This fascinating article by Daniel Kish, a blind psychologist, describes how he navigates via tongue clicks. The echos tell him about his surroundings. I was struck by the similarities with self-experimentation:
- Don’t wait for experts. A blind person could wait for a sighted person (“At the time I went to school, blind kids either waited for people to take us around or we taught ourselves to strike out on our own”). Just as I could have waited for a sleep expert to figure out why I was waking up too early. But I didn’t: I struck out on my own via self-experimentation.
- Many little probes. Kish guided himself by clicking his tongue many times. Likewise, effective self-experimentation, in my experience, involves many little experiments.
- Free. Kish can go where he wants when he wants. It costs nothing. Likewise, my self-experimentation needs no grant, and allows me to study whatever I want and reach any conclusion.
- Learning by doing. An experiment, like sonar, involves doing something, getting feedback, and moving forward based on interpretation of the feedback.
- Active better than passive. “Passive sonar that relies on incidental noises such as footsteps produces relatively vague images. Active sonar, in which a noise such as a tongue click is produced specifically to generate echoes, is much more precise,” writes Kish. Likewise, I’ve learned more from active experimentation than from measuring something day after day, which relies on natural variation.
- Ancient. “The readiness with which people learn sonar suggests to me it may be an inbuilt skill,” writes Kish. Self-experimentation is a form of trial and error, which predates humans.
- Verification in other ways. “Ultimately, students verify what they hear by touching,” writes Kish. The solutions I come up with via self-experimentation I verify by using them. Do they work? Another kind of verification is with experiments involving others.
The broad similarity is that self-experimentation, at least mine, is a way of navigating a world with plenty of important cause-effect relationships I don’t know about (e.g., what makes my sleep better or worse). Rather than continually bumping into them.