Seth’s blog

Joyce Cohen on hearing protection beyond earplugs. I often wear noise-cancelling headphones on BART; now I will wear them more often. Does the New York subway damage hearing?

The trouble with marching bands. New York noise.

A friend who has known me for years said I became more talkative recently — around the time I started taking flaxseed oil. In the letter-counting task I have been using, there is an increase in error rate at the same time that flaxseed oil is reducing reaction time — I become more “jumpy”. It is as if flaxseed oil lowers a threshold for action.

Maybe I could measure this. Following some of Greg’s principles, I devised what experimental psychologists call a simple reaction time task: I see colored circles on my laptop screen and press a key on the keyboard as quickly as possible when a circle appears. The computer beeps 0-4 times depending on how fast I respond.

With the letter-counting task, I kept improving for at least 100 sessions. With this task, I stopped improving (getting faster) after about 2 sessions. I took 4 T flaxseed oil around 2 pm and measured my reaction time before and after. Here are the results.

My reaction time decreased with roughly the time course I’d seen in other tests. The percentage decrease was unsurprisingly small but it was quite clear. It was hard to tell how long it lasted.

I was impressed how easy the whole thing was. It only took about an hour to write the experiment-running program (because I could modify something I already had) and the necessary pretraining (learning the task) was trivial (a few minutes, in contrast to weeks with the letter-counting task). I’m unsure how much follow-up of this I will do but it was reassuring to find similar results (flaxseed oil improves performance) in another task.

Please, I want to read Culture Shock! Palo Alto. Michelle Nguyen, who does healthcare software consulting, recently moved to Palo Alto from the East Coast.

On the East Coast, she said, one of the first questions she was asked was about her education. If you have a Ph.D., they take you seriously.

In Palo Alto, among the first questions are (a) where did you go to school? and (b) do you have a blog? It doesn’t help to have a Ph.D. It does help to have gone to Stanford or an Ivy League school. And — most encouragingly — it helps to have a blog. Having a blog, said Michelle, shows that you think and have ideas. Yes, it does.

Michelle’s new blog is “a place for thinking about all things tech, web, and gadget.” Her first entry reviews Microsoft’s HealthVault, which allows you to store your health info online.

The Culture Shock! series.

On Friday I had tea with Greg Niemeyer, a Berkeley art professor whose medium is games. I wanted to “gamify” the task I have been using to measure brain function. It is a letter-counting task: I see 4 letters and respond as fast as possible how many are A, B, C, or D. This takes about 600 msec — I’ve gotten a lot faster. Each session has 4 blocks of 50 trials and lasts a few minutes. From each session I get an average reaction time. I have been doing experiments to measure the effect of flaxseed oil (high in omega-3) on this task.

The task is quick, portable (requires only a laptop) and provides 200 fine-grained measurements (reaction times) per session. Flaxseed oil, I have found, not only produces long-lasting improvement in brain function (lasting weeks) but also a short-lived improvement that starts an hour or two after ingestion and lasts several hours. I developed the letter-counting task to measure the time course of the short-lived improvement. To measure the time course, I do the task every half-hour or so. The task has also turned out to be good for discovering other everyday events, such as exercise, that affect brain function. So far I have data from about 450 sessions.

It hasn’t been hard. It could be more fun. The more fun, the easier the research and the more likely other people will do it. Games are fun. Can I make the task more fun by making it more like a game? I asked Greg what makes games enjoyable. In rough order of importance (most important first), he mentioned four things:

1. The right amount of difficulty. Too easy we get bored; too difficult we get frustrated. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has made this point.

2. Lots of feedback.

3. Varying problems to solve.

4. Color and sound.

I will try adding these to the letter-counting task. I made a simple RT task with elements of #2 (feedback) and #4 (color & sound). It was much too easy but I am sure that #2 and #4 made it more pleasant.

A London Times article about medical self-experimentation.

Reading this legal complaint — suing a florist who gave the plaintiffs far less than agreed-upon at a very expensive wedding — I feel I am peering into a kind of microscope. Something far away and very small in the big scheme of things — the plaintiffs’ frustration — is made very clear. It reminds me of The Devil Wears Prada (no art but lots of emotion) but the legal complaint is even more evocative.