“I was starting to feel a little bit out of control.” Robert Carlsen used to be an amateur bike racer. When he moved to New York and stopped racing he found that his weight was slowly creeping up. He was still leading an active lifestyle, but he soon realized that most of daily food choices…
How do we spend our time? Jared Chung was curious about how he was spending his days after he transitioned from his role as a consultant into his new startup venture. Inspired by pervious Quantified Self talks he decided to start tracking his time and his daily activities (work, exercise, sleep, etc.) using Google Calendar….
Doug Kanter has been a Type 1 diabetic for 26 years. Through this time he’s come to learn more about his disease by using many data-gathering tools and his own work in visual analysis at the NYU ITP program. We’ve featured Doug’s compelling work here on the blog before and we were excited to hear him…
Typically when we think about Quantified Self and the associated collection and visualization of personal data we’re left struggling in the world of charts, graphs, and other well-worn visualizations. That’s not to disparage those of you who love spending some time tinkering in Excel. Those are valuable tools for understanding and there is a good…
How can I lead a happier life? I’m sure this is something we’ve all asked ourselves. Maybe it was during a turn through doldrums or maybe you asked yourself how you could sustain your happiness during a moment of joy. Whatever the case happiness, and by extension mood tracking, has been at the forefront of engaging in…
In this short talk from 2011, Dr. Paul Abramson talks about the intersection of Quantified Self and clinical practice.
By being able to see my ideas and see how they’re connected to each other, I’m able to think about myself in new ways. Amy Robinson is curious. That curiosity led her to think very deeply about her curiosity. What was she curious about? Where do her ideas come from? What inspires her? In this…
In this short Ignite talk, Dave Marvit from Fujitsu Labs of America talks about a prototype system he is developing to track stress and monitoring stressful events in veterans with PTSD. The Sprout system brings in and syncs multiple data streams allowing researchers, clinicians, and individuals to develop a deeper insight into what’s really happening during…
Awais Hussain is a student at Harvard, and he found himself asking the age-old question, “Where does my time go?” Using his online calendar Awais started tracking his daily activities. This tracking has given him some interesting insights into how he really works and accomplishes tasks. Watch this great talk to hear more about what…
Beau Gunderson lives inside his browser and struggles with distractions, so he wrote a Chrome extension to quantify his browser usage. He learned that he visits about 500 websites a day, sometimes has up to 100 tabs open, and occasionally declares “tab bankruptcy.” Check out Beau’s revealing story in the video below. (Filmed by the San Francisco…
Jae Osenbach LOVES chocolate. Unfortunately, her body does too. She decided to go on a calorie-restricted diet of 1200 calories a day for 6 weeks and track her weight loss. In the lively video below, Jae talks about her experiments with nuts vs. no nuts and chocolate vs. no chocolate, and her surprising T-test results….
We’ve posted some great talks by Amelia Greenhall here on the blog and we’re excited to bring you another insightful presentation. Last year Amelia gave a wonderful talk about her weight loss journey and the power of using running averages. In this updated talk Amelia gives a more in-depth look about how using a 10-day moving…
Ari Berwaldt wanted to better understand how his sleep affected his mental performance. In this great talk Ari explains his insights from tracking his cognitive skills using Quantified Mind and some surprising results about the lack of correlation between his Zeo data and his mental performance. Make sure to keep watching as Ari also explains…
“I never thought I would be getting into this business.” This is the first sentence in a mind-expanding talk by Larry Smarr about his self-tracking journey. In 1999 Larry moved from Illinois to La Jolla, CA to take a position at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Like most Southern California transplants he quickly…
Can you use technology to be more mindful? This question was at the core of a wonderful presentation by Nancy Dougherty at the second annual Quantified Self Conference: Nancy acknowledges at the start of her talk that QS is often thought to be mainly about technology. But not everybody sees it this way. Alex Carmichael,…
Adi Andrei wanted to combine artificial intelligence, psychology, art, and storytelling for the purpose of self-discovery of the subconscious mind. In the video below, Adi explains why he’s focused on this, how to go about entering the subconscious, and what he’s learned about hacking it. (Filmed by the London QS Show&Tell meetup group.) Hacking the Unconscious Mind from…
Amelia Greenhall, of QS Seattle, describes five simple and powerful self-tracking experiments she has been doing over the past few years that feel like getting gold stars. For example, she records everything she has learned, done, read, or accomplished each month. Check out Amelia’s insightful lessons in the video below. Amelia Greenhall: Gold Star from…
J. Paul Neeley has done experiments on optimizing happiness, self-control, and most recently, puns! His mom and brother are great punsters, so he decided to measure how many puns happened over Thanksgiving weekend with his family. In the video below, J. Paul explains this fun experiment, shares what he learned about the pattern of puns, and warns…
Neil Bachelor has been tracking his daily learning for the past two and a half years, with 3,200 discrete learning events. One of his motivations for this is to create a data-based CV that reflects his real work and learning habits. Neil uses Faviki to bookmark things he’s learned. In the video below, he describes his…
Crystal Goh looks at brains every day, as part of her work in a brain and sleep imaging lab in Berkeley. She wanted to know how her brain was different from other brains, in a quantitative way. In the video below, Crystal explains voxel-based morphometry, normalization and standard deviation calculations, and the scary, revealing things…
