Under katom household neurophysiology for IT specialists and traditionally mistaken common sense.
For the past 20 years, most of the time I write code, help other people write code, sometimes tell me from the stage how to write code, or even organize conferences on how to write code.
You probably noticed that over the past few years, words like âdevrelâ, âpersonal brandâ, âHR-brandâ have become popular. An entire section at the RIT ++ festival is devoted to the work of devrel and how to communicate with developers. This article was written in the wake of my speech there, there is a video if you like to listen more than read.
What is so special about developers, why do we need to communicate with us in a special way? Why do we not have, for example, a separate manager-relations, builder-relations, electrician-relations, but does developer relations exist?
When they talk about a personal brand, there is a huge amount of debate about whether a developer needs it. It is necessary to spend time, to go somewhere, to speak - instead of figurating all this time.
My hobby is neurophysiology, and as a programmer it is very difficult for me to operate with abstract social concepts like âinspirationâ, ârecognitionâ, âself-realizationâ. It's much easier for me to talk about the right temporal-parietal node. Therefore, first I will share modern hypotheses about how our consciousness generally works. Then Iâll try to show what programmers are special about and explain why we really need a devrel and a personal brand, but, for example, the painters donât need it â they are so good.
Consciousness hypotheses
For the past 100 years, scientists have not been engaged in human consciousness. It was a taboo topic because the brain is really complex. How he realizes our consciousness is generally incomprehensible. Maybe there is a soul and quantum mechanisms, maybe this is the receiver for the higher mind.
But a few decades ago we had an MRI, and then an fMRI, and the process moved off the ground. It became possible to look into the working brain of a living person in order to at least understand something about his device.
Global workspace theory
In 1988, one of the first and simplest hypotheses of the work of consciousness was formulated, which is called the Global workspace theory. In fact, she does not explain anything, but simply "points a finger at the wizard." To the question, how does this wizard do the trick, the hypothesis answers that the trick is done by the wizard, and thatâs it. The secret of focus is still not disclosed.
In a nutshell, the Global workspace theory observes that there are a lot of different things in the brain that work separately, and our consciousness is whole. There must be some kind of mechanism in the brain for synchronizing these individually working pieces. This mechanism of synchronization from the point of view of the Global workspace theory is our consciousness.
Why it is such, why the computer or the sewer system, where there are also many independently operating, but synchronized mechanisms, do not have consciousness, Global workspace theory does not tell.
Integrated information theory
In 2004, in order to clarify the previous hypothesis, Integrated information theory appeared. She also points a finger at the wizard, but a little more accurately: "The wizard sits there." The authors of Integrated information theory say that the brain does not just have many different independent parts that work together, but all the information is integrated : the brain stores everything and works associatively. When I look at someone, I have associations with tens of thousands of faces and behaviors. When a complex system processes associative information in this way, then what is called consciousness arises in it.
Like last time, the hypothesis points a finger at the wizard, but does not tell how the wizard does the trick, why we are aware of ourselves.
Attention schema theory
Less than ten years ago, in 2009, another hypothesis appeared. Its author is a very interesting neurophysiologist: a successful children's writer, a successful science fiction writer, a psychologist in his first education, a neurophysiologist in his second, and a composer. He made a big contribution to two other hypotheses, after which the scientific community disliked him, and now he is a little disgraced. Michael Graziano heads the laboratory of neurophysiology at Princeton University, where he formulated a curious hypothesis about how our consciousness works. Unlike a dozen other hypotheses, she does not point a finger at the wizard, but tries to explain the magic trick.
Frankly, as a developer, it doesnât matter to me on the whole whether his hypothesis is true - whether our consciousness is drawn by the brain, or somewhere there is an immortal soul, or the brain is just a receiver for some cosmic radiation of the higher mind. Iâm interested in any explanation that can be practically used , which gives me tips on how to train developers, how to hire developers, where to look for developers and why the developer needs a personal brand.
Attention schema theory in brief:
- Body schema is built by the brain according to data from body sensors.
- Changing the body schema controls the position of the body.
- Attention schema is built by the brain according to data from attention.
- Changing the attention schema switches attention.
- The brain builds a body and attention schema for other people.
I will explain what all this means, in more detail. The hypothesis begins with the observation that our brain builds several models , among them the model of our body (body schema). The brain constantly receives information from sensors from muscles and bones, and at each moment of time has an accurate model of the human body.
This model is constantly updated and works both ways. When I want to move my arm, I do not give commands to individual muscles. Instead, a curious mechanism works: I consciously change the model of the position of the hand in my brain, and a separate machinery that is not translated into the consciousness, tracks the change and begins to send commands to the muscles, collect information about where the hand actually moved, and adjust its position so that the hand moves exactly where I am moving my model.
Our programs work in exactly the same way: the program inside changes the state of the object, for example, a window, the operating system sees this and changes the position of the drawn window. Likewise, my hand moves with a little delay after changing the model of my hand in the brain.
The creator of the Attention schema theory has studied for many years what models the brain builds in general, including the body model and the color model. For example, the brain represents white in the form of a greatly simplified model, because in fact, white has all wavelengths, but from the point of view of the model we recognize it as the absence of color. This is the wrong model, but itâs convenient for the brain.
The brain is building simplified physical models. Our idea of ââphysics is almost like in cartoons, because it is convenient for our brain to work in a simple model of the surrounding space. And the scientist suggested that our consciousness, our soul, our free will is also a model for some kind of physical process taking place in the brain.
Philosophers, arguing what human consciousness is, spread through the tree with thought, paint fantastic paintings, castles on the water and in the clouds. But if you do this scientifically, it turns out that not everything is so incomprehensible.
For example, there is such a phenomenon as binocular rivalry: if a person is well fixed, one picture is shown to the left eye and the other is to the right, then the subject will be aware of only one of these images at a time, and it will change approximately every 2 seconds, following tiredness of one way or another in the brain. For such a situation, the following definition of consciousness can be given: consciousness (awareness) is the very thing that determines which of the two pictures a person can say with his voice that he âseesâ it.
Michael Graziano conducted experiments and suggested that consciousness is a model that our brain builds for our attention.There is a physiological process of attention in the brain. This is how we, among a huge number of active neural ensembles, choose those that have the highest priority for us. Attention is usually focused on one thing.
After much research on how our consciousness works, the scientist suggested that the model of our attention is exactly the same model as the one that the brain builds for the body. And just as well, this model can work both ways . When we show free will, that is, for example, I choose to shift attention from one person to another, I change the model in my brain. Following the model, the physical process of rivalry of neural ensembles is shifting (donât ask me how - the hypothesis is ten years old), and then the brain is used to the fact that if attention has changed, you need to move your head, turn your head where you need to.
The most interesting thing for us that benefits us and allows us to connect attention with our personal brand and development issues - the brain builds a model of the body and attention not only for our loved ones, but also for those around us .
People are believed to be social beings. All the achievements of civilization have arisen due to the fact that we communicate with each other. At the same time, with the models for himself and for others, the question âhens and eggsâ remains open: when a baby is born and sees around other people, he first builds a model of his attention, and then notices that the creatures around behave in the same way, and begins to build simplified ones models of their attention. Or the child first builds models of attention for other people, and only then uses the same mechanism for himself.
In any case, experiments and observations show that we constantly build models of attention of people around us in the same way as we build this model for ourselves.
Conclusions that are interesting to us
If you bring the dry residue, the first thing that matters to us: attention and body models that the brain builds is not the current cast, but also historical data . The model of the body that is in my brain is my whole memory of how my body generally moves and moved throughout my life. This can be easily verified by the fact that, for example, a person who has lost his hand in his model of the body will have a âphantomâ of a lost limb for many years to come.
Similarly, the attention model is not just âcurrent attentionâ. This is all historical information, how attention is generally shifted, what happens when you switch from one thought to another, from one sensation to another.
The second thing that matters is that the brain acts situationally . In what situation the model is trained, in such a situation it is applied. A programmer who read books for two years and then sits down to write code, on the one hand, knows everything. The model of his attention contains a huge array of printed information, but in order to take the keyboard and type working code on it, there are no trained models yet.
A person who has been engaged in martial arts in the gym for 10 years, going out into the street and falling under the distribution of gopniks, may not be able to deal with them simply because he is used to fighting in the gym. His brain has different patterns of behavior in the hall, and on the street he is in a completely different situation.
When a person trains to speak in front of a mirror, and then goes on stage, he finds himself in a completely different social situation, and fixed patterns of behavior do little to help.
A ttention and body models learn very slowly. Changing the model of your attention and mastering a new skill - public speaking, touch typing, programming - takes no less time than changing the body model and learning, for example, playing the guitar. These are months, years - long term potentiation is not just called âlong termâ.
Development Challenges
Let's see how this knowledge will help in programming and building a personal brand.
By the way, what are the problems with programming in general? Maybe with programming everything is fine, but a personal brand is not needed?
Unfortunately, there are a lot of problems in programming.
In my opinion, the main problem is the lack of fundamental education . We are not just super-social animals, we like to build models one on top of the other, build them on top of the foundation we have learned over the years, almost like in the illustration above. A child in kindergarten learns to count, then at school he studies mathematics, and then at the university he becomes, for example, an electrician. The following, more complex knowledge is built on the foundation of the previous ones.
Programming does not have such a foundation.
Programming is a phantom engineering, where we build non-existent engineering structures in the world we invented according to invented physical laws. There is no basis on which all this can be pulled.It seemed that it was logical to make programmers out of engineers: on the whole, the constructions are engineering, and you can teach an engineer somewhere from the second year to become a programmer. In practice, it turned out to be the same as learning from scratch.
Then they thought: in programming there is a plus, minus, divide, multiply, sometimes even a root - let's teach mathematicians to programmers - hereâs the ready foundation. But no - again from scratch. Knowledge of mathematics does not really help to build phantom bridges in the world of invented physical laws.
We do not have higher education institutions that predictably graduate programmers. There is no fundamental education, therefore it is impossible to hire programmers predictably, as it is possible to hire electricians predictably. There is no such diploma that would guarantee that its owner is a programmer who can write in React, Vue and the backend in Python / Elixir / Lua. We are self-taught.
Moreover, our professional field in the sense of mass production is only 20 years old. Therefore, we still do not have an understanding of how to develop software correctly . Developers at the level of medieval alchemists try to mix different technologies, sometimes it gurgles, sometimes it explodes, and sometimes the Stack Overflow example puts the entire infrastructure, and it remains completely incomprehensible why nginx fell.
It is impossible to predictably train a programmer on a fixed stack, and then say: âNow, Python + React developers are hired from this university. We ask at the interview the results of the final exam and we can be sure that a person can write software and solve business problems. All is well, give 20 people! â
Unfortunately, there is no such university, and you have to suffer and hire self-taught people, who are also in the information bubbles carefully created by search engines and âtechnology stacksâ.
I speak at conferences related to Python development, with a front-end, I learn more and more in Python and JavaScript, and less and less, for example, in Lua or Erlang. I am in the information bubble. And then procrastination comes and says that in such a state it will be great to postpone work until tomorrow, to delegate it to yourself in the future. âI am in the futureâ is a very convenient character; he cannot refuse.
There are many ways to deal with these problems and one of them is a personal brand.
Personal brand
A personal brand is when other developers know about you. For introverts and sociophobes, this is not very comfortable. For example, they greet you in a personal meeting at a conference, and you can hardly recognize them because the brain is clogged with a code. For example, I remember how 22 years ago I wrote code in Visual Basic, but I donât remember what the names of the half of the familiar conference participants are.
But since this is uncomfortable, why even develop some kind of personal brand? What is useful for a programmer that other programmers know about him?
Social obligations
To answer, remember that we are constantly building models of attention for ourselves and for other people. This is a fundamental mechanism that creates our personality and which models the personalities of other people, and we can use it.
People are considered social beings, not because it is so written in textbooks, but precisely because the main machinery of our brain, which draws our personality, consciousness, soul, is used to create simplified models of consciousness, attention, and the personality of other people. This is the basic mechanism.
Thanks to this basic mechanism, our model of attention has already been trained, that society is important . When we want or donât want to do something, for example, we donât want to work, but we want to watch YouTube, what happens depends on the models that we learned. If you take on social obligations, for example, apply to speak at Moscow Python Conf ++, then the behavior model will be in a new social situation. The model believes that success or failure in the case of social obligations is associated with the most important thing in our life - with sociality .
This âimportant - not important" is not always translated in the mind. You can consciously consider yourself an introvert and think that other people are not needed and their opinion is unimportant. But the mechanism by which we draw our personality cannot be âunimportantâ for us - it is the basic mechanism.
If at the conference we hear: "React - Vue - React - Vue - React ...", then we begin to guess that Angular, which we have been using in our projects for several years, is probably not the best technology. Over the decades of life, the brain has learned to model the attention of other people, and automatically marks such information as âimportantâ (at least some hypotheses suggest this. But we donât know how it âreallyâ is because the brain is complex).
The attention of other people, what they say, is always more important to us than what we read.Communication, interaction with other people, when we promise something, it is important for us by default, simply because it is the basic mechanism of our brain.
It helps to cope with procrastination very well. If for several years you canât start learning English (or learn Vue, Elixir, Erlang, Tarantool), all you need to do is publicly say : âI will speak at the conference with this topic in six monthsâ or âI will publish an article on HabrĂ©â. Everything - further a model of attention, it turns out in a situation that it is very important, and no longer wants to read the VK, but wants to prepare for the report. There is a desire to do something, because the fear of shame moves us forward.
It is very important not to break this mechanism. There are people who promise something and merge, promise and merge, promise and merge. It is difficult to break the mechanism that has been built since childhood, but if you promise other people hundreds of times and do not keep your promises constantly, then the models will be rebuilt. The brain is very flexible, our consciousness is adaptive - if you keep breaking promises, you will become the âsuperhero with the letter Mâ and lose the opportunity to get + 50 to the desire to do something with the click of your fingers. By the way, the opposite hypothesis is built on this, according to which it is better not to promise anyone, because, having promised, we can consider that "we have already done everything." Which of the hypotheses to choose is up to you to decide, but I like the first one much more, because it provides simple tools. And the second only pessimistically says that "and this will not help."
Social communications
The second plus from a personal brand is social communication. Our attention schema is already trained that communication with other people is important . Communication is when we build another personâs attention model and try to understand what he wants from us, where his gaze is directed, what emotions he is experiencing right now. The formation of the general picture of communication is provided by the most complex and fundamental mechanisms of our brain.
Naturally, such a picture has the highest priority compared to what we read.
A conversation with a person is of the greatest importance that our brain can draw.When we speak, the positive and negative reaction of the audience is imprinted in our models much stronger than what you can google , learn on Stack Overflow or read in the documentation.
Every time I go on stage, I have one goal - to tell a story and listen to what people will tell me. If after my speech someone gets up and says that Iâm wrong, everything works wrong, then for me it will be happiness. I will remember such a feedback, unlike all information bubbles and cognitive distortions. For years I can read on the Internet that Iâm wrong, and my brain will simply filter out this information because it is uncomfortable for me, it does not fit into my models. But if during a socially important performance someone says that I am wrong, it will cause enormous damage and great benefit to my internal models. In an hour I will gain more experience than in years.
The fight against the information bubble, which we IT people are very susceptible to, is the second huge plus of a personal brand.As soon as we begin to communicate with other people, we have the opportunity to hear something new. When we read Stack Overflow, we effectively ignore the new. Attention dynamics are designed to focus on familiar information.
In order to get all these bonuses of a personal brand, in principle, there is no need to speak at conferences or write on Habr. Any public activity is enough to just know what other people know. It can be answers or questions on Stack Overflow, it can be text anywhere - the main thing is that you yourself know what other people know about your achievements and your obligations.
Our brain works situationally. If you promised yourself and even wrote a promise on a piece of paper, then the âPromise on a piece of paperâ model will apply. It is very weak, because there is little external data and few examples. But if you promise the same out loud on a large corporate party, then the brain, which works situationally, will immediately remember thousands of films, books and situations in which other people made commitments. Then the next day it turns out that opening the documentation and starting work on fulfilling the promise is not so difficult.
If you expected to see career recommendations, then alas. But I can recommend the food conference , which is organized on December 9 by colleagues from Ontiko. Here there will be reports on how to build a team, products, career. Everything is from a completely practical point of view, that is, you will receive checklists or frameworks that will help to reproduce the results, just as you will become a better programmer if you follow my advice to give social obligations.