Again, I suggest the evidence is exactly the opposite! You assert that the art expert needs lots of mental space to fill with his "experiences" of past real and fake statues. I suggest that he needs less and less mental space the more expert he gets (and that this is typically what we mean by "expertise"). He specifically pays attention to less factors in making his "intuitive" judgments, because he only paying attention to the factors that will give him an answer, rather than all the distracting non-insightful factors he paid attention to when new at his job. This suggests he could have been taught to tell reals from fakes without every knowing what he was looking at, and even without the trainer knowing what he was looking at. (Studies show, for example, that novice chess players pay the most attention to the pieces, while expert chess players pay the most attention to a specific class of empty spaces. I've seen advise in chess books that might lead you to this state, but never one that gave explicit instruction to do so.) It is not amazing that such abilities are unarticulated, we should expect them to be. Being able to do something AND articulate what you are doing is more complex, not more basic, than being able to do something without being able to explain it.
Having a brain that only pays attention to the important things should require less "space", but more "specialization" than having a brain that pays attention to everything. Your brain is NOT like a harddrive on which anything can be written. Your brain is more like a custom made processor, that dynamically adapts its structure, and likes to minimize power usage. To connect this with the other thread, and Rich's eloquent statement, the transcendent person is LESS complicated than the average person. They have let go of unnecessary complications. When you "accept everyone" and "let them all the way in" you are actually doing LESS than an average person, who judges and discriminates each person, and must regulate exactly how much to let each one in. Though the process of development in each of these cases may be complex, the result is surely more elegant and simple than the starting point. Eric On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 02:58 AM, Ted Carmichael <[email protected]> wrote: > > >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." >> > >>-Ted > >>On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 9:47 PM, ERIC P. CHARLES <<#>> wrote: > >>It's strange that when Gladwell says this stuff, it sounds attractive, but >when a behaviorist says the same thing people think it sounds crazy: > > >"Intelligent" behavior is not caused by "thinking", but rather it is >simply attunement of the body to the correct environmental variables. There is >nothing "built up" about it, quite the opposite, it is pared down and >simplified. It is "selective attention", in terms purely of one's behavior >being dependent upon only the essential aspects of what is going on around you. >This shouldn't lead us to think the mind even more wonderful, but rather to >question the usefulness of mind-talk and mind-focused-learning in the first >place. > >Sigh, > >Eric> >> >> > > >On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 06:50 PM, Ted >Carmichael <<#>> wrote: > > > >>On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 4:53 >PM, Merle Lefkoff <<#12ba86c08669b3f2_>> wrote: > > >Merle Lefkoff wrote: > > >[snip] Even so-called "experts" are hard-wired for "loss aversion". They >are likely to form their predictions based on how recently they predicted >wrongly and NOT on the statistics they've studied. >> > >>Well, the point in Gladwell's book was that a LOT of learning and >experience is built up, so that predictions or assessments, etc., become >immediate, knee-jerk reactions. The processes that inform such decisions >occur below the level of consciousness, but nevertheless require years of >study. >> > >>So it's not just statistics that are studied, but rather thousands and >thousands of instances of learning that are remembered, and thus aggregated >below conscious awareness. Even though the process of training one's >brain for many different examples requires conscious thought and reflection, >the end result becomes a reflexive action. >> > >>-Ted > > > > > > > > > > > > >-- >>Ted Carmichael, Ph.D. >>Complex Systems Institute >>> >>Department of Software and Information Systems >>College of Computing and Informatics >>310-A Woodward Hall >>UNC Charlotte >>Charlotte, NC 28223 >><#> >><#> >>Phone: 704-492-4902 > > > ============================================================ >FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College >lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > Eric Charles Professional Student and Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn State University Altoona, PA 16601
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