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LunarGiantNeil t1_iui4ope wrote

Here's another example, because the popular bad take on the valid mechanistic view just annoys me: the science on learning things demonstrates that neuroplasticity (the reorganizing of the brain to optimize for cognitive tasks) responds best to "quality inputs" given over your span of attention, which is about 15 minutes for a lot of people, and then requires a good sleep that night to put into practice.

But a quality input requires intent, your conscious role is to filter stimuli, put yourself into a good learning environment, and practice with intention until your focus wanders.

This absolutely suggests the 'awake' part of the brain plays a huge role in teaching things to the unconscious parts of the brain, and then the even other parts play a role in building new brain pathways to make it possible for the conscious and unconscious parts to repeat that thing later.

You 'experience' things through a perception lag, but there really is a role being played by the part of your brain that decides to get off your butt and practice things, with focus. It actually plays a role in physically changing the parts of your brain that run the autopilot parts of your brain that you trigger when you do a complex physio-cognitive thing like playing an instrument or speaking a language.

There's lots of moving parts up there.

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