Category: self-experimentation

Brent Pottenger Comments

Seth Roberts4 Comments

I asked Brent if he had any comments on his experience (after he adopted an ancestral diet, his migraines and sinus infections stopped). He wrote:

The quality of my life (mental + physical health) improved even further when I started eating slices of butter throughout the day awhile back. For awhile, I was using spoonfuls of coconut butter/coconut oil and/or Greek yogurt for this satiation role, but once I added butter slices to the mix, I beefed up my nutritional ‘bag of tricks’ quite a bit. Of course, I had cooked in butter for a few years, but I never made the link to simply eat it in slices, despite enjoying its taste so much. And, a little bit goes a long way. I eat cultured butter from a few different brands and a few different locations of the world (hoping this diversification may carry extra beneficial side-effects: different strains of micro-organisms, etc.). I try to find brands that are pastured too (more naturally-occurring Omega-3′s, evidently). I usually suck on/chew on the butter slowly because I’ve found this has improved my oral health too: animal lipids (plus coconut oil) are good for epithelial tissue health (that’s why I rub coconut oil on my face and skin and rub butter, coconut oil, and yogurt on my hands). Pairing butter and coffee (I eat the butter; I don’t put it in my coffee; I drink my coffee black) has become a nice start to my day (Dave Lull even found a study speculating on the benefits of coupling hyperlipidity and anti-oxidants together in this way; I think it’s also a useful approach to detoxifying the liver), particularly when I know I am going to workout that morning–this little hyperlipidity kick seems to help in the gym too (when I am not fasting). Using butter slices in this manner is a nice compliment to fasting intermittently–these two practices allow me to enjoy low-caloric intake periods pleasantly. They set up my “feasts” nicely. Whenever I have a “grumbling” stomach, or I feel a “biting” sensation in my stomach, I eat a small piece of butter, and my mood and body tend to stabilize. And, like bacon and yogurt and eggs, it’s cheap. Butter has certainly been an excellent ‘cheap health option’ for me.

He later added:

Now I am working intently on Meta-Rules. Meta-Rules are simply ‘rules for making rules’ to live by. Three dynamics concern me deeply: (1) The problem of induction; (2) biochemical individuality; and, (3) factoring for the unseen. For instance, one of my nutritional Meta-Rules is: “Don’t consume anything that causes a negative physiological reaction.” From this Meta-Rule, I have deduced the following rule to live by (as one example): “Don’t consume high-fructose corn syrup.” A marker for monitoring this rule could be facial inflammation and ‘puffiness’ post-consumption, as one possibility. That’s an example of a higher-level precept empowering an individual to deduce for him or herself how that concept applies (or does not apply) in his/her own specific case (I like the term: Patient of One). Over time, I suspect that something like William Baines’ Biomedical Mutual Organization (BMO) could emerge if enough people were self-experimenting with Meta-Rules and interacting about their experiences and results. Amongst this cohort of parallel n=1 clinical trials, some convergence of Meta-Rules may occur, indicating ways that our bodies are the same, and also showing how our bodies differ individually when it comes to things like diet, exercise, and lifestyle design.

To explain why headaches can be due to inflammation, he pointed me to this.

Better Thinking By Standing

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Dan Wich, a faithful reader of this blog, told me that my work had helped him. I asked for details. He wrote:

I have a desk job and began to experience back pain that was aggravated while sitting. So I bought a desk designed for both sitting and standing, and spent most of my time standing.

I was on the lookout for improved sleep patterns because of your experiments, and I noticed similar results. But the biggest benefits I observed were unexpected. First, my ability to focus and prioritize improved while standing; sitting for long periods made me more likely to avoid challenging tasks. Second, I felt more creative while standing, avoiding the problem-solving tunnel vision I’d often get after sitting for a while.

Being able to switch between standing and sitting without changing anything else has led me to dismiss other causes for those mental benefits. And I wasn’t expecting to receive them, making me doubt the placebo effect is at work. So, I think I can corroborate your results of improved mental function while standing.

The Data-Driven Life

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Gary Wolf’s article about self-measurement in the New York Times Magazine is here. I am quoted in it. The story I identified with most is Bo Adler’s. He has sleep apnea:

“Here’s what they told me was the normal surgical course of treatment,” Adler explained. “First they were going to cut out my tonsils, and if that didn’t work, they would break my jaw and reset it to reposition my tongue, and finally they would cut out the roof of my mouth. I had one question: What if my case is different? They said, ’Let’s try the standard course of treatment first, and if that doesn’t work, then we’ll know your case is different.'”

I started long-term self-experimentation because I woke up too early in the morning. The notion of taking drugs for it — what a doctor would prescribe — was too horrible to take seriously, just as Adler resists the idea of surgery before less harmful solutions have been ruled out. Adler hopes he can learn something about sleep apnea his doctors don’t know, just as I hoped I could learn something about early awakening nobody knew. Eventually — ten years later — I managed to.

The Emperor’s New Clothes Trilogy

Seth Roberts10 Comments

In The Emperor’s New Clothes, the king is naked but only a little girl says so. The king’s advisers don’t tell him. I suppose the intended lesson was that powerful people have trouble getting frank answers. That’s pretty obvious. For a CEO, it’s said, the scarcest commodity is truth. Bosses learn this all the time. I learned it the first time I asked one of my students what he thought of the class.

Andersen’s story can be taken differently, partly conveyed by the phrase elephant in the room: Something big and important is overlooked by the supposed experts (in the story, the king’s advisers). It should be obvious — but it isn’t. Or at least no one says anything. This is how Harry Markopolos used the term emperor’s new clothes in No One Would Listen: Madoff was a gigantic fraud, his returns were (to Markopolos) clearly too good to be true, he was enormously visible (in certain circles), but no one said anything. It was as astonishing as a king parading naked. How come no one sees this? Markopolos thought. If you looked at Madoff the right way, he was naked.

That this sort of thing happens isn’t obvious at all. Yet three books — which I’ve just blogged about — have recently appeared with examples. One is the Markopolos book. Another is The Hockey Stick Illusion. Surely there’s overwhelming evidence that humans are causing global warming, right? Well, no. The only clear evidence was that hockey stick — and that’s a statistical artifact. (It looks like an artifact.) The third is The Big Short. It wasn’t easy to find the right sight line from which it was clear that Goldman Sachs et al. were taking on far more risk than they realized but such views existed. I call these books The Emperor’s New Clothes Trilogy. Their broad lesson: Sometimes the “best people” aren’t right. Sometimes there’s a point of view from which they’re glaringly wrong. The Hockey Stick Illusion is about how Stephen McIntyre found this point of view. In No One Would Listen Markopolos found this point of view. In The Big Short several people found this point of view.

This relates to my self-experimentation in two ways. First, the “best people” say self-experimentation is bad. No weight-control researcher does self-experimentation. No sleep researcher does self-experimentation. Surely they know how to do research. It’s their job. Whereas to me it’s glaringly obvious that self-experimentation is an excellent research tool, not just because of my results but also because it makes it so much easier to try new things. The best way to learn is to do, IÂ believe; self-experimentation makes doing much easier. Second, my self-experimentation uncovered all sorts of results that implied that the expert consensus on this or that was glaringly wrong. The Shangri-La Diet is just one example. Breakfast is good, right? Well, no, breakfast may wake you up too early. And so on. At first, I didn’t grasp the broad lesson I stated earlier (“Sometimes the “best people” aren’t right. . . “) and was amazed by what I was finding. To me, The Emperor’s New Clothes Trilogy is support.

Venous Multiple Sclerosis: A Website

Seth Roberts1 Comment

I’ve blogged several times about Paulo Zamboni’s discovery that his wife’s multiple sclerosis was due to poor blood drainage from the brain and the wonderful implications of this discovery for many persons with MS. Here’s an excellent website about the topic. It’s of great interest to me because it suggests the power of people with (a) the subject-matter knowledge of insiders, (b) the freedom of outsiders and (c) the motivation of someone with the problem. Medical researchers, who get the billions of dollars spent on health research, don’t have the freedom of outsiders nor (almost always) the motivation of someone with the problem. My self-experimentation had those characteristics: I had the subject-matter knowledge of an insider, the freedom of an outsider, and the motivation of someone with the problem. For example, I knew a lot about sleep, I didn’t care what sleep researchers thought of me, and I had a sleep problem.

Why Cory Doctorow Won’t Buy an iPad

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I loved this Boing Boing post by Cory Doctorow about why he won’t buy an iPad. One of his points:

Relying on incumbents to produce your revolutions is not a good strategy. They’re apt to take all the stuff that makes their products great and try to use technology to charge you extra for it, or prohibit it altogether.

Just as I believe that relying on the medical establishment to improve health care is not a good strategy. Those in power (incumbents) will resist change, especially revolutionary change. Science — connecting beliefs with reality — is surely the most revolutionary activity invented yet professional health researchers, simply because they have something to lose, now resist change.

One of Doctorow’s complaints:

Then there’s the device itself: clearly there’s a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there’s also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe — really believe — in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Screws not glue.

Likewise, I believe it’s possible to do health research where everything is understandable. Where you can understand the data. Where you can understand the connection between the data and better health. The simple situations, treatments and measurements I use in my self-experimentation I judge to be an improvement over obscure health research, whereas I suspect most professional scientists instinctively think something must be wrong with it. Real science, they think, cannot be done by amateurs.

Arithmetic Test R Code (part 1)

Seth Roberts7 Comments
[Below is some of the R code that runs the arithmetic test that I use to measure my brain function. This function (newmath2.add) is the top-level function — the function I actually call when I run the test. Later posts will give the subroutine code. The variable newmath2 is the database — the variable (a data frame) that holds the data.]

function (trials = 32, note=””, wait.range=c(1000,2000), num.possible = 9)
{#Like newmath but with separated trials.
#
#Collect data with arithmetic-like task. Simple arithmetic problems with
#the answer being a single digit. 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 0 equally likely.
#If the answer is two digits (e.g., 12) it is truncated to the last digit
#(e.g., 2). The trials during each session are sampled without replacement
#from all possible problems.
#
#Trials where the response is incorrect are repeated with a new problem.
#Trials can be aborted; this is noted.
#
#              trials           trials in a session
#              note             comment for each trial
#              wait.range       range of wait times (msec)
#              num.possible     number of possible wait times
#
# 2009.07.11 Fixation symbol changed from + to o. Repetition of
# answer from one question to the next no longer allowed.
# 2009.07.15 Feedback now based only on answers to the same question
# More sophisticated computation of percentile.
# 2009.08.07 Can end session from Press Space screen
# 2009.10.23 fixed abort session and abort trial
#
invisible()
condition=new.condition(newmath2$condition)
start.time=Sys.time()
n=nrow(newmath2.problems)
problems=newmath2.problems[sample(n),]okay=c(TRUE,!problems[1:(n-1),2]==problems[2:n,2])
problems=problems[okay,]tr=1
pr=1
while(tr< =trials){
t=newmath2.trial(trial=tr, total.trials = trials, wait.range=wait.range, num.possible = num.possible, problem = problems[pr,], condition=condition, note=note)
if(t[1]==”end session”) break
if(t$status!=”okay”) {
if(t$status==”abort trial”) this.trial.note=”trial aborted”
if(t$status==”abort session”) this.trial.note=”session aborted”
t$include=FALSE
}
else this.trial.note=note
new.line1=c(current(),condition,tr,t$wait.msec, problems[pr,1])
new.line2=c(t$answer.msec,t$actual.answer,t$correct,t$include,this.trial.note)
newmath2< <-rbind(newmath2,c(new.line1,new.line2))
newmath2.set.types()
pr=pr+1
if(t$status==”abort session”) break
if(t$status==”abort trial”) next
if(!t$correct) next
tr=tr+1
}
msg=paste(“total time”,round(difftime(Sys.time(),start.time, unit=”mins”),1),”minutes\n”)
paint(above = “all done”, below=msg, duration = 3)
save.ws()
newmath2.plot()
}

Why I Use Arithmetic to Measure Brain Function

Seth Roberts8 Comments

At the latest Quantified Self Meetup, I described my recent arithmetic results. Gary Wolf asked why I used arithmetic to measure brain function.

The simplest answer is that it won a competition. I tried eight or so different ways of measuring brain function and it was the best. I had high hopes for all of the tests and spent a lot of time on most of them. I hoped to find a test that was as fun as playing a game yet provided the detailed and controlled info of a typical cognitive psychology task. I didn’t quite get there.

The other tasks had several problems:

1. Long learning curve. My belief that our environments might be having big and unnoticed effects on how well our brains work began when I noticed that my balance was better the morning after taking 6 flaxseed oil capsules. A small amount of flaxseed oil substantially improved how well my brain worked — at least on one dimension. The test I devised to measure this effect confirmed its existence but after doing it for a year my score was still improving. Obvious learning during testing makes it harder to interpret the results — you need to correct for the learning. I wanted a task where there was less room for learning. I already know arithmetic well so an arithmetic test took less practice until learning stopped.

2. Not so portable. Some of the tasks required props (e.g., a printed sheet of paper for a paper-and-pencil test).

3. Trial-to-trial interference. Wanting to cram as many trials as possible into a short time, I started with an arithmetic task with 5 blocks of 20 trials each. There were pauses between blocks. During a block, however, as soon as I finished one question (e.g., 3+4), the next one would appear. At first, this was fine. As I got faster, though, I started to make a large number of mistakes quite often. I required 85% accuracy and it started to take longer and longer to do 5 blocks with acceptable accuracy. The arithmetic task I use now has separated trials. Instead of 100 trials in 3 minutes I do about 32 trials in 3 minutes, but there has been no increase in the amount of time they take. (I found that 3 minutes was as long as I would comfortably do the test; 32 is simply the number of trials I can do in 3 minutes.)

4. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. After doing a lot of an earlier task that involved just two fingers, my wrists started to hurt. The arithmetic task uses eight fingers (excluding the thumbs) equally. 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, and 0 are possible answers; 5 and 6 are never answers.

5. Subjective. One of the tasks I tried involved making a single motion on the touch pad. It wasn’t easy to be sure I’d made one motion rather than two.

6. Small number of measures. One task I tried only generated five scores in four minutes. The arithmetic task I use generates 32 scores in three minutes. Each of the 32 scores can be corrected for the difficulty of the problem (e.g., 0+0 is faster than 6*7).

7. Unpleasant outcomes. Some of the tasks were frustrating. When I didn’t do well it was irritating. For some reason that doesn’t happen with the arithmetic task.

A more game-like task would be better but for that I may need a new input device, like a joystick. R — the language I use to collect the data — is great for data analysis but poor for data collection. it is unlikely to work with joysticks anytime soon. My arithmetic task needs an R function that only works with Windows, which shows how bad the problem is. It’s a miracle that R function exists. Maybe it was written by an experimental psychologist.

Science in Action: Mysterious Mental Improvement (part 4)

Seth Roberts21 Comments

I blogged earlier how I suddenly got better at an arithmetic task. The apparent causes of the improvement were butter and standing. I’m not sure this is right; I will do more tests.

While I was trying to figure out the cause something even more extreme happened:

Notice the last two points. The previous anomaly was slightly below 600 msec. The new one is close to 550 msec. After observing it, I repeated the test 20 minutes later and got essentially the same result.

I’m blown away. I’ve been doing tests like this — simple measures of mental function — for about two years. Nothing like this happened during those two years.

My scores on this particular test averaged about 640 msec. Sometimes they’d be lower (as low as 610) but I had no idea why. The average stayed around 640. Now, within days, the average goes down to about 600 (presumably because I was eating butter regularly) and then down to almost 550. In other words, that 640 could be improved almost 20%! The improvement has nothing to do with practice; I was extremely well-practiced on this task. (And practice doesn’t produce such a sudden improvement.)

This is something we care deeply about — how well our brains work. Unless I’m a lot worse at arithmetic than everyone else, this suggests that for many people great improvement is possible. In an astonishingly small way. (I didn’t make any big changes during this time.) In a week.

Science in Action: Mysterious Mental Improvement (part 3)

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Previously on Seth’s Blog: A few weeks ago, during a brief test, I did simple arithmetic (e.g., 3+8, 4*0) substantially faster than usual. The next day, under the same conditions, it happened again. I thought of four possible reasons for the improvement:

  • 30 g of butter I’d eaten a few hours earlier.
  • A cobblestone mat I’d stood on earlier for 5 minutes.
  • Walking for 10 minutes before the test.
  • Standing (rather than sitting) during the test.

I guessed it was the walking.

Since then I’ve been gathering data to choose between these possibilities. I’ve been eating butter regularly to see if there’s a chronic speed-up. And I’ve been doing pairs of tests 20 minutes apart. The first test provides a baseline against which to judge the results of the second test. To measure the effects of the cobblestone mat I stood on the mat between the tests. To measure the effect of walking, I walked during the time between the tests. To measure the effect of standing, I stood during the second test but not the first.

The results so far suggest, to my surprise, that two of the four factors helped: butter and standing. How wrong I was!
At Berkeley, one of my students did a self-experiment that compared different ways of studying. She measured how long she stayed awake while studying foreign vocabulary. Worst turned out to be the conventional way: sitting at her desk in silence. Best was lying on her bed listening to hard rock. My new results are sort of a bigger version of the same thing: conventionally we avoid butter and sit while doing intellectual work.