Sunday, January 6, 2013
How insightful!
Don't you just hate that feeling you get after almost every test: you're stuck on question 17, you've narrowed it down to two possible choices, but you just can't figure out which one. You look at the clock--3 minutes left. In an act of desperation, you choose E over B. You turn in your test, and when the bell rings, you want to punch yourself, because the answer was obviously B.
If this has happened to you, you've just experienced insight. Insight is a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem. We've learned about insight before, but not in this context.
Insight contrasts strategy-based solutions to problems (i.e. heuristics and algorithms). Whoa! I've just had an insightful moment (and no Gabe Goldstein, it's not that I need to go to the bathroom). Why would I study? I've literally just decided that it would make more sense to not study at all and rely on insight. Insight is bound to happen and work, and all I would have to do is sit there and hope it comes to me. How about it?
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I wonder what causes insight. Is it biological and bound to happen? Or is it something else. What part of the brain is controlling it? The hippocampus is in charge of memory, so I wonder if it plays a critical role in bringing to one's mind subconsciously a memory that would cause one to choose E over B in your case. It is just so interesting to me.
ReplyDeleteIt sort of baffles me too. What I can come up with is that as you keep searching your mind and basically "look through more and more cabinets in your brain," you eventually find what you were looking for somewhere, assuming you already knew it at one point. But whether you find it quickly or slowly depends on how "close to the surface" it is in your mind.
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