The Quantified Self http://www.quantifiedself.com/

The Quantified Self http://www.quantifiedself.com/ is a group engaged in activities that are more or less defined by its name. The activities include Show and Tell Meetings, blogs and discussions of apps for quantifying self by tracking goals, measuring office productivity or what your eat, etc..  I see the site and activities as being completely aligned with Total Recall. The QS implies capturing and recording everything, but it goes beyond what Gemmell and I describe, by using the data for conducting experiments and for control.  For example, one QS experiment was about the effects of her caffeine consumption on productivity--data coming right from tools we advocate in Total Recal.   So we got it right-- recording everything aka self quantification is the first step for understaning, for control and eventual improvement.

John D. Sutter, CNN: My week of recording a 'digital memory

Sutter spent a week in living the life (November 3,2009) of recording everything http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/03/life.recording.sutter/index.html just to test our theory of Total Recall. He started by saying that he was frustrated “when you set out intentionally to create an e-memory of everything, you end up with too much stuff -- and you miss out on living.”  Total Recall is about how you use technology to improve your life and not become a slave to feeding your e-memory or becoming obsessed with image capture (only a minor part of our e-Memory)! His bottom line was:

“I did realize that more memories are worth preserving than I'd thought. I tend to take photos and videos at important events -- vacations, weekend outings, weddings. But some things that seem banal turn out more interesting: What your apartment looks like, the streets you drive on, your cat pushing his water dish into the wall like a hockey puck. Those boring-sounding things -- which you really shouldn't post online and bore other people with -- can be important components of an e-memory. So appreciate what you've got, celebrate the details and record your life if you want to. But, my humble advice after a week of awkwardness and embarrassment, is to do it for the sake of getting more out of living -- not just because you're afraid you'll lose something.”

This week long experiment cooroborates our experience of trying to understand the immediate and long term value storing everything.  He took many more photos, made more diary entries, and recorded more conversations than we do. We automatically capture everything that goes through our computer--especially everyday trivia e.g. bills, official documents, events. This reduces our cognitive load by not having to remember a lot of details. This in turn, lets us gets “more out of living”.

Week of Life project, www.weekoflife.com: Interesting photo story format

“Week of Life is a documentary site to which anyone can contribute that aims to create the world’s largest photo library about life around us. People from all around the world can contribute with weeks of their life, seven days captured in nine photographs for each day. Sixty-three photographs that make up a small documentary about one’s life that then become part of a large documentary about the world.”  The Czech photographer, Adolf Zika, came up with the idea of the usefulness of the 7 x 9 images week after creating a year’s worth of these images using the 9 image day.

I like the idea, but looking through the site of images shows that it takes a lot of work to get the 63 images to tell a story.  If one has the time and inclination, this is an interesting format.

Each of the user week long vignettes or stories are posted and to some degree tells a story especially to its creator or someone who has shared the experience or is interesting in exercising their imagination. The site of 9 x 7 posted images of their week has 165 common keywords from adrenalin to work, 45 locations and 31 people.

Zika’s 2006 55 MByte book of 3285 (9 x 365) can also be download is less interesting than the 9 image day idea. It is more like what you might expect to see by pulling 3000 photos from your own e-Memory or better yet those from a professional photographer on vatactio.  The experiment of Zika to recall a particular day with 85% accuracy after two years is not unexpected when you have nine images to recall something about a day.  Zika’s book is not unlike Rick Smollen’s “A day in the life of x” that he and thousands of photographers have created.

The amazing recall of Stephen Wiltshire

Stephen Wiltshire is an artist who has painted cityscapes in intricate detail after only a single helicopter tour. 

'I draw from memory, buildings and cities mostly. I can look at something for a few minutes, take it in, then go somewhere else and put it on paper. The lines, the shapes, and angles and arcs. I can go back in my mind and draw a scene I saw years ago - like the Chicago skyline in 1991, or what I saw during a carriage ride in Central Park yesterday.'

The recall of this autistic man is just staggering for those of us with average memories. Watch him draw Rome from memory:

David Pogue on reQall - check out his video

David Pogue of the New York Times has an interesting blog post about reQall that includes a great video explaining what you get out of it.

I am currently reading Total Recall, by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmel on their ongoing work in the field of life-long “e-Memory”. They mention Evernote and reQall as current, interesting and cloud based e-Memory applications and as a long-time Evernote-user, I simply had to try reQall...