This document summarizes Amber Case's presentation on using self-tracking technologies and data to improve happiness. She discusses examples of projects that make invisible internal states like emotions and thoughts visible through data. These include tracking happiness levels, locations through GPS, and brain activity. Case argues that awareness of these internal states through data can help identify issues like information overload and fragmentation that reduce happiness. Her vision is that a programmatic, data-driven approach could lead to "perfect happiness" by addressing such issues.
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Quantified Self Meetup - Portland, Oregon - A Programmatic Approach to Perfect Happiness
1. A Programmatic Approach to
Perfect Happiness
Quantified Self Meetup Group
August 15, 2012
Portland, OR
Amber Case
http://caseorganic.com/wiki/
@caseorganic
2. Of all of the newest technologies for
finding friends or dating. "I have many
friends, I have a wife" at the end of it
all, the person I know least about is
myself.
- Jon Lebkowsky
Intro: The organizer of the conference called me up to discuss this speech beforehand. And as we discussed a number of topics, I came to understand a little bit more about an alternative way of understanding meditation. I came to understandMeditation as experimenting with one's brain
A. Example: the sims.
B. example: the Harvard happiness project and discovering my happiness with Geoloqi and unhappiness with my current job. Though I reported on a daily basis a happiness with my job, I was actually miserable during the time I was actually present. A more advanced version could associate mood and emotion with the map: for instance, If you associated mood with the map, you could find ways to remove the bad moods, increasing happiness and time spent doing important things.
6. A feedback loop makes the invisible visible. See this track of Aaron Parecki's GPS trails over time. Can be beautiful. You can also see how much time is being spent traveling. For instance, the dark area up here is Aaron driving around looking for parking. If you associated mood with the map, you could find ways to remove the bad moods, increasing happiness and time spent doing important things.If you see Aaron's map here over time, you can see that his map of self was quite large in 2008, smaller in 2009, and very compact in 2010. By shaving off an hour of commute every day, he is able to add a literal moth to his life every year. Commuting is difficult and unnecessary. If you do it, spend time listening to something interesting on the route. It's another way in which humans are put on pause. 2
Technology that recedes into the background.
But they can be used to bring forth the next chapter of interfaces. The invisible interface.
One example of an invisible interface.
1. REM sleep at age four. Order to chaos. Shutting down the brain. Insomnia.
2. Goal of Tibetan Buddhism is to fully lucid awareness of dream, or to nothingness:
REM sleep at age four. Order to chaos. Shutting down the brain. Insomnia. Wake induced lucid dreaming - waiting or senses to deactivate.
1. REM sleep at age four. Order to chaos. Shutting down the brain. Insomnia.
1. REM sleep at age four. Order to chaos. Shutting down the brain. Insomnia.
4. If you look at this piece of a hard drive, you can see that many files are stored on it. When you install a program on a computer, the computer installs it where there is space. If you install something while many programs are running, or if a hard drive is fragmented, the program will be split up and distributed into the empty spaces in the hard drive. When you try to load that program later, your hard drive has to locate all of the pieces of the program in order to run it. When it has to do that, the program: and the entire computer over time, become slow.
Unlike your stomach, your brain doesn’t know it’s full. When you store memories from one computer tab and then switch to another, then look at your phone, then listen to a lecture - your brain writes memories in interrupted fragments, slowing recall and retrieval of thought. When i was littlri had a lot of wacky dreams, but the i realized that a lot of them had to do with my waking life. For instance, I was a nerd and almost autistc when dealing with other students. Because of my difficulty in social relations; I went to many schools. In my dreams at night, all of those many schools would merge into one school, the halls of which I would explore at night in the dream. I tried to figure this out for a long time. Why would all of the schools be the same school? Why would everything be in the same building? I realized later after my dad showed me how to defragment a computer that I was really watching the defragmentation process of my brain at night, and they my brain had created a system for compressing memories about school storing the schools literally in the same place in my brain. Melding them all together to save room! 4. I felt that there were two ways to defragment my brain. One was sleep, and the other one was sitting for a whole and thinking. But my behavior began to change over time. Instead of staring out of the car on a road trip while deep in thought, one is on an entertainment system or watching a film. Thought independent of the outside world. Inner thought, Internal thought, is lost. Even the act of smoking a cigarette. That was a way to think over something on a long term. A break every few hours. Some of the best thinkers I know smoke. It's a break and a displacement of time in which to consider. I used to smoke 2 packs a day, and boy was I prolific! But now what does one do when one is stopped at a bus stop, waiting in line, looking bored? They take out their cell phone! Cell phoned have become the new cigarettes. And having a phone call in public is like having someone smoking next to you. It's hard to tell what's more annoying. The smoke or the person annoying ranting about something that has nothing to do with you?5. Getting to know the self. It's often missing in digital culture. Is picking up now in the quantified self movement: more feedback technologies are needed with which to improve the self. Externally storing data over time can create a feedback look in one's brain. A. Example: the sims.B. example: the Harvard happiness project and discovering my happiness with Geoloqi and unhappiness with my current job. Though I reported on a daily basis a happiness with my job, I was actually miserable during the time I was actually present. C. Jon Lebowski on all of the newest technologies for finding friends or dating. "I have many friends, I have a wife" at the end of it all, the person I know least about is myself. 6. A feedback loop makes the invisible visible. See this track of Aaron Parecki's GPS trails over time. Can be beautiful. You can also see how much time is being spent traveling. A more advanced version could associate mood and emotion with the map: for instance, the dark area up here is Aaron driving around looking for parking. If you associated mood with the map, you could find ways to remove the bad moods, increasing happiness and time spent doing important things.B. If you see Aaron's map here over time, you can see that his map of self was quite large in 2008, smaller in 2009, and very compact in 2010. By shaving off an hour of commute every day, he is able to add a literal moth to his life every year. Commuting is difficult and unnecessary. If you do it, spend time listening to something interesting on the route. It's another way in which humans are put on pause. To summarize, feedback is important. Sleep is important. Self reflection is important. Some form of digital downtime is important to defragment the brain. Computers and humans aren't so difficult after all. People need more ways to monitor their own thoughts. People need more ways to know themselves in a very intermittent world. Some new form should occur not filled with cliche words, but something new, to help. ----Talk to Sheldon about Buddhist geeks Keynote: 1 hour long, 45 min, 15 questions. Middle keynote on Friday, August 10th, 7:30-8:30, 11:30-12:30 optional panel Saturday. Reinventing Buddhism. Explore how innovation applies to Buddhism as a system. Change it, refer bak to it. Or completely leave behind the entire system in its entirety and create something new? Richard Feynman had lucid dreams. Sheldon Renan studied to become a Buddhist monk. Wake induced lucid dreaming - waiting or senses to deactivate. A Stanford researcher invented a system to communicate REM sleep while one was lucid dreaming, proving one could be aware while dreaming. Best, Amber ---Amber Case CEO, Geoloqi.com503-729-8632
To get to these hyperlinked memories, we must become increasingly skilled virtual paleontologists. The E-mail inbox is the best example of this. Every day our memories and data is covered by a new layer of dust, spam, and items to be responded to. If we need something from our past, we must dig through the newly accumulated items in order to get it. But instead of using a hammer and a chisel, brush and field notebook, we use keywords and search results, tags and categories.
Unlike your stomach, your brain doesn’t know it’s full. When you store memories from one computer tab and then switch to another, then look at your phone, then listen to a lecture - your brain writes memories in interrupted fragments, slowing recall and retrieval of thought. When i was littlri had a lot of wacky dreams, but the i realized that a lot of them had to do with my waking life. For instance, I was a nerd and almost autistc when dealing with other students. Because of my difficulty in social relations; I went to many schools. In my dreams at night, all of those many schools would merge into one school, the halls of which I would explore at night in the dream. I tried to figure this out for a long time. Why would all of the schools be the same school? Why would everything be in the same building? I realized later after my dad showed me how to defragment a computer that I was really watching the defragmentation process of my brain at night, and they my brain had created a system for compressing memories about school storing the schools literally in the same place in my brain. Melding them all together to save room! 4. I felt that there were two ways to defragment my brain. One was sleep, and the other one was sitting for a whole and thinking. But my behavior began to change over time. Instead of staring out of the car on a road trip while deep in thought, one is on an entertainment system or watching a film. Thought independent of the outside world. Inner thought, Internal thought, is lost. Even the act of smoking a cigarette. That was a way to think over something on a long term. A break every few hours. Some of the best thinkers I know smoke. It's a break and a displacement of time in which to consider. I used to smoke 2 packs a day, and boy was I prolific! But now what does one do when one is stopped at a bus stop, waiting in line, looking bored? They take out their cell phone! Cell phoned have become the new cigarettes. And having a phone call in public is like having someone smoking next to you. It's hard to tell what's more annoying. The smoke or the person annoying ranting about something that has nothing to do with you?5. Getting to know the self. It's often missing in digital culture. Is picking up now in the quantified self movement: more feedback technologies are needed with which to improve the self. Externally storing data over time can create a feedback look in one's brain. A. Example: the sims.B. example: the Harvard happiness project and discovering my happiness with Geoloqi and unhappiness with my current job. Though I reported on a daily basis a happiness with my job, I was actually miserable during the time I was actually present. C. Jon Lebowski on all of the newest technologies for finding friends or dating. "I have many friends, I have a wife" at the end of it all, the person I know least about is myself. 6. A feedback loop makes the invisible visible. See this track of Aaron Parecki's GPS trails over time. Can be beautiful. You can also see how much time is being spent traveling. A more advanced version could associate mood and emotion with the map: for instance, the dark area up here is Aaron driving around looking for parking. If you associated mood with the map, you could find ways to remove the bad moods, increasing happiness and time spent doing important things.B. If you see Aaron's map here over time, you can see that his map of self was quite large in 2008, smaller in 2009, and very compact in 2010. By shaving off an hour of commute every day, he is able to add a literal moth to his life every year. Commuting is difficult and unnecessary. If you do it, spend time listening to something interesting on the route. It's another way in which humans are put on pause. To summarize, feedback is important. Sleep is important. Self reflection is important. Some form of digital downtime is important to defragment the brain. Computers and humans aren't so difficult after all. People need more ways to monitor their own thoughts. People need more ways to know themselves in a very intermittent world. Some new form should occur not filled with cliche words, but something new, to help. ----Talk to Sheldon about Buddhist geeks Keynote: 1 hour long, 45 min, 15 questions. Middle keynote on Friday, August 10th, 7:30-8:30, 11:30-12:30 optional panel Saturday. Reinventing Buddhism. Explore how innovation applies to Buddhism as a system. Change it, refer bak to it. Or completely leave behind the entire system in its entirety and create something new? Richard Feynman had lucid dreams. Sheldon Renan studied to become a Buddhist monk. Wake induced lucid dreaming - waiting or senses to deactivate. A Stanford researcher invented a system to communicate REM sleep while one was lucid dreaming, proving one could be aware while dreaming. Best, Amber ---Amber Case CEO, Geoloqi.com503-729-8632
I say this because somewhere along the way I became a skinnerian rat. If you're not familiar with the experiment; a rat, when it knows that it will get food at a certain time of day web it presses a lever, will press the lever every day during that time. But if the food is given at a random interval, the rat will press the button all day long.
I am like that now with so many things. Email comes in randomly. Sometimes I get Facebook messages. Reality is so fragmented that I no longer give full attention to things but something that LeisaRichelt calls "continuous partial attention". And my brain has suffered for it. No longer can I attain those states of perfect focus. Only on a plane can I write or purely think. There's nothing else that can be realistically done on a plane. Today, when so much input external to the self, people become programs. Same programs run in one's brain over and over. Junk sleep, metal fragmentation.
5. Getting to know the self. It's often missing in digital culture. Is picking up now in the quantified self movement: more feedback technologies are needed with which to improve the self. Externally storing data over time can create a feedback look in one's brain.
When Iwas little I had a lot of wacky dreams, but the I realized that a lot of them had to do with my waking life. For instance, I was a nerd and almost autistic when dealing with other students. Because of my difficulty in social relations; I went to many schools. In my dreams at night, all of those many schools would merge into one school, the halls of which I would explore at night in the dream. I tried to figure this out for a long time. Why would all of the schools be the same school? Why would everything be in the same building? I realized later after my dad showed me how to defragment a computer that I was really watching the defragmentation process of my brain at night, and they my brain had created a system for compressing memories about school storing the schools literally in the same place in my brain. Melding them all together to save room! 4. I felt that there were two ways to defragment my brain. One was sleep, and the other one was sitting for a whole and thinking. But my behavior began to change over time. Instead of staring out of the car on a road trip while deep in thought, one is on an entertainment system or watching a film. Thought independent of the outside world. Inner thought, Internal thought, is lost. Even the act of smoking a cigarette. That was a way to think over something on a long term. A break every few hours. Some of the best thinkers I know smoke. It's a break and a displacement of time in which to consider. I used to smoke 2 packs a day, and boy was I prolific! But now what does one do when one is stopped at a bus stop, waiting in line, looking bored? They take out their cell phone! Cell phoned have become the new cigarettes. And having a phone call in public is like having someone smoking next to you. It's hard to tell what's more annoying. The smoke or the person annoying ranting about something that has nothing to do with you?
The synchronous alpha activity in the contrast image is classic, quite nice. Most humans produce this activity throughout the day when they are at rest, truly at rest not just sitting while ruminating. It is just a natural part of our unwinding process and also when we are the most creative. – Derek
A. Example: The SIMs.
To summarize, feedback is important. Sleep is important. Self reflection is important. Some form of digital downtime is important to defragment the brain. Computers and humans aren't so difficult after all. People need more ways to monitor their own thoughts. People need more ways to know themselves in a very intermittent world. Some new form should occur not filled with cliché words, but something new, to help.
To summarize, feedback is important. Sleep is important. Self reflection is important. Some form of digital downtime is important to defragment the brain. Computers and humans aren't so difficult after all. People need more ways to monitor their own thoughts. People need more ways to know themselves in a very intermittent world. Some new form should occur not filled with cliché words, but something new, to help.