Seth's Blog

This reasonable article gives ten reasons why the Prime Minister of Australia has suddenly stopped talking about global warming.

Journalism and science are both ways of finding out about the world, so maybe changes in journalism presage changes in science. In a lecture about the future of journalism, Alan Rusbridge, editor of the Guardian, concluded:

There is an irreversible trend in society today . . . It’s a trend about how people are expressing themselves, about how societies will choose to organize themselves, about a new democracy of ideas and information, about changing notions of authority, about the releasing of individual creativity, about an ability to hear previously unheard voices; about respecting, including and harnessing the views of others.

My self-experimentation had/has some of these elements. The fact that I reached useful conclusions about sleep, mood, and weight without being an expert in any of these fields changed my ideas about authorities (that is, experts). Self-experimentation is very much — perhaps above all — a “releasing of individual creativity” in the sense that I could try to understand sleep, mood, and weight. If I had an idea, I could test it. The problem was mine to solve. Self-experimentation releases scientific creativity just as any artistic tool releases artistic creativity. In the areas of sleep, mood, and weight, I was a “previously unheard voice”. This blog connects my ideas with “the views of others”.

If the parallels between science and journalism hold up, we should eventually see a big restructuring of science — especially health science — that resembles the changes in journalism now happening. Dennis Mangan, who works at a blood bank, has shown that Restless Leg Syndrome can be due to niacin deficiency. No one ever found two causes of scurvy so it is likely that all cases of RLS are due to not enough niacin. So long, expensive drugs for RLS! The poor health of Americans pays for a lot of not-very-useful health science. When that health improves, that pool of money will shrink. Just as when people became better informed (by the Web), the pool of money available to pay journalists began to shrink.

Carl Willat pointed me to this press release about some remarkable research:

Treatment of mice with a ‘friendly’ bacteria, normally found in the soil, altered their behavior in a way similar to that produced by antidepressant drugs, reports research published in the latest issue of Neuroscience. . . . 

Interest in the project arose after human cancer patients being treated with the bacteria Mycobacterium vaccae unexpectedly reported increases in their quality of life.

I believe we need a substantial daily intake of microbes (in our food) to be healthy. The obvious microbe-produced improvements are in immune function and digestion. But this study and the research on which it’s based suggest we also need microbes to make our nervous systems work properly.

When I started eating lots of fermented food I did notice an improvement in mood. Not dramatic, but clear. On a trip to Boston last year, I thought: I’ll go without fermented foods to see what it’s like. But after a day or so without them, I felt so bad I stopped the experiment. A friend of mine says something similar, that kombucha improves his mood in a way that doesn’t seem to be due to caffeine.

I asked Carl how he learned about a three-year-old press release. (The research article — gated version here — appeared in 2007.) “Neil Gaiman tweeted about it,” he said.

A profile of James Patterson, the hyperprolific novelist, says this:

“I don’t believe in showing off,” Patterson says of his writing. “Showing off can get in the way of a good story.”

A few days ago, just before this profile appeared, I gave a talk about self-experimentation at EG (= Entertainment Gathering), a TED-like conference in Monterey. One reason my self-experimentation was effective, I said, was that I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. Whereas professional scientists doing professional science care a lot about impressing other people. I planned to say it like this but didn’t have enough time:

Years ago, I went to a dance concert put on by students at Berkeley High School. I really enjoyed it. I thought to myself: I like dance concerts. So I went to a dance concert by UC Berkeley students – college students. I enjoyed it, but not as much as the high school concert. Then I went to a dance concert by a famous dance company that all of you have heard of. I didn’t enjoy it at all. Why were the professionals much less enjoyable than the high school students? Because the professionals cared a whole lot about being impressive. That got in the way of being enjoyable. Scientists want to be impressive. They want to impress lots of people – granting agencies, journal editors,  reviewers, their colleagues, and prospective graduate students. All this desire to be impressive gets in the way of finding things out.

In particular, it makes self-experimentation impossible:

They can’t do self-experimentation because it isn’t impressive. Self-experimentation is free. Anyone can do it. It’s easy; it doesn’t require any rare or difficult skills. If you want to impress someone with your fancy car, self-experimentation is like riding a bike.

Because my self-experimentation was private, I was free to do whatever worked.

My broader point was that my self-experimentation was effective partly because I was an insider/outsider. I had the subject-matter knowledge of an insider, but the freedom of an outsider.

Kathy Tucker draws my attention to a recent article about the ketogenic diet, which is essentially a very-high-animal-fat diet, used to treat childhood epilepsy. I’ve blogged about the ketogenic diet (here, here, and here) but that was before I was on a similar diet. Kids on the diet didn’t develop high cholesterol (“very few children actually end up with cholesterol or lipid problems on the diet”). I slept better when I ate more animal fat, which suggests that animal fat makes the brain work better overall. The success of the ketogenic diet supports that idea. My results suggest that it is the animal fat, not the other fat, that makes the diet effective.

That many kids with epilepsy get better when put on the ketogenic diet can be seen as a canary-in-the-coal-mine phenomenon. Canaries are more sensitive to bad air than miners; children with ketogenic-responsive epilepsy are more sensitive to lack of animal fat than the rest of us. That lesson was lost on me when I first learned about the diet and its success. The broader lesson is that almost any disease has something to teach us about what the best environment is.