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So.. is "plasticity" a good or bad thing?
by abricot 7y ago
So.. is "plasticity" a good or bad thing?
- WilliamEdward 7y agoIt is both, it's a double-edged sword. On one hand, your brain can adapt very quickly to new stimuli and adopt good or bad habits such as problem solving or addiction. But, this quick adaptation also means you can 'unlearn' these things very easily too. That's my pop-sci understanding of plasticity, i picked it up when trying to get rid of my bad habits.
- drawkbox 7y agoI also wonder if that is the reason so many things online when learning new information are addicting. The brain probably loves the plasticity state and thrives for it. Almost like a dopamine hit. So we go to distractions like reddit and HN or others too often. In the span of a few moments you can learn so much and refine what you know with research if good discussions are going on. It is important to make it useful info though or market/social patterns, not just something that is as easy to forget as it is to learn it.
- etbebl 7y ago"Plasticity" basically means "learning" at a low level, so it's not really an explanation for why learning can be addicting.
- drawkbox 7y agoYeah but learning or completing tasks give a bit of dopamine so maybe learning in short bursts becomes addicting through successive iterations. When you work, you have large tasks, you break them up into smaller tasks, you learn along the way, and you get fueled by dopamine to continue. You learn and use your knowledge to work through tasks that are standard and dynamic in terms of change. Easier to do large projects/tasks by breaking it in small tasks rather than one big task. Lots of 'getting things done' or todo management plans gamify the dopmamine hits into small tasks. Each task can remove or add more work depending on how you complete them or how much you think about them to optimize or reduce work. There is weight to each decision but also forward movement and tasks being completed which gives dopamine. With online communities you are both learning and teaching on each iteration (comment/post) which when you post is a task being completed. The process is pretty standard and easy to repeat and focus on your points. The learning part is new information you get, the teaching part is formulating your response and refinement. Repeated actions like this refine and polish your ideas and understanding of the world. All of that is probably a dopamine hit combined with a bit of social aspect that may increase it. The impact of that task is low so it is easy to attack repeatedly, much like an addictive game cycle. There is little weight to each decision but also forward movement and the appearance/feeling of tasks being completed which gives dopamine. When you are sitting in front of your big project with all the tasks and smaller tasks that have real impact, next to the addicting short burst communities with all sorts of new and old ideas and discussions from learning about space or politics to jokes and memes with low impact, the online communities/information/learning can outweigh your work/project as the former seems to become a bigger draw if you aren't careful. It is almost easier to feel like you have been doing things posting on reddit/HN until you break out of a focus state and realize that is taking from your work time, but easy to slip into due to the amazing breadth of information and topics, where work is just focused usually. Both situations your brain is probably in plasticity states and getting dopamine from the learning and teaching short tasks. It is probably best to have multiple projects you are working on one serious and one with more open creative mode so that procrastination is at least on work during worktime and addiction to distractions is limited. Creating addicting game cycles to give dopamine hits and repeated addictive cycles is very evident also in social media or online discussion, like the little reddit notification. You can easily go spend 15 minute breaks from work and end up hours into a reddit/HN/social discussion. The plasticity of the brain in internet discussions also has our mind in a receptive state, so that is why online misinformation/disinformation is probably so able to propagate as well. The brain is open to new information and marketers/propagandists probably love that state to manipulate.
- ChaosDegenerate 7y agoTo add something here: everything is considered addiction nowadays: over-eating, sex, shopping, etc. Not to derail the discussion but isn't it too much? I'm under impression that today anyone who enjoys something more than we would like them to do so in immediately labeled an addict.
- shredprez 7y agoI think I've gotten a different impression. There's definitely a casual use of the word "addict" that is well-understood to be different than clinical, destructive addiction. And that destruction is obviously where the distinction lies. One might label themselves a "coffee addict" because they spend a lot of money on coffee or find themselves more dependent on it than they might like. But I think the average person recognizes that is very different from a spending addiction that leaves you $100,000 in debt and fired from your job because you can't stop shopping online when you should be working.
- ChaosDegenerate 7y agoI have no problem with the distinction you presented. The problem I have is with organizations like WHO that pathologize normal behaviors. In 2018 WHO not only added "sex" to their addiction list. They also added computer games. Not to mention "toxic masculinity" "disorder". So, these are now "well understood clinical destructive addictions" too? Because, hey, this is what clinical psychologists in places like EU use to diagnose "disorders" and "addictions". ICD is the name of the diagnostic book issued by WHO and yes, stuff like this was added by them in 2018 into the latest iteration of ICD-11. So if you happen to be more conservative than WHO would like you to be, don't be surprised to be labeled "computer games addict" (targeted specifically at males, somehow there is no "social media addiction" mentioned that would target females), "toxic masculinity disordered", "homophobic" too. They should change name to "clinical liberal ideology" or more honestly "New Middle Ages Crusaders" for all I care. This is not science anymore and I think ideologist running ideologies like "psychology" are on the collision course with majority of population. Actually have been for some time. Which we know from elections results in places like US (Trump), UK (Brexit), France (Le Pen), Germany (AfD), Eastern Europe, not to mention places where I don't think anyone pays attention to their left-invented disorders like Russia and China. Wondering how it will play out for them long term. But hey, this is the risk you take when you decide to be more of an ideologist than scientist.
- deskamess 7y agoSo if you could introduce a capability (via plasticity) and we keep practicing it regularly over time does it become long term? If so, that would be a great jump start.
- bonestamp2 7y agoIs there a proven and/or simple (but not necessarily "easy" of course) way to get rid of bad habits based on this principle?
- rf15 7y agoI don't think technology can ever fix personality flaws, especially not the desire to find an easy way out instead of doing the work yourself. Or, let's put it this way: any such technology that could overcome your nature would destroy your personality as it was, and probably be used by governments to "fix" their population. So let's not.
- bonestamp2 7y agoI wasn't even thinking about technology. I was more asking about a proven methodology based on this principle that gives someone a structured way to do the work themselves with a high likelihood of success. It's one thing to do the work, but it's ideal to know what kind of work is best to do.
- nighthawk648 7y agoYes very good thing. It means that memory associations to specific input were garnered after one hour. Typically this type of placidity takes a long time of historic reinforcement to generate. Placidity is basically an input into your brain sensory then maps to an associated brain function either a memory or a real physical action, the latter performed in the experiment. Basically a simple neuron is invoked, does it cause your arm to move. The experiment was to attempt to train that neuron to move the arm, which was successful and led to the ‘natural movement’ an hour after experiment... This is super simplified and thus there are some inaccuracies but I think it gets the point across. You can do further research and read the paper if you care to learn of the real specific implications of this experiment.
- vardhanw 7y ago~Placidity~ -> Plasticity. Probably an auto spell check.
- nighthawk648 7y agoYes, sorry you are correct. I will fix when at a computer!
- stanfordkid 7y agoI wouldn’t be so quick to label “quick learning” as a good thing. Sure learning quick is good when you’re trying to adapt to new environments, but environments aren’t always changing. In edge cases quick learning in response to, say, a traumatic event and environment change, can yield learning that is maladaptive. A suitable analogy is to look at gradient descent methods — which explicitly rely upon a “learning rate” parameter that controls how quickly the algorithm updates its global result as a result of local, immediate, information. Certain classes of problems do well with higher or lower learning rates — so it is very unspecified and unknown how something like this translates to human behavior
- hailwren 7y agoPerhaps even more relevant to your argument, most classes of problems lend themselves to an adaptive learning rate. I.e. we would like to learn our separator or weights quickly when we have no information but we want learning to slow as we have more information (so that we can settle towards a solution representative of the data vs the last batch/data point/hypothesis update) Methods like Ridge Regression also support your point. There is a lot of value to defining how learning takes place, and specifically more learning is often bad for our results(in ml).
- 0xcde4c3db 7y agoIt depends on context and on exactly what is meant by "plasticity" (which isn't very precisely defined in general).
- magnetic 7y agoIt depends. Tinnitus is believed to be, in many cases, due to the maladaptive plasticity that happens in response to hearing loss. The brain doesn't hear some frequencies so it "reconfigures itself" to amp up the volume on those frequencies. Not unlike our own HiFi amps, if you increase the volume on a line that doesn't carry a signal, you get all kinds of bad noise.
- petra 7y agoAny way to train the brain to silence those frequencies , even while it's quiet outside ?
- warent 7y agoAnecdotally I think there must be. I recently realized that I'm pretty sure I've had some form of tinnitus since I was a small child and never recognized it as such until recently. The sound inside of my ears is only there when I focus on it or if it's really quiet. The strange thing is because I always heard it when I was falling asleep as a child, it has always been associated with relaxation and rest, and so ends up lulling me to sleep rather than causing me distress like it does for so many other people.
- duahncjak 7y agoI think this also applies to many kinds of low-grade chronic suffering. Changing your response to the sensation might be easier than stopping the sensation.
- magnetic 7y agoLike many other conditions, severity matters. Mild tinnitus is very common and generally not an issue. Severe cases are a very different beast and can easily lead to suicide. See https://journals.lww.com/thehearingjournal/Fulltext/2016/07000/Suicidal_Ideation_Among_Patients_with_Chronic.6.aspx https://journals.lww.com/thehearingjournal/Fulltext/2016/070...
- mettamage 7y ago
- api 7y agoDepends. If your model of the world is inaccurate, it's better to change your mind. If it's accurate, it's better not to.
- has4erw 7y agoExploration vs exploitation. But it gets funky when you try to think of how it applies to higher-level human thought. Like trying to optimize a hyperparamter without even knowing what your categories are.