brain, memory, learning and creativity

understanding the architecture

• sensors
• filters
• processors

 

hierarchy of information

• vision
• voice
• emotions
• language
• semantics

the higher the information level, the faster the memory for it but smaller quantity in our brain. the visual memory has huge quantity, but quite slow in terms of erase and update. so we can use our permanent memory to generated vision info and sore them into our visual memory which can store many many information,but come with a draw back that it can not erase and update very quickly, but don’t worry they are just buffers so eventually you can still reuse them.

a good strategy is to generated information( compact and structured) to a visual form and then take a look at your picture. then you will be able to remember them for a much longer time and access them on demand.

so the key is the picture or voice generation, so how to generated them, any guidelines?

imagine you have two picture to look, the more interesting the picture it is, the more likely you are able to remember them longer. same goes with the voice. so how exactly we find things interesting, one thing might be related to the new information and our knowledge, say how novel it is and how well does it fit our knowledge and rules.

this process of getting a picture shows some aspect of information synthesis and creativity which I will talk about in the later part. 

algorithm of learning

the idea of learning is the opposite to synthesis, where we extract level by level from the raw information, and finally discover the gold. very like a filtering process, but with more sophistication and recursion.

so when we learned some thing, say a language, we can use it to learn further knowledge about some thing, and keeps going, so inside our brain, we have a hierarchical knowledge base and we keep building it up, kind of like a graph which model the environment we live in, but not a firmware which means we can change part of it if it does not model correctly.

 

information synthesis and creativity

one we have a model of the world in our brain, we can run our simulations in side our brain and generate some outputs which after some refinement or optimization, we can speck them out or write them down. that is the essence of information synthesis. but how creative our information is generated, has much more thing involved.

think about generating a joke, that will obviously require much more creativity than just a small talk.

joke is great example, but it has some formulas which is good for us to study more about creative info synth. of course there are many different kind of jokes, some are so called stupid jokes and some are called intelligent jokes, here we have look at the intelligent jokes, dramatic change but logically reasonable, dirty but beautiful, push and pulls.

so it seems all about a good balance, or symmetry, or many other other principles such as recursions, reflections,etc which we perceive them as our fundamental knowledge, which again is part of our model has the most agreement with the nature!