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MichaelHoward comments on The Apologist and the Revolutionary - Less Wrong
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Report: I used a glass of water mixed with ice, and a medicine dropper for delivery, lying down in bed with my left ear upward. The cold water did seem to immediately flood the ear (it popped/clicked, don't know medical term).
I tried thinking about two topics, my estimate of my own intelligence and a complicated AI issue I'm currently pondering. Neither produced any great revelation or change of heart.
I'll try to remember to test again the next time I'm currently in the middle of feeling torn on some topic, or worried that I might be rationalizing.
If all of this including the journal article is a tremendous prank along the lines of "How do you get a hundred rationalists to squirt cold water into their left ear?" it worked like a charm. You shouldn't feel embarrassed for trying it, though. A plate on a door affords pushing, a hypothesis affords testing.
As it's "caloric vestibular stimulation", ie. a temperature shock to the bits in the middle of the ear that sense movement and balance, I'd expect having your head upright at the time (not lying with your left ear up) to be important. Can anyone confirm?
Maybe it acts as a superstimulus to the "your off-balance, re-align yourself URGENTLY" reaction?
When this test is done to patients in a hospital, the patient is lying in bed on his back facing upward towards the ceiling. Ice cold water, 60 ml total, is introduced into one ear canal using a syringe. This is repeated in the other ear canal. The water runs out into a basin placed outside the ear to keep the bed dry. Severely brain damaged patients do not have any reaction to this test. This is a test used in examining patients undergoing brain death evaluation, so they are already on a ventilator.
Ouch - you lost me my motivation to follow this example at 'syringe'. I guess I'm more of a rationalist than a scientist - my desire to know whether this works (on me, in an unprofessional home-test anyway) is rated a lot lower value than my desire to not have a syringe of ice-cold water injected into my ears.
"Syringe", not "needle". It's just the plastic bit being used to squirt water into your ear, rather than a needle being used to pierce the eardrum.
Why, when I was a kid my mum, a doctor, used to give me and my brother (unused) syringes as water guns and it was great fun.