Fri Jan 31 06:00:01 EST 2020 ======================================== Slept from ten to six without waking. Cloudy. Chance of flurries. Highs in the mid 30s. South winds up to 5 mph. Work ---------------------------------------- - Put Friede in the mail line of fire Done. - 1 PM call with Entrata Done. - Follow up on Comcast high jitter Done. Fifteen-minute walk at lunch. Light snow. Saw and heard a crow. Home ---------------------------------------- Vacuumed, cursory cleaning of kitchen and bathroom. https://lithub.com/how-we-pay-attention-changes-the-very-shape-of-our-brains/ > Very quickly, the idea of learning to pay attention spread like wildfire in the field of artificial intelligence. Today, if artificial systems manage to successfully label a picture (“A woman throwing a Frisbee in a park”), it is because they use attention to channel the information by focusing a spotlight on each relevant part of the image. When describing the Frisbee, the network concentrates all its resources on the corresponding pixels of the image and temporarily removes all those which correspond to the person and the park—it will return to them later. Nowadays, any sophisticated artificial intelligence system no longer connects all inputs with all outputs—it knows that learning will be faster if such a plain network, where every pixel of the input has a chance to predict any word at the output, is replaced by an organized architecture where learning is broken down into two modules: one that learns to pay attention, and another that learns to name the data filtered by the first. > > Attention is essential, but it may result in a problem: if attention is misdirected, learning can get stuck. If I don’t pay attention to the Frisbee, this part of the image is wiped out: processing goes on as if it did not exist. Information about it is discarded early on, and it remains confined to the earliest sensory areas. Unattended objects cause only a modest activation that induces little or no learning. This is utterly different from the extraordinary amplification that occurs in our brain whenever we pay attention to an object and become aware of it. With conscious attention, the discharges of the sensory and conceptual neurons that code for an object are massively amplified and prolonged, and their messages propagate into the prefrontal cortex, where whole populations of neurons ignite and fire for a long time, well beyond the original duration of the image. > > Such a strong surge of neural firing is exactly what synapses need in order to change their strength—what neuroscientists call “long-term potentiation.” When a pupil pays conscious attention to, say, a foreign-language word that the teacher has just introduced, she allows that word to deeply propagate into her cortical circuits, all the way into the prefrontal cortex. As a result, that word has a much better chance of being remembered. Unconscious or unattended words remain largely confined to the brain’s sensory circuits, never getting a chance to reach the deeper lexical and conceptual representations that support comprehension and semantic memory. > > This is why every student should learn to pay attention—and also why teachers should pay more attention to attention! If students don’t attend to the right information, it is quite unlikely that they will learn anything. A teacher’s greatest talent consists of constantly channeling and capturing children’s attention in order to properly guide them. Watched a little anime. Servings: grains 8/6, fruit 3/4, vegetables 4/4, dairy 5/2, meat 3/3, nuts 0/0.5 Breakfast: two eggs, celery, avocado, apple Brunch: banana, bagel, coffee Lunch: cucumber, tomato Afternoon snack: orange Dinner: pizza 136/83