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atucker comments on What are you working on? - Less Wrong
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For over a year now, making full use of my body has been a big hobby. To this end, I am learning silly human tricks. It has taken a few weeks of sporadic effort and I am now able to snap my fingers consistantly. My next goal is to be able to whistle. I have made little progress so far and am not yet able to whistle particular notes. Previously successful projects of this type were refining my senses of smell and temperature. Now I can reliably tell the temperature of water or air to the degree C with a range of roughly -20 to 45C. Calibrating my sense of temperature was easy enough; I would feel something, guess the temperature, then read off a thermometer. If I was wrong, I might say something like "Oh so that's what 23 degrees feels like." and then feel it again.
Other ongoing projects of this sort are to smell relative humidity and to sneeze only in the presence of a bright light. I've lost a bit of progress since last thread, now darkening my field of vision works to prevent a sneeze, but I still sneeze occasionally at normal indoor room brightness. When I feel like sneezing I look at a bright light until I either sneeze or stop feeling like I need to. It could be that the CFL I normally use is not bright enough for my purposes. "Hazards of Light" by Cronly-Dillon et al. suggests that I would be safe using a much more intense lamp.
This sounds awesome, but I'm fairly mystified as to why you picked that particular goal.
Maybe because of how awesome it is.
A friend of mine naturally exhibits exclusively photosensitive sneezing. So I thought it would be interesting to try. This study suggests it is primarily acquired and not inherited so I figured it was worth a shot.
I'd heard a while ago that the photic sneeze reflex was a so-called Mendelian trait which might actually be a "simple Mendelian trait". Having found so many other cases where such claims didn't pan out, I guess at this point I shouldn't be very surprised when another "simple Mendelian inheritance" story turns out to be complicated :-P
I only read the abstract of your linked study rather than methods and everything. Out of curiosity (if you read the whole thing), did they disentangle the causal factors behind variation in the trait? Like, did they distinguish between hypotheses such as "actual non-ACHOO-carriers can acquire the reflex based on life experience" vs "only carriers can acquire the trait, but penetrance increases with age, giving the potentially false appearance of people acquiring it based purely on environmental factors"?
I am trying to access the full article through my library system but it will take some time. It is worth noting that my goal is for light to make me sneeze, if and only if I already feel like sneezing. This is different from ACHOO syndrome as generally described; so I am unsure whether my technique uses the same biological mechanism.
EDIT: Until reading your post I had not considered the possibility that I may be a carrier who had not yet expressed this trait. I thought that I would be able to acquire it through conditioning regardless. Lack of a response from my family suggests that this is an acquired trait for me.
UPDATE: Indeed, was about to discriminate between this hypotheses. I have the article and it states that 39.3% of those affected reported no family history of photic sneezing. From this and other data they conclude that "... in approximately 25% of cases the [photic sneeze response] may be inherited in an autosomal dominant manner, but the majority of cases appear to be related to environmental influences." They did not identify any causal environmental factors for the formation of this response, but that it is primarily acquired is good news for anyone interested in trying it.
Do you just want to learn to control your sneezes? Or are you interested in the photosensitive effect directly? If the former I would encourage you to learn more direct control mechanism rather then using a external trigger like light.
edit: spelling
Primarily I was looking for an exercise in conditioning, any practical benefits are ancillary. If progress continues, I will not sneeze unless a specific trigger is present (staring at a very bright light); so it should be a passive benefit with no long-term upkeep. If you have better ways of control sneezing, I am interested in knowing them.
I consider it a low probability that I have enough experience/knowledge to generalize my understanding/perceptions to a wide audience with fidelity. If you want to talk about it over the phone or on skype some time I would be happy to oblige. Quick iterative discussion can do much to shorten inferential distance and if a common understanding is found easily it might be worth writing up and posting.