Immediate brain plasticity after one hour of brain–computer interface

It depends.

Tinnitus is believed to be, in many cases, due to the maladaptive plasticity that happens in response to hearing loss.

The brain doesn't hear some frequencies so it "reconfigures itself" to amp up the volume on those frequencies. Not unlike our own HiFi amps, if you increase the volume on a line that doesn't carry a signal, you get all kinds of bad noise.

I wouldn’t be so quick to label “quick learning” as a good thing. Sure learning quick is good when you’re trying to adapt to new environments, but environments aren’t always changing. In edge cases quick learning in response to, say, a traumatic event and environment change, can yield learning that is maladaptive.

A suitable analogy is to look at gradient descent methods — which explicitly rely upon a “learning rate” parameter that controls how quickly the algorithm updates its global result as a result of local, immediate, information. Certain classes of problems do well with higher or lower learning rates — so it is very unspecified and unknown how something like this translates to human behavior

Yeah but learning or completing tasks give a bit of dopamine so maybe learning in short bursts becomes addicting through successive iterations.

When you work, you have large tasks, you break them up into smaller tasks, you learn along the way, and you get fueled by dopamine to continue. You learn and use your knowledge to work through tasks that are standard and dynamic in terms of change. Easier to do large projects/tasks by breaking it in small tasks rather than one big task. Lots of 'getting things done' or todo management plans gamify the dopmamine hits into small tasks. Each task can remove or add more work depending on how you complete them or how much you think about them to optimize or reduce work. There is weight to each decision but also forward movement and tasks being completed which gives dopamine.

With online communities you are both learning and teaching on each iteration (comment/post) which when you post is a task being completed. The process is pretty standard and easy to repeat and focus on your points. The learning part is new information you get, the teaching part is formulating your response and refinement. Repeated actions like this refine and polish your ideas and understanding of the world. All of that is probably a dopamine hit combined with a bit of social aspect that may increase it. The impact of that task is low so it is easy to attack repeatedly, much like an addictive game cycle. There is little weight to each decision but also forward movement and the appearance/feeling of tasks being completed which gives dopamine.

When you are sitting in front of your big project with all the tasks and smaller tasks that have real impact, next to the addicting short burst communities with all sorts of new and old ideas and discussions from learning about space or politics to jokes and memes with low impact, the online communities/information/learning can outweigh your work/project as the former seems to become a bigger draw if you aren't careful. It is almost easier to feel like you have been doing things posting on reddit/HN until you break out of a focus state and realize that is taking from your work time, but easy to slip into due to the amazing breadth of information and topics, where work is just focused usually.

Both situations your brain is probably in plasticity states and getting dopamine from the learning and teaching short tasks.

It is probably best to have multiple projects you are working on one serious and one with more open creative mode so that procrastination is at least on work during worktime and addiction to distractions is limited. Creating addicting game cycles to give dopamine hits and repeated addictive cycles is very evident also in social media or online discussion, like the little reddit notification. You can easily go spend 15 minute breaks from work and end up hours into a reddit/HN/social discussion.

The plasticity of the brain in internet discussions also has our mind in a receptive state, so that is why online misinformation/disinformation is probably so able to propagate as well. The brain is open to new information and marketers/propagandists probably love that state to manipulate.

Perhaps even more relevant to your argument, most classes of problems lend themselves to an adaptive learning rate. I.e. we would like to learn our separator or weights quickly when we have no information but we want learning to slow as we have more information (so that we can settle towards a solution representative of the data vs the last batch/data point/hypothesis update)

Methods like Ridge Regression also support your point. There is a lot of value to defining how learning takes place, and specifically more learning is often bad for our results(in ml).

To add something here: everything is considered addiction nowadays: over-eating, sex, shopping, etc.

Not to derail the discussion but isn't it too much?

I'm under impression that today anyone who enjoys something more than we would like them to do so in immediately labeled an addict.