More on Moore’s Law

If you’re anything like me, you have a whole collection of books you want to read, but the opportunity cost of spending 4-5 hours reading a book is too high. If you could drop that time down to 1h30, then suddenly it would become worthwhile.

Why do some people read faster than others? My father and best friend Alexandre Iglesias read much faster than I do. And until now, I never understood how come.

It turns out that slow readers like myself voice the text they read. The written word is captured by the eye, sent to the larynx to transform the signal into audio, and then sent to the audio-processing section of your brain. This is sub-optimal.

This video shows how to rewire your brain to read faster.

By orally repeating 1234, 1234 when reading, you use up all your larynx’s processing capability, and the brain must adapt by sending the written words to the visual-processing section of your brain. As a result, the signal does not go through any intermediary steps, and allows you to read faster with no decrease in retention.

Enjoy!

Brain workshop

In an earlier post, I talked about using technology to increase an individual’s productivity when learning.

In this post, I’ll talk about using it to increase intelligence.

Since intelligence is a hard to define concept, we’ll focus on the concepts of fluid and crystallized intelligence.

In my search of using technology to enhance the human brain, I stumbled upon Brain Workshop, an open source implementaion of the Dual-n-back game.

Studies have shown that progress in mastery of the dual-n-back game correlates to progress in mastery of IQ tests. The game consists of remembering pairs of items in a series, and recalling the pair from a fixed certain amount of steps ago.

I up to a modest dual-5-back now, meaning I can recall a pair of items from 5 steps ago. I started out at dual-2-back, and slowly progressed to where I am now. The record is alledgedly dual-11-back, which I find incredible.

It is recommended to practice 20 minutes a couple of times a week. Seems like an interesting use of technology based on research to enhance human intelligence.

In my Red Queen Race paper I detailed how we should make as much of our activities technology driven as we possibly could. The rationale is to gain the benefits of Moore’s Law for free. That is, our economy’s capacity for producing wealth would increase without requiring work or capital.

It seems that while many sectors of the economy are benefiting from this, there are two sizeable ones that aren’t: Health, and Education.

The way we teach and learn things, in school and out, has not changed significantly since the inception of universities. A teacher speaks, students listen and take notes, than an exam evaluates progress. You could argue that some universities use podcasts and other multimedia technologies; and while it does broaden the potential audience, and increase convenience by having the teaching / recording asynchronous with the learning / playback, it does not increase the productivity of the individual.

If it took an hour to learn something a hundred years ago, it probably still takes an hour to learn today. Such a shame.

I found an open source project called Mnemosyne that helps in memorization. From their explanation page:

When you have memorised something, you need to review that material, otherwise you will forget it. However, as you probably know from experience, it is much more effective to space out these revisions over the course over several days, rather than cramming all the revisions in a single session. This is what is called the spacing effect.

During the past 120 years, there has been considerable research into these aspects of human memory (by e.g. Ebbinghaus, Mace, Leitner and Wozniak). Based on the work of these people, it was shown that in order to get the best results, the intervals between revisions of the same card should gradually increase. This allows you to focus on things you still haven’t mastered, while not wasting time on cards you remember very well.

It is clear that a computer program can be very valuable in assisting you in this process, by keeping track of how difficult you find an card and by doing the scheduling of the revisions. Let’s see how this works in practice in the Mnemosyne program.

It turns out the best time to revise something is when you are about to forget it. Mnemosyne traces a graph of your capacity to remember, and schedules items at that time.

I’ve been testing this for a month now, and I find it very efficient for vocabulary (I use AWAD). Less so for complex concepts, though that could be due to the way I write my cards.

Anyway, I recommend that you try it out. You may download it from SourceForge.