Reader Compares Mind To Large-Language Model

A TidBITS writer recounts a conversation with his son Tristan and argues that routine reading functions like training a large language model, subtly adjusting the brain's internal 'weights' rather than serving as a retrievable database. He traces the analogy across life stages—pretraining in childhood, fine-tuning in education, and smaller incremental updates in adulthood—and concludes that broad, habitual reading reshapes thinking even when specific facts are forgotten.