Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Mood monitors

[Thanks to TTL.] Cute woman, this psychologist.



I think many people have a fear of "becoming too introverted". And it's understandable, it can temporarily hurt your productivity and such, and in most western countries introversion is something which is stigmatized as being an unhealthy condition. But who amongst us don't have feelings we would like to be without? And the more I learn, the more I see the astounding amount of feelings and mental phenomena we are not even aware about. Which I think, per this video, is a field which we now see embryonic technology to help us with.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

Eolake,

Get out more, move around; Paris as a base of operations. She is attractive, though.

Bron

PS. What the hell was she talking about?

Anonymous said...

She is 47% cute, but doesn't know her behind from a snare drum. She said nothing useful.

If we had a dollar for every 'um' or 'ah' - we could pay for lunch.

Otherwise - unless she was targeted to be banged - she's useless.

Anonymous said...

I wondered why you thanked me for the ref, for I don't remember ever seeing this video. But then I realised it is currently on the first page of Kevin Kelly's The Quantified Self website to which I did post a link earlier.

Just to clarify: My intention was to refer to the self-tracking movement in general, seeing that some people are using Twitter (the subject of discussion) as a tool for that. I linked to Kevin Kelly's website because it is kind of a hub for the movement. I should have been more clear about this.

Regarding mood monitoring:

Many people have found mood tracking a useful experiment. For example, by plotting a curve of your mood over time together with a curve for the amount of physical exercise you get over time typically shows a strong correlation. But diligent tracking also reveals the relative strength of the effect and its duration. Someone really wanting to get to the heart of this could, for example, find out where the point of diminishing returns is, i.e. how much physical exercise gives you the maximum benefit per effort.

Most people track mood just by regularly making a note of it. Heart rate tracking, which is what the product on this video does (as I understand it), doesn't get you very far. To automatically track mood, the device would need to analyze your hormone levels. Fortunately, the manual method of subjective assessment works well. And it's enough if you do it once a day before going to bed as you typically remember how you felt during the day.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Interesting.

Re the device: I think it's clear that this as a technology is not even nascent yet, it's only embryonic. Give it 30 years of hard work, *then* it'll be nascent. Maybe in 50 years it'll be in full bloom.

Cristina Rodguez said...

Still (pause) her face every now and then. She makes pretty funny faces.

Unknown said...

Ah hah, it's the auburn hair.

Anonymous said...

Royce, you need to get laid.