10 minute talk at Quantified-Self meetup in San Francisco - Oct 2011

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How do we ....really count and translate numbers?

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Have been working hard on the concept of a unique patterned language for self-tracking. There has to be a metaphorical language that translates primal patterns of ourselves. Something far from data visualization or graphical output of data.

I think the way to come at this is to find a more instinctual approach to numerical cognition. Read about the Amazon tribe that can only count to five - we learn linear representation of numbers from using rulers, tape measures and simple arithmetic....turns out our brains can accurately recognize one, two, three and then it gets fuzzy.  Large numbers are totally abstract in our heads, a million, a billion...how many trillion was the (fill-in the blank) war/bailout/deficit?

Young kids estimate numbers on something closer to a logarithmic scale, small quantities are far apart, and then large numbers squish together as they get larger.  Just read 'Number Sense: how the mind creates mathematics-updated' by S. Dehaene - he is THE GUY for numerical cognition.  And Alex Bellos "Here's looking at Euclid' - interesting, easy ....reads like a Malcolm Gladwell book.

We humans look for patterns, like puzzles, have an intuition for simple arithmetic - there has to be a more intuitive way to convey personal tracking data about ourselves than the line charts and graphs that the gadget companies serve up.  

Beginnings of the 'Quantify-me' installation at the Headlands

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Totally heads-down at the Headlands.... Have decided the way you figure something out is to take a stab at the idea, and then experiment.  Isn't that what scientists do?  Hypothesis and then scientific method to test and compare results.  Then test again and compare.  I can't be sure what the pattern for self-tracking feels like until I just make more, and then more of them.

I'm in the midst of installing a huge room studio size piece at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito (more on this later, this place is fabulous).

With little distraction at night, have been pouring through books.  Loved this one, 'Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious" - which questions the notion of the other self, the one who controls our actions beneath conscious thought.  Maybe self-tracking is a way to measure and watch the behavior of that other self.  Philosophically, what if we're almost entirely controlled by our primal-subconscious .... the one that drives home without remembering anything.

The other books have been about non-western mathematics.  Stay tuned.