GHC
Joined 17 February 2020
→ON PROBLEM SOLVING TECHNIQUES
No edit summary |
|||
| (2 intermediate revisions by 2 users not shown) | |||
| Line 7: | Line 7: | ||
But! | But! | ||
We know about what comes straight after that. In your (roughly) first three turns around the sun you will have learned the basics of language, having solidified your mother tongue in a way that you will never manage to do with any other language from then on. This is in part because you won't have the same processing structure available. You are born with an unfair boost of neurons that dissipate with age which cognitive scientists believe gives you the superpower of learning a language without any prior knowledge (among other things). Every other language will be learned by analogy to your first language. | We know about what comes straight after that. In your (roughly speaking) first three turns around the sun you will have learned the basics of language, having solidified your mother tongue in a way that you will never manage to do with any other language from then on. This is in part because you won't have the same processing structure available. You are born with an unfair boost of neurons that dissipate with age which cognitive scientists believe gives you the superpower of learning a language without any prior knowledge (among other things). Every other language will be learned by analogy to your first language. | ||
You will have learned how to move. Your motor cortex, which is a slice of neurons that's roughly in the middle of your brain, will have developed so many connections through trial and error, stumbling and falling so many times that you will have brute-forced yourself into standing. Aided by specified cortexes and lobes and circuitry of neurons with enough cable line to go around the world about 4.4 times (earth's circumference is more or less 40,000 km and an average 20-year-old man has 176,000 km of myelinated fibres - this is the white matter of the brain, or rather, the cabling that connects the grey matter which holds the computing power). | You will have learned how to move. Your motor cortex, which is a slice of neurons that's roughly in the middle of your brain, will have developed so many connections through trial and error, stumbling and falling so many times that you will have brute-forced yourself into standing. Aided by specified cortexes and lobes and circuitry of neurons with enough cable line to go around the world about 4.4 times (earth's circumference is more or less 40,000 km and an average 20-year-old man has 176,000 km of myelinated fibres - this is the white matter of the brain, or rather, the cabling that connects the grey matter which holds the computing power). | ||
You will have learned to identify people by face, voice, movement and with some margin of error, just from looking at their backs. | You will have learned to identify people by face, voice, movement and with some margin of error, just from looking at their backs. | ||
| Line 27: | Line 27: | ||
Another keyword in these scientists lang is 'spreading activation'. Where suppositions about brain mechanics are made, which of course, follow from experiment. A conceptual node that represents a memory object is taken to exist in a large network of other nodes. These nodes are activated upon receiving strong input signals. Once activated, the node can in its turn activate other nodes by spreading energy via its associations to its sibling nodes. If this energy reaches a nodes response threshold then the node fires away as well, causing further spreading activation. Activation is thought to accumulate, so even if a node doesn't fire per se it can still add, or summate, to other nodes and further propagate the activation. This node firing is important because scientists think that this is what brings attention to the node itself, or rather, how memory cascades into the conscious. The theory posed in the previous paragraphs can now be understood from the perspective of this spreading activation in a network of nodes. Retrieval cues and context reinstatement will aid memory recall because these involve firing close-enough nodes to the actual memory that eventually the target memory is bound to fire as well. | Another keyword in these scientists lang is 'spreading activation'. Where suppositions about brain mechanics are made, which of course, follow from experiment. A conceptual node that represents a memory object is taken to exist in a large network of other nodes. These nodes are activated upon receiving strong input signals. Once activated, the node can in its turn activate other nodes by spreading energy via its associations to its sibling nodes. If this energy reaches a nodes response threshold then the node fires away as well, causing further spreading activation. Activation is thought to accumulate, so even if a node doesn't fire per se it can still add, or summate, to other nodes and further propagate the activation. This node firing is important because scientists think that this is what brings attention to the node itself, or rather, how memory cascades into the conscious. The theory posed in the previous paragraphs can now be understood from the perspective of this spreading activation in a network of nodes. Retrieval cues and context reinstatement will aid memory recall because these involve firing close-enough nodes to the actual memory that eventually the target memory is bound to fire as well. | ||
Semantics are also important, specially for priming. This technique involves priming yourself or reading cues before a task (i.e. exam), which will result in a faster response or recall during said task. This priming can be semantic - like the piano example, where you think of semantically related or similar-in-context themes to the thing you're trying to recall. It can also be repetition priming, where you read and re-read a sentence eventually creating priming links between words, one causing activation of the other, thus conducing memorization. | |||
There is an inconvenient truth that is an outcome of the memory system that we humans are running | There is an inconvenient truth that is an outcome of the memory system that we humans are running: Implicit memories and the 'Illusion of truth'. Because our memory systems is intuitionistic and not rationalistic at all - with the causality chain being hardcoded in the form of mechanical bumps of energy and chemicals (in other words, there is no thinking machine inside the thinking machine) - there are numerous problems or flaws in the system involving some brain parts like the temporal lobes, the amygdala, the hippocampus and the rhinal cortex among others. We tend to remember things by context and not by detail. So spreading activation often induces us in error or close-enough situations especially when it comes to remembering facts, similar objects or grainy details like numbers, equations or names. These are often bundled up together anyway so it's easy to get them confused. One possible solution would be to associate them with very different things. Personally I've heard of very good math professors (including Judea Pearl who once spoke about his favourite math teacher in his childhood who influenced him greatly) who taught their material chronologically alongside the story of their inventors and historical context of the invention. This seemed to have the wanted effect - now the numbers and equations are not just numbers and equations but their solidified and differentiated by the aid of their individual history. | ||
The portal could fument memory amnd learning by developing apps which are based on two things we know about memory: people will remember information better if they keep refreshing their memory by trying to recall it. Secondly, when trying to remember many different concepts, this works best if refreshing occurs at the right moment: Things that are solidified do not have to be refreshed again, and things that are not need more refreshing. You save time by refreshing the right thing at the right time. In research on memory, these two principles are referred to as "retrieval-based practice" and "spaced practice". | |||
== ON PROBLEM SOLVING TECHNIQUES == | == ON PROBLEM SOLVING TECHNIQUES == | ||
Generally, problem-solving takes the form of a process of figuring out how to reach a certain goal - this configuration is called '''problem solving'''. The human mind is equipped with a bunch of heuristical strategies to problem solving. Brute forcing, hill-climbing strategy, means-end analysis and many more usually emerge naturally in a person's arsenal. You might find yourself trying haphazardly all sorts of combinations of letters and numbers to access a locked device to no avail. It doesn't take much to understand how unlikely it is that you'll just randomly assemble the winning code. As an example, take a simple 4 digit code (like most credit cards), not counting 0 - the likelihood of getting it right with no prior knowledge is 1 in 9x9x9x9 or 1/6561, which is the same as to say that there's a 0.015% probability of randomly inputting the right code. | |||