Category: self-experimentation

Polyphasic Sleep

Seth Roberts3 Comments

I heard about polyphasic sleep — such as sleeping 20 minutes every 3 hours — many years ago. But now I can learn about it in much more detail — and with much more suspense. For example:

[Before starting] Having always been a night-owl, and never having a sleep pattern that fits with others, I feel drawn to try it. I foresee a problem in that I have always felt that I need 8 hours of sleep per day, but on the other hand I can stay up until 5 am without a problem when I am mentally engaged, so it has seemed to me for quite some time that a 28 or 29 hour day is what my system is tuned for. . . . I can feel it energizing me already.

[Day 15] Yesterady was a disaster. Sleep is a funny thing – sleep deprivation had been accumulating and I wasn’t really noticing it. I was just happy to be awake and productive so many hours in a day that I ignored the weird feeling in my head, just going with it, thinking I would adjust and it would be all ok. Well yesterday morning I blew up at my SO for a ridiculous reason. . . . What went wrong? I was following all the sleep patterns pretty much to the letter.

More examples listed here.

“I Started Eating More Fermented Food…” (continued)

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Previously: Tucker Max found that drinking two bottles per day of kombucha for a a week had several easy-to-notice unexpected benefits.

I have some comments:

1. The best thing about these observations is how simple the change is: two bottles/day of a readily available kombucha brand. Very easy to duplicate — let’s not worry about matching Tucker’s weight, etc.

2. The speed with which the changes were noticed (within a week) makes the whole thing even easier to try to duplicate.

3. Kombucha was not one of the fermented foods from which I drew my conclusions about fermented foods. Bacteria are so varied that the notion that all fermentation bacteria have somehow the same effect isn’t easy to believe. But since the prediction about fermented foods (they are highly beneficial) turned out to be true maybe there is something to this.

4. My idea that we like umami tastes, sour tastes, and complex flavors so that we will eat more bacteria-laden food (which nowadays would be fermented food) is saying that we need plenty of these foods. Why else would evolution have tried so hard to make us eat them? The implication is they should be part of every diet, like Vitamin C. When someone deficient in any vitamin begins eating that vitamin, the deficiency symptoms go away very quickly, within a few weeks, usually. The changes are easy to notice. So the details of what Tucker observed – the speed and size of the improvements — support my general idea that there is a widespread deficiency here that can be easily fixed.

5. I used to make kombucha. I’m going to start again.

Why Self-Experimentation?

Seth Roberts1 Comment

One reason for self-experimentation is very simple: To learn about the effects of a drug you are taking. Is it helping? The medical literature is unlikely to be unbiassed. Someone heavily involved in producing that literature wrote anonymously in the BMJ:

I also do a lot of ghost writing. Sometimes I report good quality studies to which I am proud to contribute, albeit anonymously. Yet, too often, I write so called reviews, amounting to mere panegyrics of the discussed drugs, or I report poorly designed and implemented “epidemiologic” studies, bearing gross biases. Many of the (paid) signing authors of these papers do not read the manuscript, let alone provide feedback. I am surprised at how easily such papers are accepted by some journals and how rarely their flaws are challenged.

Given the financial interests at stake, I do not see what recommendations or regulations will put an end to such long debated [meaning long-criticized] practices.

My first self-experimentation to have unexpected results involved an acne drug. I discovered it was ineffective — might have even been making things worse. Yet it was a standard treatment for acne. My dermatologist was surprised I had bothered to collect the data. “Why did you do that?” he asked.

To do useful self-experimentation here isn’t complicated. The main thing you would do would be to measure the problem before and while you take the drug. Before you take the drug, you’d want to measure the problem long enough so that you had some idea of what would happen if you didn’t take the drug.

If you’ve done this, I’d like to hear about it.

Will Like vs. Might Love vs. Might Hate

Seth Roberts2 Comments

What to watch? Entertainment Weekly has a feature called Critical Mass: Ratings of 7 critics are averaged. Those averages are the critical response that most interests me. Rotten Tomatoes also computes averages over critics. It uses a 0-100 scale. In recent months, my favorite movie was Gran Torino, which rated 80 at Rotten Tomatoes (quite good). Slumdog Millionaire, which I also liked, got a 94 (very high).

Is an average the best way to summarize several reviews? People vary a lot in their likes and dislikes — what if I’m looking for a movie I might like a lot? Then the maximum (best) review might be a better summary measure; if the maximum is high, it means that someone liked the movie a lot. A score of 94 means that almost every critic liked Slumdog Millionaire, but the more common score of 80 is ambiguous: Were most critics a bit lukewarm or was wild enthusiasm mixed with dislike? Given that we have an enormous choice of movies — especially on Rotten Tomatoes – I might want to find five movies that someone was wildly enthusiastic about and read their reviews. Movies that everyone likes (e.g., 94 rating) are rare.

Another possibility is that I’m going to the movies with several friends and I just want to make sure no one is going to hate the chosen movie. Then I’d probably want to see the minimum ratings, not the average ratings.

So: different questions, wildly different “averages”. I have never heard a statistician or textbook make this point except trivially (if you want the “middle” number choose the median, a textbook might say). The possibility of “averages” wildly different from the mean or median is important because averaging is at the heart of how medical and other health treatments are evaluated. The standard evaluation method in this domain is to compare the mean of two groups — one treated, one untreated (or perhaps the two groups get two different treatments).

If there is time to administer only one treatment, then we probably do want the treatment most likely to help. But if there are many treatments available and there is time to administer more than one treatment — if the first one fails, try another, and so on — then it is not nearly so obvious that we want the treatment with the best mean score. Given big differences from person to person, we might want to know what treatments worked really well with someone. Conversely, if we are studying side effects, we might want to know which of two treatments was more likely to have extremely bad outcomes. We would certainly prefer a summary like the minimum (worst) to a summary like the median or mean.

Outside of emergency rooms, there is usually both a wide range of treatment choice and plenty of time to try more than one. For example, you want to lower your blood pressure. This is why medical experts who deride “anecdotal evidence” are like people trying to speak a language they don’t know — and don’t realize they don’t know. (Their cluelessness is enshrined in a saying: the plural of anecdote is not data.) In such situations, extreme outcomes, even if rare, become far more important than averages. You want to avoid the extremely bad (even if rare) outcomes, such as antidepressants that cause suicide. And if a small fraction of people respond extremely well to a treatment that leaves most people unchanged, you want to know that, too. Non-experts grasp this, I think. This is why they are legitimately interested in anecdotal evidence, which does a better job than means or medians of highlighting extremes. It is the medical experts, who have read the textbooks but fail to understand their limitations, whose understanding has considerable room for improvement.

“I Started Eating More Fermented Food…”

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Tucker Max, who got great results from flaxseed oil, wondered what would happen if he ate more fermented food. He emailed me:

I have been reading your posts about bacteria in food, so I decided to try it on my own. I HATE Roquefort and other stinky cheeses, and I am not about to eat fermented meat, so the best thing I could find in Whole Foods was Kombucha tea. It is basically normal tea, with bacteria cultures growing in it. Sounds weird I know, but it actually tastes pretty good, especially the ones with natural fruit juices added. It has a sparkly, almost champagne-like taste feel in your mouth. It takes a little getting used to, but I really like it now. I like GT’s brand the best, but I think there are others.

Anyway, after a week of drinking two bottles a day, I have noticed
these changes:

  1. My stool is…well, better. In every way. More regular, more solid, and something else very unusual–I only have to wipe once. For most of my life, I have to wipe twice, or sometimes three times, which I assumed was normal. But this week, the stool comes out and leaves virtually nothing behind. At least nothing that is showing up on the toilet paper. I am not sure what this means as I am not a poop expert, but I think it means my stool is “healthier” for lack of a better word.
  2. I have more energy. Aside from subjectively feeling it, I can see the difference in my workout logs, just in this past week I’ve gone up more weight on exercises than I normally do.
  3. I am feeling overall better. This could very well be placebo effect/confirmation bias as it is a very subjective measurement, but I just feel better. I feel generally healthier, if that makes sense.
  4. But, I am having trouble sleeping. I feel like I am getting less sleep, not much, maybe 30 minutes less. I don’t know if this is due to increased energy because it might be anxiety –we are about to sell my movie, and it’s an anxious time in my life, so the cause may have nothing to do with the tea.

Right now, I think kombucha tea greatly improves my health and I am
going to keep taking it to see if there are anymore changes or if this
persists. This stuff I buy is not cheap, like $4 a bottle [$3/bottle in one Berkeley store], but I am going to keep drinking at least two a day, I like it that much. Plus, once you get used to the taste and texture, it’s really delicious.

The brand he bought is GT’S. I’ll comment on this in a later post — but I’ll say now that eating much more fermented food didn’t have any noticeable effect on my sleep.

Interview with Leonard Mlodinow (part 14)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

MLODINOW As I start talking about events in the world around us and looking at the psychological components–and I dealt with that, I greatly expanded that part–they were fascinating studies and I was just so interested I just kept putting more and more into the book.

ROBERTS Yes, that’s when you decided to ask me for help. “Oh, I wasn’t planning on this.” How did you learn about the lottery winner who won twice–the Canadian?

MLODINOW It was in a book somewhere, an academic book. A lot of those interesting stories came from academic papers or books.

ROBERTS That’s interesting.

MLODINOW Sometimes I’ll find something in the newspaper that was really interesting and I would track it down but a lot of it was in academic research. I don’t know why they found it.

ROBERTS Yes, who knows where they got it, but that’s where you got it. How did you learn about the Girl Named Florida stuff? Some professor told you?

MLODINOW My friend Mark Hillery that I mentioned from Berkeley.

ROBERTS A physics professor.

MLODINOW He heard it somewhere… It wasn’t quite this problem but then I kind of tweaked it and made it the Girl Named Florida Problem. That’s a great problem for the book.

ROBERTS Yes, I loved that. So he got it from some physicist . . .

MLODINOW I’m not sure; probably. I took a few days to figure out how to make it into this problem; I don’t remember exactly the problem he told me but I tweaked it into this problem. Just to show you how much work goes into the book, I even spent a whole afternoon deciding on the name Florida. I went back into the records–I needed a rare name–and I looked up different names and tried to find one that would be colorful, interesting, but that was rarely used, and I wanted to know the percentage that it was used; I dug up percentages of names. Everything in the book . . . if you read it, it might just sound like, ’Oh, you know’ . . .

Not a thing is just tossed out there. Or very little; there’s an amazing amount of thought and work that goes behind every little detail.

ROBERTS That’s a very memorable detail I must say. I like it better than the Monty Hall Problem.

MLODINOW I do, too. I think it’s interesting; I found in the reactions to the book that the Monty Hall Problem has gotten more press and in some ways more reactions, which I found interesting given that it has been talked about before and this problem was completely new. I think this problem is in some ways even more striking than the Monty Hall Problem, more counterintuitive and more difficult to believe and certainly closer to something you might actually encounter. And yet I’ve gotten a lot more response based on the Monty Hall Problem and a few places have said that I gave the best explanation they’ve seen. I think the New York Times review said that, too. The New York Times did mention the Girl Named Florida Problem and said that they still find it hard to believe even though they followed the explanation.

ROBERTS I thought your explanation of the Girl Named Florida problem was very clear.

Interview directory.

Good Advice From Tim Hartford

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In case you are not a long-time reader, I will repeat my advice as to how to enjoy the thrill of the lottery without the fool’s bet. Choose your numbers, but don’t buy a ticket. You’ll win almost every week — the fear that your number might actually come up is an adrenaline rush to beat them all.

From his Undercover Economist advice column. Another example of the same thing: If (first) I buy and use Product A and then (second) see a commercial for Product A it makes me happy. Whereas the conventional order — (first) see a commercial for Product A) and then (second) buy and use Product A — is generally disappointing, just like the lottery.

Both Hartford’s example and mine are cases where what we are told (implicitly) is exactly wrong. Does buying a lottery ticket make you happy? No, not buying one will make you happy.

In Hartford’s example and mine it is the average consumer who is gullible and makes the whole thing work — without people who play the lottery, you couldn’t take Hartford’s advice. Scientists are no less gullible. Self-experimentation, like Hartford’s advice, takes advantage of that gullibility. Because scientists essentially play the lottery in their research — devote considerable resources (their careers) to looking for discoveries in one specific way (scientists are hemmed in by many rules, which also slow them down) — this leaves a great deal to be discovered by research that doesn’t cost a lot and can be done quickly. All of my interesting self-experimental discoveries have involved treatments that conventional scientists couldn’t study because their research has to be expensive. Could a conventional scientist study the effect of seeing faces in the morning? No, because you couldn’t get funding. And all research must require funding. (Research without funding is low status.) In practice, this means you can’t take risks and you can’t do very much. Like the lottery, this is a poor bet.

The Comforts of the Umami Hypothesis

Seth Roberts11 Comments

What a difference an idea makes. A few weeks ago I came up with the idea that evolution shaped us to like umami taste, sour taste, and complex flavors so that we will eat more harmless-bacteria-laden food, which improves immune function. (I pompously call this the umami hypothesis.) It seemed so likely to be true that I started eating more fermented foods: miso, kimchi, yogurt, buttermilk, smelly cheese, and wine. To avoid stomach cancer and high blood pressure, I later cut back on miso, kimchi, and smelly cheese.

There have been other changes, too:

  • After buying meat or fish, I don’t try to get home quickly to put it in the fridge
  • I don’t worry that eggs have been in the fridge for 3 weeks
  • When buying eggs and other perishables, I don’t try to get the freshest
  • I don’t worry about leaving milk out

Bacteria and viruses from other humans pose a threat. This is why we find fecal matter so offensive. It’s why hand-washing by doctors matters. But I believe plant-grown and dirt-grown bacteria are harmless because the substrates are so different than conditions inside our bodies. As for meat-, fish-, and dairy-grown bacteria, I don’t think they are very dangerous. Has anyone gotten food poisoning from yogurt? I keep in mind how much stinky fish the Eskimos ate. Maybe I should do some controlled rotting experiments — leave meat at room temperature for varying lengths of time before cooking and eating it.

Interview with Leonard Mlodinow (part 7)

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ROBERTS What happened in graduate school? What areas of physics did you pursue?

MLODINOW I worked for a fellow who did mathematical physics, which are mathematical techniques or mathematical underpinnings of physics. There were very few spots for theorists at Berkeley and I was very happy to get one of them. This fellow was probably the smartest one in the department and very picky about his students so I was happy to be able to have him as an advisor.

ROBERTS What was his name?

MLODINOW Eyvind Wichmann.

ROBERTS So that was in your first year of graduate school? You impressed him enough to have him take you on as a student?

MLODINOW I think at the end of the first year, yes.

ROBERTS What happened in the first year?

MLODINOW It may have been the second year; I don’t remember now. I took his course in quantum field theory and then I became his TA in his quantum mechanics course.

ROBERTS He didn’t have many students, right?

MLODINOW No. He would have, at any given time, probably average one or two over the years. He was there for probably 30 years and may have had probably less than 30 students. Since they stay a few years that makes sense but he probably had 15 students; I’m just guessing in terms of who I at least had heard of.

ROBERTS What happened to the students before and after you–his students before and after you? The one before you and the one after you–do you know what they’re doing now?

MLODINOW Yes. There were the ones with me who graduated before and after. One of them is a very good friend–Mark Hillery–who’s a professor in Hunter College in New York and very well known in quantum information theory. He graduated just before me . . .

ROBERTS With the same advisor.

MLODINOW Yes, and the one who graduated just after me I think is a professor in Indiana or Kentucky or somewhere over there.

But it was quite a great class. Two of the other theory students are big leaders in string theory now, Joe Polchinsky and Andy Strominger. One post doc, Steven Chu, has a Nobel prize [and a White House appointment]. There were quite a lot of good young people around there at the time.

ROBERTS Yes, I’m trying to get a sense of what your career would have been like if you hadn’t gone into writing.

MLODINOW I imagine I would be professor at some school, who knows where. One of the things that I always cared about is where I live, so one of the downsides in academia is that you could be really good in your field and still end up in Peoria; nothing against Peoria but it just wasn’t my choice of where to live. You don’t get to choose where you’re live; you get chosen by these places. Even Santa Barbara; I don’t know how happy I would be there, even though it’s a great school, very good in physics but I’ve always liked Chicago, New York, Boston–big cities–Los Angeles, the Bay Area, really big metropolitan areas with ethnic components and a lot going on.

ROBERTS Yes, I feel the same way. My mother went to Berkeley because she wanted to be at a big school near a big city.

MLODINOW How happy I would be in Kentucky or Georgia or Minnesota, maybe, though you don’t know. One thing I learned from Gilbert’s book is you don’t necessarily know really what would make you happy. My German girlfriend at the time was telling me that, too–’Right now you think you need to be in a big city, but you may find other things in life later, your family, that you focus on.’ Certainly I’m here and I’m very focused on my kids but still what do we like to do? We like to into the Chinese parts of town and explore restaurants or the Mexican neighborhoods and look around or Vietnamese Town. We’ve got a lot of it here in Los Angeles and we like to go and find a new noodle shop.

Interview directory.

If Commercials Told Emotional Truth

Seth Roberts2 Comments

…many of them, maybe all of them, would be unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Thanks to my friend Carl Willat, you can now see such a commercial.

Carl makes commercials for a living but he made this one for fun. A labor of love. Not only did he (a) care about the product (Trader Joe’s), he had (b) great skill and (c) complete freedom. I think this combination is extremely rare and is why this commercial is utterly different from all other commercials I’ve ever seen.

My self-experimentation combined these three things, too. I studied (a) problems I cared a lot about (such as my poor sleep) with (b) the skills of a professional scientist and (c) total freedom. This combination, just as rare in science as in commercial art, explains to me why my self-experimentation seems so different than other research.

More superhobbies.