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In Brief
- The brain contains neural machinery for recognizing errors, correcting them, and optimizing behavior.
- The neurotransmitter dopamine plays a major role in our ability to learn from our mistakes. Genetic variants that affect dopamine signaling may partly explain differences between people in the extent to which they learn from errors or negative consequences.
- Certain patterns of cerebral activity often foreshadow errors, opening up the possibility of preventing blunders with portable devices that can detect error-prone brain states.
April 26, 1986: During routine testing, reactor number 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explodes, triggering the worst catastrophe in the history of the civilian use of nuclear energy.
September 22, 2006: On a trial run, experimental maglev train Transrapid 08 plows into a maintenance vehicle at 125 mph near Lathen, Germany, spewing wreckage over hundreds of yards, killing 23 passengers and severely injuring 10 others.
This article was originally published with the title Minding Mistakes.
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8 Comments
Add Commentthe body is the interface not the cause. the interface can be adjusted and triggered to learn as a continuous process rather than as an event triggered process.....adaptability in survival mode situations is different than liesure or evolved living/controlled environments_externalandinternal. The wetware is dependant upon the current state of the individual and the applications encountered and is to an extent, turned on/functioning according to the prior existence of the subject up_to_that_point. One can achieve a continuous state of adjustment as a concious choice as in buddhist "mindfulness," "hypervigilance of the abused child" and so on...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthere are ranges of behavior and shared crossovers to information linkages....discovering a specific solution to a class of problems doesn't dismiss the "class of problem"......?the class of problem? learning as an interactive process...any result that isn't what the querant/experimentor/subject wants is a negative result unless the querant/experimentor/subject learns otherwise....example marmalade/saltwater taffy....
my statement: SCIENCE is PATTERN recognition, not truthand the truth is always opinion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScience is not _simply_ pattern
recognition, ultimately. Originally it is just that,
however, the seeing or realization that something is happening
or repeating itself - that's what the word pattern implies,
before the percieved pattern gets dragged back into the labyrinth
of the dreaded abstract mind, where it is dismembered, still
screaming and made to fit our precious preexisting models. We build models and call them reality, while ignoring reality as being too "changeable." However, if we don't "have a good feel" for reality we build our models incorrectly. Additionally, we face the danger that if we don't know that we may have built our models incorrectly or if we build them without allowing for change we end up defending them because we don't know any better, or it's too much work to change them, or we have too much ego invested, or we don't see the need, or don't see mistakes. The biggest danger is not seeing the possibility of a mistake, which exists because we all have marvelous smoothing algorithms built into our minds that help us to fit things together, perfectly - witness the fact that we are hardly ever aware of the asymmetry of our own faces or of others' faces. If we proceeded as if a comparison to reality were the ultimate judge or test of veracity rather than a comparison to accepted theory, if we know how to think rather than parrot, if the accepted body of knowledge is treated as reliable information rather than the gospel. Suppose...
Suppose the truth is an animal. Suppose that the truth existed in more dimensions than our normal 3+ dimensions. Suppose the truth left behind trails that we name "patterns", then much like the flatlanders in Goedel's example we would perceive only fractions of the truth at a time. Suppose we called these little traces TRUTH without knowing what a whole truth was. If we hold our mind's open to the possibility that the truth is perceivable only in it's ENTIRETY, then it is only by the assimilation of all the patterns into a single group at one time that we could percieve this truth. But I've already said that that was impossible by definition, we could at most build a pattern perciever, a tool of perception, not a model and using it glance along the body of truth...pass truth through the tool to get a sense of, a feeling - all the while using patterns in reality as tuning forks, to maintain our objectivity. Picking up and trying different views, classes of view.....
what I'm pointing at here is that there are multiple systems of interaction involved in responding to stimuli....damped versus undamped systsems....in air traffic control if a plane stays within flightplan and trajectory for it's class...it's simply noticed....if it strays it gets more notice, in some software classes interacting with it it may trigger alarms or monitoring to determine if it's strongly out of place...projected trajectory.....resources are used according to uniqueness....imagination is in a sense excess resource for play....the demands of the situation and the uniqueness determine the amount of resource deployed....every situation is not the same....a mistake is in the eye of the beholder....otherwise there wouldn't be psycho paths...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswow. yes, i am afraid of u.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisniktu klatu barada...earthling....foad
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thislet's get one thing straight: a mistake is a mistake.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswe're not talking various games here or philosophy.
let's get one thing straight: a mistake is a mistake.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswe're not talking various games here or philosophy.
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