3 ms·

The compression & blur analogy also applies to human minds as well. If you focus on fidelity, you have to increase storage and specialize in a narrow domain. If

The compression & blur analogy also applies to human minds as well. If you focus on fidelity, you have to increase storage and specialize in a narrow domain. If you want a bit of everything, then blurring and destructive compression is the only way. E.g. a "book smart" vs "street smart" difference. "mastery" can be considered a hyper efficient destructive compression (experts are often unable to articulate or teach to beginners) that reduces latency of response to such extreme levels that they seem to be predicting the future or reacting at godlike speeds.

scrollaway 4y ago
That’s a fantastic metaphor.
billiam 4y ago
In fact there's a potent new theory(1) that human consciousness (and probably all mammalian "consciousness") is just a memory system involving some form of lossy compression. Your sense of awareness happens ~20-50 ms after the memory is created. A lot of life is buffering and filtering, and reading that lossy record is very much who we are. Einstein's brain must have been amazing at throwing away information about the natural world. (1) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36178498/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36178498/
- ted_bunny 4y ago
  Why is this comment downvoted?
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    I dunno. It is pretty official that this what the Hippocampus does. What I do know is that people are pretty incredulous when you feed back conventional wisdom about how the brain works, how SSRIs work, etc.