In the early days of this blog, my posts were relatively brief, not quite right, but often onto something. A sampling:
Exploration: Generate and Test
Thoughts are inchoate until expressed in the head or the world. Expression generates thoughts from patterns of spreading activation. Expression amplifies some thoughts and quiets others. The act of expression is propelled by purpose – to make sense, to understand, to make a point, make an impression on an audience… Thoughts die but were once alive, if briefly.
Expression is a form of resuscitation.
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Explore or Exploit: That is the Question
The explore/exploit trade-off refers to the decision process of figuring out when to gather information and when to act on information. Whenever we seek goals under conditions of uncertainty – not knowing the best way forward, perhaps not being sure what success even looks like – we are faced with explore/exploit trade-offs as we guess our way to what we think we want. Mathematicians, computer scientists, business professionals, ethologists, and neuroscientists (to name a few) have all sought to find algorithms that optimize the explore/exploit trade-off in specific types of situations - that is, to identify when it’s best to keep exploring and when it’s time to commit to a course of action.
Whenever we deliberate whether to try something new or to stick with the old, we are engaged in explore/exploit trade-offs. Some examples:
Task switching: take a break from one task and work on a different task
Dating: pursue a potential mate or move on
Foraging: keep picking berries here or check out what’s over the ridge
Looking for keys: keep searching the dining room or switch to the kitchen
Career choices: start-up or established company
Investing: hold on to a stock or sell
College: continue a smorgasbord of classes or declare a major
Problem-solving: use solutions that worked in similar cases before or try a new approach
Medical treatment: stay with a course of treatment or try something else
As with all heuristics, no one algorithm works all the time. For one thing, the decision-making environment rarely remains the same: how much time we have, how urgent it is to act, how desirable the goal, our options for acting, the finality of our decisions, etc. Yet decide we must.
References
Hills, T. T., Todd, P. M., & Goldstone, R. L. (2010). The Central Executive as a Search Process: Priming Exploration and Exploitation across Domains. Journal of Experimental Psychology. General, 139(4), 590–609. http://doi.org/10.1037/a0020666
Hills, T. T., Todd, P. M., Lazer, D., Redish, A. D., Couzin, I. D., & the Cognitive Search Research Group. (2015). Exploration versus exploitation in space, mind, and society. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(1), 46–54. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2014.10.004
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Wandering Thoughts: Explorations in Problem Space
When attention isn’t focused on the task at hand, cognitive resources are likely to be directed to unfinished business. Much of the time our so-called “wandering minds” are focused on unresolved matters. Although “wandering” conveys an impression of thoughts adrift, unanchored and chaotic, it may be more accurate to view such thoughts as triggered by a sense of concern and seeking some resolution. The Wandering Mind is the Exploring Mind: exploring the problem space, a few moves at a time.
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The mind doesn’t wander – it goes places.
"Mind wandering" conjures up an image of random, accidental, and aimless thought fragments going hither and yon like a drunken sailor. My perspective is much more like Smallwood and Schooler (2006), in which they describe mind wandering as a “goal-driven process”. A lot of mind wandering does seem to be on a mission of sorts: rehearsing, planning, rehashing – as if trying to achieve resolution to some sort of unfinished business. Unfinished business implies a goal – something has not been achieved. Of course, many of these mental missions are aborted mid-stream, as life and other missions intervene.
Reference:
Smallwood, J.,&Schooler, J.W. (2006). The restless mind. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 946–58.