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 #7: Study neurology to better understand why I do things

Description
"Why do we do what we do?"

Google that phrase. You'll bring up self-help speeches by Tony Robbins, the Amazon page for the book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, an article on a New York Times blog, a Harvard Business Review blog, and many other references links to blogs, book reviews, news articles, etc. There's no shortage of pondering about the reasons behind our actions. But up until a few months ago, I thought of the answers only in terms of philosophical conjecture, with theorized assumptions about human behavior.

But then in March I stumbled across a neuroscience textbook in a small thrift shop while driving through the frozen and snow covered plains of Idaho. And I'd just been thinking about reading a book on neuroscience! I thought to myself as I thumbed through the pages. I'd been planning to read something more friendly to the liberal arts student, but if it was going to land in my way, I was going to read it.

It was published in 1996, but I figured I could catch up with some other, more recent things that had happened since then. As it turned out, there was quite a lot - the textbook doesn't even mention the MRI or fMRI until the last chapter. Any neuroscience book on the shelves today will be at least 75% filled with references to lessons from MRI studies.

But I learned a hell of a lot anyways, since much of our knowledge comes from animal studies. Like it or not you animal rights activists, but most of the time what we know about how the brain works comes from sticking electrodes into the brain of monkeys (or other primates, like college students) and mice. And then I kept it up with more books that report on what we've learned about the brain and what we can do with that information: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, Imagine by Jonah Lehrer, Brain Rules by John  Medina, and An Alchemy of Mind by Diane Ackerman. Let me tell you, I recommend any of those books even if you haven't read a neuroscience textbook, but I was just glad I had read the textbook so I was already familiar with the parts of the brain these authors reference in their books.

And after all this studying up on the science of the brain, you know what I've learned: most of what we do is more reaction than action.

Think about it: our brains are wired to react to events in split-second increments. Most of the time, we rely on instinct or on learned habits. Something happens, our brain defaults to previous patterns, and we act based on past behavior. Or we experience a flood of emotion (i.e., a flood of chemicals flowing from our neurons) and we act in response.

What you hear in your brain from that endless self-talk telling you why you're doing what you're doing? That's just the language center in the left side of your brain lending a voice to describe what you're feeling and what you're doing about it. But the fact is, that language center (most likely Broca's area, just above your left ear, FYI) is playing catch-up: you're in the act long before you describe to yourself what you're doing. Hence the reason we often reply "I don't know!" when someone asks us why the hell we did what we just did in a heated moment of panic. We haven't had time to tell ourselves why we did it.

So you know what this means to me? I don't know what actions could legitimately be called "original." We think we're doing things for our own original reasons. But you know what? It's not original We're reacting. We're responding. We're acting out of habit, just the way we did it last time. Maybe we'll try something a little different this time, hoping for a better outcome. But is that an original idea? Did we come up with that ourselves, or did we borrow it from something we read about, heard from a friend, or saw in a movie?

We are big, organic robots, and yet the best computers still can't perfectly replicate our actions. Perhaps it's because they act from rules of logic instead of rules of learned habit.

Okay, my essay is over. So what's the goddamned hare-brain idea?
Figure out how to act not from habit or emotion, but from that deep, untapped well of insight in my brain.

Steps
1) Understand better my reasons for doing things. Identify cues, responses, and rewards.
2) Figure out where to substitute better responses.
3) Meditate, and therefore learn to separate myself from the responsive mind (the mind that only reacts to impulses, emotions, and cures).
3) Act with original, untarnished intention.

Enthusiam:  On-going. I devour any book, magazine article, or news report on brain science.

Practicality:  Depends on the consistency of practice.

Difficulty:  When is self-discovery ever as simple as it sounds?

One note: the image of the brain pasted above is from the newest, most advanced and detailed high-definition 3-D imaging of the human brain ever created. In case you think I'm exaggerating, consider this: for most of human history, the way we have viewed the brain was either with a corpse (with no brain activity to observe) or through images of the living brain that showed clusters of activity. PET scans, MRIs, fMRIs - all of these shows bright lights where clusters of activity in the brain respond to things like questions asked of the subjects or images viewed by the subjects, or actions made by the subject. (Fun fact: we've learned about the brain on sex by putting people in MRI machines and having them masturbate).

But you know what each bright light on one of those brain images represents? Millions of neurons firing at that moment. Neurons fire for very specific reasons: one fires when it recognizes a line you see at 90 degrees, another fires when it recognizes a line at 95 degrees, and so on. One fires when you see the color red, another fires when you see a different shade of red, and so on. Add that up, and you can imagine how many neurons are involved in looking at just a red square. Multiply that by millions more, and you can see why scientists estimate the number of neurons in the brain to be in the 100's of billions. And all we can do right now is make a rough estimate as to what parts of the brain respond when you ask someone a question, or show them a picture, or have them perform an action.

So my point is that we are finally getting to the point of narrowing our views of the brain down to extremely tiny proportions. That high-def 3-D scanner can view brain structures as small as 20 microns, which is 50 times smaller than than images from the best MRI scanners. Fuckin' amazing, no?

http://news.discovery.com/tech/biotechnology/brain-ultra-high-res-3d-130620.htm