To give an additional example of tight feedback loops being helpful, I’ve been taking Alexander lessons for nearly a year. Each lesson consists of 30 minutes of me doing movements (although sometime the “movement” is holding a posture, like sitting, standing, standing on toes, or crouching) and 30 minutes of “table time”, i.e. I lay on a massage table while my teacher users her hands to very subtly suggest changes to my posture. Although I could go on about how great this has been and how much value I get from it, what I mostly want to say about it here is that it depends very much on tight feedback loops to perform a kind of reinforcement learning. As I make a movement she uses her hands and some taught jargon (part of the technique involves associating jargon with postures and movements so you can easily call them up on command by saying or thinking the jargon) to adjust what I do, giving me rapid feedback on how I’m doing. The result was that within the first 10 hours of training I dramatically improved my posture and reduced posture and movement related pain.
For comparison, overlapping with learning Alexander technique I’ve been more deeply practicing formal meditation, and learning formal meditation has very long feedback loops and requires months to make significant progress. Now, maybe the long feedback cycles are not why it takes months to make progress, and I can think of reasonable stories as to why that would be, I can also imagine finding ways to shorten feedback cycles would have made progress much faster. For example, when I’ve done biofeedback stuff in the past it only took 4 or 5 hours of sessions before I could make myself fall asleep at will (sadly I’ve forgotten how to do this), and I think it’s quite likely that it was helped a lot by having a computer telling me when I got a little closer to what I needed to do to make that happen and when I got a little farther away, such that I didn’t have to spend as much time guessing and waiting for strong evidence that I was doing the right thing before I could reliably train that ability and then go on to the next step.
To give an additional example of tight feedback loops being helpful, I’ve been taking Alexander lessons for nearly a year. Each lesson consists of 30 minutes of me doing movements (although sometime the “movement” is holding a posture, like sitting, standing, standing on toes, or crouching) and 30 minutes of “table time”, i.e. I lay on a massage table while my teacher users her hands to very subtly suggest changes to my posture. Although I could go on about how great this has been and how much value I get from it, what I mostly want to say about it here is that it depends very much on tight feedback loops to perform a kind of reinforcement learning. As I make a movement she uses her hands and some taught jargon (part of the technique involves associating jargon with postures and movements so you can easily call them up on command by saying or thinking the jargon) to adjust what I do, giving me rapid feedback on how I’m doing. The result was that within the first 10 hours of training I dramatically improved my posture and reduced posture and movement related pain.
For comparison, overlapping with learning Alexander technique I’ve been more deeply practicing formal meditation, and learning formal meditation has very long feedback loops and requires months to make significant progress. Now, maybe the long feedback cycles are not why it takes months to make progress, and I can think of reasonable stories as to why that would be, I can also imagine finding ways to shorten feedback cycles would have made progress much faster. For example, when I’ve done biofeedback stuff in the past it only took 4 or 5 hours of sessions before I could make myself fall asleep at will (sadly I’ve forgotten how to do this), and I think it’s quite likely that it was helped a lot by having a computer telling me when I got a little closer to what I needed to do to make that happen and when I got a little farther away, such that I didn’t have to spend as much time guessing and waiting for strong evidence that I was doing the right thing before I could reliably train that ability and then go on to the next step.