Alexandra Carmichael

December 9, 2010

I’ve been thinking for some time about the connection between self-tracking and mindfulness. At first glance they seem to be very different – picture the wired-up gadget wizard sitting next to the unadorned meditating guru. But step to the side and look from a different angle, and you may see meditation and self-tracking as two parallel tools that lead down the same path toward mindfulness.

While these thoughts were swirling through my mind, I got an email from Alex Pang. Alex is a futurist currently housed at Microsoft Research Cambridge, where he is studying the relationship between self-tracking/self-experimentation and mindfulness in a project he calls “contemplative computing”. Wow. Alex just finished writing an article on this topic, using his own experience with weight loss as an example, and delving both into the past and into the future to come to some interesting conclusions. His paper is available here, and I’d love to know if anyone else out there has been thinking about this connection as well.

Maybe the modern-day version of the gong and the meditation cushion are the self-tracking app and the device that runs it?