In August, at a Quantified Self meeting in San Jose, I told how butter apparently improved my brain function. When I started eating a half-stick of butter every day, I suddenly got faster at arithmetic. During the question period, Greg Biggers of genomera.com proposed a study to see if what I’d found was true for other people….
While much of our work here is focused on individual development, there are plenty of circumstances in our professional lives where we can apply the ideas of experimentation. Let me set the stage with some background and ideas, and then I’d love to hear from you on how you widen self-tracking to apply to your…
A reader over at my blog shared the NYT article Wandering Mind Is a Sign of Unhappiness, which reports on research by Killingsworth and Gilbert showing some surprises about distractedness. (My take: First, the least surprising result may be that the world’s happiest activity is reproduction. Second, almost half of the time we are not…
There’s a great new post over at the Zeo blog by an experienced polyphasic sleeper – instead of sleeping in one 8 hour chunk, he breaks it up into three segments throughout the day. In his post he shows how he used Zeo to help optimize sleep quality and create a polyphasic schedule that feels better…
A few months ago I was fatigued and decided to try a more rigorous sleep hygiene routine to see if it would help (it did). To make the experiment fun I thought I’d look for a nifty iPhone app to track the data. After a fairly extensive search I noticed that most of the tools…
In collecting data about ourselves we naturally encounter information that is unpleasant or unwelcome. This can range in scope from the prosaic (“I’m not losing weight fast enough”) to the the profound (“I just found out I have cancer.”) While this is a pervasive aspect of being human – resolving the conflict between What Is…
I am a strong supporter of self experimentation and citizen science, particularly when it comes to health (full disclosure: I’m CoFounder of CureTogether.com). Since our bodies all differ to varying degrees, we need to experiment with foods, lifestyles and medications to find out what will work best for each of us. And pooling our individual data…
For those of you following our first Quantified Self group experiment, here is Eri Gentry telling the Bay Area QS Show&Tell meetup about the Butter Mind/Coconut Mind experiment. The question she wants to answer is, does eating 3 tbsp. of butter or coconut oil a day improve math scores? Hear more directly from Eri below….
Let’s admit it. People who do stuff are more interesting than those who don’t. Naturally we’re biased as Self-Quantifiers, but don’t you love running into folks at gatherings who have surprises and results to share about themselves, gained from experimentation and tasty data? It’s stimulating to hear about an insight (“I eat less when I’m…
