Idea #13: Create a blog to write about the elusive nature of free will

Description
I started studying neuroscience as a hobby a few years ago, when I stumbled on an old textbook from 1996 while browsing through a thrift shop in some small town in Idaho on a roadtrip. Since I made my way through that, I've read up on a lot of the latest research in psychology, behavioral science, and neurology.

The more I learned about the way the brain and body respond to external stimuli, the more I learned that people have overestimated the role of "free will." Many people don't understand the extent to which humans' behavior is governed by automatic processes: subconscious processes, emotional reactions, stress-coping mechanisms, and learned habits.

"Lövheim cube of emotion" by Lyhord - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons -

There's been a wave of popular science books lately delving into these concepts, such as Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, Jonah Lehrer's similar pop-psychology books, and Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit. And while these books touch on the nature of neurology and free will, they still don't dive into the scientific nature of free will directly. I figure it could make a good blog - every week I could examine a new aspect of behavioral science and psychology, focusing on the quirks in the complex organic machinery known as the brain.

Steps
1) Write some essays, a series of five or six blog posts that lead into each other.
2) Create a new site, maybe with WordPress this time (sorry Blogger, but it's just easier to customize).
3) Start rolling out the posts on a weekly basis.

Enthusiasm: I've been thinking about this for a few weeks, developing the essay ideas in my head, and started drafting the first two today.

Practicality: Like any blog, not to hard to create, but sitting down and writing is hard. Now that my job has started to calm down after the summer I might have time to sit down and write.

Difficulty: Easy to start, hard to continue. Keeping up with a blog is hard! Maybe I could just submit the essays as nonfiction to literary journals. But with a blog I could develop a series.

Idea #12: Create a matrix to predict people's decisions

Description
I was walking down the Metro platform on my way home when it hit me: people are completely predictable.

Not long ago I read Phillip K. Dick's Exegesis, which lead me to immediately spot a book with an illustration of his face on the cover in a simulation of a circuit board, called How to Build an Android: The True Story of Phillip K. Dick's Robotic Resurrection by David F. Duffy. That got me interested in reading more about artificial intelligence and the way the brain functions, so I read Ray Kruzweil's How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. Kurzweil really drives home the concept of the brain as a pattern recognizing machine, starting with low level pattern recognition and building up hierarchically to more complex patterns. But the idea that suddenly struck me was the fact that essentially, the brain responds to stimuli based on past experience. And also based on inherent structure - or what people would normally refer to as personality.

It's a controversial idea, but I think we've all been misguided by the poetic idea that we are complex beings whose inner workings are pretty much unknowable and ultimately unpredictable. I realized that was bullshit. We just don't know enough about ourselves to accept that we're all basically reacting to the world based on our past experience and the way our personhood has shaped. There are all kinds of scientific studies out there that show how we are affected (either consciously or sub-consciously) by various situational and experiential criteria, that there had to be a way to form a model to accurately describe, with a somewhat high degree of probability anyways, a person's decision.

I came up with the idea of creating some kind of matrix to represent the factors that shape the person (a subject profile) and the factors that frame the decision to be made (the circumstances). In the column headings of my spreadsheet, I listed a combination of personality dimensions based on the Five-Factor Model (the nature aspect) and personal experience/socio-economic status/education (the nurture aspect), lifestyle practices, and emotional state. Together, these factors contribute to the development of habits that subjects fall back on in response to stimuli. In my rows, I listed a series of questions about the decision, such as whether it required an immediate response, whether the person affected is friendly or not, the expected outcomes of the decision, and other things that people take into account  when considering how to respond to a decision. 

The decision itself would be framed in simple terms of positive, neutral, or negative. There are a wide variety of reactions that a person can have, but mostly they boil down to a few types of responses that are framed in these three terms.

Steps
1) Create a matrix to contain all the criteria that shape the subject's experience and personality, and the factors included in the event.
2) Research the scientific basis for certain criteria and factors, to ensure it's based on proven ground.
3) Design a program to score a subject's responses to a questionnaire, creating a subject profile. Figure out how to weight the criteria based on expected impact.
4) Create a survey with questions presenting a situation and requesting a decision. The questions would be like those questions presenting moral dilemmas (for example, "A train is speeding toward a person on the tracks. Do you pull the switch and divert it to a crowd of old people?"). 
5) Have a computer program answer this survey using the subject profile as a guide. Compare answers with the subject's completed survey.
6) Collect as many surveys as possible. Revise program based on collected data for more accuracy.
7) Sell to some tech firm as an amazing new model for artificial intelligence. 

Enthusiam: Crazy-high. Nothing like believing you've designed something totally original and brilliant. (Unless you tell me someone out there has already figured this out).
Practicality: Ambitious-much? This is an all-encompassing model that is way beyond my field of study.
Difficulty: With the knowledge demanded, either I spend years studying up, or I get folks to help. Any computer programmers out there interested in helping?

Idea #9: Transform writing room into light-infused creativity center

Description
A few weeks ago, I visited the James Turrell exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Turrell's specialty is the perception-transforming properties of light. He plays with the distortions in space and color that occur with the way a room is constructed and the angle of beams of light.

In the biggest piece of the exhibit, there is a room (only 7 visitors allowed inside at a time, for eight and a half minute intervals), painted entirely white, slanted downward, the walls sloping into the floors, lit entirely in color-changing LED lights that slowly shift from blue to violet to magenta to red to pink and back to blue agin. The back wall of the room is a lighter shade than that of the room.

But step closer and you can put your arm through the wall as though it doesn't exist . . . because it doesn't. It's an illusion - the back wall is actually another room, the walls sloping into the floors and ceilings to eliminate the shades created by corners and right angles. That room is lit with different lights, changing in harmony with the main room.

Turn your eyes back to the waiting room where other visitors patiently await their turn, and the white lighting out there seems to change hues as well. Except it doesn't, because it's a trick of the eyes. Turrell is playing with "color opponency," the tendency of retinal ganglian to distort colors depending on which color dominates the input. Stare at red light and any white light appears green, because all other rays within white light are cancelled out. Stare at blue light, and then any white light appears yellow.

This long intro leads to the idea of installing LED lighting in my home office, where I often sit in the mornings to write. It's long been known through various studies that light (or even just staring at walls of a certain color) can influence the mind. I could inspire creativity with blue light, stimulate my mind for the day with red light, or use violet to both stimulate and inspire.

LED light strips are pretty cheap nowadays, and easy to install. They even come with remote controls to change the color without rising from my chair. Additionally, I don't want to disrupt my concentration by periodically hitting my eyes with direct beams of light (have you ever thought about how often our eyes are stuck by light from lamps and overhead bulbs? Seems like a carryover from the 19th/early 20th centuries). So I will hide the strips behind things (dresser, closet door, back edge of my desk and a table) so that only the rays reflecting off the walls will light the room.

Steps
1) Research the parts and equipment needed.
2) Determine where the lights will go and how to connect them.
3) Purchase the equipment.
4) Set the light strips in the locations desired and connect them to a power source.

Enthusiam: At a high level, especially since some preliminary research shows that this is a fairly practical project.
Practicality: Turns out color changing RGB LED strips come in sets with a 44-button remote control capable of changing the colors and setting certain color combos to memory.  The strips can be cut after every three lights to the desired length. What I want to do will probably cost only roughly $50-60. Bonus: lighting the room with LED lights may even be more cost effective than with light bulbs.
Difficulty: We'll find out once I actually purchase the equipment and set it up.

Here's a good NPR story on Turrell's work: http://www.npr.org/2013/09/07/219367766/james-turrell-experiments-with-the-thingness-of-light-itself

Idea #8: Create a log of story ideas

Description
Recently, I flipped through my journal and stumbled across an idea I had come up with for a story. Nothing crazy or detailed, just a quick blurb that could be fleshed out in the future into a complete plotline. I had jotted it down quickly, the handwriting a scribble, thinking that it would make for a good story and I didn't want to lose it. Then I promptly forgot about all about it.

But this is the point of keeping a journal, right? To capture those ideas that drift out of the smoke in our pre-frontal cortex, before the wisps drift off again into the ether. Our minds are always changing - fail to record an idea, and it might never come back from the hidden lands of inspiration. The problem is, these story ideas are buried in amongst the pages of sketches, grocery lists, designs for furniture or other items to build, dream logs (a future blog post on that shortly), and other mishmash. With no key word or date search capability.

So I just have to go back through my journals, one page at a time, and type them up.

Steps
1) Dig up old journals from the basement.
2) Find the story ideas and type them up.
3) Select the most promising and flesh them out into a complete story.
4) Get them published.

Enthusiam: Moderate. Much like the jotting down of story ideas, enthusiasm for reading through these ideas fades as soon as I get them typed. But at least I have them for the future, right?
Practicality: I'd forgotten how many journals I've kept over the years. And that's not counting the ones from high school (dare I step back into that mindset?)
Difficulty: I had to flip back through years and years of notebooks and journals. And sit down and actually type them up. And I'm still haunted by the feeling that I've missed a few.

And I did. I went back and dug out my journals, flipped through them, and typed them into a Word doc. I now have a list, a sampling of which includes:
- A man with Alzheimers in a nursing home who sends postcards about places he had been to with his wife when she was still alive. His granddaughter puts them together into a story of his life, a biography she would have never known had she not read the postcards.
- A boy who is a thief and punk, but wears a Boy Scout uniform to look wholesome.
- A short short about a lottery winner who sets fire to his own house to fake his death so he can finally shake all the people asking him for money.
- A future in which the government has mandated public servants to have electrodes implanted in their brains to force them to make policies according to laws and regulations, removing emotional thought from policy decisions. Based on a new technology using nanofiber cables implanted in mice's brains, successfully making them turn in certain directions when the light in the cables turns on.
- Based on a man I met in the Philippines, who long since went "off the grid," who is now dying and teaching his lessons to an American who happened by chance to meet him while on vacation.

And that's just a quarter of the story ideas I dug up out of these journals. Someday I'll type them up and get them published.

Idea #3: Roomates: A Saga of Intrigue and Despair and Beer Cans and Dick Jokes

Standard sink condition
if it were set in the kitchen

Description
A play about living in a house full of roommates. The setting would be entirely within the living room, so it would be ideal for a play because scenery changes would be unnecessary. Set the stage so that the couches of the living room would face the audience, as though the people in the play were looking at the TV, and the audience would be looking at the actors as though through the television screen. The actors could enter and exit through the sides of the stages as though they were entering and exiting through the front door, bathroom door, bedroom door, kitchen door, etc. The play would focus on the various stories behind each roommate, some that would include the other roommates, while others would be secret from the roommates altogether.

Steps
1) Outline the story.
2) Learn how to write in the format of a play.
3) Dedicate time to writing and bang out the scenes.

Originality: This would be like the stage version of Australian author John Birmingham's non-fiction book of the best stories from his years living with dozens of roommates, He Died with a Felafal in His Hand, except set in one living room. Although it would be really tough to compete with Birmingham's stories.

Enthusiam: Medium. I've had this idea before. But I have yet to dedicate any time to thinking about the stories that would drive the play.

Practicality: Not very, considering I consistently dedicate my time to other pursuits. But something to keep in mind for the future.

Difficulty: Very. Have you ever tried to write a play? I really don't know how Shakespeare banged out so many in his lifetime.