“The problem is that it is extremely hard to measure the functioning of our immune system or our circulatory system or most other parts of our body.”

If you are diagnosed by a traditional Oriental acupuncturist or someone well-trained in naturopathy, you will get a reading of separate body systems. Here in North Carolina, I have been getting yearly exams (and homeopathic remedies) from such a practitioner for over 30 years. I’m 65. As a result of these checkups and a generally sensible lifestyle, my health is good because my doctor can see conditions and imbalances such as inflammations and pre-precancerous areas before they become problems. In the Bay area, it should be very easy to find such a practitioner. These kinds of exams might make your self experimentation more trackable and fun.

Thank you for your good work.

Changing the dose from 2 T/day to 3 T/day did not change my attitude. And balance is remarkably unconscious. Wanting to balance better has no effect, as far as I can tell.

Throughout my balance testing I have always tried to do the best I could possibly do. To minimize the possibility of effects due to changes in motivation.

But why do think that you demonstrated such poor improvement when you had practiced the task thousands of times.

I am sure you almost always get the comment that your own expectations are affecting the results of the experiment (and that you are tired of hearing it), but with these kinds of physical tasks the degree to which you believe that you should be able to do it or to improve can make a huge difference. And this confidence factor can often explain a big jump in performance.

I think most climbers will tell you that they have had both periods of gradual improvement and leaps in performance, the latter having to do with attitude changes.

I am sure you are also aware of this potential explanation, but I just do not understand how you are controlling for this factor. Can it be done, or is attempting to demonstrate a link between Omega-3 and something as attitude dependent as balance not the kind of thing that can be shown with any confidence via self-experimenting. Again here it makes a big difference whether or not a jump from 4 seconds to 6 seconds is big for a person with your physical capabilities, i.e. not for you specifically but the average for all people with comparable physical capabilities to you since we want to rule out your expectations about what your body can do.

Could one have a control were you try to think that you will be able to do 8 seconds tomorrow and visualise yourself actually doing it and honestly try to build confidence that you can do it. Such a control might also require trying to convince yourself that your Omega-3 results are not real but due to an attitude change, and it is not obvious that it would be easy to detach yourself from previous results in this way.

I have been measuring my balance for months. I have done it thousands of times. And then it suddenly got better. This is not how practice works. Between-session practice effects — such as the improvement from Day 1 to Day 2, or from Day 2 to Day 3 — get smaller as practice continues. For example, the improvement from Day 1 to Day 2 will be much larger than the improvement from Day 100 to Day 101. At the time this experiment began, the day-to-day improvements were quite small, as the slope of the lines shows.

I do not get your argument here. When it comes to balance you can dramatically improve your results during a single session. Trying to balance on a beam 5 times in a row most people will normal physical health will have a significant improvement from the 1st try to the fifth try. Going from 4 to 6 seconds should be no problem. I would expect something like, for example, 4 seconds to 30 seconds for the unathletic types and 30 seconds to 1.5 minutes for athletic types, if you get my drift.

Your general claim that practice improvemnets are gradual if we are talking about big improvements does not tell us anything about the specific case at hand. A fifty percent imporvement is big if were are talking about a change in how fast you can run 100 meters, but not if we are talking about balacing on a beam. A big improvment in the later case might be on the order of 500%

1. Computer chess might be fun. That would be a big advantage. of course. Other pluses: lots of mental computation; easy to describe. Minuses: Most people don’t play chess. Unclear how to deal with speed/accuracy tradeoff issue (if I take more time my moves improve).

2. Arithmetic sets. Pluses: easy to describe, easy to generate (I assume), easy to measure performance, little worry about speed/accuracy tradeoff (because accuracy always close to perfect). Minuses: Less fun than chess.

3. Blinded self-experiment. Pluses: More convincing. Minuses: Requires swallowing a lot of capsules.

For the arithmetic sets, I just xerox them and start over after I get to the 60th one, seems to work ok.

But if you use computer analysis to rate the quality of your moves and give you a score that way, it doesn’t matter whether you finish a game (or get beaten early, and start another). It doesn’t even matter as much whether you win. So you could play for ten minutes at a stretch and not worry about finishing.

The way you’d do that is to have your chess engine think for some standard amount of time for each move, say ten seconds, and it would tell you who it thinks has the better position after (1) your move and (2) its favorite move. You’d subtract the scores to get the difference, and add up the difference over the whole game. The closer to 0 you get, the better. I think I could pretty easily set up an engine to do this to an arbitrary game with some scripts.

Flaxseed oil has lots of the shorter-chain omega-3, ALA. Which is converted in the body to the longer-chain omega-3s, such as EPA. Fish have lots of EPA.

“I don’t know how long it takes to replace enough of the lipids in the brain membranes to make a difference. I have a feeling it’s much more than one night, though. The placebo effect definitely cannot be ruled out here.”

The initial improvement in my balance was a total surprise and cannot be due to a placebo effect. The other part of this comment — shouldn’t it take longer than one night to replace enough of the lipids to make a difference? — is what I thought. It is what all experimenters have thought, apparently, because these day to day measurements have never before been made. This is part of what is so interesting here, that the effects are much faster than expected.