Canalization and plasticity in human brains

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)

3 Matrescence

The brain rewriting mothers experience over childbirth (Orchard et al. 2023).

6 Incoming

• 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.