Hacking My Brain

^{(Title image: Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash)}

At the beginning of 2026, I had decided that I was going to take a break from doing certifications or complicated classes. That was because I kept pushing myself and figured it was time to take a break…

But then…I found out about a “hackathon” that involved machine learning and Python, a computer coding language that I do not know, and I decided I should enter and see if I could muddle my way through it.

I am a glutton for punishment.

To be clear, usually you don’t enter these kinds of competitions when you have no idea what’s going on, but I also don’t know what’s good for me, so I guess it evens out.

I convinced my husband (who does have some knowledge of Python) to enter along with me, and we managed to form a team with a PhD student in Computer Science, who fortuitously brought along her Siberian Husky. If we didn’t win the hackathon, at least we could rank highest in fur production.

But that’s not the point of this post.

Not only was this an excellent learning experience for understanding machine learning, it also taught me a few things about how my brain has changed.

1. In order to comprehend a complicated concept, I need to see it written down. Preferably with visual aids.
2. If I’m reading something while someone is speaking loudly, I will not understand the words I’m looking at.
3. I have a 50% chance of remembering something new after learning it the first time. Wait…more like a 30% chance.
4. Pushing my brain to learn something new and highly technical for eight hours is exhausting. I went home each day feeling like I’d been hit by a Zamboni.

Sometime back, I’d read about an MRI study involving twins in which one twin was a cancer survivor and the other wasn’t. While there wasn’t a significant different in cognitive abilities between the twin siblings, a huge difference appeared when they were told to perform cognitive tasks during an MRI scan: the twin who had undergone cancer treatment was recruiting vastly more of their brain real estate than their sibling was to perform the tasks. Essentially, the cancer survivor’s brain was less efficient and needed to use more brain cells.

I thought about this study when I came home from the hackathon. My brain was so full that information was seeping out through my ears. Using so many neurons to try to learn highly technical stuff was quite a workout.

On a side note, I had made use of AI (artificial intelligence; in my case, an AI assistant called Claude) to explain the coding sequences we were using. What I found was that (1) AI was useful in explaining complicated concepts using simple language, and (2) no one’s going to lose their coding job to AI anytime soon because when I asked Claude to re-write my code it did an absolutely horrible job with no improvement over the original code, although Claude tried to convince me it was better. Hmph.

So for the time being, I’m stuck with using my own brain, imperfect as it may be.