 Yesterday I wrote about insecurity and lack of self-esteem and how they lead us to go overboard seeking appreciation and attention. Another product of frail, dependent-on-others egos is learned helplessness
-- the belief that we're not competent to do things for ourselves, that
we have to rely on specialists, experts, consultants, or 'leaders' to
do everything for us, or at least to tell us what to do. Even the
latest trend towards 'self-serve' everything (e.g. Home Depot, FAQs to
go through before you get to talk to 'service', kiosks, buffets, etc.)
is driven by corporations' desire to reduce overheads, and (thanks to
outsourcing, offshoring, corporate profit-skimming and the
ever-widening chasm between executive salaries and everyone else's) the
decreasing affordability of service of any kind, rather than any
genuine desire to make us more self-sufficient and less helpless.
This insecurity and learned helplessness mitigates against self-experimentation, the process Seth Roberts of The Shangri-La Diet
so brilliantly employs to improve his own health, fitness and
productivity (and encourages us to employ to improve ours). Just to
reiterate, self-experimentation is the use of the well-established
scientific method using your own personal
data, diligently collected every day. Instead of relying on laboratory
tests performed on other people, whose bodies, minds, behaviours and
motivations are inevitably much different from yours, you test on
yourself, the only 'sample' that really counts. Those who make their
money conducting formal scientific tests (often dubiously and in their
own self-interest) or selling you the standardized, hyped and
overpriced product that comes from such tests, obviously go out of
their way to dissuade you from self-experimentation, playing up fears
that it is dangerous, unscientific, even (if it involves use of
substances that require an 'expert's' prescription or licence) illegal.
But for those not dissuaded by learned helplessness,
self-experimentation can provide an excellent, inexpensive, and
liberating means to make your life measurably better.
Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame points out that one of the critical requirements for successful self-experimentation is lots of immediate data -- what he calls feedback.
What you're trying to do is compile persuasive evidence of a
correlation between some action that you perform (such as a particular
diet or exercise program) and a desired outcome (such as weight loss or
improved physical fitness). The more data you collect, and the sooner
you collect it after each self-experiment, the more quickly and
effectively the self-experimentation will produce significant results.
Because you're only one person, you need to be imaginative (not
limiting yourself to tried and true actions) and improvisational (quick
to change the actions if they do not appear to be producing the results
you are looking for). Formal scientific tests do neither of these
things, which is yet another advantage of self-experimentation.
Let's review the five steps of self-experimentation again:
- Decide on your objective:
What result do you want to achieve (weight loss, better fitness, better
sleep, reduced pain or stress, better work productivity, faster commute
to work, better creativity etc.)?
- Collect base-line data:
Some measurement of the current state (the 'before' picture) that you
can compare with the final state (the 'after' picture) to assess
whether the desired result has been achieved -- for example, your
current weight or fitness or stress level etc. Some measures may be
objective (e.g. weight in lbs or kg) while others will be subjective
(e.g. how happy or sleepy or stressed you feel) but you should try to
develop a quantitative scale (e.g. 1 to 10 or 1 to 100, with some
subjective terms that explain what a '5' or a '75' on that scale means)
so that you apply the measurements reasonably consistently.
- Use your imagination to come up with hypotheses (theories): These are 'educated guesses' (after all, you know yourself better than anyone else does) about what actions might
lead to the desired result (e.g. reducing daily caloric intake or
carbohydrates by x%, running three miles a day four days a week etc.)
Imagination is critical here, if you want to succeed where others have
usually failed, or where you have failed before. Things happen the way
they do for a reason. Understand that reason if you want to change what
is happening. Seth Roberts realized that his diets didn't work because
his body was adjusting its metabolic 'set point' to offset his food
intake, essentially defeating his diet. It took enormous imagination
(and some thoughtful research) to conceive that he might be able to fool his body to lower its 'set point' by consuming flavourless calories (the essence of the Shangri-La diet).
- Test
your hypotheses (theories) by trying them out, one at a time, keeping
everything else about your routine as unchanged as possible, and if
possibly by collecting immediate feedback.
If the feedback (data) supports your hypothesis, continue it, increase
it, find out how sensitive the achievement of the desired result is to
slight modifications in application -- more sugar-water to fool your
body, longer or shorter, less or more frequent exercise etc. If the
feedback doesn't support your hypothesis, re-think or modify the
hypothesis, collect different data if you still think the hypothesis
may be valid, or set aside the hypothesis and go on to the next one.
This is all about improvisation.
- Each time your feedback data confirms your hypothesis, continue it, practice it,
make it part of what you do regularly and who you are. If you find you
can't, e.g. if the diet or exercise program succeeds in achieving the
desired objective but it's simply unbearable,
then go back to step 3 and come up with some other hypotheses or
theories that, if they pan out, would be bearable, sustainable, natural
to continue.
In his recent article, Levitt illustrates
this with two examples: The use of a biofeedback machine to reduce
stress and pain, and the use of a golf-swing analyzer to improve golf
score. These are sophisticated technologies, but the ones you use may
be as simple as a stopwatch, a measuring tape, a scale, the size of
your 'to-do' list, or your own subjective daily rating of your
creativity or happiness. The Collision Detection blog (thanks to Seb Paquet for the link) suggests that a self-experimentation chart of commuting times,
to find the optimal route and departure times for your daily commute,
can save you more time per year than you get in vacation time. The
applications are limited only by your imagination and your
determination to make your life better in some way.
Imagination.
There's the rub. We live in a world of imaginative poverty, where our
education system goes out of its way to crush our imaginations. Our
work lives (for most of us) give our imaginations no exercise, and we
associate imagination with childishness, daydreaming and
impracticality. But Freakonomics would not have been the phenomenon it has become if it was just a book of statistical correlations. The book shows Levitt's extraordinary
imagination. To explain this, and to give you some practice stretching
your imagination, I've invented something I call The Freakonomics Game.
The objective of the game is to come up with the Unconventional Theory
that just might explain why something happened, or is happening, that
no one else would have imagined to consider. So, when violent crime in
American cities plummeted in recent years, conservatives explained this
by pointing to tougher sentences, capital punishment, more cops on the
beat, and even more devout religious belief. Liberals explained it by
pointing to tighter gun control and more outreach and social programs
for inner city youth. Levitt found none of these correlated. The
Unconventional Theory in this case was the famous Roe vs Wade decision
a generation earlier, making abortion much more readily available to
urban women who weren't ready to have a family (or a bigger family),
who therefore, presumably, didn't bring children who might live
desperate lives and/or have an innate or learned propensity for
violence, into the world. This has outraged conservatives and liberals
alike, and it showed great imagination to even think of it. But the
data correlates very strongly.
Another example: Seth Roberts had tried everything to improve his restless sleep and insomnia.
All the obvious hypotheses failed the self-experimentation test. And
then Seth thought: What if our bodies are still genetically like the
Cave Man's, the result of the first 2.97 million of the 3 million years
of human evolution on Earth? For that 2.97 million years humans were
gatherer-hunters, on their feet for most of their waking hours. What if
our sleep patterns haven't adjusted for our 'recent' sedentary
life-style? His imaginative Unconventional Theory was that by spending
most of the day on his feet, like his ancestors did, he might better
prepare his body for a natural night's sleep. When Seth
self-experimented with this (he now works all day at a standing-height
desk with a fatigue-reducing cushion under it) it worked. When you
think about how well you sleep after a day hiking, this isn't a
surprise, but it still takes imagination.
Ready to play the
Freakonomics Game? OK, here's one to try. Some recent studies have
indicated that soccer and hockey stars are twice as likely to have been
born in January or February as in November or December. What's the
Unconventional Theory that likely accounts for this (hint: it's not
astrological)? There are actually two Theories, and if you can guess either
of them you have a good imagination. Think about it, and then peek at
the note at the bottom of this article to see if you were right.
Now
you're ready for some serious play. I've taxed my imagination and come
up with an Unconventional Theory for each of the following seven
observations. I'll disclose my theories in a later post. Give your
imagination a workout and see if you can come up with one or more
compelling Unconventional Theories for each, post any of them in the
comments to this article, and we'll let other readers be the judges.
Who knows, your Unconventional Theory might be revolutionary, and
change the way we look at things, or even make millions of people's
lives better.
- When people are quizzed about their
creativity, they claim it is highest (a) when they're in or near water,
(b) when they're in motion, and (c) just before falling asleep or just
before/after awakening. Why would this be?
- Seth Roberts' work
refers to extensive research (and some personal experimentation) that
suggest that sleep deprivation elevates mood and may alleviate
depression. Why would this be?
- We appear to become easily
addicted to substances that are healthy or even essential in moderation
but unhealthy in excess, and when we get addicted we tend to need more
and more to get the same 'high'. A recent experiment indicated that
birds in captivity can get quickly addicted to sugar-water, craving
more and more to the detriment of their health. Why would this be?
- There
is some evidence that very intelligent people are the ones most prone
to procrastinate, and to fail to keep New Years' resolutions. Why would
this be?
- Here's an article
that reports on a dramatic drop in teenage pregnancy and teenage
abortions in the US. Conservatives claim this is due to effective
'family-values' abstinence programs. Liberals claim it's due to better
information about and use of contraception. But there's lots of
evidence that neither of these is the case. The author of the article
ascribes it to lower sperm counts, but, as we all know, it only takes
one. Is there a better Unconventional Theory? (Thanks to Dale Asberry for this link)
- Here's an article
that reports an epidemic of rare cancers and even rarer auto-immune
diseases in the small community of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta. Residents
blame water, air and soil pollution due to pulp and paper
effluents, uranium and other mining, and now the disastrous Tar Sands
development nearby. Business interests say the water has been
exhaustively tested and is fine, and blame the poor diet in the remote
community, exacerbated by the prohibitive cost of trucking in fresh
fruits and vegetables. What's your Unconventional Theory?
- You probably know that Harper's magazine and others have been providing increased publicity to the groups who insist HIV is not the cause of most auto-immune deficiency diseases, and that there must be another cause, probably not viral or microbial, to account for so many
people dying of auto-immune related diseases who do not have HIV in
their bodies. Many of the diseases on a sharp upswing (e.g. severe
allergies, asthma, autism, and ADD/ADHD) also do not appear to have
'natural' causes. While some blame human behaviours, or chemical
residues (mercury etc.) there are some reasonably compelling studies
that refute viral, microbial, behavioural and
toxic chemical causes for the dramatic increase in these illnesses,
while others assert (less convincingly) that it's all due to 'increased
awareness and reporting' of them. Is there another possible cause for
one or more of these illnesses (no one Unconventional Theory is likely
to explain all of them) that we're overlooking?
Unconventional Theories for sports stars being born at the start of the year:
(1)
Cutoff date for most age-categories in amateur sport is December 31. So
in any class, the January kids will be up to a year older, bigger, and
more coordinated than those born in December of the same year. Guess
which kids will therefore tend to get more play and more attention from
the coach?
(2) Levitt suggests another possibility. If December 31
is the cutoff date, and you're an ambitious parent, maybe you might be
tempted to lie about your kid's birth date by a few months to push him
or her into a more advanced, 'serious' class with older kids that will
force him or her to work harder and learn faster against tougher
competitors, especially if he or she is a bit big for his or her 'real'
age.
Einstein, pictured above, once said "Imagination is more important than knowledge". |
1:27:51 PM 
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MADE IN CANADA
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