Hey, left,

From my understanding of the theory, the answers to your questions are yes, no, yes, although if the goal of improving as a programmer is important in itself to you, there may be activities better suited for that on account of their closer relationship to the kind of mental processes used in programming.

That aside, if you're anything like me, playing a musical instrument is an intense pleasure not many other activities can give us, an important factor for motivation and well-being that in the long run may prove to be more beneficial to your goal than a hobby or exercise chosen for pragmatic reasons only.

Meta,

thanks for your reply; programming is not important in itself for me, but since it's the subject I understand most, I mentioned it as an example of a more general principle: that unrelated tasks in different networks could influence each other. It would be absolutely fascinating if they could, but from my observations I couldn't conclude anything.

But! Since I started to understand the mechanics of playing guitar a little, I opened a whole lot of ways of looking at learning.

For example, the brilliant book "Principles of correct practice for the guitar" taught me how to form new skills! And I am 21 years old. It seems like the first time I "really" understood this process.
It says basically: when you want to perform a particular passage or a movement, you must absolutely relax everything not related to the movement, then perform it extremely slowly for a couple of dozens times, and then you can increase speed, because muscles "know" what they must be doing. If you mix the movement with tensions in other muscles, they get incorporated into the movement as well, and you end up tensing these muscles every time you perform it.

So this book opened to me the golden rule "Cells that fire together, wire together", and I must thank the Author and the Guitar for that.

leftblank wrote
since I read ICMM back in 2007, I became fascinated with how the top networks build on top of the bottom ones, so we can train the latter and actually improve the former.

Sorry to be so late replying. ICMM is well out of date, and I didn't know the details back then. Now it's apparent that working on certain skills can improve both abstract and concrete abilities at the same time because the brain uses them same networks for both types of task. It works for the same reasons that imagining yourself working out improves actual physical performance AND imagination -the brain's using the same nets for imagining doing stuff as it uses for physically doing stuff, so the same network's getting extra exercise. There's more info about this in the updated tutorial 6, and hopefully more coming.

If you grab the list of animal behaviors (concrete skills) from the library and see what abstract skills you can associate with what concrete skills, you'll know what you can do to rear nets to improve front nets, and vice versa. Simple behaviors in N2 improve both N2 AND complex procedural thinking in N4, and so on, so hunting moose really will improve your ability to detect program bugs and spot priorities, and tidying your office really will help you organize your ideas. I'll get around to making up a chart as soon as I catch up with this moose.  :  )

All nets depend on those that came before because their functions depend on previous abilities -you can't begin the task of perception or put anything into memory (N3) if you can't pay attention to anything(N1) or be motivated and able to explore it(N2) in the first place. We can't respond effectively or interact with things we fail to notice; this must be obvious. So doing things in the right order means getting your rear nets' abilities up and running before trying to develop front end abilities that rely on them.

Inevitably the work you do on the back end will have already improved some front functions before you get there, and the feedback from beneficial tasks that the front end does every day will also have helped further improve rear nets. That's the idea in NH -setting up loops of beneficial feedback, then the system gets back to it's originally-intended automatic habit of self improvement.

I am a computer programmer. Day by day I move lines of text back and forth, rename things, type ;'s and &'s and stuff. This is a purely abstract activity (although I type a lot with ten fingers). Probably for the most part it's N5.

This depends on what you're doing mentally. If you're programming (being creative, assembling, putting stuff together, synthesis) it's mainly N4. If it's data entry, factual text or excel sheets (assessing, administration, taking stuff apart, analysis) it's mainly N5. When you're coding it's gonna be some of both.


The question: is it possible to become a better programmer by learning to play guitar? Should the N4 activities, for example, be inherent to the N5 activity I want to augment, or can they be of any kind, only the N4 ones?

Yes to the first part. Playing guitar (or any instrument) improves the connections between all networks and so improves overall performance as well as parts of each net.
I hope the notes above have already helped with the second part. If not, tell me what info is missing.

I'll catch up with other posts here asap,
Best,
AR

Sakiro,
Hopefully my previous post has answered some of your questions. Obviously there are a lot of different, more- or less-creative approaches to programming, as you pointed out.

Re: improving skills: check out timed repetition interspersed with a variety of different tasks (eg, practice programming for a couple of hours, then watch a comedy show and eat, then return to programming an hour later. Leave longer gaps between repetitions as time goes by. A variety of different activities, some outdoors, fill in the gaps, including of course sleeping.

Remember that stuff we read is not always backed up by evidence, so make sure you know where your info is coming from. It is true that many hours of practice are required to broaden a neural pathway and make a skill automatic, but its also true that regular breaks, good food,  natural sleep, input control and anxiety reduction will speed the learning process up a lot.

Reading lots of books will help most in the first stage of learning. If you are familiar with the learning process you can work with it at every stage.
Best,
AR