Canalization and plasticity in human brains
Updating fast-system priors; therapy as described by mathematicians
April 9, 2022 — December 4, 2024
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Perhaps one reason we do complicated things naïvely is that we do not notice when circumstances change, and in fact retain deep instincts calibrated to some lost past state of the world, and new information does not overspill in that deep-worn rut. A term of art for that wearing-a-groove-into-our-souls, is canalization. Mathematical models thereof have gotten some hype lately, so let us track some of teh ideas.
Is canalization an important concept for meditation? How about for maladaptive feelings? How can we decanalize something we do not want canalized?
Conversely, how do we canalize that which it benefit us to commit to? Maybe choosing this is how we commit to something that is in a sense arbitrary, but also important to commit to — like a relationship.
Canalization is the converse, I suppose, to neuro-plasticity, which is also a hot topic. And moving between states of plasticity and canalization seems to be sometimes called annealing.
Introduction: The Canal Papers - by Scott Alexander about Carhart-Harris et al. (2023)
1 Puberty
(Blakemore and Choudhury 2006; Carhart-Harris et al. 2023; Durston et al. 2006; Tyborowska et al. 2018) TBC.
2 Sex.
Maybe (Leuner, Glasper, and Gould 2010).
3 Matrescence
The brain rewriting mothers experience over childbirth (Orchard et al. 2023).
4 Psychedelics
(Carhart-Harris and Friston 2019; Carhart-Harris et al. 2023) and (Nardou et al. 2019, 2023) argue that psychedelics can induce a state of plasticity in the brain that is normally only seen in puberty.
5 Love
See: What is Love? Neural Annealing in the Presence of an Intentional Object.
6 Incoming
- The Wall of Awful - Mishpacha Magazine
- Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality. 🚧TODO🚧 clarify. NB I think this phenomenon is interesting but I wish he did not use sloppy Bayesian terminology in this case. It sounds like he is talking about an excessively tight prior, but the dynamics of this case diverge in substantive ways from a direct Bayesian update with an excessively tight prior. One would need some more complicated structure to explain the observation, such as a hierarchical model incorporating observation reliability, or an action-observation loop.
- Motivated Reasoning As Mis-applied Reinforcement Learning
- Jiminy Cricket Must Die
- DRMacIver’s Notebook: Emotional reactions as legacy code
- DRMacIver’s Notebook: Your emotions are valid but probably wrong
- The Replacing Guilt series
See also the problem of growing up, messenger shooting.
