(This is part of the 20 minutes blog challenge)
For the past two months (since my birthday) I’ve been walking around with a Fitbit.
The main purpose of this is device is to track my sleep and doing so in the laziest, least infringing way possible. People say you have apps for sleep tracking and they are right, it’s true but those apps need to be activated manually when you go to bed. With the Fitbit, you just go to bed and it tracks your sleep, so it was the perfect solution for me. I can recommend it to everyone.
The device gave me a particularly cool insight. It showed me that when I sleep for ~6 hours, I actually have a better nights rest than when I sleep for 7+. I found this very strange but it made me think.
What if you had a Fitbit for your brain. Like a tiny device that tracked your brain activity. The device could literally track your brains activity and would analyze thinking and emotion patterns produced by your own brain. The device would actively track your daily activities and associate it with brain activity. It would be able to analyze which activities during the day you truly enjoy and give you a happy state based on your brain activities and it could see which ones you don’t like.
At the end of the day, your BrainBit would literally give you an overview of the day and advise you to take cold showers more often since it re-activated certain areas of your brain which were kind of inactive for a long time. It would also advise you to stop watching Youtube video’s of Pewdiepie since your brain activity literally almost comes to a halt.
So how would this BrainBit improve your life?
Take learning, for example, an area which I like a lot: how can I become a faster and better learner? The BrainBit could be amazing for this. Based on my brains activity during the day and night, it could track the following: During the day it would say at which moments I’m the most creative, concentrated or distracted. It would analyze that over a certain time span and it will know exactly when I’m in a high concentration state on when I’m the most creative.
When your BrainBit notices your concentration levels are peaking, it would suggest you do more difficult exercises or tasks since you are in a high concentration state. And then at night during your sleep, it would track if you have the brain activity that is associated with a good night of processing your learnings during the day. If you had a bad processing night (since your BrainBit would have seen that) it would suggest you redo some exercises from the day before. It’s an interesting concept to think about.
My 20 minutes are up now… It’s just a concept so don’t think I believe that future will hold anything like what I described above, but I just liked the thought experiment. Maybe one day we will all have a Brainbit. Who knows, some day we might really need them to still be able to win the cognitive battle from AI. I’m joking, but still, a fun thought to play with.
Have a good one. I’m off to bed.
