Category: self-experimentation

Science in Action: Flavor-Calorie Learning (another simple example)

Seth Roberts4 Comments

At the heart of the Shangri-La Diet is the idea that we learn to associate flavors (smells) with calories. This learning was first shown in rat experiments. There’s some human evidence, but not much. If I could discover more about what controls this learning, I might be able to improve the diet. For example, maybe I could say more about what the flavor-free window should be.

My earlier self-experimentation on this subject – I used tea for flavor and sugar for calories — was helpful. To my surprise, I found that really small changes in flavor made a noticeable difference. If I switched from one canister of Peet’s Gunpowder Tea to a new canister, the ratings went down, although everything else stayed the same. From this came the notion of ditto food: Foods with exactly the same flavor each time are especially fattening. I hadn’t realized what a difference it would make if you kept the flavor exactly the same each time.

It’s been hard to learn more. After Christmas dinner, my mom gave me the leftover brandy (A. R. Murrow). I used it for a very simple experiment in which I learned to like it. I’ve never drunk brandy in any quantity and I started off not liking it. Every day for a few weeks, I drank one tablespoon. I drank it in a few sips over a few minutes. I didn’t eat anything else for at least 30 minutes. I rated how good it tasted on a 0-100 scale where 10 = very bad, 20= quite bad, 25 = bad, 30 = somewhat bad, 40 = slightly bad, 50 = neutral, 60 = slightly good, 70 = somewhat good, 75 = good, 80 = quite good, 90 = very good. The overall rating was the maximum of the ratings of the several sips. (The first sip usually tasted the best.)

Here are the results.

learning to like brandy

I’ve observed similar results five or six times. They are more support for the most basic conclusions: 1. The effect is very clear. One tablespoon of brandy has only 30 calories. 2. A really simple experiment is easy.

That’s a promising start but then it gets hard, or at least non-obvious. As a way to study flavor-calorie learning, this little example has several flaws: 1. Slow learning. 2. Expensive materials. 3. Little control of flavor. The best I can do is choose which liquor to buy. Soon I will run out of ones I haven’t used. 4. No way to separate flavor and calories in time. 5. No way to change the calorie source.

An earlier demonstration used a soft drink. It’s really Science in Inaction: I’ve made zero progress in a year.

The Lessons of Bilboquet

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There are lots of omega-3-related self-experiments I’d like to do: 1. What about fish oil? 2. Is omega-6 bad for the brain? As my olive-oil results suggested. 3. “Blind” experiments where I don’t know what I’ve ingested. I wanted to use a design that involved many tests/day. This would be easy if the tests were fun, hard if they weren’t. Games are fun–could I figure out why and make a mental test that was like playing a game?

After talking with Greg Niemeyer, I decided that color, variety, feedback, and appropriate difficulty (not too little, not too much) were possible reasons games are fun. I constructed a letter-counting task with all of these attributes — and it wasn’t fun. I had to push myself to do it. These attributes may help, but not a lot.

Then, as I’ve posted, a friend gave me a bilboquet. For such a simple object, it was surprisingly fun and slightly addictive. Thinking about other addictive games, such as Tetris (I once played a lot of Tetris), I guessed that the crucial features of a game that make it addictive are: 1. Success is sharply defined. 2. Not too easy. 3. Hand-eye coordination. (Not any eye-body coordination: I did thousands of balancing tests but had no trouble stopping.)

I constructed a new task with these attributes: Click the Circle. A circle appears on the screen, you move the pointer to the circle and click on it; a new circle appears somewhere else, you move the pointer to click on it, etc. At the end there’s a little feedback: how long it took. Very simple.

This task, at least so far, is addictive. I think something else may be going on in addition to the three factors: we enjoy completion, especially visual completion. (Which Tetris had a lot of.) In this case the visual completion is the blank space that appears when I click on a circle. If I have a few dishes to do, it’s easy to do them–the promise of an empty sink (= visual completion) draws me to the task. In contrast, if there are a lot of dishes to do, it’s much harder to do a few of them. I’ll probably do none of them or all of them. If you have 20 dishes to do, doing them will generate a lot more pleasure (and thus will be easier to do in the future) if you can manage to create 20 completion moments than if they get piled up and there is only one completion moment.

Jane Jacobs and Self-Experimentation

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In answer to a question about what Pittsburgh should do to revive itself, Richard Florida answered:

I asked Jane Jacobs once, “What would you do — as a person who lived in New York in the Village — to rebuild the World Trade Center site? She said, “Well, Richard, you asked the wrong question. What would the people who used that site do? What would the people who used to work there do? What would the people who owned shops there do?”

The people who used the site know the most about the site. And they care the most about it.

This is one big reason self-experimentation is a good idea: The people with a problem know the most about the problem and care the most about it. People with acne know more and care more about acne than people without it. People with insomnia know more and care more about it. And so on. It’s a huge resource that conventional research almost completely ignores.

The Mystery of Bilboquet

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A bilboquet is a toy: a ball and stick. The ball has a hole and is attached by a cord to the stick. You toss the ball and impale it with the stick. A friend gave me a Japanese version:

bilboquet

It seemed impossible to reliably catch the ball on the stick but here is someone who can do it:

Even better:

How do people get so good at this? I have part of the answer: it is a lot of fun to practice. I have been tracking my progress and I have to restrain myself from doing it more often. Why is it so much fun to practice?

To be continued.

Irritability and Coca-Cola (continued)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

John Keltner, an M.D./Ph.D. at Oxford, guest-blogged earlier about a self-experiment to measure the effect of Coke on his mood. Below he describes his results in more detail.

I did a self-experiment to measure the mood and hunger effects of consuming 30 oz of Coke, Diet Coke With Caffeine, and Diet Coke Without Caffeine. I used two numerical rating scales. For the mood scale 0 represented profound dysphoria, 5 neutral mood, and 10 profound euphoria. For the hunger scale 0 represented profound hunger, 5 no hunger or fullness, 10 profound fullness.

Each day before dinner (after ~ 7 hours of not eating anything but water), I measured my mood and hunger/fullness at four times: right before drinking 30 oz of soda, right after drinking the soda, 10 min after, and 20 min after.

I collected the data in two ways: blinded and not blinded. The 3 drinks were consumed in a random order.

The experiment lasted 25 days – one drink per day.

At the end of the 25 days there were a couple of measurement categories with only 2 or 3 data points, so I have combined the blinded and not blinded data for the purposes of presenting the data here.

The figures below show means and standard errors.

mood ratings vs time

fullness ratings

Within 10 minutes (and stronger at 20 minutes) there appears to be a significant change in mood ratings for the sugar and caffeine coke drink compared to the non-sugar and non-caffeine coke drink. Furthermore, it appears that caffeine alone was able to cause an increase in mood at the 10 minute and 20 minute time points between diet+caf coke vs diet w/ no caf coke. Finally, it appears that effects of sugar and mood are additive.

There was not a large difference in the fullness ratings between the three different drinks.

It is also notable that mood and fullness were markedly increased for all drinks immediately after consuming the drinks. Presumably this immediate increase in fullness and mood has more to do with the immediate taste or volume affects of the drinks and less to do with the calories or caffeine in the drinks.

In my next experiment investigating mood effects of sugar and caffeine I will reduce the number of parameters in my experiment. I spent a month collecting this data and a fair amount of effort (blinded data are hard to collect). Because I chose three types of coke drinks (sugar+caf, no sugar but caf, no sugar and no caf), two parameters to examine (hunger and mood), and two conditions (blind and non-blinded) my data points were spread too thin over the categories. Next experiment I will choose just two drinks (caf vs no caf), one condition (blinded), and I would focus on mood instead of hunger.

This experiment leads me to believe that a number of smaller experiments are more effective than one large experiment – at least in the beginning.

I would like to thank Seth Roberts (a lot!) for his generous helpful suggestions as I pursued this self experiment. I initiated the experiment on my own, but I would not have finished it without Seth’s help.

Diet and Acne

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Two years ago I guest-blogged at the Freakonomics blog about diet and acne. I wrote that the claim of dermatologists that there is no link between diet and acne was absurd, not only because I had seen for myself such a link but also because it was an impossibly broad generalization.

In an article in the Boston Globe, Cynthia Graber, a science journalist, describes quite a bit of evidence that yes, diet affects acne. The research on which the no-link claim was based tested only two foods (chocolate and sugar)! From which committees of dermatologists generalized to all foods.

SO WHY HAVE DOCTORS been taught for so long that there’s no link? The anti-diet hypothesis . . . arose solely from two studies from the late 1960s and early 1970s. . . . One compares real chocolate bars with fake ones and was conducted at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine with funding from the Chocolate Manufacturers Association. . . . The other study examines sugar in the diet of a small group.

It’s like that scene in the Wizard of Oz where the Great Oz is revealed to be an ordinary man behind a curtain. All those knowledgeable-sounding claims by dermatologists, based on nothing more than this.

Conventional research on the subject is difficult, both because of funding problems — drug companies won’t fund such research; and dairy farmers won’t fund experiments to find out if dairy causes acne — and because it’s clear that many different foods are involved. On the other hand, determining the effect of Food X or Y on your own acne is easy. I wonder why someone doesn’t build a website to gather information from such self-experiments. If I had superpowers, I would.

More about diet and acne.

Fighting Cancer Via Self-Experimentation — With Success

Seth Roberts3 Comments

About 10 years ago, a UCSD psychology professor named Ben Williams, who is in my area of psychology (animal learning), managed to successfully cure his own terminal cancer by self-experimentation. He wrote a book about it called Surviving Terminal Cancer. As this WSJ story shows, his approach — which can be summed up think for yourself — is spreading.

Just as my dermatologist was irritated by my acne self-experimentation (”Why did you do that?” he asked), Ben’s oncologist, a University of Washington med school prof named Marc Chamberlain, was against what Ben did. Chamberlain now tells the WSJ that Ben’s self-treatment “probably contributed” to saving Ben’s life. Which is like a math professor saying 2 + 2 “probably equals” 4.

A long essay by Williams about his experience.

Addendum: Williams’s book, which had an amazon rank of about 1,000,000 when the WSJ article appeared (Dec 15), is now (morning of the 18th) ranked about 29,000.

The Power of Prayer

Seth Roberts5 Comments

From Nassim Taleb:

I truly believe that it was rational to resort to prayers in place of doctors: consider the track record. The risk of death effectively increased after a visit to the doctor. Sadly, this continued well into our era: the break-even did not come until early in the 20th Century. Which effectively means that going to the priest, to Lourdes, Fatima, or (in Syria), Saydnaya, aside from the mental benefits, provided a protection against the risks of exposure to the expert problem. Religion was at least neutral –and it could only be beneficial if it got you away from the doctor.

This gives placebo effect a whole new meaning. And it defends religion in a new and reasonable way.

A belief similar to Taleb’s is why I began the long-lasting self-experimentation that led to my paper “ Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas“: I didn’t want to see a doctor about my sleep problem (I awoke too early in the morning and couldn’t fall back asleep). I was sure that what the doctor would prescribe (sleeping pills) would do more harm than good.

Everyday Hedonics

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Conversation on a Berkeley lawn:

Andrew Gelman: You’d think we prefer an upward spike in pleasure — we’re happier for a while, then return to normal — to a downward one, but the evidence isn’t clear.

Seth: I know someone who woke himself up so he could enjoy falling asleep.

Andrew: Really?

Seth: Yes, really.

Andrew: Was that you?

Seth: No, it wasn’t me.

Andrew: If I heard about someone doing that, I’d think it was you.

Phil Price: That’s brilliant, actually.

Leonard Mlodinow, author of Euclid’s Window (about geometry), Feynman’s Rainbow, and a forthcoming book on probability and chance, and co-author with Stephen Hawking of A Briefer History of Time, was the brilliant sleeper. (Not Montaigne.) He might have woken himself up while he was a grad student at Berkeley (in physics). After Berkeley, he became an assistant professor of physics at Caltech. He left Caltech to become a writer. As unorthodox in a big way as waking yourself up so that you can fall asleep is in a small way.

Experimental Mathematics

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The journal Experimental Mathematics, started in 1992, publishes “formal results inspired by experimentation, conjectures suggested by experiments, descriptions of algorithms and software for mathematical exploration, [and] surveys of areas of mathematics from the experimental point of view.” The founder wanted to make clearer and give more credit to an important way that mathematicians come up with new ideas. As the journal’s statement of philosophy puts it, “Experiment has always been, and increasingly is, an important method of mathematical discovery. (Gauss declared that his way of arriving at mathematical truths was “through systematic experimentation.”) Yet this tends to be concealed by the tradition of presenting only elegant, well-rounded, and rigorous results.”

When John Tukey wrote Exploratory Data Analysis (1977), he was doing something similar: shedding light on how to come up with new scientific ideas plausible enough to be worth testing. Tukey obviously believed this was a neglected area of statistics research. I was told that the publisher of EDA was uninterested in it; they only published it because it was part of a two-book deal. The other book, with Frederick Mosteller, was more conventional.

My paper titled “ Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas” made the same point as Tukey about an earlier step in the scientific process: data collection. How to collect data to generate new ideas worth testing was a neglected area of scientific method. Self-experimentation, derided as a way of testing ideas, might be an excellent way of generating ideas worth testing.

I think of it as crawling back into the water. In the beginning, all math was conjecture and experimentation. In the beginning, all data analysis was exploratory. In the beginning, all science was tiny and devoted to coming up with new ideas. From these came methods of proof, confirmatory data analysis, and methods of carefully testing ideas. Human nature being what it is, users and teachers of the new methods came to greatly disparage the earlier methods. Gary Taubes told me that he spoke to several obesity researchers who thought that the field essentially began with the discovery of leptin. Nothing before that mattered, they believed.

Thanks to Dev Rana.