4 ms·

If you practice something 4 hours per day, 365 days per year, you'll hit the legendary 10,000 hour mark in about 6 years and 10 months. --- Does this mean tha

If you practice something 4 hours per day, 365 days per year, you'll hit the legendary 10,000 hour mark in about 6 years and 10 months. --- Does this mean that each of us has a reservoir of about 4 hours of intense concentration per day? When we perform a less-intense task, like driving or facebooking, are we using those 4 hours at a reduced rate? This sounds like it could feed into another idea - that each human has a limited number of actions per day. Performing actions costs concentration, and so we pay for each action from our concentration reservoir?

minikomi 14y ago
Sounds quite similar to the concept of ego depletion : http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion
- ErikAugust 14y ago
  Agree - Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast & Slow is a good book that addresses the topic. Understanding how the brain works a bit really helped me to get "in the zone" a lot more often and I have certainly seen gains in focus/concentration (which translates into learning/ability) because of it.
rayiner 14y ago
I think theoretically less-intense tasks use up your concentration more quickly if you do it intermittently with an intense task. Which I think makes the usual "work 30 minutes, Facebook 5 minutes, repeat" cycle quite devastating to productivity. I think we overestimate how quickly we can really context switch. It's interesting to look at how people respond to stimulants. People take adderall to "help them focus" but what it really does is magnify what I think is a latent resistance to context switching.
jonmc12 14y ago
In 'How to Create a Mind', Kurzweil states that Kasparov could simulate 100k board positions in parallel. Which was roughly same working knowledge as, say, Shakespeare with 100k word senses (http://books.google.com/books?id=FCcXiBPurdEC http://books.google.com/books?id=FCcXiBPurdEC - search for 'board positions' and read next 3 pages). Further, he suggests that each of the 100k may require 100 pattern recognizers in neo-cortex. That means, the brain needs to configure 10 million patterns in total - these are either newly observed, or new relations formed with existing patterns. I'm sure its not linear, but if you divide 10M patterns by 10k hours, that means the neocortex needs to add an average of 1 pattern every 3.6s, or 4k patterns per every 4 hours (ie, limit for day). Thats about 400k neurons / day re-purposed for learning through deliberate practice to learn 40 board positions / day in chess. __________________________ Continuing the conjecture, what we know about about spaced-repetition and mass-repetition might provide some nice bounds for upper limit on how these neurons can be exposed to learning material over 4-hr period to optimize their use as pattern recognizers. Could make a nice illustrative simulation to speculatively address your question about limits of concentration / learning reservoir.

minikomi 14y ago

Sounds quite similar to the concept of ego depletion : http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion

ErikAugust 14y ago
Agree - Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast & Slow is a good book that addresses the topic. Understanding how the brain works a bit really helped me to get "in the zone" a lot more often and I have certainly seen gains in focus/concentration (which translates into learning/ability) because of it.

rayiner 14y ago

I think theoretically less-intense tasks use up your concentration more quickly if you do it intermittently with an intense task. Which I think makes the usual "work 30 minutes, Facebook 5 minutes, repeat" cycle quite devastating to productivity. I think we overestimate how quickly we can really context switch. It's interesting to look at how people respond to stimulants. People take adderall to "help them focus" but what it really does is magnify what I think is a latent resistance to context switching.

jonmc12 14y ago

In 'How to Create a Mind', Kurzweil states that Kasparov could simulate 100k board positions in parallel. Which was roughly same working knowledge as, say, Shakespeare with 100k word senses (http://books.google.com/books?id=FCcXiBPurdEC http://books.google.com/books?id=FCcXiBPurdEC - search for 'board positions' and read next 3 pages). Further, he suggests that each of the 100k may require 100 pattern recognizers in neo-cortex. That means, the brain needs to configure 10 million patterns in total - these are either newly observed, or new relations formed with existing patterns. I'm sure its not linear, but if you divide 10M patterns by 10k hours, that means the neocortex needs to add an average of 1 pattern every 3.6s, or 4k patterns per every 4 hours (ie, limit for day). Thats about 400k neurons / day re-purposed for learning through deliberate practice to learn 40 board positions / day in chess. __________________________ Continuing the conjecture, what we know about about spaced-repetition and mass-repetition might provide some nice bounds for upper limit on how these neurons can be exposed to learning material over 4-hr period to optimize their use as pattern recognizers. Could make a nice illustrative simulation to speculatively address your question about limits of concentration / learning reservoir.