AI Speed vs. Human Learning: It's Alarming

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AI Speed vs. Human Learning: It's Alarming

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Hey rockstar,In the last piece, we explored why AI “fast money” shortcuts leave so many people feeling numb, overwhelmed, and disconnected — and why the real foundation of a sustainable business is still connection, care, and community.There’s a closely related piece almost nobody is talking about:If numbness is what erodes your relationships, joy and wealth creation from the inside out, curiosity is what brings it back to life.Not just as a nice idea — but as a literal learning rate for your brain and your purpose.“Hey, before we jump in - when you get a moment, hit reply and tell me…. What’s the #1 thing you’re struggling with right now?The Number That Should Stop Every Purpose Driven Wealth Creation - ColdA developmental psychologist at Williams College tracked how many questions children ask per hour.At age five, the average kid asks 107 questions per hour. They’re relentless. Why is the sky blue? Why do dogs have tails? Why does grandma’s hair turn white? Their brains are running at full throttle, pulling in data from every direction.Then school starts.* By first grade, the entire class asks 2.3 questions per hour — combined.* By fifth grade? 0.48 questions per hour. Less than one question every two hours from a room full of eleven-year-olds.In one observation, kids were experimenting with an old-fashioned balance scale, genuinely doing science. The teacher shut it down: “Enough of that. I’ll give you time to experiment at recess. There’s no time for experiments now. We’re doing science.”Read that again. No time for experiments… during science class.The researcher’s conclusion is brutal: if you lose your curiosity by age 11, you probably don’t get it back.I disagree on one thing. I think you can get it back. But you have to understand what curiosity actually is, neurologically. And that’s where it gets interesting — especially for anyone trying to build something real in the AI era.Your Brain Is a Large Language Model (No, Really)The more I create custom services and learn about how advanced AI models work, the more clear it becomes: your brain is running the same basic algorithm.Consider the parallels:* Your brain has roughly 86 billion neurons connected by an estimated 100 trillion synapses.* GPT-4 has approximately 1.8 trillion parameters across its mixture-of-experts architecture.* Both are massive pattern-recognition networks.* Both learn by prediction.Here’s how an LLM trains: it reads a sentence, predicts the next word, checks whether it was right, and adjusts its internal weights. Right answer? Strengthen that pathway. Wrong answer? Weaken it, try again. Billions of repetitions, trillions of adjustments.Your brain does the same thing.Every experience is a prediction. You reach for a coffee cup and predict its weight. You start a sentence and predict how the other person will react. When reality matches your prediction, your synapses strengthen. When it doesn’t, your brain recalibrates. Neuroscientists call this predictive coding.A 2024 study found LLMs become more advanced, their internal representations actually become more similar to human brain activity during speech processing.Your brain is the original foundation model — pre-trained by evolution, fine-tuned by experience.But here’s the critical difference:An LLM’s learning rate is set by engineers. They decide how aggressively the model updates its weights in response to new data. Too high and it’s unstable. Too low and it stops learning.In your brain, that learning rate has a name. It’s called curiosity. And unlike an LLM, you can adjust it yourself.Curiosity as a Reward Signal: The Dopamine ConnectionUC Davis put people in an fMRI scanner and asked them trivia questions.What they found — published in the journal Neuron — changed our understanding of how curiosity works.When participants were highly curious, their ventral tegmental area (VTA) and nucleus accumbens lit up. These are the same brain regions activated by food, sex, and addictive drugs.Curiosity hijacks your reward circuitry. It’s not a nice-to-have personality trait. It’s a neurochemical event.But the more interesting finding was this: during the curious state, participants were shown random faces, completely unrelated to the trivia. Later, they remembered those faces significantly better than faces shown during low-curiosity moments.Curiosity didn’t just help them learn the answer they wanted. It supercharged their memory for everything happening in that moment.This is exactly how reinforcement learning works in AI. When an LLM gets a reward signal through RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback), it doesn’t just strengthen the specific output — The reward ripples through the network.Curiosity is your brain’s RLHF. It’s the reward signal that tells 86 billion neurons: pay attention, something important is happening, encode everything.Without that signal, your brain does what an ...

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