List of Interesting Self-Tracking Results

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This List of interesting self-tracking results links to results of a self-tracking experiments that are both non-obvious and (at least potentially) actionable.

Examples that should *not* be on this list would include:

  • Quitting Smoking Makes Me Cough Less
  • Eating more fruits and vegetables makes me healthier

It should be noted that just about every Project has produced an actionable result for the individual self tracker (e.g. conventional wisdom testing, finding optimal doses) if not a new idea for humanity as a whole and are important and valid contributions to personal science. Also check out Gary Wolf's blog.[1]

The ListEdit

Allan Neuringer's - Self Experimentation 1981 paper[2] describes tens of experiments that he and his students performed. It also includes a summary of Altman's 1972 paper on Auto-Experimentation.[3] " At least 185 investigators in four continents have served as subjects in 137 experiments over the last four centuries."

Nick Winter - A Lazy Man’s Approach to Cognitive TestingEdit

Butter slows by 28ms. Feeling great improves speed by 12ms. Together pracetam and choline counteract the effects of butter. Gluten, whey, lactose, krill oil, and music didn't do anything to Winters. Music made these tests much more fun for him. Acetolocarnatine did a bit on one test. Creatine helped especially on coding test. Walking desk helped a little bit.

Seth Roberts - shows that walking 60 minutes per day improves his blood sugar.Edit

Formal Scientific PapersEdit

  • "research from UC San Francisco that tested possible triggers of a common heart condition, including caffeine, sleep deprivation and sleeping on the left side, found that only alcohol use was consistently associated with more episodes of the heart arrhythmia."[4]

Observational, Many variablesEdit

Most talks in Projects focus on a small section of possible variables to track and a few sturdy results, including those above. There are the "data dredging" or "fishing expedition" projects which try to track many different aspects of a person and give lots of little advice and can be very useful for exploratory work.

Examples of these types of projects are:

  1. quantifiedself.com/blog/
  2. quantifiedself.com/blog/self-experimentation/
  3. 10.1056/NEJM197202172860704
  4. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/11/211124154126.htm