In 1948 Ashby wired four control units together and made a device he called the "Homeostat." What made it special is that it was "ultrastable" - if you changed the dynamics of the system, or plugged it into a completely new system then after a period of adaption it would relearn how to keep its outputs between tolerances.

Ashby gave the example of an autopilot - if you flipped the yoke controls so that up was down and down was up, a traditional autopilot would go into a positive feedback loop and crash, but the Homeostat would adapt to the new dynamics.

He postulated that this was a model for some systems in the brain and perhaps all learning (he wrote an entire book about it) and there's some evidence he was right. If you put goggles on someone that flips their vision upsidedown, they adjust after a few days... and have to readjust again when you take them off! (This was a real experiment.) YouTuber SmarterEveryDay found he could learn to ride a "backwards bike," but it destroyed his ability to ride a normal bike. You may have experienced this first hand if you've ever played a video game where the controls were flipped temporarily: it's disorienting, sure, but you quickly adjust.

Because of these phenomena, I think Ashby was right about the Homeostat being a useful model of the brain. It explains why so many apparently contradictory diets "work" - simply making a major changes resets the homeostat in your brain where it may settle into a better calibrated equilibrium eventually.

It implies a simple strategy: are you happy? If yes, we're done. If no, change something, and return to the question. (I've seen this as a flowchart online somewhere but can't find it now.)

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Cthulhu_ 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Motor controls are interesting like that; it's (to my layperson's understanding) a subsystem of your brain close to the brain stem / spine that allows your brain to skip conscious processing for (fine) motor controls. And it can be trained. It's what allows us to learn to play an instrument.

Take drums, put an amateur behind it and it's all over the place, but learning it is (simply?) a matter of slowing down until you can think about every strike, repeating, then slowly speeding up. The movements become almost automatic.

I'm sure something similar happens in 'higher' brain functions, but it takes longer; a common saying is that it takes 6 weeks of conscious effort to form a new habit.

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romanobro56 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yea I learned Dvorak but now I can’t type on qwerty

	▲	abound 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I was thinking about this from another thread (the Helix one). Initially, learning Helix broke my ability to use Vim, but now I flit back and forth between Helix and IdeaVim without thinking about it. Similarly, I switched to a split keyboard at my desk with lots of customizations, and it initially broke my ability to use my laptop keyboard, where there was a several minute adjustment period every time I switched, but now I can jump back and forth without making more typos or typing slower. Both followed the same curve for me: learning the new thing disrupts the old thing, but if you do both enough, your brain/body seems to distill the shared core of both just fine.