Seth’s blog

For a few years, I’ve been making daily measurements of how well my brain works. I got the idea after I found that omega-3 (from flaxseed oil) improves my balance. It improved other mental functions as well. Tim Lundeen, using an arithmetic test, found similar results. These results suggested to me there might be a lot we don’t know about how our environment affects our brain.

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.

Everyone knows about RDAs (Recommended Daily Allowances) of various nutrients. In a speech to new University of Washington students, David Salesin, a computer scientist, advised them to “maintain balance” by getting certain experiences daily:

• 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.

I liked many things about this talk by Jacqueline Edelberg, a Chicago artist and political science Ph.D., about how she and other moms transformed their local school. Edelberg has written a book about this called How to Walk to School: Blueprint for a Neighborhood Renaissance.The man who introduced her told a story: In a classroom, he noticed a girl drawing a picture. What are you drawing? he asked. I’m drawing God she said. You can’t do that. No one knows what God looks like he said. They will soon she said.

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).

Andrew Gelman’s thoughts about teaching led me to mull over what I learned last semester from teaching at Tsinghua. I taught two classes: a freshman seminar that covered a wide range of psychology research; and a class for graduate students about R.

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.

Here’s something I wrote a few days ago:

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.