How is this information useful? Because meanness tracks—with relatively little branching—to the deepest centers of the brain, the so-called archipallium, responsible for self-preservation, which relies to a large extent on aggression. It’s a primitive response and emotion. Kindness also tracks to the deep centers, but, in addition, to centers not quite so deep; the branching is more extensive. It’s a less primitive, evolutionarily-speaking more recent, emotion, and therefore more cortically and neo-cortically involved. A kind thought or word, on average, traverses 1.3 billion (of the 100 trillion) synapses throughout your brain; compare this to 0.78 billion synapses for meanness. If you happen to be born with a congenital “mean streak”, or acquire one later in life, the branching is even less (0.61 billion synapses), further limiting your behavioral flexibility.
The less flexible you are, the more energy efficient. This is basic physics. You need look no further than the synaptic juncture, where, with each firing, thousands of molecules are released, then processed, degraded, and re-manufactured, requiring in toto an enormous energy expenditure. The less synapses you recruit, the more remain in a resting state, thriftily conserving their energy.
Meanness, in other words, is a much more efficient emotion than kindness. It’s leaner. It’s built for speed. It’s more economical. Kindness is more profligate. It’s less muscular, if you will. It uses more brain. But what it lacks in muscle and efficiency, it makes up for in connectivity, in bridge-building (which has its own level of efficiency), by a robust 4 to 1 margin.
You will, of course, be wearing oxygen sensors. This goes without saying. The sensors allow you to move—in real-time—from poorly oxygenated areas, such as dance clubs and coal mines, to well oxygenated ones, such as rainforests and augmented O2 infusion cubicles, or the reverse, if you choose. Carbon monoxide sensors are also recommended, for obvious reasons. Also, sensors for carbon dioxide, which can reach near toxic levels in mere conversation, as other people, your friends or co-workers, for example, surround you and have the audacity to exhale. New sensors you should consider adding to your armamentarium pick up traces of ozone and nitrogen dioxide; also available are sensors for argon, neon and krypton, the so-called noble gases (which may not be so noble as you’ve been led to believe.)
Are you wearing your methane sensor? Unless you work at an energy farm, take it off. Everybody farts. On average 7.8 times a day. You should be tracking your own farts, and no doubt you are, but it’s pointless to track other people’s. You need data, but this is data saturation.
As for monitoring your flatus, you don’t need a methane sensor. The anal clip does just fine. It has the added advantage of distinguishing silent farts from audible ones, the ratio for which, you well know, varies widely depending both on culture and on gender.
A word on gas from the mouth. The quantity and manometrics of burps, belches, hiccups, and the like have been linked to longevity, but many find the small polyethylene coil annoying, particularly when it dislodges from its attachment point near the base of the tongue and dangles free, like a tiny minnow thrashing about, in the throat. Most eruptions from the stomach and mouth are noticeable and can be self-monitored, making the throat monitor an extravagance, though the punctilious will not want to be without.
Which brings up an important point: lifelogging can be done half-assed, or it can be done the way it was meant to be done. Partial data can so readily lead to false conclusions. If you weigh your portions of food but fail to note their percentage of fat, carbohydrate and protein, then you fail to know what you are putting into yourself. If you note the percentage of fat, carbohydrate and protein, but fail to know the amounts of vitamins and trace minerals, and then compound the error by failing to document how many times you chew each mouthful, then you fail to know the energy expenditure per mouthful, the EEPM, which leads to an overestimation of the CCPM, the calories consumed per mouthful, which over time will lead to a disparity between caloric intake and total body weight, the quintessential CI/BW index. Under the best of circumstances, this index is difficult to track accurately. Without full data transparency, it falls prey to that lowest-common-denominator human tendency that you, who, as a less-than-lowest-common-denominator human, have gone to great pains to avoid: self-delusion.
You are not in the self-improvement business (or in any business, for that matter) to delude yourself. That said, auto-analytics can only do so much. Case in point: whether you use the simple, user friendly, easy-to-apply, bitemporal pads, or the more cumbersome—and more data rich—eighteen lead cranial grid to monitor your sleep, only you, at this point—you in a conscious state—can fully document your dreams. Not all REM dream states are the same, regardless of what the numbers say. Different dream content will have a different effect on your vital functions—your blood pressure, your breathing, your heart rate—and different effects on your sleep. Falling dreams, dreams of familiar people in unfamiliar situations, dreams of being recognized for who you are, the real you, finally, after all these years, and dreams of sleep itself, which account for 38% of nighttime dreams, 46% of daytime dreams, and an unsurprising 61% of dreams in nappers, both deepen sleep and shorten total sleep duration. Paradoxically, you feel refreshed. These dreams allow you to get by on less. From the point of view of efficiency they get an A+.
Alternatively, there are dreams—and you all know what dreams these are—that leave you feeling like a train wreck.
Take home message: optimize your dreams, optimize yourself. This may be a cliché, but you know the cliché about clichés: change a few letters, move them around, add one or two, and cliché spells common sense. Is it a cliché to program your appliances before leaving home? Is it a cliché to brush your teeth three times a day for a full 120 seconds each time (that’s 1.2 × 102), and analyze your oral bacteria by species and colony count at least once a week? A cliché to note the weight, thickness and color of your nail parings, and graph these against the calcium, phosphorus and trace arsenic in your diet? Clichés are the bedrock of self-improvement. They’re the cream in your coffee. The tempest in your teacup. The snarl in your Red Bull. They’re a haven of safety, a refuge, a lighthouse, in the storm, the twister, the hurricane, of everyday speech. Look to them. Trust in them. Case dismissed.
With devices currently in the pipeline, dream data will soon hack itself, but for the present it requires your input. This applies only to dream content, not to external factors that might influence your dreams. The effect of sharing your bed with someone else, for example, assuming you do (the data here skews wildly), and assuming that someone, like you, monitors their sleep, is taken care of automatically. The monitors, as you know, communicate with each other, and data such as body-to-body separation, skin-to-skin contact, position, restlessness, conscious and unconscious movement (thrashing, poking, cuddling, fondling, and the like), are detected, analyzed, and, if you wish, expressed as a function of total downtime, aka, sleep. Rule of thumb: for every partner you share your bed with, sleep decreases exponentially, beginning with partner number one, who decreases it, on average, by 18% (that’s 1.8 × 10-1). If your partner happens to be under five years old, or acts as if they were under five, that number balloons to a bleary-eyed, catatonic 43%.
Who said self-improvement was a piece of cake? Much easier to simply collect the data, then forget about it. Or pass it on to somebody else, the way you pass along your census data to the feds, or your vital statistics to almost anyone who asks, then let them decide what to do about it. Have them crunch the numbers, then come back at you with some perfectly good advice, which you can then ignore.
This is the easy path, what the shrinks and psychobabbologists call passive-aggressive, what your Mom calls sticking your head in the sand, but that’s not you. You’re not passive. You’re taking positive steps. You’re assertive and pro-active.
You’re not into ignoring. You’re into acknowledging. The data’s there, and you’re happy to have it. You’re head over heels. You’re ecstatic.
> You understand that in any system there’s waste: wasted energy, wasted time, wasted chances. 27% of people between the ages of 13 and 26 waste 22% of every waking hour (that’s 13.2 minutes); between the ages of 27 and 51 these numbers increase to a surprising (and shocking) 34% and 29.5%, respectively. This might have been acceptable in the days when our systems—our economic systems, our ecologic systems, our financial systems, our systems of personal hygiene and personal growth—could accommodate waste. Today that luxury is gone. You and your friends know that. You and your friends are all about cutting the waste, trimming the fat, and sculpting the best you there could possibly be. Without plastic surgery. Without drugs. Without anything but your own two hands and your one, fully operational, superlatively enabled, monstrously scalable, personal computer, aka, your brain.
This is a DIY project. Hammer, nails, brains, electronics. Numbers, algorithms, and pure, red-blooded, hot-blooded, neo-capitalist, spit and polish. It’s translational science at its best: from digits to digital, from random bits of input to masses of usable data, from data to knowledge, from knowledge to wisdom, from wisdom to change. In mathematical terms, it reads like this:
(RD) × (BF)3 / (SAF)-4 × (FOD)-2 = (S-I)/√πRD
where RD = Raw Data; BF = Behavioral Flexibility; SAF = Self-Absorption Factor; FOD = Fear of Death; S-I = Self-Improvement; and √πRD = the translational adjustment coefficient.
Improve yourself, improve the people around you. Improve the people around you, improve the atmosphere of everyday life. Improve the atmosphere, improve the world.
This may not be your goal. It may seem too ambitious. It may seem self-important. It may sound evangelical. But do the math:
If one person—you, for example—improves by one iota (as expressed in either nanograms or nanometers) every 1.2 minutes, and that iota leaves your sphere of influence and penetrates another person’s sphere, and that entry/penetration results in an impact < 1.00 but > 0.00, and that impact leads to a new iota, attenuated but still measurable—easily measurable—which then enters another sphere, and so forth, then after an hour, assuming a linear transmission, 50 people will have been affected. Except the transmission is not linear but spherical, it’s one sphere touching many spheres, and these spheres touching many others, a substantial number of which will begin to gyrate and spiral, so that in fact the impact, even taking into account its steady dissipation as its orbit widens, is exponential, on the order of 2(n)(n+1), which on anybody’s scorecard, is astronomical.
You’re a Boolean entity, and you know it. Every day more Boolean than the day before. World-wide, the interactive overlap is accelerating at the rate of 5.4% per day. 3 out of 4 people know more about 2 out of 3 people than they did 4.2 days ago. 5 out of 9 know more, but less than they should. 6 out of 7 are happy on 1 out of 2 occasions. 4 out of 5 on 1 out of 3. 9 out of 10 wish things were better. 3 out of 8 try to make them better. 2 out of 9 throw up their hands and say fuck this crap. Of these, 1 out of 5 will show remorse for their outburst. Within 60 days (p < 0.001) they’ll have a change of heart, along with a better attitude: they’ll be willing, if not eager, to take another crack. This is your target population. If you have a humane bone in your body (and where else would it be), now is the time to use it. These people are hungry to improve. 3 out of 4 of them are desperate. All are primed for a systematic self-assessment and a well-organized, thoroughly quantifiable, internal review.
You’ll recognize them. They’ll be open to reason. You have no obligation to help, but you’ll feel a kinship, and you’ll want to. The fold is growing, you’ll say. 8.4 × 106 at last count. Your people are on the rise. There’s a movement, you might venture. No fee to join. Nothing to sign. No leaders.
At this point you’ll pause. 1 second, 2 seconds. Average is 3.3. Then you’ll give the secret sign. Then the secret handshake. You’ll want to be careful. You know the risks of contact of any sort. You know what can come of extending yourself. You know what can happen to the unwitting, the unwary, the spontaneous, and the unprepared. You’ll be monitoring your vital signs: heart rate, blood pressure, respirations, core temperature, bowel activity, bladder pressure, your various cognitive, behavioral and emotive parameters.
You may decide to hold off on the handshake. It may register as unnecessarily bold and premature. You may decide instead on a smile. Not a full-blown, 43 muscle, smile, but not an excessively stingy one either. A 35-40%, invitational smile. Consuming a nothing-to-sneeze-at 2.9 joules of energy, and spreading a proportional amount of caloric warmth and encouragement. You’ll observe what effect this has. You’ll adjust for time of day, gender discordance and age differential. From here you’ll decide what to do next. Extend yourself further? How much, if any? How much is prudent? How much is safe? Perhaps you’ll decide to withdraw and retract. The odds are 9 to 5 you’ll make the right choice.
You can improve the odds by waiting another 4 minutes before proceeding. This may seem strange to the other party, your standing there without saying or doing anything. Your smile will probably have faded. Your eyes may have glazed over slightly. You may appear distracted, uninterested, or confused.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Confused? Hardly.
Distracted? Not even close.
Uninterested? In improving the odds? In knowing more about yourself? In choosing the right course? Hump a rock.
You’re running a risk-benefit analysis.
You’re working overtime.
Locked in? You bet you’re locked-in.
You’re immersed.
BIRD WALKS IN NEW ENGLAND
I followed my boyfriend to the city because I was in love with him. He had come to fetch me from across the country, like a knight riding in for his damsel. He had dark and curly hair.
My family is fair, and there was something about his darkness, something sharp and sexy and wild, that told me I had to be with him. Silently, I pledged that I would make this happen. I would say yes to him. I know how to say yes, just as I know how much people like to be pleased. I have seen it my entire life, to the extent that I have become an expert in the art of pleasing and wanting to please. Such an expert that long ago I managed to combine its two components, the art of pleasing others and the art of pleasing oneself, so that the two became one to me. How odd to discover, many years later, that the two were not one. That the two, in fact, were in conflict. Or could be in conflict. That in a world where there seemed no limit to pleasing and being pleased, in a world of plenty there still could be scarcity. But I get ahead of myself.
I pledged that I would be with my knight. I would ride side by side with him atop my horse, or if necessary, I would sit on his steed, hands clasped around his waist behind him. Both positions suited me, and I sensed that both would suit him, and I also sensed that if I asked, he would agree to ride, hands clasped, behind me. This (and so much else) intrigued me about him. His looks, his cocksure attitude, his high and sometimes stormy spirit. He was bold and armored, but unlike other knights, or potential knights, I had known, he was not afraid to shed his armor. In fact, he loved to shed it—shed everything—and come to me. He feasted on me, and I feasted on him. In the early days before Melissa, we were gluttons for each other. We ate greedily and often. And we talked. Oh, how we talked. Such rhapsodies! Such songs! And we read together. And took walks. And when we were apart, we ached to be together, and we wrote each other of the minutiae of our aches and longings each and every day.
The dawn of love: is there any day that dawns brighter? Any sun more radiant, blinding and fine? All men have their faults, Lord knows, and I marvel sometimes how it is that we go on loving them, and my knight had his. He was brash, and a verbal bully; his sword was edged with sarcasm, and he liked to sneer. He was smart, but I was smarter. His intelligence was different from mine, native and quick and therefore interesting to me. I liked to observe it, but I never mistook it for high intelligence. Certain simple thoughts and ideas, such as how to change the world, were
beyond him. Fortunately, I had blinders on when we met, and his faults were hazy and even invisible to me. The sun, as it were, was in my eyes.
Why fortunately? Because had I seen clearly, I might never have said yes to him. I might never have fallen in love.
I set three conditions on following him, simple ones that he could not help but agree to. First, he must not take me to a certain city on the coast, a sprawling, factionated city of intellectual hysteria and petty sectarian politics, a city of political strife, where I could not possibly live. Second, he must not take me to a certain city north of the first, equally unlivable. Third and last was a third city; he must not take me there. Those were my conditions: three cities out of a thousand, out of ten thousand. When he chose the third city, my three conditions shrunk in a puff of smoke to two.
It was not a bad city. It had its beauty and its charm. Its politics were as crass and doctrinaire as I feared, which in retrospect might have been the best thing that could have happened to me, because I turned my back on the political life sooner rather than later, before my hopes and dreams for a better world were completely gone. I took a job caring for children (in whom hope always abides), then gave that up when I had a child of my own. When Melissa turned five, I started working again, this time for a children’s museum. The work suited me in every way, and before long I became program director. I spearheaded a slate of new programs, but the one closest to my heart was the one for injured wild animals. Being a city museum, most of these animals were birds.
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