John Vervaeke - Thinking & Reasoning - Lecture 6 (2s0xy-P4Ldg)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=2s0xy-P4Ldg

Perfect. A couple of announcements. I’ve badly hurt my hip and I’m in pain. So if I look at you and it looks like I’m grimacing at you, it has nothing to do with what you’re saying. I like all of you. Things are going great. The class is going well. So please take that into consideration and don’t misread any of my facial expressions. I’m going to ask you right now. I’ll just suddenly get a sharp pain. Okay, I’m not going to review what we’ve done because you haven’t reviewed last class. So we’re going to go forward. All I’ll remind you of from previous is we ended with two more recent criticisms by Weisberg from 95 and then we’ll see if there’s yet another criticism that he doesn’t report with Fleck and Weisberg. Weisberg keeps going, by the way. He’s like the energizer bunny of criticizing research and then like I say creativity. And I have a lot of respect for him even though I tend to disagree with almost all of his conclusions. I think he’s a great scientist. So the two criticisms, the first one is, and they’re both philosophical criticisms. They’re the good sense of philosophical, right? Using rational reflection to challenge assumptions and presuppositions, which is what philosophy is really good at. The first assumption was that something just is objectively an insight problem. He pointed out that that’s not the case. I extended his argument by pointing out that nothing is any kind of problem at all. The universe just is. We gave up a long time ago that the universe acts on purpose because the universe doesn’t act on purpose. The natural world, at least the non-biological world, is not problematic in any sense. So the idea is, we’ve just been assuming that certain problems are intrinsically an insight problem, but that is a very questionable assumption. The second, even if there were such things, it doesn’t mean they form a natural class, a natural client kind, a homogeneous class in which we can derive inductive conclusions. It might be that there are three kinds of problems, insight problems, incremental problems, and hybrid problems, and that therefore many of the tests that we’ve engaged in the past have been confounded and confused. I think these are both important ideas, and I think by responding to them, what’s happened is not all, so I don’t want to say make it overly rational, but a lot of the research has shifted about insight problem solving as a response to these critiques. Welcome. So, I think the most important response to the first critique has come out of the work of Young, Beeman, and Boden, and Kunias. Did you see, oh there’s the chalk. It is migrated to here. Young Beeman, who is now just Beeman, so… Beeman’s move around a lot these days, much more than they used to, and that’s probably a good thing. Young Beeman and Boden, and I’m putting them on this order, but the order in the articles shifts around. So, you’ve got 2003, 2004, 2005, a series of studies. And then you have the Beeman and, I can’t remember if it’s Kunias and Beeman or Beeman and Kunias, a book from last year, the Eureka moment, that follows up and summarizes and integrates all this neuroscientific research. So, what I’m pointing out with this is you have a pretty well developed and robust line of research. So, we’re not just talking about one study, we’re talking about a whole bunch of work. So, how did they try and address the Weisberg critique? They agreed that we should give up claiming that problems are intrinsically insight problems or not. Instead, what they proposed was to teach people the basic phenomenology of an insight problem. This is what people typically report when they’re having an insight. And we’re going to give you a whole bunch of problems randomly selected from the literature, right? And what you’re going to do is you’re going to tell us when you’re having an insight. We’re not going to claim that any particular problem is itself an insight problem. We’re going to instead ask you to tell us when you’re having an insight while you’re solving these problems. The thing is, while you’re doing that, while that’s happening with all the participants, there’s going to be FMRI studies and dense EEG studies to see what’s going on in the brain. So, now what you do is you shift, and I think this is a fundamental thing, and I’m going to argue later why it’s in fact absolutely necessary, that you shift from trying to come up with a theory of the problem to a theory of the processing. So, right? The idea here is there may not be any objectivity or universality to the entities that people have been calling insight problems, but there may be universals to the processing whenever anybody is experiencing an insight. So, this is a very good move, and I’m going to argue later when we talk about relevance realization, where this in fact turns out to be an essential move. So, you’re doing these, and then you want to find if you’ve got two sort of features to your finding. You want to see if there’s a consistent set of results. Now, of course, consistent in the framework of neuroscience, it’s hard to get, I mean, you can’t get like even 90% consistency for anything in neuroscience. And this has to do with the fact that, we don’t get to talk about it much in this course, but we talk about it in 3.12, the massive redeployment hypothesis, that brains don’t always use the same area to perform the same function. So, nevertheless, within those standards, you’re looking for a consistent set of results. Do you find that the same areas are largely becoming more active, and there’s a pattern of activation? So, don’t just look synchronic, don’t just do cerebral cartography. We should all be sick of that by now, right? We all know that that doesn’t do much for us. This part of the brain glows, so what? That’s not quite what we’re looking for. We don’t want the snapshot, we want to look for patterns of activation. And I think Rusaki and others have been arguing for that for quite a long time, and I think that’s a good point to make. I am disturbed, and many of you are probably equally disturbed, by the repeated finding that you can take results, you can take articles that will not get published, that have been refused, change them in no other way but put some fMRI brain images in them, resubmit them, and those exact same articles will now be published. This is disturbing, and it keeps happening. So we’ve got to not fetishize things. Sorry, that’s a bit of a rant in my late nights. Okay, so let’s get back to it. We want a consistent set of results, and again, we want to look for not just areas of activation, but patterns of activation, and consistency within the existing standards of neuroscience. Second, does or do these patterns provide theoretically meaningful content? Is there a good theoretical, independently established theoretical explanation of these patterns of activation that would also extend explanatory power to what’s happening in insight? Now, if you get both of those things, consistent results and theoretically powerful results, then you have good reason for believing that you’re coming up with some objective properties of the processing of insight without stipulating any features of the problem that itself have to exist in order for it to be an insight problem. Okay, so we’re going to follow up this work, and then we’re going to take a look at convergent work with it. So, what did they find? They found that in fact, there was a consistent set of results. So, the problems, if you compare the problems that are reported as insight to those that are not insight, there’s a very consistent difference between them. The insight solutions are associated with increased activation in the right anterior superior temporal gyrus. Generally, there’s a significant shift in activation from the left to the right hemisphere. That’s clear from the fMRIs. And the EEG was able to show that activity begins shortly before the insight solution compared to the non-insight solution. So, what you get is you get a very, to put the two results together, you get a very sudden shift that actually seems to correspond quite well to those sudden shifts in feelings of warmth and heart rate activity that we saw in previous behavioral experiments beginning the sudden shift from left to right. And then activity returns. So, is it theoretically motivated? Yes, it is. Now, the problem is that the activity is not motivated. The problem here is we have to stop and be a little bit more careful because the media is crazy and strange about left and right hemispheres of the brain. According to the media, your left hemisphere is some kind of crypto-fascist. Your right hemisphere is a romantic artist that if you could just liberate it would make you astonishingly creative and bring fulfillment to all of your human relationships. A more better appraisal of this is McGill-Crisp book, The Master and His Emissary, tracing out how there’s an interaction between cultures and which type of hemispheric activity might be more dominant. And I think that cultural assessment is a more interesting one to pay attention to than our particular media misrepresentation. Instead, what we can take a look at, yes? The Master and His Emissary by McGill-Crisp. Thomas, since you’re already interested in other things because I know this because you’ve taken courses, he’s also written a book on the relationship between cultural-driven hemispheric dominance and the meaning of it. Okay, so this has to do with lateralization of functionality. Some of you might have done something with me and you take some time on this to talk about it. And what’s interesting is now biologists have done some work on this and have afforded good information, good evidence that the lateralization is much more ancient than we think. Initially, in fact, for quite a while, people thought that such strong lateralization was a feature of humans or at least just humans and the higher primates. But now they have found evidence for lateralization in amphibians, like frogs. And we haven’t shared a common ancestor with frogs since a very, very long time ago. Okay, now why do we have to do this? And we haven’t shared a common ancestor with frogs since a very, very long time ago. Okay, now why is that important? That means that lateralization reflects a convergent solution. Many different species evolving in different environments have evolved some kind of brain lateralization. So it’s representing a deep evolutionary solution to something that is pervasively common. And so it looks like, and the way that biologists talk about this, I think, and without any travesty to their vocabulary, be mapped onto the language and the vocabulary of our course. The way to do it, right, is to think about some possible ancestors. We’ll do a little bit of a Godonkin experiment. Not because the work is a Godonkin experiment, I’m doing this just as pedagogy. Okay, so we have Indu’s ancestors and Thomas’s and Hattie’s. So they’re all in the primordial swamp or something like this. Now, they’re in a very familiar situation to both of them. They spend a lot of time in the swamp. Okay, now all things being, all else being equal, so there’s a pair of us, the one that is going to eat, I’ll compete the other, is the one that can notice differences, more fine-grained differences. Right? It’s going to not be, right? Because the situations are familiar, the differences are going to be harder to find. That’s what familiarity means. But if the differences can be found, those differences could make a difference in the ability to track food, move around, etc. So in very familiar environments, that kind of increased acuity, cognitive acuity, is going to be important. Does that make sense? So you want, in that situation, you want this kind of thing. You want very narrow focused attention. You need to be able to focus in on details. You want to be very intolerant of ambiguity because you’re trying to get very clear on things. And you want your processing to be very step-by-step and detailed. Because if you’re going to do, take advantage of differences, you have to have sort of fine motor action. And that requires breaking your process up into steps. So let’s say, right, that’s what Indus ancestors have. They have this shh. And so as the day goes on, she’s getting food and Thomas’ ancestors are dying because they don’t have the same ability. Right? But then a predator sneaks in, some sort of primordial hawk entity. And they’re going to be like, oh, I’m going to be a predator. And they’re going to be like, oh, I’m going to be a predator. And they’re going to be like, oh, I’m going to be a predator. And so the predator sneaks in, some sort of primordial hawk entity. Right? Now, you want a very different kind of attention. You want wide open attention. Right? Wide open. Your attention is much wider open. You’re not concerned about clarity. Because you want very fast getting the gist. So you’re much more ambiguity tolerant. You don’t care if it’s a hawk or an eagle or something. It’s just, oh, big frying thing. Okay? Now here, Thomas will outcompete Indus ancestors. Because they’re all focused on detail. Isn’t this better hawk or an eagle hawk or a, oh, and she’s dead. Right? And he’s run away. But, there’s a third ancestor in the swamp. I don’t know. And she has a brain that’s divided to do both. Now of the three, who’s going to win the Darwinian competition? I don’t know. Because she has a hemisphere that can compete with Indu for familiar situations. And she has a hemisphere that can compete with Thomas for the unfamiliar situations. Or to use language of the course, she has a hemisphere that really likes well defined problems. And a hemisphere that’s better adapted for well defined problems. Well defined problems. So, the Laff hemisphere in general is oriented the way Indu’s ancestors were. Narrow focused. It’s looking at the feature level. It has step by step processing. And it tends to be very ambiguity intolerant. That’s a better way of describing the Laff hemisphere in general. Right? The right hemisphere has got much wider scope of attention. More global or gestalt. It looks for the gestalt. It looks for the overarching unifying pattern. It tends to leap. Get the gist. Notice I’m using language also from the inside research. It’s tolerance of ambiguity. It does what’s called more coarse grained processing. So, for example of you, and we’ll talk about these later. A little bit later. You use Navon letters. Or Navon letters. I’ve heard both pronunciations so I don’t know which one’s correct. Navon letters are one in which the gestalt and the feature aspects. Right? Can be differentiated. In fact, you can even make them incongruent with each other. So, for example, I can make an H. This is an incongruent Navon letter. Because the feature level is incongruent with the gestalt level. You can make them congruent and people process them differently. Okay, now, think about this. I want you to answer the question. You asked something. This has been done by the way. I don’t know what the right answers are. But, presumably you’ll be able to figure it out. Suppose somebody is damaged in their right hemisphere. Okay? And you ask them to draw this. What will they draw? So, if you’ve seen this before in other courses, we don’t answer. But, if there’s damage in the right hemisphere and you ask them to draw this, what will they draw? Can anybody say? No ideas? Yes? No? Just an L? One single? No. They don’t do that. Close. You’re halfway there. A big H? No. That’s the wrong way. They draw a bunch of unconnected Ls. It’s not hard for you to do that, by the way. Why? Because all they’re seeing is the local, fetal, and what are they not doing with it? They’re not gestalting it at all. They’re not getting any gestalt. Okay? This is by confidence. Now, if the left hemisphere is damaged and you ask them to draw it, what will they draw? So, people are not mumbling because you’re getting more confidence? They’ll draw this. They’ll say, that’s what I see. So, they’ll draw the gestalt, but they will lack the feature differences in detail. Does that make sense? Okay, so like I said, they’ve been able to show this kind of specialization of function even with frogs. Fuck amazing. Hi, how are you? That’s okay. How are you? I’m good. How are you? Independent evidence for this, cross-species evidence. Much better, I think, interpretation of the hemisphere. So, the idea is that there’s a sudden shift. They’re shifting from working within the left hemisphere that’s treating the problem as well-defined, which means it already has a problem formulation, to shifting to the right hemisphere, right? Where you’re trying to get a gestalt, you’re open to novelty, you’re tolerant of ambiguity, you’re much more exploratory. Now, what does that remind you of, that shift between the left and the right? Does it remind you of anything? Yes? The primary level. Yeah. Kaplan and Simon predicted there would be something like this. You’ve got searching within a well-defined problem space versus searching for an alternative problem formulation. So, notice how this result is very consistent with both the feeling of warmth difference that Matt Kaplan was finding, and the purely analytic theoretical argument, the design argument, given by Kaplan and Simon to get this sudden shift. Now, a couple other things before we do some hybridization. Now, a couple other things before we do some convergent replications and extensions to this. They note that this sudden shift can be found in other kinds of phenomena. They point to two phenomena that will also induce this sudden shift. One is garden-packed sentences, and the other is metaphor. So, you know garden-packed sentences are things like, the horse raced past the barn fell. It’s the horse that was raced past the barn fell, but when you first process it, you think that, right, the horse raced past the barn is the main verb, and it’s not. It’s an adverbial phrase. The horse raced past the barn fell. Metaphor, you know metaphor, you know Sam is a pig. Some of you know in other courses I talk about the connections between metaphor and insight, and you can think about, by the way, the garden-packed sentences is very similar to the puzzle form that was used in Lockhart’s experiments. Again, very consonant. But here’s the point I am now reminding you of. Notice that both metaphor and garden-packed sentences are verbal stimuli, linguistic stimuli, showing once again that language per se is not the issue. Again, challenging from another set of experiments, the idea of verbal overshadowing. It’s not language use per se, but the kind of processing and brain activity that is being triggered by the linguistic stimuli. So add that in as yet another example that I’m going to come back to when I’m going to criticize verbal overshadowing as a model construct that should be removed from our textbooks, even though it keeps getting promoted. Even though it keeps getting promoted as it has increasing failures to replicate, by the way. So both theoretically mongrel and empirically degenerative. Sounds horrible, doesn’t it? Sounds like some sort of really bad movie from an old, a really bad monster from an over-intellectualized horror movie. Okay, so what you have going on there is this interesting idea that you’re getting basically a non-inferential move, a shift in activation between different patterns of information processing that is a crucial thing happening in insight. This is very far, we’re now coming very far distance from the gestaltists who couldn’t give us any account of what they meant by a non-inferential move. So, is that all? No, there’s more. I mean, as Ian Hacking has taught us, if you don’t know who Ian Hacking is, he’s a famous philosopher of science who, guess where he was actually based? University of Toronto. So Ian Hacking has consistently argued that science is not just about explaining, it’s about intervening. One of his books, one of his most crucialness is a book back entitled, Is it Representation and Intervening or Representing and Intervening? I think it’s Representing and Intervening. The point is, we think we actually are getting at reality when our explanations afford us causal power and intervention. When somebody says, I understand what’s causing pneumonia and then they can actually cure it, we tend to think that they are on the track of the truth. So, mainly can you take this and can you turn it into an intervention? So, Chy and Snyder did two studies on this. Now, they used what’s called transcranial direct current stimulation. Transcranial direct current stimulation is kind of up in the air about how powerful it is and you’re getting, it alters brain activity, but of course, that doesn’t mean that it directly corresponds to the brain. Of course, that doesn’t mean that it directly corresponds to the results people are seeking. But, what you can do is you basically run a weak current and it’s probably going to get replaced and improved by transcranial alternating current. Which is probably, because it’s probably again not just direct stimulation but patterning of stimulation. But, I’ll leave that all aside for now. What you basically do is you get a 9 volt battery and hook up two electrodes to your skull and run a current across it. What that does is it’s not like TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, that basically activates neurons. With transcranial magnetic stimulation is you basically have an electromagnetic pulse near somebody’s brain. It causes the neurons to fire and fire and fire and then they fatigue, right, deeply fatigue. And then what you have is a temporary lesion, at least they claim it’s temporary. So, I could do TMS on him and sort of shut down parts of the lap hemisphere and he would lose a lot of standard linguistic functions. And in that very new stage you would find the cycle traumatizing but the function would come back. So, TDCS doesn’t do that. What it does is it changes the probability that the brain will spontaneously shift its pattern of activity. So, it’s not direct stimulation. What it does is it sort of coaxes the brain to more spontaneously and internally shift its pattern of activation. So, they did a study in 2011 in which they gave people a bunch of problems, insight problems. We’ll come back to the second of Weisberg’s Creed Peak which would apply here but we’ll see why it’s not going to be that important. They gave people a bunch of insight problems and what they had was a TDCS montage, that’s how you place the electrodes, that was designed to basically radically shift activation into the right hemisphere, especially around this area. And what they found, and what you do is you compare that, so you control it with these people who also have the montage but have what’s called sham. It sends out a weak current that makes people feel like a little tingly thing that something’s happening but it’s not strong enough or consistent enough to do anything. So, you have sham compared to actual TDCS. And what they found was that people who had the actual TDCS solved about three times as many insight problems as those that didn’t. That in and of itself is an impressive result. But then they decided to do the ultimate test. So what’s one of the hardest insight problems of all time? The 9 dot problem. So what’s the statistical solution rate for the 9 dot problem? 0%. You put this montage on people, the spontaneous solution rate for the 9 dot problem goes to 40%. The chances of that happening by chance are one in a billion. Pretty impressive. So that tends to lend a lot of credence to the idea that we’re getting a clearer idea of what’s going on. But before we go on, we should stop and think about this. Because, I mean, this is a university and it’s not just about presenting isolated pieces of information but you’re supposed to be fitting them into a universal picture. Namely, this is kind of worrying as a result too. So some of you may know that DARPA and the military are already using this kind of technology to try and induce flow. So some of you may know that DARPA and the military are already using this kind of technology to try and induce flow states and other things to improve the training of sharpshooters. I’ve been approached by the US Army because of my interest in trying to integrate PDCS with mindfulness practices to have a neutral enhancement. By the way, there’s some preliminary evidence of that. In fact, it seems to be the case. And we’ve had this unique history that whatever we initially did by wire, we figure out how to do wirelessly. You can imagine corporations wanting you to wear this when you’re working on their stuff. You can also imagine a government coming up with a wireless alternative that actually has the opposite effect on you. It would reduce your capacity for insight. You might be more likely to vote for Donald Trump. Okay, this is very worrying. And there’s increasing stuff like this happening. It used to be that your skull was the border of how the state could intervene on your cognitive agency. I mean, it was crude drugs and brainwashing techniques, and there was torture. But all of those are actually quite ineffective. They’re horrible. I’m not sanctioning them at all morally, but they were actually, causally, very poor tools. They were bludgeon tools that did not work. Their results were very unreliable. But that boundary’s going away. The boundary’s going away. The ability to intervene and invade what’s going on inside your cognition by getting more fine-grained access to your brain is now becoming a real thing. So, about the time I’m retiring, I predict it will be a very dangerously real thing. But I’ll be retired. But you won’t be. So, one of the things in addition from just learning what you need to learn for science is you need to become more literate on all of this stuff just to be an effective citizen of a democracy. Because this is going to become another thing that we have to have legislative around. So, of course, you want to be as well-educated as you can about all of this. They called this thing the thinking cap, which was a dangerous thing to do to the media. The media has a way of naming, well, I mean, that’s their job. They have to name things to make them sound exciting and interesting. And that’s easily understandable. So, it looks like, and you can read the most recent book, it’s called the Eureka Moment, it looks like we’re getting some clearer idea. There’s variance in it, but it’s generally getting an idea of what’s going on in insight. And it seems to be consonant, like I said, with the feeling of warmth stuff and also with Kaplan and Simon’s design prediction about a shift in the cognitive processing that’s going on. It would be interesting to see if we could make more fine-grained predictions. This hasn’t been done. This has not been done. This has not been done. This has not been done. So, when the right hemisphere is searching for alternative formulations, is it using something like the notice invariant heuristic that Kaplan and Simon said is going on in the meta-space? Is it more sensitive to aspects of various problem formulations that aren’t changing? So, that’s work that needs to be done, for example. Okay, so I think what we can claim, at least with minimal, without being too contentious of plausibility, is that there is a bona fide and ongoing and powerful research tradition that has developed in response to Weisberg’s first criticism that seems to be far in quite a bit of success. Yes, there is no objective measure of insight, but there’s objective measures of insight processing, and they seem to be objective enough that we can actually use them to enhance and induce insight problem solving. With all the scary political and moral consequences thereof. I mean, that’s one of the surest tests that you’re starting to do science, that it becomes morally scary. Because until it’s morally scary, you don’t really have any new causal power. And if you don’t have any new causal power, then you really aren’t doing science that much. Okay, so that’s the first thing. The second one, the critique, was whether or not insight problems, the ones that have been traditionally called insight problems, in fact form some kind of homogeneous class. Because if they don’t, then many of the experiments, right, are questionable. Now, first of all, there’s no inconsistency between the first point and the second point. What do I mean by that? Even though there’s nothing objective, it could be that the universals of how problems are solved, and the constancy of the population we tend to test, has led to statistical norms for what is an insight problem for people. Let me go over that argument again. We’ve already seen that there are universals, or there’s good reason to believe it right now, there are universals in insight problem solving processing. Not in insight problems, but in the processing. We tend to test people at the same sort of relevant level of expertise. Now, this has its downside, but for here it might not be. But we’re standardized. People tend to be standardized in terms of their background education and experience going into these insight problems, because who are all the participants in psychology experiments? You guys. Now, before we go back to the main argument, I’m now stepping aside, an important digression, another methodological point. I mentioned this before. This is also a contributor to the replication crisis. This is the weird problem in psychology, that where our participants tend to be western, educated, industrial, rich, democracy. Citizens. You guys. And in fact, there should be an additional thing there. You’re almost always the same age. You’re young adults. So, it should be weird A. Adults who are young. Okay? Now, this might have some problems to the degree to which this research generalizes, and I’m acknowledging that right now. But what it might help to do, though, is say that we don’t have to throw out all the previous experimental data. So, Luhuly and Murphy in 2005 took a look at this. And in a empirical way. And in a empirical way. So, what they did was they gathered a whole bunch of, first of all, they used Weisberg’s own taxonomy proposals from 95. Again, so this tells you they’re directly responding to Weisberg’s criticism. So, Weisberg said if restructuring is necessary to solve the problem, it is a pure insight problem. He said if restructuring is not necessary, or even used, it’s a pure non-insight problem. He said if insight is, sorry, if restructuring can help but is not necessary, then it’s a hybrid problem. So, they used this and reports to label certain types of problems. They did not present the labels to the participants. These labels are for the theoretical analysis. This is what is meant by an insight problem, what is meant by a hybrid problem, what is meant by a non-insight problem. You then give people a large number of insight problems that vary considerably in their characteristics, and also a relatively large contrasting set of non-insight problems. You just give all these problems to people. You don’t tell them anything. You just say solve all these problems. Because now you’re not actually paying attention to the phenomenology. What you’re doing is you’re going to do a cluster analysis. You’re going to see if how people solve one problem is predictive of how they solve other problems. That’s what you’re doing in cluster analysis. You’re looking for a strong positive manifold. A strong positive manifold, you know this because this is how we do measures for general intelligence and things like this. Strong positive manifold is how I do on A problem predicts on how I do on B, how I do on C, and how I do on D. And then how I do on D predicts how I do on A and B and so forth. How you do on 1 predicts on how you do on… If they’re all strongly mutually predictive like this, then you have a strong positive manifold. Does that make sense? The argument being that if you have… That’s a high degree of order. This is the opposite of entropy. Remember that because we’re going to need it when we talk about self-organizing criticality. You have a high degree of order. The very plausible conclusion is manifold points to the fact that these things are sharing the same fundamental process. These things are sharing the same fundamental process. There’s some general factor behind this high order. So what you’re doing is to, using this cluster analysis, to see if the problems that have traditionally been called the insight problems are non-insight problems, et cetera, clustered together. What they found, which was very good, is that the presumed insight tests strongly tended to cluster together. So the problems that have been traditionally called insight problems tend to strongly cluster together. The non-insight problems clustered mainly with other non-insight problems. So they didn’t cluster quite as strongly, but they mostly clustered with other non-insight problems. So the insight problems have a very strong positive manifold. The non-insight problems have a positive manifold, but not quite as strong. So that was interesting. So a plausible conclusion about that is the one I sort of foreshadowed. The universals of processing are interacting with the standardized population community to produce a statistical cluster range of the kind of problems that are found to be insight problems. That does not say, listen to me carefully please, that those problems are objectively insight problems. I didn’t say that. I did not say that. What it says is, the interaction between universals of processing and the standardized population is producing a statistical clustering of certain kinds of problems as insight problems. Why does that matter? It means that, and it didn’t have to turn out this way by the way, because I don’t think any problem is intrinsically or objectively an insight problem, but the empirical evidence is it did turn out this way, which means we don’t have to go back and say all those problems where people were using insight problems to test insight should be thrown out. All those experiments where people were using insight problems to test their insight should be thrown out. Because now we have reason to believe that they are statistically, in the statistically normal way, highly, right, predictable way, insight problems for the testing population. Now, hang on, Chloe, and Emma. All of that’s good, but it’s nevertheless within the overall bad. Because the overall bad is, we got that because we’re testing people in a weird-a-fashion way. Because we’re testing people in a weird-a-fashion. Now, what you need to do then, and this hasn’t been done, it started to be done, so to say it hasn’t been done is too strong. It hasn’t been done enough is what I’m trying to say. People are starting to do it. We do cross-cultural investigations of problem solving. And in line with the Gilchrist, there seems to be some evidence that Western culture tends to bias and privilege left hemisphere processing. And therefore, whereas more Eastern cultures, and I hate these names because they’re ethnocentrically generated in the first place, but I don’t think it’s east or west of anything. It’s like, we’re sort of, it’s a map of Europe. Look at, we’re in the center. And look at that, that’s in the east of the center, right? Anyways, we’re at the setting sun, the culmination of history. Things started in the east, but they’re going to end in the west. It’s all about, okay, anyways. And the idea, Nisbet has been doing some of the best research on this, whereas people who are brought up in Eastern culture tend to process more, the stalt and orientation, etc., etc. And that seems to have an impact on how they’re formulating and solving problems. It even seems to have an impact on how they’re perceiving phenomena. So Westerners tend to regard empty, like non-painted space on a canvas as empty, meaningless space. Eastern people tend to find it some of the most meaningful space in a painted canvas. This pregnant with nothingness and stuff like that. Okay, so you have to take that all into consideration. Yes? In that particular line of research, I guess it’s quite basic, but is that interested for, sort of, for the center cultural differences in methodology, or more of an individual methodology, so there are things you’re concerned about? Yeah, no, there’s the concerns about that. We’re attributing a certain standardized cultural personality type or something like that. And that needs to be put in more. Some of it has been more individual differences, and then you find that you’re getting clustering between Western versus Eastern people and things like that. And the problem is all of this is done in Asia, as I said. Okay, now Chloe and Emma, please. So for the clustering analysis, I think they chose a set number of groups and a cutoff where things seem to cluster together. But if you choose, is there a graph of the whole thing? But if you went one cutoff ahead of that, it seemed like there was a lot of clustering between not insight and insight problems. So did they decide ahead of time on the clustering? Is there a standard, this is how you decide when it’s going to be? And that that was the only one that fell in the positively correlated box? Or is this the most strongly, but these two insight problems correlate together with these two non-incentive problems, but then you go the four of them are a group? So, I mean, part of it is this is a general issue with cluster analysis itself. I mean, how you set your caution parameter or your way you’re calling your cutoff point will affect how much clustering you get. And so generally you’re supposed to give sort of, and I have to go back and reread it. You’re supposed to give sort of an overall justification. Usually the justification is that you use the same cutoff points for both sets of entities, things like that. And then what you do is you try to get some independent measures that map up with this. And that’s what they did in this experiment, as you know, because you’ve obviously read it. So what they did is they did the clustering analysis and see if their cutoff point maps with their individual differences in methodology, which is what they got. I don’t think any, no, this is a standard, and this shows up in the IQ literature. There isn’t a standardized metric for when you do the cutoff. There isn’t anyway, even in physics. You change the scale of reference, right, and things that were predictably correlated become uncorrelated, et cetera. So usually what you want to do is see if the cluster analysis maps on or is consistent with independent behavioral predictors, which is of course what they did with the individual differences in methodology. Is that okay for now? Emma? There was a really long conclusion sentence that was very important and very specific, and I didn’t get it down. No, I’m sorry. You said it twice. It was when you were talking about insight problems are not objectively insight problems, but they reflect… I’m suggesting that what the results show is that you have universals in processing interacting with a standardized population to produce a statistical norm of problems that are experienced or treated as insight problems. Okay, thanks. I pointed out that what that means is we don’t have to throw out all the previous examples or experiments where these problems were used, but I did say that is situated within a larger problem for psychology as a whole that we’re using weird A participants. Okay, so you heard me mention to Chloe there was a second set of things they did. They did individual differences methodology, and you know what that is because we talked about it with Shuler and Melcher. Because they wanted to see which things would be predictive of the problems that were clustering as insight problems. And what they did was they used things like figure of fluency and the alternative use test. So figure of fluency is I give you like some dots and like five dots I believe it was, and you have to in a limited amount of time, I think it was like a minute, you have to draw as many different patterns connecting the dots as you can. The alternative use task is I give you some standard object and you have to within a minute give me as many alternative uses as you can of that task, sorry of that object. And we’ll talk about what these things measure when we come back to the work of Nobler and others, people talking about breaking frame and making frame. So what they found in fact was that these are the measures, the cognitive flexibility of all the measures they did, the cognitive flexibility measures as measured by figure of fluency and alternative use test are predictive of people who are solving the problems that were clustering together as insight problems. So that has been the first thing that they did. So the idea is well people who can sort of have this cognitive flexibility who can do much better at reformulating, as we’ll see later we can clear that up or make it a little bit more clear by talking about making frame and breaking frame. But basically people who are solving the problems that we’re clustering together as insight problems. So that hangs together very well theoretically. The idea is well people who can sort of have this cognitive flexibility who can do much better at reformulating, as we’ll see later we can clear that up or make it a little bit more clear by talking about making frame and breaking frame. But basically people who have the cognitive flexibility to do restructuring are better at insight problems. So that sort of lines up well. Alright. So what was good about this, both of these studies, was that new way, I mean this is what, I mean you hear me say theoretical debate of experimental competition, is very important to me. So I think that’s the first thing that they did. So the second thing that they did was they did a study of the cognitive flexibility of people who were solving the problems that were clustering together as insight problems. New way, I mean this is what, I mean you hear me say theoretical debate of experimental competition. New ways, some of it afforded by new technology I admit, but new ways of asking questions about problem formulation, new ways of processing the data are now being used. And that’s important. The fact that when we use these newer ways they are not inconsistent, in fact they’re theoretic and coherent with the more traditional behavioral measures in experimental psychology, is also an indication that we are making some empirical progress. But, but Weisberg is not done. And now I’m going to come to the part of the lecture that I’ve been promising to come to for a while and I foreshadowed earlier, I need another book here, which is the discussion of verbal overshadowing because it’s going to be relevant in the next Weisberg critique, which I think is a very good one. Actually Flack and Weisberg. Okay, so Flack and Weisberg 2004. Okay, so Flack and Weisberg 2004. Okay, so Flack and Weisberg 2004. Okay, so Flack and Weisberg 2004. Okay, so Flack and Weisberg 2004. Okay, so Flack and Weisberg 2004. Alright, so what they did, what Flack and Weisberg did is they were doing some insight problems. I believe one was the candle box in the bunker. I might be misremembering. That’s not crucial right now. What they did was, as they were testing sort of aspects of what was going into solving these insight problems, they were also along the way testing the Schumer and Melcher idea from 93 about verbal overshadowing in pairing insight problems. And not affecting non-insight problems. Now, I’ve already given you independent and independently motivated evidence for why this whole notion of verbal overshadowing is a mistake to begin with. But let’s go into this now because it was again because of Weisberg that this whole thing is more explicit. However, I’m going to argue that it needs to be addressed much more powerfully than it has been. Because, and I’ve checked with some of my students, this notion of verbal overshadowing is still showing up in the textbooks. By the way, that’s generally the case for textbooks. Textbooks are really museums of ideas. Never end. Textbooks are kind of better versions of Wikipedia. They represent sort of a museum of consensus that you should use to start your research, but you should never end your research there. So, that’s why I generally tend to not use textbooks. The only textbook I use, of course I use a textbook for a Psych 100 because you have to because if you don’t give first year students a textbook, they will get torches and pitchforks and they will march on the castle. All right. So, what Flack and Weisberg did was they had people doing concurrent verbalization. And what they were able to show is that there was no impairment of insect problem solving with concurrent verbalization. There was no impairment. Completely the opposite of what Shuler and Meltzer found in 1993. Comparative verbalization did not impair insect problem solving. Yes? Did they use the exact same method and was it like a replication of the passage? Well, that’s a good question to ask. And see, part of the issue, you’ll allow me to respond probably more than you want me to. Go for it. Replication is relative to your constructs coherence. If your construct is a mongrel, then replication is going to go crazy. You’re going to get replications and then failures to replicate. So, in fact, before we get into the specifics, that’s what had already been happening. Independent of insect problem solving, the general notion of verbal overshadowing was coming into some pretty hard times. Because it was doing exactly that. There would be one study that seemed to show clear evidence for verbal overshadowing. And then there would be other studies that would replicate or demonstrate any evidence for verbal overshadowing. Now, we’ve seen that before. Remember when we did incubation. And it had to be with, that people weren’t, we had to do a lot of work. Remember the construct, the incubation construct, plausibly had a lot of components missing from it that we had to fill in. Now, what was disturbing is, Schuller gave two different answers before we get to the Fleck and Weisberg thing. About why this, what, they called it the fragility, the fragileness, the fragility of verbal overshadowing. One is a rational one from 2002. One is irrational from 2010. So, I’m going to tell you the irrational one first, even though it’s later, because it’s irrational and we should abandon it. Yes. So, can you repeat that, you have two different answers about? Verbal overshadowing. One is rational, 2002. One is irrational, 2010. The one in 2010 postulates that the universe tracks when people are doing experiments, and will sometimes alter itself in order to thwart the investigation of phenomena. I can’t tell if this is a joke or if he’s serious. If it’s a joke, we should laugh and ignore it. If he’s serious, we should worry and ignore it. But that tells you something about the desperation around this construct. I couldn’t believe it when I read it. Now, he gives a more rational answer in 2002, which I think is going to be part of the solution. He talks about, but again, to try to be charitable to me in criticizing him, I think he can’t quite finish his argument because he’s still attached to the construct. He’s still attached to the construct. But what he does talk about in 2002 is he talks about what kinds of processing are being triggered, and that the kind of processing that’s being triggered is probably what’s relevant in the verbal overshadowing phenomena. Now, let me try to explain to you what I meant just a minute ago. If he were to find out that the process of the verbal overshadowing is not going to be the same as the process of the verbal overshadowing, he should come to the conclusion, therefore, that verbal is irrelevant. It’s the processing that’s relevant. But he can’t go that far because he’s still attached to the verbal overshadowing. So he sort of gets halfway, in my opinion, towards dealing with this. Now, he’s not going to be able to do that. He’s going to be able to do it. Now, I want to answer Michelle’s question. Give me one second, Sarah, and then I want to answer Michelle’s question even more. And talk about the changes that have occurred in how concurrent verbalization was being used in between Schuler and Melcher. This is not going to defend Schuler at all, other than that one point that we just talked about, about different types of processing. Yes, Sarah? Oh, I was just going to ask if this was Schuler or what? Okay, thank you. So what had been happening in the intervening time is that people had been trying to reduce any kind of interference from concurrent verbalization in order to improve protocol analysis. So there was independent, empirically driven, experimentally driven research on what kind of things should you take out from concurrent verbalization, or another way of putting this, what kind of instructions should you give to your participants in order to reduce the effects of concurrent verbalization on whatever they were doing. Now, interestingly, what this research pointed towards is you should be trying to get people to remove the inferential components of the concurrent verbalization. Namely, tell your students, tell me what’s going on, but try not to offer any explanations or justifications or any theorizing about it. Try to be almost as associational as you can in describing what’s going on. So interestingly, what was happening is all the triggers for inferential processing were being removed from concurrent verbalization. So what this seems to indicate, instead what was happening is a much more associational, perhaps even more right hemispheric kind of processing was being encouraged. By the way, if you want a really good book on what the inferential processing was, you can find it on the website. And I’ve given one so I know what I’m talking about from the inside. Can’t you say that more jazzy, but it won’t be as true? It doesn’t matter. It’s just a little bit more jazzy. So, I’m going to give you a little bit of a summary of what this research is about. So, I’m going to give you a little bit of a summary of what this research is about. So, I’m going to give you a little bit of a summary of what this research is about. So, I’m going to give you a little bit of a summary of what this research is about. So, I’m going to give you a little bit of a summary of what this research is about. So, I’m going to give you a little bit of a summary of what this research is about. So, I’m going to give you a little bit of a summary of what this research is about. Because it refers of course to a stroke of insight, the sudden aha. But what actually happened to her is she suffered from a stroke and there was hemorrhaging in the left hemisphere. And it actually shut down most of her left hemisphere. She didn’t lose consciousness because her right hemisphere remained unaffected. It’s interesting when she talks about what that actually felt like. Because the right hemisphere, everything starts to become interconnected and interpenetrating. It almost sounds like a mystical experience. But at the same time, she’s trying to dial the phone because she’s a neuroscientist. She’s trying to dial the phone and she’s losing the ability to press the numbers. Because her left hemisphere is shutting down. Why she calls it her stroke of insight is that as she rehabilitated, and none of us know what this feels like, There’s no reason to doubt her. She retained the ability to, at will, shift activation into the right hemisphere. She calls it stepping to the right. So, she sort of was able to reconstruct and rehabilitate using the left hemisphere. She’s now mostly normal. But in that process of rehabilitation, it’s kind of like, sounds like the story of a superhero, right? Here’s a horrible accident and then as I recovered, I discovered a superpower. But what she has is the ability to, at will, massively shift activation or processing to the right. Because she has phenomenological markers of what that feels like. Yes? So, that persisted past the rehabilitation? Yes. And she, of course, is arguing that that makes her more insightful in nature. She’s found that it has significantly improved her processing. Especially with ill-defined, emotionally-laden social situations. Yes? I was just curious if she did a physiological scan of her brain in her days. They did. Other people did. Was there a significant difference? When she’s stepping to the right or after? Before and after she got this wall stepping to the right. Yeah, they did. Like, what she reports, she didn’t do any testing on her. When she’s having the hemorrhage, they were able to show that that’s what most of the left hemisphere was shut down. Not permanently damaged, it was just traumatized. Oh, okay. And then the right… Permanent structural change or something. No, no. There wasn’t that much damage. I think that answers your question. Yeah, that’s a good question. Yes? Do social situations mostly involve insect processing or problem solving? I think the most social situations that aren’t… I think what she meant by social situations… Sorry, I picked up the wrong word. I think what she meant by social situations are problematic social situations. Of course, many of our social situations are highly well-defined for us. They’re regularized. We have all kinds of norms and customs and stuff like that. But what she means is social situations that are problematic tend to be very ill-defined precisely because they fall outside of sort of cultural norms and scripts for how we’re supposed to resolve them. So if you don’t know how to resolve them, then you use… it involves insight. Or something like that, or at least some process, more significant processing in the right hemisphere. And then she’s talking about sort of emotionally-laden social… problematic social situations. They tend to be very, as we say, they tend to be very messy situations for us. So compare when you’re doing math to when you’re breaking up with somebody. There’s no script here. No matter what I do, I will feel morally horrible. And no matter how justified I am in this, I will feel emotionally horrible. And no matter how well I do it, it won’t go well. Look at all of you sluggishly. Yeah, Michelle. Oh, okay. So I was just wondering, like, with emotions and feedback, what’s the ability to solve these problems? Yeah, and so, I mean, some of you have written writing essays on that, so I’m not going to speak too much on that. But the idea that affect alters sort of your scope of cognition. This is Gretchen’s work on the broadening of bill theory of positive affect and the possibility of what she calls an affect spiral. And so what you can do, the idea is that positive emotions sort of… and we’ll talk about this when we talk about the construal level. They sort of make you broaden your attentional scope and have you build skills within it, broaden and build. And so positive affect tends to improve, this is the claim, which I’ve got quite a bit of evidence for, tends to improve your ability to solve problems. Yes? So in that book she was saying that she could willingly shift from one hand straight to the other. That’s what she claims, she claims that she can step to the right, that’s her phrase for it. So is she saying that it’s possible to train this ability in a helping hand? I don’t know. I don’t know what she’s saying when she… She says I could do this and everybody should do it, which isn’t the same thing as saying everybody can. So that’s what I’m wondering. Yeah, me too. Should she explain? No, she just like… it’s like a superpower for her. I think of parrots or something like that. She just does something, she does that like… but I mean, that’s not weird, like bend your fingers. What do you do to bend your fingers? I just do it. Right. So a lot of our abilities are you just do it. Yeah. Okay, so she can just do it. I mean, it’s not like being the Flash, it’s a very weak superpower, but it’s a boy. Right? You’re sort of a super social situation woman. She argues that it significantly improves her ability to self-regulate. I find that kind of useful because I have an argument going on elsewhere. I made it in 371, the machinery of self-regulation is actually significantly overlapping. But that’s only one piece of evidence. Yes? That’s an interesting… because usually the things that we associate with self-regulation or at least serious minded people who are very disciplined would usually be things that are like step wise in nature or things that are very clear, which would be not the right hemisphere. Right. But it looks like… Again, I keep doing this, I’m sorry. We take this, we talk about this more in 371. A lot of the attentional moves, and we still haven’t gone into them yet, we’re going to do them very shortly in this class, that seemed about making frame and breaking frame, that seemed to be effective for insight also seemed to be exactly the same processes that people engage in to be effectively capable of self-regulation. Most of that step by step and inferential processing is actually very ineffective for self-regulation. The most telling example of this is expertise in moral reasoning is almost zero predicted of moral behavior. There’s almost absolutely nothing. I think I said that a long time ago by the way, so you should get Mark’s correct. Well, I was reading this book that talked about how attention itself is like charity. This is what? Attention itself is like charity. So like, let’s say you have an addiction to cigarettes, so just you paying attention to yourself grabbing the cigarette and putting it in your mouth, it makes you, just the act of you paying attention to that makes you able to better self-regulate. And I would think insight involves shifting attention as well, so it would make sense if they would… That’s kind of the same thing that I was alluding to. So the idea that attentional processes can alter, what you’re doing there is you’re doing what Ainsley talks about in terms of using attention to create what’s called symbolic bundling, which is effective for delaying gratification. And you’re right, and notice the connection he made, I forgot your name. Inua. Inua. Notice how he’s arguing and this points to the possible connections. Again, I can’t do this very much here, we do it in 371, but it is a connection we’re going to talk about in this course. Mindfulness seems to enhance both self-regulation and insight, and it seems for similar reasons. So we are going to talk about mindfulness and insight. One thing that’s missing from this course, although it’s in 371 where all the good things are, is the role that self-regulation plays in problem solving and rationality and things like that. Okay, so this idea, what I’m suggesting to you is what we see is that a type of processing, the propositional processing is actually being removed from confirmable verbalization. And when you remove the propositional processing, but less verbal processing still in existence, you’ve got no interference effect. Now, here’s where I’m going to just put something up on the board and then we’ll take a pause, because when we come back after the break, we’re going to be in a long digression. A long digression that we need in order to come back and talk about things like levels of construal and other things like that. Okay? But here’s the point. We now have, I’m going to put this up on the board, but here’s the point. We now have from Lockhart and what we saw with Young, Demon, and Bowden and now from Fleck and Weisberg that this part of this construct is irrelevant. I’m going to show you the other side, how you can get over-shattering effect even when language isn’t used. Okay. So the first part of this is going to be largely theoretical, because we’re talking, and this is where theory is important, about the validity of a construct. I’m going to argue that this is overly simplistic, because it uses a searchlight metaphor of attention that massively misrepresents attention. And as was just mentioned, attention is becoming, and we’ve seen this building towards this, attention and potential processes are becoming crucial. It seems like when we manipulate attention, we can shift activity around in the brain and vice versa. Shifting activity around in the brain alters the scope and type of attention you’re directing. And of course, we’re going to have to look at the scope of attention. And of course, we know that already, because we know that attention is bottom-up, top-down, in a self-organizing fashion. So, I’m going to take it that this part of the construct has already been disposed of. What I then want to do is to say, this notion of over-shattering, this represents attention, because it’s largely relying on the searchlight metaphor of attention, which is overly simplistic and misleading. And then, while we get a more adequate model of attention, we will actually have the theoretical means to return back to the experimental literature and take a look at the attentional processes that are out working inside problem solving. It might take most of the remaining time, because I’m probably most of it ahead of you, but we’re going to do a step back and do a sort of philosophical theoretical analysis of the construct of attention. And then, what that will allow us to do is to better go back and look at the experimental evidence around these attentional processes in insight, and also take a look at the attentional processes that work within mindfulness, and also, therefore, link mindfulness to insight, for which there’s also increasing experimental evidence. So, this is why we’re spending a lot of time investing in this theoretical reconsideration, reformulation of attention, so that we can make all of these connections to these individual components of the experimental literature, the insight literature, the mindfulness literature, and the mindfulness connected to insight experimental literature. That’s why we’re doing all of this. We’re also doing this in order to finish this project of deconstructing, no insult intended to dare it up, deconstructing this construct. Okay, so the verbal overshadowing, which is itself a metaphor, notice the word overshadowing, is part of, or at least a derivation from, the searchlight metaphor for attention. The idea is that the verbal processes are somehow blocking or overshadowing the searchlight from operating. Okay, so the searchlight metaphor of, I guess I should put up attention, is a prevalent metaphor. So, it’s the idea that attention is like, it’s a metaphor, so of course, like when we shine a light on something, it’s the direction of processing onto something, and that, like when we shine a light on something, the object shines to us, when we shine our attention on it, or direct our attention on it, it becomes more salient to us. Now, I’m not denying that these are aspects of attention, that we can direct our attention, and that the directing of attention alters salience. What I want to do is question some of the implied or assumed presuppositions of how people use this metaphor, because what’s actually happening right now is a huge renaissance within the cognitive science of attention. Both philosophy and psychology are going through a very, sorry, I’m trying to be as neutral as possible, very interesting reflection and reconstruction on attention. And so, it’s one of the hot areas in cognitive science right now. If I was starting out right now, and I don’t want to be starting out right now, but if I were, I would go into the cognitive science of attention. And I think you’re already seeing why that makes sense. We’re starting to see how pivotal and central attention is to all of this. All right, so what’s wrong with the searchlight metaphor? Again, let me say one more time, I’m not denying that it points to some important features of attention. That’s why I said the model is overly simplistic, and not that it is false. Please remember that I said that. It’s missing important features that misrepresent and misdirect us as we try to look at phenomena. All right, so one of the most important recent books on this is a book by Christopher Mole, which sounds like a character from Winnie the Pooh, but… And he actually steps back and gets us to challenge the notion that attention is a direct primary process. And then we’ll see that there’s other challenges to the idea that it’s a sort of simple, simple process. And what does Mole mean by this? So, a primary process is one, of course, you directly do, like when I had… Fingers, fingers. But there are other types of things that we do that are not primary processes. Of course, again, primary and secondary are like tall and short, they’re relative. But the way you pay attention to it, the way you get understanding of it is compare two different verbs, for example, for describing actions we did. Okay, so I say to you, walk, and you walk, and you walk, and you walk, and you walk, and you walk, and you walk, and you walk. So if I say to you, walk, and you’re willing to do what I tell you to do, you know what to do, you walk. But I have this other verb. If I say to you, practice, come on, practice, what do you say to me? Practice what? Because practice isn’t something you do, it is a way in which you do other things. Same thing with this word, where I’m using it as a verb, not as the choo-choo entity. If I say to you, train, come on, train, you say to me, train what? So some things we do, some actions we perform, these two, especially cognitive in nature, can be, at least, can be, I should say. Some of the things we do are things we directly do, other things we do are ways in which we do other things. Does that make sense so far? Now, Mo’s point is that attention is treated, in the literature, or has been, people are now changing because of the critique, it’s treated like it’s this kind of term, this kind of construct, but in fact it’s this kind of thing. It’s just that we don’t take the time to unpack it. What he means by this is that when I say to you pay attention, you can do this in very many different ways. You could look more carefully, you could listen more carefully, you could remember more carefully, you could look and listen more carefully, you could remember and listen more carefullyc you could listen and remember more carefully, in fact, it doesn’t pick out a thing you do, it picks out how you do other things. If I say to you, I want you to pay attention, but I don’t want you to use any of your perceptual faculties or imagination or memory, but I want you to pay attention, what would you be doing? So what he argues, in fact, is that what we’re actually doing when we’re paying attention is what he calls cognitive unison. So the searchlight metaphor treats attention like this, and that’s wrong. Because attention is actually like this, and it involves what he calls cognitive unison. So cognitive unison is when you’re coordinating a bunch of processes so that they find something co-relevant. So that they are coordinated, they are unified in finding some goal relevant, co-relevant. And of course this links up to the connection between relevance and salience we’ve already been talking about. Another way of turning it around is something becomes salient to you precisely because it allows you to coordinate different processes together. So if you go back and I’m saying pay attention to my lecture, I’m asking you to try and find somehow integrate visual stimuli and hearing stimuli together, find the co-relevant. Pick out what’s going on visually and what’s going on auditorially that are co-relevant to the goal of getting understanding in the lecture. That’s what it means when I say pay attention. It’s even what you get when I say pay attention to me. It doesn’t mean, for example, look intently at my shoes, even though that’s a way of paying attention to me. Now this is a really sort of powerful idea that attention is doing this kind of coordination and integration. That’s what I think he needs by unison. This is important. I mean, this is again, you’ve seen this already in this lecture. It’s important to do this philosophical work, to step back and look at assumptions that you might have about attention that could actually be misdirecting you. So already I’ve shown you that there’s an important sense in which this metaphor is misleading, but there’s more. Is this okay so far? Yes. Can I just ask what the name of the book is? Attention is called abuse. Is that the actual? That’s the essay. Right. Is it as or is? Attention is called abuse. I think it’s a philosophical essay or something. Or is that a subtitle? I’ll put it together. Came out in 2011, I believe. And there’s variations on this. Other people argue that that is also a foregrounding, backgrounding, and we’ll come into some of that later. But first I want to talk about another theoretical reflection on attention that actually gives and integrates with this quite well. Because Moll doesn’t really talk too much about this processing. Because he’s more interested in just establishing this conclusion. Which is fair enough. But there was somebody who actually talked a lot about this. Actually, we talked a lot about this a lot earlier, in the 60s and the 70s. And that’s Michael Palanian. And if you know him, he’s an important philosopher of science. But he was very interested in problem solving and meaning making within science. And so he did some philosophical work on attention. Now, in order to get what he’s doing, I want to do a direct demonstration with you. Phenomenological demonstration. Some of you have done this before. Or if you’ve come to 250 with me. Or if you’ve taken Newton’s 3.3. But do it anyways. Because primates won’t do a thing if a significant minority of primates refuse to do it. So I need you to get an object. And there’s a bit of a concedere. You’re going to pretend that you haven’t seen the object before. And you’re going to ask for some object that you can hold in one hand. We’re going to use touch. Because touch is slower than sight. And therefore, you can gain more access to it. But there’s good reason to believe that the thing we’re going to talk about is also happening in sight. Sorry, I meant in sight. Not in sight. Okay, so what I’m going to ask you to do is the following. Please don’t start it yet. You need an object and you need your probe. Like a pen or a pencil or something. So I’ll wait. You didn’t think we could do any science actually in the classroom, right? Okay, is everybody got their object? Okay, so what I’m going to ask you to do is the following. Also, don’t start doing it yet. Let me finish the explanation of what we’re going to be doing. Then close your eyes. And you’re going to pretend that you didn’t know what the object is. You do, but it still works even though you don’t. And you’re going to tap the object with your probe to try and figure out what the object is. You can even maybe put it on a table in front of you to stabilize it. You’re going to be tapping it to determine what it is. Do you understand? And of course, you can do this, right? So let’s start doing this. So everybody, now what you, well, when you’re doing it, no matter what I say, keep the tapping going. This isn’t a self-regulation task, I promise you. Okay? So close your eyes, start tapping the object in that exploratory fashion that you would actually do to try and determine what the object is. Okay, so keep tapping. So you’re going to be obviously moving your probe around and things like that to try and determine. Okay, now what I want you to do is keep tapping, but shift your awareness into your probe. Feel the way your probe is moving around. Okay, feel the way your probe is moving around, changing direction, stopping and starting again. Keep doing what you’re doing and shift your awareness into your fingers. How your fingers are flexing and moving and shifting direction. Keep doing what you’re doing. Now shift your awareness into the sensations in your fingers, all the sensations you’re getting. The sensations of touch, movement, temperature, etc. Now notice you’re not aware of the object right now. Now bring your attention back into your fingers, back into the probe, and now back into the object. You’re aware of the object again. And if you’re nodding your head, hey that’s kind of cool, I could do that. Okay, you can stop now. Although I mean if you want to do it later when you go home tonight. Okay, so now this is a very readily available demonstration of a capacity you have that you normally aren’t using. Or sorry, that’s an incorrect sentence. You’re not normally aware that you’re using it. Okay? And first of all, before we go on, notice how it points out how layered attention actually is. And how attention and awareness are inter-defining in an important way. Okay, so what does Planey argue? What Planey argues is that whenever I’m paying attention to something, it’s actually a structural relation. It’s what I’m atten- it’s what he has to, right? He has two sides. He says there’s two sides of attention. There’s attention from and attention to. And what does he mean by that? Okay, so what he talks about is there’s two kinds of awareness. S stands for subsidiary. Subsidiary, there’s also another place that’s called a tacit. Okay. The idea is I have a subsidiary awareness, and then I have F8, focal awareness. And attention is a relationship between subsidiary and focal awareness. What is attention? A relationship between subsidiary and focal awareness. Now, let me show you how we did that in the experiment. So, for example, initially, and we used a probe in order to break things up. You’re not paying attention to your probe. You’re paying attention through your probe to your object. Does that make sense? You weren’t actually paying attention to your probe. You were paying attention to the object through your probe. You were attending from the probe to the object. Is that okay? So you have a focal awareness of the object. It was sort of prominent in your mind. And you only have a subsidiary awareness of the probe. Because you’re not aware of the probe, you’re aware through the probe. Is that okay? Again, see how the searchlight metaphor completely misses all of this what’s going on in attention? Okay. Now, of course, you could do something really cool. And we’re certainly getting a bit of an idea of what actually might be sort of shifting around in the brain when you’re doing this. What you could do though is you could make these focal and step back now, right? And step back, if you’ll allow me to speak metaphorically, to a deeper level. Now you were looking, remember I had you to now look at your probe? And what you were actually looking from was the movement in your fingers. Right? You were aware of the probe, but you’re aware of the probe because how your fingers are moving. Do you remember that? And then, of course, I had you do this. I said pay attention to your fingers, right? And what you were doing was you were paying attention through your sensation to your fingers. Is that okay so far? And then you did something really freaky. Some of you might have had a difficulty with this last stage. I asked you to step back and become aware of your sensations. And then it’s like where are you coming from from here? And you get all sort of creepy and weird about that. Where were you when you were paying attention to your sensation? And you’ve built a whole culture around that, but we won’t do that right now. One of the things I can tell you though, and first of all before we get into this, is that this is the place you get to in mindfulness practice. This already starts to say something interesting about the connections we’re going to be able to form. In fact, and this will creep you out more, and I’ve been doing mindfulness practices now for 26 years, and I’ve been teaching them for about 10 to 15. I can’t remember what days well. You can actually get here. You’re not even aware of your sensations. You’re not even aware of your consciousness. You’re just purely conscious. You’re not conscious of anything, not even of consciousness. This is called the Cure Consciousness Event, and it’s widely reported in many different traditions. I’ve experienced it myself. When you ask, what’s beyond that? Nothing. Now what’s interesting is when you’re looking or touching an object, all of this is layered going on. All that zzzzzt is missed with the searchlight metaphor. But notice how when we already, we’ve already seen doing this is fruitful, because it’s giving us a conceptual vocabulary for talking about what’s going on in mindfulness. It’s going to also turn out to be relevant for what’s going on in insight. So this is the thing. This is the primary cognitive unison that’s going on in attention. This is what Polandia calls integration. This is a bunch of subsidiary awarenesses being made co-relevant to some focal awareness. Now unfortunately, I think the term integration, I see why Polandia used it for this, but it’s misleading. Because typically when I integrate, I’m aware of the parts within the integrated whole. So if I integrate the four lines, I get a square. But you can still see the individual lines within the square, right? Yes? Should I just stop for a minute and let you catch up? Some of you are looking like… Just wait. Okay, I’m just making a terminological point right now. Up until now I’ve been making theoretical points, but now I’m making a terminological point. You see, but that’s not what’s happening here. You’re not aware of your probe moments in the object. You’re aware through them of the object. Let me give you an example that you all know of from psychology, because it’s again one of the things you’re taught in Psych 100. So one of the ways you get depth perception is with stereoscopic vision. How many of you were taught that? Good. It’s a very hard-carrying book. Top stupid fact. Okay, how does stereoscopic vision work? You all remember the fact, but you don’t remember how it works. How does stereoscopic vision work? Yes, Michelle? Do you have to correspond points on your retina to get a depth perception? Right, I get that. Sorry. Now I see why you did that. I just mean what’s going on at a phenomenological level. You see depth popping out of two images. That’s right, but you don’t actually experience two images, do you? You experience the third dimension. Now remember you did this as a kid? You close your left eye and then your right, and it’s entertaining for five minutes. And then you never do it again. And it looks like your finger’s moving, but it’s not moving. It’s because you have two different fields of vision, the left and right, and that’s important for brain experiments. Remember all that? Yes, yes, yes. Now you’re all nodding. You all remember. So stereoscopic vision is the left and the right fields of vision are actually fused together to give you the depth perception. You don’t look at the two images and integrate them together like this. You look through the two of them in order to realize the third dimension, which sounds really ominous, but it’s not. Is that okay? So I’m proposing that a better term so we don’t get misled is this notion of fusion. That what’s happening in that plant, what Plane was talking about is a kind of fusion, right? A fusion that is bringing about the cognitive unison that Ball talks about. Is that okay so far? Now, again, why are we doing this? We have to get very clear about what attention is because getting this more sophisticated vocabulary, that’s what philosophy is good for, theoretical work, will allow us to better talk about the kinds of attentional processes we see at work in insight, the kind of attentional processes we see at work in mindfulness, and you’ve already seen a suggestion of that already, and therefore that will allow us to explain why we’re finding increasing evidence of a link between mindfulness and insight. Okay? That’s why we’re doing this. And final reason, the fourth reason, I’m trying to destroy the verbal overshadowing construct. I hope this is getting very destroyed for you now. Because this is irrelevant and this is overly simplistic because it’s missing a lot of the phenomenology and processing that’s going on in attention. Now, when you have an incorrect, overly simplistic construct, you’re going to get inconsistent empirical results for it. Which of course is what we’ve been getting. We don’t have to invoke some cosmic conspiracy where the universe is trying to deceive us. Okay, now let’s talk about a few things here because we can start talking about putting some names to this. And people have, psychologists, Michael Apter, this was done independently, and then the cognitive scientist, Metzinger, both talk about these shifts as transparency to opacity shifts. That’s the language they use. And one of the neat things about your attention is how you can actually do these. Okay, so they’re invoking obviously an analogy here, so let’s do the analogy. And then I’ll extend the analogy again. Okay, so right now I am looking through my glasses. Right? I’m using the word through in both senses, beyond and by means of. I’m looking through my glasses. And I’m using through in both senses, beyond and by means of. Is that okay? You know, but sometimes you might see somebody wearing glasses like me do this. Instead of looking through my glasses, I’m now looking at my glasses. Because now what I want to actually do is not direct my attention towards some object, but actually direct my attention to my glasses. Because I might need to, for example, clean them. I do, by the way. There’s chalk dust on them. And then I can return and look through them again. I can look at them to get properties of the glasses and then look through them to get properties of some object that I see by means of the glasses. Is that okay? So that’s a transparency to opacity shift. Transparency, I’m looking through. Opacity, I’m looking at. So initially, your probe was transparent to you because you weren’t looking at it. You were looking, I’m using looking to be perceiving. You were looking through it, but then you redirected your attention so you could look at it. That was a transparency to opacity shift. Is that okay? Does that make sense? Now, of course, the reverse is the case. And you went the reverse way, by the way. Remember? You went this way, but you didn’t get stuck there. You didn’t get stuck there. Oh my God, I can never see anything again. You came back this way. Going this way is an opacity to transparency shift. This is where you go from looking at something to looking through it. Looking at something to looking through it. Now, you’ve all had these experiences, too. A lot of these come from experiences in your psychology textbook. Perception. They have a picture, and it would have black and white blotches. And you sort of look at the picture, and then all of a sudden you go, oh, it’s a Dalmatian dog. How many of you have seen that picture? So you go from looking at it to looking through it. And you go from looking at blotches of black and white that are actually present to thinking about a dog that is actually not present. You go from looking at it to looking through it. You start to become aware of dogs in the world. Yes? Did you say that when you’re admiring your own handwriting, that’s sort of like the same thing? I don’t know. I’ve never had that experience. It’s not admiring, but if you’re looking at your handwriting and thinking, oh, that’s not dark enough, right? Sure. So that’s like making it, okay. That’s right. And let’s pick up on that. Oh, but before I pick up on that, let’s use this metaphor again to go back, again to foreshadow how we might be able to talk about mindfulness. Basically, in mindfulness training, what you’re training yourself to do is Normally, you’re sort of looking, if you allow me to use the word in this sense, you’re normally looking through your mind. You’re looking at through, to use the language of the course, you’re looking through your problem formulation. It’s transparent to you. But what you’re trained to do in mindfulness practices is you step back to look at your mind, to look at how it formulates and frames experience. Do you understand? Does that work? Normally, I’m looking, look, think about the frames of my glasses, like the framing of a problem and the formulation of a problem. Normally, it’s transparent and I’m looking through it. Well, what I can learn to do with mindfulness practices is step back and look at how my mind is formulating and framing things. Does that make sense? Yes? So you were saying that the problem formulation when you’re first looking through it would be transparent. Transparent and then mindfulness makes the problem formulation opaque. Yes. You did it perfectly. Cool, thank you. You’re welcome. How’s the piece going, guys? This is really abstract stuff, I know. And I warned you ahead of time, I feel like, but you see why we’re doing it? See how we’re gaining a way of thinking and talking about things? It’s automatically affording us to link the research on mindfulness and the research on attention and the research on insight together, which of course is what a good theoretical construct would do. And that theoretical construct wouldn’t do any of that for us. In fact, it would misdirect us and not have us even ask any of these questions. That’s, by the way, by science’s not only experimental competition, but theoretical debate. Yes? How is opacity good? How is opacity good? Well, because if I can become aware of something, then I can presumably interact with it, modify it, change it. When I step back and look at my glasses, I can feel them. So you should ask me, so what does that mean, right? What does that mean for problem formulation and insight? Well, part of it what’s going to mean is when you step back and bring something into awareness, then it is no longer operating automatically for you. You can de-automatize some of your subsidiary processing. And that could be important, couldn’t it? No, there was a… Yes. And then… Just to clarify, when you come to transparency to opacities involved in subsidiary awareness to focal awareness… No, no. It’s where this… Something that was previously subsidiary has become focal for you. Is that what you mean? That’s exactly what I meant. That’s exactly what I meant. You usually ask really deep questions. Yeah. So the opposite phenomenon was just moving the other way. Right. So the opposite phenomenon is an opacity to transparency shift, where you go from looking at the black and white colored watches to looking through them. Now we’re going to do a cognitive one that you’re familiar with in a second. Yes. What does the opacity mean? Opacity means that you can’t… It’s from opaque. It’s not transparent. You can’t look through it. Okay. That’s just what the word means. That’s all you’re asking me, right? Yeah. Yeah. Are we okay? So, Sarah? For the Dalmatian example, how is it when you see the dog that it transplants? Because you’re no longer looking at the black and white watches. You’re looking through them to see a dog. But isn’t that kind of reverse of all the other examples? That’s right. Because we’re doing opacity to transparency rather than transparency to opacity. Did I do that too fast or…? No. I think you did. Okay. Yes. Did this a little bit of a stretch? But is it similar to, say, opacity is meta, double, search, and just a little bit of a stretch? The connection isn’t going to be a direct identity relation, like you just said. But it’s not totally… It’s not a mistaken move you’re trying to make. So, you’re drawing an identity relation, which I don’t think is quite right. But, but, the idea that this shifting can move you meta as opposed to staying primary, that’s an important idea. Yes. So that far it’s good. Well done. And is it more meta? You can go super meta. Okay. Are we all right so far? Okay. And then I erase the board with this tremendously helpful diagram. I don’t know if it’s helpful or not. I was being self-deprecating. Because I don’t know if these diagrams are that helpful. Because maybe they are. Because we’re trying to draw something that phenomenologically is fused, but I’m having to represent it with parts, you know, the whole picture. And that can be of course misleading. Okay. Okay. Now of course, and we’ve already been talking about it in this course, but we’re going to now bring it back and we’re going to see how important it is. People have been talking about another dimension along which your attention moves for a very long time. And we’ve already mentioned in this course. This is this dimension, if I can put it here. The global processing of gestalt. And again, just like before, this is what’s a gestalt and what’s a feature is relative. Versus the local processing of features. And in there, I think in that, on that dimension, it is appropriate to talk about integration. So, remember we talked about this when we did things like the cat and things like that. You’re simultaneously coming up from the features and down from the gestalt. Yes or no? So you know that this is dynamically self-organizing. And we’ll talk about the fact that this, being able to shift between global and local, or gestalt and feature, right? So for example, Danenberg and Forster, 2010 I believe it is. Yes. Forster and Danenberg. They talk about that this movement between global and local, or gestalt and feature, is now, it’s a tremendously convergent thing. Many different strands of psychology, from perception to abstract social cognition, are zeroing in on this. So much so that they call this the glue of cognition. This is a universal, and it’s also, it’s like I can prime you in one and it will translate to another. I can prime you conceptually to be global, and then you’ll be more global when you’re perceiving and vice versa. I can prime you to be featureal in your vision, and you’ll end up being featureal if you go into a hearing task. Now of course, that should make sense to you, right? Because given what we talked about today, this ultimately probably reflects to a significant degree, you know, the opponent processing that’s going on between the left and right hemispheres. But again, the searchlight metaphor would miss this. The fact that attention is constantly trying to optimize in a self-organizing fashion between the global and local levels of construal. And this of course is part of what’s called construal level theory. That I can dramatically affect your cognition by altering the level of construal. The level at which you’re pitching attention such that you organize the information. Construal means how you are set to formulate problems. So I’m not going to do a lot about this right now, but some of the interesting things you might know is if you move people, if you prime people into a higher level of construal, they will act more morally. They will act more altruistically. They will act in a more rational and principled manner. Some of you may know, and we talk about this, you know, in the book, the book of the Some of you may know, and we talk about this, yes I know, in 371, that a lot of the ancient wisdom traditions involve practices, spiritual exercises as they were called, to practice shifting your attention to higher levels of construal. So for example if you read the meditations by Marcus Aurelius, he talks about a common practice which was called the view from above. So you close your eyes and you practice imagining this room. And then you try to imagine sort of rising above and seeing the entire university. Then all of Toronto, then all of Canada, then all of the Earth, then all of the solar system, then all of the universe, and then not just at this time but for all of time. You practice doing that regularly and reliably so that you get a lot more flexibility in being able to move your level of construal. And it was thought, and now there’s some evidence to support this, that a facility of familiarity with being able to move to a higher level of construal was beneficial for the cultivation of character because it tended to make you more rational, altruistic, capable of pursuing on-term goals. And guess what? We’re getting experimental evidence of that. Okay, so this is a relevant feature of attention in the way you can radically transform your salience landscape and how you will formulate problems and direct your behavior that is also missed from the searchlight metaphor of attention. So a little overshattering has turned out to be a really crappy construct, right? This is why I don’t think we should have it in our textbooks. But it still will remain there for another five years or ten years. By the way, most of you aren’t doing 312 with me. So this will be my only opportunity to say most of what your textbooks tell you about classical and awkward conditioning is more false than true. If you want to know more about that, take 312 with you. And by the way, I’m far from a voice crying in the wilderness. This has been something that the primary researchers in the field have been arguing. 1988, Rescorla published a paper, Pavlovian Condition, it isn’t what you think it is. That’s the title of the paper. So again, Rachele. Do you ever advertise 370 in your other documents? Yes, I do. I was just wondering. Yes, I do. So when I’m doing 250, and we talk about inside problem solving, I talk about 370 and how we go into it in much more detail. Is it up to you? Okay. So I’m going to put a schema on the board, and because we’re all budget scientists, we’re going to be tempted to turn it into a Cartesian graph. But it’s a schema. It’s not a graph. It’s a schema. Right? It’s a schema. It’s not a graph. It’s not a graph. It’s a schema. It’s a schema. It’s not a graph. Right. Because we can actually sort of put these two together. For reasons that I don’t know, we need to do research on it. We talked about levels of control using an up-down metaphor, as if Gestalt is up and Feature is down, which of course it’s not. It’s not like, oh, look, there’s the Gestalt. Oh, there’s the Features. That’s not what’s… But notice how natural this seems to you. When I do the other thing, the transparency opacity thing, people naturally use a moving inward and a moving outward metaphor. When they’re doing transparency opacity, when they’re stepping back and looking at, it feels like they’re somehow moving in towards the center of their mind. Which, by the way, might have something to do with why the word meditation is used, because meditation really needs moving towards the center. In fact, the oldest translated meditation manual we have is called Center. By the way, that’s what’s supposed to be meant by finding your center. It’s not what it is degenerated into in the media. It’s sort of finding your, you know, the nexus point of your autobiography so you can more effectively stroke it. That’s not what it meant. Sorry, I just like romantic interpretations of Eastern phenomena. Yes. You said it’s actually moving towards the center in terms of the conception of self. Is that a move that… I didn’t hear the last thing you said. Is that a move that a magazine is trying to make that’s all with the… Being no one? Yeah. Or the ego tunnel. Which one? I’m only from the Earth direction. Yeah. I think it’s something like that. So he has a vaguely Buddhist notion that the ego is not a sort of grounding process underneath it all. That there’s something pre-egolic that actually looks through the ego. Or he calls it the ego tunnel. Yes. So I was just wondering whether there’s a connection there to the mission experience. Yeah. Yes, yes. So I think there’s… So his research, although it’s Western and cognitive science, I think he’s happy to think it’s consonant with sort of Buddhist ideas of Anakwan. That the ground of your cognitive agency is not the narrative ego. That’s just, as he puts it, an ego tunnel. It’s a way in which attention is being tunneled. Is that alright? The rest of you don’t worry about any of that, okay? If you’re interested in that, I teach another course. Buddhism and COGSILE will be talking about some stuff like that. Okay. But now back to the schema that is not a graph. I think we can talk about this also. An inward and outward movement of it. These are both metaphorical. That’s one reason why it’s not a graph. And this isn’t an origin point because both of these are relative rather than absolute measures. What I mean by this is whenever you’re moving this way on the graph, even if you’re in this quadrant, this is a transparency to opacity shift. Whenever you’re moving this way on the graph, no matter where you start from, if you’re moving that way, I mean by that an opacity to transparency shift. That’s what I mean by this schema. When you’re moving leftward, that connotes a transparency to opacity shift. And when you’re moving rightward, that’s an opacity to transparency shift. But right and left are relative, unlike positive and negative, right? Yes? Say yes because it’s true. Okay. That’s why this is not a graph, right? It’s a schema. So what we have is we have that attention is doing this recursively self-organizing thing this way and recursively self-organizing this way. And of course, although they’re analytically independent, they’re not functionally independent. They’re happening together in an interpenetrating fashion. Okay. Then I’m going to bring in one more theorist. We’ll talk a bit more about what that means and then we’ll end it for today because you’re all looking extremely weird. So I don’t know who’s in more pain, me or you. Are you okay? I don’t mean that facetiously. This is tricky. We’re moving in very abstract domain. I’m trying to get this very well articulated and many of you are making great connections with that. And that’s how you determine a good construct. This will allow us to go back and talk very clearly and cleanly, I hope, or at least improve. Maybe that was too arrogant. Sorry. It will improve our ability to talk more cleanly about the attentional literature, experimental literature on attention and insight, mindfulness, and the connections between mindfulness and insight. So I appreciate your patience. Thank you for hanging in there. There’s just one more person. And this is the work that Maitzen, who wrote a book in 1976, called Sentience. And there what he did was he basically linked sentience to a particular model of how attention works, a model of attention that in some ways dynamically integrates these two. So what’s happening is some things are becoming, the primary thing that’s happening is some things are becoming salient to you. They’re standing out for you. And he talks about an intro-length set of processes, which he doesn’t specifically name, but it’s like the work I did earlier. Featureization. This is picking out of all of the environmental stimuli certain things that are going to count as features for you. And then there’s foregrounding. Some of those get foregrounded. Some of them get backgrounded. So not only are you doing this and this, you’re starting to do this. And of course, as you foreground things, that feeds back into what you feature. As you background that form. And then that leads to figuring. Like when we figure out what is meant by that is what is foregrounded gets integrated together. That of course feeds back not only to the foregrounding level, but to the featurization. And then what that feeds up into is formulation. Formulate problems about the things that have been figured within their background. So you’re doing that as well with your attention. He calls all of this, the featureization. It’s for him the basic link between being, having attention and being sentient. That’s why the book is entitled Sentient. So I can’t really put that onto this thing. I can’t really put that onto this thing. I can’t really put that onto this thing. I can’t really put that onto this thing. So I can’t really put that onto this schema. But what I want you to understand is that this is going on within each one of these, and this is also self-organizing. That is what you’re doing when you’re paying attention. That is not well captured with a search light. Yes. I don’t understand what featurization and figuring are. So featurization is certain features like redness and blueness are sentient. Figuring is when it becomes a unified object for you. Okay. So you’re not going to be able to see the whole thing. You’re going to be able to see the whole thing. So that becomes a unified object for you. Now, what I want to show you is we’re primarily relying on this schema, but I will constantly allude to this schema. When we come back next week, we’re going to use this model of attention to talk about what is actually going on when we get some overshadowing effects. The calling of overshadowing effects is now really, really misleading. And like I said, to look at what are the attentional processes at work at InSight. Now, what I want to do is just make one more theoretical point then in order to try and integrate that together. Looking at this schema, to try and convey how you can be doing the two simultaneously, I’m going to do these diagonal lines. This means that you’re doing a transparency opacity shift and breaking up a gestalt into its underlying features. You’re doing a transparency, you’re stepping back and looking at rather than looking through, and you’re breaking up a gestalt into its features. This would be the opposite. You’re integrating features into a whole, and instead of looking at them, you’re looking through them. And you’re thinking, that’s bizarre, I don’t know what you mean. Yes, you do. We already did it. Both of these. But just to show you one, and then we’ll come back to this next week, remember the cognitive leaping? I started to show you a bunch of dots. First of all, you’re looking at the dots. But then you integrate the dots into a gestalt, that is the sofa, and you go from looking at the dots to looking through it, because it now became a picture for you of the sofa. Cognitive leaping is to do that. You’re aware of these already. So think about using an analogy. Well, it’s not even an analogy. There’s a sense in which your brain is using representations of the world. And I can use, I can’t give you a brain representation, because I don’t know what the hell that looks like. So I’ll use what we often use as an analog for brain representation, a linguistic representation. And what is the most studied effect in psychology? The strupefact. In fact, I don’t even need the colors. That’s what’s misleading about the strupefact. Don’t think of the morale-murale thing. Don’t think of the furry mammal that pretends to love you. There’s two aspects to any representation. You can look at it or you can look through it. When I look through it, I’m thinking about these kinds of properties. It’s a mammal, it’s furry, it’s basically a land shark with brains, stuff like that. Or I can look at it. This is about four inches long. It’s made almost completely out of limestone. It’s always white. It’s not a mammal. It doesn’t move and it doesn’t pretend to love me. Here’s what a representation is as a thing versus what it represents. You can either look at a representation or you can look through it. The strupefact is to study how automatic your opacity to transparency shifting is. You’re integrating, look at this, you integrate the features into a gestalt that you then look through. Do you see that? You integrate the features into a gestalt that you then look through. I’m not saying anything foreign to your experience. What we’re going to see is that both these are important for facilitating insight, both of these moves. What I’m also going to argue is that mindfulness practices usually form an ecology of practices where people are getting training to do this and training to do that. That’s it for today. Thank you for your patience. This was like a vast desert of theory that we had to cross. Is that the rise and what? We’ll stop the lecture. No, that’s a mirage. We’ll keep going. More theory. There’s more theory. No, we’re starving. Doesn’t matter. More theory.