveled at all. This has never happened before. Instead of going straight home, I did some errands.

Why did I sleep so well? It surely helped that the flight started at 4 pm Beijing time, to which I was well-adjusted. But I’ve never before slept well sitting up, no matter what the flight time. I think this time was different because I did two things I’ve never done together before:

1. Lots of one-legged standing. Around 2 pm I stood on one leg to exhaustion 3 times (right leg, left leg, right leg). Around 7 pm I did it again: left leg, right leg, left leg. Six times is a really large dose, too large to be used every day because my legs would get too strong. Usually I do two or four times. I think that the two bouts (in this case, 2 pm and 7 pm) need to be widely spaced so that signaling molecules released into the blood by the exertion can be replenished.

2. Lots of cheese. Around 7 pm, I ate about a quarter-pound of Stilton. With a milder cheese I might have eaten more. It isn’t just the animal fat, I think something in milk makes me sleepy.

Around 8 pm I started trying to fall asleep. It didn’t seem promising, I only felt a little tired and not completely comfortable, but after maybe 4 minutes with my eyes shut, I fell asleep for most of the rest of the flight.

My Theory of Human Evolution (good-luck charms)

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In a museum about the history of Tokyo, I saw an exhibit that showed a typical Tokyo home from hundreds of years ago. It contained an elaborate good-luck charm next to the shrine. I realized that good-luck charms can be explained by my theory of human evolution as another example of behavior — along with art, ceremonies, and gift-giving norms – that long ago supported technical progress. This particular good-luck charm was hard to make. Because people wanted them, they bought them. This helped support skilled craftsmen, who were the ones who made technical progress. Along the same lines, ceremonies usually involve lots of high-end hard-to-make stuff, such as fine clothes.

Visiting distant big cities has taught me a lot about human nature. The big examples are the Shangri-La Diet (Paris) and the umami hypothesis (a earlier Tokyo visit led me to make a lot of miso soup, which had surprising effects). Trips to Antigua (single words make it easy to trade), Toronto (gifts support technical progress), and now Tokyo (again) helped me think about human evolution.

The Future of Dentistry and Experimental Psychology?

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Rereading an old post, I found this:

Today I had my teeth cleaned and was told my gums were in excellent shape, better than ever before [due to flaxseed oil]. They were less inflamed than usual. “What causes inflammation?” I asked. “Tartar,” I was told.

I believe that reddish gums are a great sign (so easy to see) that overall your body has too much inflammation, putting you at higher risk for many common diseases. (Perhaps due to too little omega-3, which the body uses to make an anti-inflammation hormone.) Every day my dentist measured, or at least saw, a great correlate of health (the redness of his patients’ gums) and failed to notice. It’s like failing to notice an oil field under your property. If dentists became experts in measuring gum redness and helped their patients lower overall inflammation, the public health contribution would be great. (Writing this makes me wonder why I haven’t become skilled at measuring the redness of my gums.)
Experimental psychologists are in a similar position. I believe brain health is closely correlated with health of the rest of the body. In other words, the foods that make the brain work better make the rest of the body work better. I discovered the anti-inflammatory effects of flaxseed oil because it improved my balance. The brain is much easier to study (via behavior) than the rest of the body — it’s a model system for the rest of the body. Experimental psychologists are as unaware of their good fortune as dentists. By using their skills to figure out how to have the healthiest possible brain, they could make a great contribution to human welfare.

Omega-3 Correlations in Eskimos Support Anti-Inflammation Effect

Seth Roberts8 Comments

A problem with much nutritional epidemiology, as I blogged earlier, is “the narrow range of intakes within a given population”. For this reason Ernst Wynder thought it better to make between-country comparisons. Of course different countries differ in many ways other than the ones you care about. A solution to both problems is to study an unusual country — a country with a wide range of intakes of the nutrient you care about — in depth.

This is what a new paper about omega-3 has done. The researchers measured the blood of about 400 Eskimos, who had a much larger range of omega-3 levels in their blood than Americans or Europeans. The results aren’t easy to sum up because there were plenty of non-linear associations. Here’s what I think is their most interesting result:

Associations of EPA and DHA with C-reactive protein were inverse and nonlinear: for EPA, the association appeared stronger at concentrations >3% of total fatty acids; for DHA, it was observed only at concentrations >7% of total fatty acids.

C-reactive protein is a marker of inflammation. Notice that, due to the details, the combination of (a) high intakes and (b) a wide range of intakes makes this correlation much easier to see. This result suggests that EPA and DHA (or something correlated with them) indeed reduce inflammation, as is often proposed. Perfectly consistent with my dentist’s observation that my gums looked a lot better (less inflamed) right after I started drinking 4 T/day flaxseed oil. Plus a reader’s observation that his sports injuries healed much faster after he started drinking 4 T/day flaxseed oil. (And here.)

Previous epidemiology had had a hard time detecting the anti-inflammatory correlation of omega-3s. My self-experimentation plus other people’s observations made it obvious there was something to it (and provided experimental evidence for causality: more omega-3, less inflammation). Better epidemiology has now supported this.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

The Trouble With RCTs

Seth Roberts11 Comments

In an email to a friend, I compared the obsession of med school professors with methodological purity (e.g., efficacy must be demonstrated with an RCT, randomized controlled trial) to religious ritual. More concern with appearances (ritual), I said, is linked to less understanding of substance. My friend replied:

I am actually a believer in this particular religion (The Cult of RCT)! Seriously: I think the medical world is quite right to put a huge premium on RCTs, because RCTs so often prove that things they are doing don’t work. While sometimes the RCT may provide a negative verdict on something that does work, this seems to me an unusual case, and generally avoidable if one considers statistical power, possible subgroup responses, etc and avoids overgeneralizing the conclusions.

I replied:

Are RCTs better than what prevailed before? Probably. But I would say the same about religion, which has its benefits.

I think the medical world has turned off a large fraction of its brain via insistence on RCTs and failure to understand their weaknesses and the strengths of alternatives. It isn’t just that “RCTs may return a negative verdict on something that works,” it’s also that such a requirement for very expensive research suppresses innovation — testing things via cheaper ways. Atul Gawande wrote about how obstetricians made a lot of progress by ignoring this requirement:

https://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/09/061009fa_fact

Other areas of medicine, which followed the RCT requirement, made less progress during the same period, it can be argued.

Let’s say I told you that the only way you can travel to work is via an armed escort — you would be appalled, even though it’s true you would be safer. An insistence on RCTs is overreaction. Given the lack of innovation in medicine/health care, for which I believe they (or at least the lack of understanding they embody) are partly responsible, very expensive overreaction.

The best way to learn is to do. The best way to learn about health is to do as many experiments as possible. Not slow, expensive RCTs. Not slow, expensive surveys, which don’t involving “doing” to the extent that an experiment does. This is a big reason my self-experiments taught me a lot — because I could do so many of them.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Thanks to Steve Hansen and Gary Wolf.