I think the conclusions the author makes are way too broad.
What generates consciousness, appears to me to be a function of what the neurons are all 'doing'. The brain has two features that are devoted to linguistic processing, and you have to activate them in order to find words for the things you think.
Thoughts that 'bubble up' all the way to linguistic representation in the mind are definitely conscious, while it's also possible to make some sense out of brain activity that doesn't quite find words. For example, playing ping pong or some other sport would be exceedingly difficult if you had to use the linguistic part of your brain in order to make sense of what you're doing.
If you meditate, you can focus on that 'line' between when thoughts become linguistic and when they don't, and if you do trance work, you can block out the sensory world and so generate experiences using 'only' the mind. From here, you can work out that brain activity becomes conscious at some point.
Also, obviously there is brain activity that does not reach consciousness, the brain for example needs to do things like regulate heartbeat, and certain aspects of our experience we're only dimly conscious of much of the time. Consciousness is a continuum, not a binary.
So our brains can be doing a lot that we're not aware of.
In the book “The Elephant in the Brain”, the author makes the argument that our consciousness is entirely the PR department of the brain, making explanations for the “company” but not truly knowing what’s really going on.
That is, all our thoughts are post-event justifications to make us feel good.
There’s this famous experiment where they show two different things to each eye of a brain divided patient. The patient would then follow instructions from 1 eye, but provide a justification based on what the other eye saw. Like a PR rep having to do the job but with email and communication being down.
The PR rep has to interpret things in a way that is in harmony to the external environment. Making the self seem self-less or hardworking or moral, etc...
Where it gets interesting is that the resulting PR effects affect the environment which then trigger new behaviors resulting in new PR spin. The PR rep has a degree of control over the system yet at the core of it, the PR rep is installed by language/culture/society and is somewhat of an outsider. Like an overly idealistic justice warrior sent to whitewash some corrupt company and being frustrated by the job.
> Thoughts that 'bubble up' all the way to linguistic representation in the mind are definitely conscious, while it's also possible to make some sense out of brain activity that doesn't quite find words. For example, playing ping pong or some other sport would be exceedingly difficult if you had to use the linguistic part of your brain in order to make sense of what you're doing.
Conscious brain activity always struck me as the primary meaning of "thought". The idea of conflating "thought" with unconscious brain activity just seems to devalue the word itself rather than bring some utility or added understanding to the table.
Personally, I don't think of breathing as a thought at all, or my heart beating, even though it's evidently controlled by the brain, evidently also the source of thoughts. I only really ever have evidence of thoughts as distinct from other brain functions because I experience them consciously.
Surely nobody who is reasonably high-functioning operates with a "single-threaded" consciousness.
Isn't it a common experience to work out problems in your sleep or while doing other tasks? If there's no thought going on beyond the surface of your awareness, where do these solutions come from?
I find analyzing a problem is facilitated by using words to describe it out loud or in writing, but there is clearly something that operates simultaneously apart from the target of my focus, because the description is not the analysis.
Also, I find your description of meditating not really in line with my experience - what I think of as meditating is focusing on a mantra in order to suppress conscious thought, gently pushing it away every time it resurfaces. "Generating experiences" would be the opposite of meditating to me.
> Suppose, instead, that while focusing our conscious minds on generating foods, unconscious mental search processes can work away, in the background, unearthing a string of countries. Then, when we switch to countries, we should be able rapidly to download these—they would not need to be found afresh, because unconscious search would have identified them already. ...
The author seems to have a model of "unconscious" as being deliberate or task-oriented or focused, just like conscious thought, except sequestered somehow from the conscious section of our minds.
Obviously it's not like that, and I don't think anyone thinks it is like that. So the article can be perhaps summarized as "man has obviously wrong idea of how phenomenon works, tests his hypothesis, finds that it can't work that way, declares the phenomenon must not exist at all."
There are plenty of times in the day or night where we may be "thinking" about things but not attending to our thoughts very much or at all, such as while dreaming or zoning out while driving. Actually, driving itself is a great example of a complex activity that requires very little conscious oversight. While driving, you can suddenly realize you have no recollection of the last ten minutes. If your brain can drive "unconsciously," surely it can work on a problem unconsciously; after all, you've been thinking longer than you've been driving. Moreover, you can be driving home from work after a hard day, and your brain can switch back and forth between emotional processing of your day and keeping an eye on the road, and you can still have that feeling where you can't remember the last ten minutes.
None of this contradicts the idea that your brain can only work on one problem at a time, but the overall thesis of the essay only works by blurring different concepts together under the terms "thought" and "consciousness."
Let's distinguish between these different brain/mind functions:
1) Parallel, perceptual work (like recognizing an image)
2) Serial, conceptual work (problem-solving, "thought")
Cognitive behavioral therapy demonstrates that (3) doesn't imply (4) as much as you'd think; you can have a verbal thought very rapidly that you are at most dimly aware of and immediately forget. Rather than implicating consciousness awareness in a wide range of mental activities extending all the way to problem-solving (2), I would say that most things the brain can do with awareness it can also do without awareness.
Those of us familiar with non-verbal "thinking" as we solve a problem know that (2) doesn't imply (3), either. Meanwhile, the thesis of the essay seems to require that (2) implies (4), which is quite a stretch.
> If your brain can drive "unconsciously," surely it can work on a problem unconsciously; after all, you've been thinking longer than you've been driving.
I don't think that follows -- driving is a habitually developed skill which we know can be done unconsciously, while "working on a problem" has nothing to do with habits or skills, and it's hard to argue that kind of symbolic manipulation can be done unconsciously.
In your framework of 1-4, I agree that (3) doesn't always imply (4) because we can produce language out of habit/instinct rather than thought (yelling a curse word involuntarily).
But I find it hard to believe how (2) wouldn't always imply (4). But perhaps this is semantics -- from my understanding, (2) and (4) are merely different terms for the same thing, each implies the other. We're almost always solving some problem at each point during the day and therefore consciously aware -- and when occasionally we're not, that's when we daydream or space out and lose conscious awareness.
I'm not quite convinced of the article's thesis. It may be true that the brain doesn't chug along on a background problem continuously for days, but instead it checks in on the problem every so often when it is in a different state. But the act of reconsidering a problem from a different mental context is the essence of problem solving.
The experiment involving retrieval of foods and countries is suggestive, but I think it cannot be generalized outside of that experimental paradigm. The same for doing arithmetic in one's head. Creative problem solving is a different beast, and the flashes of inspiration described in the article which take place after a matter of hours or days are indicative that the mind revisits the problem in the unconscious.
It might be arguable that the check-in on the problem isn't so much an automatic process, but one of stimuli triggering a pattern match on a problem, or conscious triggering of the thought process.
When people are working on a problem, simply saying out loud "I'm trying to work out this problem" has an effect lighting up the neurons associated with the previous thinking done on that topic. If there is new information, (like a snake eating its tail), that may be integrated unexpectedly into the consideration.
I would suggest that there are prompts all around us that will trigger a "revisit" of a problem, it is conscious (or at least autonomous based on stimuli) action, but not directed.
Having before college stumbled across the "study then toss it to the background and wait for inspiration" method, and used it successfully ever since (& having studied neuroscience in college & seen other similar mistakes), I can say that the author's study & results are likely accurate, and definitely irrelevant.
The key is NOT, as the author describes, to work hard on topic B while topic A is expected to percolate in the background process. This will have the exact result that he found, no progress on A, and indeed many studies show that it will actually interfere with learning/cogitating A to immediately switch to work/study/cognition on topic B.
Instead, the method requires focus on topic A until near exhaustion, then active rest -- do something not requiring any big mental energy/focus, e.g., go for a walk, do work with your hands, go to a cafe for idle conversation, and await inspiration (with writing implements at hand ready to write furiously & in no particular order when it arrives).
He highlights a nice little study showing 1, stuff we already knew (similar to studies I read of decades ago), and 2, are irrelevant to the question at hand.
I'd go even further to counter his title and say that there is barely any such thing as conscious thought, and that the vast majority of thought is unconscious.
This is really taking the Von Neumann computing device metaphor to the extreme.
Opposed to this, I'd rather suggest that there is no such thing as an active thought process (which is probably more like an illusion). Also, the concept as described in the article really fails to account for the experience of creative insight or impulse, neuroses, or "metapsychological" phenomena.
Edit: By applying the idea/concept of threaded processes (pretty much the only concept sufficiently defined in the piece), it really illustrates how much we adapted culturally to the technology we use, which, when introduced, was clearly pictured as an restrictive abstraction from how we would model such processes or how the underlying "architecture" was described by McCulloch and Pitts. (Comparatively, we might add an observation on how Freud was influenced by the then prominent technology of telephone networks on how this was reflected especially in his first topic.)
The unconscious is the opposite of the conscious, if you walk down the road you are thinking unconsciously about where to put your limbs.
You might say "aha! walking is not thinking", but surely you would think very hard about where to put your limbs if you were to walk through a minefield, etc. Is walking thinking if the conscious mind does it? So whether "thought" can occur unconsciously or not is a question of English not of neuroscience.
> if you walk down the road you are thinking unconsciously
I think this statement makes the same error as the article, just in reverse: making a very strong claim that's impossible to prove.
I don't think walking uses "thinking". That sounds incredibly inefficient. Wouldn't unconscious thinking be slow, just as conscious thinking? If not, why not? Wouldn't the body be better off using its short-circuited system, as opposed to thinking through it?
And consider animals whose brains are not very large or known for their mental ability, yet who are very good at body kinematics. I'm inclined to think these are not related at all. The body likely uses some short-circuited system for kinematics, similar to how spiders' legs work, just more advanced. If we figured out how such a system works, we'd be able to build very good robots, but right now we try to make our robots think about how to control each individual part of their limb, so it's cludgey, slow, and inaccurate.
> but surely you would think very hard about where to put your limbs if you were to walk through a minefield, etc.
I'm not thinking of how to put my limbs there, only where to put them, which is a very different task from actually putting them there.
The author jumped from an experiment he did which suggests that our brains can't pull different objects from our memories at the same time to "There is no unconscious thought."
The thesis of this article (that the brain can't multiprocess because neurons are all interconnected) is presented without evidence or any elaboration. It's not hard to imagine that brain has a way to maintain the integrity of multiple distinct thoughts at once, even though they're all running on the same hardware network.
In fact, it's easily disproven given the many experiments conducted on split brain patients. Both halves of the brain can understand complex concepts and act on them simultaneously.
> The thesis of this article is presented without evidence
From the article:
> I carried out an experiment some years ago that tested whether unconscious memory searches can help out the conscious mind. ... Across a wide range of test stimuli, the results were unequivocal
That's not conclusive proof, but it looks to me like evidence?
Any experienced psychonaut knows this is utter bullshit. It doesn't take a lot of LSD or psilocybin for one to experience "unconscious" thought, it is amongst the first things to manifest on a trip. To clarify, this is cognitive activity that results in various streamS of thought that is ordinarily hidden from the conscious self but one can become aware of under altered states of consciousness.
Moreover, if we examine more powerful trips (mystical experience, induced psychosis), there can be no doubt whatsoever as to the presence of a multitude of intelligenceS that one can communicate with. In fact, one can take away the psychedelics and learn to gain access to these parts of the mind through other methods (Jung - active imagination, western esoteric tradition, shamanism). It boggles the mind that the author of this nautilus drivel has nothing to say on these matters.
Finally, he makes the classic mistake of assuming that the unconscious processes of the mind work in the same way as the conscious ones, in terms of one taking advantage of them, when he describes the experiments he uses as proof, that are based on verbalisation and language instead of visualization and symbol reinforcement.
The arguments in this article were unconvincing. It's not surprising that naming foods and countries together is no easier than naming them separately. These are two similar, focused tasks. There is no time for the unconscious to do any work amidst this focus. The unconscious mind requires a more diffuse state, which is best attained by walking in the park, taking a shower, or something like that.
> A natural answer might suggest itself: “I must have been unconsciously working away on these images—and solved or partially solved the mystery without even knowing it. Then the answer ‘broke through’ into consciousness, when I saw the image again.” Yet this would be quite wrong—the same sudden “pop out” occurs when we continuously contemplate the image, and there has been no opportunity for unconscious background pondering.
The statement "and there has been no opportunity for unconscious background pondering" doesn't seem true here. There is always opportunity for "background pondering", even if you're apparently focusing on something. There's no reason to think two parts of the brain aren't working in parallel.
Something close to the reverse might be true. It's possible the apparent act of focusing may not have helped solve the problem, and it's always solved by some background effort. I can't say that I'm consciously aware of how to analyze an image, in the same way that I'm aware of how to multiply.
I wouldn't be too surprised if this is true... but there's no way in hell that's enough evidence to reach that conclusion. We do not know 100% that brains are ran on a single conscious mind, even.
Following the conclusion of this article, given that it uses fairly broad definitions, I'm not sure how it is possible to understand a concept the morning after a good night of sleep. Something has to be going on sufficiently powerful to solve a problem, even if it's not a "thought" in the experiential sense.
I'm inclined to believe the opposite, the brain does a hell of a lot of work unconsciously and not that much consciously. I generally found that I reach better conclusions from throwing a lot of information at my brain, as opposed to trying to build a logical chain. The latter generally happens after.
Right. So we have no idea what consciousness is, or how it works, or where it comes from, but yet we can deduce that there is no such thing as unconscious thought?
>If unconscious thought is impossible, any background racing around our mental archives is entirely ruled out. That is, if we are scouring our memories for foods, we cannot simultaneously search for countries, and vice versa.
The author is not arguing against unconscious thought. They are arguing against background thought. I've never heard of anybody claiming to gain unconscious insight while concentrating hard on something else. It's only claimed to happen while dozing or walking or similar. I'd always assumed that unconscious thought used the exact same brain resources as conscious thought, and the only difference was the lack of consciousness. Obviously if you're using those resources for something else then they won't be available for unconscious thought.
Poincaré and Hindemith cannot possibly be right. If they are spending their days actively thinking about other things, their brains are not unobtrusively solving deep mathematical problems or composing complex pieces of music, perhaps over days or weeks, only to reveal the results in a sudden flash.
No, the brain is reconfiguring itself during REM sleep to be more able to solve the sort of problem that you had been working on. It doesn't happen when you're thinking about other things, particularly. There's a ton of research relating REM sleep to improved skill at problem solving and Poincaré was certainly sleeping on the problems he was trying to solve.
Off topic, and IANAL, but I believe this website breaks European law by refusing to serve the article to european residents who block cookies.
Under the ePrivacy legislation (and GDPR's redefinition of consent), you must obtain "freely given consent" to use cookies that are not necessary for the proper functioning of the site (and under this definition, analytics cookies are not necessary).
By refusing to serve the site to those who opt to block cookies, they ensure that consent can only be given under duress.
> Importantly, the cycle of thought proceeds one step at a time. The brain’s networks of neurons are highly interconnected, so there seems little scope for assigning different problems to different brain networks. If interconnected neurons are working on entirely different problems, then the signals they pass between them will be hopelessly at cross-purposes—and neither task will be completed successfully: Each neuron has no idea which of the signals it receives are relevant to the problem it is working on, and which are just irrelevant junk. If the brain solves problems through the cooperation computation of vast networks of individually sluggish neurons, then any specific network of neurons can work on just one solution to one problem at a time.
Are we to conclude upon observing the crossing paths of trains and passengers that a rail system can service only one route at any moment?
[+] [-] vinceguidry|7 years ago|reply
What generates consciousness, appears to me to be a function of what the neurons are all 'doing'. The brain has two features that are devoted to linguistic processing, and you have to activate them in order to find words for the things you think.
Thoughts that 'bubble up' all the way to linguistic representation in the mind are definitely conscious, while it's also possible to make some sense out of brain activity that doesn't quite find words. For example, playing ping pong or some other sport would be exceedingly difficult if you had to use the linguistic part of your brain in order to make sense of what you're doing.
If you meditate, you can focus on that 'line' between when thoughts become linguistic and when they don't, and if you do trance work, you can block out the sensory world and so generate experiences using 'only' the mind. From here, you can work out that brain activity becomes conscious at some point.
Also, obviously there is brain activity that does not reach consciousness, the brain for example needs to do things like regulate heartbeat, and certain aspects of our experience we're only dimly conscious of much of the time. Consciousness is a continuum, not a binary.
So our brains can be doing a lot that we're not aware of.
[+] [-] dlwdlw|7 years ago|reply
That is, all our thoughts are post-event justifications to make us feel good.
There’s this famous experiment where they show two different things to each eye of a brain divided patient. The patient would then follow instructions from 1 eye, but provide a justification based on what the other eye saw. Like a PR rep having to do the job but with email and communication being down.
The PR rep has to interpret things in a way that is in harmony to the external environment. Making the self seem self-less or hardworking or moral, etc...
Where it gets interesting is that the resulting PR effects affect the environment which then trigger new behaviors resulting in new PR spin. The PR rep has a degree of control over the system yet at the core of it, the PR rep is installed by language/culture/society and is somewhat of an outsider. Like an overly idealistic justice warrior sent to whitewash some corrupt company and being frustrated by the job.
[+] [-] drb91|7 years ago|reply
Conscious brain activity always struck me as the primary meaning of "thought". The idea of conflating "thought" with unconscious brain activity just seems to devalue the word itself rather than bring some utility or added understanding to the table.
Personally, I don't think of breathing as a thought at all, or my heart beating, even though it's evidently controlled by the brain, evidently also the source of thoughts. I only really ever have evidence of thoughts as distinct from other brain functions because I experience them consciously.
[+] [-] perl4ever|7 years ago|reply
Isn't it a common experience to work out problems in your sleep or while doing other tasks? If there's no thought going on beyond the surface of your awareness, where do these solutions come from?
I find analyzing a problem is facilitated by using words to describe it out loud or in writing, but there is clearly something that operates simultaneously apart from the target of my focus, because the description is not the analysis.
Also, I find your description of meditating not really in line with my experience - what I think of as meditating is focusing on a mantra in order to suppress conscious thought, gently pushing it away every time it resurfaces. "Generating experiences" would be the opposite of meditating to me.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pmichaud|7 years ago|reply
The author seems to have a model of "unconscious" as being deliberate or task-oriented or focused, just like conscious thought, except sequestered somehow from the conscious section of our minds.
Obviously it's not like that, and I don't think anyone thinks it is like that. So the article can be perhaps summarized as "man has obviously wrong idea of how phenomenon works, tests his hypothesis, finds that it can't work that way, declares the phenomenon must not exist at all."
[+] [-] dgreensp|7 years ago|reply
None of this contradicts the idea that your brain can only work on one problem at a time, but the overall thesis of the essay only works by blurring different concepts together under the terms "thought" and "consciousness."
Let's distinguish between these different brain/mind functions:
1) Parallel, perceptual work (like recognizing an image)
2) Serial, conceptual work (problem-solving, "thought")
3) Verbal, narrative mental occurrences ("thoughts")
4) Conscious awareness
Cognitive behavioral therapy demonstrates that (3) doesn't imply (4) as much as you'd think; you can have a verbal thought very rapidly that you are at most dimly aware of and immediately forget. Rather than implicating consciousness awareness in a wide range of mental activities extending all the way to problem-solving (2), I would say that most things the brain can do with awareness it can also do without awareness.
Those of us familiar with non-verbal "thinking" as we solve a problem know that (2) doesn't imply (3), either. Meanwhile, the thesis of the essay seems to require that (2) implies (4), which is quite a stretch.
[+] [-] crazygringo|7 years ago|reply
I don't think that follows -- driving is a habitually developed skill which we know can be done unconsciously, while "working on a problem" has nothing to do with habits or skills, and it's hard to argue that kind of symbolic manipulation can be done unconsciously.
In your framework of 1-4, I agree that (3) doesn't always imply (4) because we can produce language out of habit/instinct rather than thought (yelling a curse word involuntarily).
But I find it hard to believe how (2) wouldn't always imply (4). But perhaps this is semantics -- from my understanding, (2) and (4) are merely different terms for the same thing, each implies the other. We're almost always solving some problem at each point during the day and therefore consciously aware -- and when occasionally we're not, that's when we daydream or space out and lose conscious awareness.
[+] [-] jawarner|7 years ago|reply
The experiment involving retrieval of foods and countries is suggestive, but I think it cannot be generalized outside of that experimental paradigm. The same for doing arithmetic in one's head. Creative problem solving is a different beast, and the flashes of inspiration described in the article which take place after a matter of hours or days are indicative that the mind revisits the problem in the unconscious.
[+] [-] mtippett|7 years ago|reply
When people are working on a problem, simply saying out loud "I'm trying to work out this problem" has an effect lighting up the neurons associated with the previous thinking done on that topic. If there is new information, (like a snake eating its tail), that may be integrated unexpectedly into the consideration.
I would suggest that there are prompts all around us that will trigger a "revisit" of a problem, it is conscious (or at least autonomous based on stimuli) action, but not directed.
[+] [-] toss1|7 years ago|reply
The key is NOT, as the author describes, to work hard on topic B while topic A is expected to percolate in the background process. This will have the exact result that he found, no progress on A, and indeed many studies show that it will actually interfere with learning/cogitating A to immediately switch to work/study/cognition on topic B.
Instead, the method requires focus on topic A until near exhaustion, then active rest -- do something not requiring any big mental energy/focus, e.g., go for a walk, do work with your hands, go to a cafe for idle conversation, and await inspiration (with writing implements at hand ready to write furiously & in no particular order when it arrives).
He highlights a nice little study showing 1, stuff we already knew (similar to studies I read of decades ago), and 2, are irrelevant to the question at hand.
I'd go even further to counter his title and say that there is barely any such thing as conscious thought, and that the vast majority of thought is unconscious.
[+] [-] masswerk|7 years ago|reply
Opposed to this, I'd rather suggest that there is no such thing as an active thought process (which is probably more like an illusion). Also, the concept as described in the article really fails to account for the experience of creative insight or impulse, neuroses, or "metapsychological" phenomena.
Edit: By applying the idea/concept of threaded processes (pretty much the only concept sufficiently defined in the piece), it really illustrates how much we adapted culturally to the technology we use, which, when introduced, was clearly pictured as an restrictive abstraction from how we would model such processes or how the underlying "architecture" was described by McCulloch and Pitts. (Comparatively, we might add an observation on how Freud was influenced by the then prominent technology of telephone networks on how this was reflected especially in his first topic.)
[+] [-] bodas|7 years ago|reply
You might say "aha! walking is not thinking", but surely you would think very hard about where to put your limbs if you were to walk through a minefield, etc. Is walking thinking if the conscious mind does it? So whether "thought" can occur unconsciously or not is a question of English not of neuroscience.
[+] [-] projektir|7 years ago|reply
I think this statement makes the same error as the article, just in reverse: making a very strong claim that's impossible to prove.
I don't think walking uses "thinking". That sounds incredibly inefficient. Wouldn't unconscious thinking be slow, just as conscious thinking? If not, why not? Wouldn't the body be better off using its short-circuited system, as opposed to thinking through it?
And consider animals whose brains are not very large or known for their mental ability, yet who are very good at body kinematics. I'm inclined to think these are not related at all. The body likely uses some short-circuited system for kinematics, similar to how spiders' legs work, just more advanced. If we figured out how such a system works, we'd be able to build very good robots, but right now we try to make our robots think about how to control each individual part of their limb, so it's cludgey, slow, and inaccurate.
> but surely you would think very hard about where to put your limbs if you were to walk through a minefield, etc.
I'm not thinking of how to put my limbs there, only where to put them, which is a very different task from actually putting them there.
[+] [-] StClaire|7 years ago|reply
I think he needs stronger evidence
[+] [-] brianberns|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enragedcacti|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] opportune|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SideburnsOfDoom|7 years ago|reply
From the article:
> I carried out an experiment some years ago that tested whether unconscious memory searches can help out the conscious mind. ... Across a wide range of test stimuli, the results were unequivocal
That's not conclusive proof, but it looks to me like evidence?
[+] [-] armitron|7 years ago|reply
Moreover, if we examine more powerful trips (mystical experience, induced psychosis), there can be no doubt whatsoever as to the presence of a multitude of intelligenceS that one can communicate with. In fact, one can take away the psychedelics and learn to gain access to these parts of the mind through other methods (Jung - active imagination, western esoteric tradition, shamanism). It boggles the mind that the author of this nautilus drivel has nothing to say on these matters.
Finally, he makes the classic mistake of assuming that the unconscious processes of the mind work in the same way as the conscious ones, in terms of one taking advantage of them, when he describes the experiments he uses as proof, that are based on verbalisation and language instead of visualization and symbol reinforcement.
[+] [-] dingo_bat|7 years ago|reply
What does this profound experience with drugs tell us about human consciousness/thought? Literally nothing.
[+] [-] pixelperfect|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nitwit005|7 years ago|reply
The statement "and there has been no opportunity for unconscious background pondering" doesn't seem true here. There is always opportunity for "background pondering", even if you're apparently focusing on something. There's no reason to think two parts of the brain aren't working in parallel.
Something close to the reverse might be true. It's possible the apparent act of focusing may not have helped solve the problem, and it's always solved by some background effort. I can't say that I'm consciously aware of how to analyze an image, in the same way that I'm aware of how to multiply.
[+] [-] projektir|7 years ago|reply
Following the conclusion of this article, given that it uses fairly broad definitions, I'm not sure how it is possible to understand a concept the morning after a good night of sleep. Something has to be going on sufficiently powerful to solve a problem, even if it's not a "thought" in the experiential sense.
I'm inclined to believe the opposite, the brain does a hell of a lot of work unconsciously and not that much consciously. I generally found that I reach better conclusions from throwing a lot of information at my brain, as opposed to trying to build a logical chain. The latter generally happens after.
[+] [-] teilo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrob|7 years ago|reply
The author is not arguing against unconscious thought. They are arguing against background thought. I've never heard of anybody claiming to gain unconscious insight while concentrating hard on something else. It's only claimed to happen while dozing or walking or similar. I'd always assumed that unconscious thought used the exact same brain resources as conscious thought, and the only difference was the lack of consciousness. Obviously if you're using those resources for something else then they won't be available for unconscious thought.
[+] [-] projektir|7 years ago|reply
I feel like this might have happened to me here or there...
You never felt like you thought about one thing, and, in the background, something else was processed?
[+] [-] StanislavPetrov|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Symmetry|7 years ago|reply
No, the brain is reconfiguring itself during REM sleep to be more able to solve the sort of problem that you had been working on. It doesn't happen when you're thinking about other things, particularly. There's a ton of research relating REM sleep to improved skill at problem solving and Poincaré was certainly sleeping on the problems he was trying to solve.
[+] [-] jeffmcmahan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanWaterworth|7 years ago|reply
Under the ePrivacy legislation (and GDPR's redefinition of consent), you must obtain "freely given consent" to use cookies that are not necessary for the proper functioning of the site (and under this definition, analytics cookies are not necessary).
By refusing to serve the site to those who opt to block cookies, they ensure that consent can only be given under duress.
[+] [-] dingo_bat|7 years ago|reply
Not being able to read a random website is not "duress".
[+] [-] groupdeterminac|7 years ago|reply
Are we to conclude upon observing the crossing paths of trains and passengers that a rail system can service only one route at any moment?