Sometimes I feel like my brain works like the dog in the movie Up ([1] contains a clip of this if you've never seen it). I get so hyperfocused, so obsessed over certain things that I find myself spending most of my free time in a state of mental masturbation about those things that I love. This is wonderful, but it also doesn't always mean I'm growing my knowledge on those things either. Often times, I find that my low tolerance for boredom eventually pushes me to expand my knowledge, but I'm realizing that it doesn't always happen as quickly as it could.
For instance, I could be absolutely infatuated over some mathematical concept and I'll be thinking it about it constantly. I get excited about it when I wake up in the morning and it might keep me company while I'm driving to work. While I'm constantly thinking about these things, I might be making myself smarter internally by analyzing them to the point of intuition, but I am finding that I begin to form assumptions about those topics that make it harder for me to adjust to changes as a result of new evidence (like when I finally sit down to read something that provides new knowledge about them. This new knowledge might be counter to my previous assumptions).
While I was a teenager, I took guitar lessons for a few years with a private teacher and boy was my thirst for knowledge nothing short of voracious. I didn't want to sit down and learn to play tablature of songs on the radio like other kids. That was boring as heck! I wanted to learn how music works- what's the math that makes it tick? What intuitions do some of these amazing historical composers possess? My teacher had fun with me- we started with the circle of fifths and progressed into more complex modal harmonies focusing on jazz and Spanish classical guitar.
But I remember him telling me, quite often, "You know, when you learn things right the first time, it makes it harder to have to unlearn bad or incorrect habits". My thirst for knowledge would almost always start with an incorrect intuition about how some process works and that intuition would be pivoted, translated, stretched, and warped until eventually, it would match the more generally accepted state of the field in which I was obsessed.
That last paragraph- doesn't that seem like a larger generalization for the way most things work? When we start a business for the first time or we want to expand our business into new areas, we need to first start with a particular model of the world- that model determining the decisions we make and the goals we set initially. Once we get new evidence that counters intuitions we've formed, we incorporate that evidence into the intuition and out pops a new model of the world. They call this "Bayesian Inference" in statistics. When we are babies, we have a model of the world based only on what we've experienced in the womb. Upon getting out into the world, those models are updated constantly until we eventually learn that things don't really disappear when we close our eyes. At one point, we learn how to walk by doing so incorrectly and then fixing it. No harm no foul- we learned how to walk and we did it by trying all the wrong ways first!
In fact, Edison claims that this very phenomena, or process, if you will, was at play during all of his most successful inventions. The path to his success may appear linear to us on the outside but in his view, he "learned 1 million ways to build them [his inventions] incorrectly."
So this pattern of human learning, in and of itself, becomes a little bit inspiring, doesn't it? It reminds us how humans, how all of us, problem solve from birth and build intuitions with a capacity to do absolutely amazing and extraordinary things. But I believe there are ways this process can further be optimized in order to converge our intuitions into the reality more quickly.
In mathematics and computer science, we have a term "Greedy choice". If we think of all the possible ways that the world can work as a gigantic decision tree, you could imagine the sheer number of nodes in the decision tree will become quite massive, rendering any manipulations of such a tree intractable. But what if we didn't need to have the entire tree? What if we could make the most informed choices/decisions in that tree from the start? This would allow the traversal through the tree to become feasible.
A way to visualize this would be how a simple artificial intelligence might have been implemented to teach a robot to play chess back in, say, the 1970's. One way to teach the robot is to have them play millions upon millions of games of chess and, for each game, store off every possible configuration of pieces on game boards as well as how "nice" each of the moves was in terms it leading to a win. This may seem like an easy feat, but it's completely intractable- too many possibilities of different board configurations. It's a combinatorial explosion.
Can you imagine trying to store that information yourself? Even storing this much data on a single hard drive and being able to recall it quickly is likely not feasible. So what we do in these situations is we learn the most probable moves to make and we derive a policy that can be made very small- a simple set of rules that we can rely on to inform our decisions without having to store too much clutter and details in our heads. We abstract concepts into rules in this way because it's efficient, even though it's not always optimal.
I've found, as someone with ADHD, that my tendency for cognitive dissonance increases with respect to many neuro-typical individuals as a result of my overacting thinking. That is, I store too much of my decision tree and abstract it into policies much too quickly. As my former guitar teacher used to say I end up "having to unlearn bad habits" rather than forming the proper intuition out of the box. It's inefficient and it slows me down. Quite frankly, I feel that if overactive thinkers, such as most people w/ ADHD, can just master the ability to halt the abstracting of their current intuitions until after enough evidence has been received to draw better conclusions, they would be able to hyper-learn. And I mean hyper-learn with impeccable accuracy.
Another good example of the phenomena I'm describing is something that my mother tends to do all too often. I believe the ADHD genes to have come from her side of the family and she believes she might be ADHD as well. Of course, she's 70 years old and doesn't care much for getting treatment because she's fine with living her life the way she always has.
But my mom doesn't have much of a filter and she never has. It used to get a tad embarrassing when we would be out in public and my mom would blurt something out about someone who was around us- whether in our party or a complete stranger. She might offer a negative opinion about how someone is dressed or behaves and it's generally done within earshot of that individual. She's a very kind-hearted soul and she'd give her last dime to charity, but it often doesn't appear this way when she says such things in public around people who do not know her.
My in-law's know her now, but that hasn't always been the case. There were "things said" when my mom finally met my wife's family and some things were taken offensively by the in-laws. Over this past summer, after my youngest son's birthday party, where both sides of the family often come to my house for cake and ice cream, my mom had made a comment to me in private that my sister-in-law "looked like a snob".
Yeah sure, my sister-in-law often doesn't smile unless given a reason and she's got anxiety so she doesn't tend to initiate conversations with people unless there's a purpose. But my mom doesn't know her very well and she's obviously formed an opinion that was based on her intuition "policy". She was so quick to take the evidence and abstract it down to be explained by her policy that she had, what would be perceived by most, called a family member a dimeaning name- judgement without really knowing any details.
My point here is not to attack my mother. In fact, I love my mother. But the example here is something we all do all too often- we make a "greedy choice" in the intuition policy that we've formed of the world without regard to the sparsity of evidence that we might have been given. Perhaps, in this case, it's even harder to modify the policy because it may have converged this way years ago and overlooking new evidence may have become part of the policy itself!
I bring this up because it happens with me as well. I'll be working through something for work or school, a really complex concept in mathematics or computer science, and I'll come to the table with my own intuitions founded on nothing more than assumptions. Perhaps there's a vocabulary word that means something different in mathematics than it does in other fields (this happens all too often!) and a cognitive dissonance subconsciously holds me back from being able to accept the mathematical definition- or even to remember it, for that matter. I don't believe at any point that I struggle with it because I believe the mathematical definition to be stupid. On the contrary, I think a lot of it has to do with my intuition suffering as a result of my poor attention span and working memory.
As a visual learner, my intuition about things is often formed first with images- so when I'm reading a book of mathematical concepts and they use words that mean different things in other fields, I naturally get an image in my head based on the definition of the word that I'm used to (often the non-mathematical definition). This causes the subconscious cognitive dissonance because I can't, for the life of me, drill the new definition into my brain.
I'm only pointing this out because, in my view, I think this particular problem wastes a lot of time and causes me to spend more time building my intuition than it should. It's something that I'll be working on now that I've been able to even describe and point out that it happens. They say knowing is half the battle, right?
Do you guys feel like this ever happens to you? Does your brain form a pictorial representation of your intuitions? Does cognitive dissonance ever, inadvertently, set in as a result of your ADHD working memory when trying to mold that intuition?
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