M2M Day 268: How your brain works

Max Deutsch
Jul 27, 2017 · 4 min read

This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For July, my goal is to solve a Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle in one sitting without any aid.

Here’s a doodle. What does it look like to you?

How about now?

In the context of the word, it’s much more easily recognized as the letter E, and yet, it’s the same exact squiggle.

This is because your brain tries to predict the future, which affects the way you see the world. In other words, your interpretation of the world isn’t objective — instead, your brain is primed in some way or another, skewing your interpretation of the world to more closely match your priming.

This is why Republicans and Democrats are more likely to think that their respective candidate won a presidential debate, for example.

This is also why, after you see the letters “APPL”, your brain drastically lowers its standards on what it’s willing to except as an E. Your brain anticipates an E, because of its priming, letting it more easily interpret the input as such.

If you’re interested in the science, I’d recommend that you check out the books On Intelligence and How to Create a Mind, or this TED talk:

But, in short, to continue with the “APPLE” example, your brain has some pattern recognizer that is devoted to recognizing the letter E. When it sees the squiggly E from above, this visual input is passed through your E pattern recognizer. Based on how much the pattern recognizer thinks the input is actually an E, it will output some amount of electrical activity. If this activity surpasses a certain threshold, a message is sent to your brain, letting it know that it has seen an E. If the threshold is not reached, your brain says “Nope, not an E”.

When you see the squiggle without any context, your brain’s E pattern recognizer has a pretty high threshold. After all, there’s no reason for it to expect an E. In fact, there’s no reason that it should even expect to see a letter from the alphabet.

However, once your brain is primed with APPL, the threshold of the E pattern recognizer is significantly dropped, preparing itself to call just about anything an E.

Your E pattern recognizer may even be willing to accept something like this…

Certainly, you see the word Apple.

Anyway, the point is that our brains work in two directions at all times: One direction is from sensory inputs to interpretation. The other direction is from prediction (interpretation of the past) to sensory inputs, affecting how real-time data is consumed.


So, what does this have to do with crossword puzzles?

In the beginning of the month, I assumed that my brain only solved crossword puzzles in one direction: From clue to answer.

In other words, I highly valued my ability to parse a clue in isolation. This is why I incorrectly declared that my “Crossword Trainer” was useless, since it was unlikely that I would see an exact clue-answer pair from a previous crossword in a new puzzle.

But, in reality, solving a crossword is all about thinking and anticipating in both directions (from clue to answer, and from answer to clue).

For example, in this past week, as I read a clue, I found myself trying to anticipate the answer before I ever looked at the grid, priming my brain accordingly. Then, I would look at the grid, and because I had this priming, I was able to more strongly validate or invalidate my guess.

Additionally, when I saw a partially-completed answer, I would anticipate what the full answer and corresponding clue would be. Then, I would validate this guess against the actual clue.

By creating this loop of anticipation, my brain became much more receptive to finding the right answers in the crossword puzzle.

This is why, in many cases, during my successful solve, the correct answers often came to me instantly, even though the clues could likely correspond to many potential answers.

In this way, when I was using the Crossword Trainer to memorize the 6,000 most common crossword answers, I was essentially priming my brain to anticipate the most likely words within any given crossword. This helped me build up the necessary mental anticipation in the direction of clue to answer.

Then, I used my Letter Trainer, to practice using partial answers to anticipate clues (i.e. in the direction of answer to clue).

With both of these anticipation capabilities, I was able to create a highly effective mental feedback loop.

The power of this feedback loop seemed to grow exponential as I added more and more underlying data, which is why I made huge jumps in ability in the past week and why I was caught by surprised (I projected that my abilities would grow more or less linearly).

Anyway, the point is… My Crossword Trainer and Letter Trainer were able to harness this feedback loop and become much more effective training tools than I originally suspected.

Read the next post. Read the previous post.

Max Deutsch is a product manager at Intuit, the creator of Somebody.io and Rightspeed, and the guinea pig for Month to Master.

If you want to follow along with Max’s year-long accelerated learning project, make sure to follow this Medium account.

Max Deutsch

Written by

Founder at https://LearnMonthly.com. Blogging at http://MonthToMaster.com. Get in touch at http://max.xyz.

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