> You only learn permanently and effectively from particular stimulation coupled with surprise.
This is just, not true. A single 2min conversation with emotional or intellectual resonance can significantly alter a human’s thought process for years. There are some topics where every time they come up directly or analogously I can recall something a teacher told me in high school that “stuck” with me for whatever reason. And it isn’t even a “core” experience, just something that instantly clicked for my brain and altered my problem solving. At the time, there’s no heuristic that could predict how or why that particular interaction should have that kind of staying power.
Not to mention, experiences that subtly alter thinking or behavior just by virtue of providing some baseline familiarity instead of blank slate problem solving or routine. Like how you subtly adjust how you interact with coworkers based on the culture of your current company over time vs the last without any “flash” of insight required.
You are just rephrasing things without using terms commonly used in research. I used "surprise" because it is a) true (if not complete) and b) easy to understand for people outside of the field. The correct term you are looking for is "arousal" (not necessarily sexual). There is tons of research on the fact that arousal enhances memory formation that would otherwise need many, many repetitions. But it also inhibits memorisation of nearby events. So you either need a very particular emotional state to remember a specific thing or massive repetitions to remember many new things. There's no way to cheat the sample inefficiency of your own brain. And for LLMs we have only figured out the first one, at least without external algorithms.
But that resonance is a form of surprise. You are just using different words for the same context. At the same time: You are correct in the sense, that this "surprise" is completely ignored by today's LLMs. They only use this in training mode and not for continuous learning. Whether one can find a sufficiently useful definition of "surprise" to use auxiliary "learning systems" (vector DBs or system prompts) has yet to be shown
This is just, not true. A single 2min conversation with emotional or intellectual resonance can significantly alter a human’s thought process for years. There are some topics where every time they come up directly or analogously I can recall something a teacher told me in high school that “stuck” with me for whatever reason. And it isn’t even a “core” experience, just something that instantly clicked for my brain and altered my problem solving. At the time, there’s no heuristic that could predict how or why that particular interaction should have that kind of staying power.
Not to mention, experiences that subtly alter thinking or behavior just by virtue of providing some baseline familiarity instead of blank slate problem solving or routine. Like how you subtly adjust how you interact with coworkers based on the culture of your current company over time vs the last without any “flash” of insight required.