Personal Science
32 posts · all topics
Biohacking and Shifting Science
Exploring the historical and contemporary shifts in scientific paradigms, and the phenomenon of biohacking.
Get Your Shots!
If you're pro vaccine,shouldn't you want as many as possible?
How ProdromeGlia™ Affects my OpticareAI Cognitive Risk Score
How does a plasmalogen supplement affect my cognition?
Opticare Analysis
Retinal age and fundus image evaluation day-to-day
Food Experiment: GlucoTrojan
How well does a new food additive my glucose spikes?
Food Experiment: Good Idea Drink
How well does a new soda help prevent my glucose spikes?
Do blood donations cause my low ferritin?
How do my blood donations track ferritin levels?
Testing my COVID-19 Antibodies With Serimmune
Results from regular antibody testing
The Limits of Expertise
Why motivated individuals can rival career experts. Examining the replication crisis, overconfidence research, and personal science advantages.
Toward a definition of personal science
Defining personal science: prioritizing direct experience over authority, humble curiosity, and self-experimentation in the Quantified Self tradition.
Hypnosis is just another way to get into the Flow
Stanford psychiatrist David Spiegel reframes hypnosis as a flow state. Overview of the science, the Reveri app, and Huberman Lab episode.
Why most psychological research findings are not even wrong
Anne Scheel's paper on how underspecified claims in psychology research make most findings impossible to evaluate or replicate.
Reducose Experiments
Personal experiments with Reducose (mulberry leaf extract) to reduce postprandial glucose spikes, with CGM data analysis.
Hunter-gatherers sleep like me
Anthropologists Gandhi Yetish, Hillard Kaplan and their colleagues just published the results of some experiments that show hunter gathers get much less sleep than the eight hours we…
For potato starch, maybe less is more?
A friend who is enthusiastic about the affect potato starch had on his sleep, suggested that maybe my less-than-stellar results were caused by the amount I had been…
Seth Roberts Rules for Self-Experimenters
Digging through the blog of the late Seth Roberts , I find many gems. Here is his concise summary of how to do self-experimentation. He mentions intending to…
My QS Seattle Talk: Cholesterol and my Microbiome
My presentation at the July meeting of Quantified Self Seattle , with more details about the A/B experiment I wrote about on the uBiome blog . Embedded content…
My QS15 Slides
Here’s the presentation I made at the Quantified Self Conference in San Francisco last week. It doesn’t include audio, but the full text of the transcript is embedded…
What I learned at Quantified Self 2015
I’m back from two jam-packed days at the QS15 (the Quantified Self Conference ) held at Fort Mason, in San Francisco, and I have a few impressions. There…
My gut diversity through time
Clark Ellis posts a nice summary of his uBiome results over at the uBiome Blog and now, with more detail at The Self-Taught Author blog . A long…
A year without Seth Roberts
Hard to believe it’s been a full year . http://www.seth-roberts-memorial.com/
Potato starch doesn't help my sleep
I've been experimenting with the relationship between sleep and resistant starch, taking a few tablespoons of Bob's Red Mill potato starch, which some people think improves sleep by…
Yup, statins make me smarter
After a fifteen day test , I’ve concluded that 20mg of simvastatin daily has a major effect on my results on Seth Robert’s Brain Reaction Time (BRT) test.…
Will statins make me smarter too?
For the next two weeks, I’ll conduct a new test to measure the effect of simvastatin on my Brain Reaction Time. Two or three Kirkland fish oil pills…
A mistake in my fourth uBiome sample?
[ Update : uBiome recomputed my results, which are now much closer to what I expected. I'll update with a more detailed post soon.] After all that analysis…
Looking into my mouth microbiome
The gut biome is interesting enough, but bacteria colonize just about every part of the body, so recently I’ve been studying my uBiome mouth test results . The…
Fish oil, even when it's not a pill
An interesting result when I measured my BRT today: Note how today’s result was noticeably higher than for the past few days. I've been traveling, and I didn't…
Fish oil makes me smarter
Fish Oil Makes Me Smarter We all feel more “alive” on some days compared to others. Some people call it “being in the zone”, or “flow” , where…
The lazy way to review a Quantified Self product
When I attend software product review meetings, there are inevitably times when I’m too busy to read or study the product specs beforehand. In a roomful of people,…
Using the AliveCor Heart Monitor
Every few months, I feel a slight flutter in my chest, almost like a cough but coming not from the lungs or throat but from something deeper inside.…
Seth liked people who think for themselves
Some people have an influence that is difficult to see in the usual standards of pageviews, book sales, citations. Seth Roberts , I think, was one of those…
Remembering Seth Roberts
Like many people, I first heard about him back in 2006 through a chapter in the best-selling book Freakonomics . His strange habit of tracking various aspects of…