Even if there were an easy way of pumping more information into our brains, the extra data inflow would do little to increase the rate at which we think and learn unless all the neural machinery necessary for making sense of the data were similarly upgraded. (p45-6)
This seems far from obvious to me. Firstly, why suppose that making sense of the data is such a bottleneck? And then even if making sense is a bottleneck, if the data is in a different form it might be easier to make sense of.
Intuitively, things that are already inside one’s head are much easier to access than things one has to read, but I’m not sure how relevant this is—it seems likely to me that something turning up from an external source ‘in your head’ is much like it being read to you out of the blue.
The visual cortex can handle huge amounts of data input, but the amount of data one can output by typing/writing/drawing is orders of magnitude lower, suggesting that data output is the lower-hanging fruit for BCI.
Two datapoints: I find reading and typing faster to both be very useful, suggesting my brain is not bottlenecked in its capacity to understand things at my natural rate of reading or typing.
I’ll have to weigh in wiith Botrom on this one, though I think it depends a lot on the individual brain-mind, i.e., how your particular personality crunches the data.
Some people are “information consumers”, others are “information producers”. I think Einstein might have used the obvious terms supercritical vs subcritical minds at some point—terms that in any case (einstein or not) naturally occurred to me (and probably lots of people) and I’ve used since teenager years, just in talking to my friends, to describe different people’s mental processes.
The issue of course is (a) to what extent you use incoming ideas as “data” to spark new trains of thought, plus (b) how many interconnections you notice between various ideas and theories—and as a multiplier of (b), how abstract these resonances and interconnections are (hugely increasing the perceived potential interconnection space.)
For me, if the world would stop in place, and I had an arbitrary lifespan, I could easily spend the next 50 years (at least) mining the material I have already acquired, generating new ideas, extensions, cross connections. (I sometimes almost wish it would, in some parallel world, so I could properly metabolize what I have, which I think at times I am only scratching the surface of.)
Of course it depends on the kind of material, as well. If one is reading an undergrad physics textbook in college, it is pretty much finite: if you understand the presentation and the development as you read, you can think for an extra 10 or 15 minutes about all the way it applies to the world, and pretty much have it. Thinking of further “applications” pretty much add no value, additional insight, or interest.
But with other material, esp in fields that are divergent and full of questions that are not settled yet, I find myself reading a few paragraphs, and it sparks so many new trains of thought, I feel flooded and have a hard time continuing the reading—and feel like I have to get up and go walk for an hour. Sometimes I feel like acquiring new ideas is exponentially increasing my processing load, not linearly, and I could spend a lifetime investigating the offshoots that suggest themselves.
This seems far from obvious to me. Firstly, why suppose that making sense of the data is such a bottleneck? And then even if making sense is a bottleneck, if the data is in a different form it might be easier to make sense of.
Intuitively, things that are already inside one’s head are much easier to access than things one has to read, but I’m not sure how relevant this is—it seems likely to me that something turning up from an external source ‘in your head’ is much like it being read to you out of the blue.
The visual cortex can handle huge amounts of data input, but the amount of data one can output by typing/writing/drawing is orders of magnitude lower, suggesting that data output is the lower-hanging fruit for BCI.
Two datapoints: I find reading and typing faster to both be very useful, suggesting my brain is not bottlenecked in its capacity to understand things at my natural rate of reading or typing.
I’ll have to weigh in wiith Botrom on this one, though I think it depends a lot on the individual brain-mind, i.e., how your particular personality crunches the data.
Some people are “information consumers”, others are “information producers”. I think Einstein might have used the obvious terms supercritical vs subcritical minds at some point—terms that in any case (einstein or not) naturally occurred to me (and probably lots of people) and I’ve used since teenager years, just in talking to my friends, to describe different people’s mental processes.
The issue of course is (a) to what extent you use incoming ideas as “data” to spark new trains of thought, plus (b) how many interconnections you notice between various ideas and theories—and as a multiplier of (b), how abstract these resonances and interconnections are (hugely increasing the perceived potential interconnection space.)
For me, if the world would stop in place, and I had an arbitrary lifespan, I could easily spend the next 50 years (at least) mining the material I have already acquired, generating new ideas, extensions, cross connections. (I sometimes almost wish it would, in some parallel world, so I could properly metabolize what I have, which I think at times I am only scratching the surface of.)
Of course it depends on the kind of material, as well. If one is reading an undergrad physics textbook in college, it is pretty much finite: if you understand the presentation and the development as you read, you can think for an extra 10 or 15 minutes about all the way it applies to the world, and pretty much have it. Thinking of further “applications” pretty much add no value, additional insight, or interest.
But with other material, esp in fields that are divergent and full of questions that are not settled yet, I find myself reading a few paragraphs, and it sparks so many new trains of thought, I feel flooded and have a hard time continuing the reading—and feel like I have to get up and go walk for an hour. Sometimes I feel like acquiring new ideas is exponentially increasing my processing load, not linearly, and I could spend a lifetime investigating the offshoots that suggest themselves.