1. Anyone who thinks that art of any kind makes you a better person
had better explain why concentration camp commandants could listen to
Bach at night--with great appreciation. (And, for all I know, read
Goethe and Schiller). Furthermore, surely museum guards, exposed to
art daily, must be among our better persons, right? Evidence?
No, literary art is the same: it is its own best excuse. To see how an
author spins a tale, presents a character, reveals a landscape, or how
a poet stops us short with a line that upends our thoughts, all these
using only the medium of words, the stuff in our mouths every day, is
simply to be made more sensitive to the act of observing. Good enough,
as far as I'm concerned. If it also helps you to understand human
nature a little better, in its contradictions and inexplicable
impulses, so much the better.
2. "Compiled knowledge" was first noticed in expert chess players (so
far as I know). They "chunked" knowledge that less experienced players
had to put together slowly, piece by piece. I expect it is the same in
go, the same in playing a violin, the same in medical diagnosis, in
architecture. That's why it takes ten years to attain expertise in
almost anything. That compiled knowledge cannot be made explicit is
another question, and since I haven't thought about that issue for a
while, I won't say. I *suspect* it can be made explicit with some
effort.
3. I have also read what Robert read about the vision system taking up
40% of our brain. (40%? 60%? a high very proportion). Small
illustration: my cousin had surgery to correct a vision defect she'd
had all her life (she was in her sixties). Though physically her
vision in the corrected eye is perfect, she still has some trouble
with that eye because the brain pathways have not yet adjusted to the
new vision. It gets better, but very gradually.
On Oct 14, 2010, at 10:46 AM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:
As I quoted earlier ... the best performance [expertise] came from
'compiled knowledge' which is intrinsically inexpressible.
Sometimes, we'd like to think it's pattern recognition. It
definitely is in my mind when I play Go. Being inexpressible means
I can't tell that there's a pattern in there or not - it feels like
it. "How to ride a pedal bike" is also in that category, tho' it
doesn't feel like pattern recognition at all. May be it is some
emergent phenomenon of how the brain works that makes it look like
expertise. More probably expertise is something the other guy has
like an accent.
BTW, I was told on good authority some years ago that Vision takes
up 40% of our brain. That includes the reading process. So I never
buy into the we "only use 10% of our brain" hypothesis.
Thanks
Robert C
On 10/14/10 8:06 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
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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