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."

Comments

Taking a break

[justinmc]

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!!)

Re:Taking a break

[Tooky]

With code I always find that if I try to show a colleague a problem, I almost always solve it, often while I'm showing them and before they've even had chance to think about it. I guess this works in the same way as taking a break, because it allows you to think about it in a different way. When you demonstrate the bug to someone else, your concious mind isn't focusing on the problem and that moment of insight seems to happen.

Re:Superior attitude

[troon]

I disagree. Look at how some people find picking up new languages (I'm not talking computer languages, although the same principles probably apply) really easy, and other people of similar apparent intelligence seem to have a complete inability do this.

It must be down to differences in thinking. During my bike ride across France, I found that after only a couple of days of "immersion", I was thinking and dreaming in French, despite having a relatively limited knowledge of the language. I'm not claiming to be elitist (should that be 31337157 round these parts?), but I'm sure that some people clearly have a particular gifting for languages.

Re:Superior attitude

[FlippyBoy]

Actually, thought processes are quite different among people. Growing up in different cultures, and speaking different languages can bring about very distinct ways of thinking about things. Even among similar people, family environments shape the way we process information. Even within one family, if one child is raised on puzzles and interactive games with strategies, s/he will most likely grow up with a vastly different thought proces than one brought up on television. There's still so much about the brain we don't understand, it's impossible to say we all think alike.

Potential vs. actual ability

[BitwizeGHC]

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.

apple, the answer is apple.

[mattyp]

pineapple, crabapple applesauce

Plenty of Aha! in math

[wurp]

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.