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me with a notebook of spreadsheets detailing various data extracted from their daily lives: blood pressure, weight, cholesterol, blood sugar levels, amount of exercise, etc., carefully tabulated for several years. But all previous data collections I had seen, even those organized into Excel and meticulously graphed, paled in comparison to Ray’s. His data collection was so thorough and meticulous that he could tell me what he ate for lunch on June 23, 1989 (as well as what he ate for lunch every other day for several years before that time). And not only what he ate, but the number of grams of each serving andcalories consumed, as well as the number of calories he burned that day through exercise—every day for decades!” 8
    Ray Kurzweil has been experimenting on himself and carefully recording the results for almost thirty years now. When I ran into him at a San Francisco event in October 2012, he told me that he credits self-quantification with helping him overcome the threat of heart disease and diabetes. At the very least, it’s helped him outlive his father, who died at age fifty-eight.
    â€œThese numbers, you can change them . . . very radically. You’re not a prisoner to this characteristic. I’ve dramatically changed who I am.”
    Improving health is, today, the most common use of self-quantification. But there are entire areas of life where a rigorous approach to data collection and analysis can lead to better outcomes; this includes analyzing communication, work, and buying patterns. Computer scientist Stephen Wolfram shares a lot in common with Ray Kurzweil. He too was an early pioneer of the use of personal computers to create and store records of virtually any signal, transaction, or change that could be recorded, even though he didn’t know exactly what he intended to do with that information when he started collecting it.
    Wolfram is best known as the creator of the Wolfram Alpha search engine. It’s similar to Google except that the inputs—what you type in the search box—and the outputs are mathematical, sort of like a calculator that can read the Web. Unlike the Google engine, which responds to every question with a ranked list of pages, Alpha actually computes specific answers.
    When you use Wolfram Alpha, a lot of queries come back with results like “need more information,” but when it works, it’s miraculous. Need to know the average life span for a human being in France? Alpha can give you the number in years (81.4) and a breakdown for the percentage of the population dying older or younger, as well as a graph for how the number has changed over time. For instance, there’s a dip during the two world wars, but a strange blipupward in the middle of both. Need to predict how long it’s going to take you to read 1,000 pages in a standard textbook? The answer, via Wolfram Alpha, is thirty hours, assuming this 1,000-page textbook is perfectly statistically average, contains 3.05 megabytes of information, 500,000 words, 45,000 lines, and 5.1 characters per word.
    In March 2012 Wolfram surprised the world with a revelation on his blog that he had been Wolfram Alpha–izing his own life for close to thirty years. 9 He had a log of not only every phone call he had made in that time but
every keystroke
since 2002 (more than 100 million), and every e-mail he had sent since 1989 (more than 200,000). He knows, roughly, how many steps he’s taken in the last two years, according to GPS and room-by-room motion sensor data. He has all of his medical test results and his personal genome, which he describes as “not yet very useful.” If it’s a Thursday night and it’s 10 P.M. , he knows there’s a 50 percent probability that he’ll be on the phone. When I had the opportunity to speak with him I wanted to know what he’s learned.
    â€œOne thing I’ve found out is that I’m far more habitual than I ever