MikeY, yes, writing stuff down improves memory. Price’s diaries are unlikely to be the reason for her fantastic memory because she also had a great memory for stuff that wasn'’t likely to be in them — all sorts of world events. If you are saying that maybe the reason we have a desire to keep diaries, scrapbooks, and other records is so that we will remember, that’s an interesting idea. Price found her great memory a huge burden but of course no memory at all is even worse.

In evolutionary terms, widespread literacy is recent — so recent that I doubt evolution shaped us to write things down so that we will remember them. My guess is that scrapbooking and the computerized record-keeping project I described derive from the combination of a desire to tell stories and a desire to make art. The evolutionary reasons for those I think I understand. Scrapbooking is obviously an artistic kind of story-telling. The computerized record-keeping I mention (a log of daily activities) was in fact artistically done. Different activities were given different colors and the whole record was nicely displayed.

Point is, I’d love to see a study correlating compliance with these blackberry quizzes and various personality measures. I can think of a few that might be pretty intuitive, and ran it with a big group (maybe not in the furloughed UC system, though) you could make a neat story out of it.

I’m not an individual differences kind of guy, but still.

Seth, writing things down improves memory. Must’ve been some basic cog-psych stuff from the old days, maybe Tulving, or Craik, or somebody.

I’m not being a nitpick about this, though. Maybe there’s some other benefits of self-data collection besides analysis that help people. Do you have any thoughts on this? Perhaps people maintain more continuous self-images - the only studies I’ve seen with this concept examine the effects on intertemporal preferences, but I’m sure there’s plenty of other interesting things. Or perhaps those who have such self-images are more likely to test data.

The iPhone App is called “Equanimity” - there’s a link to it here: http://www.meditate.mx/iphone

Disclosure: I’m the author of the app.

The idea that led to the app was the desire to create a ‘mirror’ in which I could see the reality of my practice. I had noticed that I tended to have thoughts like “It’s too late today, I’ll meditate tomorrow”, or “I meditated yesterday, and I feel great today - which led to me not actually practicing, and so I wanted a record that would provide an antidote to such thoughts.

I’d found the same approach (of having data to counteract false beliefs) to be effective in breaking my coffee habit (http://www.kk.org/quantifiedself/2009/10/the-false-god-of-coffee.php) earlier in the year, so I was fairly convinced that the same things would work for creating a positive habit.

Speaking of meditation, and specifically Buddhist meditation, one of its goals is to free you from the illusion that there is a separate, permanent self. I wonder if the impulse to collect data that isn’t used for anything comes from the need to prop up the illusion. The scrapbook (or unused data) is an attempt to preserve and make permanent the self that vanishes with each passing day/hour/minute.

Thanks,
David