The first speaker will be Robin Barooah, who will tell how he cured his RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury). What his doctors told him to do didn’t work.

Jeremy Howard, the president of Kaggle, discovered the same effect independently while studying Chinese. A few days ago, I heard from Patrick Roach, a medical student in the Midwest, who also discovered the same effect independently — in his case, studying anatomy rather than Chinese. He blogged about the Anki/treadmill combination. I asked him if walking on a treadmill made it easier to study Anki? He replied:

Absolutely.  I originally tried this with a 3100 card deck I created while studying anatomy in med school.  The format (Image/Name) was perfect for reviewing while walking, as there wasn’t too much text to read.  I imagine your experience with learning a new language was similar.  Anyways, Treadmill + Anki (+Music) along with my Tablet / Wiimote combo was much more productive than either task alone.  I could easily spend 1-2 hours and not notice the time passing in the same way it dragged on when trying to study endless flashcards sitting in a quiet room.  Getting tired or losing focus was less of an issue as well – I noticed I had less distractions/extra attention to spare while walking.

Thanks for getting in touch, Patrick. As Lewis Carroll said, “What I tell you three times is true.”

When Grant was a graduate student (at the University of Michigan), he was asked to help people at the university’s fund-raising call center raise more money. They call alumni, asking for money. The person who ran the center had tried the usual motivational tactics, such as offering bonuses. They hadn’t worked.

Grant noticed that most of the money being raised went for scholarships. He tried various ways of making the call center employees aware that the money they raised helped students directly. The most effective way turned out to be a 5-minute meeting with a scholarship recipient. This had a staggering effect:

The average caller doubled in calls per hour and minutes on the phone per week . . . Revenue quintipled: callers averaged $412 [per week] before meeting the scholarship recipient and more than $2000 afterward.

A huge effect — and a useful huge effect. And one that is not even hinted at in countless introductory psychology books. Notice that physical conditions of the job and the “physical” payoff (the salary) didn’t change. All that changed was employees’s mental models of their job.

I conclude that people are far more motivated by a desire to help others than you would ever guess from reading psychology textbooks — and, even more, from reading economics textbooks. Grant says nothing about this, at least in the book, but I’d guess that the employees were considerably happier at their jobs as well. You might think that there has been so much research on job design that there were no big effects left to be discovered. You’d be wrong.

The book’s main theme is the non-obvious advantages of being a “giver” (someone who helps others without concern about payback). Grant teaches at Wharton, whose students apparently enter Wharton believing (or are taught there?) that this is a poor strategy. With dozens of studies and stories, Grant argues that the truth is more complicated — that a giver, properly focussed, does better than others. Whether this reflects cause and effect (Grant seems to say it does) I have no idea. Perhaps “givers” are psychologically unusually sophisticated in many ways, not just a relaxed attitude toward payback, and that is why some of them do very well.

I was more impressed with two other things where cause and effect is clearer. One is a story about communication style. It is the best story in a book full of good stories. About ten years ago, Grant was asked to teach senior military officers how to motivate their troops. His first class was a four-hour lecture to Air Force colonels in their forties and fifties. Grant was 24.  The feedback forms, filled out by the students after the class, reflected the age — and presumably wisdom — discrepancy. One comment was: “More quality information in audience than on podium.”

Grant taught the class again, to another group of Air Force colonels. Instead of talking about his credentials at the start of the class, he began like this:

I know what some of you are thinking right now: What can I possibly learn from a professor who’s twelve years old?

Everyone laughed. Grant does not say what he said next — how he answered the question. He went on to give the same lecture he had given before. The difference in feedback was “night and day”. Here is one of the comments: “Spoke with personal experience. He was the right age! High energy; clearly successful already.”

This is great. A non-obvious, seemingly small change produces a huge outcome difference. Grant clearly understands something enormously important about communication that isn’t not found in other psychology books, such as introductory textbooks. It isn’t easy to interpret (why exactly did Grant’s new opening have its effect?) nor study experimentally — but that’s fine. In Give and Take, Grant follows this story with research about what is called “the pratfall effect”: Under some circumstances making a blunder (such as spilling a cup of coffee) makes a speaker more likeable. But Grant’s opening (“what can I learn…”) isn’t a blunder. Grant calls it an “expression of vulnerability”, a category broad enough to include pratfalls — fair enough.

What can we learn from Grant’s story? Above all, that something mysterious and powerful happens or might happen at the beginning of a talk and that ordinary feedback forms are sensitive enough to detect it. What Grant did was highly specific to the situation (young speaker, older military officers) so you can’t copy it. To use it you really have to grasp the general rule. Which remains to be determined.

Tomorrow I will blog about another impressive part of the book.

Jacobs’s point is at the heart of the success of my personal science. My personal science is hugely different from professional science, but different may or may not be better. It has succeeded, I’m sure, because of what Jacobs says. How did I manage to find new ways to sleep better, lose weight, and so on? I had good ideas, yes, but so do many people, including professional scientists. One reason for my success: I observed myself closely. Now and then I noticed outliers (e.g., nights when I slept unusually well, days when I lost my appetite). These gave me ideas to test. In professional science, this rarely happens. For one thing, they can’t wait for outliers. They are under pressure to get results soon. Another reason for my success: I persisted. For many years, I measured my weight, sleep, mood, and so on. Unlike a professional scientist, I had no required output. I could spend as much time as necessary.

I keep coming back to this because Jacobs’s point is absent from conventional American thinking, such as New York Times op-eds. But it is illustrated again and again. A recent episode of This American Life, titled “Dr. Gilmer and Mr. Hyde“, is about two doctors named Gilmer: Dr. Benjamin Gilmer and Dr. Vince Gilmer (who are unrelated). VG kills his father and goes to jail. BG replaces him at a rural clinic. His patients tell him what a nice man VG was. This puzzles BG: Why would such a nice man kill his father? The legal system had ignored this question or at least not provided a convincing answer. BG, on the other hand, actually cares. (Spoiler alert.) He gathers information about the case and visits VG in prison. With the help of a psychiatrist friend, he comes up with a new idea: VG has Huntington’s disease, whose symptoms include aggression (such as murder). In prison, VG has been far too aggressive. His hands shake some of the time; this had been called “malingering” (faking) by a psychologist. When tested, it turns out VG does have Huntington’s disease, in the sense that he has the gene for it. When VG was given medication appropriate for Huntington’s disease, he got much better.

BG, who cared about VG, managed to improve his condition. The legal system, which did not care about him, did not. The implication for all health care, including research, is straightforward: Empower those who care.

Thanks to Bryan Castañeda and Andy.

I am a mother of five children. I live in Fremont, California. In 2009, my youngest child, who was three, was diagnosed with autism. The diagnosis came from her social and communication impairment and highly repetitive behavior. She did not play with other children. She had no imaginary play. She made no eye contact with anyone. She had no spontaneous language. She did not understand questions. Her language was restricted to repeating what she heard (echolalia). In other words, she didn’t use language to communicate. She could stack blocks for hours. She would line up toys and have a meltdown if you moved a toy out of line. Everything had to be according to her rules or she was in chaos. She had highly repetitive routines that would escalate into unrest or panic. For example, she would go to wash her hands, turn the water on, turn the water off, turn the water on, and so on. Each time through the routine she would get more upset that she couldn’t stop. These loop-like routines might last hours, typically ending because of exhaustion from crying. She also had episodes of absence (blank stares) that lasted 15-30 seconds.

My husband and I tried a number of popular therapies. We tried Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) for 3 months. She got worse; her loop-like routines occurred more frequently. We tried speech therapy for 6 months. It increased her vocabulary, but did not improve her communication in other ways. The third therapy we tried was auditory integration training. We did the full series twice, which took a total of 3 months. There was no improvement. Then she started going to a special-needs school, where each student is given an individualized program. At this point, she was 3.5 years old.

Around the same time that she started the new school, we started changing her diet. I had been looking at nutritional deficiencies associated with autism. As a result, we added green veggie smoothies (for example, kale, cucumber, cilantro, nuts, seeds, fruits, it varied with the season) to her diet, supplemented with a multivitamin, magnesium, B complex, Vitamin D3, Omega 3′s (EPA and DHA) and probiotic blends (a mix of pills from different companies, such as New Chapter and MegaFoods). Within three days, she began to look people in the eye and began responding to her name. Before the autism diagnosis, we had taken her for a hearing test, because of her lack of response to her name.

This encouraged us to think that diet was important. We eliminated gluten and casein (dairy) from her diet. Many parents had seen improvement after they made this change. These changes were often not large enough to make the children no longer autistic, but they did improve. Our daughter’s response was similar. Her social and communication skills improved, but she was still about a year behind her peers. She still had long outbursts and meltdowns. We were sure it was the new diet, not the new school, that caused the improvement because several times she had eaten gluten or casein at school by accident (e.g., pizza) and her language and behavior regressed. This happened about ten times. Twenty-four hours after these exposures, she was considerably worse. She wouldn’t be able to articulate words and her language comprehension decreased. She also became much more emotional and picky (e.g., had to take a certain route home). The regression lasted about five days.

These improvements encouraged me to read more about diet and autism. I read a few clinical studies – there were hardly any. On blogs, I read about parents’ experiences. On one blog – I can’t remember which one — I read a comment from a parent that he found that his son benefited from removing gluten and casein, and, importantly, MSG made his son worse. What idiot feeds his child MSG? I thought. I was wrong.

I have a Ph.D. in biochemistry, with an emphasis in protein chemistry, from UC Santa Cruz. I have spent 20 years conducting research and development on proteins for therapeutics and molecular diagnostic applications. Proteins are made of amino acids, the most abundant of which is glutamic acid. When a protein breaks down, glutamic acid is released. I discovered that I had been feeding my daughter plenty of glutamate. I started researching connections between glutamate and autism and convinced myself it was plausible that too much glutamate caused behaviors associated with autism, as well as other brain disorders. Suddenly I understood why removal of gluten and casein might help. Both proteins have a high glutamate content (= a large fraction of their amino acids are glutamic acid). Common types of food processing break down these proteins. For example, fermentation, ultra-pasteurization, adding acid (such as lemon juice), and adding enzymes (e.g., when making cheese) all create free glutamate.

I started looking into food labels. Glutamate can be hidden in many ways, I learned. For example, “natural flavor” may be up to 60% glutamic acid. Perhaps my daughter had a predisposition to glutamate sensitivity; my research revealed that many of us do. There are glutamate receptors all over the body, including the brain. For example, glutamate receptors in the pancreas regulate insulin secretion. To reduce the amount of glutamate in her food, I tried to remove all processed proteins from her diet. This wasn’t simple. Apple juice may have “natural flavors”. Toothpaste may have glutamate. Our new diet mainly consisted of organic vegetables, fruits, seeds, nuts, meat, quinoa, and rice. We stayed away from any product with processed soy, corn, or wheat (because of the processed protein). Corn on the cob or edamame was fine because they aren’t processed.

This was a huge shift in the family diet and was met with protest. My husband was hesitant because the advice from a team of neurologists had been to try behavioral therapy again. (ABA is one type of behavioral therapy.) They thought a better therapist might help. That was their main advice. They told us they hadn’t seen gluten-and-casein-free diets produce improvement.

In May 2010, we made the big dietary changes. After we started the new diet, my daughter never again had a meltdown. She had had one the previous week. About a month later, at the end of the school year, we were contacted by the special-needs school. They said she had improved so much that she should go to a mainstream pre-school. At this point she was almost four. Her language and social skills quickly caught up with her peers. Of my five children, she is the most social and outgoing. Today, at 6 years old, she attends a public school kindergarten. At a September 2012 parent-teacher conference, her kindergarten teacher was shocked to find out that she had been previously diagnosed as autistic.

I decided to make it my mission to educate and raise awareness of the amount of free glutamate in our food and the health ailments associated with it. The name of my mission is Unblind My Mind. More information can be found at unblindmymind.org.

Katie spoke about this at the first Make Yourself Healthy Meetup.

Sous vide isn’t new. Professional chefs have been using it for many years. The equipment has been too expensive (such as $1000). What’s new is lower prices. A friend paid about $350 for a sous vide cooker and vacuum sealer.

My brief experience suggests two conclusions I haven’t read anywhere else:

1. Don’t pay that much. I bought a Dorkfood DSV controller ($100). It turns the electricity to a crockpot on and off to maintain the right temperature. (A new crockpot is about $20. I already had two.) The controller is much better than “home sous vide” cookers (about $400) because it takes up much less space and can be used to control anything, not just crockpots. I can use it to make yogurt, for example. I no longer need a yogurt maker ($15, in China). The only problem with the Dorkfood controller is that you can hear it operate. It makes audible clicks. My crockpots and  yogurt maker, which do the same thing at fixed temperatures, are silent.

2. You don’t need a vacuum sealer. You put the food in a bag, which is submerged in a water bath. Yes, sous vide means “under vacuum” but vacuum sealing may be inferior to using ordinary freezer bags, which cost less, are much easier to get, and unlike vacuum-sealed bags allow opening and re-closing. When I use an ordinary freezer bag I put the top of the bag above the water so as to not worry about leakage. My low-end vacuum sealer (Seal-a-Meal, $40) works with ordinary freezer bags, not just the special bags you are supposed to buy. I will eventually do a side-by-side comparison: cook the same food two ways (vacuum-seal and freezer bag).

When I was a graduate student, I read Adventures of a Mathematician by Stanislaw Ulam (a very good well-written book). One of the book’s comments impressed me: That John Von Neumann was able to distinguish the main lines of growth of the tree of mathematics from the branches. My research was about how rats measure time. The relevance to big questions in the psychology of learning wasn’t obvious. I wondered: Am I studying something important? Or something that will be irrelevant in twenty years? My advisor didn’t seem to have thought about this. 

When I interviewed for jobs at various universities, no one asked me why do you study this? But it was still a question worth answering. As a grad student I had no choice. But eventually I would have a choice: I could continue to study how rats measure time. Or I could study something else. (Eventually I did change — to studying what controls variation in behavior.)

Here’s what I would say now about how to choose a research topic.

What’s best is a new method. If you can use a new method to answer questions in your field, do that. The cheaper, easier and more available the method, the better. As a graduate student, I developed a new way to study how rats measure time, which I called the peak procedure. It made it easier to determine if an experimental treatment affected an animal’s internal clock.

What’s second best is a new experimental effect. Discovering a new way to change something of interest. The bigger, cheaper, newer, and more surprising the effect, the better. Using the peak procedure, my colleagues and I discovered a large and surprising effect (at a certain time during the peak procedure, the variability of bar-press duration — how long a rat holds down the bar when pressing it — became much larger). When I first saw the result, I assumed it was due to a software mistake. It turned out to be a window in what controls the variability of behavior — an easy way of studying that. In that sense it was also a new method.

I don’t know if the two job candidates I interviewed were doing either of these two things. Maybe not. My broader point is that if you don’t have a good understanding of how to choose a research topic you will have to retreat to studying something simply because others are studying it. Which is exactly the wrong thing to do if you want to be an innovator and a leader.

Thanks to Casey Manion and Bryan Castañeda.

1. I’ve blogged many times about the value of insider/outsiders — people who have the knowledge of insiders but the freedom of outsiders. Patrick Pineda, the founder of Tisano Tea, was not an insider/outsider but he connected two worlds — the United States and Venezuela (in particular poor Venezuelan farmers) — that are rarely connected.

2. When people from rich countries try to help people in poor countries, the usual approach is to bring something from the rich country to the poor country. Nutritional knowledge, medicine, dams, and so on. One Laptop Per Child is an extreme example. Microcredit is a deceptively attractive example. In recent years, the flaws in this approach have become more apparent and there has been a shift toward local solutions to problems (e.g., the best ideas to help Uganda will come from Ugandans and those who have lived there a long time). Tisano Tea illustrates something that people in rich countries have had an even harder time imagining: people in a poor country (Venezuela) knew something that improved life in a rich country (the United States) — namely, that you can make tea from cacao husks. A small thing, but not trivial (maybe chocolate tea supplies important nutrients). An American desire for Venezuelan cacao husks improves life in Venezuela. Ethnic food trucks are a more subtle example.  When immigrants from poor countries manage to make a living in a rich country — using knowledge of their own cuisine is a good way to do this — they often send money home. As far as I know, this possibility has been ignored in development studies.

My research, which shows how a non-expert can do research that teaches something to experts, is related to the second generalization. For example, my research on faces and mood has something to teach experts on depression and bipolar disorder. Although the term “home remedy” is standard, and lots of non-experts have improved their health in ways not approved by doctors, I have never heard a health expert show a realization that this could happen.

Patrick’s father was an ambassador from Venezuela. Patrick grew up in California and England and went to college at the University of East Anglia. After studying for a Master’s in Film Production from Columbia University (New York), he started working for Al Jazerra in Venezuela making documentaries. He also worked for a local TV station making segments for a children’s program. One segment was about cacao. He learned that Venezuelan cacao beans were among the most highly-valued cacao beans in the world. The cacao beans from one valley (Chuao) sold for ten times the usual price.

While making the segment, he met cacao farmers. He discovered a group of cacao farmers whose beans had been organically certified by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) due to local NGO sponsorship (the NGO paid for it). The farmers saw it as free training. The organic certification took lots of paperwork to maintain. The farmers had hoped that the certification would allow them to sell their beans at a premium. However, after four years, this hadn’t yet happened. At the end of each harvest, they’d had to sell their beans at the conventional (non-organic) price.

This struck Patrick as an opportunity – a niche (organic) within a niche (Venezualan). In the US, there was a growing demand for organic products. The co-op grew about 16 metric tons of organic cacao beans each year. In 2009, with the financial help of his older brother and friends, he bought 10 metric tons ($40,000). A month earlier, he hadn’t known that chocolate comes from cacao.

He soon realized there was a problem: How to get it out of the country? If taken straight out, the government would fumigate it and it would lose its organic certification. It would have to be processed in Venezuela. There were several cacao processing plants in Venezuela but to them 10 metric tons was nothing. Patrick finally convinced one of them that organic might be the future. He taught the employees how to process the beans organically while learning it himself. After that it was relatively easy to get the processing plant certified organic.

During processing, 12% of the weight is “lost” in shells that are normally discarded. Patrick took the shells with him back to America hoping he could do something with them. In Venezuela, he had met an indigenous tribal community that drank tea made from cacao shells as remedy for asthma and to sooth coughs. He looked academic journals for other uses. He eventually found about 120 published papers. The shells had been used as toothpaste and to increase the Vitamin D content of milk by feeding them to cows. The only common uses, it turned out, were as fertilizer (due to the nitrogen content) and animal feed (due to the fiber and Vitamin D content). Neither use was high-price.

What about tea? Patrick sent samples to his partners. They were unenthusiastic. “This tastes like grass. Why would anybody drink tea from a by-product?” However, he was selling chocolate butter and nibs online. With each order, he included an 8-ounce pouch of cacao shells with instructions how to brew the tea. His customers – at least, some of them – were enthusiastic: How unique, how great, they emailed him. A German woman said she hadn’t drunk such tea since World War II ended. During World War II, cacao shells had been added to tea to extend it. His customers wanted to buy more.

He convinced his partners to go to a trade show. In 2010, they went to Expo West, a natural and healthy food product show in Anaheim. Out of all of their products, the tea got the most attention. It won Best in Show for tea. Out of about 500 new products, it was one of four that won Best New Product of Show. People from Twinings Tea and Stash Tea complimented them on their product.

After the trade show, Patrick decided the tea was a good concept and decided to make it a separate brand. Dark chocolate without the guilt. No sugar, no caffeine. He launched Tisano. The name comes from tisane (herbal tea in French) and artesano (artisanal in Spanish).

When I tasted Tisano’s chocolate tea, it tasted very familiar. That’s because Tisano’s cacao shells are the cacao shells in both American Tea Room’s CocoMate and Peet’s Red Cloud Cacao. There is no doubt that Patrick has created a new niche within the American (and maybe world) tea market: chocolate tea. I don’t know how well CocoMate is selling at American Tea Room but I decided to buy it after smelling maybe 40 teas. At Peet’s, Red Cloud Cacao sold surprisingly well and they will bring it back seasonally.

I recently learned about Teeccino coffee-substitute “tees” (brewed like tea) from Patrick Pineda of Tisano. They resemble Pero but with more flavor and variety. I really liked the first two flavors I tried (Vanilla Nut and French Roast) so I wrote to Teeccino asking for samples of all the flavors. In addition to no caffeine, Teechino drinks are high in inulin, a soluble fiber.

Here are my comments on the samples.

Dandelion Dark Roast. Similar to French Roast (relatively strong coffee taste) but more earthy-tasting. Maybe that’s the dandelion.

French Vanilla. Strong vanilla taste. Too much like vanilla for me, I want something more complicated.

Caramel Nut. Halfway between  caramel and burnt caramel, which I like. As complex as French Roast.

Mocha. Excellent. Complexity of coffee plus complexity of chocolate.

Chocolate. Like mocha, except darker coffee flavor.

Original. Excellent. Weaker coffee flavor plus fruity complexity.

Almond Amaretto. Wonderful combination of coffee flavor with nutty almond/amaretto flavor.

Java. Rounded coffee flavor.

Chocolate Mint. Enough mint but not enough chocolate and coffee.

Southern Pecan. Delicious. Pecan and coffee flavors well-balanced. I wonder: What does Northern Pecan taste like?

Maya Chai. Tastes like chai. I would prefer, in addition, a dark coffee taste.

I tried making it myself. I found I could easily make better lassi than Pavel’s by optimizing the amount of salt, adding an optimal amount of sweetener (xylitol – Pavel’s lassi was unsweetened), and flavoring it, for instance with vanilla.

Yogurt companies of the world (except maybe Pavel’s) seem to have failed to notice that lassi is a very unusual food. It provides pleasure in eight ways: (1) satisfies thirst, (2) creamy, (3) frothy (if you shake the bottle before drinking), (4) salty, (5) sour, (6) sweet, (7) complexity (yogurt alone is slightly complex, vanilla increases complexity) and (8) flavor novelty (if you vary the flavor). To a small extent, (9) it satisfies hunger and, if you’re hot, (10) cools you off. It’s also (11) very convenient — easier to take a swig of lassi than a spoonful of yogurt — and (12) very healthy. I can’t think of another food with twelve strengths. My friends’ pizza provided pleasure in ten ways but wasn’t convenient or healthy. There are several similar yogurt drinks in other cultures,  such as doogh, perhaps because lassi has such a high benefit/cost ratio.

To make lassi, mix 3 parts yogurt with about 1 part water, add sweetener and salt and flavoring to taste, mix. I’m going to try adding cardamon and maybe replace the water with tea, to increase complexity.

What about the naysayers who [say], “Where are the cures for diseases that we were promised?”

I became director of this institute three and a half years ago, and I remember when I first started going around and giving talks. Routinely I would hear: “You are seven years into this. Where are the wins? Where are the successes?”

I don’t hear that as much anymore. I think what’s happening, and it has happened in the last three years in particular, is just the sheer aggregate number of the success stories. The drumbeat of these successes is finally winning people over.

We are understanding cancer and rare genetic diseases. There are incredible stories now where we are able to draw blood from a pregnant woman and analyze the DNA of her unborn child.

Increasingly, we have more informed ways of prescribing medicine because we first do a genetic test. We can use microbial DNA to trace disease outbreaks in a matter of hours.

These are just game changers. It’s a wide field of accomplishment, and there is a logical story to be told.

There you have it. The head of the Human Genome Project, a very big deal, says in an oblique way that the project has had little practical benefit so far. Note the present tense: “We are understanding cancer”. Nothing about decreasing cancer. In a short discussion of benefits, he mentions microbial DNA. In a short discussion of benefits, he says, “We are able to draw blood from a pregnant woman and analyze the DNA of her unborn child.” Genetic tests of fetuses are not new. I think he means that the number of rare genetic diseases that can be detected has increased (by how much?). Well, yes, not surprising. It is an increase of something that was already happening and helps only a tiny number of people. Not a “game-changer”.

Thanks to Bryan Castañeda.

He ate a half-stick (2 ounces = 57 grams) every day. Nothing fancy: Kirkland Salted Sweet Cream Butter. At first it was repulsive. He had trouble eating it. He ate it with other foods, such as soup or pancakes. Or he would take lots of tiny slices (without other foods). It felt like more butter than he wanted.

After about two weeks of this, however, he decided this is pretty good. He was enjoying it. He began looking forward to the slices. He made them larger. He prefers the butter hard, straight out of the fridge. He now enjoys eating the fat on meat. He stopped limiting how much animal fat he eats. (His wife still cuts it off meat.) Now he gets lots of fat from lots of sources. Butter is the easiest source.

His children (7 and 9 years old) don’t eat butter directly, but he allows them to eat as much as they want. They eat a lot more butter than other children. At other people’s houses, he jokes about it. Incidentally, he tried taking Vitamin D3  in the morning (around 7 am) but it made him so sleepy in the evening he stopped.

This impressed me. I’d been eating a half-stick of butter per day for a few years (half as much was less effective), but I always ate it with a little bit of meat, e.g., sliced roast beef (Berkeley) or roast pork (Beijing). That was less than ideal because I kept running out of the meat. I started eating it Dustin’s way (straight) and found it’s fine. It’s like dessert, halfway between ice cream and cheese.

Your work and discoveries, just like Hong’s, are very inspirational. . . . They send a message that every individual has the potential to contribute something to society even with no or limited budget.

This hadn’t occurred to me. It should have. I could have made this point in talks, for example.  Beyond the obvious point, David was saying that the more your personal science could help others, the more likely you would be to do it. The prospect of helping yourself and others will surely be stronger motivation than the prospect of helping only yourself.

How can one person’s personal science help others? This doesn’t happen automatically, it has to be arranged. My Journal of Personal Science and the Make Yourself Healthy Meetup group are two ways of facilitating this. What about other ways?

David’s comment made me think of another way: Acne Club, that is, a high school club for people with acne. The purpose of the club is to promote personal science about acne. Members of the club try to find the causes of their acne, partly by self-experimentation. They meet to share results and ideas (e.g., treatments to try, how to measure acne) and encourage each other. The discovery of two groups of “primitive” people who have no acne suggests that all acne has environmental causes. If a high school group could identify even one environmental cause, it would be a huge contribution to human well-being — especially the well-being of high-school students. I think this is quite possible.

I had acne as a teenager. If you start such a club, I would be happy to help you however I can. For example, I could give advice about measurement and experimental design and could publicize what you learn.