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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."
This seems to be very much what Q was talking
:)
about in the very last episode "All Good Things...". When we learn something, we open ourselves up for more.
Someday hopefully we will learn everything.
I find the best thing to do is walk away from the problem for a while - could be for a cup of coffee or you could sleep on it etc. Either you look at the problem again and you just see the answer, or you are brushing your teeth and you suddenly have the answer in your head! Don't ask me why.. IANABS (I Am Not A Brain Scientist!!)
you probably have a gift for insight. ... 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.
I'm sick of people thinking that they are so fscking "special". I don't necessarily accept the idea that someone has a very special way to solve very complex problems - the principles of the way we think is universal for all people.
The puzzles always have an underlying hint to solving them, but on Saturdays that clue is insanely obtuse.
Saturday NYT puzzles frequently don't have themes.. That usually makes them harder.
From the article: In the first experiment, thirteen people were given three words (pine, crab, sauce) and asked to think of one word that would form a compound word or phrase for each of the words (can you figure it out?). Fish? Pine-fish, Crabfish, fish sauce?
I find it interesting that researchers are using the EEG to measure emotional response at an unconcious level. This is flawed in my opinion since an EEG can only measure electrical activity in the outside of the cerebral cortex (new cortex) while most emotional activity, and in particular memory management has been linked to the old cortex (and the hippocampus directly for memory storage). For those who don't know, the old cortex is covered by the cerebral cortex like a shell. The old cortex is basically a group of components that form the limbic system (includes structures like the hippocampus, the amygdala, basal ganglia, etc.) that connects to the diminutive midbrain through the thalamus and hypothalamus. For this reason the EEG which measures only surface electrical activity of the cerebral cortex can't determine the activity in the old cortex. One of the reasons that lie detectors tests work so well is that the cerebral cortex can override lesser functions (concious decisions, not unconcious ones) and the old cortex (with the thalamus in particular) controls the parasympathetic and sympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system. If there is an emotional stimuli, this system responds unless overridden, and one of the effects is opening or closing of sweat glands. Doing so changes skin electrical resistance for the galvonic skin response part of the polygraph. Wouldn't this be a better test?
I would say that the potential for insight is the same in all humans but the ability we have for insight depends on how much we practice using it. It's like a muscle -- use it and it builds; stop using it and it deteriorates.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Subjects pressed a button to indicate whether they had solved the problem using insight, which they had been told leads to an Aha! experience characterized by suddenness and obviousness.
So really, how would one solve a word problem without insight? Did any of the participants solve it by writing a dictionary searching algorithm into their PDA? Did they open a dictionary and start checking answers systematically? ("Bart, Cart, Dart, Eart... Nope, can't see any problem with that!")
In my own experience it just seems like it's the obscurity of the answer that makes it seem insightful or not. If I had read the three words and instantly known the answer I don't think I would have felt the Aha! moment that I felt after staring at it for a minute. So am I less insightful if I solve it faster?
pineapple, crabapple applesauce
Epiphany
One would have thought one with a decent vocabulary would have known the word for it rather than 'a eureka moment'.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
So, they did a study...just to tell me that insightful people are going to finish a crossword puzzle faster?? who diddn't know this already?
I know I'm just echoing the AC, but I'm going to bull through anyway :) I have a math degree, and I had a lot of eureka classes. You were taking the wrong ones. In fact, it seems to me you would have to go out of your way to take math classes that were grind instead of eureka.
Differentiation (basic calculus) is a grind. You learn a few simple rules and apply them. Integration, beyond the most basic, is all eureka. You learn a few rules, but they all require insight into how to rearrange the thing you're integrating so it fits a pattern.
My favorite classes were about proofs. A proof is all eureka. A proof is a series of simple, basic steps that takes you from the given to the thing you're trying to prove. However, finding which basic steps go together to get what you want is all eureka. Many times in graduate level math courses I would work on a problem until midnight, go to sleep, wake up at 3am with the solution to the problem, write it down, & finish the problem in the morning. The interesting thing to me about proofs is that virtually always the way to prove the answer you want is to prove something much, much more powerful, of which the answer you want is a minor subset. It's as if your engineering teacher tells you to design a power source that can provide 1.5 volts for a day, and the easiest way you can find to do it is to build a Mr. Fusion. For example, to prove that all groups with 113 members are really the same group with different names for the elements, the easiest way is to prove that all groups with a prime number of elements hold that quality.
"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once
with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found
the object of his search.
I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory
and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labour. "
(Nikola Tesla, New York Times, October 19, 1931)
From the original article: "Illustrating the strong emotional response elicited by such a sudden insight, Archimedes is said to have run home from the baths in euphoric glee..."
I think this is one of the places our education system is missing a bet. I have never met a person who does not get that rush of joy from solving a problem. If our education process stressed problem solving instead of rote memorization, we would have a population addicted to learning.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
IMO: good on you, I went too :) (Mumbai, 1996)
With college math, I had the same disenchantment as you. There are some courses that are more insight-y (eg. analysis) and less so (eg. partial differential equations). But this is not a reason to lose heart. You cannot apply insight if you have not first fully grokked the available tools. Part of training for IMO geometry problems is learning dozens of theorems and tidbits of information (eg. incircle, circumcircle, triangle equalities, sin & cos formulae, sin 2A, similar triangles, that one about the fractions of each edge multiplying to -1, and so on). Then to solve the problem you try things until you strike an 'aha' that resolves the problem into these simple units you have already learned.
The thing with college math is that it is a whole new bunch of "simple units" to learn. Once you have done grind work to grok eigenvectors and orthogonal basis vectors, for example, then you can suddenly "aha-solve" a whole new class of problems (eg. unitary evolution in quantum physics) by slapping such a basis on them.
Also, tv doesn't help, neither do all those bad things that all the religions talk about, they seem to diminish the trust that the insightful part of you has in your concious.