Why do we need mental breaks? Why do we get mentally tired? Why do we task switch?
Anecdotally, many people report that they can focus only for limited few-hour time slots for creative focused concious work.
Naively, one would think that the brain is getting tired like a muscle yet the brain -as—muscle might be a misleading analogy. It does not seem to get tired or overexert itself. For instance, the amount of energy used does not significantly vary with the task [LINK?].
Global Workspace theory suggests that focused conscious reasoning is all about serially integrating summarized computations from many parallel unconcious computing units. After finishing the serial conscious thought the conclusion is backpropagated to unconscious computing units. Subsequently, these unconscious computing units need to spend time to work on the backpropagated conscious thought before there is enough ‘fertile ground’ for further serial conscious thought.
Famous scientists often credit dreams and downtime with creative insights. This explanation would fit that.
It could also explain why it seems easier to change conscious activities. Switching tasks can be more computationally efficient.
A related but different frame is related to how human memory is encoded:
Human memory is a form of associative memory, very different from the adress-based memory of computers. Our best model of human memory are Hopfield Networks/Ising models. Patterns that are correlated are stored less efficiently as they can interfere with one another. There is an hypothesis that part of sleeping is getting rid of spurious correlations in our learned memories such as to encode them better. This takes time—in the process the data becomes more distinct, better learnt, and more compressed! This means that later on we may compute with the pattern faster on a later timestep.
Why do we need mental breaks? Why do we get mentally tired? Why do we task switch?
Anecdotally, many people report that they can focus only for limited few-hour time slots for creative focused concious work.
Naively, one would think that the brain is getting tired like a muscle yet the brain -as—muscle might be a misleading analogy. It does not seem to get tired or overexert itself. For instance, the amount of energy used does not significantly vary with the task [LINK?].
Global Workspace theory suggests that focused conscious reasoning is all about serially integrating summarized computations from many parallel unconcious computing units. After finishing the serial conscious thought the conclusion is backpropagated to unconscious computing units. Subsequently, these unconscious computing units need to spend time to work on the backpropagated conscious thought before there is enough ‘fertile ground’ for further serial conscious thought.
Famous scientists often credit dreams and downtime with creative insights. This explanation would fit that.
It could also explain why it seems easier to change conscious activities. Switching tasks can be more computationally efficient.
A related but different frame is related to how human memory is encoded:
Human memory is a form of associative memory, very different from the adress-based memory of computers. Our best model of human memory are Hopfield Networks/Ising models. Patterns that are correlated are stored less efficiently as they can interfere with one another. There is an hypothesis that part of sleeping is getting rid of spurious correlations in our learned memories such as to encode them better. This takes time—in the process the data becomes more distinct, better learnt, and more compressed! This means that later on we may compute with the pattern faster on a later timestep.
An alternative mechanism is a reinforcement learning task with uncertain and delayed rewards. Task switching becomes optimal if there is a latency/uncertainty in the reward signal. Compare the Procrastination equation: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RWo4LwFzpHNQCTcYt/how-to-beat-procrastination