Seth's Blog

As I blogged earlier, my arithmetic performance suddenly improved about a month ago (close-up above). How fast the change: On February 2 at 8 am I took the test; my scores were roughly the same as they had been the past month. At 2 pm the same day, I took the test again and was about 50 msec faster. (In reaction-time experiments, a surprising 50-msec effect is huge.) I remained faster for at least several weeks. Comparing the last 30 sessions before the shift to the first 30 sessions after the shift, t (38) = 11, p = extremely small. In an experiment, comparing treatment and baseline, t> 3 is very good and t > 4 is extremely good.

What might have caused this?

I moved to Beijing in October. Eventually I ran out of the Spectrum Organic flaxseed oil I’d brought with me and started drinking a Beijing brand called Joyful Organic. When I returned to Berkeley I brought a few bottles of it with me and continued to drink it. In late January I ran out; the evening of January 29 I started drinking Spectrum Organic again. Four days later my arithmetic scores sharply improved.

It’s really plausible that the improvement was due to the change in flaxseed oils. Flaxseed oil had made a difference (versus nothing) with a very similar task. A few weeks before the shift, a friend had asked how I knew if my Chinese flaxseed oil was good; I’d said I’d find out when I switched back to Spectrum Organic.

But why was the improvement delayed four days? I started studying flaxseed oil because one evening I took several capsules and the next morning noticed my balance was better. And if the improvement is going to take that long, why would it happen so sharply after the delay? I can’t even begin to answer these questions.

• Secrets of the UC Regents
• Very good free clinical nutrition newsletter
• one blog = one self-experiment (does BHT prevent cold sores?)
• excellent interview of Robert Caro (by Brian Lamb)

The new TV show — I like it. It is based on the work of Paul Ekman, a psychologist who lives in Berkeley. It is a new sort of reality show. It isn’t a 50% reality show (as most reality shows are), it is a 10% reality show. Perhaps 10% of the show involves discussion and illustration of actual research. You learn about it painlessly.

When I was in college, I tried to learn about stuff by finding fun-to-read books on the subject. Genetics, for example. TV was worthless. Educational TV (opera concerts, televised lectures) was dreary and ordinary TV was completely non-educational. Since then, the gap between educational TV and ordinary TV has narrowed a lot: the History Channel, the Food Channel, the Weather Channel, not to mention Frontline, are moderately entertaining and Top Chef and Survivor are mildly educational. But it is still easy to put all these shows on one side or other of the education/entertainment divide.

Lie to Me bridges the gap. Although meant to be seen as entertaining, it’s undeniably educational. I wish there was an entertaining show I could watch to learn Chinese. There isn’t even an entertaining book!

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Buy direct sat tv

I believe language evolved because it facilitated trade. If you wanted X, being able to say “X?” made it a thousand times easier to find someone with excess X. This efficiency required prior language learning, of course. Language learning happened in the background, so to speak, then paid off in the foreground by making one of human life’s biggest tasks (trading) much easier.

After reading this excellent article about netbooks, I realized they’re like language. All sorts of tasks become much easier for your computer if the heavy lifting is done by a server. You no longer need Word or Photoshop, for example. Just as using language to trade required prior language learning, using netbooks this way requires prior software development.

For a few months, I’ve been measuring how well my brain is working using arithmetic problems. Each test session includes 100 simple problems (3+4, 7-0, 4*8) divided into 5 blocks of 20. I type the last digit of the answer as quickly as possible. I got the idea from Tim Lundeen, who got better on a similar task when he increased his DHA intake. My performance on an earlier version of this task was improved by flaxseed oil.

I’ve blogged about this. The virtues of this test include: 1. Fast. Takes only a few minutes. 2. Portable. Requires only a laptop. 3. Many possible answers (1, 2, 3, etc.). This reduces anticipation errors. 4. Many numbers (reaction times) per test.  This allows me to get a measure of variability for each session and can correct for the difficulty of the problem. Aspects with room for improvement include: 1. Speed/accuracy tradeoff. Accuracy isn’t fixed. Depending on how accurate I want to be, I’ll go faster or slower. (I aim for 95% correct.) 2. No complex actions. The most enjoyable games have a motor-skill aspect that this task does not.

Here’s the data so far.

The big gap happened because I moved from Beijing to Berkeley. The most fascinating result, of course, is the sudden drop on February 2. Here is a close-up.

The drop was easy to notice. All of a sudden I was faster (and only slightly less accurate). The first test with better performance took place while my landlady, who lives upstairs, was practicing piano. Usually it’s quiet when I test myself. My first thought was that the music had caused the improvement. But it persisted so long after the music had stopped that the music couldn’t be the cause.

Part 2: I think I know what caused it. But there is a big problem with my explanation.