Highlights of the First Quantified Self Conference

The First Quantified Self Conference happened last weekend in Mountain View. It resembled a super-duper QS meetup: more talks, more varieties of expression (short talks, long talks, booths, posters, breakout sessions, panels), people from far-flung places, such as Switzerland, and more friends.

Above all, it felt sunny, after a long overcast. Something I’d done most of my life was now enthusiastically being done by many others. Other highlights for me:

Talking with Steve Omohundro, an old friend I hadn’t seen in years. After I saw him on the attendee list, I aimed it at him. After it, he came up and said he really liked it. Mission accomplished . Like so many smart people, he has started to eat paleo.

Meeting John de Souza. I really admire what he has done at Medhelp (“the world’s largest health community”). I like to think that, in the future, the first thing you’ll do when you have a serious health problem will be to contact others who’ve had that problem.

Christine Peterson‘s poster. She measured her sleep with a Zeo for three months. Her poster showed how various things, such as caffeine consumption, correlated with sleep measurements, such as REM time. I believe the most important Zeo measurement is how long you are awake during the night (less is better). Christine’s data showed a strong correlation between her score on Zeo’s Sleep Stealer‘s index (you get points for all sorts of things, such as alcohol consumption, that studies have shown disrupt sleep) and how long she was awake at night. With a high score, she was awake twice as long (about 1.5 hours) as with a low score. This shows the practical value of the Zeo. Assuming that the correlation reflects cause and effect, it’s now clear how she can improve her sleep (reduce her Sleep Stealer score). It also shows that what’s true for other people is true — in the sense of helpful – for her.

The difference between two breakout sessions. Robin Barooah and I ran two breakout sessions about self-experimentation. In the first (many attendees), we talked about 15% of the time. In the second (six attendees), we talked about 5% of the time. In the second, but not the first, it became clear that everyone had something they wanted to talk about. If they could talk about it, they were pleased.

Migraines. I met a woman who used self-experimentation to figure out that her migraine headaches were due to common household chemicals. Doctors had repeatedly told her she had a brain tumor. One doctor had proposed trying twenty-odd medicines one by one until one of them worked.

Speaking advice. Melanie Cornwell, a friend of Gary Wolf’s, gave me advice about my talk. I’m sure her advice will help me in the future.

Mood improvement via sharing. At an excellent mood measurement breakout session run by Margie Morris, I learned how Jon Cousins had tracked his mood for several years and then started to share it with a friend. The sharing had a huge positive effect. He has started a website called Moodscope to help others do this. At the same session Alexandra Carmichael told about sharing mood ratings with someone who, at first, was not an especially good friend but who became her best friend. The sharing improved her mood ratings and curiously their moods become more synchronized.

So I enjoyed the conference on several levels: socially, professionally, and intellectually. Above all, as I said, it was a relief to finally meet others with similar values and goals.