Turning Up the Awesome

The idea here is pretty simple:

This concept seems to obvious to not have *some* merit — even if you only take the fraction of bright people who would rather think actively than tune out, there is an immense about brain power just hanging out there.

Interesting that he points out PatientsLikeMe — this is certainly a much more targeted application of the ‘excess brain power’ concept, which I imagined at first as engaging people in a structured ‘project’ versus randomly surfing the interwebs, but healthcare does seem an obvious application, especially considered in the larger concept of general well-being. It’s easy to imagine that there are widespread cause/effect relationships between behaviors and outcomes that no one has thought to observe or study – if you could get large groups of people to record and track activities and health metrics it would seem likely to turn up some interesting findings.