I enjoyed Burton’s description of his idea of the feeling of knowing, but not his rejection of Gladwell’s blink, since I think the two are very much related, as the person asking the question also seemed to. I would really like to read his book before I try to understand what he meant, but I think it is similarly about the other part of the mind, outside of consciousness, where decisions and thoughts begin.
This sensation of knowing, that he says are responsible for deja vu, seems to get in the way a lot when I’m designing or experimenting. With this sensor project, for example, there are theories I have and things I expect and I am always looking for them, having a harder time “seeing” the actual results, and anything that can be gleaned from them. I think this is why it always takes so long to do stuff like this, maybe after I am used to it, and look at it long enough, it will teach me something unexpected.
So Far I would characterize my GSR sensor readings and results as massive failures. I have spent all of my time on trying to set up the mobile android system, and so have had no time at all to adress the inconsistencies of the sensor itself. Until I tried this exercise, I was pretty happy with its results, but now I realized that they are very different than last time, and also don’t correspond to what I imagined. For example, movement and breath and position are all important factors, more so than my imagined state of mind or what I am looking at. At the same time, I know that being aware and looking at the charts makes them much less interesting, and much more influenced by me. Still, I would like to collect more interesting long term data mobily, but I am not there yet. Here are some examples of these failed attempts, where I tried to compare short term results from the sensor while looking at or engaging with different things: (in all of them I think my movement had way too much impact on the results, so next time I will have to set the sensor up in a better way). . .
These are the results I'm getting so far. They seem to be pretty irregular, and will possibly be more informative or interesting if I keep collecting data on a mobile device.
