Increase the Information Entropy in Your Life
Increasing the options, the uncertainty, keeping things novel will preserve your brain's elasticity, make life go by more slowly, and increase the number of options for the future.
tl;dr Version
- Intelligence makes the external world more syntropic by becoming more extropic.
- Information Entropy increases your potential future histories.
- Information Entropy keeps your brain elastic.
- Information Entropy makes time pass more slowly. Perceptually extending your lifespan.
- Some people have so little Information Entropy they can be described with an algorithm.
- Don't be an algorithm.
Folksonomies: cognition intelligence novelty elasticity
Memes
A Lack of Uncertainty Impacts Learning in Adults
Healthy aging can lead to impairments in learning that affect many laboratory and real-life tasks. These tasks often involve the acquisition of dynamic contingencies, which requires adjusting the rate of learning to environmental statistics. For example, learning rate should increase when expectations are uncertain (uncertainty), outcomes are surprising (surprise) or contingencies are more likely to change (hazard rate). In this study, we combine computational modelling with an age-comparativ...Orwell Notes Hitler's Rigidity of Mind
It is a sign of the speed at which events are moving that Hurst and Blackett’s unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf, published only a year ago, is edited from a pro-Hitler angle. The obvious intention of the translator’s preface and notes is to tone down the book’s ferocity and present Hitler in as kindly a light as possible. For at that date Hitler was still respectable. He had crushed the German labour movement, and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anyth...He notes that Hitler's ideas did not change at all over 15 years and that is a mark of madness.
Alternative Reason for Age-Related Cognitive Decline
As adults age, their performance on many psychometric tests changes systematically, a finding that is widely taken to reveal that cognitive information-processing capacities decline across adulthood. Contrary to this, we suggest that older adults'; changing performance reflects memory search demands, which escalate as experience grows. A series of simulations show how the performance patterns observed across adulthood emerge naturally in learning models as they acquire knowledge. The simulati...The idea that as we grow older, our brains have more information to sort through, which makes it take longer to find the data we need.
Non-Hacking Activities for Aspiring Hackers
Again, to be a hacker, you have to enter the hacker mindset. There are some things you can do when you're not at a computer that seem to help. They're not substitutes for hacking (nothing is) but many hackers do them, and feel that they connect in some basic way with the essence of hacking. Learn to write your native language well. Though it's a common stereotype that programmers can't write, a surprising number of hackers (including all the most accomplished ones I know of) are very able w...Things hackers do in their spare time to keep their minds flexible and sharp.
Environmental Variation Improves Creativity
It also suggests, at least to me, that creativity can be enhanced deliberately through environmental variation. Two techniques seem promising: varying what you learn and varying where you learn it. I try each week to read a scientific paper in a field new to me—and to read it in a different place. New associations often leap out of the air at me this way. More intriguing, others seem to form covertly and lie in wait for the opportune moment when they can click into place. I do not try to fo...Jason Zweig describes how new experiences prompt new associations.
A Second is Subjective
How many seconds are there in a lifetime? 10^9 sec A second is an arbitrary time unit, but one that is based on our experience. Our visual system is bombarded by snapshots at a rate of around three per second, caused by rapid eye movements called saccades. Athletes often win or lose a race by a fraction of a second. If you earned a dollar for every second in your life, you would be a billionaire. However, a second can feel like a minute in front of an audience, and a quiet weekend can disap...Terrence Sejnowski on how a moment of time is a subjective experience that grows longer the more novelty is packed into it.
Stress is Healthy
Your heart might be pounding, you might be breathing faster, maybe breaking out into a sweat. And normally, we interpret these physical changes as anxiety or signs that we aren't coping very well with the pressure. But what if you viewed them instead as signs that your body was energized, was preparing you to meet this challenge? Now that is exactly what participants were told in a study conducted at Harvard University. Before they went through the social stress test, they were taught to ret...At least it can be, if we don't think of it as being detrimental. If we don't stress about stress, but rather think of it as healthy reaction and seek social connections as a coping mechanism for it, then stress is good for us.
Additional Note: Could this be why parents have longer lifespans? The oxytocin response tempers the detrimental effects of stress, leaving only the beneficial?
Cognitive Neoteny in Modern Humans
The boy-genius can be seen as a specific instance of psychological neoteny which is apparently adaptive in modernizing cultures, and it occurred early in science because science is one of the most ‘modern’ and advanced social systems [2]. ‘Neoteny’ refers to the biological phenomenon whereby development is delayed such that juvenile characteristics are retained into maturity. It represents a relatively fast and simple way of evolving adaptations – for instance modern humans in Western Europe ...Perpetual education and change has pushed humans into a perpetual state of youthful cognition. Our brains remain childlike in order to continue to learn and adapt to our ever-changing modern environment.
Cognitive Benefits of Bilingualism
In stark contrast to early suspicions that bilingual children were at risk of retardation or at best, “mentally confused” (Bialystok, 2005), recent research links bilingualism to cognitive reserve and suggests it may offer protection against dementia in old age. Cognitive reserve describes a kind of resilience which appears to mediate the relationship between brain pathology and the clinical expression of that pathology; it is thought that this resilience derives from more efficient use of br...It protects against the onset of dementia in old age and produces numerous sensory and executive cognitive benefits in life.
Intelligence Arises out of a Need to Maximize Entropy
The researchers developed a software engine, called Entropica, and gave it models of a number of situations in which it could demonstrate behaviors that greatly resemble intelligence. They patterned many of these exercises after classic animal intelligence tests. [...] "It actually self-determines what its own objective is," said Wissner-Gross. "This [artificial intelligence] does not require the explicit specification of a goal, unlike essentially any other [artificial intelligence]." ...The more entropy, the more possibilities. Intelligence therefore seeks to maximize "future histories" in order to keep the number of possibilities maximized.
Walking is Good for the Brain
Have you ever wondered why one of the most difficult things to teach a robot to do is to walk on two legs? It turns out there's a reason. Apparently, the simple act of walking turns out not to be so simple after all. Professor Florentin Worgotter of the University of Gottingen in Germany explains why teaching a robot to walk on bumpy terrains like cobblestones is so challenging: "Releasing the spring-like movement at the right moment in time—calculated in milliseconds—and to get the dampe...Walking rapidly on uneven surfaces exercise all areas of the brain and may explain why humans experienced such rapid brain growth once we became bipedal.
Novelty is Good for the Brain
There is unanimous agreement among neuroscientists and psychologists that the human brain operates best when it is regularly subjected to new challenges. We have recently discovered that the brain benefits from a broad variety of problem-solving activities such as crossword puzzles and Sudoku. There also appear to be benefits when we mix these activities up: doing crosswords puzzles for a while and then switching over to Sudoku, and later, back again. The same goes for changing daily routines...The more the brain experiences novel situations, the more it grows new connections, soon it becomes good at growing new connections.
Constant and Free Life
Constant, or free, life is the third form of life; it belongs to the most highly organized animals. In it, life is not suspended in any circumstance, it unrolls along a constant course, apparently indifferent to the variations in the cosmic environment, or to the changes in the material conditions that surround the animal. Organs, apparatus, and tissues function in an apparently uniform manner, without their activity undergoing those considerable variations exhibited by animals with an oscill...Mammals and other animals that maintain a constant environment within themselves are free of the changes to the world outside them.
Spend 20 Percent of Your Time Learning New Things
He says things like, "Do good stuff." He says, "If you don't do good stuff, in good areas, it doesn't matter what you do." And Hamming said, "I always spend a day a week learning new stuff. That means I spend 20 percent more of my time than my colleagues learning new stuff. Now 20 percent at compound interest means that after four and a half years I will know twice as much as them. And because of compound interest, this 20 percent extra, one day a week, after five years I will know three time...From Joe Armstrong, the "compound interest" on this learning will result in big gains in the future.