Along with my digital wristbands, I am packing an emWave2 pocket-size Personal Stress Reliever, which, through an earlobe attachment or thumb sensor, measures heart-rate variability (H.R.V.) and doubles as a biofeedback meditation assistant. By breathing in unison with a climbing and descending column of illuminated beads and thinking happy thoughts of ballerinas, I seek to raise my coherence level from red (low) to blue (medium) to green (high), achieving a steady-state flow of relaxed awareness that will undulate through the day, until somebody annoying calls. It’s like a mood ring for the heart. I practice with the emWave2 five minutes at a stretch, because any longer than that and its beeps begin to bug me and drop me into the red zone, which defeats the purpose. On sunny days I dude myself out with a pair of Pivothead sunglasses, which have a spy camera dead center in the nose bridge that can take multiple shots at sequential intervals. Another technological advance in voyeurism, perhaps, but I didn’t purchase them with pervy intent, honest, Officer. Ever since I read Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell’s Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (later reissued as Your Life, Uploaded, perhaps so as not to be mistaken for the Arnold Schwarzenegger film), I’ve been intrigued with the notion of digitizing life into a present-tense documentary, a first-person narrative capturing and preserving events as they unfold and filing them away as visual evidence rather than putting them through the filtration process of the brain, where they survive as scraps and scratchy flashbacks of unreliable memory.
more from James Wolcott at Vanity Fair here.