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Those Eureka Moments
Phoe6 writes "If you're one of those insufferable people who can finish the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle, you probably have a gift for insight. The puzzles always have an underlying hint to solving them, but on Saturdays that clue is insanely obtuse. If you had all day, you could try a zillion different combinations and eventually figure it out. But with insight, you'd experience the usual clueless confusion, until--voilà--the fog clears and you get the clue, which suddenly seems obvious. The sudden flash of insight that precedes such "Aha!" moments is characteristic of many types of cognitive processes besides problem-solving, including memory retrieval, language comprehension, and various forms of creativity. Although different problem-solving strategies share many common attributes, insight-derived solutions appear to be unique in several ways. PLoS Biology explains the Neural Basis of Solving Problems with Insight.
The Complete Research Article is here."
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I've found it!), but 'That's funny...'"
-Isaac Asimov.
Sorry for the Amazon link, but it was easy to find there. Strangely, going through this book, especially if you don't resort to the hintws and answers in the back, helps develop just the sort of insight mentioned.
As always, your mileage may vary.
More interesting info on Mark Jung-Beeman's website.
While I know some of the folks who create the NYTimes Crosswords (and other published puzzles) and have spoken with Will Shortz on occasion, I do know that there are plenty of crossword fans that abhore the NYTimes puzzles of late. They would prefer puzzles that don't have the 'cutsie/theme' clues and simply rely on good old-fashioned "words on a grid" that don't require knowledge of jokes/puns/pop culture in order to guess the answer.
Those of you who are really into puzzles and games may want to join the National Puzzlers League. While they do know the answer to the ubiquitious "what words end in -ngy other than HUNGRY and ANGRY?" question, they also pride themselves on being among the first to play many of the latest/newest board games as well.
We are given three discrete states of cognition by nature:
Sleeping so deeply there are no dreams (delta or deeper)
Sleeping with dreams (alpha, beta state)
Eyes-open sleep (ordinary waking)
But we can have several others:
Observation and info-gathering (adult ego-state)
Understanding and compassion (unnamed by science)
Insight (unnamed by science)
Oneness with God
The fourth and later stages of consciousness usually are unpredictable and come and go by mood.
The first three stages are culturally-defined and mandated, and the later stages are spoken of in metaphor by mystics, as language is incompetent to describe them.
Eastern religious practices (yoga, zen, t'ai chi) are curricula for attaining these states.
In Christianity, Insight is called "The Holy Spirit (or Ghost)." Anyone who has had an insight can remember wanting to sing, dance, shout, tell the world -- this is a religious experience that even scientists can share.
In fact, science has another vector of similarity with religions: The scientific method (do it and see what happens) is exactly as useful as faith (I'll do it because I know God wants it done.)
--
We are not humans in search of the spiritual, we are spirits out to experience the truly human.
epiphany
n. pl. epiphanies
A comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization: "I experienced an epiphany, a spiritual flash that would change the way I viewed myself" (Frank Maier).
Just another day in Paradise
The Einstein Factor
One of the many, many topics in the book is just as the summary is like - leave a problem for awhile and your subconcious figures it out while your concious is doing something else. (no, I didn't RTFA, and I'm too lazy to sign up for a slashdot account, but I saw the article, skimmed the comments, and when I didn't see this book mentioned, I figured I'd share..)
Very good book, by the way. I've not tried the techniques in there, but I've heard they're pretty powerful.
Hopefully the real experiment is more bulletproof than this fluff piece suggests.
Perhaps the news reporting in the first link qualifies as a "fluff peice", however you could have simply followed the second link - the Complete Research Article. - to see that it was quality science and that your critisism were misplaced.
severe methodological issues... they could be picking up any of a variety of mental processes that have nothing to do with the insight experience. Most obviously, it could merely be the intent to push the button.
That is fully controlled for. I'll cover what they did in some detail for those not familiar with scientific methods.
In studies like this you don't analyze the measurements themselves, you use proper controls and analyze differences between measurements. You set things up so that the only difference will be the difference you are looking for.
If a subject does not report finding a solution within 30 seconds that trial is disarded completely. This means we only look at cases of people who have solved the problem. People who solve the problem always indicated that in an identical manner - with a button press. The fact that the problem was solved is a constant, it was always solved. The intent to press the button is a constant, there was always an intent to press teh button. Physically pressing the button is a constant, the button was always pressed. As an added bonus, it is not merely a button press", it is a double button press. One button in each hand. That avoids any left/right differences in activity.
Those are all constants. Since we are only analyzing differences those constants entirely vanish.
We only look at the brain data for roughly the two seconds before that button press. This time period covers the mental process of solving the problem and always pressing the button.
Two seconds after that button press there is always the question "Answer?" and the subject always speaks the answer they found. Two seconds after that "Insight?" flashed up. Here the the subject may or may not indicate an insight experience, but this is long after the time period we are studying. Any action here has (or should have) no effect at all on the data we already recorded.
If the subject reports a subjective "insight" experience then you take the recorded data and average it into one bucket. Cases indicated as non-insight are averaged in another bucket.
You then subtract one average from the other average. If we haven't screwed up anywhere then the only difference we see should be differences in brain activity while the problem was being solved. We should only see increases or decreases in various brain activity related to insight/non-insight solution processes.
The biggest problem is the fuzzy nature of people subjectivly reporting insight experiences. Different people subjectively interperting it differently can introduce random "noise" into our results. Despite any such niose, a clear and stable difference was seen. Even if different people interperted their experiences differently, there was still some sort of consistant and measurable difference.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
MEG, like EEG, does have fairly fine temporal resolution, and using many electrodes and fancy signal processing, you can often get good spatial resolution as well (mm resolution). MEG does have better spatial resolution than EEG because the skull/scalp actually distorts/spreads the E fields. However, MEG also has the same problems as EEG -- the signals are mainly derived from cortical areas. Because you are measuring magentic fields, you must measure orthogonal to the direction of current -- therefore MEG only measures current that is parallel to the skull surface. The human brain is heavily folded (each fold being a sulcus), and much of the important areas lay within these sulci. Also, I believe MEG is a fairly expensive technique, and doesn't have the dual-use of functional MRI, so they are more difficult to find.