Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.

This is a download from the BBC. In this week's analysis, Francis Stona Saunders asks whether the

quantified self really measures a life or reduces it to fractions.

I got up this morning at 6.10 a.m. after going to sleep at 12.45 a.m. I was awakened once during the night.

My heart rate was 61 beats per minute. My blood pressure 127 over 74.

I had about six

about six hundred rate during exercise wasn't calculated. I had about 600 milligrams of caffeine, zero of alcohol,

and my score on the Narcissism Personality Index

or the NPI 16 is a reassuring 0.31.

This is Gary Wolf giving a TED Talk, and he's done a lot of homework on himself.

We would expect no less from the co-founder of the Quantified Self Movement, a project

that is fast expanding into a global phenomenon. You can now track, measure and analyze every minute detail of yourself.

And yes, that includes how narcissistic you are.

I think the quantified self as it stands at the moment is the habit of using technology to measure something in your life

in order to be able to pay more attention to it and then from that to be able to share that data that's created and share that attention

amongst other like-minded people in order to try and find some wider correlation, some wider causality behind whatever that thing is.

We know that numbers are useful for us when we advertise, manage, govern, search. I'm going to talk about how they're useful when we reflect, learn, remember,

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