Life, quantified

I just read this article about self-measurement. It's full of accounts of people who have undertaken self-measurement projects for various reasons, like trying to optimize their running performance, quit smoking, quit coffee, deal with sleep disorders, or improve productivity at work. I found the article quite thought-provoking in its own right, although all the descriptions of people hooking themselves up to sensors of various kinds made me think of this talk about how games will invade real live, as well as this TED Talk about harnessing the power of gamers, both of which I found quite interesting from the perspective of trying to shape the everyday behaviour of gamers (or would-be gamers... or maybe just anyone, really) by introducing into real life some of the same elements that drive them to happily spend hours training/leveling-up their characters, going after some kind of epic weapon or gear, or trying to beat a high score. I refer to gamers as if they're some kind of foreign group, but there's a very good reason I've deliberately avoided playing most video games for the last few years... in any case, my interest in the issue comes from a desire to more effectively shape my own behaviour.

I think I would do well to keep a detailed record of my activities, even just for some set period of time like a week or two. I can't even imagine how much time I don't realize I waste doing absolutely nothing of any productive value (entertainment/recreation counting as productive in some sense). I think seeing some hard numbers in front of me would shock some self-control into me. That's certainly the case when it comes to my spending habits, at least.

On a different note, the social aspects of self-measurement (when the collected information is broadcast) are also really interesting... In situations like trying to quit smoking, I could see how making your data available to friends might enable them to help keep you on track. But this part of the article gave me pause:

Jon Cousins is a 54-year-old software entrepreneur and former advertising executive who was given a diagnosis in 2007 of bipolar affective disorder. Cousins built a self-tracking system to help manage his feelings, which he called Moodscope; now used by about 1,000 others, Moodscope automatically sends e-mail with mood-tracking scores to a few select friends. “My life was changed radically,” Cousins told me recently in an e-mail message. “If I got the odd dip, my friends wanted to know why.” Sometimes, after he records a low score, a friend might simply e-mail: “?” Cousins replies, and that act alone makes him feel better.

As uncomfortable as I am with the idea of, say, Google Latitude, I think I'd really like to know when my friends are feeling down or especially happy, even if it isn't over something they'd consider worth going out of their way to talk to or tell someone about. At the same time, I'm not sure how I'd feel about sharing that kind of info if I were to track it myself... though I guess if the sharing bit were user-controlled, that would be less of an issue.

Ideas Worth Spreading

One of the best websites on the internet (yes, the entire internet) is, in my opinion, TED.com. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), for those who aren't familiar, is an annual conference where some of the world's most extraordinary people -- scientists, artists, entertainers, entrepreneurs, innovators -- convene to share their ideas in concise 20-minute talks that range from thought-provoking to inspiring to mind-blowing. To read more about TED itself, you can go here, but I want to share some of my favourite talks that I've watched recently. Talk descriptions are taken straight from the TED site, and below each video I've included some comments of my own.

Pawan Sinha on how brains learn to see

Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain's visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism.

I'm extremely interested in cognition and how people process information, so in addition to the treatments his groups has been doing, his research and its implications are very exciting.

Dan Ariely on our buggy moral code

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it's OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we're predictably irrational -- and can be influenced in ways we can't grasp.

I actually think the description for this one is somewhat misleading. The studies Ariely describes aren't really about why "we think it's OK", so much as under what circumstances we tend to cheat (and, based on those findings, he suggests explanations for this). However, given that the factors involved in those explanations aren't (in all likelihood) consciously considered by people who are deciding whether to cheat or not, his findings are quite interesting. If we're predictably irrational, we certainly aren't intuitively so.

[As an aside, I recently read the paper of his about what the authors term "coherent arbitrariness", how even when the value people ascribe to something is arbitrary (e.g., the amount of money they would have to be paid to be willing to endure the pain of the vice-grip on their finger, as he mentions in this TED talk), they still make adjustments in "coherent" (predictable) ways (i.e., demanding more money for longer duration of pain). He has also authored a neat paper on how buyers and sellers can value the same good quite differently. If you're interested in either paper, let me know and I can send them to you.]

Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds

Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how her mind works -- sharing her ability to "think in pictures," which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss. She makes the case that the world needs people on the autism spectrum: visual thinkers, pattern thinkers, verbal thinkers, and all kinds of smart geeky kids.

This talk actually made me shed tears. I cannot explain why. Maybe it has something to do with how strongly I feel about education and the role it ought to have in tapping into the specific strengths that everyone has -- getting people to realize their potential, especially in spite of what "conventional wisdom", such as academic curricula, would indicate should be expected of them.

Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy?

Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.

This talk I actually watched years ago. As someone who is given to spending obscene amounts of time deliberating over important (and not-so-important) decisions, often to the point where my indecision ends up making my decision for me, I found this talk Most Excellent. Even aside from never really being able to know which choice will be "best", there's the reality that, even if we could always choose the "best" options, it wouldn't necessarily make much difference to how happy we end up being: by and large, humans make themselves (relatively) happy with the reality they are faced with.

Hm. There are several more talks that I really want to share, but I'll save those for another post.

Morning's here... The morning's here! Sunshine is here...

I love mornings. :D To observe my behaviour, you'd never conclude such a thing. For instance, my last couple weeks have gone more or less like so:

Sunday: wake at 3 pm

Monday: sleep at 7 am; wake at 2 pm

Tuesday: sleep at 11 am; wake at 5 pm

Wednesday: sleep at 4 pm; wake at 6 pm

Thursday: sleep at 6 am; wake at 3 pm

Friday: sleep at 3 am; wake at 12 pm

Saturday: sleep at 7 am; wake at 3 pm

Sunday: sleep at 6 am; wake at 3 pm

Monday: sleep at 5 am; wake at 7 am; sleep at 5 pm; wake at 7 pm

Tuesday: sleep at 8 am; wake at 9 am; sleep at 6 pm; wake at 8 pm

Wednesday: sleep at 5 am; wake at 5:10 am; sleep at 9 pm (!!)

Thursday: wake at 6 am (!!)

Friday: sleep at 1 am; wake at 8 am

I don't quite understand why I always tend to stay up forever into the night, eventually giving in to exhaustion and sleeping sometime in the morning... I guess there's something about the quiet, when everyone else is asleep, that I like, but I most of the time I don't get much (or anything) done when I'm awake really late anyway. Sometimes there's something specific I'm doing such that I stay up forever (e.g., playing guitar), but other times time just somehow elapses, and suddenly it's 6 am, and I wouldn't even be able to describe what I was doing the whole time if you asked me.

I think I need to get into the habit of sticking to a behavioural curfew. Something like "no computer after 10 pm". I really like early mornings, when it's just getting light out (or even before it starts to get light). They're so much better than evenings. They feel so much happier...

I watched a TED Talk yesterday, about lifestyles that are associated with longevity, and (in addition to making me think about what a ridiculously high proportion of the time my body must be under stress -- due to my sleeping habits alone) the speaker talks about the Japanese concept of ikigai, which he, perhaps rather inaccurately, translates as "the reason for which you wake up in the morning"... Now, maybe what he really meant by this description was something closer to a raison d'être, or broader sense of purpose in life (which surely would be a great thing), but even taking it literally: for me it makes such a huge difference simply to have something specific that I want to do when I wake up each day. It's such a great feeling to wake up and to not be able to stay in bed because there are things that you can't wait to do right away. Which is another reason to set a curfew for myself, even (or especially) when there are things I really want to do right that moment, at night.

It's odd... I saw this personality quiz recently (a Which Typeface Are You? quiz, hehe) in which the following question was asked "Are you relaxed -- do you take any chocolate from the box, whether it's orange cream or hazelnut crunch? Or are you disciplined -- do you first suffer the orange cream so you can later enjoy the hazelnut crunch?" I would never think of myself as disciplined (like, at *all*), but I always do the latter. I always eat things I don't like first, saving the best things for last. If this is indeed some kind of manifestation of discipline, maybe there's hope for me yet -- maybe I can make a habit of not only to holding off on enjoyable activities until morning (so I can sleep and wake early :D), but maybe even first doing tasks I don't want to do, getting them over with right away so I can enjoy other things fully afterwards. Wouldn't that be something...