Overall an interesting thread. I'd like to offer a couple of
observations, however.
It is hard for me to think of "the brain" as a strongly conserved
quantity. Most people speak as if developing one set of skills or
proto-patterns to match from pushes some other set out... There is
lots of evidence supporting the old rule of thumb that we "only use 10%
of our brains"... Admittedly, the re-remembering that happens when we
recall memories leads to (yet more) mis-remembering (re-member that next
time you are being "coached" for legal testimony).
Admittedly (as might be implied in Gladwell's Outliers examples), the
time devoted to becoming an expert in one thing (exposing yourself to
lots of examples and observing them carefully) takes *time* and *focus*
away from exposing yourself to *other* things. All that time in an art
gallery, takes away from time in the field looking at "little yellow
flowers". Similar skills and styles of observation are required for
both (being good at one prepares you to be good at the other) but one is
done in stuffy (or airy) old (or new) museums and art galleries in the
middle of big cities, far away from the wide open fields and meadows
where little yellow flowers grow.
In my own foray into Morphometric Analysis of Lithics (based on 3D
Surface scanning), I feel like I experienced a hint of how my own
*brain* must do such comparisons... observe enough examples to begin to
develop an unconscious classification scheme of the feature set, develop
a rough measure of the features (what are the distributions of size and
orientation of flakes on a given lithic/point type?) and then begin to
make rough comparisons of a weighted vector of said types, thereby
identifying clusters based on high-dimensional similarity metrics. The
"classification" and even measuring process would probably be enhanced
mightily if I actually learned the techniques of flint-napping *myself*
and didn't just observe hundreds of examples (often thousands of years
old, from locations thousands of miles apart). This kind of "machine
learning" seems to be quite accessible today for experts and hardy
amateurs alike.
Anecdotally, an astute observer (Sherlock Holmes, Columbo, House) can
look at a situation or object or set of objects and do similar analysis
with considerably less "training" on the specific class of objects.
The ability to pull out of an object or situation the most relevant
features and to recognize anomolous features with a limited sample size
is even more fascinating... and something I suspect most of us aspire
to do here, to become meta-pattern matchers... to determine the "pattern
of patterns" in a new situation quickly.
This class of pattern matching seems to be out of reach for automated
reasoning systems for the most part, though I'll bet there are experts
in the field right here ready to inform us on the current state of the art?
- Steve
Well ... by "built up" I mean the collecting of examples. Yes, each
example is part novel and part pattern. So I do get what you are
saying, in regards to how these specific examples allow a sort of
mental pruning, down to the essential aspects.
In Blink, Gladwell uses the example of an art expert who is able to
see - immediately - that a particular statue is fake. The expert's
judgement is immediate, without even articulating - at first - exactly
/why /he knows it is fake. But he has crafted this expertise over
time, with thoughtful and particular study of many, many examples of
real and fake statues.
What's wonderful about this is that many of the rules /remain
/unarticulated. The brain somehow manages to piece together many of
these patterns - these 'essential' aspects - unconsciously. But it
still requires intense study, and foreknowledge of what is real and
what is fake. By giving years of study to these particular examples,
the art expert is allocating more of his brain to record all the
patterns he needs.
This is very similar to how, for example, a blind person has more
expert hearing or touch. It's not that your ears are magically better
because you are blind, or your fingers more sensitive to touch for
reading braille. The blind simply devote more time and study to
interpreting these particular patterns of touch and sound ... more
brain area for processing a greater number of patterns in this realm
than a sighted person would use.
Then eventually, a blind person can read while hardly aware of the
individual dots felt by his fingers.
Perhaps it would be better to say these skills are "developed" rather
than "built up." But they do, I believe, require a larger chunk of
mental space, to accommodate the larger number of specific patterns
that are remembered in the domain of expertise.
For myself, I can assure you the amount of space in my brain dedicated
to statues is much smaller. It's pretty much restricted to "Yes,
that's a statue."
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