alt Hacker NewsIt's like those articles that say super high IQ people are not always successful.
So I think human brain development is like some kind of optimization algorithm, like simulated annealing or gradient descent. I think this because there is way more complexity in the brain than there is in human DNA, which has pretty low information by comparison. Anyway, child prodigies occur when the algorithm happens to find a good minimum early on.
Replies
Retric • today at 4:21 AM
Prodigies almost always spend vastly more time doing their thing than the average kid. So it’s not just some random outcome.
That relative advantage goes away as people age and specialize.
Around puberty brain drops loads of connections to become an adult brain.
More than 40% of all synapses are eliminated.