The mine's canary revisited and other matters

I guess that I should update this blog just a bit more frequently, but my full-time job and my part-time nano startup enterprise (a nice product coming soon! ;-)) prevents me from mantaining it properly updated. Well, let's go to what interests us here.

Firstly, I updated the Arithmetic Speed Test to make it more useful for our goal: measuring someone's reaction times, that seems to be correlated with IQ and body health as a whole. I have eliminated the division operation and reduced the range of values (0 to 9) of the terms to measure more effectively reaction times.

I have found two interesting articles/sites supporting the correlation of the reaction time with IQ and health: the ability to respond quickly to circumstances is a far better gauge of longevity than blood pressure, exercise levels or weight, says this study. Though this study is an epidemiological one, it is on the side that the environmental brain's sensibility turns to be a good indicator of the organism's health. The other article presents the high correlation between reaction time and IQ as an argument in support of one general intelligence theory, citing Eysenck (1982): "IQ correlates very highly (.8 and above, without correction for attenuation) with tests which are essentially so simple, or even directly physiological that they can hardly be considered cognitive in the accepted sense".

Secondly, after reading about magnesium here, here and here, I'm taking supplementation in the form of magnesium glycinate (200mg daily aprox., in two doses). It works wonderfully! I'm more calm and relaxed yet focused, the effect is as clear as mineral water! :-)

Measuring brain function - the canary in a coal mine

As Seth Roberts, I believe that brain function is more sensitive to the environment than the other body's organs; thus it's easier measure the impact of nutrition and lifestyle changes by measure the impact on brain function. The brain is the canary in a coal mine, making possible to detect early the effects of changes in someone's lifestyle.

I did want replicate the arithmetic speed test to measure brain function, used by Seth Roberts in various self-experiments (removal of mercury amalgams, ingestion of flaxseed oil, ingestion of butter), but I don't wanted to use R for it. Then, I implemented a similar algorithm in Python, with a desktop interface. It can be downloaded here. This is a rough version, developed on my lunch time yesterday and today, but it just works fine, saving the result of the tests in a SQLite database file, that can be accessed for analysis purposes (this version don't have the 'view results' function implemented yet, but i'm going to implement it in the next version).

To use the Test of arithmetic speed, download it and execute the file 'arithmeticspeed.py'. You need the Python interpreter (2.6 or later) to run it.

I'll use it to measure brain function changes and evaluate my changes in lifestyle and nutrition, and so can you!

My first post! This is a temporary post, I'll create an appropriate first post soon. But the basic idea of this blog is to have a channel to present the results of my research, my experiments and related things about nutrition. Nice content coming soon...