My Current Research (Jan 2023)

The major thrust of my thinking at the moment concerns how animals learn and exploit structure in the world.

The world has manifold repeating patterns; from the mundane (things tend to fall unless supported), to the obscure (like a dense mathematical theorem, or musical structures like a fugue). How is it that a completely uninitiated human can, after tuition and effort, come to understand these mathematical or musical structures (among many others), often so well that they can then play creatively with the structure, developing new inventions, elaborations, insights, or analogising between seemingly disparate situations?

Well, finding this structure requires seeing the world in the certain way, a representational question. For example, being able to conceptualise sound as notes on the western musical scale seems a pre-requisite to understanding the fugue's musical structure. You need to know what parts of your stimulus are important for the current situation. Then you need to learn the patterns, and their predictabilities.