
Your Brain Knows a Lot More Than You Realize  - jamesbritt
http://discovermagazine.com/2011/sep/18-your-brain-knows-lot-more-than-you-realize
======
phunction
Reading this article reminded me of an acid trip I had (thanks Steve Jobs),
where I was completely surprised by how much was going on when the "filter"
was removed and I felt as though I was able to look at what my subconscious
was doing. I wrote a really long essay about it (unreleased), but I didn't
feel all of it was relevant so I'll just summarize my thoughts here: I was
pretty surprised at the depth of thoughts I could access when I tried LSD.

I was surprised at the speed of the processing: simple thoughts like "bike"
would trigger an enormously long chain of associations and thoughts that would
go all the way back to my childhood, and I would vividly recall pictures of my
first bike, but even now when I try to think of it I have trouble recalling
such vivid memories.

I'm not quite sure whether the LSD caused me to think more about things, or
whether it simply removed a filter that otherwise would exist without the
drug. Either way, I walked away from that trip thinking, "there's so much more
going on up there than I realize."

~~~
cturner

        even now when I try to think of it I have trouble
        recalling such vivid memories.
    

Are the youth memories part of what you captured to paper, and are you able to
find an external way of verifying that they're authentic?

I have zero experience in this field and no education in related disciplines
(other than CS :) ).

A theory about experiences such as from dreams - that it might feel like
memory recall but actually be caused by stuff being written directly to the
recall system at the time of recall.

By way of analogy, you used to be able to buy devices that plugged into floppy
drives, and wrote magnetic signal directly to the reader head, without there
being any actual movement or a real disk in there.

Continuing this (still entirely speculative) theory, after we wake up, a whole
lot of internal correction rebuilds our knowledge map. This could explain why
our memory of dreams fades as we wake up - that stuff we experienced wasn't a
genuine experience and our brain has ways of knowing and chucking the junk.

------
coryl
_Well, almost exactly. The Japanese invented a method of sexing chicks known
as vent sexing, by which experts could rapidly ascertain the sex of one-day-
old hatchlings. Beginning in the 1930s, poultry breeders from around the world
traveled to the Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School in Japan to learn the
technique.

The mystery was that no one could explain exactly how it was done. It was
somehow based on very subtle visual cues, but the professional sexers could
not say what those cues were. They would look at the chick’s rear (where the
vent is) and simply seem to know the correct bin to throw it in.

And this is how the professionals taught the student sexers. The master would
stand over the apprentice and watch. The student would pick up a chick,
examine its rear, and toss it into one bin or the other. The master would give
feedback: yes or no. After weeks on end of this activity, the student’s brain
was trained to a masterful—albeit unconscious—level._

Huh? "Subtle visual cues" that seemingly cannot be described, but can somehow
be taught and passed on? I call bs.

Just googled it, here's the technique:

 _Vent sexing, also known simply as venting, involves literally squeezing the
feces out of the chick, which opens up the chick's anal vent (called a cloaca)
slightly, allowing the chicken sexer to see if the chick has a small "bump",
which would indicate that the chick is a male. Some females have very small
bumps, but rarely do they have the large bumps male chicks possess._

~~~
bane
"Huh? "Subtle visual cues" that seemingly cannot be described, but can somehow
be taught and passed on? I call bs."

I'm still on the fence. Years ago I rented a room in my house to an immigrant
from South Korea who got his work visa (and later his green card) because he
could sex chickens and the local farmers couldn't get anybody local who knew
how to do it. He got great pay, and relatively easy work hours since as the
taskers became tired, their error rate went up. He worked with several other
sexers who were all either from South Korea or Japan.

He could never quite explain how he did it, but he did teach a few Americans
at the poultry plant how to do it via the technique described in the article
before moving on to some different trades.

------
irrationalfab
I (try to) use this process to learn efficiently.

When I want to understand a complex topic (e.g. back end development), I
simply read every now and then articles and posts beyond my comprehension. And
I do it quickly. When I commit to learn the topic, I usually find that 90% of
the work is already done. Is really like somebody else was processing all the
information.

I think that this is a very powerful process to boost knowledge. But it also
has significative drawbacks. It tend to be a far less social person when I
saturate my subconscious. I also noticed, that my brain tends to discard
little details. For example sometimes I can't remember what I eat at lunch.

AS a side note, I also noticed that I can bump myself out this learning mode
if I don't touch a computer for the whole day. I do it on saturdays and
sundays and start the next week feeling more productive. On the other hand if
I don't do it for a couple of weeks I tend to feel exhausted.

Anybody else has similar experiences? Tips to share?

~~~
ajuc
I'm reading books different way than people I know. I'm skipping many
fragments, I think I read maybe 10% of the whole text. This applies to fiction
and technical books as well.

I'm doing this automatically, without thinking about it, some time ago I've
discovered this, when at 2nd reading of the book I've stumbled at a fragment
that made my understanding of the whole story "reevaluate" :) Somehow I've
missed the fragment before, and the whole book made less sense.

I've tried to understand how my brain decides what to skip, and the heuristic
is sth like this - read all things that starts with "-" (dialogs are the most
important), beginning of the paragraphs, and the places that have many
whitespaces, skip most of the other text, if you don't know what you are
reading about - think for a while to deduce what's going on, if you don't know
- go back and read more. That's not the whole heuristic, but that's what I can
easily notice.

Especially the skill to "wait for a few pages to see if something you don't
know yet will explain by itself, or can be deduced from what you know" is
usefull. That way I read faster than most people I know, and I'm good at
quickly learning material for exams (but without using the information I
quickly forget what I've read. I even don't remember sometimes if I've read
this book at all - mostly happens with fantasy books - they are all similiar
:) ).

I'm also very bad at remembering names of real people and book heroes. I
remember them "functionaly" - the one that is the uncle of the bad guy, etc.

~~~
orp
Interesting. I read about the same way, and I find that I'm using something
very similar to your heuristic (looking for dialog signs, skip-reading long
descriptions, etc.)

I call this 'reading for the plot'.

I also suffer from the same issue with remembering names. I wonder if the two
phenomena are related.

~~~
lpolovets
This might sound facetious, but it's not meant to be: if you are reading for
the plot, then what is the advantage of reading a book compared to reading its
summary on Wikipedia or some other site?

I sometimes wonder about where the value of reading (fiction) comes from: is
it the plot and trying to figure things out before they are explicitly
explained? The little details? The long, lyrical passages? The act of reading
itself? Something else? I'm curious what your thoughts on this are.

~~~
orp
Well, if you think percentage wise, I guess for a given book I'm reading
50-90% of the text. That's far more than a summary.

Emotionally, it's certainly enough to get attached to characters, which is the
point. But the way my brain likes to read (it's not a conscious decision, just
the way I do it), is to skip a lot of the description, and get to the
interesting bits (dialog, action scenes, etc).

I certainly miss out some subtleties, but if you and I read the same book we
could have a meaningful discussion about it, probably without you realizing
that I likely read it in half the time and only paid attention to about 80% of
the content.

------
meric
"With a little ingenuity, the British finally figured out how to successfully
train new spotters: by trial-and-error feedback. A novice would hazard a guess
and an expert would say yes or no. Eventually the novices became, like their
mentors, vessels of the mysterious, ineffable expertise."

I think a lot of programmers here learned programming the same way too.
Sitting in front of a compiler/interpreter, edit the code, try to compile and
run the program. We will get a "yes or no", and if no, we repeat the
procedure. Today, we can program without thinking consciously "will this code
compile"; We just write it and a lot of the time, it compiles just fine. If we
were to teach someone having trouble with programming however, the most useful
advice we have is usually "You just need to spend more time with it".

------
rohit89
A few years back, one skill I realized that I have is that I can recognize
people at a distance. I recognize them by the way they walk, the way they
dress, their height and a couple of other cues that I can't really explain. As
long as I have met the person a few times, I can pick them out even when they
are in a crowd and it takes only a second or so for me to realize that I know
the person. I may not remember the person immediately or place him, but I will
be sure that I know him. I've had a few false positives here and there but
never a false negative. This is in complete constrast to noticing things
around me. I could walk past a shop multiple times and not see it, not realize
that a picture has been moved, not realize that my friend got a new phone etc.
All these things come as suprise for me, but never with people. I don't
consciously observe or study how people walk, dress etc but apparently my
brain processes it all. I can't explain it, I just _know_.

I read about a year back that a person's gait can be used for biometric
identification (something which I wondered about because its seems to be the
primary way I recognize people). The article linked to a pdf that showed an
attempt at designing a system that recognized people from their gait. It was
incredibly difficult and complicated because you needed a lot of sensors to
measure, bunch of high level math to process and prone to failure because the
gait would change if you were carrying a heavy bag, walking on a slippery
floor etc. Yet, the brain is capable of doing all this and adjust to
situations all in a fraction of a second. It was the first time that I was
_seriously_ blown away by how incredible the brain is.

------
thret
"Amazingly, this entire sequence is possible in less than four-tenths of a
second; otherwise no one would ever hit a fastball. But even more surprising
is that conscious awareness takes longer than that: about half a second. So
the ball travels too rapidly for batters to be consciously aware of it."

I believe I've had this experience with some computer games - like tetris -
where at some point it is too fast to really see what is going on despite the
fact that you are still playing correctly.

~~~
Too
This is why gamers go berserk when they don't get a monitor with 100Hz refresh
rate and a computer that can deliver 100fps. You can really tell the
difference, even though studies show that your brain can only react in 20ms
and your eyes can't see more than 25fps and blabla. Though i think it's quite
well known that the 25fps myth has been busted long ago.

In the near future I guess we will have to live with 60fps, which still is
quite good, since that's becoming the defacto standard refresh rate of tvs and
monitors. But it's quite sad to see newer games trying to lower the frame rate
just for more visual effects, Battlefield 3 for example only runs in 30FPS on
consoles T_T

~~~
sp332
Actually 24 fps was chosen for film (way back when film was first
standardized) because it was the _lowest_ frame rate at which your eyes
interpret the separate frames as smooth motion. 60 fps makes a huge difference
over 30 fps in a movie.

------
JoeAltmaier
To debug code, I read it. All of it. Without trying to process it. Sometimes
the bugs jump out at me. Not the only way I debug but it has its place.

One consulting project involved 900 modules in 200 directories. I opened
modules and skimmed through, and the bugs were just everywhere. (No, not
false-positives. Once flagged, you can read carefully and prove the bug). I
abandoned that source base as unredeemable and wrote a simple 10-module driver
to replace it. (The customer rejected it, couldn't believe I could be right.
They hired somebody else, the product was cancelled and recalled 9 months
later).

~~~
kahawe
Not having a clear-structured and measured method doesn't equal to not having
any method any relying purely on your subconscious. Sounds more like you were
parsing through the code and lots of typical hints such cesspools usually have
made it pretty clear very quickly.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Perhaps. But I page through the code faster than I can register the details.
Just the 'shape of it' gets through. Not really time for parsing. So some
subconscious element must be in play.

------
billswift
This is the reason government regulation never works as well as the regulators
expect. It is the distinction between "tacit" knowledge and "explicit"
knowledge. Most tacit knowledge is both local and non-verbal, some can be
explained after the fact, like the chick sexing technique, but the verbal
description itself isn't the useful part. And it is contained in the heads of
the people actually doing the work so it is rarely, if ever, taken into proper
account when formulating regulations.

For a really good explanation of the differences and the problems caused, read
Thomas Sowell's _Knowledge and Decisions_. Hayek's _Use of Knowledge in
Society_ also discusses this, as do other books and essays, but Sowell's is
more readable and his examples are closer to contemporary (it was written in
the late 1970s and published in 1981).

------
ap22213
This makes sense to me - and, I do this all the time, especially with games.

Recently, I took a three-day trip and wanted to zone out on a game, so I
started playing a card game called 'spider solitaire', based on a friend's
suggestion.

I had never played it before, and I found it to be very challenging with all
the difficulty settings set to the maximum. And, at that difficulty level, I
would quickly lose every attempt, and it was very frustrating.

But, by the third day, I found that I suddenly winning 15-20% of my attempts.
Not statistical evidence by any means, but I was playing enough to definitely
see a drastic change in success.

The funny thing was that I had no idea why I was suddenly winning. I didn't
consciously change my playing methods. In fact, I 'felt' like I was just
moving the cards around the same as I was before.

------
extension
I'm awfully skeptical that there is some part of the mind called
"consciousness" that is distinct from all these other "unconscious" things. I
suspect that what we think of as conscious thought is just a frankenstein of
these same little faculties, that just happen to have control of your mouth.
The sensation of unity and free will is just that: a sensation, nothing more.
I'm not even sure we would claim to have the sensation if we didn't learn
about it from our culture.

The story about the judge is great evidence of this. He knows what an injury
is, and all his senses tell him he is injured, but somehow he still can't
_know_ that he is injured. Or at least, he _behaves_ like he can't know it.
The conscious/unconscious model of the mind just can't reconcile this.

~~~
maeon3
The words "Conscious" and "unconscious" to describe thought states is like
trying to cram an array of ints into a boolean. I always saw my mind as a
collection of states ranging from "Front and center, obvious when I'm wide
awake" to "mysterious process I cannot control". Like night time brain
optimization strategies, night time breathing, squeeze-loosening process to
get the small intestine to flow, etc.

We need a better resolution picture of "Conscious" and "Unconscious".

~~~
tqgupta
<http://www.quora.com/What-is-consciousness>

------
colonelxc
The story about the chickens and planes was fascinating. In those cases, there
obviously is something that the brain can detect that differentiates the
different sets, yet is something so subtle that the conscious mind cannot
readily identify it.

I'd be interested to hear if "muscle memory" like this is used in machine
learning/AI type situations for things such as evaluating and tuning randomly
created classifiers to identify objects, or respond to stimuli. If so, we
could extract those "memories" from the computer to identify exactly what it
ends up using to classify different objects, to show us the subtle
differences.

------
syncopatience
"To the extent that consciousness is useful, it is useful in small quantities,
and for very particular kinds of tasks."

I wonder where programming falls on this?

~~~
nagel1234
Problem solving can fall under both categories I think. If you have a lot of
experience, eventually you begin to instinctively know what approach to take.

