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DOUBLE_BLIND_YOURSELF

                                                  February  14, 2012

   An old idea with me:

   Is it possible to conduct
   double-blind experiments
   with yourself as a subject?

   I started working on the design of an
   experiment to look for evidence of
   the effects of taking a "smart drug"
   like lecithin supplements.  If you
   could find another "neutral" capsule
   that looked much like lecithin, then
   you could package up doses of them in
   identical containers, labeled on the
   bottom.

   Take your daily dose, and slip the
   container in a dated envelope without
   looking at the code on the bottom.

   Do memory tests daily and
   record the results.                              I bought a deck of
                                                    flashcards for learning
   Later, break open the sealed                     chinese ideograms to
   envelopes and see if there's any                 use in the memory tests.
   significant relationship between what
   was taken and the test results.                      It's a subject I know
                                                        next to nothing
       Where this clever design                         about, and yet it has
       fell to the ground: I                            enough intrinsic
       had the impression that                          interest I wouldn't
       lecithin caps and                                mind studying it.
       vitamin E caps were
       identical, and I could                           Memory tests using
       use the E as a placebo                           randomly generated
       of a sort.                                       strings aren't a test
                                                        of memory but of
       Really, on closer inspection,                    determination, or
       it was easy to distinguish                       perhaps stupidity.
       between them, and I believe I                    What's your level of
       could tell them apart by                         boredom tolerance?
       taste as well (so popping
       them from container to mouth
       without looking wouldn't work
       either).

          There are probably ways to
          rescue this idea, though,
          working with things in
          powdered form, filling
          identical capsules with
          the powder -- I've heard
          you can buy capsules like
          this, so emptying ones for
          over-the-counter medicines
          shouldn't be necessary.


                   This idea has two things that are
                   appealing about it:

                   You immediately get some data about
                   the subject that you probably
                   care the most about: no worries about
                   whether your individual constitution
                   is similar to the average, etc.

                   You can publish your results on the
                   net, and invite others to repeat
                   your work and gradually pool data,
                   to obtain a more generally useful
                   result.

                                       AMATEUR_NET


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