1. Ate about 30 g of butter.

2. Stood on a cobblestone mat (for 5 minutes, which was all I could bear).

3. Stood during the test.

4. Walked for 10 minutes just before the test.

To find out which mattered, I did them again in the same order and at the same times of day, but with tests before and after each one.  If performance suddenly improved after one of them, then I’d know.

Here’s what actually happened.

The last six points are the relevant results. The first of the six points (627 msec) was before everything. The second (613 msec) was after butter but before the cobblestones. The third (630 msec) was after the cobblestones but before standing. The fourth (610 msec) and fifth (603 msec) were while standing but before walking. The final one (581 msec) was while standing after walking.

I was surprised and pleased how closely the first and last scores repeated the earlier difference. The first score was close to the previous baseline; the last score was close to the previous outlier. A big improvement seems to be under my control.

Before doing these tests, my best guess about what caused the improvement was the walking. But the scores were improving before the walking so that’s unlikely. Perhaps the walking was one of several factors that helped. The data suggest, if anything, a shocking conclusion: butter made my brain work better. An alternative, less consistent with Occam’s razor, is that butter, standing, and walking all produced smaller improvements, which together added up to the big improvement. The cobblestones produced a short-lived decrement.

That pork fat improved my sleep obviously supports the butter interpretation. I should be less surprised than anyone else, but still . . . Last week I noticed something else that supports the butter explanation. At a restaurant with a friend, the waiter brought bread and olive oil. I asked for butter. I spread all of it on a piece of bread, then asked for more butter, and spread all of that on another piece of bread. (About 30 g butter total.) It was the first time I’d eaten a large amount of butter at a meal. An hour or so later, I felt unusually good, some combination of calm and warmth. I never noticed this after eating pork fat, but butter may be to pork fat as hamburger is to steak: Easier to digest. The pork fat is within cell walls; the butter fat isn’t.

If so, tracking myself might turn up interesting anomalies — clues to big environmental effects. The first one I found involved flaxseed oil. There turned out to be a short burst of improvement after I took it. The second anomaly I found also involved flaxseed oil. When I switched from Chinese flaxseed oil to American flaxseed oil (Spectrum Organic), a few days later my arithmetic scores suddenly improved. Something was wrong with the Chinese flaxseed oil.
The third revealing anomaly — which doesn’t involve flaxseed oil — happened yesterday (see below). Each point on the graph is one testing session.  Each session consists of 32 simple arithmetic problems (e.g., 3+5, 7-6) and takes about 3 minutes. I use R on my laptop to collect the data. I type the answer or the last digit of the answer (e.g., if the answer is 13 I type “3″) as fast as possible. Here are the results from almost a year of this task:

The Y axis is the time it took to do one problem. Yesterday, the graph shows, I suddenly got much faster. My score dropped about 50 msec — far more than normal variation.

What caused the drop? I can think of four possibilities:

1. The test was standing. Usually I test myself sitting.

2. The test happened after I’d been walking on my treadmill for 10 minutes. That too was very rare.

3. I’d had about 30 g of butter 2 hours earlier.

4. I’d stood on my cobblestone mat 2 hours earlier.

My guess is that it’s #2 (10 min walking). The previous record low score, in January, might have come after I did Dance Dance Revolution for 30 minutes or so.

• something intellectual [such as a computer science class] (not so hard in college);
• something physical (like running, biking, a team sport);
• something creative (like music, art, or writing); and
• something social (like lunch with a friend).

This served him well in college, he said, and he continued it after college.

I think he’s right — we need certain experiences to be healthy just as we need certain nutrients. My rough draft of such a list would be this: 1. Social. 2. Physical. Nassim Taleb’s ideas about exercise seem as good as anyone’s. This is really several requirements, for different sorts of exercise. 3. Travel. About an hour per day. 4. Hunger. The data behind the up-day-down-day diet suggest we should experience a substantial amount of hunger every week. 5. Face-to-face contact in the morning. About an hour. 6. Morning sunlight. An hour? 7. Being listened to. I suspect the therapeutic value of psychotherapy derives from this. I believe this is one reason blogging is popular — it provides a sense of being listened to. 8. Being helpful. 9. Being recognized as having value. Blogging helps here, too. 10. Being part of a group effort, something larger. Of course #1 (social) and #5 (morning faces) can come from the same experience, and so can #2 (physical) and #3 (travel). I wouldn’t say we need #7-#10 every day but perhaps several times per week.

I might add two more things: 11. Learning. After I started studying Chinese via Anki/treadmill, I started to sleep better. It wasn’t the treadmill; that wasn’t new. Several studies have found that people sleep more when they are learning intensely. After I became a professor, instances of concentrated learning — such as learning to use R — became rare. I remember how good they felt. How intense learning could go on throughout your life during the Stone Age isn’t obvious, however. Presumably all the experiences we need to be healthy were easily available then. 12. Foot stimulation. In a Beijing park, I came across a cobblestone track about a hundred yards long. Walking on it is supposed to be beneficial. I took off my shoes and socks and tried it. I was astonished how painful it felt — but day by day I could stand on it longer. This is a topic for another post but of course in the Stone Age people got a lot more foot stimulation than anyone reading this. Commercial cobblestone track. Thanks to Tim Lundeen for reawakening my interest in this.

Edelberg’s story did sound miraculous: Her crummy neighborhood public school, within a year, became an acceptable place for her children. The change had many elements, including an after-school program, a farmer’s market, and painted doors, but I think the most important piece — which Edelberg said little about  — was this: Parents were allowed to attend every class. Within two years, said Edelberg, all the bad teachers left.

I call this way of governing top and bottom versus middle. In this case the top was the school’s principal (Susan Kurland, Edelberg’s co-author), the bottom was the parents, and the middle was the teachers. Acting alone, the principal couldn’t control the teachers — she couldn’t fire the bad ones, for example. With the parents’ help, she could control them.

It’s as old as Moses:

1. As I’ve blogged, the Ten Commandments was an agreement between Moses (top) and the preyed-upon men in his community (bottom) against the men who were preying upon them (middle) — stealing from them, for example.

There are other examples:

2. One reason surgical checklists — implemented by hospital administration (top) — work so well, I believe, is that they give nurses (bottom) power over doctors (middle). A nurse can tell a doctor to follow the checklist. The details of implementation also empower the lower-ranking members of the surgical team.

3. In China, what are called (in Chinese) human-flesh searches — a kind of cyber-vigilante-ism — go on with the approval of the central government (top). These searches, which are actually mini-crusades — allow ordinary citizens (bottom) to punish corrupt or otherwise misbehaving local government officials (middle).

I predict that someday someone in the American government (top) will realize that a way to greatly improve health care is to empower patients (bottom) against doctors (middle).

Some things worked well:

1. In the freshman seminar, one of the assignments was to design a Mindless-Eating-type experiment. (Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink was one of the reading assignments.) One of the students designed a really good experiment in which people on different buses get different treatments. She happened to be a senior applying for graduate school and her work on that assignment helped me write a really strong letter of recommendation for her.

2. I graded the students on their comments on the reading and set the bar very high to get a full score (3 out of 3): they had to say something that interested me. A fair number managed to do this. The bar wasn’t too high.

3. I had lunch with all the students in the seminar (about 5 per week). The students seemed to like it. I certainly did.

4. There were classroom debates about which paper was the best (one week) or the worst (another week). They got everyone involved, was far less passive than listening to me talk, and gave them practice speaking English.

But there was plenty of room for improvement:

1. Students in the seminar were frustrated by the vague criterion (”interest me”). Toward the end I posted the comments that got the full score and that seemed to help.

2. In the seminar it was hard to get feedback about how well I was being understood. The best I could do was pass out slips of paper and have the students write down what percentage of what I said they understood. More immediate feedback (e.g., when I used a too-difficult word) would have been better.

3. In the R class I hoped the students would analyze their own data. This was too hard for quite a few of them. In the future I’ll give them a data set.

4. One student dropped the R class because my English was hard to understand.

5. In the seminar, some students (freshmen) complained that other (older) students, whose English was better, talked too much. They had a point and I should try calling on people randomly. I also should try to get general feedback after each class (e.g., “tell me one thing you liked and one thing you didn’t like about today’s class”).

6. In spite of my constant complaint that professors treat all of their students alike (e.g., all students get the same assignment) when they aren’t all alike — they differ substantially in what they’re good at, for example — I pretty much did the same thing.

7. I should have at least tried to learn my students’ Chinese names.

In graduate school, I studied experimental psychology. I wanted to learn how to do experiments. The best way to learn is to do, I thought, so I started doing self-experiments in addition to my regular research (with rats). One thing I studied was my acne. My dermatologist had prescribed tetracycline and benzoyl peroxide. In a few months, my self-experiments showed that tetracycline didn’t work and benzoyl peroxide did work — the opposite of what I originally believed.

Emphasis added. I wanted to write “the opposite of what I originally thought” but the earlier use of thought made me use believed instead. Avoidance of this sort of repetition is standard practice. It’s even important scientifically. The linguist David Stuart made a big advance in understanding ancient Mayan when he realized that different symbols mean the same thing. The different symbols appeared in the same block of text, like my thought and believed.

My question is: Why? What’s the evolutionary reason? Maybe it’s part of a push toward novelty, so that nobody says, “Today I went to the store. Today I went to the store.”  Or maybe it’s a way of pushing us to make distinctions, invent new words, and learn new words. It pushes us to make distinctions because it pushed me away from  lazily writing ” . . . thought . . . thought”.

One reason this interests me is my interpretation of why we like repeated decorative elements. Many sorts of decoration involved repeated elements — identical things or pictures placed side by side. I believe we like this sort of thing so that we will place similar things side by side. When we place them side by side it’s easy to notice small differences that would otherwise be hard to see. Noticing small differences makes us connoisseurs. Connoisseurs are important economically because they are willing to pay more for finely-made stuff. They support cutting-edge artisans.

The invent-new-words explanation strikes me as the most plausible. First we do what the Mayans did: invent new words that mean exactly the same thing as the old words, purely to avoid short-range repetition. As the words get older, their meanings drift independently and they start to mean slightly different things (such as job and profession). Thereby the language does a better job of keeping up with technical/economic progress, which keeps generating new things that need new names.

thinks most [journalists] are liberals overly concerned with writing stories that will impress other liberal journalists and win prizes in journalism competitions.

Well, yes. Not everyone is a liberal, of course, but basically everyone wants to impress their colleagues. Scientists have an amusing spin on this: They call it “peer review.” The amusing part is that somehow no one else’s opinion should matter. (E.g., all journals must be peer-reviewed.) Scientists get away with this bizarre view of economics (thinking someone should pay you and get nothing in return) perhaps because it is indeed difficult to assess the quality of this or that bit of science if you’re not in the field and because science has produced huge benefits for the rest of us in the past.

As I said, this is just human nature. As far as I can tell, professors act this way — try to impress colleagues — in every academic department. In schools of education, the result is this:

Amy Treadwell . . . received her master’s degree in education from DePaul University, a small private university in Chicago. . . . But when she walked into her first job, teaching first graders on the city’s South Side, she discovered a major shortcoming: She had no idea how to teach children to read. “I was certified and stamped with a mark of approval, and I couldn’t teach them the one thing they most needed to know how to do,” she told me.

It’s no secret that many schools of education do a poor job of training their students to teach — which is nominally one of their main goals. I am just repeating what Veblen said long ago.

What’s new is this: One man, Doug Lemov, working mostly alone, has figured out how to make people better teachers. One man. Not an professor. Did he build on the work of others? No, he started from scratch. He’s made a list of about 50 techniques. They are teachable. He gives workshops about them. As far as I can tell from this magazine article, Lemov has done a better job of figuring out how to train teachers than all the education professors in the world put together. If you arrived on earth from outer space, and didn’t understand human nature, you’d think this couldn’t possibly be true, but apparently it is. It’s like something out of a comic book.

Thanks to Bob Levinson.

[Joe] Forgas [an Australian psychology professor] placed a variety of trinkets, like toy soldiers, plastic animals and miniature cars, near the checkout counter. As shoppers exited, Forgas tested their memory, asking them to list as many of the items as possible. To [vary] mood, Forgas conducted the survey on gray, rainy days — he accentuated the weather by playing Verdi’s “Requiem” — and on sunny days, using a soundtrack of Gilbert and Sullivan. The results were clear: shoppers in the “low mood” condition remembered nearly four times as many of the trinkets. The wet weather made them sad, and their sadness made them more aware and attentive.

I found the scientific article that reports this experiment, in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Memory for the trinkets was measured two ways — recall and recognition — and both ways the “sad” shoppers did much better. I didn’t know about this; the size of the effect suggests it’s important. Calling it variation in “memory” is odd, since the remembered event was only a minute ago. Variation in attentiveness is a better summary.

Whatever you call it, I like the general point made in the scientific article. When you are in a good mood, you pay less attention to your surroundings than when you are in a bad mood. When you’re in a good mood, the model of the world in your head is working well. No need to change it. When you’re in a bad mood, the model of the world in your head isn’t working well. Time to gather more data and revise it.

My colleagues and I have studied a different effect along these lines (in rats): When things aren’t going well, you vary your actions more. You try new things more. That’s another way to update your model of the world.