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The process of learning and a neurological basis for intuition (7/20/06)
"On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect" studied the ability of our unconscious mind to make decisions by giving three groups of people a problem to figure out and then put them through 3 situations:
- Choose a solution to the problem immediately,
- Choose a solution to the problem after time to consider things,
- Choose a solution to the problem after being distracted for the same amount of time as #2, and then making a decision immediately.
As it happens the folks in #3 did the best.
Another study, "Offline Persistence of Memory-Related Cerebral Activity during Active Wakefulness", put participants through a driving course in a virtual environment and then studied their brains afterward. Participants showed signs of neuronal connections being remapped, as though their brains actually remapped themselves in the wake of the new experiences, in the hippocampus (center of memories) and the stratium, which takes care of automatic memory, such as what we use when driving a car, riding a bike, or making a PB&J. The implication is that the brain actually tailors itself to deal with the situation better, possibly more quickly, in case it is presented with it again.
While the specifics and interconnections of these studies will surely be debated I think the second provides some insight into the first. Let's look at the three groups from the brain's perspective:
- Immediate answer based on the pre-problem circuitry,
- Questions posed and conscious development for some time, followed by an immediate answer based on the pre-problem circuitry,
- Distraction allows the circuitry to change before trying the decision making process. That process happens, and the best answer is produced.
It sounds like the distracted folks from group #3 score higher because their brains have had a chance to tailor themselves to the problem based on the experiences during that initial exploration of the problem. The folks from group #2 didn't get this advantage because they continued exploring the problem, using the existing, non-specialized circuitry, and then produced an answer. If they went in an incorrect direction it would likely be reflected in the optimized circuitry created later on. However, the process of that optimization might even yield a moment of epiphany where the early decision is realized to be wrong, the in-process circuitry optimization updated with the new information, and the end result would be the correctly optimized circuitry found in the folks from group #3.
Were the groups to be tossed through a similar problem using different variables a few days later, we would expect all three to have had a chance to get the optimized circuitry. It becomes a story of different strategies though. Group #1 probably just got the raw end of the deal. Group #2 would have the benefit, or loss depending on how things went for them, of a deeper understanding of the material due to the time taken for deliberation. Group #3 wouldn't have that but the experience of producing an answer using the already optimized circuitry would itself be used to optimize the circuitry even more, possibly leaving them with a leg up over the other groups except for the lucky gems from group #2 who successfully realized their mistake and then encoded that into their circuitry. So the question is, who is further along, those gems or the twice encoded folks in group #3? Either way they are both better off than the folks in group #1.
As part of growing up, wondering about the system of humanity, I learnt it would be a lot faster to depend on this "optimized circuitry" process rather than depending on route memorization, mainly because I didn't get bored as easily with it (note to school age children: chemistry and languages have too many irregular "gotchas" to depend on this alone!). At the time I thought it was intuition. Now I just know I was tailoring my brain for the problems. Look at the material on this website and you will quickly see the majority of it comes from me tying incredibly disparate thoughts and information together to form new ideas and information. After so many years of embracing this optimization process this is what my brain ended up being specialized for. Other brains are specialized for other processes, be it memory recall, specific activities like troubleshooting problems, etc. The big question is if we can successfully specialize for more than one type.
Those interested in the application of this topic might be interested in what I said in this Ask Metafilter thread.
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