Fish Oil Makes Me Smarter
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Quantified Self 2015 Presentation
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Fish Oil Makes Me Smarter
- 1. Does Fish Oil Make Me Smarter? Richard Sprague Quantified Self June 21, 2015
- 21. Fish Oil effect fades over time
- 23. Statins make me smarter too
Editor's Notes
- I want to be smarter. After two fantastic days listening and watching so many brilliant people, I’m having a hard time keeping up. Can I change something about myself – the foods I eat, my environment – to make me smarter?
- My friend, the late Seth Roberts, was interested in this question too. Many of you knew Seth. He’s no stranger to the long-time QS crowd. UC Berkeley psychology professor, NYTimes best-selling author, inventor of the somewhat odd “Shangri-La Diet”, that said you can lose weight by drinking sugar water and looking at faces in the morning.
- I met him when we were both living in Beijing a few years ago, where he was teaching at Tsinghua University, and like any of you who ever had the privilege of knowing him, I treasured every conversation we ever had.
- He had invented an odd psychology test, which he called “Brain Tracker”. It was supposed to measure your “brain reaction time” and I helped him turn it into an iPhone app, which sadly we didn’t complete before he died. But I’ve continued to work on it, and I made some discoveries that I’ll share with you.
- The basic idea: you’re presented with some type of “stimulus”. In this case it’s a series of balls, one of which suddenly turns red. You have to hit the red ball as quickly as you can.
- Repeat the test 32 times and save the results someplace. Do this every day and track your results over time.
- Here are a bunch of charts that I made from the data. By looking at the results — and comparing with anything unusual that you may have eaten or did during that period, Seth believed you could tell whether something was good for your brain or not.
- Here are the results from his classic self-experiment. He found that he had better results on this test on days after he had eaten half a stick of butter. He was pretty sure of the results, having tested it many times over many years. He even got a bunch of you (working with Genomera) to crowdsource a bigger test.
- One of his fans, Alex Chernovsky, using the same test found that soy increases his performance on this test. Contrary to what a lot of people might tell you about dangers of soy…
- Alex found that, contrary to what some people suggested, flaxseed didn’t help.
- So for the past year I decided to try too. Like many of you, I’ve been tracking myself for years, and for the past year I’ve done that along with my BRT results. I found that most things don’t seem to matter. My daily test results are about the same day-to-day, regardless of what I do.
- I tried testing it with sleep. It seems obvious that sleep would help. I strap on a Zeo every night, carefully measuring exactly how much sleep — and breaking it into REM and deep sleep phases. How does that help my brain reaction time?
- Answer: it doesn’t. To my surprise, there’s pretty much no difference in my scores no matter how much I slept (or didn’t). REM, deep sleep too: no difference.
- Answer: it doesn’t. To my surprise, there’s pretty much no difference in my scores no matter how much I slept (or didn’t). REM, deep sleep too: no difference.
- For example, here are my results on mornings after I had a drink of alcohol the night before. Incidentally, Seth’s latest algorithm used “BRT” to measure time, a normalized variant of milliseconds that makes it more accurate to compare over time. Red Lines are with alcohol; blue lines without. HIGHER IS BETTER Not really much difference.
- that’s when I discovered this. People tell me that fish oil is supposedly good for the heart, so I’ve experimented off and on for many years, taking 2 or 3 of these daily. It’s just normal Costco cheap stuff. No fancy “organic”, “mold-free"
- Imagine my surprise when, analyzing the data later, I found this. red lines are with fish oil; blue lines without [higher is better]
- Imagine my surprise when, analyzing the data later, I found this. red lines are with fish oil; blue lines without [higher is better]
- Not only that, but my score results fade over time, as you would expect. Remember, this is me randomly taking them at no particular schedule.
- Most recently, I tested with a statin drug. My doctor had prescribed these for me several years ago, but I stopped taking them when I’d heard about studies that showed it can impair brain function. Hmmm… would I be able to prove that?
- Answer: no. Statins markedly improve my function on this test. Again, I was surprised that the effect was so dramatic.
- I’m very sorry that Seth is not around to interpret these results. I think he would have been very impressed. and now that I know what helps — and doesn’t — I’m empowered, right? I should take more fish oil. More statins. This is the whole point of QS and self-discovery, right? I know what makes me smarter!
- But then I saw this chart. See that final data point over there on April 25th? It was taken at 6:50pm, and it’s Seth’s final brain reaction time test. He died suddenly at 4pm the following day, of “occlusive coronary artery disease”.
- Knowing what I know now about how this test works , I have no doubt that with a score like that Seth was feeling very smart that day. In fact, when I searched through all of his data – more than 90,000 runs of this test over many years – I found that last data point was his best day ever.
- And I’m left wondering what to think. There’s no question that fish oil makes me smarter. But like so many things we do to improve ourselves, am I just trading off one thing for another? I answer it the only way I know how. Let’s keep measuring!
- If you would like to try this test for yourself, please follow me on Twitter, or email us to learn how you can try the app for yourself. See what makes you smarter! Thank you!