Culture Steve Howard talks about IKEA’s super-sized sustainability strategies at TEDGlobal 2013. Photo: James Duncan Davidson
Many companies have sustainability goals. But IKEA’s are quite radical. By 2016, the assemble-it-yourself furniture megastore — which is so much a part of our lives — will only stock LED bulbs. By 2020, IKEA stores will produce more energy than they use.
IKEA, what with its Swedish meatballs, is a part of the cultural conversation in a way few brands are. So could their sustainability efforts push the needle for others? Here, a collection of memes, homage websites, and fan-made videos that speak to how entrenched IKEA is in our lives.
The IKEA Monkey. Last year, a monkey wearing a coat was found wandering the aisles of an IKEA in Toronto. The people of the Internet jumped on board, creating an Ikea Monkey Twitter account, photoshopping the monkey into tons of photos, and tweeting with the hashtag #IkeaMonkey. On December 10, 2012, Canadian journalist Tom Podolec tweeted, “#IkeaMonkey is a Rhesus Macaque Monkey Approx. 7 months old. In good health; stressed. Jacket is wool and said to be his favourite.” The monkey’s owners were fined for having a prohibited animal.
The IKEA Song. What happens when you write a song about wooing a lady in an IKEA store? This video from singer/songwriter Brad Go.
Hot Malm. The best way to describe Hot Malm is as an “IKEA-themed porn parody site.” A pair of twin beds is captioned “Twin Blonde Malms,” a shot of a bed’s headboard reads “Hot Malm from Behind,” and “Check out the Pussy on this Hot Malm” refers to a cat on a bed. (MALM, remember, is an IKEA bedroom series.) Bonus: the Ikea Monkey sits in a corner of the website, with a speech bubble: “Feeling lonely? Click here now!”
“Fireflies” Parody in Ikea. And then there’s this, which a description would ruin, so…
If Ikea Made Instructions for Everything. A 2010 College Humor piece illustrates IKEA-style directions for creating a “HÖUSS,” “TRÜSST,” a “HÄDRÖNN CJÖLIDDER,” and more.
Herding Cats.IKEA itself can rival the cleverest parodists: in a 2010 experiment, the store released 100 cats into a UK store. Watch to the end—slow-mo shots of cats in IKEA are surprisingly moving.
Room 23. This quite remarkable four-minute short film, created in 48 hours as part of a contest in the Netherlands, imagines the lives of IKEA catalog models.
A store full of drama. And finally, we have to give it up to artist Guy Ben Ner. He shot this drama in IKEA (sans permission) … with his real family.
. “An intellectual challenge presents itself ? I am in bliss. Instantly, it brings forth the notion of triumph,” high-wire artist Philippe Petit writes in his new TED ebook, Cheating the Impossible: Ideas and Recipes from a Rebellious High-Wire Artist. “Even before I address a challenge, invariably a rainbow of out-of focus solutions hovers over my horizon and dissolves into friendly clouds.”
On August 7, 1974, Petit stepped onto a wire strung between the Twin Towers. Balancing 110 stories in the air, Petit played on the tightrope for 40 minutes, even lying down on the wire to watch those “friendly clouds” pass above him. Petit’s routine was a delight to those on the ground, but it was technically illegal — Petit and a band of friends had schemed for months to make it happen. Petit was arrested as soon as he was back on solid ground, but as the police cuffed him, he had a huge grin across his face—for he had achieved a feat everyone, including himself at times, had thought impossible.
“The impossible — we are told — cannot be achieved,” Petit tells the TED blog in a Q&A about his book. “To overcome the ‘impossible’ we need to use our wits and be fearless. We need to break the rules and to circumvent — some would one say to cheat.”
Above, watch photos of Petit cheating death on his Twin Towers tightrope walk. And after the jump, four more videos of Petit doing what he does best.
. While Petit’s 1974 walk made him a celebrity, a whole new generation was introduced to his work in James Marsh’s documentary Man on Wire, released in 2008. Here, the trailer for the Oscar-winning film.
. Before Petit walked between the Twin Towers, he pulled off another renegade walk, rigging a wire between the towers of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. In this video, watch the full walk.
. Petit might be 62, but he is still very much the entertainer. In 2008, he walked on a tightrope held only by two men (one of them being David Duchovny) at the reopening of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York.
. Here, see Petit as a young man, prancing across a rope in his yard with no need for a stick.
As someone who tries to get the most out of their day but also likes to take some time and relax with a video or two every once in a while, I’ve been out of luck for a while. There’s a lot of noise out there on social networks, especially since I follow a lot of people on them. If I want to be able to keep up with the latest and greatest of what my friends are sharing, I’ll likely have a lot of digging to do. Because of that amount of digging I’ll have to do, it’s more likely that I don’t do any digging at all.
But this week that changed for me because Showyou 3.0 was launched.
Showyou is the first social video app for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch – and now it’s available for those who have the Kindle Fire. I’ve had a chance to play with the iPad version, and I’m very impressed with the time I spent in Showyou and the time I saved using Showyou.
??Showyou allows me to seamlessly wade through the videos shared by firends on a variety of social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Vimeo, YouTube, etc.) and keeps me out of those services when I want to watch online videos altogether. I just connect those accounts to Showyou and I am able to search through each and every video shared by those I’m following – and I can also add fellow Showyou users to the mix.
The app has a great sense of responsiveness to it, flowing from panel to panel within the “grid” you’ve composed of the various connections you’ve made. I can add videos to those I enjoy by tapping on the “heart” button, can add a comment by pressing the “speech bubble” button, and share videos to social networks, via email or add them to my “Watch Later” list by pressing the “share” button. To watch videos in full screen view, on the iPad you can spread your fingers out over the video and it makes htat happen. Go back to the default view by pinching the video while in full screen. The user interface is simple to use and the app is gorgeous.
If you also want to be able to watch Showyou videos on a much larger screen than your iPad (like, on your TV, for example), Apple’s Airplay lets you play most of the videos you see – if you have Apple TV 2.0.
You can also drill down further into Showyou in a variety of ways. You can watch shared videos by genre, like Film, Comedy, Music and more. You can follow others by pressing their avatars either while viewing a video in default mode or by looking at someone’s profile and seeing those users on their followers’ list. You can also follow “channels” on Showyou, which opens up your social video experience even further. As you can see, there is plenty of socialization that goes on with Showyou, and plenty of it that can go on outside of it as well. You don’t feel disconnected from anyone you’re following while following them on Showyou – in fact, you’re more likely to catch some of the videos by using this app rather than searching through your very noisy social spaces. Plus, you can share videos as much as you want within Showyou, which allows you to keep your Facebook and Twitter streams a little less noisy for others.
That said, one of the things I’ve been unable to figure out is how to add an image to my profile, which may be because I’m using an original iPad (sans camera) and you need to have an on-board camera to do so. It’d be great if I could simply add a photo of myself from my library, but there doesn’t appear to be a way to do this. I’ve seen plenty of Showyou users with a profile photo, so I know it can be done. I’m just one user that can’t.
I’m a big fan of apps that do “one thing well” and don’t try to do more than that, just focussing on making that ine thing better. Showyou has done – and is doing – just that. Showyou launched in April 2011, and keeps getting better and better, optimizing the user experience in both quality and quantity – a rare combination. In fact, Showyou is the only app of its kind to be picked by Apple as one of the best of the year (Best Social Networking App for the iPad, along with Skype & Facebook); to be featured in the Wired app guide; and to make it onto a variety of “Top 10 apps for the iPad” lists.
Showyou won’t only enhance – and curate – your online video experience, but it won’t break your bank. That’s because Showyou is a free app. You can get it now in The App Store, and if you want to keep up with your consumption of online video, get the best of what those you trust are sharing and not lose time in the process, Showyou will show you a really, really good time.
Mike Vardy is a writer, speaker, and "productivityist". Read more of his writing and learn more about him at MikeVardy.com, and you can also follow him on Twitter.
“My generation has so much potential in changing this world. We have all the tools necessary.” — TEDxYouth@Conejo
So, how do we get those tools to the youth at large? How do we help young people not only access those tools, but understand how to use them? From November 19-21, more than 90 events for (and by) young people will unite to answer these questions and more for TEDxYouthDay 2011.
Youth from all over the globe will share a common vision: inspiring curiosity, igniting new ideas and empowering young leaders. One of the tools that TEDxYouthDay organizers are using to spark your curiosity is video. Last year, TEDxYouth@Aveiro visualized how small steps can lead to big changes. TEDxYouth@Porto and TEDxYouth@Amsterdam reminded everyone that the youth all over the world not only have ideas worth spreading, but also worth doing!
This year, students organizing TEDxYouth@Conejo have put together an amazing invitation for you to come out and “play, learn, build, & share” during TEDxYouthDay 2011. Take a look at these quick and brilliant videos that remind you of how important, powerful and committed today’s youth are to making a lasting impact on the future, starting now.
As a follow up to my Living Your Life Purpose post, I wanted to share that Dr. Brad Swift also has a series of 3 short videos that will introduce you to his Life on Purpose process. These videos are free to watch and don’t require signing up for anything.
Once you’ve watched the first video, follow the link at the end of the text below the video to view the next video in the series. There are 3 videos in total, and each one is a little over 10 minutes long.
These videos will give you a good overview of the more detailed process you’ll experience in the Life on Purpose Virtual Video Coach program that helps you discover your life purpose and begin living in alignment with it.
If you feel you’ve been drifting lately and would like to have more meaning, focus, and centeredness in your life — or if you’ve been thinking about a career change to do work that’s more aligned with who you truly are — these videos are a good place to begin.
Enjoy!
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I recently discovered a nifty utility called MySpeed (for Windows and Mac) that lets you speed up the playback of online videos. I started using it last week, and now I can watch most online videos in half the time it used to take me. Obviously that’s a great time-saver.
It doesn’t work for all videos, but it works for anything Flash-based like YouTube videos and TED Talks videos. So you can watch a 20-minute video in about 10 minutes, or watch two videos in the time it used to take to watch just one.
You can increase the playback speed up to 5 times faster, but you’ll probably want to use 1.5x to 2.5x for most videos. I usually start at 2x and then gradually increase it once I get used to the speaker’s speech patterns. For a slow speaker, you can still get a comprehensible video at 3x speed.
You can also decrease the playback speed to as slow as 0.3x normal, which can be useful for highly technical information that you wish to digest more slowly. It’s also good for watching videos in languages where you aren’t perfectly fluent — you can slow down the rate of speech to hear each individual word more clearly.
The videos are automatically pitch-adjusted, so you won’t hear chipmunk voices. I was impressed with how easy it is to understand the audio as you change the speed. It may take your brain a few seconds to adjust though if you set it to 2x or faster.
The app comes with a 7-day free trial, and it’s very easy to use. You can download it, install it, and have it all figured out within 5 minutes or less.
The main control is a slider bar that pops up on your screen whenever you view a video in your web browser. It tells you whether or not the video is Flash-based, so then you know if you can speed it up.
This is one of those no-brainer apps that will boost your productivity right away. There’s really no learning curve to speak of. If you can use your mouse to move a slider left and right, you’ve mastered it. It does one thing and does it well.
If you watch online videos, especially “talking heads” videos, you’ll definitely save yourself some time, probably many hours over the course of each year. The faster playback is more engaging too. You can listen and comprehend material at least twice as fast as someone can speak it.
The full version is inexpensive (less than $30 at the time of this post). There’s also a premium version that works for offline videos too (under $100).
I was going to recommend this utility no matter what, but since they have an affiliate program, I’ll earn a small commission on each sale that results from my links. After doing the free trial, I purchased a copy of this app for myself, so in this case I’m a regular customer passing on something I think you’ll appreciate. Any commissions I happen to earn will be used to help me bring on new staff members.
On the publisher’s website you can play a little demo video to see how MySpeed works. Do the free trial, and you’ll see right away that this app will save you time and help you digest educational videos in half the time (and sometimes a third of the time).
Maybe now I can actually make it to the end of an Eckhart Tolle video without wanting to commit seppuku.
If you've found this website helpful, please click the Donate button. I'm grateful for your support.This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 13th, 2011 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Productivity, Technology, Time Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
The following is an excerpt from the appendices of The 4-Hour Body, which explores a common question: Can self-experimentation be valid at all, compared to placebo-controlled studies?
As we shall see, self-experimentation need not be extreme (I do the extremes so you don’t have to), and you can make significant discoveries with a sample size of one.
I’ll let a professional, Dr. Seth Roberts, explain how…
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” —Richard Feynman
This is an excerpt from The 4-Hour Body, written by Dr. Seth Roberts, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California–Berkeley and professor of psychology at Tsinghua University. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and The Scientist, and he is on the editorial board of the journal Nutrition.
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I started self-experimentation when I was a grad student. I was studying experimental psychology; self-experimentation was a way to learn how to do experiments.
One of my first self-experiments was about acne. My dermatologist had prescribed tetracycline, an antibiotic. Just for practice, I did an experiment to measure its effect. I varied the dosage of tetracycline—the number of pills per day—and counted the number of pimples on my face each morning. First I compared six pills per day (a high dose) and four pills per day (the prescribed dose). Somewhat to my surprise, they produced the same number of pimples. I tried other dosages. Eventually I tried zero pills per day. To my shock, zero pills per day produced the same number of pimples as four or six pills per day. The conclusion was unavoidable: the drug had no effect. (Many years later, research articles about antibiotic-resistant acne began to appear.) Tetracycline is a prescription drug; it’s not completely safe. I’d been taking it for months.
My dermatologist had also prescribed benzoyl peroxide, which comes in a cream. When my self-experimentation started, I believed that tetracycline was powerful and benzoyl peroxide weak, so I rarely used the cream. One day I ran low on tetracycline. Better use the cream, I thought. For the first time, I used the cream regularly. Again I was shocked: it worked well. Two days after I started using it, the number of pimples clearly went down. When I stopped the cream, two days later the number of pimples rose. When I restarted the cream, the number of pimples went down again.
My data left no doubt that (a) tetracycline didn’t work and (b) benzoyl peroxide did work—the opposite of my original beliefs. My dermatologist thought both worked. He’d seen hundreds of acne patients and had probably read hundreds of articles about acne. Yet in a few months I’d learned something important he didn’t know.
This wasn’t the usual line about self-experimentation. Read any book about it, such as Lawrence Altman’s Who Goes First? The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine, and you will come away thinking that self-experimentation is done by selfless doctors to test new and dangerous treatments. My experience was different. I wasn’t a doctor. I wasn’t trying to help someone else. I didn’t test a dangerous new treatment. Unlike the better-known sort of self-experimentation, which usually confirms what the experimenter believes, my self-experiments had shown I was wrong.
From my acne research I learned that self-experimentation can be used by non-experts to (a) see if the experts are right and (b) learn something they don’t know. I hadn’t realized such things were possible. The next problem I tried to solve this way was early awakening. For years, starting in my twenties, I woke up early in the morning, such as 4 a.m., still tired but unable to go back to sleep. Only a few dreary hours later would I be able to fall back asleep. This happened about half of all mornings. It showed no sign of going away. I didn’t want to take a pill for the rest of my life—not that there are any good pills for this—so I didn’t bother seeing a doctor. The only hope for a good solution, as far as I could tell, was self-experimentation.
So I did two things:
I recorded a few details about my sleep. The main one was whether I fell back asleep after getting up. How often this happened was my measure of the severity of the problem. In the beginning, I couldn’t fall back asleep about half of all mornings.I tested possible solutions.
The first thing I tried was aerobic exercise. It didn’t help. Early awakening was just as common after a day with exercise as after a day without exercise. I tried eating cheese in the evening. It didn’t help. I tried several more possible remedies.
None helped. After several years, I ran out of things to try. All my ideas about what might help had proved wrong.
Yet I managed to make progress. For unrelated reasons, I changed my breakfast from oatmeal to fruit. A few days later, I started waking up too early every morning instead of half the time. The problem was now much worse. This had never happened before. I recorded the breakfast change on the same piece of paper I used to keep track of my sleep, so the correlation was easy to see. To make sure the correlation reflected causality, I went back and forth between fruit and oatmeal. The results showed it was cause and effect. Fruit for breakfast caused more early awakening than oatmeal for breakfast. After ten years when nothing I’d done had made a difference, this was a big step forward. I eventually figured out that any breakfast made early awakening more likely. A long experiment confirmed this. The best breakfast was no breakfast.
I was less surprised than you might think. I knew that in a wide range of animals, including rats, a laboratory result called anticipatory activity is well established. If you feed a rat every day at the same time, it will become active about three hours earlier. If you feed it at noon, it will become active about 9 a.m. I had been eating breakfast at about 7 a.m. and waking up about 4 a.m. I had essentially found that humans were like other animals in this regard.
Not eating breakfast reduced early awakening but didn’t eliminate it. In the following years, self-experimentation taught me more about what caused it. By accident, I found that standing helped. If I stood more than eight hours in a day, I slept better that night. That wasn’t practical—after trying to stand that much for several years, I gave up—but the realization helped me make another accidental discovery 10 years later: standing on one leg to exhaustion helps. If I do this four times (left leg twice, right leg twice) during a day, even in the morning, I sleep much better that night. More recently, I’ve found that animal fat makes me sleep better.
Both effects are dose-dependent. I can get great sleep if I stand enough and great sleep if I eat enough animal fat.
How much animal fat is “enough”? I’ve just started trying to figure this out using pig fat, which I consume in a cut called pork belly (the part of the pig used for bacon). I found that 150 grams of pork belly had a little effect; 250 grams of pork belly had a much clearer effect. The effect seems to get larger with more pork belly (e.g., 350 grams). Because pork belly may be more than 90% fat by calories (there is great variation from one piece to the next), it’s a lot of calories of fat to get the maximum possible effect. I need to burn a lot of calories per day to make that many calories easy to eat, but it’s in some respects more convenient than standing on one foot.
Acne and sleep were my first self-experimental topics. Later I studied mood, weight control, and the effects of omega-3 on brain function. I learned that self-experimentation has three uses:
To test ideas. I tested the idea that tetracycline helps acne. I tested ideas about how to sleep better. And I’ve tested ideas derived from surprises. A few years ago, while trying to put on my shoes standing up, I realized my balance was much better than usual. I’d been putting on my shoes standing up for more than a year; that morning it was much easier than usual. The previous evening I’d swallowed six flaxseed-oil capsules. I did self-experiments to test the idea that flaxseed oil improves balance. (It did.)To generate new ideas. By its nature, self-experimentation involves making sharp changes in your life: you don’t do X for several weeks, then you do X for several weeks. This, plus the fact that we monitor ourselves in a hundred ways, makes it easy for self-experimentation to reveal unexpected side effects. This has happened to me five times. Moreover, daily measurements—of acne, sleep, or anything else—supply a baseline that makes it even easier to see unexpected changes.To develop ideas. That is, to determine the best way to use a discovery and to learn about the underlying mechanism. After I found that flaxseed oil improved balance, I used self-experimentation to figure out the best dose (three to four tablespoons per day).
One complaint about self-experimentation is that you’re not “blind.” Maybe the treatment works because you expect it to work. A placebo effect. I have never seen a case where this appeared to have happened. When treatment 10 helps after treatments 1 through 9 have failed to help (my usual experience), it’s unlikely to be a placebo effect. Accidental discoveries cannot be placebo effects.
My experience has shown that improve-your-life self-experimentation is remarkably powerful. I wasn’t an expert in anything I studied—I’m not a sleep expert, for example—but I repeatedly found useful cause-and-effect relationships (breakfast causes early awakening, flaxseed oil improves balance, etc.) that the experts had missed. This isn’t supposed to happen, of course, but it made a lot of sense. My self-experimentation had three big advantages over conventional research done by experts:
More power. Self-experiments are far better at determining causality (does X cause Y?) than conventional experiments. Obviously they’re much faster and cheaper. If I have an idea about how to sleep better, I can test it on myself in a few weeks for free. Conventional sleep experiments take a year or more (getting funding takes time) and cost thousands of dollars. A less obvious advantage of self-experimentation is that more wisdom is acquired. We learn from our mistakes. Fast self-experimentation means you make more mistakes. One lesson I learned stands out: Always do the minimum—the simplest, easiest experiment that will make progress. Few professional scientists seem to know this. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, self-experimentation is much more sensitive to unexpected side effects.Stone Age–like treatments are easy to test. I repeatedly found that simple environmental changes, such as avoiding breakfast and standing more, had big and surprising benefits. In each case, the change I’d made resembled a return to Stone Age life, when no one ate breakfast and everyone stood a lot. There are plenty of reasons to think that many common health problems, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and cancer, are caused by differences between modern life and Stone Age life. Modern life and Stone Age life differ in many ways, of course; the fraction of differences that influence our health is probably low. If so, to find aspects of Stone Age life that matter, you have to do many tests. Self-experiments, fast and cheap, can do this; conventional experiments, slow and expensive, cannot. In addition, conventional research is slanted toward treatments that can make money for someone. Because conventional research is expensive, funding is needed. Drug companies will fund research about drugs, so lots of conventional research involves drugs. Elements of Stone Age life (such as no breakfast) are cheap and widely available. No company will fund research about their effectiveness.Better motivation. I studied my sleep for 10 years before making clear progress. That sort of persistence never happens in conventional health research. The reason is a difference in motivation. Part of the difference is how much the researcher cares about finding solutions. When you study your own problem (e.g., acne), you care more about finding a solution than others are likely to care. Acne researchers rarely have acne. And part of the motivation difference is the importance of goals other than solving the problem. When I studied my sleep, my only goal was to sleep better. Professional scientists have other goals, which are enormously constraining.
One set of prison bars involves employment and research funding. To keep their jobs (e.g., get tenure, get promoted, get jobs for their students, and get grants), professional scientists must publish several research papers per year. Research that can’t provide this is undoable. Another set of prison bars involves status. Professional scientists derive most of their status from their job. When they have a choice, they try to enhance or protect their status. Some sorts of research have more status than others. Large grants have more status than small grants, so professional scientists prefer expensive research to cheap research. High-tech has more status than low-tech, so they prefer high-tech. As Thorstein Veblen emphasized in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), useless research has higher status than useful research. Doing useless work, Veblen said, shows that you are higher-status than those who must do useful work. So researchers prefer useless research, thus the term “ivory tower.” Fear of loss of job, grant, or status also makes it hard for professional scientists to propose radical new ideas. Self-experimenters, trying to solve their own problem on their own time, are not trapped like this.
Acne illustrates the problem. The dermatological party line is that diet doesn’t cause acne. According to a website of the American Academy of Dermatology, “extensive scientific studies” show it’s a “myth” that “acne is caused by diet.” According to “guidelines for care” for dermatologists published in 2007, “dietary restriction (either specific foods or food classes) has not been demonstrated to be of benefit in the treatment of acne.” In fact, there is overwhelming evidence linking diet and acne. Starting in the 1970s, a Connecticut doctor named William Danby collected evidence connecting dairy consumption and acne; it is telling that Danby wasn’t a professional scientist. When his patients gave up dairy, it often helped. In 2002, six scientists (none a dermatologist) published a paper with the Weston Price–like conclusion that two isolated groups of people (Kitava Islanders and Ache hunter-gatherers) had no acne at all. They had examined more than 1,000 subjects over the age of 10 and found no acne. When people in these groups left their communities and ate differently, they did get acne. These observations suggest that a lot of acne—maybe all of it—can be cured and prevented by diet.
Why is the official line so wrong? Because the painstaking research needed to show the many ways diet causes acne is the sort of research that professional researchers can’t do and don’t want to do. They can’t do it because the research would be hard to fund (no one makes money when patients avoid dairy) and because the trial and error required would take too long per publication. They don’t want to do it because it would be low-tech, low-cost, and very useful—and therefore low-status. While research doctors in other specialties study high-tech expensive treatments, they would be doing low-cost studies of what happens when you avoid certain foods. Humiliating. Colleagues in other specialties might make fun of them. To justify their avoidance of embarrassment, the whole profession tells the rest of us, based on “extensive scientific studies,” that black is white. Self-experimentation allows acne sufferers to ignore the strange claims of dermatologists, not to mention their dangerous drugs (such as Accutane). Persons with acne can simply change their diets until they figure out what foods cause the problem.
Gregor Mendel was a monk. He was under no pressure to publish; he could say whatever he wanted about horticulture without fear for his job. Charles Darwin was wealthy. He had no job to lose. He could write On the Origin of Species very slowly. Alfred Wegener, who proposed continental drift, was a meteorologist. Geology was a hobby of his. Because they had total freedom and plenty of time, and professional biologists and geologists did not (just as now), Mendel, Darwin, and Wegener were able to use the accumulated knowledge of their time better than the professionals. The accumulated knowledge of our time is more accessible than ever before. Self-experimenters, with total freedom, plenty of time, and easy access to empirical tests, are in a great position to take advantage of it.
Seth Roberts, “Self-Experimentation as a Source of New Ideas: Ten Examples Involving Sleep, Mood, Health, and Weight,” Behavioral and Brain Science 27 (2004): 227–88 (www.fourhourbody.com/new-ideas) This 61-page document about self-experimentation provides an overview of some of Seth’s findings, including actionable sleep examples.
The Quantified Self (www.quantifiedself.com) Curated by Wired cofounding editor Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf, a managing editor of Wired, this is the perfect home for all self-experimenters. The resources section alone is worth a trip to this site, which provides the most comprehensive list of data-tracking tools and services on the web (www.fourhourbody.com/quantified).
Alexandra Carmichael, “How to Run a Successful Self-Experiment” (www.fourhourbody.com/self-experiment) Most people have never systematically done a self-experiment. And yet, it’s one of the easiest methods for discovering what variables are affecting your well-being. This article shows you the five principles that will help you get started in running successful self-experiments. Bonus: an 11-minute video from Seth Roberts, discussing experiment design.
CureTogether (www.curetogether.com) CureTogether, which won the Mayo Clinic iSpot Competition for Ideas That Will Transform Healthcare (2009), helps people anonymously track and compare health data to better understand their bodies and make more informed treatment decisions. Think you’re alone with a condition? Chances are you’ll find dozens of others with the same problem on CureTogether.
Daytum (www.daytum.com) Conceived by Ryan Case and Nicholas Felton, Daytum is an elegant and intuitive service for examining and visualizing your everyday habits and routines.
Data Logger (http://apps.pachube.com/datalogger) Data Logger for iPhone enables you to store and graph any data of your choosing along with a time-stamp and location. It can be used for anything, whether food-related, animal sightings, or temperature sensor readings around your neighborhood. If you can think of it, it can be recorded and tracked.
[How Seth Roberts’ self-experimentation began]. Roberts, Seth. Surprises from self-experimentation: Sleep, mood, and weight. Chance. 2001; 4(2):7-18. UC Berkeley: Available from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5bv8c7p3[The first of many papers to show antibiotic-resistant acne was a significant problem]. Eady EA, Cove JH, Blake J, Holland KT, Cunliffe WJ. Recalcitrant acne vulgaris. Clinical, biochemical and microbiological investigation of patients not responding to antibiotic treatment. Br J Dermatol. 1988; 118:415-23.Roberts, Seth. Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 2004; 27(2), 227-288. UC Berkeley: Available from http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/117/Boulos Z, Rosenwasser AM, Terman M. Feeding schedules and the circadian organization of behavior in the rat. Behav Brain Res. 1980; 1:39–65.Seth Roberts’ blog: http://blog.sethroberts.net.Acne myths: http://www.skincarephysicians.com/acnenet/myths.html on 2009-09-13.Guidelines of care: http://www.aad.org/research/_doc/ClinicalResearch_Acne%20Vulgaris.pdf on 2009-09-17.Danby: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2007/12/16/a_clear_connection/ on 2009-09-17.No acne among two isolated groups: Cordain L, Lindeberg S, Hurtado M, Hill K, Eaton SB, Brand-Miller J. Acne vulgaris: a disease of Western civilization. Arch Dermatol. 2002; 138:1584-90.Dangers of Accutane: http://www.accutane-side-effects.net/ on 2009-09-13.Wegener: http://www.pangaea.org/wegener.htm on 2009-09-17.Posted on December 18th, 2010
Today (Saturday) is the last day that The 4-Hour Body has to beat Guinness on the New York Times’ bestseller list. Although my book has done well on Amazon, Guinness OWNS retail, which is at least 60% of our total reported sales.
For three years, I went through hell and back for this book (100s of experiments like the above), so I’ll kindly ask for your help one last time.
If you’ve been on the fence, I implore you to please take a look at the book and consider ordering. If you’ve been enjoying the book but haven’t told any friends, I implore you to please share your enthusiasm or favorite tips with them in the next 12 hours, if you can. If you really liked it, please consider getting copies as a gift this Saturday.
That said, I really hope you enjoy the following excerpt from the appendices, which explores a common question: isn’t self-experimentation valueless if it’s just one person’s experience?
As we shall see, self-experimentation need not be extreme (I do the extremes so you don’t have to), and you can make significant discoveries with a sample size of one.
I’ll let a professional explain how: Dr. Seth Roberts…
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” —Richard Feynman
This is an excerpt from The 4-Hour Body, written by Dr. Seth Roberts, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California–Berkeley and professor of psychology at Tsinghua University. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and The Scientist, and he is on the editorial board of the journal Nutrition.
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I started self-experimentation when I was a grad student. I was studying experimental psychology; self-experimentation was a way to learn how to do experiments.
One of my first self-experiments was about acne. My dermatologist had prescribed tetracycline, an antibiotic. Just for practice, I did an experiment to measure its effect. I varied the dosage of tetracycline—the number of pills per day—and counted the number of pimples on my face each morning. First I compared six pills per day (a high dose) and four pills per day (the prescribed dose). Somewhat to my surprise, they produced the same number of pimples. I tried other dosages. Eventually I tried zero pills per day. To my shock, zero pills per day produced the same number of pimples as four or six pills per day. The conclusion was unavoidable: the drug had no effect. (Many years later, research articles about antibiotic-resistant acne began to appear.) Tetracycline is a prescription drug; it’s not completely safe. I’d been taking it for months.
My dermatologist had also prescribed benzoyl peroxide, which comes in a cream. When my self-experimentation started, I believed that tetracycline was powerful and benzoyl peroxide weak, so I rarely used the cream. One day I ran low on tetracycline. Better use the cream, I thought. For the first time, I used the cream regularly. Again I was shocked: it worked well. Two days after I started using it, the number of pimples clearly went down. When I stopped the cream, two days later the number of pimples rose. When I restarted the cream, the number of pimples went down again.
My data left no doubt that (a) tetracycline didn’t work and (b) benzoyl peroxide did work—the opposite of my original beliefs. My dermatologist thought both worked. He’d seen hundreds of acne patients and had probably read hundreds of articles about acne. Yet in a few months I’d learned something important he didn’t know.
This wasn’t the usual line about self-experimentation. Read any book about it, such as Lawrence Altman’s Who Goes First? The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine, and you will come away thinking that self-experimentation is done by selfless doctors to test new and dangerous treatments. My experience was different. I wasn’t a doctor. I wasn’t trying to help someone else. I didn’t test a dangerous new treatment. Unlike the better-known sort of self-experimentation, which usually confirms what the experimenter believes, my self-experiments had shown I was wrong.
From my acne research I learned that self-experimentation can be used by non-experts to (a) see if the experts are right and (b) learn something they don’t know. I hadn’t realized such things were possible. The next problem I tried to solve this way was early awakening. For years, starting in my twenties, I woke up early in the morning, such as 4 a.m., still tired but unable to go back to sleep. Only a few dreary hours later would I be able to fall back asleep. This happened about half of all mornings. It showed no sign of going away. I didn’t want to take a pill for the rest of my life—not that there are any good pills for this—so I didn’t bother seeing a doctor. The only hope for a good solution, as far as I could tell, was self-experimentation.
So I did two things:
I recorded a few details about my sleep. The main one was whether I fell back asleep after getting up. How often this happened was my measure of the severity of the problem. In the beginning, I couldn’t fall back asleep about half of all mornings.I tested possible solutions.
The first thing I tried was aerobic exercise. It didn’t help. Early awakening was just as common after a day with exercise as after a day without exercise. I tried eating cheese in the evening. It didn’t help. I tried several more possible remedies.
None helped. After several years, I ran out of things to try. All my ideas about what might help had proved wrong.
Yet I managed to make progress. For unrelated reasons, I changed my breakfast from oatmeal to fruit. A few days later, I started waking up too early every morning instead of half the time. The problem was now much worse. This had never happened before. I recorded the breakfast change on the same piece of paper I used to keep track of my sleep, so the correlation was easy to see. To make sure the correlation reflected causality, I went back and forth between fruit and oatmeal. The results showed it was cause and effect. Fruit for breakfast caused more early awakening than oatmeal for breakfast. After ten years when nothing I’d done had made a difference, this was a big step forward. I eventually figured out that any breakfast made early awakening more likely. A long experiment confirmed this. The best breakfast was no breakfast.
I was less surprised than you might think. I knew that in a wide range of animals, including rats, a laboratory result called anticipatory activity is well established. If you feed a rat every day at the same time, it will become active about three hours earlier. If you feed it at noon, it will become active about 9 a.m. I had been eating breakfast at about 7 a.m. and waking up about 4 a.m. I had essentially found that humans were like other animals in this regard.
Not eating breakfast reduced early awakening but didn’t eliminate it. In the following years, self-experimentation taught me more about what caused it. By accident, I found that standing helped. If I stood more than eight hours in a day, I slept better that night. That wasn’t practical—after trying to stand that much for several years, I gave up—but the realization helped me make another accidental discovery 10 years later: standing on one leg to exhaustion helps. If I do this four times (left leg twice, right leg twice) during a day, even in the morning, I sleep much better that night. More recently, I’ve found that animal fat makes me sleep better.
Both effects are dose-dependent. I can get great sleep if I stand enough and great sleep if I eat enough animal fat.
How much animal fat is “enough”? I’ve just started trying to figure this out using pig fat, which I consume in a cut called pork belly (the part of the pig used for bacon). I found that 150 grams of pork belly had a little effect; 250 grams of pork belly had a much clearer effect. The effect seems to get larger with more pork belly (e.g., 350 grams). Because pork belly may be more than 90% fat by calories (there is great variation from one piece to the next), it’s a lot of calories of fat to get the maximum possible effect. I need to burn a lot of calories per day to make that many calories easy to eat, but it’s in some respects more convenient than standing on one foot.
Acne and sleep were my first self-experimental topics. Later I studied mood, weight control, and the effects of omega-3 on brain function. I learned that self-experimentation has three uses:
To test ideas. I tested the idea that tetracycline helps acne. I tested ideas about how to sleep better. And I’ve tested ideas derived from surprises. A few years ago, while trying to put on my shoes standing up, I realized my balance was much better than usual. I’d been putting on my shoes standing up for more than a year; that morning it was much easier than usual. The previous evening I’d swallowed six flaxseed-oil capsules. I did self-experiments to test the idea that flaxseed oil improves balance. (It did.)To generate new ideas. By its nature, self-experimentation involves making sharp changes in your life: you don’t do X for several weeks, then you do X for several weeks. This, plus the fact that we monitor ourselves in a hundred ways, makes it easy for self-experimentation to reveal unexpected side effects. This has happened to me five times. Moreover, daily measurements—of acne, sleep, or anything else—supply a baseline that makes it even easier to see unexpected changes.To develop ideas. That is, to determine the best way to use a discovery and to learn about the underlying mechanism. After I found that flaxseed oil improved balance, I used self-experimentation to figure out the best dose (three to four tablespoons per day).
One complaint about self-experimentation is that you’re not “blind.” Maybe the treatment works because you expect it to work. A placebo effect. I have never seen a case where this appeared to have happened. When treatment 10 helps after treatments 1 through 9 have failed to help (my usual experience), it’s unlikely to be a placebo effect. Accidental discoveries cannot be placebo effects.
My experience has shown that improve-your-life self-experimentation is remarkably powerful. I wasn’t an expert in anything I studied—I’m not a sleep expert, for example—but I repeatedly found useful cause-and-effect relationships (breakfast causes early awakening, flaxseed oil improves balance, etc.) that the experts had missed. This isn’t supposed to happen, of course, but it made a lot of sense. My self-experimentation had three big advantages over conventional research done by experts:
More power. Self-experiments are far better at determining causality (does X cause Y?) than conventional experiments. Obviously they’re much faster and cheaper. If I have an idea about how to sleep better, I can test it on myself in a few weeks for free. Conventional sleep experiments take a year or more (getting funding takes time) and cost thousands of dollars. A less obvious advantage of self-experimentation is that more wisdom is acquired. We learn from our mistakes. Fast self-experimentation means you make more mistakes. One lesson I learned stands out: Always do the minimum—the simplest, easiest experiment that will make progress. Few professional scientists seem to know this. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, self-experimentation is much more sensitive to unexpected side effects.Stone Age–like treatments are easy to test. I repeatedly found that simple environmental changes, such as avoiding breakfast and standing more, had big and surprising benefits. In each case, the change I’d made resembled a return to Stone Age life, when no one ate breakfast and everyone stood a lot. There are plenty of reasons to think that many common health problems, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and cancer, are caused by differences between modern life and Stone Age life. Modern life and Stone Age life differ in many ways, of course; the fraction of differences that influence our health is probably low. If so, to find aspects of Stone Age life that matter, you have to do many tests. Self-experiments, fast and cheap, can do this; conventional experiments, slow and expensive, cannot. In addition, conventional research is slanted toward treatments that can make money for someone. Because conventional research is expensive, funding is needed. Drug companies will fund research about drugs, so lots of conventional research involves drugs. Elements of Stone Age life (such as no breakfast) are cheap and widely available. No company will fund research about their effectiveness.Better motivation. I studied my sleep for 10 years before making clear progress. That sort of persistence never happens in conventional health research. The reason is a difference in motivation. Part of the difference is how much the researcher cares about finding solutions. When you study your own problem (e.g., acne), you care more about finding a solution than others are likely to care. Acne researchers rarely have acne. And part of the motivation difference is the importance of goals other than solving the problem. When I studied my sleep, my only goal was to sleep better. Professional scientists have other goals, which are enormously constraining.
One set of prison bars involves employment and research funding. To keep their jobs (e.g., get tenure, get promoted, get jobs for their students, and get grants), professional scientists must publish several research papers per year. Research that can’t provide this is undoable. Another set of prison bars involves status. Professional scientists derive most of their status from their job. When they have a choice, they try to enhance or protect their status. Some sorts of research have more status than others. Large grants have more status than small grants, so professional scientists prefer expensive research to cheap research. High-tech has more status than low-tech, so they prefer high-tech. As Thorstein Veblen emphasized in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), useless research has higher status than useful research. Doing useless work, Veblen said, shows that you are higher-status than those who must do useful work. So researchers prefer useless research, thus the term “ivory tower.” Fear of loss of job, grant, or status also makes it hard for professional scientists to propose radical new ideas. Self-experimenters, trying to solve their own problem on their own time, are not trapped like this.
Acne illustrates the problem. The dermatological party line is that diet doesn’t cause acne. According to a website of the American Academy of Dermatology, “extensive scientific studies” show it’s a “myth” that “acne is caused by diet.” According to “guidelines for care” for dermatologists published in 2007, “dietary restriction (either specific foods or food classes) has not been demonstrated to be of benefit in the treatment of acne.” In fact, there is overwhelming evidence linking diet and acne. Starting in the 1970s, a Connecticut doctor named William Danby collected evidence connecting dairy consumption and acne; it is telling that Danby wasn’t a professional scientist. When his patients gave up dairy, it often helped. In 2002, six scientists (none a dermatologist) published a paper with the Weston Price–like conclusion that two isolated groups of people (Kitava Islanders and Ache hunter-gatherers) had no acne at all. They had examined more than 1,000 subjects over the age of 10 and found no acne. When people in these groups left their communities and ate differently, they did get acne. These observations suggest that a lot of acne—maybe all of it—can be cured and prevented by diet.
Why is the official line so wrong? Because the painstaking research needed to show the many ways diet causes acne is the sort of research that professional researchers can’t do and don’t want to do. They can’t do it because the research would be hard to fund (no one makes money when patients avoid dairy) and because the trial and error required would take too long per publication. They don’t want to do it because it would be low-tech, low-cost, and very useful—and therefore low-status. While research doctors in other specialties study high-tech expensive treatments, they would be doing low-cost studies of what happens when you avoid certain foods. Humiliating. Colleagues in other specialties might make fun of them. To justify their avoidance of embarrassment, the whole profession tells the rest of us, based on “extensive scientific studies,” that black is white. Self-experimentation allows acne sufferers to ignore the strange claims of dermatologists, not to mention their dangerous drugs (such as Accutane). Persons with acne can simply change their diets until they figure out what foods cause the problem.
Gregor Mendel was a monk. He was under no pressure to publish; he could say whatever he wanted about horticulture without fear for his job. Charles Darwin was wealthy. He had no job to lose. He could write On the Origin of Species very slowly. Alfred Wegener, who proposed continental drift, was a meteorologist. Geology was a hobby of his. Because they had total freedom and plenty of time, and professional biologists and geologists did not (just as now), Mendel, Darwin, and Wegener were able to use the accumulated knowledge of their time better than the professionals. The accumulated knowledge of our time is more accessible than ever before. Self-experimenters, with total freedom, plenty of time, and easy access to empirical tests, are in a great position to take advantage of it.
Seth Roberts, “Self-Experimentation as a Source of New Ideas: Ten Examples Involving Sleep, Mood, Health, and Weight,” Behavioral and Brain Science 27 (2004): 227–88 (www.fourhourbody.com/new-ideas) This 61-page document about self-experimentation provides an overview of some of Seth’s findings, including actionable sleep examples.
The Quantified Self (www.quantifiedself.com) Curated by Wired cofounding editor Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf, a managing editor of Wired, this is the perfect home for all self-experimenters. The resources section alone is worth a trip to this site, which provides the most comprehensive list of data-tracking tools and services on the web (www.fourhourbody.com/quantified).
Alexandra Carmichael, “How to Run a Successful Self-Experiment” (www.fourhourbody.com/self-experiment) Most people have never systematically done a self-experiment. And yet, it’s one of the easiest methods for discovering what variables are affecting your well-being. This article shows you the five principles that will help you get started in running successful self-experiments. Bonus: an 11-minute video from Seth Roberts, discussing experiment design.
CureTogether (www.curetogether.com) CureTogether, which won the Mayo Clinic iSpot Competition for Ideas That Will Transform Healthcare (2009), helps people anonymously track and compare health data to better understand their bodies and make more informed treatment decisions. Think you’re alone with a condition? Chances are you’ll find dozens of others with the same problem on CureTogether.
Daytum (www.daytum.com) Conceived by Ryan Case and Nicholas Felton, Daytum is an elegant and intuitive service for examining and visualizing your everyday habits and routines.
Data Logger (http://apps.pachube.com/datalogger) Data Logger for iPhone enables you to store and graph any data of your choosing along with a time-stamp and location. It can be used for anything, whether food-related, animal sightings, or temperature sensor readings around your neighborhood. If you can think of it, it can be recorded and tracked.
[How Seth Roberts’ self-experimentation began]. Roberts, Seth. Surprises from self-experimentation: Sleep, mood, and weight. Chance. 2001; 4(2):7-18. UC Berkeley: Available from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5bv8c7p3[The first of many papers to show antibiotic-resistant acne was a significant problem]. Eady EA, Cove JH, Blake J, Holland KT, Cunliffe WJ. Recalcitrant acne vulgaris. Clinical, biochemical and microbiological investigation of patients not responding to antibiotic treatment. Br J Dermatol. 1988; 118:415-23.Roberts, Seth. Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 2004; 27(2), 227-288. UC Berkeley: Available from http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/117/Boulos Z, Rosenwasser AM, Terman M. Feeding schedules and the circadian organization of behavior in the rat. Behav Brain Res. 1980; 1:39–65.Seth Roberts’ blog: http://blog.sethroberts.net.Acne myths: http://www.skincarephysicians.com/acnenet/myths.html on 2009-09-13.Guidelines of care: http://www.aad.org/research/_doc/ClinicalResearch_Acne%20Vulgaris.pdf on 2009-09-17.Danby: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2007/12/16/a_clear_connection/ on 2009-09-17.No acne among two isolated groups: Cordain L, Lindeberg S, Hurtado M, Hill K, Eaton SB, Brand-Miller J. Acne vulgaris: a disease of Western civilization. Arch Dermatol. 2002; 138:1584-90.Dangers of Accutane: http://www.accutane-side-effects.net/ on 2009-09-13.Wegener: http://www.pangaea.org/wegener.htm on 2009-09-17.Posted on December 18th, 2010
Steve Howard talks about IKEA’s super-sized sustainability strategies at TEDGlobal 2013. Photo: James Duncan Davidson
