[HN Gopher] The strange path of accepting how your brain works
___________________________________________________________________
The strange path of accepting how your brain works
Author : otras
Score : 60 points
Date : 2021-10-31 15:08 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (alexanderell.is)
(TXT) w3m dump (alexanderell.is)
| danbmil99 wrote:
| Great article. From the perspective of someone who's getting
| older, you have to come to grips with the fact that your mind and
| brain change in ability just like your body does. At first it can
| be frustrating, and you see it only as a negative. But strangely,
| having your brain change a bit in terms of its speed or its
| ability to memorize and recall things can actually give you a new
| perspective on solving problems and thinking about things in
| general. I'm not saying it's a bed of roses, for the most part
| it's a loss. I'm just saying you can learn to accept that and
| move on with the capabilities you have at the moment, rather than
| wallow in self-pity and see every cup as half empty.
|
| There's also the fact that as you get older you simply know more,
| you've seen more patterns and data. You're like a machine
| learning algorithm that's been trained on a larger corpus.
| chasil wrote:
| I am older now than John von Neumann was at his death.
|
| I do not possess his genius, but my life has been far from
| worthless.
|
| I do not feel myself slipping, and I have much to look forward
| and appreciate.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| well, you have no choice but to accept it. whats the
| alternative? depression? meth? some tips i'm thinking for
| myself are: rely on the wisdom crutch--solve the right
| problems. stop investing mental energy in chasing the next
| persons fad / weekend project. take advantaged of mastered
| knowledge, have it finally pay it's dividends.
|
| the older i get, the more i appreciate technology that isn't
| rewritten every release candidate cycle. a tip for the fifteen
| year old self, don't take this advice just be aware of it so
| you know what technology to invest in. You'll eventually want
| those dividends.
| maikosonko wrote:
| Great article. Something I really struggle with. That is
| accepting my brain and it's limitations. But working to improve
| it daily.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| I think this is an up-close look at a small part of a much larger
| overarching concept that most people never really come to grips
| with in the way that the author does: Life isn't fair.
| tibbar wrote:
| Very relatable reverie. I'd add to this that, while the author
| focuses on the genius of von Neumann, most of the smart people
| around you aren't actually like that. They too have limitations,
| strengths and weaknesses, and the fact that you're working with
| them is already a good signal that you're clustered fairly close
| together in capacity.
| techbio wrote:
| Excepting von Neumann, I've recently enjoyed the parts in
| Turing's Cathedral on Nils Barricelli, and would encourage anyone
| interested to look into the sections about his kilobyte-scale
| genetic algorithms.
| Zababa wrote:
| > A few problems in, I noticed him pause when starting on a new
| problem, and after a brief moment, he wrote down an answer
| without any intermediate steps or work.
|
| Isn't that pretty frequent for high school work? I'm not a
| genius, far from it, but I spent a big part of high school
| writing down solutions and being bothered by the professors to
| write the steps (that's how I felt at the time, I've since
| understood why they acted that way).
| ericmcer wrote:
| That anime character perspective reminded me of myself when I
| first started out. I figured with hard work over time, I would
| someday be able to confidently just sit down and start cranking
| out code to fix most every problem.
|
| How wrong I was, the further I go along the more time I spend
| being totally out of my comfort zone and learning new frameworks
| or trying to figure out someone else's code.
| martindbp wrote:
| I also struggle a lot with the limitations I have, frustrated at
| being so slow and stupid. I've also relied on flashcards as an
| augmentation, but I've started to question its value. For
| language we're already wired to pick up on it without tools like
| flashcards. As I think back, like most people (I assume) I
| learned English through watching TV without subtitles, and
| reading online. I didn't speak much (if at all) until I was about
| 20. By then I was pretty much fluent, just from TV and the
| internet, no flashcards nor lots of output (like conversations)
| needed. Ironically, I'm in the process of building a language
| learning tool, but it's aimed at bringing interesting native
| content (TV) down to a level where a lower intermediate learner
| can enjoy and learn from it.
|
| Anyway, my hope is that the difference in performance between me
| and those more naturually "gifted" is in how they use the neurons
| they have, maybe there's a way for me to find a better way to use
| what I have. I think the key to this is spatial as well as social
| reasoning and memory. We're already wired to excel at these
| things. I can barely remember the formula for cross entropy loss,
| but I remember the layout and details of that coffee shop I
| frequented 10 years ago in a different country without much
| effort. Jeff Hawkins talking about thought through reference
| frames and movement in his book on the brain really indicates to
| me that taking the effort to encode our knowledge spatially, i.e.
| finding the right representation, rather than trying to beat it
| into our heads with spaced repetition is a bette rway. I've also
| noticed that when I can tie ideas to a face, a person, I'm more
| likely to remember them. I think a good way for me to remember
| science and math is to learn the history of the subject, like who
| invented/discovered what in what order, where (possibly) and why,
| i.e. what's the story behind it all.
|
| I don't like mnemonics, because they're basically garbage
| encodings. They make it possible to retrieve a memory, very
| slowly, but don't encode things in a way such that you can reason
| over them. It's the difference between one-hot encoding a word in
| NLP vs a semantic word embedding.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| I think you are onto something quite important. There's a ton
| of work being done right now on the psychology and cognitive
| mechanisms underlying learning. Part of the difference, it
| seems to me, is not just that you encode spatial information
| differently - it's also that you have no option but to _use_
| your spatial memory, and it 's working all the time. It gets
| flexed naturally in a way that the part of your brain that
| memorizes a formula doesn't unless you have no choice but to
| exercise it very frequently, or possess a truly unusual brain.
|
| Put another way - I have terrible visuospatial skills, but I
| still am able to navigate the world and manage fine because I
| have no choice. I had to learn to do visuospatial tasks in
| order to function, so, I can do them, and I do them constantly
| with low error rates. The muscle isn't naturally as strong as
| other peoples', but it's exercised enough to not make a
| functional difference.
|
| This is where the idea of "mind palaces" come from - maybe such
| a visualization would help you.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| I'm a bit confused. Did you not speak at all, to any human,
| until your 20s? Or is English a second language? Because the
| way this is phrased, I imagine you, somehow, growing up
| isolated in a cabin in the woods with internet. How does a baby
| feed itself?
| shime wrote:
| Sonke Ahrens has a good point on forgetting in "How To Take Smart
| Notes". We view it as a negative thing, but if we remembered
| everything we would be drowned in details and we wouldn't be able
| to distinguish signal from the noise. He argues that forgetting
| makes us able to learn.
| shock wrote:
| > if we remembered everything we would be drowned in details
| and we wouldn't be able to distinguish signal from the noise.
|
| Not to mention how difficult it would be to distinguish past
| from present.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| I think there is actually a lot of benefit in being "smart
| enough" but not a genius in some areas.
|
| When I was growing up, if you were too smart as a young kid,
| you'd be singled out as "gifted and talented" and then put in
| special classes, asked to do more schoolwork, etc. This
| separation had both positive and negative effects - on the one
| hand, it was a lot less boring to work on accelerated material.
| On the other hand, adults came to view you as "special" and just
| inherently smart in a way others weren't. That's both denigrating
| to others, and an intense amount of pressure for a kid.
|
| Personally, my response to this pressure was always to shut down
| if I didn't immediately grasp something. I just didn't bother to
| try - why fail and look stupid? It wasn't until college that I
| learned how to study and flex mental muscles that weren't already
| strong. In fact, I took introductory calculus three times - once
| in high school, twice in college - before I actually understood
| what was going on. Unlike language-related fields, higher
| mathematics just didn't come naturally. It took three tries
| because I had to figure out how to _study_ , which I had never
| needed to do until that point, and because I'd taken the idea
| that I had to study as a sign I was unfit to be learning the
| material at all.
|
| I went on to do just as well as my peers, or better, in the other
| higher mathematics classes I needed to take, but the fear was
| always there - what if this is finally the thing I can't do, that
| my brain just can't learn? What if this is just too hard, because
| it doesn't come naturally at all?
|
| It's much better, in my view, to be someone who knows they _can_
| do anything, but that they have to put in effort. Learning to put
| in that effort consistently and not be disheartened by the
| challenge is much more valuable in some ways than knowing how to
| do the specific thing one is learning.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-02 23:01 UTC)