Heuristic Oriented Learning

Patterns can be found everywhere. From Fibonacci Numbers in petals of flowers to learning a football shot perfected over 10,000 hours+ of practice. These are some heuristics we see in our daily day to day life and frequently use in our negotiations, the way we respond to our problems, whom we spend time around, etc. Why do we have heuristic oriented learning? One way of perceiving it from a physics point of view is that our brain consumes roughly 20% of the energy produced through food consumed and wants to conserve it so that much of it is available to the other bodily functions.

Our brain paints a picture of the world around us from our sensory receptors and then brings changes to its structure on how we interact with the world. Since the way we interact with the world, brings smaller changes to the physical structure of the brain — a big chunk of carbohydrate, in our skull, thus it is less energy-consuming. Consider an example of Chess, a game with simple rules and patterns but with a surging complexity. If you attack one of my pieces on the 8*8 board, I have many ways to respond to it. For example, I can counter-attack your more valued piece, say King, or can move the attacked piece to another square on the board, maybe defend it with another piece, sacrifice that piece to attack your pieces, or capture the piece with which you are attacking mine, etc. There many ways to achieve those things. Of course, there are options outside the rules of the game like flipping the board or resetting the board to start position, asking the player to take a move back, etc. How we respond is generally determined by the heuristics we have. A player becomes a better one once they understand what heuristics are easy to learn for them and how they can learn the rest through the lens of that pattern.

Winston Churchill once quoted, “There is a place for everyone, man and woman, old and young, hale and halt; service in a thousand forms is open. “There is a place for everyone, man and woman, old and young, hale and halt; service in a thousand forms is open. From the highest to the humblest tasks, all are of equal honor; all have their part to play.” Primarily because the same pattern has many facets in diverse fields. And since there are a plethora of patterns, the number of permutations and combinations are countably infinite.

Coming back to the need of studying heuristics, do we gain something from learning about them, or is it just for the fun of doing science? I think there are many insights that the research points to. There are some patterns in every field one must master, may it be any from sports to STEM degrees to music and art. Acknowledging those patterns and generalizing them in every way possible brings fruitful results. For example, a chess coach once told me to un-learn the patterns that belong outside the rules of the game or the ones that don’t show love for the game, say, giving up on a problem too early, etc., and learn the ones that were implemented by great players. Needless to say, being a researcher today, I couldn’t learn these lessons before committing a mistake. Another example comes from Sidney Coleman, one of the students of Prof. Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize winner in the field of Physics, who quoted, “The career of a young theoretical physicist consists of treating the harmonic oscillator in ever-increasing levels of abstraction.” By spending time around people who we aspire to be, we learn their patterns and incorporate them whenever we tackle the same situation, be it our parents, a famous chess coach, a professor in the lab, etc. This idea resonates well with the research from Neuroscience, “Neurons that wire together, fire together. ”

People who take the Mensa IQ Test are often tested with pattern recognition problems of various kinds. These varied pattern problems are designed to challenge different parts of the brain. Hopefully, in the near future, Researchers can find patterns that pinpoint the parts of the brain to what disease they may carry, For example, Epilepsy, Parkinson's Disease, etc. These might give away symptoms of the underlying disease at an early stage just like a routine check-up with an ophthalmologist. Nevertheless, one must be aware of the countably infinite combinations that our brain may switch to and fro in order to save energy.

Let me end with a heuristic that I challenge you to catch:
“Pattern Pattern everywhere,
Some accepted, others dismissed
Pattern Pattern everywhere,
Not one left fixed.”