Everybody, in a sense, is a “personal scientist.†For example, we enthusiastically try different recipes to make foods taste more delicious. Women are extraordinary self-experimenters. Every woman can tell you how many cosmetics she has tried and what is the best for her skin. Indeed, we do variety things to ourselves hopefully to fix some ailments. Many people constantly change their behaviors such as drinking water instead of coffee, replacing meat with vegetables, and listening to music to improve their moods, let alone many unfortunate souls hopelessly try to diet, quit smoking, or abstain from alcohol. We do experiments on ourselves all the time.
In fact, many scientific discoveries were made by self experiments. 1956 Nobel Prize winner Werner Forssmann threaded a catheter to his heart through a vein in his arm to demonstrate the vascular catheterization. Barry Marshall drank Helicobacter pylori to prove that the bacteria can cause stomach ulcers. Nowadays, all insulin treated diabetic patients have to do a little experiment on themselves to figure out the best dosage and timing to inject insulin.
Recently I am also very interested in self experiments. Three months’ ago, I started to exercise without restricting my diet. Physical activities have tons of physiological benefits which I don’t need to reiterate here. But I have another motivation to do this. I am used to sitting in the chair all day long. I had tried to increase physical activities several times but all attempts had failed. This time I wanted to see how long I could carry out my plan, how much pain I could tolerate, and what kind of physical and emotional responses I had along the exercise. In particular, I wanted to know why I could not adhere to the plan. I decided to make it a scientific experiment with only one observation–myself.