Seth’s blog

I’m sure we need to ingest plenty of bacteria for our digestion and immune systems to work properly. What about the brain? When I started eating lots of fermented foods, I didn’t notice any brain-related changes, such as changes in mood or sleep. Suggesting that fermented foods have little effect on the brain. But a new study in the American Journal of Psychiatry suggests I reexamine the question. The researchers followed 160,000 high-school students in Taiwan for eleven years.

The incidence rate of suicide mortality in participants with current asthma at [the start of the study] was more than twice that of those without asthma (11.0 compared with 4.3 per 100,000 person-years), but there was no significant difference in the incidence of natural deaths.

Linking immune-system dysfunction (asthma) with brain dysfunction (suicide). I believe fermented foods will substantially reduce asthma. This finding makes it more plausible they’d also improve brain function.

Here I describe my discovery that seeing faces on TV in the morning improved my mood the next day. The details of the effect suggested that the ideal stimulus is what you’d see during a conversation. For a long time I used the C-Span show Booknotes as the main source of the faces. I watched it on a 25-inch TV. More recently I used my own face in a mirror. It was readily available and perfectly life-size. I listened to a podcast or book at the same time.

A few months ago, Caleb Cooper commented saying that he’d found that looking at two faces every morning seemed to work better than looking at one face. He found that Bloggingheads.tv expanded to full screen on a 24-inch monitor (measured diagonally) produced close-to-life-size faces, which is what he wanted.

This interested me for several reasons: 1. It might make the effect stronger. 2. Bloggingheads.tv has a big selection, offering control over size.  3. I disliked looking at my face for long times. 4. It seems more naturalistic than looking at my own face.

I’ve been trying this with a 22-inch monitor (which I already had). Perhaps 24-inch would be better. The effect does seem stronger, as Caleb said.

I asked Caleb several questions about his experience.

How did you get started doing this?

I think it started when I read your posts about standing and sleeping.  This led me to read your paper on self experimentation and sleep.  Like you, I often suffered from early awakenings where I would wake up around 2-3 hours early, still feeling tired but having a hard time going back to sleep.

Based on what I learned from you and other sources, I tried out the following; got a pair of blue blocker clip-ons for my glasses which I put on about two hours before bed; ordered an Apollo goLite blue light emitter that I use for about an hour in the morning, I would sometimes take 1/3 mg of melatonin nine hours after waking up, and 3mg half hour before bed, and I started standing on a high difficulty Thera-Band balance pad on one leg while looking into a mirror for 30 minutes in the morning.

What made you think it was worth a try?

Well, why not:)  Most self experimentation can be easily done for practically no cost, while the potential upside is significant.  There’s also satisfying curiosity, expanding self knowledge, gaining mastery over your mind and body…  You had a plausible theory, had collected suggestive data, and I’d already found the appetite suppression effect of the Shagnri-La was very real, so you had a track record of introducing ideas worth paying attention to.

What happened at first?

It felt to me like my sleep modestly improved, sleeping through the night longer and having the energy to get up and go much sooner after waking.  This was awhile ago though, I didn’t keep any data, and I was adding and dropping different things, so my experience doesn’t have a high enough confidence interval for drawing any general inferences.

When did you make those changes?

I’d guess around sixteen months ago.

After you made those changes (”got a pair of BlueBlocker glasses…”) did your mood change?

It improved in as much as waking up feeling rested makes you feel a lot better than trying to get up while still tired.

Tell me something about yourself (job, age, etc.).

I got into medicine through Clinical Massage Therapy.  Being a high school dropout I wanted something I could get into quickly, then sink or swim on my own.  Massage is one of the few fields the university-accreditation complex hasn’t sunk its tentacles deeply into (a mixed blessing; for an autodidact it lets you quickly start a great career, but the field really needs a bifurcated certification track to separate medical massage from relaxational spa massage). I live in the Pacific Northwest, near the site where they developed the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.  Despite all the lingering nuclear waste, it’s a nice, mid sized metro area. I’m in my mid twenties.

• “ant tribes” near Beijing
• What exactly is umami?
• Is omega-3 an antidepressant?  “Initial analyses failed to clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of Omega-3 for all patients taking part in the study. Other analyses, however, revealed that Omega-3 improved depression symptoms in patients diagnosed with depression unaccompanied by an anxiety disorder.” Are they fooling themselves? Maybe not. My research suggests that morning faces can reduce only depression but also anxiety disorders. So if you have depression without an anxiety disorder it may indeed have a different cause.

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

After I complained about lack of outrage in Daniel Carlat’s Unhinged, Bruce Charlton pointed me to this essay (registration required) by Simon Sobo, a psychiatrist. Sobo says something I may end up repeating every time the subject of antidepressants comes up:

Rat pups that are isolated from their mother and littermates produce ultrasonic sounds that are indicative of stress. SSRIs [the most popular type of antidepressants] reduce these sounds (Oliver, 1994). Is a chemical imbalance being corrected? I doubt it.

That’s a nice summing-up. Prozac (an SSRI) really does something, but the notion that it returns to normal something broken is absurd. Sobo also gives an example of how the anti-anxiety effect of such drugs works in practice:

Mrs. L. had originally required 40 mg of Paxil (paroxetine) per day to recover from a postpartum depression. After 12 months on the medication, an incident happened that disturbed her. During her lunchtime, she was visiting her 1-year-old son at his day care center when one of the workers began screaming at another infant instead of picking her up. The next day Mrs. L. went shopping during her lunch break. Later that week a co-worker became tearful during the course of a conversation with Mrs. L. regarding her own child’s day care center. Only then did Mrs. L. wonder about her decision to go shopping the day after she had witnessed the day care worker’s inappropriate reaction. She wondered if her Paxil had made her indifferent when ordinarily she would have reacted and worried about such a thing.

My research about mood suggests that depression is due to defective entrainment of a mood oscillator. It’s caused by something missing from the environment. “Chemical imbalance” has nothing to do with it.

• kaleidoscope game
• The Transfer Book. Helpful for college students thinking of transferring.
• Some medical schools have trouble disclosing their disclosure policies! In the case of an NPR show The Infinite Mind, which I liked, the founder, Frederick Goodwin, whom I took seriously, “received over a million [undisclosed] dollars from pharmaceutical companies to give promotional talks.” Details. This is especially horrifying because Goodwin co-authored the “bible” of bipolar disorder research. His influence is great. His co-author was Kay Jamison, who writes a lot about the subject for popular audiences. To me, she’s now tainted by association.
• Robert Woodward, the great chemist. A terrific biographical essay.