Category: self-experimentation

“A Great Change is Coming” (part 1 of 2)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In an earlier post, I wrote “A great change is coming” — meaning a great improvement in health. It will be due to better ideas. Let’s call the new ideas evolutionary thinking. They will replace gatekeeper thinking. With gatekeeper thinking, which began with shamans, you need to extract payment from sick people. Remedies and associated ideas that don’t allow this are ignored. Gatekeeper thinking pervades not only mainstream medicine but also clinical psychology, alternative medicine, and a zillion advertisements. Everyone in those fields, like the rest of us, needs to make a living. The possibility that they are doing so at the expense of the rest of us — by suppressing innovation — is impolite to bring up. Perhaps the person you are speaking to has a brother who’s a doctor. And for an enormously long time there was no alternative. A sick person doesn’t have time to do research, even if that were possible. They are forced to rely on gatekeepers, who are interested only in certain types of remedies.

Now there is an alternative — now just a glimmer, but surely growing. It has several dimensions. One is the sort of research involved. At one extreme of that dimension is original research — for example, my discovery that breakfast caused my early awakening. Gatekeeper thinking had no interest in such ideas. You could not charge for something that simple. I wrote about my discovery, with plenty of data. Anyone with web access can read it. At the other extreme of that dimension is “library research” — usually web search. An example is Dennis Mangan searching for possible cures for his mom’s Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS) and discovering persuasive stories about niacin. Again, there was no mainstream research about niacin for RLS. Anyone with web access can read what Dennis found. So for these two disorders — early awakening and restless leg syndrome — there is now a practical alternative to consulting (and paying) an expert. This isn’t repackaged folk wisdom or home remedies or someone opining. There is clear-cut data and theory involved. In the case of breakfast and sleep, it makes evolutionary sense that food would cause anticipatory activity. Likewise, the case for megadose vitamins makes biochemical sense, as Bruce Ames and his colleagues explained. You can judge for yourself.

Another dimension of this emerging space is the simplicity of the treatment. In my breakfast example, I established cause and effect with just one change: stopping breakfast. Dennis’s example also involved a simple change: megadose niacin. In contrast, Aaron Blaisdell found his sun sensitivity went away after he made many dietary changes. If you have sun sensitivity you will find it harder to duplicate what Aaron did than what Dennis or I did, but you can still come close and in any case it is a big improvement over the previous best treatment, which was to avoid the sun.

In all three cases — early awakening, RLS, and sun sensitivity — there was no gatekeeper approval. (My article with my breakfast discovery was peer-reviewed but appeared in a psychology journal rather than a medical one). In all three cases, the solution was excellent — cheap, fast, highly effective, no side effects — compared to prescription drugs (e.g., for depression). The sort of solutions that gatekeeper thinking doesn’t find. In all three cases, you don’t need to go through a gatekeeper to learn about them.

In a later post I’ll describe why I think this emerging solution space will soon become far more important.

The Foxconn Suicides

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Foxconn, located on the coast of China, is the largest electronics manufacturer in the world. They make iPhones, Wiis, and many other famous products. You may have read about the epidemic of suicide that has broken out among its employees. There were two in the last few days, for example. The count now stands at something like a dozen suicides in about a month. The factory complex involved is gigantic, with perhaps 300,000 workers, but no question this is a terrible thing. The victims are all or mostly men in their early twenties. The median length of employment at Foxconn might be about a year.

Foxconn has appealed to my university (Tsinghua) and in particular my department (Psychology) for help. I’m told their assembly line was designed at Tsinghua. In any case, several people from my department (faculty and graduate students) have gone to the factory and tried to do something.

At a department meeting we discussed our department’s involvement. I said it’s really hard to make progress on such problems for reasons that might not be obvious. When I had trouble waking up too early, I started to study the problem via self-experimentation. All I cared about was solving the problem. Any answer was acceptable. I would spend as long as it took to find it. It took me 10 years to make visible progress. The first thing I figured out was that the problem was partly due to eating breakfast — which sleep researchers had failed to discover.
Consider the Foxconn suicides. It would be incredibly helpful to figure out what’s causing them. But few professors want to study a problem that they have no idea if they can solve nor how long it will take. They don’t want to wait ten years to write a paper. By then their funding will have run out. If funding is assured regardless of progress, then how does the funder ensure they are actually doing something? And few professors have total academic freedom. Their graduate school advisor, their academic friends, the people who control their career have certain beliefs. About which theories are good and which are bad. About which methods are “correct”. If their results contradict these beliefs, if they use a “wrong” method, they will suffer, just as all heretics suffer. So there is pressure to come up with an acceptable answer using proper methods. This gets in the way of coming up with the actual answer.

This doesn’t mean academic research is useless, but it does mean that professors work in shackles that outsiders are, in my experience, unaware of. I wrote about this in my Medical Hypotheses paper. It is a big reason my self-experimentation found new and surprising answers to old questions: I had total freedom. All I cared about was finding the answer. I didn’t care about publications. I didn’t worry about funding. I had as much time as it took.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of My Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts7 Comments

A good way to have new ideas, it’s said, is to talk about the ideas you already have. After I posted about advantages of self-experimentation, Bruce Charlton, the editor of Medical Hypotheses, invited me to write an editorial about it. Wondering what I thought gave me some new ideas and the editorial turned into a full-length article called “ The unreasonable effectiveness of my self-experimentation.” For 20 years I’d been mystified by this. I’m not exaggerating, I had no idea what I was doing right. I wanted to know — so I could do more of, or at least continue to do, whatever it was — but I just couldn’t figure it out.

Restaurant With No Menu

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Today I had lunch at a Beijing restaurant with no menu. You choose dishes in discussion with your waiter. The restaurant’s theme is kung fu. Somehow having no menu is kung-fu-like. A sword hung on the wall and there were other martial-arts decorations. As we left, the wait staff said an ancient Chinese good-bye loudly in unison. It meant “the mountain and river will still be here [a metaphor for enduring friendship], let’s make a concrete date to meet again.” Only one of our two dishes was really good but I’ll go back.

Foot Fungus Revisited

Seth Roberts7 Comments

I described earlier my theory about foot fungus — that mine, at least, has been caused by socks. It recently got worse. Consistent with my theory, I had just gotten a dozen new pairs of socks of a new material. My theory suggested I buy new socks of a different material (I did), change socks more often (I did), and go sockless more often (I did). As soon as I made these changes, the fungus went away. More support for the theory. A few other people (see the comments to my earlier post) and a friend have had experiences that also support the theory.

My Berkeley doctor didn’t know this theory. He looked at my foot fungus and repeatedly suggested certain non-prescription medicines. I haven’t seen this point made elsewhere, although you can find a list of 20 things to do that includes “change your socks often”.

Sometimes doctors (and medical schools) are criticized for lack of emphasis on nutrition. Sometimes they are criticized for lack of emphasis on prevention. This was neither: it was cure and non-nutritional. Curing infection is one of the main things doctors try to do, which is why antibiotics are heavily-prescribed.

Suppose you bring a task to Programmer A. He has done a long education in programming followed by a long internship, and then passed a difficult screening test to become “board-certified”. To maintain his certification he takes “continuing education” classes. He returns with a 100-line program that fails to work. (The medicines my doctor recommended failed to work. He thought the failure was due to my not following the directions closely enough.) Then a 10-year-old boy gives you a 3-line program that works perfectly. You would realize your society is fond of make-believe — in particular, making believe that those who teach programmers understand their subject.

Butter: New Antidepressant?

Seth Roberts19 Comments

Ever since I found that pork fat improved my sleep, I’ve tried to eat a substantial amount every day. A few months ago, I knew I couldn’t eat any that day so I had a lot of butter at lunch (about 30 g). About 1-2 hours later, I felt in an unusually good mood — in particular, unusually calm. I hadn’t noticed such an effect with pork fat, perhaps because it is digested more slowly. (It’s easy to see that pork fat melts more slowly than butter.)

Now a friend has reported a similar effect:

My mood is better with the Straus butter, but I am concerned about my cholesterol, so maybe I’ll just use it when I feel depressed. But it does work.

I’d guess that Straus Family Creamery butter, which is from grass-fed cows, has more omega-3 than other butter but I haven’t noticed mood elevation from flaxseed oil, so I doubt that’s involved. Moreover, I’ve always been drinking plenty of flaxseed oil so I doubt I’m omega-3 deficient.

Maybe this has something to do with why certain food is “comfort food”.

A new study found that consumption of unprocessed meat was not associated with more risk of heart disease but that consumption of processed meat (such as bacon) was associated with greater risk of heart disease. The whole American fear of animal fat (including butter) may be due to an unrecognized confounding: those who ate more animal fat also ate more bacon.

Restless Legs Syndrome, Niacin, and Web Search

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Gary Wolf and I have a post on Boing Boing today about how Dennis Mangan cured his mom’s Restless Legs Syndrome. I mentioned this accomplishment earlier. Mangan’s story is an example of what I call personal science — doing science yourself about something you care about.

More One comment on Boing Boing is that niacin is also known as Vitamin B3 and if we searched “restless legs syndrome AND Vitamin B3″ we’d get lots of hits. I tried that search and got zero hits.

“Psychology is the bridge between art and science”

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Yesterday I attended interviews of Tsinghua students who want to transfer from another major to psychology. Almost all of it was in Chinese, but at one point, as part of an explanation of her interest in psychology, a student said (in English), “Psychology is the bridge between art and science.”

Well put. Maybe she read that somewhere, but I doubt it. I’d never heard it before. Notice how we think art can be done by anyone yet science can only be done by scientists (in extreme cases, only by physicists). Psychology, especially self-experimentation, may lead us out of that desert.

The wisdom of Tsinghua freshmen.

Colony Collapse Disorder and My Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts9 Comments

At the risk of being extremely self-centered, my self-experimentation is related to this depressing news:

The decline of [America’s] estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.

The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter.

The bees vanish from the hives. What has surely happened is that their navigational systems have malfunctioned. Bees have dozens of things that must work for them to live, all of which need a certain environment. The bees live in a degraded environment. Which system will fail first? A neural system turns out to be the most sensitive to environmental degradation.

No one predicted this, nor did I predict that my self-experimentation would find many ways in which our environment, like the bees’s environment, has come to lack crucial stuff. But one reason for the two outcomes (colony collapse disorder, discoveries of my self-experimentation) is the same: The nervous system is especially sensitive to the environment. I’ve studied stuff controlled by the brain: sleep, weight, mood, arithmetic. Just as bee brains are the first part of bees to be crippled by a bad environment, our brains are the first part of us to improve when given a better environment.

More About Treadmills and Learning

Seth Roberts4 Comments

In Beijing, a friend and I were talking about how to improve high-school teaching. I said two things would help: more personalization, and more movement. Movement really helps learning, I said. I read something about that recently, my friend said. She meant this post of mine (treadmill walking made it pleasant to study Chinese)!

Paul Sas has drawn my attention to a man with a remarkable memory:

JB is an active, articulate septuagenarian who began memorizing Paradise Lost at the age of 58 in 1993 as a form of mental activity to accompany his physical exercise at the gym. Although he had memorized various poems in earlier years, he never attempted anything of this magnitude. JB stated that he wanted to do something special to commemorate the then-upcoming millennium. “Why not something really challenging like, oh, ‘Paradise Lost’?” he said. He began by walking on a treadmill one day while trying to memorize the opening lines of the poem.

He eventually memorized the whole poem, about 11,000 lines. Apparently the scientists who studied him ignored the treadmill.

A learning psychologist might say that walking provides mental activation, we learn better when we’re stimulated. (For example, we learn better when we’re scared.) My point is treadmill walking produced an hedonic change: I found learning more enjoyable when I was walking.