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Annals of Self-Experiment - Seth Roberts is His Own Mouse

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mouser:
This is a story from a site called Quantified Self (Tools for Knowing your Own Mind and Body).
I *love* this stuff.  More please.

I'm becoming a devoted fan of Seth Roberts, one of the great champion of self-experimentation. Roberts, an emeritus professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, has spent many year studying himself, and, even better, offering many practical clues about how to construct your own "experiments of one." I first found out about his work in the most obvious way: searching on "self-experimentation" in Google.

mouse.jpgThis lead me to Roberts paper: "Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight." The problems he describes are so common, and his solutions so counter-intuitive, that you can't help being intrigued. One of the great things about reading Roberts is getting a feeling for how different self-experimentation is from other forms of self-knowledge. While Roberts often begins his experiments with a hypothesis, using his stock of common knowledge, suggestions from friends, and categories of analysis typical of a well-trained college professor, this first idea is usually proven, through experiment, to be wrong. Not superficial, or too narrow, or distorted by delusion or prejudice; simply incorrect, provably irrelevant. So then Roberts has to come up with new ideas. The data, expressed as charts, no longer merely test his hypotheses; the data becomes the source of his theories. And the theories bear the mark have having emerged from data. Often, they seem very, very odd.

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http://www.kk.org/quantifiedself/2008/05/annals-of-selfexperiment-seth.php





from http://www.boingboing.net/


Direct link to Seth Roberts' PDF: http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/117/

tomos:
hah ;D
I thought you meant he somehow became his own (computer) mouse &
was physically moving his body in order to move the arrow
...off to read...

steeladept:
LOL, Me too! 

wreckedcarzz:
hah ;D
I thought you meant he somehow became his own (computer) mouse &
was physically moving his body in order to move the arrow
...off to read...
-tomos (June 02, 2008, 02:18 AM)
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Ditto. Good read though. Similarly, I don't eat breakfast until about lunchtime, because it makes me nauseous and sometimes dizzy. I don't wake up early though.

Interesting what you can find out about yourself, provided you have the time to dedicate to "test" changes on yourself.

JennyB:
This is a story from a site called Quantified Self (Tools for Knowing your Own Mind and Body).
I *love* this stuff.  More please.

-mouser (June 01, 2008, 05:11 PM)
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Thanks for pointing this out. I never noticed it before though I have feeds for some of Kevin Kelly's other stuff that is linked from there: The Technium and Cool Tools. The latter is a direct descendant of the old Whole Earth Catalog that was a formative part of my student years.   8)

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