Thanks to Paul Sas.
At a Mr. Lee’s restaurant (a Chinese chain), I started chatting with a girl sitting near me. I told her I was a psychology professor. “You know what people are thinking,” she said. I lamely said, no, I study what foods make the brain work best.
“I don’t know the English word for it,” she said. She drew a walnut. Good for your brain, her parents had told her. I was astonished. When I got to China, my arithmetic scores mysteriously improved. I had expected them to get worse, if anything. I tried to duplicate my American diet in Beijing but it is hard to duplicate the flaxseed oil. (Chinese flaxseed oil is worthless. I can bring it from America but not easily, and it’s impossible to keep it cold the whole way.) I had tested various explanations of the improvement but none held up.
I was starting to believe the reason for the improvement was walnuts. I have two servings/day of yogurt, each time with walnuts. I ate a lot of yogurt with walnuts in Berkeley, too; this was not a dramatic change. But maybe I eat more walnuts in China, and maybe the walnuts have more omega-3. Maybe the walnuts are fresher. In Berkeley I put ground flaxseed in my yogurt (in addition to walnuts), without obvious improvement. Walnuts are lower in omega-3 than flaxseeds.
A Chinese friend of mine had told me the same thing — that her parents had said that walnuts are good for the brain. This is a common Chinese belief, mingled with the curious idea that they are good for the brain because they look like a brain. The Wikipedia entry for walnut, which includes its use in Chinese medicine, says nothing about improving brain function. This long article about the benefits of walnuts doesn’t connect them directly with better brain function. It does say they are considered “brain food” because of high omega-3 content and links to a page that says 1/4 cup of walnuts (25 g) has 2.3 g of omega-3. I am now consuming 2 tablespoons/day of flaxseed oil, which contains 14 g of omega-3. I have sometimes consumed 3 or 4 tablespoons/day (with 21 or 28 g omega-3). You can see why 2 g doesn’t impress me, especially when added to 14 g. I thought I was getting the optimal amount of omega-3 from flaxseed oil. Adding a small amount to the optimal amount shouldn’t have a noticeable effect. This article says walnuts are brain food because of their lecithin content. Lecithin is used to make acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter.
Miraculously I can gather better evidence by myself, in a month, than all the evidence I’ve found. I simply vary how much walnuts I eat and see what happens to my arithmetic score. The experiment is worth doing because of the common Chinese belief and my puzzlingly good scores. Maybe walnuts help a brain that is already getting plenty of omega-3. Maybe not.
A Chinese physicist recently resigned from his job (pure research) at a Beijing research institute. His salary was too low. The base salary is something like $200/month, with something like $1200 for each paper you publish. He explained his decision in a letter to his bosses, which he posted on the Internet. From Google Translate:
Dear leaders:
Hello!
August 2006, I single-handedly carried the mat, one hand holding the quilt to the school to report to work. Slept on the floor in the office 3 nights later, Frank and others XX XXX Street, shares a house, 800 yuan per month. Themselves feel better. However, when my wife came to see me when to Shanghai, but a cry. She did not expect this to write beautiful prose, in English is superb, the monthly salary of ten years ago, men who have three thousand dollars so come down: the room to work without a decent table, there is no place to sit, could only sit bed; office also can take place without her. Yes, until now, my office is a chair, a common HP laser printer or the wife gave me a birthday present. His wife’s insistence, in March 2007, after six months sharing with others, I moved to Village X XX X, X round room (Reference: College on XXXX XXX), monthly rent of 1,600 yuan.
Thanks to Peter Spero, Dave Lull, and David Kramer.
I suppose I’m one of the few people who know there are many differences between the audiobook version of On Beauty and the printed version. Maybe two per page. The audiobook version was prepared before the printed version was finalized. The printed version is better, of course. Long before that comparison, I was fond of comparing books drawn from New Yorker articles with the articles themselves. The New Yorker versions were better-written (= better-edited). It was a painless way to learn how to write.
Last week the TV show 30 Rock did two live shows: one for the East Coast, one for the West. I noticed many differences. The writing was better in the West version (jokes were improved) but the acting was better in the East version (the comic timing was better, for example). New York magazine has listed the biggest differences. For example:
East Coast: In a flashback, Julia Louis-Dreyfus calls to Jonathan, “Yeah, Chai Boy, get in here. You’ll never be a millionaire … Slumdog Millionaire ref. Blammo!”
West Coast: Instead, Louis-Dreyfus says, “Hurry up, Aladdin, before Jasmine is forced to marry Jafar! Similarities … Lemon out.” It gets way more applause.East Coast: In the final scene, Liz is happy with how her birthday went. After all, she even “got to eat the cake off the floor.”
West Coast: This time, she “ate the Fonz’s face.”
I wish there was a whole website about this: Differences between Things that are Supposed to Be The Same. I wrote a Spy article about Similarities Between Things that are Supposed to Be Different. I noticed similar jokes in Jay Leno’s and David Letterman’s monologues.
You are currently browsing the Seth's Blog weblog archives for October, 2010.
