Do you want to become more insightful?
We’ve all had the experience of knowing where we were when a particular insight popped into our heads: Sitting in a restaurant with friends, riding public transportation, putting together a recipe, running or exercising, or trying to solve a problem. But how does insight occur? We can categorize possible sources of insight: Seeing some object or process for the first time, reading someone else’s insight, or drawing on someone else’s findings, or having an experience. In some instances, insight seems to rise from a conscious effort; in others, from some unconscious activity, such as a dream or daydream.
As Einstein noted, “A new idea comes suddenly in a rather intuitive way…but, intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.” Shaggy haired Albert was an example par excellence of an insightful theoretical physicist, but he might have worded his analysis a bit differently had he been a neuroscientist.
Neuroscientists have approached the problem of insight through experiment. One conclusion cognitive researchers have reached relates unconscious processing to insight. The Annual Review of Psychology’s online summary of insights on insights proclaims: “The fact that a subliminal prime can spark a later insight supports the hypothesis that insight solutions are preceded by substantial unconscious processing rather than spontaneously generated.”* I guess for Einstein that would mean not only memory, but also the unconscious houses earlier intellectual experience.
Neuroscientists have run all sorts of experiments, including watching the brain work during the process of problem-solving. Using EEG and fMRI, John Kounios and Mark Beeman found that “the transient state of one’s attentional focus…helps to determine the range of potential solutions that a person is prepared to consider when a problem is presented. Outwardly directed attention coupled with low anterior cingulate activity focuses processing on the dominant features or possibilities of a situation; inwardly directed attention and high anterior cingulate activity heightens sensitivity to weakly activated remote associations and long-shot solution ideas.”* Anyway, the gist is that there are parts of the brain that can be primed to be insightful, but that blocking certain kinds of attention opens up other kinds of attention, a bit like closing the eyes or plugging the ears to think without distractions.
Einstein found some of his insights through “thought experiments” (Gedankenexperiment), one of the earliest of which had him thinking of what it might mean to “ride alongside a light beam.” And in running thought experiments, Albert kept his focus. As he wrote, “I do not permit myself a single distraction save for what my studies offer me, sustains me and sometimes protects me from despair.”**
Einstein did not run his thought experiments in the absence of knowledge. Like Newton, he “stood on the shoulders of giants.” He knew his physics. And that’s not all he knew. He played the violin and knew music. And he dabbled in just about every aspect of life, including women’s rights, international relations, and education. This stereotypical “scientist” was a Renaissance Man, a polymath.
Looking at Einstein’s unkempt hair, we might guess that he had never visited the barbershop, and that he was truly the representative “mad scientist” or “absent-minded professor.” Certainly, he didn’t seem to own a comb, and certainly, he did get lost in reverie, sometimes forgetting to row back to shore when he sailed in his little boat.
But if he had visited the barber, I believe that as he sat waiting his turn, he would have picked up the closest magazine—regardless of its age and condition—and perused its ripped pages. Not that he would be looking for anything in particular: No, he would simply look, read, and possibly learn.
We never know what will kick off our insightful thinking, but there’s little denying that insights spring from everywhere and at unexpected times. It’s also clear that any of us can synthesize an insight from our storehouse of information and experience.
Magazines in the doctor’s office, the lobby of a business, the library, the bookstore, online sources: Read everything. Observe as much as you can. Put as much into your brain as you want, and want more than you currently know. Somehow, that jumble of stuff will occasionally self-organize into an insight or the makings of an insight.
Here’s Albert: “The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking. It is for this reason that the critical thinking of the physicist cannot possibly be restricted to the examination of the concepts of his own specific field.”*** And that’s coming from a guy who seems to have rarely visited the barbershop, where all those diverse magazine articles lie around for free consumption.
No one knows when what he knows will engender an insight.
*The Annual Review of Psychology: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight, Volume 65, 2014, Kounios, pp. 71-93. Online at https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115154
**Einstein to Maya Einstein, quoted in Isaacson, Walter, Einstein: His Life and Universe, New York. Simon & Schuster, 2007, p. 39.
*** Einstein, Albert. “Physics and Reality.” The journal of the Franklin Institute, Vol. 221, No. 3, March, 1936.
We’ve all had the experience of knowing where we were when a particular insight popped into our heads: Sitting in a restaurant with friends, riding public transportation, putting together a recipe, running or exercising, or trying to solve a problem. But how does insight occur? We can categorize possible sources of insight: Seeing some object or process for the first time, reading someone else’s insight, or drawing on someone else’s findings, or having an experience. In some instances, insight seems to rise from a conscious effort; in others, from some unconscious activity, such as a dream or daydream.
As Einstein noted, “A new idea comes suddenly in a rather intuitive way…but, intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.” Shaggy haired Albert was an example par excellence of an insightful theoretical physicist, but he might have worded his analysis a bit differently had he been a neuroscientist.
Neuroscientists have approached the problem of insight through experiment. One conclusion cognitive researchers have reached relates unconscious processing to insight. The Annual Review of Psychology’s online summary of insights on insights proclaims: “The fact that a subliminal prime can spark a later insight supports the hypothesis that insight solutions are preceded by substantial unconscious processing rather than spontaneously generated.”* I guess for Einstein that would mean not only memory, but also the unconscious houses earlier intellectual experience.
Neuroscientists have run all sorts of experiments, including watching the brain work during the process of problem-solving. Using EEG and fMRI, John Kounios and Mark Beeman found that “the transient state of one’s attentional focus…helps to determine the range of potential solutions that a person is prepared to consider when a problem is presented. Outwardly directed attention coupled with low anterior cingulate activity focuses processing on the dominant features or possibilities of a situation; inwardly directed attention and high anterior cingulate activity heightens sensitivity to weakly activated remote associations and long-shot solution ideas.”* Anyway, the gist is that there are parts of the brain that can be primed to be insightful, but that blocking certain kinds of attention opens up other kinds of attention, a bit like closing the eyes or plugging the ears to think without distractions.
Einstein found some of his insights through “thought experiments” (Gedankenexperiment), one of the earliest of which had him thinking of what it might mean to “ride alongside a light beam.” And in running thought experiments, Albert kept his focus. As he wrote, “I do not permit myself a single distraction save for what my studies offer me, sustains me and sometimes protects me from despair.”**
Einstein did not run his thought experiments in the absence of knowledge. Like Newton, he “stood on the shoulders of giants.” He knew his physics. And that’s not all he knew. He played the violin and knew music. And he dabbled in just about every aspect of life, including women’s rights, international relations, and education. This stereotypical “scientist” was a Renaissance Man, a polymath.
Looking at Einstein’s unkempt hair, we might guess that he had never visited the barbershop, and that he was truly the representative “mad scientist” or “absent-minded professor.” Certainly, he didn’t seem to own a comb, and certainly, he did get lost in reverie, sometimes forgetting to row back to shore when he sailed in his little boat.
But if he had visited the barber, I believe that as he sat waiting his turn, he would have picked up the closest magazine—regardless of its age and condition—and perused its ripped pages. Not that he would be looking for anything in particular: No, he would simply look, read, and possibly learn.
We never know what will kick off our insightful thinking, but there’s little denying that insights spring from everywhere and at unexpected times. It’s also clear that any of us can synthesize an insight from our storehouse of information and experience.
Magazines in the doctor’s office, the lobby of a business, the library, the bookstore, online sources: Read everything. Observe as much as you can. Put as much into your brain as you want, and want more than you currently know. Somehow, that jumble of stuff will occasionally self-organize into an insight or the makings of an insight.
Here’s Albert: “The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking. It is for this reason that the critical thinking of the physicist cannot possibly be restricted to the examination of the concepts of his own specific field.”*** And that’s coming from a guy who seems to have rarely visited the barbershop, where all those diverse magazine articles lie around for free consumption.
No one knows when what he knows will engender an insight.
*The Annual Review of Psychology: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight, Volume 65, 2014, Kounios, pp. 71-93. Online at https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115154
**Einstein to Maya Einstein, quoted in Isaacson, Walter, Einstein: His Life and Universe, New York. Simon & Schuster, 2007, p. 39.
*** Einstein, Albert. “Physics and Reality.” The journal of the Franklin Institute, Vol. 221, No. 3, March, 1936.
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