Life In 19x19

I just stumbled this and thought it was a fun demonstration of the brains ability to adapt.



I've always found my experience with music to be very motivating when trying to learn something new. Despite not being very good at it when compared to other people, those years of practice have shown me how something that seems mindblowingly difficult can become second nature with enough practice, and I wondered if reading this might be a shortcut to the same realisation.

This message appears to most people as a seemingly random muddle of letters and numbers. If you are reading it, your unusually super clever brain is decoding it before you even comprehend its contents. If you can read it, post it in as many places as possible so everyone else the select group capable of reading it can feel good about themselves.

Or a shortcut to the realization that our perception of what is difficult is actually badly calibrated to our capabilities? Clearly the reading task shown turns out to be rather easy for us. Are our brains amazingly clever or our preconceptions amazingly poor?

amnal wrote:This message appears to most people as a seemingly random muddle of letters and numbers. If you are reading it, your unusually super clever brain is decoding it before you even comprehend its contents. If you can read it, post it in as many places as possible so everyone else the select group capable of reading it can feel good about themselves.

I feel so cynical today.

You get that the title was a joke right? The point was that it seems hard at first but by the time you reach the end it's really easy.

you're a bunch of geniuses

ez4u wrote:Or a shortcut to the realization that our perception of what is difficult is actually badly calibrated to our capabilities? Clearly the reading task shown turns out to be rather easy for us. Are our brains amazingly clever or our preconceptions amazingly poor?

That's my point. Sometimes it's appropriate to judge difficulty by considering your current capability, but often it would be more helpful to judge by how hard it is to learn.

I can't help but find it ironic we all seem to feel the need to point out that we are superoir to the writer's attempts to make us feel superior.

Splatted wrote:I've always found my experience with music to be very motivating when trying to learn something new.

I'm similar - except, for "music", read "mathematics and (to a lesser extent) go". The brain is fantastic at spotting and internalising patterns. Though I must admit that most of my weakness in go is due to my reluctance to let go of patterns...