The strange path of accepting how your brain works

Great article. From the perspective of someone who's getting older, you have to come to grips with the fact that your mind and brain change in ability just like your body does. At first it can be frustrating, and you see it only as a negative. But strangely, having your brain change a bit in terms of its speed or its ability to memorize and recall things can actually give you a new perspective on solving problems and thinking about things in general. I'm not saying it's a bed of roses, for the most part it's a loss. I'm just saying you can learn to accept that and move on with the capabilities you have at the moment, rather than wallow in self-pity and see every cup as half empty.

There's also the fact that as you get older you simply know more, you've seen more patterns and data. You're like a machine learning algorithm that's been trained on a larger corpus.

I think there is actually a lot of benefit in being "smart enough" but not a genius in some areas.

When I was growing up, if you were too smart as a young kid, you'd be singled out as "gifted and talented" and then put in special classes, asked to do more schoolwork, etc. This separation had both positive and negative effects - on the one hand, it was a lot less boring to work on accelerated material. On the other hand, adults came to view you as "special" and just inherently smart in a way others weren't. That's both denigrating to others, and an intense amount of pressure for a kid.

Personally, my response to this pressure was always to shut down if I didn't immediately grasp something. I just didn't bother to try - why fail and look stupid? It wasn't until college that I learned how to study and flex mental muscles that weren't already strong. In fact, I took introductory calculus three times - once in high school, twice in college - before I actually understood what was going on. Unlike language-related fields, higher mathematics just didn't come naturally. It took three tries because I had to figure out how to study, which I had never needed to do until that point, and because I'd taken the idea that I had to study as a sign I was unfit to be learning the material at all.

I went on to do just as well as my peers, or better, in the other higher mathematics classes I needed to take, but the fear was always there - what if this is finally the thing I can't do, that my brain just can't learn? What if this is just too hard, because it doesn't come naturally at all?

It's much better, in my view, to be someone who knows they can do anything, but that they have to put in effort. Learning to put in that effort consistently and not be disheartened by the challenge is much more valuable in some ways than knowing how to do the specific thing one is learning.

I think intelligence is more then just biology. Its a technology. In my experiance we can significantly improve our ability to learn just with aquiring different mental techniques. Theres no getting around that some peoples brains are already pre-wired or had experiences to cause this, and thus have a headstart (all these geniuses like von Neumann etc) but that doesn't mean you can't start treading in the same path.

Everyone's brain might be different, but that just means you might need different mental techniques then someone else. For example, I'm terrible at memorizing things, my working memory is rather small compared to the average person I've come to find[1]. To adapt, I focused on finding things that would let me compress memory, focusing on the 'core' of things so to speak and ignoring everything else. For example, in math and physics, I ignore pretty much all the equations and instead try to find the similarities that tie everything else together and use that to derive/figure out the rest as needed. This way I can get away with knowing much less. (I've also been lucky to have teachers that let us reference the equations on tests). Suprisingly, I found this acts as a great foundation for learning new things, letting them slot together much more readily. (I also got into the habit of using a notebook as both a reference and workspace for ideas, letting me refer back to things that dropped out of my working memory quickly)

The thing is though, if I didn't pressure myself to develop that habit in the first place, I would never have improved.

I think a huge part of mental ability is simply having motivation to go through the process.(admittedly a large part of motivation is biological/just how you are wired)

[1]This is a bit subjective, the important part I think though, was the pressure it caused me to put on myself to improve.

Very relatable reverie. I'd add to this that, while the author focuses on the genius of von Neumann, most of the smart people around you aren't actually like that. They too have limitations, strengths and weaknesses, and the fact that you're working with them is already a good signal that you're clustered fairly close together in capacity.

If you value intelligence, in and of itself, you’re going to have a crisis when your brain inevitably decays with age. A more resilient, but similar, value is: doing the most with the intelligence you’re gifted.

Sönke Ahrens has a good point on forgetting in "How To Take Smart Notes". We view it as a negative thing, but if we remembered everything we would be drowned in details and we wouldn't be able to distinguish signal from the noise. He argues that forgetting makes us able to learn.

> A few problems in, I noticed him pause when starting on a new problem, and after a brief moment, he wrote down an answer without any intermediate steps or work.

Isn't that pretty frequent for high school work? I'm not a genius, far from it, but I spent a big part of high school writing down solutions and being bothered by the professors to write the steps (that's how I felt at the time, I've since understood why they acted that way).

Great article. Something I really struggle with. That is accepting my brain and it's limitations. But working to improve it daily.

I think this is an up-close look at a small part of a much larger overarching concept that most people never really come to grips with in the way that the author does: Life isn’t fair.

That anime character perspective reminded me of myself when I first started out. I figured with hard work over time, I would someday be able to confidently just sit down and start cranking out code to fix most every problem.

How wrong I was, the further I go along the more time I spend being totally out of my comfort zone and learning new frameworks or trying to figure out someone else's code.

I also struggle a lot with the limitations I have, frustrated at being so slow and stupid. I've also relied on flashcards as an augmentation, but I've started to question its value. For language we're already wired to pick up on it without tools like flashcards. As I think back, like most people (I assume) I learned English through watching TV without subtitles, and reading online. I didn't speak much (if at all) until I was about 20. By then I was pretty much fluent, just from TV and the internet, no flashcards nor lots of output (like conversations) needed. Ironically, I'm in the process of building a language learning tool, but it's aimed at bringing interesting native content (TV) down to a level where a lower intermediate learner can enjoy and learn from it.

Anyway, my hope is that the difference in performance between me and those more naturually "gifted" is in how they use the neurons they have, maybe there's a way for me to find a better way to use what I have. I think the key to this is spatial as well as social reasoning and memory. We're already wired to excel at these things. I can barely remember the formula for cross entropy loss, but I remember the layout and details of that coffee shop I frequented 10 years ago in a different country without much effort. Jeff Hawkins talking about thought through reference frames and movement in his book on the brain really indicates to me that taking the effort to encode our knowledge spatially, i.e. finding the right representation, rather than trying to beat it into our heads with spaced repetition is a bette rway. I've also noticed that when I can tie ideas to a face, a person, I'm more likely to remember them. I think a good way for me to remember science and math is to learn the history of the subject, like who invented/discovered what in what order, where (possibly) and why, i.e. what's the story behind it all.

I don't like mnemonics, because they're basically garbage encodings. They make it possible to retrieve a memory, very slowly, but don't encode things in a way such that you can reason over them. It's the difference between one-hot encoding a word in NLP vs a semantic word embedding.

If we could foster scenius instead of genius we would have a lot more opportunities for collaboration and would not need a genius around to leap forward...

Excepting von Neumann, I've recently enjoyed the parts in Turing's Cathedral on Nils Barricelli, and would encourage anyone interested to look into the sections about his kilobyte-scale genetic algorithms.