A theory on automation of human knowledge
Let’s pause for a second and really try to imagine a time and place when you learned and finally understood something complex. It was awesome. All that dopamine rushing through your brain made you feel nothing short of a genius. Maybe it was an interesting topic in class, a neat coding trick, or something from your latest book. Despite the effort, it felt great. The next time you encounter the same topic, you’ll no doubt spare some of that precious mental capacity to refresh it in your mind. And by the third or fourth time, the subject will feel almost instinctive. But why is that?
The answer lies in how our brains automate themselves.
When we encounter something new (and not life-threatening), we activate something called the prefrontal cortex. This is the most rational part of our brain and important in abstract thinking and logic. Try to imagine a white rabbit teaching a classroom of ducks about bitcoin. Here you go — prefrontal cortex at its finest. Most of you have probably heard about the prefrontal cortex, but I bet you haven’t heard about basal ganglia. Basal ganglia are clusters of nuclei deep within the brain, responsible for the integration of learned motor and cognitive skills. In other words, it is what we call muscle memory, but it’s not limited to motor skills. Once we encounter a problem a given number of times, less and less activation of the prefrontal cortex is required, and more of our basal ganglia kicks in until the point, where we don’t have to rationally think about the action we are performing or the idea, we are contemplating about.
This beautiful dance between the two structures is mostly damaged in patients with Parkinson’s disease, where patients if asked to write down their name, will require a significant amount of time and focus to perform the act because they will need to activate energy-consuming prefrontal lobes due to damage to the basal ganglia.
The main idea here is that once a certain cognitive task, such as why HTML is not a programming language is reinforced many times, basal ganglia will automate the task almost without you knowing about it and it neatly compacts it into what I call a Brain Black Box.
The Brain Black Box (BBB)
If someone mentions aspirin, my first thought is decreased platelet aggregation, because somewhere along with my medical studies, that is what I have concluded based on a few in-depth sessions. This is an example of a BBB.
The trick here is that once a BBB has solid foundations, it can be used to build larger BBBs. For example, when I hear about stroke prevention in patients with atrial fibrillation I know not to prescribe aspirin because it won’t be effective, but it will be in carotid artery narrowing due to atherosclerosis.
And so the hierarchy of boxes can become quite long, stacking up into several layers of abstraction, which define the total complexity of the idea, but not the individual’s level of understanding. A person instinctively only remembers the input and the output of the black box, but rarely its detailed contents. Doing so would require investigating a lot of black boxes and investing a significant amount of prefrontal mental capacity, which would consume a lot of energy.
What conclusions can we draw from this?
- Experts in their domain build their knowledge and experience based on several layers of abstraction and are sometimes reluctant to give detailed reasoning to their conclusion precisely because it would require a lot of prefrontal processing power.
- Remember, the input and output of the BBB are much more readily available than its content, which is why content is often forgotten. This is not a problem unless the content needs to be elaborated on in detail. In such case, use the magic words — “I don’t know”.
- Prefrontal processing power, like time, is a resource in limited daily quantity. Use it wisely. And as software developers like to put it, “Don’t reinvent the wheel”.
Additional resources
A M Graybiel
Tiziana Marilena Florio