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What would you do with a complete memory of your entire life? Would you relive your first kiss? Figure out what triggered your recent migraine? Remember the name that goes with the familiar face in front of you?

In other words, wouldn’t it be great to have a backup of your brain?

Gordon Bell is a walking experiment doing just this. Bell has been tracking his life in delicious detail for the past 11 years. It started at Microsoft Research, where Bell started the MyLifeBits project. His goal was to digitally record as much of his life as possible. He wore a camera, recorded his phone calls, scanned photos and letters, documented all of his computer work, and tracked his biometrics. The job of Bell’s colleague Jim Gemmell was to build software to make all this tracking easier, searchable, and meaningful.

This September Bell and Gemmell released a book called Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything. In it, they talk about the future implications of being able to remember everything about your life in extraordinary detail. Bell proposes that a “continuous digital diary or e-memory” that integrates digital recording devices, memory storage and search engines will fundamentally “change what it means to be human.” Their work includes research into memory, work, health, learning, and immortality. A side order of privacy is served up too, as the authors distinguish between “life loggers,” who keep their records to themselves, and “life bloggers,” who broadcast their data.

Of course, self-tracking is not a new idea. People have been recording their lives in analog format ever since they started drawing on cave walls. Benjamin Franklin used to keep a detailed checklist of the thirteen virtues he was striving to live by, including annotated explanations of where he was succeeding and where he still needed to improve.

Now, it can all be monitored digitally.

It probably won’t surprise the readers of this article that I track myself. But it might surprise you that I track 40 different things every day. On a typical day, my pain level is 2, my weight is 126 lbs, I did 1 hour of walking, my happiness is 9, and I slept 6 hours. Charts like the one below help me to be aware of my mood, activity level, and sleep, and how these things interrelate.

With a background in molecular genetics and bioinformatics, as well as a history of chronic pain, I started tracking to help myself. But I soon wanted to apply what I had learned to help others. Here are two of the projects I’m currently working on.

QUANTIFIED SELF

Imagine a show-and-tell for grownups. Fifty or so people get together every month in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City. They show each other the data they’ve collected, the tools they’ve built, the ideas they have, or the self-tracking projects they’re working on. Feedback and questions pop up from the audience. All of it is reminiscent of the Homebrew Computer Club.

This amazing group, which calls itself The Quantified Self, was started in 2007 by Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf of Wired Magazine. They noticed a trend in people seeking greater self-knowledge, and using numbers on this quest to understand themselves. (Hence the name.)

So whether it’s for art, memory, health, or data for data’s sake, people are tracking themselves and sharing their results. We do it because we love data or because we have specific things we want to optimize about ourselves. As Kevin Kelly wrote, “Unless something can be measured, it cannot be improved.” When Gordon Bell is asked what he has learned about himself through the MyLifeBits project, his reply is unexpectedly qualitative: “That’s been a really hard question to answer... I guess it’s the rich set of connections and people that I’ve been involved with.”

Bell’s comment reflects the challenges that come up over and over again at Quantified Self discussions — questions that tend to revolve around two topics: motivation and meaning. How do we stay motivated (and motivate others) to track ourselves, and how do we make sense and learn actionable lessons from all of this data? The search for solutions to these challenges offers ample opportunities for innovation. Imagine self-tracking games that reward people for recording their health with badges of recognition; passive monitoring devices that remove the need to actively track yourself; social pressure in the form of online group challenges; prizes awarded to algorithms that turn messy data into beautiful insight.

CURETOGETHER

One step on this path of innovation is self-tracking applied to health. An example of this is CureTogether, a patient data-sharing site I co-founded with Daniel Reda where people come to self-report symptoms, treatments, and triggers for over 300 conditions.

People are tracking their depression, cholesterol, migraines, and countless other measures. Using migraine as an example, patients visiting CureTogether can see community statistics and learn that the top reported symptoms are “Nagging pain in one side of the head” and “nausea;” the top reported treatments are “sleep” and “ibuprofen;” the top reported triggers are “stress” and “not enough sleep” and the top related conditions are anxiety and depression.

Instead of narrative websites that provide emotional support in the form of shared disease stories, the quantitative data at CureTogether enables decision support and hypothesis generation. People are getting ideas for new treatments that they ask their doctors about. They are seeing how common or rare their symptoms are, and learning what triggers might be affecting them. While each individual’s data is completely private, the aggregate data is open for researchers around the world to analyze and use to make discoveries for the greater good. Some interesting correlations are already starting to emerge, like a potential link between migraine and fibromyalgia.

Alexandra Carmichael is co-founder of CureTogether, blogger at The Quantified Self, advisor to Singularity University, and mentor to several startups. Find her on Twitter @accarmichael.