README

Richard Sprague 11/26/2018

Seth Roberts was an early self-experimenter who developed this script as a way to measure “brain reaction time”, which he believed was correlated with many important aspects of health and well-being.

How to get started

You’ll need to load this script in an R environment.

Then type this to get started:

> me()

This will open a window with a menu of additional instructions.

Start first with a warmup session and then do the testing session. When finished, the script will print your results to the R console, or you can also show plots with many more data points.

Examples

Seth Roberts published several examples of things he learned from using this app:

Roberts, S. (2004). Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight. Retrieved from http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/2xc2h866

And here’s a presentation showing more about experiments conducted with this app:

Technical

Data is kept in the variable newmath5. For example, here’s how to show unique trials:

library(tidyverse, quietly=TRUE)
load("originalValues.RData")
newmath5 %>% select(condition, when) %>% group_by(condition) %>% filter(n() == 1)

## # A tibble: 13 × 2
## # Groups:   condition [13]
##    condition                                                when               
##    <chr>                                                    <chr>              
##  1 2014-10-28 06:26  morning coffee                         2014-10-28 06:26:19
##  2 2014-11-03 08:19 warmup                                  2014-11-03 08:19:46
##  3 2014-12-01 06:41  morning coffee (Z=6)                   2014-12-01 06:42:51
##  4 2014-12-04 06:39  morning coffee (Z=6.5)                 2014-12-04 06:39:34
##  5 2014-12-09 06:33  morning coffee (z=6+)                  2014-12-09 06:33:46
##  6 2014-12-24 08:00  morning coffee (z=5.3)                 2014-12-24 08:01:01
##  7 2014-12-25 06:51  morning coffee (Z=7)                   2014-12-25 06:52:05
##  8 2014-12-26 08:41  morning coffee (Z=5.5)                 2014-12-26 08:41:49
##  9 2014-12-27 07:15  morning coffee (Z=6)                   2014-12-27 07:16:09
## 10 2014-12-31 06:33  morning coffee (Z=6.5)                 2014-12-31 06:33:48
## 11 2015-01-04 06:46  morning coffee (coffee evening before) 2015-01-04 06:47:21
## 12 2015-01-06 06:14  morning coffee (Z~7,P=1)               2015-01-06 06:14:58
## 13 2017-05-12 07:40  after coffee, shower.                  2017-05-12 07:40:58

Questions

Join the Seth Roberts Facebook Community.

The original discussions about braintracking occured in Seth Roberts’ Brain Tracking Google Group (closed since 2014).