A new beginning
I’m hunkering down like everyone else in this new pandemic world. While I’ve been writing on Quora for a few years (2000 answers), I’m ready for a more coherent platform. I still enjoy answering questions, but I may have something else to say. We’ll see. (If you want to read me on Quora, I use my real name John Light.)
My user name here (@L_teralThinker) reflects my own sense of ambiguity. I am both a literal thinker and a lateral thinker, and I want to share why I think both are important. I hope the reader comes to appreciate that the fusion is what makes me worth reading.
I was born in 1948, so I am 72 year old as I write this. I’m reasonably healthy, so unless Covad-19 takes me, I should be able to write for a few years. My father lived to 96, and my three brothers (87, 85, 83) are all still mobile and coherent, though my sister (90) died this year after a hard later life on the streets.
I grew up in L.A., attended public schools, and earned university degrees in Mathematics and Psychology. I worked as a system software engineer for 50 years, transitioning between solving the toughest engineering problems and researching the toughest user interface issues. I retired in 2016 to a life of leisure and writing.
I’ve been married twice, and disappointed two other good women. I have two boys by my first wife, both stories all by themselves. One grandson.
My father was a Congregational minister, and for years I expected to lead a spiritual path. Revelations in my late teens made that unlikely, but in my 50s I found Buddhism, and I feel at home there.
My politics are liberal but not conventional. I have always yearned for a more communal life style, even as I realized I could never survive being that close to people all the time. I find the inequality of the world very painful, and I support efforts to minimize it. I support efforts to ensure that every world citizen can eat, have shelter, receive health care, and speak freely.
My primary interests now relate to neuroscience, presaged by my early degree in Psychology. A lifetime of reading science was focused by my research in the late 90s on User Interface design and the importance of how the brain works. My first area of study was the lateralization of the brain, and my more recent area of study is predictive processing in the brain. More on both later.
Along the way I’ve enjoyed hiking, kayaking, folk dancing, modern dance, tabletop role playing games, board games, video games, and SF reading.
I consider the above a reasonable biography. Let’s both be surprised by what I write next.
