https://praxis.fortelabs.co/progressive-summarization-iv-compressing-all-types-of-media-4dff7f6f27e8/

Reading through the previous three parts, a question probably popped into your mind: does this apply only to text?

It’s an important one, because we are becoming a less text-based society. Ubiquitous cameras, real-time video chats, and visual displays of information have become the norm. Which means expressions of creativity will increasingly take on these forms.

But the principle of compression is not at all limited to text. It is a universal feature of all information, and by extension, all media. It falls to us, however, to understand how it works and apply it to our medium of choice.

The story begins with this paper, one of the most influential works in the study of cross-disciplinary creativity in recent years.

Available here

The paper explains curiosity as “…the desire to create or discover more regular data that is novel and surprising…in the sense that it allows for compression progress because its regularity was not yet known.”

Basically, your brain prizes efficiency. If it can remember one thing instead of ten things, it’s happy. For example, learning that fruits are tasty is one piece of information, which is much easier to remember than individually memorizing each kind of fruit, and whether it’s tasty or not. This has obvious value for survival: the brain that is only trying to remember a few, vital pieces of information will outperform the brain trying to remember a bunch of inconsequential details.

The drive that has evolved to reward us for seeking out simpler kinds of data is called curiosity. Curiosity tends to get directed toward areas in which we don’t know something:

• You know traffic patterns fluctuate, but your brain makes you curious about whether there is an easy-to-remember pattern
• You know the sky is usually blue, but not always, and the brain wants a simple rule to know what to expect
• You know people react negatively when you talk about your accomplishments, but your brain wants a simple heuristic to remember what to say or not say

The curiosity drive is pushing you to learn a pattern, a rule, or a heuristic that will help you compress your knowledge of that area into something easier to remember.

It doesn’t have to be a perfect rule. Those are rarely found, and never last. What your brain is looking for is progress in its ability to compress its knowledge. Thus, compression progress. Any new rule that is better at compressing previously accumulated experience than the last one qualifies:

• Traffic is worse during rush hour when people are traveling to and from work, which tends to be in the morning and late afternoon
• The sky is always blue due to its chemical makeup, but can often be obscured by clouds, or darkened at nighttime
• People react negatively when I talk about my accomplishments because they think I’m bragging, which implies I think I’m better than them