Category: self-experimentation

Visible Big vs. Invisible Small

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In the current New Yorker, James Surowiecki writes:

The bailout of the auto industry, after all, was as unpopular as the bailout of the banks, even though it was much tougher on the companies (G.M. and Chrysler went bankrupt; shareholders were wiped out, and C.E.O.s pushed out), and even though the biggest beneficiaries of the deal were ordinary autoworkers. You might have expected a deal that helped workers keep their jobs to play well in a country spooked by ballooning unemployment. Yet most voters hated it.

Yes, rewarding failure doesn’t play well. The voters were right. The same money that was used to give a few giant companies a second (or third) chance could have been used to give many thousands of very small companies a first chance. It could have been used to help many thousands of people start new small businesses (often one-person businesses) or keep their new small business afloat. All those small businesses would have provided plenty of jobs. and they would have had a far more promising future, far more room for growth, than the Big Three, being both far more diverse and having not already failed. The many thousands of people who wanted to start small businesses were unable to get together and make themselves visible, so the failure of government to help them went unnoticed. Their diversity was economic strength but political weakness.

It’ isn’t surprising things happened as they did — the Big Three (not to mention Wall Street) were bailed out, small businesses were ignored — but it is an indication of how poorly our economy is managed in the most basic ways. I’m not even an economist and I understand this simple point. Bernanke and Summers do not.

It’s easy for me to understand because the same thing happens in science. Government support of research is a good idea, but the money is misspent, in the same way. Grant support goes to a few large projects — generally to people who have already failed (to do anything useful) — rather than to a large number of small projects that haven’t yet failed. The way to support innovation is to place many small bets not a few big ones. That’s one thing I learned from self-experimentation, which allowed me to place many small bets.

Experiments in Gift-Giving

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Kathleen Hillers posted this on a website called The Intention Experiment:

I just read a book called 29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life by Cami Walker. The author of the book has ms and was seeking natural healing. She was told by a “wise woman” from South Africa that if she gave a gift everyday for the next 29 days that it would have a healing effect in more ways than one. It’s a great book, but if you don’t want to read it, start giving a gift everyday and make a journal of every gift you give and the circumstances involved. If you miss a day, you have to start over because you have to keep the flow of giving constant. The gifts do not have to be materialistic. You can give some one a phone call, a ride, encouragement, whatever. I just started doing this on Feb 1st and my life is already getting better. The day before I started, I was in a panic. I couldn’t sleep, and I was completely broke . The day I started, i actually started feeling much better, and things are already looking up.

Regression to the mean, maybe. But maybe not. The idea has some plausibility: The Chinese character that means “happy” is a combination of a character that means “owe” and a character that means “again”.

Schizophrenia Prevented By Fish Oil

Seth Roberts10 Comments

A new study in the Archives of General Psychiatry, summarized in the Wall Street Journal:

Researchers in the new study identified 81 people, ages 13 to 25, with warning signs of psychosis, including sleeping much more or less than usual, growing suspicious of others, believing someone is putting thoughts in their head or believing they have magical powers. Forty-one were randomly assigned to take four fish oil pills a day for three months. The other patients took dummy pills.

After a year of monitoring, 2 of the 41 patients in the fish oil group, or about 5%, had become psychotic, or completely out of touch with reality. In the placebo group, 11 of 40 became psychotic, about 28%.

The study is impressive not only because it uses ordinary food (fish oil) rather than dangerous drugs (such as Prozac) but also because it studies prevention. Just as the ketogenic diet suggests a widespread animal-fat deficiency, so this study suggests a widespread omega-3 deficiency, which won’t surprise any reader of this blog. Completing the picture — I believe most Americans eat far too little animal fat, omega-3, and fermented food — baker’s yeast is being studied as a cure for cancer.

Thanks to Oskar Pearson and Chris.

Four Quantified-Self Talks

Seth Roberts5 Comments

At the recent Quantified Self Meetup in San Francisco, four talks especially interested me.

The first was by a woman who has been making scrapbooks about her life for a long time. She now has nineteen volumes. They contain the usual scrapbook stuff (photos, ticket stubs, drawings — she’s a designer — newspaper clippings, receipts, and so on) plus her design work and her medical records. They help her remember her life. “I look at them so I won’t make the same mistakes in relationships,” she said. “How’s that working?” someone asked. It’s a lot of work and she’s now three months behind. Her talk was about what sort of computer tool would make the whole thing easier. It made me wonder why woman scrapbook so much more than men. My earlier post about scrapbooking didn’t answer that question. The whole thing reminded me of Jill Price:

At the age of 10, Price began to keep almost daily diaries, which she then saved — thousands of pages filled with her impossibly tiny handwriting.

The curious thing about Price’s diaries is that her memory is so astonishingly good that she can remember her past in great detail without them. Apparently she kept such detailed diaries because of her great memory or both have some common cause.

The second was by a man who had recorded his daily activities in detail for five years. A graph showed that he had a free-running sleep cycle: He went to sleep slightly later each day. At certain times he’d be awake at night and asleep during the day. He started keeping these records because he was washing his roommates’ dishes a lot and wanted to see how much time it was taking. (Much less than he thought, it turned out.) I asked what he’d learned from his records. The sleep pattern, he said. Someone told me he must have meant the regularity of the pattern. His records had no obvious value so again I wondered: What’s the evolutionary reason? He enjoys keeping these records. Why? In some ways it’s a male version of scrapbooking: You can’t easily show it to someone (in line with male lack of communicativeness), but, like a scrapbook, it’s a long-term record of random stuff that helps you remember what happened.

The third was about a startup called Skimble. Maria Ly and her partner have created a web app to keep track of your outdoor activities, such as climbing and kayaking. She does a lot of climbing and the app started as a way for her to keep track of it. She used to be an engineer at Google. This seems promising because she was trying to solve her own problem, not someone else’s. Apps to help other people self-experiment don’t get very far, in my experience.

The fourth was a kind of combination of the first three. Robin Barooah wanted to meditate more. His bouts of meditation last a half-hour or more, so it wasn’t easy. After a retreat, he started meditating more but the effect wore off within a month or so. His talk was about an iphone app for tracking his meditation. After he started using it, about a month ago, he’s been achieving his goal of regular daily meditation better than ever before. It reminds me of a University of Colorado engineering professor who stopped binging on ice cream as soon as he forced himself to keep track of what he ate.

Why We Travel

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Jonah Lehrer writes:

We travel . . . because distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed.

He’s wrong about animal fat (“the taste for saturated fat, one of those instincts we should have left behind in the Pleistocene epoch”) but he’s right about that. A trip to Amsterdam is why I have a scooter. It’s so much better than a bike or a car. Only after visiting Amsterdam did I figure this out. The Shangri-La Diet came out of a trip to Paris. Living in Beijing half the year is somewhere between emigration and travel but whatever you call it it has opened up a whole new world. (Whether this will make me more scientifically creative remains to be seen. It certainly makes blogging easier.) My study of the faces/mood effect showed that travel changes something in the brain in a bad way: The light-sensitive oscillator involved takes about three weeks to fully recover from a big change in time zones. The effect takes three weeks to regain full strength, which is longer than it takes sleep to appear normal.

Self-Experimentation and Journalism

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Journalism and science are both ways of finding out about the world, so maybe changes in journalism presage changes in science. In a lecture about the future of journalism, Alan Rusbridge, editor of the Guardian, concluded:

There is an irreversible trend in society today . . . It’s a trend about how people are expressing themselves, about how societies will choose to organize themselves, about a new democracy of ideas and information, about changing notions of authority, about the releasing of individual creativity, about an ability to hear previously unheard voices; about respecting, including and harnessing the views of others.

My self-experimentation had/has some of these elements. The fact that I reached useful conclusions about sleep, mood, and weight without being an expert in any of these fields changed my ideas about authorities (that is, experts). Self-experimentation is very much — perhaps above all — a “releasing of individual creativity” in the sense that I could try to understand sleep, mood, and weight. If I had an idea, I could test it. The problem was mine to solve. Self-experimentation releases scientific creativity just as any artistic tool releases artistic creativity. In the areas of sleep, mood, and weight, I was a “previously unheard voice”. This blog connects my ideas with “the views of others”.

If the parallels between science and journalism hold up, we should eventually see a big restructuring of science — especially health science — that resembles the changes in journalism now happening. Dennis Mangan, who works at a blood bank, has shown that Restless Leg Syndrome can be due to niacin deficiency. No one ever found two causes of scurvy so it is likely that all cases of RLS are due to not enough niacin. So long, expensive drugs for RLS! The poor health of Americans pays for a lot of not-very-useful health science. When that health improves, that pool of money will shrink. Just as when people became better informed (by the Web), the pool of money available to pay journalists began to shrink.

Impressive Versus Effective

Seth Roberts7 Comments

A profile of James Patterson, the hyperprolific novelist, says this:

“I don’t believe in showing off,” Patterson says of his writing. “Showing off can get in the way of a good story.”

A few days ago, just before this profile appeared, I gave a talk about self-experimentation at EG (= Entertainment Gathering), a TED-like conference in Monterey. One reason my self-experimentation was effective, I said, was that I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. Whereas professional scientists doing professional science care a lot about impressing other people. I planned to say it like this but didn’t have enough time:

Years ago, I went to a dance concert put on by students at Berkeley High School. I really enjoyed it. I thought to myself: I like dance concerts. So I went to a dance concert by UC Berkeley students — college students. I enjoyed it, but not as much as the high school concert. Then I went to a dance concert by a famous dance company that all of you have heard of. I didn’t enjoy it at all. Why were the professionals much less enjoyable than the high school students? Because the professionals cared a whole lot about being impressive. That got in the way of being enjoyable. Scientists want to be impressive. They want to impress lots of people — granting agencies, journal editors, reviewers, their colleagues, and prospective graduate students. All this desire to be impressive gets in the way of finding things out.

In particular, it makes self-experimentation impossible:

They can’t do self-experimentation because it isn’t impressive. Self-experimentation is free. Anyone can do it. It’s easy; it doesn’t require any rare or difficult skills. If you want to impress someone with your fancy car, self-experimentation is like riding a bike.

Because my self-experimentation was private, I was free to do whatever worked.

My broader point was that my self-experimentation was effective partly because I was an insider/outsider. I had the subject-matter knowledge of an insider, but the freedom of an outsider.

Morning Light Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts9 Comments

A 25-year-old Toronto accountant blogs:

A few weeks ago my parents came downtown to take me out for dinner. Apart from leftovers, my dinosaur garbage can and a few pieces of mail, they also brought my Ikea lamp. Now my apartment is very small. It’s a bachelor with about 600 square feet. It faces south and gets a fair amount of light during the day, which is fine during the weekends. But during the week when I’m at home — in the morning and at night — it can get pretty dark.

Now enter my Ikea lamp. The first morning after receiving it I turned it on along with all my other lights, while getting ready for work. I noticed a few things that day. One, I wasn’t angry during my commute via the subway. If you’re not from Toronto you won’t get this. But if you are and you ride the rocket each morning, then you’ll understand the general expression of, “angry defeatism” on most commuters’ faces. My lack of hate was personally noticeable. I also noticed that I didn’t need my usual green tea when I got into work. Even crazier I was alert when I got in, the type of mental alertness that often doesn’t show up until roughly 11 am.

I really thought about this for a while. I couldn’t figure it out until I remembered this post by Seth Roberts. It’s very short. I thought about it for a few days and made a little experiment. I went from turning on all my lights every morning to a few, to none. My “awakeness” varied positively with the quantity and duration of morning light. Along with morning light, I’ve also found that having the TV on and taking Vitamin D amplifies this effect.

It’s not a small impact. It’s had a huge effect on my day-to-day.

I left a comment asking what the Ikea lamp was. One interesting thing about this was the exposure time. Judging from a comment (see below), it was about an hour. That’s the minimum I try to get early every morning (from sitting outside).
After I bought the absolute necessities for my Beijing apartment (bed, water heater, washing machine, etc.), my first optional purchase was a chair for the balcony. So I can sit on the enclosed balcony in the morning.