Thinking with a cool head

It would be interesting to test whether people do think more clearly when they have a cool head (e.g. actively cooled down with a cool pad). And if so, develop a productivity had that maintains the head at the optimum temperature.

REM

A hypothesis from personal observation: when sleep we are more likely to respond to external stimuli during the REM phase.

Psychology of group photo composition

Hypothesis: people appearing in the centre of the photo are perceived to be more important.

Experiment: assemble a group of people, and photograph them in every possible combination. Ask respondents to rank the importance of the people in the photo, with different groups of respondents getting different photos to look at. Control for the specific people (as tall people are perceived as more important). Look for patterns.

It would also be interesting to explore whether there are any cultural differences in the findings.

How hard did people work?

Written accounts of working practices during the industrial revolution paint a stark picture of working life. Not just the absence of health and safety, and workers' rights, and not to mention low pay, the working hours were long. But how hard did people actually work? It should be possible to get a sense of this by recreating the working conditions and tools, and comparing output achieved, e.g. coal mined per person per day.

Life themes

It would be interesting to get a good understanding (i.e. some good data) on how life's themes and preoccupations change over lifespan.

A Gantt chart would be an interesting way to present it. It would give people a road map of what to expect from life. Here's an oversimplified example:

How would we go about collecting such data? Respondents are asked to list their preoccupations on a regular basis, but are also prompted at intervals to confirm whether something previously identifid as a preoccupation is still one.

The same approach could work for worries, likes, dislikes, etc

Anti-tie campaign

How much power do marketers (in particular advertisers) actually have? An interesting experiment I'd happily fund (if I was a billionaire) would be to challenge a group of marketers (e.g. students or a professional firm) to get rid of the tie. In some ways its not a tough sell: ties cost money; they take time to put on; and they're uncomfortable. They are a complete waste of economic resource. However, our cultural attachment to them persists. Could a group of marketers with the right resources kill the tie? I'd like to know.

Judging time

Observation: we think about time differently if we see it on a clock face or presented in digital format.

Experiment: assess how people make time based decisions (e.g. how fast they work to get a task done within 10 minutes) whilst varying the format of time presentation (analogue/digital/etc)

Benefits of ambidexterity

Hypothesis: ambidextrous people learn more if they switch hands during writing something compared to if they use a single hand.

Test: relatively simple recall testing with a sufficient population of ambidextrous people divided into four populations (left hand no change, right hand no change, midway change from left to right, midway change from right to left)

Implication: it may be the case that there is potential value in teaching all children to be ambidextrous if the learning dividend is sufficient.

The benefits of automation

How long does it take to turn off a light? Perhaps a couple of seconds, depending on how far away the switch is. How much energy does it take to turn off a light? I'm not going to guess, but it's an incredibly small amount compared with energy we consume on a daily basis.

My point is that having automated lights, or those that turn on and off at a verbal command, are not going to save us huge amounts of time: certainly less than a robot vacuum cleaner (1h per week) or a robotic car (1h per day of time that can be spent doing other things). Nor are they going to save us lots of energy (compared to say the benefit of a lift in a tall building). And yet we still want them. Why?

My suggestion is that it's not just about the time taken to do a task, or the effort expended doing a task, but that there is a cost to humans per task that is independent of time, effort, difficulty, etc. It's a kind of mental exhertion. I appreciate that this is unscientific, but that's where good science starts - with a hypothesis like this and a goal of measuring, proving or disproving.

Random paper

Hypothesis: the paper we write on, in particular the line spacing and other pre-printed patterns, affects how we're thinking at the time of writing. A diversity of paper to write would stimulate diverse (creative) thinking.

Idea: random paper - it should be possible, even with a standard dots per inch printer, be able to print paper such that no sheet is ever the same. The pre-printed patterns include: line spacing; line thickness; line width; dots; polygons (regular and irregular); non-horizontal lines; other familiar shapes (e.g. the shapes included in common drawing tools); colours; etc.

Testing the hypothesis: how to measure creativity? One method that has been used before asks a respondent to come up with uses for an object - the more uses the more creative.

The power of individuals

What is the highest individual power relative to the total power in the world? And how has this varied over time?

Whilst the disparity in power between the most and least powerful is gargantuan, and whilst the media obsess about the power and influence of a few, I suspect that even the most powerful people are still small cogs in a big machine.

By contrast, during earlier periods of history I would suggest that power was more concentrated.

I think the same kind of trend would hold true for metrics such as fame, status, creativity and intellectual output, but not for wealth.

Analysing conversation

I am always intrigued by what people spend their time talking about (a quick google suggests we spend between 2 and 5 hrs a day talking). So how to get that data?

It would be an interesting experiment to place mics in bars, clubs, restaurants, shops, near watercoolers, etc to capture conversation, which could then be transcribed and analysed. Obviously the particular locations would need to disclose to people that the experiment was in progress, and steps would need to be taken to ensure privacy of data.

Alternatively, venues could offer subsidised drinks and food in return for this invasion of privacy, with marketing organisations paying the venues for the resulting intelligence gleaned. This could potentially be a win-win-win for consumer, venue owner and marketing organisation. There is also the potential for marketing organisations to identify people who are Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen, and follow-up with these individuals, for example offering them free samples.

An initial batch of questions:

• What topics are people talking about? (work, home life, friends, celebrities, TV shows, etc)
• What brands/companies/products are people talking about? What are they saying? What attitudes were conveyed by word choice and tone of voice?
• How do people get from one topic to another?
• What syntactic structures are common?

There are a couple of movements into the tracking consumers space, e.g. SceneTap and Shopperception, so perhaps this (potentially scary) future might become commonplace and not an experiment.

Understanding the physiological basis for human needs

Although widely criticised and found to be incorrect (at least the ranking aspect), Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is still widely taught and is a model that is easily understood and rings-true to those who learn about it. But perhaps most interesting about this model, and others such as the Fundamental Human Needs, is that they are really only posing the questions that require further research to answer.

For the physiological needs in Maslow's hierarchy (breathing, wood, water, sex, sleep, homoeostatis, excretion - to list those in the model shown on Wikipedia), the chemical and biological mechanisms are understood: we know how we breathe, and we know why chemically we need to breathe; we know how oxygen and carbon dioxide are carried around the body.

But for Maslow's other layers, what are the physiological mechanisms? It's likely that dopamine and serotonin will feature in there somewhere. But are all the other layers actually distinct from each other physiologically? If connection with family triggers the same dopamine pathway that problem-solving does, then the fundamental need is not either of those things but the pathway underneath.

Once we understand the physiological basis, we can refine the groupings and disaggregate the cultural/nurture expressions of needs from the true fundamental needs. And we will gain profound insight into the way humans work.

[N.B. although homeostasis is separated out in the model on the Wikipedia page, it actually emcompasses many if not all of the physiological needs]

Trusting self-help and personal development

I have an instinctive distrust of self-help and personal development, but at the same time a strong desire to optimise my productivity and happiness, and to see the productivity and happiness of the world improved. How to reconcile the two?

What we really need is science: double-blind controlled trials. The book 59 seconds by Richard Wiseman is an attempt in that direction, collating the scientific evidence in the field. But much more is needed. Every assertion of the self-help and personal development field requires research that results in either debunking or optimisation.

Another aspect I am cynical about is people who have been solely successful in selling self-help material, and use their own success at selling self-help material as evidence that their self-help material is of value. If we are to trust any non-scientifically-derived annecdotal self-help suggestions, surely it should be those from people who have been successful at more than just self-help and personal development?

Loss of empathy

Is there a demonstrable link between suffering and loss of empathy?

Seasonal affective disorder double peak

Could seasonal affective disorder be caused not just by length of day (and hence the amount of light received), but also rate of change in length of day. This would generate a double peak in the systems on an annual graph, one at the winter solstice, one at the autumn equinox. If this was the case, the extent to which these two causal variables stimulate the effect would no doubt vary from person to person. And understanding this would be helpful in treatment.

The rate of change in length of day stimulus would be a logical one to have evolved, as it would stimulate earlier preparations for winter than a short day stimulus.

Judging people's actions based on response from victim

It seems to me that we subjectively judge to seriousness of a person's actions (e.g. criminal, bullying, etc) by the response from the victim. If the victim exhibits a stoical response, we judge the actions less harshly; if the victim exhibits a strong emotional response, we judge the actions more harshly (unless excessive, when we begin to question victim).

It would be interesting to conduct a psycological experiment to prove this point (if it hasn't already been done  - too lazy to search). The results would perhaps cast some light on the reliability of our judicial system.

Polytunnel in the desert

If you were to cover an area of desert with polytunnels, would the reduced water loss be enough to de-desertify the desert, and if so, how long would it take?

I would hope that the area would undergoe ecological succession, beginning with cacti, but progressing to more economically useful species, whilst developing a richer soil.

Work, rest and play

Common knowledge suggests that we need a good balance of work, rest and play. But is this true? There's a fair amount of science behind the need for rest (especially sleep) and some pretty serious side effects of not sleeping. But how about play? What would be the impact of taking "play" out of someone's life, but giving them work and enough rest. Does their productivity, happiness increase, decrease or stay the same?

Needle in a haystack

I'd quite like to conduct an experiment to see how many manhours it takes (without using any magnets) to find a needle in a haystack.