Hey there fellow Apprentices,
It’s time for another co-authored discussion piece. This time Dan Smith & I are exploring the neuroplasticity of our brains and how it links to learning, innovation & communication. All while sharing a story or two from understanding our own minds along the way.
Dan is a fellow multipotentialite operating at the intersection of tech and art, where he’s used his skills to master all the latest trends. Whether it’s virtual DJing in the metaverse, using ChatGPT to summarise entire books or diving down the rabbit hole of DAOs, he’s always exploring where his heart takes him. Fully recommend dropping him a connection on LinkedIn.
Now the small talk is over, it’s time to dive into what matters…
Introduction
Everyone’s brain is different. Radically different in fact. And delightfully so. For the world would be a boring place if they were the same. Even identical twins don’t have identical brains. Instead, they have different experiences throughout their lives which create unique connections between their neurons, leading to vastly different brain structures.
But why should you care about the connections between neurons in your head? The brain operates just fine without us knowing how it works, so what’s the point in learning more?
That’s a good question… thanks neuron 3,356 & neuron 71,029.
The answer is pretty simple. These connections in our skulls dictate everything we do. And if we understand how they work, even just a little bit, we can radically change how we approach all the different things we do in life. But, if that isn’t reason enough… realising everything we’ve ever thought is just a little electric signal transporting information between a super complex racetrack in your brain is a sure-fire way to have an existential crisis. And why wouldn’t you want one of those?
So where do we start…
The brain consists of 85-86 billion neurons, each of which can be connected to 10,000 other neurons. Which makes for a pretty complex system. So complicated in fact that we barely understand it, and might never. At this point we don’t even understand the brain of a worm. We can see the worm wriggle, but how no idea how the 302 cells in its nervous system truly work.
But, even though our understanding is patchy at best we do know a few things. The most important of which is that when you learn new information you are creating new connections and strengthening others. Which is a process called neuroplasticity and it’s very powerful indeed.
For each of us is given, for better or worse, a unique context and upbringing in this wonderful world, which enables us to make the connections in our minds needed for learning. Which means that when we want to absorb new information that we consume, it’s important to draw on these different experiences to ground the new concepts within our heads.
How do you do that? Well let us explain…
Learning
Have you ever crammed a whole semester’s worth of content into three days, brain vomited it onto your exam paper and then instantly forgotten everything you learnt in by the time you’re at the pub celebrating?
Well you’re not alone. We’ve all been there.
And there’s a reason for it. Simply that not all the time you spend learning is equal. Some approaches are more effective than others and if you know which ones are which you can supercharge your information absorption.
Hands down the best approach to learning is to create a link between the new knowledge and an existing fact, experience or memory. Which works because instead of forming a new neuron path, you are simply connecting a new neuron to an existing path, which is a considerably quicker process.
Armed with this understanding, one strategy Dan uses when learning something new is trying to think of an experience or analogy he can use from his own life and then relating the two. He’s tried this technique for many memorisation games, but has weirdly found that the analogies work best when trying to remember complex engineering theories.
Not knowing it at the time, Charlie has also linked new information to an existing memory in the form a mind palace. Not quite a Sherlock level one. But, simply for remembering the most strange of facts about an lesser known character in history called Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart who completed all of the side quests of life. In his mind Charlie walks into his childhood home to see a friend’s dad called Adrian kneeling before him with a sword over one shoulder in a puddle of orange juice while looking up at him with a zany 🤪 face. It’s not exactly the prettiest of sights. But, it works. And he’s never forgotten his name. Nor his many exploits that scatter the kitchen, living room & corridors.
Innovation
One guy you’ve probably never heard of called Steve Jobs once said “creativity is just connecting things”. But, it wasn’t just a passing motto. He lived by those words. Practicing them time and again at Apple with the meteoric rise of the Mac, iPod and iPhone that linked existing technologies together.
He did this by drawing expertise from one industry and adding it to another, which is a tremendously powerful skill. But, he’s not the only one that can do this. In fact practiced effectively it can become your competitive advantage as a budding multipotentialite.
A great example of this is James Cameron and the success of the Avatar franchise. He combined his experiences of film making, his love of the deep sea and his mindset grounded in physics (he actually dropped out of a physics degree to pursue his film-making career) to evolve film-making technology and create something truly magnificent. The spectacle we’ve already seen in Avatar 1 & 2 and are set to enjoy three times more with Avatar 3, 4 & 5 would not have been possible without his unique and diverse background.
The cross pollination of innovation has been fundamental to many successful organisations who have applied learnings from one industry to another to beat out the competition. From BioTech to FinTech to LawTech the fundamentals of technology have been applied to whole new sectors, bringing with them the efficiency to decimate the incumbent dinosaurs. So much so that the leaders in the space quickly move to jump on the bandwagon of ideas before they become redundant. Just think how Starling, Monzo & Revolut have forced the traditional banks to get smart with their digital offerings and customer support, lest they lose out on a whole generation of clientele.
Communication
Sometimes topics are very hard to explain without complexity. As an engineer and tech nerd Dan has learned this the hard way. But, the truth is that most people can handle complexity, it just has to be on their ‘turf’.
Meaning that when explaining a new concept you need to meet the person on their level and use anecdotes or metaphors to contextualise it in a way they understand. When discussing AI or blockchain with his mam (an eye nurse for the NHS) Dan always talks about it with examples of how it could and will affect the nursing industry, which helps her understand and feel like she is in her depth, while enabling him get an expert perspective from an angle he would not have otherwise have been able to understand. If he just went straight in with a pure technical description complete with a glossary of jargon, his mam’s brain would switch off almost instantaneously.
Which is an important lesson for when you want people to buy into what you are trying to tell them, understand their perspective and find a way to spark a new connection for them. For when it clicks in their brains they will forever associate you with their new found revelation, cementing you in their mind as the truly undeniable genius you know you are. When all you’ve really done is brought an existing subject to within their comfort zone.
Conclusion
You might have heard about this little thing called ‘AI’ in the news recently. Applications such as Chat-GPT, Midjourney and DALL-E have been rampant across all our newsfeeds. And you might have also heard of the term neural networks, which is one of the overarching techniques used in AI models and is named so because it works in a similar way to the neurons of the brain.
Which means AI has the ability to draw from a much wider range of experiences and content. We can feed it anything and it has the potential to understand much more than one single human brain. But, for now at least, it doesn't have the ability to comprehend the nuances that come with deep understanding of a field. It lacks the natural logic humans have that we take for granted (at least most of us) every single day,
Right now AI is a powerful brainstorming partner, enabling it’s human overlord to look at a problem through a huge array of different lenses quickly. But, it’s a matter of time before it inches closer to imitating the learning, innovation and communication possible through the neural networks of the human brain. That will be quite a day. One for which we hesitantly hold our breaths. Please no Terminator AI we beg.
But, that’s enough from us diving deep down the rabbit hole of beauty of brains. We’d love to hear how you hack your brain to make the most of it’s learning, innovation and communication?