Category: self-experimentation

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Thanks to Brent Pottenger, Phil Alexander, dearime, and Casey Manion.

Brain Surprise! Why Did I Do So Well?

Seth Roberts9 Comments

For the last four years or so I have daily measured how well my brain is working by means of balance measurements and mental tests. For three years I have used a test of simple arithmetic (e.g, 7 * 8, 2 + 5). I try to answer as fast as possible. I take faster answers to indicate a better-functioning brain.

Yesterday my score was much better than usual. This shows what happened.

My usual average is about 550 msec or more; my score yesterday was 525 msec. An unexplained improvement of 25 msec.

What caused the improvement? I came up with a list of ways that yesterday was much different than usual, that is, was an outlier in other ways. These are possible causes. From more to less plausible:

1. I had 33 g extra flaxseed last night. (By mistake. I’m not sure about this.)

2. The test came at the perfect time after I had my afternoon yogurt with 33 g flaxseed. When I took flaxseed oil (now I eat ground flaxseed), it was clear that there was a short-term improvement for a few hours.

3. Many afternoons I eat 33 g ground flaxseed with yogurt. Yesterday I ground the afternoon flaxseed an unusually long time, making made the omega-3 more digestible.

4. I did kettlebells swings and a kettlebell walk about 2 hours before the test. These exercises are not new but usually I do them on different days. Yesterday was the first time I’ve done them on the same day. I’m sure ordinary walking improves performance for perhaps 30 minutes after I stop walking.

5. I had duck and miso soup a half-hour before the test. Almost never eat this.

6. I had a fermented egg (“thousand-year-old egg”) at noon. I rarely eat them.

7. I had peanuts with my yogurt and ground flaxseed. Peanuts alone seem to have no effect. Perhaps something in the peanuts improves digestion of the omega-3 in the flaxseed.

8. I started watching faces at 7 am that morning instead of 6:30 am or earlier.

Here are eight ideas to test. Perhaps one or two will turn out to be important. Perhaps none will.

After I made this list, I read student papers. The assignment was to comment on a research article. One of the articles was about the effect of holding a warm versus cold coffee cup. Holding a warm coffee cup makes you act “warmer,” said the article. Commenting on this, a student said she thought it was ridiculous until she remembered going to the barber. She sees the person who washes her hair (in warm water) as friendly, the barber as cold. Maybe this is due to the warm water used to wash her hair, she noted. This made me realize another unusual feature of yesterday: I had washed my hair in warm water longer than usual. I think I did it at least 30 minutes before the arithmetic test but I’m not sure. In any case, here is another idea to test. I found earlier that cold showers slowed down my arithmetic speed.

This illustrates a big advantage of personal science (science done for personal gain) over professional science (science done because it’s your job): The random variation in my life may suggest plausible new ideas. As far as I can tell, professional scientists have learned almost nothing about practical ways to make your brain work better. You can find many lists of “brain food” on the internet. Inevitably the evidence is weak. I’d be surprised if any of them helped more than a tiny amount (in my test, a few msec). The real brain foods, in my experience, are butter and omega-3. Perhaps my tests will merely confirm the value of omega-3 (Explanations 1-3). But perhaps not (Explanations 4-8 and head heating).

Even More About The Willat Effect

Seth Roberts9 Comments

I have had tea daily for the last ten years, ever since I discovered the Shangri-La Diet. A few weeks ago, I started doing side-by-side comparisons of similar teas or the same tea prepared two ways (e.g., different brewing times). Would the Willat Effect make me a tea connoisseur?

Since then I have done at least one side-by-side comparison every day. It’s almost as easy as making an ordinary cup of tea and a lot more fun. These comparisons have taught me more about tea preparation than the previous ten years. I’ve learned:

1. The black tea I have (an Earl-Grey variant) tastes better when brewed for 3.5 minutes than 4.0 minutes.

2. The black tea tastes better when I use 1.5 grams of tea than when I use 2.0 grams of tea. (After starting these comparisons, I bought a scale for weighing tea.)

3. One of the green teas I have tastes better when “rinsed” for 30 seconds before brewing 1 minute than when simply brewed for 1 minute. In China, this preference (rinse green tea before brewing) is common. I was reminded of it by this comment and Paul Jaminet’s post about tea. Black tea is different, as I noted earlier.

4. I have a caffeine-free tea blend called Choco Late made of cacao husks, vanilla, and rooibos. The package says brew 5 minutes. Which is nonsense. It tastes better (fuller, more rounded) when brewed 30 minutes than when brewed 15 minutes. (I’ve noticed the same thing with caffeine-free chai blends. Enormous brewing times, like 60 minutes, produce much better results than short times.)

5. My most interesting discovery is when I brew Choco Late for 30 minutes it tastes so good I no longer want to sweeten it. It is pleasant enough already and sweetness would distract from the complexity, fullness, and slight bitterness. (At first I wrote “lovely complexity, fullness …”) I was shocked when I noticed this. It has never happened before.

This tea-selling website mentions the Willat Effect under the heading “Do you want to be a tea connoisseur?” I hope this means the idea will spread among the fancy-food community. They have a lot to gain from better understanding of how to make people connoisseurs. Many times I have asked people in that community what makes someone a connoisseur? The usual answer is education. In my case, Willat-Effect comparisons (side-by-side comparisons of similar teas) were far more powerful than reading about tea, drinking a variety of teas, going on tea tours, going to ordinary tea tastings (where you taste a wide range of teas), and talking about tea with experts. I have been to five or six Fancy Food Shows and have visited thousands of booths. Exactly one booth offered side-by-side comparisons of similar products. It was their product made with and without a special ingredient.

Willat-Effect comparisons are mini-science. They aren’t quantitative but they include three other things central to science: 1. Close comparisons. This is the essence of experimentation. 2. You don’t know the answer. 3. You care about the answer.

Bipolar Disorder: Good Results With Blue-Blocker Glasses

Seth Roberts10 Comments

At the Shangri-La Diet forums, Anima writes:

I have been diagnosed with ADHD and Bipolar II disorder. I am also a Non-24, a chronic circadian rhythm disorder where one’s body thinks a day is longer than 24 hours. . . .I’ve been using amber safety glasses (around $3 in the hunting section of the sporting goods store) for dark therapy. I put them on 3 hours before I want to go to sleep. They block blue light, allowing dark therapy without the dark. I also wear an eye mask while I sleep. The glasses make me look like a big weirdo, but they really work. It’s easier to get to sleep, and they prevent hypomania (the milder form of mania that people with Bipolar II experience) better than any medication I have tried. It makes sense that almost anyone could benefit from them, because our ancestors were not exposed to blue light after dark.

She makes many other interesting observations, such as how she kept her cat from waking her up too early.

I don’t have trouble falling asleep but this makes me wonder what effect blue-blocker glasses would have if I wore them regularly at night. Nowadays I carry them in my backpack in case I have to be exposed to fluorescent light at night, such as on the subway. Even though I avoid fluorescent light at night, I still get blue light at night from my laptop screen. I have thought it is too weak to matter because using f.lux (which reddens the screen at night) made no clear difference. I can test this idea again by wearing blue-blocker glasses. I have been using a Zeo to measure my sleep, which may help me notice changes.

At Genomera, Michael Nagle and Eri Gentry are doing a study of the effect of blue-blocker glasses on sleep.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments

  • Interview with me on Jimmy Moore’s Livin’ La Vida Locarb
  • This article about natto helped its author win a prize for best newspaper food column
  • great QS talk about self-measurement by John Sumser. “It all started when I quit smoking. Bad idea. Since I quit smoking in 2004, every quarter for 7 years it has rained shit on me.”
  • In a QS talk, I compare the Quantified Self movement and the paleo movement.
  • Chinese high-school students in America: Not what was promised. Lack of “rigor” has benefits, as I have blogged: “Dismayed by the school’s [poor] college placement record, Chen considered transferring. Instead, he began to enjoy himself. Because his courses were undemanding, he had time for friends and outside interests. He took four Advanced Placement tests on his own.“I’ve developed my personality a lot,” Chen said. “Everything turned out for the best.””
  • If you read The China Study by T. Colin Campbell, a pro-vegetarian book, you may remember the big role played by some casein experiments with rats. Rats that ate a low-casein (= low animal-protein) diet were supposedly in better health than rats that ate a high-casein (= high animal-protein) diet. In this article Chris Masterjohn shows how misleading that was. “One thing is certain: low-protein diets depressed normal growth, increased the susceptibility to many toxins, killed toxin-exposed animals earlier, induced fatty liver, and increased the development of pre-cancerous lesions when fed during the initiation period of chemical carcinogenesis.”

Thanks to Janet Chang.

More About The Willat Effect

Seth Roberts16 Comments

The Willat Effect is the hedonic change produced by side-by-side comparisons of similar products — for example, two green teas. It happens in seconds: Suddenly the differences matter more. Some versions become more pleasant, other versions less pleasant. I first noticed it with limoncello that my friend Carl Willat offered me. Here are some reactions to my recent post about it:

1. A Facebook comment from a friend of Carl’s:

I too can confirm the existence of The Willat Effect. Example: I’ll look at a coat that feels and looks great, see the price and say I can’t afford this. Then I’ll try another on and it’s close to the first but not quite but it’s also 300 dollars less. I opt for the first, spending more. Carl’s taught me to never settle for second best. And he doesn’t make a bad limoncello either.

Yes to both. I recently went bike shopping in Beijing. I asked a Chinese friend who makes the best bikes: Giant, she said. A Taiwanese company. I found a Giant store. I chose the model I wanted. I test-drove it. Fine, except the seat was too short. This could not be fixed, they said. I didn’t like any other Giant model. I would have to buy a different make of bike. There were other bike stores nearby, all with cheaper bikes. (Giant bikes cost about 40% more than the next most costly.) I tested a few. The cheaper bikes were clearly worse than the Giant bike: less smooth ride. Too bad for me. I chose one to buy. The problem of too-short seat remained, but the seller said he could fix it. He brought out a longer neck that could be attached to a seat. I bought the longer neck, took it to the Giant store, and got my first-choice bike. I am especially pleased how smoothly it rides. In the Giant store (franchise), there was no bargaining — the sticker price was the actual price — and the employees were standoffish. In the other stores (non-franchise), you could bargain and the employees were friendly. This talk mentions the very smooth ride of a very expensive car.

2. A Boing Boing post about this linked to a side-by-side comparison of expensive cameras — that is, a side-by-side comparison of the pictures they take. As David Scrimshaw commented, this sh** is dangerous. It could make me dissatisfied with what was previously (and in other ways still is) perfectly acceptable.

3. I compared black tea steeped for 3 minutes with the same tea steeped for 5 minutes. I tasted them side by side. I have been drinking black tea for 10 years. For the first time I noticed that the 5-minute tea had a strong bitter note unnoticeable in the 3-minute tea. People had told me that if you steep black tea too long it becomes bitter. I thought they meant if you steep it for 8 minutes it becomes bitter. I routinely steeped black tea 5 minutes. I told someone about this and he said rinse the tea first. This made no sense (experienced tea drinkers rinse certain green teas, not black teas) but I tried it. I found that ten seconds of rinsing (add water, wait 10 seconds, discard water) didn’t eliminate the bitterness. There was no clear difference between rinsed and unrinsed tea.

4. I agree with commenters who said I should taste my tea “blind” — not knowing the price. That’s a good idea. During a tea-tasting tour of Beijing (which did not include side-by-side comparisons of similar teas and had little effect on my green tea consumption), I learned that at the wholesale level green tea leaves are priced lot by lot. The buyer tastes tea made from the tea leaves for sale and offers a price. If I notice a correlation for green tea between cost and how much I like it, it presumably reflects this earlier process. As far as I can tell in Beijing there is no advertising for different varieties of green tea. Tea stores usually sell it in bulk in identical bins. No packaging, no boasts or claims.

5. Does the effect happen because I knew the teas cost different prices? I doubt it. During the first example, with limoncello, I had no idea of the prices. The homemade limoncellos, which were not identified, had no price. I have noticed the effect with YouTube videos (different covers of one song), which are free. I have done side-by-side tastings of cheeses, wines, etc., that varied greatly in price countless times. No Willat Effect, presumably because they weren’t similar enough (e.g., the two wines came from different lines of grapes). But I agree it would be nice to eliminate the effect of price differences.

6. Wangston commented: “More expensive things taste better because rarity is delicious.” There is certainly pressure to say expensive things taste better. You/we are supposed to think that. Millions of advertisers would like us to think that. Surely the phrase the finer things in life came from an ad. Maybe ads are where the pressure comes from. In my experience, without side-by-side comparisons more expensive things usually do not taste better. For example, I have never done side-by-side comparisons of wine. And expensive wines ($30/bottle) taste no better than much cheaper wines ($10/bottle). Before I did side-by-side cheese tastings, $30/pound cheese tasted no better than $10/pound cheese. After side-by-side cheese tastings, only then did I notice and care about the difference. I started to pay much more for cheese. I wish I could make the cheap stuff taste better but every time (tea, cheese, orange marmalade, sake) the expensive stuff turns out to be what tastes better. Contradicting the “rational actor” assumption of economists.

7. Robin Barooah commented that with experience you form a mental map of the product space. He is “something of a coffee connoisseur” and has a mental map of the coffee space. This has allowed him to enjoy less-than-the-best coffees because they have their place and he enjoys brewing them in different ways. My limited experience entirely supports this. I have never gone far with these close comparisons. I am not a connoisseur of anything. But from my mere two weeks of close tea comparisons I feel the beginnings of a mental map. I hope, as Robin says, it will allow me to enjoy tea I can afford. In Beijing, the most expensive tea is insanely expensive — like $1000/pound.

 

Willat Effect Experiments With Tea

Seth Roberts39 Comments

The Willat Effect is the hedonic change caused by side-by-side comparison of similar things. Your hedonic response to the things compared (e.g., two or more dark chocolates) expands in both directions. The “better” things become more pleasant and the “worse” things become less pleasant. In my experience, it’s a big change, easy to notice.

I discovered the Willat Effect when my friend Carl Willat offered me five different limoncellos side by side. Knowing that he likes it, his friends had given them to him. Perhaps three were homemade, two store-bought. I’d had plenty of limoncello before that, but always one version at a time. Within seconds of tasting the five versions side by side, I came to like two of them (with more complex flavors) more than the rest. One or two of them I started to dislike. When you put two similar things next to each other, of course you see their differences more clearly. What’s impressive is the hedonic change.

The Willat Effect supports my ideas about human evolution because it pushes people toward connoisseurship. (I predict it won’t occur with animals.) The fact that repeating elements are found in so many decorating schemes and patterns meant to be pretty (e.g., wallpapers, textile patterns, rugs, choreography) suggests that we get pleasure from putting similar things side by side — the very state that produces the Willat Effect. According to my theory of human evolution, connoisseurship evolved because it created demand for hard-to-make goods, which helped the most skilled artisans make a living. Carl’s limoncello tasting made me a mini-connoisseur of limoncello. I started buying it much more often and bought more expensive brands, thus helping the best limoncello makers make a living. Connoisseurs turn surplus into innovation by giving the most skilled artisans more time and freedom to innovate.

Does the Willat Effect have practical value? Could it improve my life? Recently I decided to see if it could make me a green tea connoisseur. Ever since I discovered the Shangri-La Diet (calories without smell), I’d been drinking tea (smell without calories) almost daily but I was no connoisseur. Nor had I done many side-by-side comparisons. At home, I had always made one cup at a time.

In Beijing, where I am now, I can easily buy many green teas. I got three identical tea pots (SAMA SAG-08) and three cheap green teas. I drink tea every morning. Instead of brewing one pot, I started making two or three pots at the same time and comparing the results. I compared different teas and the same tea brewed different lengths of time (Carl’s idea).

I’ve been doing this about two weeks. The results so far:

1. The cheapest tea became undrinkable. I decided to never buy it again and not to drink the rest of my purchase. I will use it for kombucha. Two of the three teas cost about twice the cheapest one. After a few side by side comparisons I liked the more expensive ones considerably more than the cheaper one. The two more expensive ones cost about the same but, weirdly, I liked the one that cost (slightly) more a little better than the one that cost less. (Tea is sold in bulk with no packaging or branding so the price I pay is closely related to what the grower was paid. The buyers taste it and decide what it’s worth.)

2. I decided to infuse the tea leaves only once. (Usual practice is to infuse green tea two or more times.) The quality of later infusions was too low, I decided. Before this, I had found second and later infusions had been acceptable.

The Willat Effect is working, in other words. After a decade of drinking tea, my practices suddenly changed. I will buy different teas and brew them differently. I will spend a lot more per cup since (a) each cup will require fresh tea, (b) I won’t buy the cheapest tea, and (c) I have become far more interested in green tea, partly because each cup tastes better, partly because I am curious if more expensive varieties taste better. When I bought the three varieties I have now I didn’t bother to learn their names; I identified them by price. In the future I will learn the names.

To get the Willat Effect, the things being compared must be quite similar. For example, comparing green tea with black tea does nothing. I have learned a methodological lesson: That tea is a great medium for studying this not only because it’s cheap but also because you can easily get similar tasting teas by brewing the same tea different lengths of time. I haven’t yet tried different water temperatures but that too might work.

I have done similar things before. I bought several versions of orange marmalade, did side-by-side tastings, and indeed became an orange marmalade connoisseur. After that I bought only expensive versions. After a few side-by-side comparisons of cheese that included expensive cheeses, I stopped buying cheap cheese. You could say I am still an orange marmalade and cheese connoisseur but this has no effect on my current life. Because I avoid sugar, I don’t eat orange marmalade. Because of all the butter I eat, I rarely eat cheese. My budding green tea connoisseurship, however, is making a difference because I drink tea every day.

My posts about human evolution.

Edward Jay Epstein on Homeland

Seth Roberts3 Comments

A new series on Showtime called Homeland is about a CIA agent (played by Claire Danes) who believes that a newly-released American prisoner of war may have been “turned” during his years in Iraqi captivity. In the first episode, she tries to find evidence to support her belief. Judging by that episode, it is very good.

I told Edward Jay Epstein about it — his book on James Angleton centers on CIA infiltration by “moles”. He commented:

What is interesting here is the schism between the fictional world and real world of counterespionage. In the former, it is an issue of “who”. Find the guilty man and arrest or kill him. In the real world, the issue is vulnerability. The bureaucracy has two choices: admit its methods are vulnerable to penetration and paralyze the organization, or deem the search for a mole to be paranoia and sick think. That latter course is what happens in the real world, alas. Some fiction writers understand this: Graham Greene in Human Factor and Le Carre in Smiley’s People.

Yes. If you go back in time, I predict you will find that the term kill the messenger arose at the same time as powerful organizations. I have a theory: Only people who derive power from their placement in big organizations want to kill the messenger (who says the organization assumes something not true). In other situations, bad news is less threatening. In health care, outside ideas are met by insiders, such as doctors, with where’s the double-blind placebo-controlled study? As Epstein says, the dismissiveness is partly motivated by fear: fear that something is wrong with their system and its values.

Morning Faces Therapy: Personal Account

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Five years ago I heard from someone that he had been successfully using my discovery that seeing faces in the morning improved my mood the next day. Recently I asked him to write about his experiences with it. Here’s what he wrote:

I’m a male professional in my 30s and have had mild to moderate depression since my early teens. I am a considerable rationalist and skeptic, so when I read about Seth’s morning faces therapy in a New York Times article about 5 years ago, my first thought was to doubt its effectiveness. But it was so easy and simple to try, with nothing to lose, that I gave it a shot. To my surprise, it really worked, and the change was quite noticeable.

I do 30-40 minutes of faces therapy every morning, starting around 7:00, 7:15, but the timing moves around a bit based on my schedule or sometimes for experimentation purposes. My first few years I used videos of actual faces (some of the recommendations that I found on Seth’s blog and others that I found on my own). Over time it’s become harder to find quality videos of sufficient length and compelling interest, and I now more often use a mirror. The effect, for me, usually lags by a day or two. So if I haven’t been doing faces for a while and I’m depressed then it takes a couple of day or so to get back to where I should be, and similarly when I stop the faces therapy it takes a few days or so for the depression to return.

While the therapy itself is simple, getting up on time and doing it every single morning has proven more difficult than expected. Even when I do it for several weeks in a row with no break, at some point the tiredness and weariness inevitably kicks in, whether because I was up late several nights in a row and am too tired to get up early, or because I’m traveling, or for other reasons.

Proof the therapy works is that I’m still carrying on five years after discovering it! When I stop for more than a few days, the resultant drop in mood inevitably brings me back.

As an aside, I sometimes spend time in the evening or morning doing other depression exercises, such as writing a gratitude list (google “count your blessings exercise”) or doing meditation/self-hypnosis. In the spirit of self-experimentation, I am currently seeing whether I can get the equivalent effect I get from the faces, by doing these other therapies in morning sunlight at the same early hour as I do the faces therapy. Full results are not yet in.
More about morning faces therapy.