On Genius
This tweet today got me thinking about a set of journal notes + dialogue with my favourite smart friend about the subject of learning. So I thought I’d share it here. Enjoy and let me know your thoughts!
- The Notes: Talent = Enjoyment + Repetition
The more pleasurable the feedback from something, the higher the motivation to pursue the experience again, right? And the higher the motivation to pursue the experience, the greater the pleasurable feedback when the experience is experienced.
Whether something is deemed or expected to be pleasurable then in the first place, is a result of what happens the first time it’s engaged.
If the baby hasn’t yet learnt to not approach things with high motivation slash high pleasure expectation, it will do so, giving the experience its best shot to return pleasure; and if that experience does return feedback that registers as pleasure then, thereafter baby knows to approach receptively again in the future and repeat the behaviour that made the pleasurable feedback happen.
And of course there is the situation of high motivation generated by recoil from something else unpleasant, accounting for the classic trauma based supercharged learning.
In any case, some people grow up in such a way that high motivation is encoded for certain behaviours, thus allowing them to attain genuine hedonic satisfaction from the feedback loops of those behaviours, and likely, also allowing them to perform those behaviours well — given the obvious link between repeated motivated pursuit and performing the behaviour correctly to external judgement.
So when people talk about talent they mean a thing that you enjoy so much — which is to say receive reinforcing rewards for almost every element of performing it — so much that you have been doing the various performances of it repeatedly, and perhaps from a young age; so much so that you have essentially practised it deeply enough to perform to a higher level of some standard in comparison to others.
It’s not that I think genius or talent doesn’t exist, it’s that I see it as a state of affairs that can result from this loop, for ANYONE, as opposed to like an innate characteristic possessed by some and not others.
2. The Texts: Genius Results from Breadth
Okay all well and good, but I think the other determining factor for genius is breadth. I think it’s to have accumulated information not just down one subject but across multiple such that: extra dimensional perspective on any one body of knowledge is possible. And ditto for seeing patterns you can only see from outside the field or via analogy.
13:15
Oooh, yeah that makes sense! But I think at some point learning anything begets a love of learning itself, which compounds — wait, that doesn’t actually make sense, does it?
13:18
Ha, yeah I think you’re right about learning becoming a stim on its own almost regardless of subject but I think that just mediates how one will feel about the acquisition of some new piece of information on a subject they care about as opposed to making multiple subjects equally likely to be consumed. I definitely think people can fall in love with learning and still end up staying in only one lane.
14:03
No, you’re absolutely right there; that’s actually most examples of genius we see right? Like the extreme specialist good at the one thing and then ironically dumb on so many other fronts; or worse still, loud and wrong. So then I guess the other factor is proximity of the things to be potentially learned to the pet subject on which the stim of learning is primarily based.
14:06
Exactly, like a filter. Which makes sense given how it is with food. Like enjoying the sensational consequence of milk leads to motivatedly seeking it specifically and then eventually the overall stim of food consumption. And while that enjoyment of eating can and usually does cover lots of ground beyond the original milk that got the party started, there is still a filter and accordingly a spectrum of what is considered food and indeed appetising or attractive food to the individual.
14:10
3. The Voice Note: A more detailed breakdown
So memory records that Y was the body’s state after a given stimulation (call it X) landed the last time. And everywhere in general there’s code that says: “if this then that”; as in, for any given state there is a THAT — a next in line consequence; like the IFTT thing in computer science —
If the body is in Y state (this being a snapshot of where things stand following the landing of X incoming stimulation from the environment), then Z is the THAT that follows — the total picture of consequential reactions after Y.
Wait, I feel like I’m losing the thread…
Okay no, it’s back! Ok yeah, so memory has a record that Y is the state of the body following X stim, and Z is the reaction that happens after the body is in Y state. So then when the probability of Y happening becomes non-zero, because that underlying stim X is in the vicinity, the probability of the Z reaction taking place also becomes non-zero, and I guess starts unfolding unless and until interrupted by some other IFTT loop playing out.
So for the whole sequence to play out properly: X stim, then body in Y state as a result, then subsequent Z reaction; anything purporting to be X or just floating around minding its own business and happening to pass into the zone of consideration (e.g. one’s range of vision), would have to register as close to matching the description of the original X as recorded on file in memory. Right?
In other words, things have to be considered a match in order for the resulting Y state and consequential Z reactions to be triggered. So where X is new information or food or whatever and Y and Z are the receptive states and then entire cascade of reactions entailed in noticing and consumption, there must be a moment where it’s like either: “nah that thing has no, or insufficient, qualities in common with the record of X in memory, ignore”;
or on the other hand, it’s like: “hot damn that’s the same set of characteristics we have in memory as X, and yep there’s the resulting Y state so let’s get this Z party started and salivate in hunger or curiosity then chomp.
Which I suppose is just a long way to say that I reckon it’s the proximity or distance between a prospective piece of information and the original subject that got them all horny for learning in the first place, that would determine whether people are drawn to consume.”
4. More Texts: Pattern Thinking
That feels like it jives with my idea that autistic smart is always more intelligent than neurotypical smart. Because we are, for whatever reason, wired to see relationships between things more readily than things themselves; hence the always seeing supposedly weird or oblique connections and patterns. So we can almost always find some proximity, some entanglement, between any prospected piece of information and what we are already interested in or knowledgeable about or reliant on. Even the least X looking thing will still register and trigger Y and Z.
14:45
But then that has me wondering why that’s the case to begin with? Why do we see relationships between, more readily than actual things?
14:50
Well autism is just getting a head start on thinking since the big thing is that your cortex comes online before the brain stem; and I think after you pass a certain level of holding knowledge about anything you start seeing that information in commonly used groupings and recording information about how the knowledge has been previously applied or what other knowledge it relates to or is interchangeable with, and other sorts of pattern data; and eventually this replaces the individual bits of original information itself.
14:50