From birth, parents raise us in different ways, teachers teach us in different styles, and doctors treat us with different medicines and give us different advice. These experiences set us upon our paths in life, sculpting how we learn and how we stay healthy. We can think of each interaction between a teacher and a student, or between a doctor and a patient, as a little miniexperiment, with an outcome that can be evaluated: Did the student learn and become able to use the information to do creative and useful things throughout life? Did the patient improve in health and develop proactive health-related behaviors? With almost one million physicians, and about four million educators of children, in the U.S. alone, we are as a society conducting millions of perturbations of behavior every day. However, we do not take advantage of the enormous amount of empirical data that, in principle, could be collected and analyzed in the process. A tool for generating and mining such a data set could not only reveal general empirical facts and principles about how best to teach, or to prevent and treat disease, but also allow individuals to monitor their own personal parameters that govern how they best operate, empowering them to better themselves.

Consider the idea of an ongoing clinical trial. Currently a clinical trial for a drug involves, typically, a blinded test of a treatment versus a control, which lasts a certain amount of time, and progresses in multiple stages, increasing the number of people each time, and looking for certain outcomes. Then, if the trial ends successfully, the drug can be sold. However, it's been observed that a great many drugs likely work for only a fraction of the patients who receive them. Indeed, drugs that may be bad if prescribed indiscriminately are sometimes useful for specific subpopulations (e.g., consider the story of thalidomide). Furthermore, after a drug is out in the world, it can be used off-label by doctors. If side effects appear in a subpopulation of patients, there isn't a forum to interactively analyze the properties of that subpopulation in a rapid way. Clinicians can publish the results of such observations in journals, but such observations often stand alone.

A complementary approach might be to continually accumulate data about a drug as it is used to treat different diseases, in different populations, over time. Each individual patient would be permanently associated with a data point, so that follow-up and further examination would become possible. As genomic information, brain imaging, and other information-dense measures become increasingly cheap to acquire, tracking multiple variables within a patient over long periods of time will become more and more valuable, allowing one to find better predictors of future outcomes in response to a specific treatment, and to derive conclusions that would be impossible from a limited snapshot of a person's life. This could speed up the process of testing out technologies, allowing evidence to be accumulated and analyzed in a distributed and open fashion, and enabling cures to be developed and tested faster. It could also simplify prospective studies, in which patients are tracked before and after disease onset, say for conditions such as autism or schizophrenia; right now it is very hard to do this because detailed studies of people before a disease occurs are difficult for all but the most common diseases. With integrated database design and accessibility, it would become possible to perform this analysis. Such a system would also need to have instantaneous peer review that would occur in a rewardable way; the system must track real identities and real reputations of people who comment on or synthesize insights from the database, to synthesize accountability, reputation, and trust, and to separate the experts from the nonexperts. Perhaps free access to the database's wealth of data would motivate people to contribute; people who contribute less, or who contribute lower-quality judgment, might instead pay to access it.

It's possible that this methodology could apply to other domains of life, exploring how to assist people to become better--for example, consider how to evaluate trajectories for the approximately two million inmates in U.S. prisons. Or consider mental health, in which many styles of therapy are continually being explored by a diverse set of psychologists, therapists, and psychiatrists. Or the economy: perhaps a way to help economies self-regulate is to build in self-analysis at every step of the way, continuously generating models and testing theories to catch disasters before they happen.

How many approaches to life ever get validated? When does a strategy or method need to be personalized to an individual, and when is an insight a general piece of wisdom? Systems that enable these questions to be answered by providing a continuously updated snapshot of the best practices of the world may change the way we live, and enable a new age of rational decision making. "Those who can't remember the past are doomed to repeat it." Well, currently that's just about all of us.

Cite as: Boyden, E. S. "Civilization as Experiment" Ed Boyden's Blog. Technology Review. 1/18/09. (http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/boyden/22512/).

We are terrible at solving future problems before they become big. A friend of mine who worked for decades as a governmental security advisor was once told by an official, "Unless there are bodies on the ground, we can't pay attention to it." This property of the human mind affects us at the personal, community, and global levels, whether it's dealing with diet and exercise and debt, or the future of Social Security, or global climate change--all scenarios where people must invest effort now, to solve a problem that won't hit until some time passes. Now, it's one thing to complain about how bad we are at this problem (as psychologists have been gleefully pointing out for many years). But can we do anything about it? Can we engineer new tools to enhance our judgment, and to augment our ability to objectively deal with problems?

Easy gimmicks and fixes don't work: this problem might be fundamental to the human condition. Information is not enough to enable good decision making. We need to improve how we act on information, and that means utilizing emotion as a tool. Now, emotions of the moment shape how we prioritize and act, whereas distant emotions have little or no impact on our current actions. Thus it is hard to resist that extra cheese Danish or that new car--because we feel current urges and emotions right now, while the distant emotion that would accompany a medical problem or a financial problem isn't real to us. Conversely, an immediate problem is far more painful than a future one: it is easy to procrastinate about something laborious, or to rush to solve an emergency. So immediate problems will override future ones, grabbing our attention because of the immediate anxiety and stress produced.

Thus, one possible principle of prevention is: develop tools to help yourself feel future emotions now. Create visceral visualizations of the different outcomes, so that you can feel the feelings that result from each one. Emotions are shortcuts, and while they can be destructive when gone awry, they can be harnessed to augment rational behavior, if you understand your mind. It is possible to make software tools that enable visceral visualizations of the consequences of current actions. When I schedule future activities on my to-do list, for example, I often embed appropriate emotional cues in the list, so that when the time comes to act, it's easier for me to do what I've planned. Perhaps software that enables additional visual, auditory, and other-modality cues to enhance this process--and personalizes the emotion to the individual--could help boost the power of the human mind, to actively prevent problems. I wonder if such a tool, properly developed, could be a true cognitive prosthetic to enable better decisions and fewer disasters in the future.

^{Cite as: Boyden, E. S. "Averting Disasters, Preventing Problems." Ed Boyden's Blog. Technology Review. 9/2/08. (http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/boyden/22122/).}

Community activities, especially those that bring together people of all ages, seem to be increasingly rare and brief lived in this busy world. Yet they provide a lot of meaning in people's lives, for reasons ranging from the deeply personal to the broadly impactful. I used to volunteer for the San Francisco Symphony, selling discounted concert tickets to college students. This activity brought together people of all ages to contribute to the survival of the arts, and to learn from one another about topics ranging from fundraising to musical composition to the role of music in health. And it yielded many enduring friendships, formed in the act of pursuing a common goal. From this experience and others, I learned that community participation in an activity gives people a stake in it, ensuring its endurance and prominence. It also increases the diversity of people who contribute to the activity, beyond just the specialists, thus broadening the scope of the activity and increasing its power and relevance. Finally, such activities enrich the meaning of the lives of the people participating, enabling them to contribute to the well-being of the world and building communities of interaction and support, which is perhaps why the absence of such activities in one's life can be palpable at times.

Scientific research, when compared with other areas in which people can volunteer their time, seems to be relatively unexplored as a community-building activity. The conventional wisdom implies that scientific research is something you do when you are training or in school, so that afterward you can go off to make useful products and provide valuable services. To caricature only slightly: the public is often painted as a confused, and sometimes suspicious, consumer of scientific information, and the production of science is often painted as an abstruse art, and occasionally a dangerous one. And the two sides--the public and the producers of science--meet only occasionally, through journalists and explicit outreach efforts. It is, however, widely accepted in this interdisciplinary age that scientific discovery, to be the engine of change that is needed, broadly benefits from the interaction of people from diverse backgrounds. Thus, I believe that we should think about ways to involve all community members broadly in the act of research itself, working in groups to discover and share knowledge.

Involvement of the public in the act of science would shape the kind of science being done, perhaps increasing the impact of science on daily life. Community involvement in the act of research would also make science more understandable, and perhaps more familiar, to the public, because people would be engaged in its framing and communication. What better way to increase scientific literacy, make the benefits of science clear, and quell myths and spread facts than to give all people a stake in the act of discovering science? Maybe the way the world sees some currently controversial topics--stem cells, climate change, energy sources--would be different if more people engaged in the act of testing hypotheses and examining data. Community participation in science would also be enormously personally enriching, providing exercise in thinking and problem solving (something that is useful in all problem domains, throughout life) and empowering people to contribute directly to the betterment of society in a broadly impactful way.

More and more fields are being democratized by strategies that make it easy for people to create: bloggers can write news stories, teenagers can film movies and upload them, and anyone can compose a novel and get it in front of millions of readers. People talk about "participatory media," but what about "participatory science"? The opening of science is occurring slowly--led by the open-access journals, perhaps, and by some groups sharing their data and insights in increasingly informal ways. But the opening up of the act of scientific research itself is still not widespread. I propose that we begin to create programs in which members of the public, of all ages, can meaningfully volunteer in laboratories, working together on problems--perhaps only for a few hours a week, but over an extended period of time, to achieve depth. If you are a lab head, think about inviting someone new into the fold. If you are interested in participating in scientific research, reach out to people nearby and see if you can help.

Most scientific funding agencies currently focus on the training and development of young people. "K-12, undergraduate science majors, non-science majors, and graduate students," the NSF helpfully suggests as key demographics to focus on in order to broaden the impact of one's research. But it seems to me that programs that engage other demographics--for example, retired individuals who want to create and mentor, with their wealth of knowledge, practical experience, and wisdom--would not only provide new perspectives for young people entering science, but also enrich the lives of a segment of the population that is not actively recruited to the intellectual process by many current institutions. Working with other scientists is just fun. It is highly interactive and engaging, and can cover vast intellectual and emotional ranges, as well as bring people together, as with any meaningful community activity. And there will always be important problems to solve.

_{Cite as: Boyden, E. S. "Research as a Community-Building Activity ." Ed Boyden's Blog, Technology Review. 7/28/08. (http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/boyden/22102/).}