Comment by kaivi
6 days ago
> We constantly anticipate what happens to us in "the future", approximately, and where the farther future is predicted progressively less exactly
There's then evidence of what's called Predictive Coding. When that future happens, a higher level circuit decides how far off we were, and then releases appropriate neuromodulators to re-wire that circuit.
That would mean that to learn faster, you want to expose yourself to situations where you are often wrong: be often surprised and go down the wrong paths. Have a feedback mechanism which will tell you when you're wrong. This is maybe also why the best teachers are the ones who often ask the class questions for which there are counter-intuitive answers.
> There's then evidence of what's called Predictive Coding. When that future happens, a higher level circuit decides how far off we were, and then releases appropriate neuromodulators to re-wire that circuit.
Yes, and ideally there would be whole backpropagation passes which update the entire model depending on how much the current observation diverges from past predictions. (Though brains use an updating mechanism which diverges from the backpropagation algorithm.)
Edit: Apparently the theory of this is broadly known (apart from "JEPA" and "predictive coding") also under the names "free energy principle" and "active inference": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle