One presenter from Fujitsu demonstrated his around-the-clock blood pressure, heart rate, and blood oxygen monitoring results in an effort to understand which medications influenced his sleep apnea. Esther Dyson showed her 23andMe genetic profile and compared it to her family members and colleagues, while another researcher showed the challenges of posting his genome on Twitter. (Hint: at 140 characters per Tweet and 1000 Tweets per day, it takes two years and you have a high risk of being flagged as a spammer.) Others logged symptoms and environmental factors related to medical issues, analyzed language to passively capture information and insights on mental health, while one person showed his 10 year mind map.

The common denominators at the Quantified Self meeting were that everyone was interested in taking notes on their life experience in a quantifiable way in order to better understand their own experience and to solve problems. In each case, the limiting factor seemed to be the ability and persistence to take notes that could be converted into something useful. It’s just too much darned work.

Simplicity is the key to any kind of self-monitoring and information capture, because no one needs a bunch of extra work. I learned the strength of simplicity working in the field of personal health monitoring for many years as the founder and former CEO of Health Hero Network, the developer of the Health Buddy System, a pioneering effort of electronic “lifestreaming” to improve chronic care.

Initiated over 10 years ago, Health Buddy started as a rather limited pre-scripted four-button survey system to collect symptoms from patients while providing education and motivation on following a treatment plan. Despite its simplicity and limitations (or more likely, because of them), Health Buddy was tremendously successful in positively influencing health behavior and in reducing health complications for complex conditions ranging from diabetes and heart disease to mental health and obesity. Tens of thousands of patients are using Health Buddy daily. The Medicare project that we spent years in winning and implementing is showing great results where many others have failed. The company is now Robert Bosch Healthcare.

Earlier this year, my new company, 3banana Inc., introduced note-taking applications for iPhone and Android smartphones that offered the ability to sync with a free online notebook and share with social networks like Twitter and Facebook. My interest in Quantifed Self is to learn, share and discuss ideas about how to use smartphones to enhance our working memory and augment our brains by capturing information and connecting to useful services that can help us achieve our goals — and to do so with less work.

Can we shape our brains around mobile technologies to expand our working memory in much the same way we do in developing software? In developing software for mobile devices where memory resources are more limited, we don’t store all of the content in short term memory. Instead, we store the links to where we know we can find the rest of the information when needed, wherever it might be on the network. The same can work for our brains. Once we have a trusted memory accessory where we can easily park and retrieve notes, we can free up both short term and long term working memory.

The key to capturing information is simplicity, which is why 3banana Notes is freeform and unstructured. Who needs the work of thinking up titles and categories when you want to jot down a thought? Instead, structure can emerge from inline hashtags (the ubiquitous # sign that gives semantics to Twitter) and from context awareness: Knowing where you were and what you were doing when you took the note can improve pattern matching services that add value to your notes by appending useful information and filling in the blanks. On our Android smartphone app, for example, addresses within notes automatically turn into links to Google maps, and phone numbers automatically link to dialing a call.

The other way that 3banana on Android works to enhance your working memory is to enable you to store links to your content directly on physical objects by generating and scanning your own personalized two dimensional barcodes, or QR Codes. We have brain maps dedicated to the physical objects we find around us every day, and these objects can be powerful cues to recalling the information and actions associated with those objects if we can link to them in context. Simple examples include putting a QR Code on your furnace that you can scan with your phone to recall the logbook about changing the filters, or putting a QR code linking to your music practice chart or exercise log on the music stand or on the exercise bike.

At Quantified Self, I showed the example of scanning bottle of wine with a smartphone to access shared wine notes and wine tasting discussions with friends. Remembering bottles of wine is one of those “note to self” categories that always got lost until I started connecting it to my digital world. Now I can quickly snap a photo into my #wine notes, share with people who like wine, or post to social media sites Twitter and Facebook, using Twitter’s OAuth and Facebook Connect for one-click integration. Perhaps a wine distributor or retailer will want to use 3banana to tag expensive bottles wine so that each sale becomes a potential viral marketing channel leading to new customers and increasing the loyalty of existing customers.

Finally, we know from brain research that emotion is the most powerful trigger in the brain to put something in long term storage — to remember something rather than to forget it. That’s great when we need to remember something for survival, like how to get away from the lions and bears, but it doesn’t serve us well for all the non-life threatening content we might want to remember for business and personal interests. Just as teaching is the best way to learn something, I have found that writing, sharing, and discussing new ideas with real people is the best way to remember something. Sharing with other people using social media connects that information to our brain maps associated with people, and relationships are loaded with emotional content.

In the world of the brain, three is a magic number because we can remember and work with things in threes better than any other number. 3banana has three meanings: In the geeky world of code monkeys, 3banana describes those smart, flexible, fast learners adept with new technology. In the world Twitter and jotting down notes, 3banana is a unit of time that represents the minimum latency to capture and absorb an idea. And if you are looking at three bananas on your kitchen table, you probably know that bananas are brain food. Bananas are rich in potassium, which helps the brain transmit messages. But bananas don’t last long sitting around, so if you are looking at three, better share one.

Our mission at 3banana is to create tools that enhance your working memory and augment your brain. In addition to taking notes, we will keep enhancing these tools to become more and more useful in those areas of your life that you want to improve, both personally and for the planet. Give it a shot and let us know what you think.

SXSW (South by Southwest) is one of the largest music festivals in the United States. In recent years, SXSW has also become a mecca for creative internet and new technology developers, entrepreneurs and designers. Augmenting Your Brain is a panel proposal for SXSW Interactive.

The next evolution of the web, the semantic web, is rapidly adding layers of intelligence to the connected information of the world. And we get to carry more and more of this intelligence around with us every day. How will that change us?

Soon we all will have two brains: one in our head and one in our pocket. At least one is getting smarter every day. How can we augment the squishy one? Learn how context-aware mobile devices connecting to semantic web services can give you ESP and new powers. Discuss how it might actually start to change our brains.

The questions that the panel will address include:

1. What are semantic web technologies?
2. What is augmented reality?
3. How can I augment my brain with technology?
4. How does context awareness change every application?
5. What is the bridge between human brains and silicon brains?
6. How will new media and semantic technology make me smarter?
7. What is brain plasticity?
8. How might semantic mobile technology change my brain?
9. What are the best use cases to illustrate the power and potential to augment our brains?
10. What happens when we connect a billion brains using mobile and semantic technology?

There are over 2200 proposals for panels for SXSW 2010, and the community vote partly determines which panels will be on the agenda at the SXSW conference. The Panel Picker is a fascinating list of ideas. This is a great way to organize a conference, with topics sourced from a very creative community of participants.

If you like the idea of Augmenting Your Brain with Smartphones and Semantic Technologies, and you would like to see this panel at SXSW 2010 or online, vote here: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/3253.

Thanks for your consideration, and please be sure to give this panel a Thumbs Up and leave a comment on the SXSW Panel Picker with your thoughts.

Biochemist Gregory Petsko gave a talk at TED forecasting how an aging population will lead to an epidemic of neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. As advancing science cures or reduces the mortality of other diseases, the last to go is the brain. More people than ever are living long enough to face cognitive decline. Is that really such bad news?

As the focus of medicine shifts to the brain, we will see new advances and discoveries in brain science. We have already learned that the brain is plastic and can continue to grow and develop even into old age—if we keep challenging ourselves to learn new things. Petsko ends his talk with what we can do about neurological disease: “use it or lose it.” An entire industry of brain fitness and brain training is emerging because baby boomers don’t want to lose their minds.

While many have expressed concerns about how immersion in digital media technology is shaping the brains of young people, not enough people are talking about the potentially positive impact of new social media on the brains of people young and old.

Social media, and the rapidly changing digital devices and tools that enable it, force us to learn something new every day. To fully participate, we need to write down our thoughts and ideas, take notes on our experiences, and share them. We need to form sentences, make decisions about which photos to keep, edit the videos down to something compact enough to share, and choose soundtracks to spice them up.

Participating in social media can be hard cognitive work. Writing a WordPress blog post, editing a YouTube video, or touching base with 100 old friends on Facebook is like a good hard run for the brain. One of the best remedies for the neurological epidemic might be sitting right in front of you right now.

You would probably have much less of an awareness of the world beyond the vicinity of Budrio, not much past the big city of Bologna. But you knew your neighbors: Their stories, their experiences, their music, their relationships, and their gossip all had a place in your brain.

In the next century people would gain an ever-expanding awareness of the world beyond their local community through the virtual experiences of mass media. Starting with motion pictures, then television, 24-hour news channels, and the Internet, the world would become a lot smaller. We now live in a state of continuous awareness of the entire world. At the same time, we have become less aware of and connected to the people in our own local communities.

There has been much written lately about brain training and brain plasticity, and how we are entering the brain fitness age. If our experiences with the world can change the wiring of our brains, then how is our immersion into the constant stimulation of digital media affecting us? Is our continuous experience with the larger world through digital media impairing our ability to socially connect with our neighbors?

The brain maps of our ancestors just a century ago probably included many more connections for the social network of our local community. Some of that map has probably been superseded and replaced by our current awareness of and pseudo-relationships with the celebrities of the mass media. Too many of us know all about the daily activities, relationships, and gossip of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, but do not even remember the names of our neighbors.

The Ocarina application for the iPhone from Smule is a deeply compelling example of how a new generation of social media technology could be the start of a new kind of community experience. The social media experience surely will change our brains, and I believe in a highly positive direction. Learning to play the ocarina on the iphone gives us yet another chance to learn new skills, which keeps our brains fit and growing. The brain training impact of individual practice is trivial, however, compared to the deep impact of connecting us to a new global community.

We might not know our geographical neighbors, but more than ever we can find and connect with our creative, intellectual and spiritual neighbors, anywhere in the world. And from our home late at night, we can hear them playing a new tune. And we can join them.

Phineas Gage

Growing up, I learned about Phineas Gage, the railroad construction foreman who survived an incredible accident in 1848 that shot a large iron rod through his brain, destroying the frontal lobes. Although Gage survived for another decade, his personality changed profoundly. The brain science books I read in the late 1980’s still used the over century-old example to introduce the idea that every function had a special location in the brain, and everything was hard-wired for life once you finished childhood. It turns out the hard-wired model of the brain was dead wrong, and academic opinion and dogma had led research down the wrong path for over 100 years.

Dr. Michael Merzenich, founder of Posit Science and one of the world’s leading brain scientists helped disprove the old “what you have is what you get” brain theories. In the 1980’s, Merzenich’s team developed the cochlear implant, a device that stimulates nerves in the inner ear with electrical signals that correspond to sound. With the “bionic ear”, people with profound deafness have learned to process the electrical signals and hear again. Merzenich went on to show that the brain can adapt and change based on all sorts of sensory input. How neurons wire together not only changes based on our experience with the world, but also based on our own thoughts. Posit Science applies this new knowledge of brain plasticity to brain training and brain fitness products that improve memory and processing speed to treat age-related cognitive decline.

I asked Dr. Merzenich: If I were to read just one book about the state of the art in brain science and better understand the background for Posit’s brain fitness research, what would it be? He gave me a copy of “The Brain that Changes Itself” by Norman Doidge, M.D. With compelling cases studies ranging from recovery from brain injury and stroke to overcoming learning and physical disabilities, Doidge details the radical advances in the science of brain plasticity of the past couple of decades. Now that we can measure brain activity even down to the firing of individual neurons, we can see without a doubt that the substance of our thoughts changes the wiring of our brain. The experience of the world around us—what we sense, what we do, what we concentrate on—can change the brain even into old age.

Dispelling the myth that we only stand to lose our minds over time is great news, especially to baby boomers worried about memory loss and cognitive decline as they get older. My English teacher in 7th grade used to say—to much teasing—that the brain is just like a muscle: You need to exercise it every day. It turns out she was right. The other side of brain plasticity, however, is that our brains can get set in their ways by the same principles of brain plasticity: Neurons that fire together wire together.

Dr. Merzenich described neural connections as like cow paths in a pasture. When cows continually tread the same paths over and over, the paths become ruts and the cows grow ever more fearful of treading anywhere else. Unless someone kicks the cows off the path, the ruts can become deep and permanent. Our thoughts are like the cows. We need to learn something truly new to make sure that our neurons keep growing and strengthening new connections. Merzenich showed that the biggest changes in our brains take place when we engage in “massed practice”, or efforts that demand intense concentration over a period of time. It also helps to be unique, striking, dangerous, or emotional: When the brain sees a new idea or skill as important, the brain goes into building mode and generates millions of new connections.

What struck me most about the book was the extent to which the scientific community had impeded progress in an area so obviously vital to everyone. Rather than looking at examples like Phineas Gage as evidence that the brain can adapt and change, Gage was used as an example of the opposite. For over 100 years, the academic community refused to consider the idea of brain plasticity and refused to support, encourage, publish, or even give a fair hearing to the few scientists who challenged convention. The social network of academia was much like their outdated idea of the hard-wired brain: Set in its ways with the same cows treading the same ruts.

Luckily for us, Dr. Michael Merzenich and his peers defied their academic advisors and department heads and went on to quietly pursue their brain plasticity research. Their breakthroughs and discoveries have spawned a new wave of brain research and brain training innovations that could improve the lives of millions of people for years to come.