By this point, my deep dive into mnemonics organically looped me back to the research of my previous mentor, Prof. Jeremy Gunawardena.​​ In this paper, learning is defined as "an increase of mutual information between environmental states and system states in which the internal representation of external information can influence subsequent behavior," which struck me as compatible with what I was intending to articulate regarding mnemonics. At the same time, there are vast implications across biology if single cells can learn.

 

I did these two projects in parallel.​​​​​​​ Thomas Kühn frequently mentions analogies and metaphors when describing his views on conceptual change and paradigm shifts within science. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​How does the human mind manage the risk of novel information? How about the science community? How about a single bacterium? 

 

- What is the fabric of the world model(s) of a human? Of a bacterium? Of a single eukaryotic cell within a multicellular organism?

- Is there a relationship between intrinsic curiosity and the allostatic regulation of world model(s)?​

This introduced me to Dani Basset's conformational change theory of curiosity, which months later led me to study this review at the intersection of self-supervised learning & information theory.

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- Is there a common language for describing the constraints faced by a bacterium in deciding whether or not to internalize information about a pathogen via its CRISPR system as well as for describing the constraints on working memory in humans due to dopamine levels in the prefrontal cortex?​​​​​​​​​​​​