On this day 65 years ago LSD was discovered via self-experimentation. Here is an in-depth account; the title of this post is here. When I was a grad student, a faculty member had recently retired and his reprints were available. I took one from the 1950s about the effect of LSD on snails.
Category: self-experimentation
How Bad is Dairy?
A most intriguing comment on Tim Ferriss’s excellent post about how to sleep better:
To require less sleep and yet still feel awake, energetic and not sleep deprived in general:
The single biggest factor for me has been the elimination of all dairy products from my diet. I have experimented with this over 4 years now and it is clear the most benefit is achieved with the most radical approach to this. In other words, removing dairy products completely from my diet has the biggest benefit. Yes this means no chocolate, no products with whey in them, no milk, yoghurt etc etc. it’s also interesting to see how difficult this is to do, but the benefits are so astounding from an energetic lifestyle point of view that I do it for long periods of time at a stretch.
Huh. Cheese makes me sleepy, so much so that I use it to fall asleep on planes. I didn’t always understand this. Several years ago, I was in New York and bought expensive tickets to a Broadway show. Before the show I ate some cheese — samples at a store, maybe. During the show I fell asleep.
Self-Experimentation and Murphy’s Law
While studying Air Force records [in the 1940s], Dr John Stapp realized that simple, everyday car accidents — not plane crashes — were responsible for a huge proportion of pilots’ deaths. Dr Stapp decided to test the limits of humans’ ability to withstand an impact to demonstrate the need for proper restraints in airplanes and in cars. One of the tests, in 1954, in which Dr Stapp, “the fastest man on earth,” rode a rocket-powered sled from zero to 1,019 km/h in five seconds and then came to complete stop in 1.4 seconds, temporarily blinded him due to retinal hemorrhages, broke both of his wrists and caused other injuries. In an earlier test, an engineer named Edward Murphy managed to install both of the two sensors incorrectly, rendering the data useless. “If there are two or more ways to do something and one of those results in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way,” Captain Murphy declared after seeing Dr Stapp emerge from the sled bloodied and hurt, spawning his famous law.
From a very good article about self-experimentation.
Andrew Gelman on Blogging (part 4)
Bad is Good
A health study by Japanese researchers has found that people with low levels of LDL cholesterol — often referred to as “bad cholesterol” — are more likely to die than those with higher levels.
More. Thanks to Pearl Alexander.
Praying With Lior and Labors of Love
Last night I saw Praying with Lior, a documentary about the bar mitzvah of a boy with Down’s Syndrome. Easily the best movie I’ve seen this year, better than There Will Be Blood, Mary Poppins (leaving aside the great song Feed the Birds), Blade Runner, and several documentaries, for example. I asked a friend why she liked the TV show ER. “It makes you feel happy and sad,” she said. Praying for Lior made me sad again and again, which is part of why I liked it so much. I also liked seeing someone with a handicap struggle and succeed; Praying with Lior has a lot in common with My Left Foot, one of my favorite movies.
The person responsible for the film is Ilana Tractman, who met Lior at a religious retreat. Her day job is making television documentaries. She got the money to make the film — from a large number of foundations and people — while she was making it. As far as I can tell, she had almost total freedom, in contrast to her TV documentaries. I use the term superhobby to describe activities that combine the skills and resources of a professional with the freedom of a hobbyist. All of the blogs I read regularly are superhobbies. My self-experimentation was (and is) a superhobby. Writing open-source software is a superhobby. Most books are superhobbies. When a superhobby produces art, we call the product a labor of love. As we get richer and richer — thus can afford more freedom — and skills and knowledge improve, these labors of love become better, more possible, and more common.
The Praying with Lior website revealed to me that the film had/has a “mission”: “to change the way people with disabilities are perceived and received by faith communities.” Perhaps that is another reason why such a good film was made: This purpose helped it get funding and other help (a lot of people worked on it). And maybe it was part of why Ms. Tractman began and continued a difficult and uncertain project.
I’m Speaking at Penn
This coming Monday (March 31), at noon, I’m giving a talk at the University of Pennsylvania titled “The Value of Self-Experimentation, with Examples from the Study of Omega-3 and Brain Function.” The talk will be in the Large Conference Room of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, Suite 400A, 3401 Walnut Street.
Blood Sugar Measurements?
Speaking of blegs, Howard Wainer, a renowned statistician at the National Board of Medical Examiners, is looking for sets of blood sugar measurements in Excel format. The ideal set would be measurements six or more times per day for several months. He is writing a paper about better ways to analyze such measurements, which are commonly made by diabetics and persons at risk for diabetes. He has collected such measurements himself; he wants to see how well the methods he developed using data from himself work with data from someone else. You can reach him at hwainer at nmbe dot org.
I told Howard: You will be the first statistician (a) to use your professional skills to improve your own life and (b) publish the results. (Which is what I did with my self-experimentation.) Lots of statisticians must have done something similar, said Howard. For example? I asked. He mentioned John Tukey making traffic measurements to help his wife push a change in traffic rules. However, Tukey didn’t publish the results and the relevance to Tukey’s own life was tiny. If anyone reading this knows of an example, please let me know. Statistics is hundreds of years old; there are thousands of professional statisticians. It seems strange that it has taken this long for such a thing to happen but that seems to be the case.
Cramps and Self-Experimentation
Does too little potassium cause cramps? Quite possibly:
Dr. Stephen Liggett, a professor of medicine and physiology at the University of Maryland, . . . got terrible cramps in his calf during yoga. The culprit, he decided, was the drugs he takes for asthma, which can diminish the body’s supply of potassium. He knew that potassium is sold over the counter. But because high levels of potassium can be dangerous, store-bought potassium supplements are not very strong. . . . Before he does yoga, he measures the potassium levels in his blood before and after taking what he describes as a hefty dose of over-the-counter supplement. Then he calculates how much additional potassium he thinks he needs, securing it from concentrated potassium tablets from his research lab — how much he declined to say.”I didn’t want to drink two gallons of Gatorade,” Dr. Liggett explained. He hasn’t had cramps since he began ”preloading,” as he calls it, with potassium. But, he said, ”I haven’t done a controlled trial.”
Thanks to Evelyn Mitchell.
Addendum. Someone commented that the potassium/cramps connection is widely known. And he or she is right. No wonder Dr. Liggett didn’t do a “controlled trial”.
Bryan Caplan on How to Lose Weight
My self-experimentation inspired Bryan Caplan to do his own self-experiment: Could he lose weight by eating less without discomfort? He did two things:
1. Stopped eating when he wasn’t hungry. During a meal he began to pay close attention to how hungry he was. When he stopped being hungry, he stopped eating, even if it meant leaving food on his plate. Before this he rarely left food on his plate. Now it was common.
2. Cut down on his soda consumption. Previously he was drinking at least two cans/day of Coke or IBC Root Beer (both non-diet). He reduced this to one can/day, which he found was enough to keep his energy up.
Bryan is 5′ 10″. When this started he weighed about 178 pounds. Over 9 months, his weight went down to 155, where it has remained for 9 months. “Is this something I’m willing to do for the rest of my life?” he asks. “Yes.”
I’m sure that non-diet soft drinks — primo ditto food — are very fattening but it isn’t easy for me to believe that cutting back on them could cause so much weight loss. Did the don’t-eat-when-not-hungry rule also help Bryan lose weight? I don’t know of research that answers this question.