Unconscious thought precedes conscious | Incognito | The Economist

Description

Evidence mounts that brains decide before their owners know about it

EVERYONE has had the experience. You are confronted by a complex problem, with a not-so-obvious solution. You pore over it, engrossed, but still the answer will not come. Fearing you will be stuck for ever, you take a walk. Then suddenly, from nowhere, there it is. Eureka!

But did it really come from nowhere? A piece of research about to be published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, by Joydeep Bhattacharya at Goldsmiths’ College in London and Bhavin Sheth at the University of Houston, in Texas, suggests that although people are not consciously aware of it, their brains have to be in a certain state for an insight to take place. Moreover, that state can be detected electrically several seconds in advance of the “aha!” moment itself.

The question of where insights come from has become a hot topic in neuroscience, despite the fact that they are not easy to induce experimentally in a laboratory. Some researchers have used getting the punch line of a riddle as an example of an insightful outcome. Critics complain, however, that this is less an insight than an “outsight”. Other experiments have used word tasks. In these, a person might be given three seemingly unrelated words, such as “skirts”, “black” and “put”, and asked to come up with a fourth that can link to each of the other three. (In this case, “out”.) But those tasks may say more about lexical ability than true insight.

Dr Bhattacharya and Dr Sheth have taken a third approach. They have selected some brain-teasing but practical problems in the hope that these would get closer to mimicking real insight. To qualify, a puzzle had to be simple, not too widely known and without a methodical solution. The researchers then asked 18 young ...

Original URL

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13489722

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13489722