In philosophy, "qualia" are the conscious subjective feelings of an experience.  Qualia are fundamentally incomparable: your pain when eating a jalapeno pepper is different than my pain, or perhaps I do not experience pain but pleasure.  We have different qualia to the same experience. 

People generally have satisfied lives when they experience more pleasure and less pain.  There are exceptions, for example, physical or mental training, but these are typically time limited and are done to create new opportunities for satisfaction.  As we have mentioned before, research from Oxford University has shown that about 50% of people's joy in life comes from the quality of their social interactions.  The "quality" part of this statement was assessed by asking people to answer survey questions about the perceived "qualia" of their social lives.

Subjective experience matters. If it feels good, it probably is good.  But, self-report should also be taken with skepticism because people lie.  People lie not to be malicious, but because surveys ask questions that are impossible to answer and impossible to compare across individuals. The qualia of your social interactions are fundamentally different than mine.  There is also a recency bias in which if people are happy or sad now, they answer general questions like rating the richness one's social life differently.  Finally, people lie because surveys ask them do what cannot be done: consciously report their unconscious emotional experiences. The brain just doesn't work that way--the unconscious remains hidden no matter how much one probes. 

This causes a dilemma: how can researchers understand how people's social interactions influence their satisfaction with life if self-reported measures are not accurate and comparable?  The solution comes from the brain.  Because the brain is stingy with its limited resources, experiences that are highly valued produce a specific neural signature that quantifies how important they are based on the metabolic investment in processing them.  Once baseline brain activity is removed, neural responses are comparable across individuals.  My colleagues and I named the brain's social-emotional valuation network "Immersion" because people appear to get lost in peak Immersion experiences.

The SIX app developed by Immersion Neuroscience quantifies the value of experiences every second by measuring neurologic Immersion.  The published research from my lab has shown that people need six well-defined high neural value moments a day to build their emotional fitness and experience the joy it produces.   SIX measures the activity of a network in the brain rather than some small neuronal structure which is now understood to be how qualia are processed.  

But, SIX does more.  By linking the key moments that are most valuable to an individual to calendar entries and location, SIX users gain clear and actionable insights into which activities are most important so they can do more of them.  SIX's technology, based on 25 years of published science, takes unconscious emotional responses, measures it, and shares this with users.  

And here's a secret: adding a social component to nearly any experience increases its neurologic Immersion.  Doing an online training course alone might be valuable, but the data show that doing a course shoulder to shoulder with others in the same room increases its Immersion.  Moreover, Immersion has a strong positive correlation with information recall weeks later so in-person training is not only more enjoyable, but it creates a larger payoff for the individual attendee and the organization that sent him or her.  Win-win!

Now, add in the socializing and networking that happens when people congregate together and key moments are nearly guaranteed to happen.  People need people. For love, for work, and to increase their happiness and wellbeing.  SIX tells users which people, which events, and how much of these are needed to grow socially and emotionally. Of course, it is not just taking, but giving that builds strong social relationships. Investing in relationships, and measuring how this increases one ability to live a radically fulfilled life, is exactly why we built SIX.

Oh, and SIX is free.  For everyone.  Forever.  Quantify your happiness by grabbing SIX today from the App or Play stores and join thousands of others on the journey to live a longer, happier, and healthier life.