Seth Roberts - Becoming His Own Mouse

[Republished from QS]

I'm becoming a devoted fan of Seth Roberts, one of the great champion of self-experimentation. Roberts, an emeritus professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, has spent many year studying himself, and, even better, offering many practical clues about how to construct your own "experiments of one." I first found out about his work in the most obvious way: searching on "self-experimentation" in Google.

This lead me to Roberts paper: "Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight." The problems he describes are so common, and his solutions so counter-intuitive, that you can't help being intrigued. One of the great things about reading Roberts is getting a feeling for how different self-experimentation is from other forms of self-knowledge. While Roberts often begins his experiments with a hypothesis, using his stock of common knowledge, suggestions from friends, and categories of analysis typical of a well-trained college professor, this first idea is usually proven, through experiment, to be wrong. Not superficial, or too narrow, or distorted by delusion or prejudice; simply incorrect, provably irrelevant. So then Roberts has to come up with new ideas. The data, expressed as charts, no longer merely test his hypotheses; the data becomes the source of his theories. And the theories bear the mark have having emerged from data. Often, they seem very, very odd. They seem to have no link to received wisdom, to folk knowledge, to intuitive "rightness." To me, they seem like the kinds of theories a computer might have about a person.

Does standing up a lot during the day reduce susceptibility to colds? Go ahead and doubt it; I did. But Roberts has data to back it up, and while it would be foolish to believe that standing up a lot  during the day would eliminate colds across an entire population - foolish, that is, without experiments to prove it - Roberts' own practice of standing up a lot has a lot more empirical back-up than many of the more "sensible" things we naively believe.

Here's anther one: for a long time Roberts had a problem with his sleep. He woke too early, could not go back to sleep, and then was tired in the morning. He tried different ways to cure this problem until, through a combination of coincidence, experiment and analysis of the data, he discovered an expected correlation: his problem disappeared when he skipped breakfast. He cured his early awakening by not eating until 11 a.m.

The idea that skipping breakfast may reduce early awakening was, wrote Roberts, "a new idea in sleep research." Strangely, Roberts was not hungry in the wee hours when he was troubled by early awakening, which lead him to suspect that it was not discomfort that roused him, but rather some glitch in his sleep cycle caused by anticipation of food.

In his paper, Roberts cites a number of studies showing that:

Food-anticipatory activity is a well-established effect in animals (Bolles & Stokes 1965; Boulos & Terman 1980). Mammals, birds, and fish become more active a few hours before feeding time (Boulos & Terman); as far as I know, no effect present in mammals, birds, and fish has ever been absent in humans. Because activity requires wakefulness, food should produce anticipatory wakefulness as well.

Roberts' theory came to mind recently because just last week, in the May 23, 2008 issue of Science, Patrick M. Fuller, Jun Lu, and Clifford B. Saper report on some experiments that precisely locate an important mechanism that links food with circadian rhythms in mice. The idea that circadian rhythms in mice are influenced by food availability is not new, but, through an elegant experiment, the authors show that there is a food-entrainable clock in the dorsomedial nucleus of the hypothalamus (DMH), and that this clock can override the light-sensitive circadian clock in the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN).

Our data indicate that there is an inducible clock in the DMH that can override the SCN and drive circadian rhythms when the animal is faced with limited food availability. Thus, under restricted feeding conditions, the DMH clock can assume an executive role in the temporal regulation of behavioral state. For a small mammal, finding food on a daily basis is a critical mission. Even a few days of starvation, a common threat in natural environments, may result in death. Hence, it is adaptive for animals to have a secondary "master clock" that can allow the animal to switch its behavioral pattern rapidly after a period of starvation to maximize the opportunity of finding food sources at the same time on following days.

How strongly this mechanism operates in humans - if at all - is unknown. But, thanks to Seth Roberts' experiments, we have data on a human whose sleep problem was cured by an alteration in the schedule of food. One of the regular contributors to the forum Roberts runs on his Web site uses the tag line: "Proud member of Lab Rats United."  This is a joke, but more than a joke. When we experiment on ourselves, we can fruitfully adapt the methods used by psychologists on mice; but that's not so surprising, because we share a lot of their biology, too.
 
 

Negotiating with Nazis - A Good Idea

Yesterday George Bush said:

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

This comment is so irritatingly ignorant that I break into the usual random research notes posted on this non-blog to point out that the United States did, in fact, actively negotiate with Nazis long after the invasion of Poland, and not out of any delusions about the nature of the regime. The U.S. continued to operated a diplomatic mission in Germany after the invasion of Poland, staffed by - among others of course - an able administrative officer named George F. Kennan. A taste of the duties undertaken by U.S. diplomats among the Nazis can be had from Kennan's Memoirs: 1925-1950:

Among other things, we were taking over the interests of France and Great Britain: the protection of their nationals, their diplomatic property, their prisoners of war, and the tasks connected with the exchange of their official personnel...

This administrative burden of the Berlin embassy, incidentally, grew steadily as the war progressed... The increasingly desperate situation of the German Jews,, and Jews from the German occupied areas, and the heavy attendant pressures brought to bear upon us to effect their release and removal to the Untied States, added to the burden...

As the Nazi conquest proceeded, new countries were added to the list of those whose interests we were protecting. By the time of Pearl Harbor there were, I believe, about eleven of them. And we had the responsibility for representing the interests of these countries not just in Germany alone, but also throughout the wider and steadily expanding sphere of German-occupied Europe, so that in the end we stood as the sole representatives for most of Europe, of the interests of the United States and a good part of the remainder of the Western world.

Now somebody with knowledge of the historical details will find some painful ambiguities in this excerpt, for the "pressure" to rescue German Jews was resisted by many in the U.S. government. But that is another topic altogether, and I quote the passage just to show that if George Bush wants to make a list of delusional appeasers, and his criteria for this list is that they negotiate under such circumstances, then he should definitely include Roosevelt and the best of his diplomatic service.

And in case you think that negotiating over the status of foreign nationals is a small thing compared to the negotiations Barack Obama must have in mind for Iran, here's a bit more from Kennan about what Roosevelt wanted:

In late February 1940 I was sent off to Italy to meet the Under Secretary of State, Mr. Sumner Welles, and his party on their arrival at Naples and to accompany them on their journey to Berlin. Mr. Welles had been dispatched by President Roosevelt to the four European capitals of Rome, Berlin, Paris, and London to ascertain the views of the leading European statesmen on the possibilities for the negotiation of an end to the hostilities and the establishment of a just and permanent European peace. Up to that time, it will be recalled, the western front had been inactive. It was clear that unless the war could be in some way terminated before the advent of spring, hostilities would begin in the west on a serious scale, and the struggle would assuredly develop into another great and tragic one, from which it would be unlikely that the United States could remain aloof. If there were the slightest possibility of averting this catastrophe, the President wanted to know about it before it was too late.

Kennan did not think such negotiations likely to succeed. He preferred that the White House rely on the diplomatic work of the staff, who were likely to be better informed. "But," he writes, "this was FDR's way of doing business, and he was entitled to the indulgence, in this respect, of his own preferences."

Kennan's clear criticism of Roosevelt here has nothing to do with the mere fact of engagement with the Nazi regime and everything to do with the level of preparation, analysis, and diplomatic tact that could be expected under the circumstances. The irony here is that, while President Bush criticizes others for being naive in even considering to meet with the leader of Iran, he himself is most notorious for letting a sense of inner conviction substitute for information and thought.

Links for Talk at Maker Day

BodyBugg
Wrist Device Tracks Behavior by Category
Emotion Map
Reality Mining with Mobile Devices
Talk to Baby

Eric Kandel's In Search of Memory

At the beginning the memoir he published last year, the great neuroscientist Erik Kandel gives an account of his first sexual experience. His partner was "an attractive, sensual young woman," named Mitzi, who worked as a servant in his parents house. Mitzi was twenty-five. Kandel was eight. His memory of the encounter is intense and bittersweet. On the one hand, he felt great pleasure and interest. On the other hand, Mitzi told him they would have to stop, because if they didn't he could become pregnant.

Kandel remembers being dubious. He knew full well that only women could have babies. But at the same time he felt a certain anxiety. What would his mother think if he became pregnant?

Continue …

5 Posts on Getting Things Done

Below are links to some recent posts with background material (and a small amount of new reporting) connected my story in Wired on David Allen and Getting Things Done.

Wired profile of David Allen
GTD and "The Civilizing Process"
Courtesy, Conditioning, and GTD
What is a Good Cult?
The Unity Church Influence
The Eusocial "Meaning" of Getting Things Done