John Vervaeke - Thinking & Reasoning - Lecture 7 (z8An0OhA3s0)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=z8An0OhA3s0

The last time we looked at a couple of challenges coming from Weisberg. The first, the very good metaphysical argument. I’m using metaphysics in a good sense, not the majority of the sense. That there is no such thing as an intrinsically independently existing problem. Problems don’t exist in the universe, therefore, having is intrinsically an insight problem. And if that’s the case, it looks like the experimenters have been treating certain things, certain structuring of information, for example, as intrinsically as if they were both problems and more specifically insight problems. And Weisberg’s metaphysical argument cuts against that very deeply. The second argument that Weisberg made was, well, even if there are such a thing as insight problems, it’s not clear the class is homogeneous. So yes, instead, it could be that we have insight problems, those in which restructuring is necessary, hybrid problems, those in which restructuring is helpful but not necessary, and then non-insight problems in which restructuring is minimal or doesn’t play a very causally significant role. We took a look at the response to the first issue, and this was the work of Jan Wiemann, Boden, and Kunias, and others. And this is where the neuroscience of insight started to take lead in the research in an important way. And the idea here is, well, we don’t designate anything as an insight problem. We explain to people what the experience of an insight problem is, the phenomenology, and what the experience of a non-insight problem is. We just give people a whole bunch of problems and ask us to report when they’re having an insight when they’re doing problem solving. And then we’ll see if we can find two things in the brain. Are we finding an assisted pattern of activity associated with insight, and this is always an important thing in neuroscience when you’re taking a look at neuroscience, but you don’t just want to do cartography, and is it theoretically explanatory? We already have independent understanding and evidence for why this activity would actually help to explain the behavior that is under investigation. Of course, as we saw, both of these things received good empirical confirmation. We get the sudden shift in activation to the right, which probably corresponds to Metcalf’s feeling of warmth spike, because we know that that has a physiological basis. We had confirming evidence that there’s a physiological change occurring, and a sudden shift in activity, metabolic activity, from the left to the right hemisphere would bring about such a kind of physiological change. So that all lines up very nicely, and then we have a lot of independent research coming out, now even biology. The lateralization of the two hemispheres, lateralization of function, is an ancient strategy. Sorry, whenever we speak about evolution, we end up speaking anthropomorphically, as if evolution was an agent, because our language is agentic language. We even say ridiculous things like, it is raining. What’s raining? Nietzsche once famously said, I’m afraid we’re not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar. So please take that in mind whenever I have to use this language to talk about evolution. So evolution has zeroed in on this lateralization across many different species with many different evolutionary ancestries, and come up with very similar solutions. The idea is the left hemisphere seems to be organized for well-defined problems. It has a narrow scope of attention. It works in a step-by-step kind of manner, so you can get fine, detailed intervention. It is very low in ambiguity, tolerance. It pursues clarity and certainty. The right hemisphere is for ill-defined problems, so it has wide open attention. It works in parallel. It’s after speed. It goes through the gist. It’s very ambiguity, tolerance, very wide open attention, etc. And so the shift from left to right makes sense. And then I pointed out how prescient Kathleen and Simon had been, because in a purely abstract sense, way before the neuroscience was possible, they had predicted that such a shift between these different kinds of processing should be occurring. So all of this, we’re getting very independent, even from different theoretical camps’ convergence on this being sort of what’s going on in insight. So that seemed to be a very principled answer, and there’s been ongoing research. And this has been one of the primary areas in which the neuroscience has been becoming a dominant player in insight. It’s resulted in the recent book by Biemann and Cunhais called The Eureka Moment. And so the idea here is, yes, we shouldn’t think we can have a science of insight problems. That’s a mistake. And when I go later to talk about relevance realization, I think it will be very clear why it’s a deep mistake. But perhaps we shouldn’t have been trying to do that anyway. We can have a science of the kind of processing that goes into problems that individuals, for whatever subjective reason, experience or find to be insight problems. The second issue is the issue about whether or not the problems that we have been using have been typically experienced and processed as insight problems by our participants. And so this brings up the possibility that because we have a very standardized population and we have universal processes at insight, that we could end up with a statistically normal set of problems that that standardized population would statistically normally find to be insight problems. Now, remember what that means. That means that this argument is only good relative to the weird day factor that is besetting all of psychology. So please keep that in mind. Taking that into consideration, we looked at the work of the William Moody and what they found using cluster analysis by just giving people a whole bunch of problems is that the insight problems tend to cluster together very tightly, the non-insight ones quite tightly. And then the insight ones seem to correlate well with an individual differences methodology about what kind of processes seem to be predictive of solving the insight problems. And we took a look at measures of cognitive flexibility, which is becoming an increasingly important topic in cognitive psychology. Measures of cognitive flexibility seem to be very good predictors of insight. So we seem to have a really good response to what… Are you asking a question? Oh, no. Okay, just doing a primate gesture. Yeah, because you tend to do stuff like that too. I’m not calling you a genius. I’m saying this is an old thing we’re doing. We have a really good answer, I think, to the first of Weisberg’s criticism. I think we have sort of a good enough answer that we don’t have to go back and sort of throw away all the previous experimental work. Nevertheless, more work should be done on that issue about trying to broaden our cross-cultural study of problem solving. So we then took a look at a… Oh, and sorry, I forgot to mention something. When we were doing the young human and bone stuff, we took a look at not only the neuroscience explaining it, we took a look at the work of Trident Snyder using TDCS to actually shift or help make it more possible for such shifting of activity to occur. And that, we’ve got two separate experiments, seem to significantly increase insight problem solving. So this is that the science is not only sort of explaining the phenomena, we’re getting to a place where we’re starting to be able to generate it. We’ll see another way of generating it, not quite as powerfully, but from the stimulus side, when we look at Stephen Dixon’s work. Okay, so we then took a look at a further criticism from Flecken Weisberg in 2004, in which concurrent verbalization did not seem to impair insight problems, like it did for Schuller and Elcher. I pointed out that Schuller had two responses to this. One, a rational response, which maybe it isn’t about concurrent verbalization, but the kind of processing that’s being triggered. And we have independent evidence that predates all of this, that lends strong support to the idea that language use per se is not relevant in the triggering or impairment of insight. We’ve already seen that. We’ve got independent evidence. So that part of Schuller lines up with already existing argument and evidence. And then Schuller gave another wacky, crazy thing about the cosmos somehow shifts in order to make science harder or something. So I’m just going to put that aside because I find it ridiculous or absurd. And like I said, I think he’s joking, but can’t quite… If he’s joking, then he shouldn’t go out socially because his sense of humor is very, very poor. If he’s not joking, then he shouldn’t go out socially because he’s losing touch with reality. So no matter what’s happening, the necessary conclusion is Schuller should stay in. Should stay in. All right. In order to follow up on that, I started into a critique of the construct of verbal overshadowing, which I had been mentioning I was going to do already. Sorry, I forgot to open my one other notebook. Just give me a moment, please. All right. So I pointed out to you that the verbal part of the verbal overshadowing is irrelevant and should be thrown out, already putting the construct into significant question. Then I pointed out that the notion of overshadowing runs off of the searchlight metaphor for attention. And while there’s truth to that metaphor, that metaphor also misframes and misleads us in our understanding of attention. In order to get into that, I’ve tapped into some of the cognitive science around attention. And as I mentioned, attention is becoming a very hot topic in psychology and philosophy and cognitive science in general. Precisely because, sorry, this sounds self-promotional, I guess it is, but it wasn’t my intent, the thought came into my mind. But there’s a lot of converging evidence on the kind of argument that I’m making in this class, that attention is playing a pivotal role. And we have not paid enough to attentional mechanisms in our understanding of attention. And partially, perhaps, and that’s part of what my argument is implying, that’s because we’ve had an overly simplistic model of attention at work. So we took a look at the work of Christopher Moll who argued that one of the ways in which the searchlight metaphor misrepresents attention is it represents it as a singular, simple, direct process that we undertake. It would be like, so it’s analogous to, like, walking or talking. He points out, though, that attention is much more like our description, like practice or training. Whereas attention is not something that you do on its own directly, it’s a way in which you do other things. More specifically, what it seems to involve is what he calls cognitive unison, the integration of various processes onto a common goal, somehow getting various processors to find a shared task and the goal they’re in to be co-relevant to them. I pointed out that a way of understanding how that might work is to take a look at the work that Flannye did on attention and understand attention as what he calls integration. I suggested to you that that’s a poor term. Instead, I would suggest something more like fusion and the idea of how, what attention is, is a structural relation and a function between subsidiary and focal awareness. Now, what awareness is has to do with what consciousness is, and I’m not going to talk about what consciousness is here, because consciousness is the hardest thing in cognitive science and psychology and philosophy and life and your existence. So, for example, just to point out, how many of you would take the following deal? I’ll guarantee you that you’ll have wealth, power, and all of the love you want, you just will not be conscious of any of it. Do you want it? No? No? No? Now, so that must mean you know clearly what your consciousness does for you, what its function is, why it has such a great value. What is consciousness’s function? Since most of your processing can go on unconsciously, what is consciousness for? So why do you value something so much that you have no idea what it does for you? Obviously, there’s an answer to that. I mean, I don’t have an answer, but there should be an answer. I’m just trying to point out to you how problematic consciousness is. Okay, so I’m going to take it that we’re not going to discuss what awareness or consciousness is. We’re going to leave that alone for Plani, because he doesn’t have an account of it either. It’s something like your basic consciousness of your environment, that’s what awareness is. But given that, we’ve agreed that we won’t open that Pandora’s box of worms. How’s that for a mixed metaphor? We can take Plani to giving us an account of attention in terms of awareness, where attention is the fusion of subsidiary awareness into focal awareness in a highly recursive and layered fashion. Remember, we did the tapping exercise to sort of bring that out. And then what we noted is that we have the possibility that Apter and Metzinger and other people in Plani, of course, talk about. You have the capacity for a transparency to opacity shift. You can step back and look at the subsidiary awareness that you were previously looking through. And you can do that back towards something like the pure consciousness event. Or you can do an opacity to transparency shift. You can go from looking at something to looking through it, especially looking through it in a representational manner. And then I propose to you that we also know about something sort of from the beginning of the class. There’s another axis along which attention can move. This is the axis between the feature of the gestalt. And I pointed out to you that both the transparency and opacity and the feature of the gestalt axes are relative axes, not absolute points. And therefore, it’s not a simple Cartesian graph. So the idea is there’s constant opponent processing between the gestalt and the features. And this, of course, you need this account of attention. This was argued first by neural network theorists, people like David Rumelhart and Jeffrey Hinton in the 80s, in order to break out of chicken and egg problems. So you remember this. We did this last time. So you read this as the cat, even though these two stimuli could be exactly equivalent. And you do this. And this was a very deep problem for sort of standard computational models because you can get this kind of, it sounds like an ancient Greek argument. In order to read the word, I have to read the letters. But in order to disambiguate the letters, I need to read the word. Therefore, reading is impossible. And what Rumelhart and McFarlane and Hinton showed is the way you get out of that is you have opponent processing, processing in parallel within a neural network from the gestalt down and from the features up. So attention is constantly doing gestalt to feature. It has the capacity to constantly shift in and out, transparency, opacity. And then I also pointed out that attention doesn’t just do this simple thing. We took a look at the work of Maitzen that attention is doing the sizing up relation, this complex, recursively self-organizing process, picking out features, foregrounding and backgrounding, figuring the foregrounded features and then formulating problems around them. And so all of that complexity is being lost in the searchlight metaphor for attention. I believe that’s where we got to. Is that correct? Now, did I talk about the difference between things being independent in theory but almost always functionally integrated together? So blank stares, which means no. Okay, so what is this that I’m not, this is not a Cartesian graph, right? The global processing of gestalts, the local processing of features, right? Transparency to opacity going this way, opacity to transparency going that way. Let me move these arrows up here. So although we can analyze these two things as not being theoretically identical together, it is very often the case that they are co-occurring together in a functionally integrated fashion. So we talked about the possibility of this and the possibility of this. I concentrate on these two because these two things map onto some functions we’re going to process and we’re going to talk about when we take a look at it and say problem solving and also to processes that are at work within different kinds of mindfulness practices. So the idea here, what this is supposed to represent is you’re moving from feature to gestalt and you’re going from looking at something to looking through it. This is you’re going from gestalt to feature and you’re going from looking through something to stepping back and looking at it. So what I want to now do is try and argue how this different model of attention gives us a lot of theoretical machinery for organizing and bringing together a lot of results. In the insight literature about what’s going on in restructuring and perhaps give us the basis for theoretical integration. And also this way of looking at attention will help us to connect to processes that are at work within mindfulness practices. And then that of course will afford us helping to explain the increasing evidence that mindfulness practices enhance your capacity for insight problem solving. Which of course has been the traditional claim and that it is being substantiated by ongoing experimental confirmation. Okay. Is that okay so far? Alright. So let’s think about what, let’s just start off talking about this intuitively and then I want to start following it up with some research. Some of it done here at U of T. Okay. So doing this would break up gestalts in your cognition. It would break up the structural functional organization that you have imposed on things. Because you’re moving from gestalt to the feature level. Stepping back and looking at your subsidiary processing would have the effect of de-automatizing it to a degree. So you’re going to have to do a lot of research to understand what’s going on in your subconscious. So stepping back and looking at your subsidiary processing would have the effect of de-automatizing it to a degree. Why? To automatize something is to do the opposite. It is to take things out of working memory, out of consciousness. Alright. So that you can perform the action automatically. That is without requiring directed manipulation within awareness, within working memory. So compare when you first, how many of you can now draw it? How many of you can now drive? It’s getting better. It used to be that when I asked this, almost nobody could drive. Because I live in Toronto. So how many of you have been driving for more than a year? Okay, good. My son Jason just got his Jeep. So when you first start driving, I remember this myself, I remember with Jason, recently with Jason. You’re driving like, and you’re looking at everything and all you can do is drive. Don’t talk to me, I’m driving. And you look at everything, right? But after a while, that becomes proceduralized and it becomes automatic. And you can have this really horrifying experience. You can be driving, often it’s on the highway, and then you realize, I haven’t been paying attention for the last 15 minutes. I’ve been in my head, la la la, I could have died. So this phenomenon, which is widely reported and documented, is known as highway hypnotism. It’s really not a form of hypnotism. It just means that you can rely on, some people call it your internal zombie, you can rely on your internal zombie to do the task of driving because it has been automated. What means the process has been, it’s been organized so that it does not require conscious direction of working memory in order to do the thing. Now, the opposite is the case. If you try to redirect attention to processes that are normally subsidiary and happening automatically, if you bring them into consciousness, then that often has the effect of disrupting their automaticity. Precisely because you’re now giving working memory access to it. So some of you are typing, and some of you are writing. And this is what I’m suggesting was going on with concurrent verbalization, not the verbalization per se. If I ask you to try and focus on the subsidiary processes in your fingers when you’re typing, pay attention to what your fingers are doing, what happens to your ability to type? It slows down. And if I ask you to pay attention to the sensations in your fingers while you’re typing, your words are like, ahhh. What if you could do all of this without language being involved at all? Interference isn’t from language per se. Interference is when you’re doing a transparency opacity shift that tends to de-automatize some of your cognitive processing. Now, there’s good evolutionary reason why you should be able to do this, because sometimes you need to debug your automatized processing. So sometimes this will be the case, like here’s a clear example, this happens a lot in martial arts. You practice something a lot and it becomes quite automatic, and then somebody will show you, oh, but here’s a better way to do that. And it’s really hard to change it at first. And what you have to do is you almost have to disrupt it. You have to try and pay attention to, break it up. I mean, we’re speaking metaphorically, of course, because there’s nothing physical there. Well, no physical structure. You have to break up your processing. You have to pay attention to what you’re doing in order to make the move. And then you have to really interfere with it in order to be able to debug it. You know what I’m talking about exactly. So, what I’m pointing out for you is the fact that you can get this kind of disruption in automatic processes just by doing a transparency opacity shift. Of course, a clean example of where transparency opacity shifting is interfering or being interfered with by automatic processes, a clear instance of where transparency opacity shifting and automaticity are antithetical, interfere with each other, is the most studied effect in psychology, which is the Stroop effect. The Stroop effect is that you’re trying to do a transparency to opacity shift, and that is interfering with and being interfered with by the automaticity of your process. Again, all of this is happening without language. Language can make it happen, but there’s nothing intrinsic about language making it happen. We also have evidence that doing this kind of move, doing Gestalt to Petrel, will break up processing. And this comes from work using Navon letters. Do you remember what the Navon letters were? Especially in congruent Navon letters, like remember the big H that was made up of a bunch of little L’s? Okay, so Finger, sorry, that’s her name, her name is Finger, I don’t know how that comes to be. In 2002, following up on earlier work that McCray and Lewis had done in 2002, I’ll quickly describe McCray and Lewis. Is it CC? Yes. So, what McCray and Lewis did was they took something that most of you are processing both very automatically and at a very Gestalt level, which is faces. So, what McCray and Lewis did was they took something that most of you are processing both very automatically and at a very Gestalt level, which is faces. So, what McCray and Lewis did was they took something that most of you are processing both very automatically and at a very Gestalt level, which is faces. Interestingly, this seems to be a diagnostic difference between statistically normal and autistic people. You tend to process faces automatically at a Gestalt level. We’ve got some evidence from eye tracking that that doesn’t seem to be the case for people diagnosed with autism. So, if I do an eye tracking of you looking, if you’re statistically normal, and I don’t mean to presume, sorry, I’m presumed. It says statistically normal person looking at a face, there’s this incredibly complex movement around the face that seems to be oriented towards doing this kind of thing. Bottom up, top down, creation of the Gestalt. If you do tracking of somebody who’s diagnosed with autism, you’ll get a very hard focus, limited looking at the mouth. Yes? Does that mean that there’s a possibility of a spirit damage? So, some people in fact, there’s one theorist, Vernon Cohen, who argues that autism is having what he calls two male of a brain, which is a very convictious way of putting it. I wish he hadn’t said that. What he means is that in autistic people, it’s two left-hander spirit dominant. This also lines up with an earlier theory by Frith and others called weak central coherence that autistic people seem to be much more oriented to the feature level. This also lines up with independent evidence and theory that autistic people tend to overfit to the data. They tend to fit on the specific features of the sample rather than trying to Gestalt it and generalize beyond it. So, all of these things are sort of converging. Can I ask a follow-up question? Of course, in any sense. Has there been any sort of research done in like the mindfulness training since that source seems to be… There’s been some, but not much. And the problem is, in general, my opinion of the clinical research on mindfulness is, while promising, it’s very shoddy and crappy work. There’s often no good operationalization. The construct is not theoretically coherent. You don’t have active control group. There isn’t longitudinal follow-up. There isn’t theoretical debate between different experimenters, etc. So, the theoretical debate and the experimental competition is not being run well. The cognitive studies of mindfulness tend to be better because they typically link up with already existing research paradigms in cognitive psychology. And the neuroscience stuff tends to be better too about mindfulness. So, that’s why I’m very hesitant in answering. So, first of all, there’s not much research and it’s all clinical as far as I can tell. And I think, I’m pretty sure I’m the first person who started teaching about mindfulness at this university academically. And some of you know I teach it extracurricular. I believe in mindfulness. I believe in mindfulness, right? And I think there’s still good evidence and argument to do so. Some of it I’ll show you today. But on the other hand, it really bothers me that, I like that there’s an academic journal called Mindfulness. That there’s a magazine out now called Mindful. And apparently mindfulness is how we cure everything. It is the panacea and the cure for the problems in the Middle East. And it’s an overblown, you know, hyperbolic claims are made. And there’s, a backlash is coming. So, I just published an article in an anthology about the need to reformulate the mindfulness construct and really try it much more closely. Some of you might have done 471 with me last year when we went through all that. And how to get better empirical research, how to get better conceptual constructs, and how to get better theoretical argumentation around mindfulness. So, that was a long thing, but it’s an important thing. This is a big phenomenon right now. And I know you’re interested in cognitive improvement, cyber technologies. Thank you for waiting. I just wanted to give him a very complete answer. And it was relevant to all of you because we are going to be talking about mindfulness very shortly. Yes, go ahead. Isn’t it possible to be left brain dominant, but then perform the shift from left brain to right brain well and quickly so that you’re still good? Like, does being good at insight problems mean that you’re right brain dominant? No. Or is it just being able to do the switch? I’m not sure that statistically normal people should be talked about as being right or left brain dominant. I think culturally, I think McRochrist’s argument that as a culture we have tended to reward sort of left hemispheric functionality. And therefore as a culture we might be skewed that way. But I don’t know if non-pathological individuals should ever be. I do not like the media’s attempt to create typologies around your left brain and your right brain. And this seems to just be a really, really shoddy and largely disruptive saying, well you tend to follow enlightenment rationalism and you tend to follow post-enlightenment romanticism. And that’s all it is as far as I can tell. So I wouldn’t, I just don’t want to answer that question. Not because you don’t ask good questions, because you do. I just think that it’s a mistaken way of thinking. And remember, I caution you, given the increasing evidence for the massive redeployment hypothesis, and some of you who do 312 with me know about this, the idea that we can’t, the idea that we can strictly localize functions to the specific areas of the brain is disappearing. Like it’s going to be gone out of your textbooks eventually in ten years. By the time you’ve graduated and moved on and you don’t care about psychology anymore. So remember, people can show a lot of these functions who have had hemisporectomies. So, like if you lost a lot of functioning in your right hemisphere, would that impact your ability for insight processing? Could, depends. When in your life, what circumstances, what skills you’ve had, what psychotechnologies of rehabilitation go through. Like, yes. Okay, so it is related to the right, like it’s not just the shift, it’s not just being able to… No, because you also would be incapable of insight if you had left hemispheric damage. Because then you would be like Joe Bulti Taylor, just wandering in a suffuse world in which there are no boundaries and there are relations of relations of relations. Don’t forget, and this is what a lot of people are now proposing, at the opposite end of this spectrum, and people like Braddock and Crispi and others are talking about this increasingly, that we can see people on a continuum where they tend to be featurely biased and overfitting to the data. And then you can be on the other end of the spectrum, right, which is your psychotic. Which is your overly committed to relations and to gestalts. So, I think if what you’re asking me is, like I said, I’m hesitant for the reasons I’ve given you for trying to localize a function, but if you sort of push me on it, the insight is in the dynamic relation between the two. The insight is in the dynamic relation between the hemispheres, not in either hemisphere. Is that what you’re asking me? Yes. But I needed to give you that longer answer, because it’s not a simple answer. Yes. Yes. Okay, that should be a simple question. You described our recognition of faces as this up-down, top-down, bottom-up integration to form a gestalt. That’s right. What is this up-top, bottom, bottom-up supposed to mean, if not gestalt to feature level? That’s what I’m meaning. Okay. So, you’re tending to perceive faces as a gestalt, right, so you, I can include quite a bit of a person’s face, right. Apparently the only person that’s fooled, for example, by putting glasses on is Lois Lane. Lois Lane. Right. Most of you can take all kinds of occlusion and still recognize my face, right, so you can do something like that. And you tend to see a face as a whole. Now what’s interesting is the way that machinery works. If I take the same face and turn it upside down, your processing goes wonky. It gets really bad really fast, right. So. So it’s just a dynamic until you have a gestalt. I think, I think the gestalt is forming almost right away. That’s why you can represent faces in a very gestalt fashion. Like, so for example, I think that I mentioned this. So you take four-month-olds, they can barely just see. You give them these two figures to stare at freely. You can probably tell me, which one will they look at a lot? Which one? Left. Now why? Because it looks like a face. No it doesn’t. That’s not a face. You met somebody like that and that was really their face. That’s horrifying in a way. Okay. So, I mean, so there’s a lot of evolutionary machinery at work. Because evolution can, like, help you do, help can sort of get you innate automatic processing. If a relative reproductive factor or factor that contributes to reproduction has existed in your environment long enough. Faces have been around a long time. They’ve been around since fish. And faces are a very valuable source of information about an entity. Okay, is that enough on faces? Yeah. Your test is here by the way. Don’t forget to pick it up at the break. Yes. I’m going to do the faces. Sure. I could never do the faces without getting soft. See, you’re really intrinsically interested in faces. So, you’re talking about, from this demonstration, you’re talking about the more basic features of faces. Not something like someone’s expression, like that kind of, like larger integration. No, I think I am. Because I’m even invoking, this is where Maitzen’s idea of sizing up is really coming into play. You’re not just getting like the features, you’re foregrounding, backgrounding, right? And you’re also formulating. You’re formulating problems, which is, like for example, you’re nodding at a pace that’s in rhythm with my words. I’m picking up on that, which means, oh, she understands me. Whereas if you were nodding sort of, oh, something’s wrong, she’s having a seizure, right? Okay. And we’re really good at this by the way. So, you know what Nick, Nick Ruhl’s work here. And also the thin slicing work. Nick was the, he’s in the psychology department here. He’s provided really good experimental evidence that gaydar exists. Like people can very rapidly determine if somebody’s gay or not. Right? And, like Nick’s gay, so he’s not, he doesn’t have a political axe to grind. He’s trying to see does this thing actually exist. Yes, it does. You have thin slicing. You show people very brief, very brief, like, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you have to show them very brief, very brief, like, like, four seconds of somebody doing something and ask them what’s going on in their mind. People are surprisingly accurate at thin slicing, at determining from a face. You also know that most of you are very good, I can just show you the eyes and you’ll be able to tell me what emotion the person is experiencing. And you scroll way above chance on that. Way above chance. Okay? Yes? This is another question on faces. Assuming someone doesn’t have, like, face blindness or something specifically related to that, if people have difficulty, for instance, if someone says like, oh, all faces look very distinct, I have difficulty recognizing people, or someone else says, oh, I can very easily tell the people’s, like, ethnicities because, like, oh, I can put people into broad classes, is that like a, one person is just, in that instance, focusing too much on features and overfitting and the other person is, like, in general? Yeah, yeah, I think so. So people do vary on the continuum the way you said. So it’s probably something like that. I don’t know if there’s any sort of, you know, attempt to sort of study that population specifically in an experimental fashion. But I think that’s plausible, yes, what you suggested. Can I now, yes, one more face thing. Just building on this, if that is true, is it possible that they might be worse at insight problem solving? So that’s an interesting question about the degree to which, but again, we have to be careful and remember my answer to Ainsley. It’s not so much like one thing or the other, right? It’s the degree of flexibility between, so if people are more sort of skewed and locked, probably they will have detriments for insight problem solving. Is there any link between the left and right hand and the right and left and right hand? Okay, so there is no good theory of handedness, which is disturbing because it is a very, like, it’s a continuum factor. So, I mean, it does shift around your processing somewhat, but it’s not always the case. Okay. Let’s go back to the argument, of course. Okay, so what McCray and Lewis did was, they were trying to solve the problem of the left handedness in the left-handedness. And the right-handedness is a very, very difficult problem to solve. So the problem of the left-handedness is the problem of the right-handedness. Okay, so what McCray and Lewis did was they had two groups of people. Well, there’s three groups. One is the control group. And remember, you can always tell if you’re in the control group that what you’re doing is boring. Okay, so the first group, right, is going to, all three groups are going to look at faces, right, since this works for you. Okay. And then what you’re going to do is you’re going to expose all three groups to Navon letters. Okay. Okay, so here you’re going to drive people down, and then you’re going to drive people up. And here you’re actually just going to give, like, neutral. Not by giving them the, the ruined Navon letter. Right? Sorry, I did, yes. What you now do is you now give people a face recognition task. Right? Did you see this face before? Now as you can expect, the control group stays relatively constant because that’s what you want. If your control group is walking around, then scrap your experiment, right? Okay, so if that happened. So these people’s face recognition declined considerably, and these people’s, like, improved. Now what’s interesting about this is you can, you can do this with Navon letters, you can also do it with language. But notice you can do it with Navon letters. You do it with language, and here’s how you can do it with language. I give you a bunch of these, and I ask you to describe somebody’s face. If I ask you to describe somebody’s face, that actually impairs you being able to recognize that face later. Which means, think about what this means. You know what we should be doing, what the police shouldn’t be doing? Ask people to give descriptions, and then ask them to try and point somebody out in a line. Because it actually impairs. But there’s something the police could be doing to overcome that. And this has to do with fingers. She did the same experiment, right, specifically with Navon letters. But in the intervening, right, she would give people a face recognition task. She would give people music to listen to, or mazes to trace through. Again, non-linguistic stimuli that drive people to the Gestalt level. And what she was able to do is completely remove the deleterious effect of having to describe the face, or having gone down to the Featured level. So what this police should do is ask for you to describe the face, and then play some Beethoven to you. Seriously. You could also approach music or mazes from a Featured level. Sure, sure. You just not appreciate the music and be bad with mazes. Yes, but people generally don’t like to make experience unpleasant for themselves. I know, but as I pointed out last week when you were trying to arrange music, you had to listen to all the different parts. Sure, sure. And so then it’s impossible not to listen to music right after, and be constructed in the wrong way. That’s right, that’s right. And so, a similar thing would happen after I would do, like when I was doing my philosophy degree, I had four degrees. And you’d do a lot of conceptual analysis and logic, and then you’d go home and people would try to talk to you. And you’re like, shh, shh, shh, shh. And then they don’t want to be around you. And you don’t want to be around them. Okay, so what I’m showing you, all of this, is that independent of language, I can cause, so what I was showing you intuitively, we’ve got experimental evidence for. The interference effects by moving you up and down the gestalt, the feature roll, moving you in and out. Is that okay so far? Yes. What does driving down and driving up mean? Driving down means pushing you this way towards the local processing of the feature. How do you operationalize that? How do you operationalize that? How do you operationalize that? What do you mean? How do you force someone to? I’ll give you a NABOM letter, for example. So remember the incongruent NABOM letter? Yeah. I do a task that is priming you or requires you to use the letter L. So you’re going down to the feature level. Or I give you a task that primes you or requires you to make use of an H. It drives you up to the gestalt level. You always have to do it relative to some task or stimulus because as I’ve mentioned repeatedly, gestalt and feature roll are relative terms. Nothing is intrinsically a gestalt or a feature. Is that okay? Yes. But the other point I was making is, I can do this with language as well. I can ask you to describe the features of somebody’s face and that will cause interference in your ability to recognize it. So what I’m trying to show you is language can do this, but I’ve already given you lots of evidence that it doesn’t have to do this. And I can cause this to happen without using language. So why am I doing this? Because I’m showing you how useless the verbal overshadowing construct is. Is that okay? Is this getting too panatic? Okay. All right. So let’s take a look at these moves within the insight literature itself. These are the moves that are used in the insight literature. I’m going to show you a little bit of the moves that are used in the insight literature. So this is the first one. This is the second one. This is the third one. So let’s take a look at these moves within the insight literature itself. These attentional moves. And then let’s map them into, and what I’m going to show you, and you’re going to have to bear with me. As we start to look at the insight literature, it’s going to look like we’ve got an inconsistent set of data. All right? About these attentional relations. But then I’m going to hope to show you how you can actually make very good sense of it all. Thomas, you had a question? Yes. Question? Still on the intercept, I’m just wondering, and really, it’s a verbal overshadow. Are there any experiments and contractuals that some people develop for trying to do things that are very digital? Do you see them as something like metaphors or synopses or something like that? Well, I mean, remember Young, Boman, and Beeman pointed out that metaphor rings about this, and garden pass sentence has been about this same sudden shift from left to right. It would be interesting if, I would like it if people would do with sort of poetry readings or poetry generation what they’re doing with jazz music. So jazz musicians are now being extensively studied, and we’ll talk about this when we talk about the flow state in particular in the course. Because jazz is a powerful way of inducing the flow state. It’s second only to the most powerful flow induction activity we have. Which is what? What do you think it is? Rock climbing. Rock climbing is pretty good, and that’s why people do it, because it’s the only reason why people do it, because otherwise it’s something from Homer for torturing somebody in Hades. Video games. Video games. Video games are the most reliable way of inducing the flow state. So think about why. We’ll come back to that later. Okay, so I wish that people would do with poetry. There’s been some studies about the connections between poetry and flow, but I don’t know if anybody’s done some of the neuroimaging or density EG with poetry for example, that they have been doing with jazz. I suspect that if they did, we would find interesting results. Very similar kinds of results. We do have phenomenological equivalences of people getting into the flow state doing poetry. That’s the best I can give you, sorry. Okay. Let’s keep going. Alright. So, what we want to do is, a lot of people have been making use of the individual differences methodology that was originally undertaken, remember by Schuller and Melcher, and then also again by Gauhuli and Moody, of Murphy, trying to find the processes that seem to be predictive of insight. Now, let’s remember we know some already, and we’ll come back to them. Remember the cognitive leaping. And there was the perceptual restructuring, or at least the attentional restructuring, but that of course is vague and needs work. So, some of the first work around on this aspect of trying to get clearer about what was going on in restructuring, is the work of Nodlich and Associates. That’s a K. So, the original important experiment is done in 99, it’s been replicated since, and he’s done something more recently. And what Nodlich did, the original work was not Nodlich and Olson by the way, some of you know Olson because you’ve taken a look at some of his work in your research for your essays, because I’ve seen your talk at Olson, so it’s the same Olson. It’s taking a look at the processes that seem to be predictive of improved insight. And the first ability that’s predictive of insight is what he calls chunk decomposition. The way he operationalized this is he would give people Roman numeral math problems with matchsticks, and you have to move one of the matchsticks to convert a false statement into a true statement. And people find this very difficult, because it often requires you to break up a chunk. Now, what’s a chunk? Well, this is one of those terms in psychology that sounds like it’s an explanation, but it’s really a description that comes disguised as an explanation. Chunk, right? Me, I mean, you’ve all heard of chunking, right? And you know that chunking has to do with somehow getting more things through working memory, through the working memory bottleneck. This is a piece of evidence, one of the key pieces of evidence for Lynn Hasher’s idea that working memory is primarily a relevance filter rather than just a limited container space. Because if you’re measuring it just in terms of quantity of information, you can get a ton of information through working memory if it’s been chunked enough. And the idea, and then she points out, a better way of thinking about what working memory is doing then is it’s sort of filtering for how much things have been processed for relevance. How tightly, right, how much co-relevance you’ve found in your information. And that’s all really a chunk is, right? Another way of putting it, using our language, a chunk is basically something that you process as a gestalt. Because the features have a structural functional organization that makes the features co-relevant to each other and relevant to you. And of course you know that when you’re studying you should be doing as much chunking as you can, and you should be doing chunking of chunking, etc. etc. So what Noblic found is the better people are at chunk decomposition, the better they are at insight. Now how do you measure, well you can measure how good people are at chunking composition in terms of how tight or loose the chunk is. Okay, so this is an obvious and therefore non-controversial example. Okay, so battlefield is a loose chunk because it’s easy for you to break it up into two other chunks that are meaningful. Namely what? Not all in field. Okay, cap, right, is a much tighter chunk because if you break it up you lose semantic meaning. You’ll still have graphic meaning, you still know what a C is and an A is and a T is, but you’ll lose semantic meaning. Because what’s a cock? Well it’s a tuck, it’s not nothing. And the brain, and this is I think part of, this will ultimately be integrated with things like Christmas pre-energy pencil. The brain is always loath to give our meaning. So if you are better at breaking up chunks, that is quite good, it’s quite well predictive of how good you are at solving insight problems. Which seems to mean that moving your attention this way facilitates insight. Now in fact, there’s even sort of, he sort of represents it mathematically, I think it’s not quite perfectly formalized. But the idea that of course the tighter the chunk the harder it is to decompose it. And he’s done work with Roman numerals, they’ve done stuff with Chinese ideograms, so some cross-cultural aspect there which is good. And he’s done work with Roman numerals, they’ve done stuff with Chinese ideograms, so some cross-cultural aspect there which is good by the way. That needs to be done more of as I’ve already put it. What he calls constraint relaxation. And he’s not quite as clear about what that means. And part of the problem, he uses an analogy, he uses a linguistic analogy. He talks about like in a sense, like when you’re doing a Chomsky tree for example, the sentence is your noun phrase, your verb phrase, and this is a determiner, and a noun, right, and a noun. And this is perhaps an adverb phrase, right, and a verb, and then this breaks down into a modifier, etc. Some of you who have done syntax know these, and when you’re doing it you dream these trees at night. Very boring. And the idea is that the higher up a constraint is, the more scoped it is, the harder it is to relax the constraint. So he’s got an idea that constraints are sort of organized in a hierarchical fashion. And what he talks about is individual constraints in particular problems. So for example, in a matchstick problem, breaking up a number is easier than moving a matchstick that’s being used as an operator, like as a minus sign. Because that’s a functional marker, and so changing that is supposed to be harder to do. I think this is this part of the work. He’s on to something, but this way he’s talking about it is very murky, and I want to try to suggest to you, so this is not him, this is now a verbatim attempt to reconstruct this. The problem about trying to get this is we’ve got really good evidence that insight is largely procedural in nature. And so constraints probably aren’t things like unconscious rules or propositions. What we would need is, what would a procedural version of a constraint be? Well, I’ve already given you sort of a good argument as what it is. The most common one is the one that’s used in a matchstick. What would a constraint be? Well, I’ve already given you sort of a good argument as what it is. The more automatized your processing is, the more constrained it is. That being the case, we could then, as soon as we do that, notice that we could then come up with a sort of a better way of operationalizing and measuring this. The longer something has been automatized, the more automatized it is. We could measure that in terms of how automatized something is by how weakly it makes demands on your working memory load. Because the more automatized something is, the less it puts demands on working memory. So I could determine how automatized something is by testing. By testing, you can continue to do that process, that task, without interference as I put more cognitive load on your working memory. So for example, I’m putting lots of cognitive load on your working memory by my lecturing, but many of you are able to still write. Which is good evidence that it’s highly automatized. Which is why it’s so hard for you to break that constraint in this troop effect. You understand, this is not anything Nodlic does. This is something I’m doing to try and make this more testable and measurable and rigorous. So what I’m giving you is a plausibility argument as to what’s going on with constrained relaxation. I’m going to give you some evidence for this in terms of the way mindfulness facilitates insight. So what I’m suggesting to you is that this basically should be understood as de-automatization. Now, if we do it that way, then one of the benefits of that is we can talk about the potential, we can now talk about both of these in terms of potential mechanisms. Characters decomposition is to move this way, potentially, to go from the salt to the nitrile. De-automatization is to go this way. It is to do a transparency to opacity shift. So what Nodlic’s work is really showing is that if you’re doing both, you’ll tend to get an improvement in insight. I want to try and show you other work that lines up with that. Is that okay so far? So I’m not going to rely just on this. I’m going to come back and we’ll take a look at the work done here, work done by McCaffrey and others, about this idea of an integration of these two intentional processes as a way of facilitating insight. And then I’m going to show you something confusing, that all of this can degrade your performance. And then going this way can improve your insight, and going this way can degrade your insight. It’s like, what? What? So, going this way seems to facilitate insight, manipulating attention this way. And there’s Ben. Nodlic has done work comparing, like doing theoretical debate and experimental competition, pitting the representational change theory, and feather theories. It’s doing quite well. I don’t think it’s going to be a sufficient answer for the reasons I’ve foreshadowed before, but it deserves to be taken seriously. At least to say that this machinery, this intentional machinery, does seem to, under the right circumstances, I’ll make that this way when we come back to this point, facilitate insight. So, De Young, Flanders, and Peterson. Colin De Young was a TA of mine, and I also taught him meditation. Joe Flanders was a student of mine who took this course at one point, and other courses, and you know Jordan Peterson. It’s kind of impossible to not know about Jordan Peterson right now. So, they did work in 2008. Now, I’m going to present this work as evidence for the argument I’m building, but in order to be intellectually honest, I have to say that it is not completely independent. Because if you go to this article, and you scroll down to the bottom of the first page where there’s an acknowledgement, you’ll see the following thing. The authors would like to thank John Gravace for inspiring them to do this work. So, it’s not completely independent. But nevertheless, it is empirical confirmation that we have that it should be paid attention to. So, they did a bunch of tests. I’m not going to go over the whole experiment. Some of you are looking at it in your essays. I’m just going to concentrate on one important part. They wanted to examine the degree to which what they call breaking frame, and they sort of blocked that term for me. The degree to which breaking frame is predictive of insight. And the way they operationalized breaking frame is they did it in terms of using what’s called the anomalous card sorting task. So, in the anomalous card sorting task, what happens is I give you a bunch of playing cards, actually pictures of playing cards that are flashed on the screen, rapidly, but not so rapidly that you can’t have awareness of them. And you have to identify the cards that are anomalous. An anomalous card would be something like a black three of hearts. Now, this task turns out to be independently important. So, this ability to detect anomalies is also predictive. So, it’s not predictive, but this is what some of Jordan’s other work shows. People’s ability to detect anomalies or not detect anomalies seems to be quite predictive of how prone they are to self-deception. Which, I mean, I can’t go into it right now because this isn’t a course on abnormal psychology and everything, but it kind of makes sense, right? One of the things in which we, one of the ways in which we can deceive ourselves is by not paying attention to things that don’t fit our current structures. It also points out, right, an interesting connection, we can go the other way, and I can’t explore it very much here, I do it in another course, that of course one way of seeing insight is that insight is an adaptive evolutionary machine for overcoming self-deception. That one of the functions of insight is to free us from the ways in which we are mis-framing situations in a self-destructive manner. Okay, that all being said, and what they found was in fact that, they did some work on convergent and divergent thinking I won’t go into largely because there’s a lot of controversy over whether or not those are consistent with the way we think. So, I think that’s a good point. Okay, that all being said, and what they found was in fact that, they did some work on convergent and divergent thinking I won’t go into largely because there’s a lot of controversy over whether or not those are consistent constructs. Okay, that all being said, and what they found was in fact that, they did some work on convergent thinking I won’t go into largely because there’s a lot of controversy over whether or not those are consistent constructs. And the point of the experiment is that this was independent of those factors. It independently predicted, right, it independently predicted how well you would solve insight problems. Now notice what’s going on in the anomalous card sorting task. Notice the two things you have to do. You have to break up the gestalt of the card to notice a distinctive feature. And you also have to do something else. You have to de-automatize your card recognition processor. You have to do transparency dual-pacity shifting. You have to become aware of how you’re paying attention to the cards. You can already sort of feel the aspects of mindfulness at work there. So what I’m trying to show you is that breaking frame is exactly, again, this kind of move, going downward, right? Breaking up the gestalt and its features and doing a transparency-alpacity shift in order to de-automatize the framing of the situation. So similar work, again done independently, this time completely independently for me, is work by McCaffrey, 2012. As far as I can tell, McCaffrey is unaware of the work by Deon Flanters and Peterson. I think he’s aware of some of the novel work, but it’s not that clear. Anyways, what he did was he was giving people a particular problem to solve, and he was looking for insight problem solving. It’s called innovative problem solving, but it’s exactly the same thing if you look at the work. So what he was giving people was the following problem. I give you a one-inch metal cube, right? I give you a candle, and I give you two metal rings, right? Here’s my candle, here’s my one-inch metal cube, here’s my two metal rings. And using only these things, you have to attach the two metal rings together so you can’t pull them apart. And I’ll tell you right now, the rings are stainless steel, and wax won’t stick to them. When people say, well, you know, I like the candle, and I try to melt the two rings into each other, many of you know that candles are not that hot. Okay, so now I’m doing this backwards because of course I’m showing you the problem first. The participants were first given the training intervention, and then exposed to the problem. What they were taught to do was to take anything and break it up into its components. Which of course is to do chunk decomposition, even literally. And it is to break the Gestalt up literally into its features. They were also taught to do something else. Redescribe the features in as meaningless or functionless a term as possible. Namely, try to do a transparency opacity shift. Try to take back from your description the meaning that you’re projecting into them. Try to become aware of what meaning you’re attributing to your processing. So instead of looking through your meaning at the components, try to step back and look at the meaning and reduce it. So do a significant transparency opacity shift. Try to de-automatize the meaning-making, the meaning attribution. So what people would do is they would think about, okay, well I break this thing up into its parts, and this isn’t just wax, it’s this sort of semi-solid substance that I can manipulate. And this isn’t a wick, it’s a long string. And now do you have an answer? You can of course take the wick, which is actually a string, and you can take the wick, which is actually a string, and you can take the wick, which is actually a string, and you can take the wick, which is actually a string, and you can of course take the wick, which is actually a string, and tie the two rings together. Now interestingly, if you took people, right, and you gave them this training program and gave them problems like this, he was able to get, I believe it was a 67% increase compared to controls on being able to solve these problems. Yes? Do people ever attend to, because wax, when it’s hot, can also, you don’t need to separate it, you could just use the candle if it’s hot enough to also do the exact same thing. Do the candle pop in what way? And that if wax is hot enough, you can just break it, like also a ring, and tie it. Sort of with sort of a goopy wax? No, yeah, well it’s attached to the wick, so you can do it without necessarily separating them, like theoretically, physically, you could also do that. I don’t know if anybody did that. That’s like the first thing I thought of. But it only works because the wax is congealed around the wick. But it also depends, but it’s also not breaking them up, it’s their component pieces. It’s not like wick and wax, it’s wax and the wick, so it’s just like… I guess. I don’t know if that’s going to work for some of the other problems, but I don’t know, they didn’t report anybody doing that, so. But again, most people don’t report all the raw data. Is that okay? Yes, Sarah? Can I blow this already on fire? No, but you can light it on fire if you want to. Oh, I didn’t have a computer that was working. It’s a possibility, but I mean, yeah, it’s not going to do anything, because candle flame can’t, right? The wax itself won’t hold these together, and you can’t sort of melt them together with the flame or anything like that. I have a weird question. How do people come up with new insight problems? So you basically do the reverse. Lockhart actually talked about this a long time ago, and we have a cultural practice for coming up with new insight problems. It’s called generating a riddle. Now, is that creativity? So do you think that all acts of creativity are the generations of riddles? No, I mean, that’s just a sample. I’d like to show that creativity actually is the city. Ah, so in that sense, I think there’s something you’re pointing to, Jenny, that’s deeper. One of the things I’m going to consider is whether or not insight and creativity in some sense are using the same machinery, but insight is using the machinery in reverse as you’re proposing. So a lot of people explore the possibility that insight is about solving problems, whereas creativity is about finding problems. We’ll take a look at that proposal. There’s merit to that proposal. It might be that creativity is about finding problems and then formulating them so they’re intelligible or potentially solvable, rather than just generating riddles for people. But what you just did is a bona fide attempt to explain how the machinery of insight and creativity overlaps so much, but creativity could be something different from insight. So good, well done. Yes, in one sense. Sorry, am I giving a too qualified answer? Yes? Is your ability to solve insight problems positively correlated with creative ability? Well, the problem with answering that question is exactly that. The theoretical issue that was brought up in my discussion with Dan again that I foreshadowed. If, for example, if there’s no deep theoretical difference between insight and creativity, we would find a high correlation between insight and creativity, but that wouldn’t be meaningful because all we’ve done… We would define them the same. But like the way you talked about it before as insight is, how do you say, creativity is generating problems? Finding problems. Whereas insight is solving found problems. So wouldn’t that… since they use similar machinery… Then they should be highly correlated with each other, right. And so what I’m suggesting to you is what we have to do is get clear on… we have to get a clear consensus on the construct of creativity in order to do the correlational study you want to do. And part of what I’m suggesting to you is we don’t have that yet. I mean, we even have somebody, his name is Weisberg by the way, who argues that there’s no such thing as creativity. Well, that’s sort of his shtick, right? Imagine living with him. We’re going into the living room. There’s no such thing as a living room. Okay. As I’ve mentioned repeatedly, I have a lot of respect for him. I mean, he’s sort of the gadfly of the insight literature. That’s an important job. Okay, so you’re seeing… And each one of these is just an example of, you know, a body of experiment. So you’ve got a lot of convergence for this idea of breaking frame. And I’ve operationalized breaking frame because that’s how it’s actually being used in this experiment as these two intentional moves. You know, going from gestalt to fetal and doing a transparency opacity shift in order to de-automatize your framing of a problem. So that facilitates insight. The problem with this is that it’s not a very good idea to go back to the McCrane-Lewis figure. Go back also to an experiment that I’m not going to tell you, Beckman 2012, and doing this can also degrade your performance in a powerful way. All right? So what Beckman did in 2012, right? And this will line up again with what we saw. So you get… So we’re considering the idea that, you know, insight is a very procedural thing, and it’s about, you know, coming up with a structural functional organization for your processing, et cetera, for your problem, your problem formulation. So Beckman was trying to also test sort of with such procedural gestalts. He had three kinds of tests. Shooting a soccer ball at a net. All right? I have to say soccer because we’re in North America. All right? And then there was a judo one, and I can’t remember what the third one was. And so what you do is you have people… You first of all have them baseline. You just have them repeatedly from a certain distance shoot the ball at the net. You get, you know, a reliable average how many goals they can score. All right? And then what you do is you have people, and then you then surprise them. You have, you know, judges come in who could potentially move them to a better lead or something like that. This is all kind of deception because it’s an experiment. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And then these people are being watched. And what would you predict happen when they’re being watched? What happens to their average? It goes down. Okay, because they start doing this. They start breaking up the gestalt, and they start becoming, as we say, self-conscious. They start paying attention to how they’re doing it. They de-automatize. And that screws up their performance. Their performance degrades considerably, which lines up with also what we saw with the face recognition, et cetera. Then you did something really interesting. Right? Okay, now for this one, and this goes back to the conversation I had with… You know, a while ago. Everybody has to be right-handed. Okay? Because you redo the experiment, and you have one group just replicating that, right? Get the average baseline, and then getting them to shoot under, you know, critical observation. You have the other group doing the same thing, baseline, under critical observation. But while they’re shooting under critical observation, they’re squeezing a foam ball in their left hand, which is an extra task, which should degrade their performance, in terms of just calling it a float. But what you find is that if they’re squeezing the ball in the left hand, their performance doesn’t degrade. Why not? You hit Chloe? I have to slide in the box. Just say it? Okay. Like this is it. Yeah. How would their cognitive task be focused on squeezing, so that actually should they stay automated? Not so much, because they do seem to be… It only seems to be if they’re squeezing in their left hand, rather than in their right hand. Try it, though. That’s reasonable. Yes? One automatized process is coming, another automatized process, which is taking the attention away from the launch. Well, that’s what she said. So it sounds like that’s what she said. So, okay, why squeezing your left hand? What’s that doing? What part of… Is it shifting? Shifting activation suddenly to the right, especially this part of the right hemisphere, which is the area that was activity was shifted to in insight. So notice what’s going on here. The pattern of activity shifting that was insightful generating is actually counteractive to this breaking frame. Breaking frame is going to be… It’s actually detrimental to the performance, and the cure to it is to shift activity like in insight. Now it looks like this move is opposite to insight. Yes? If you have a probe that can just stimulate the brain… Yeah, remember the PDCS? So the answer is yes. And it’s a dangerous yes. Okay, so to use the language that’s common and they use it in the experiment, the problem with this is this can choke, and choking can be actually antithetical, and the cure for it is to have something like an insight experiment. So, like, what? This is… We just got all this evidence that this facilitates insight, and now it seems like it’s the opposite. And now to make it more confusing, there’s evidence that going this way facilitates insight. Yes? But then, they measured this based on, like… I know that you say, like, in sense of procedural scale, but they’re not actually measuring, like, the playing of soccer. Sure. Not actually… But we did say that the shifting in activity is… What rescues them from the impairment is the shift activity in a way that’s very analogous to the shift in activity that we see in insight. Yeah, but then that’s… I feel like that’s not saying exactly the same thing as, oh, this little impair insight. It’s just saying, like, this impairs you, but insight will rescue this activity, but it’s not the same as, like, it actually being insight. But what it’s showing is there’s times when, right, this breaking frame can actually mess up the shifting to the right that you need in order to succeed at your task, right? Okay. Does that have anything to do with what Weisberg said in terms of insight problems not being on homogeneous class? It could, but we have some evidence that that might not be the case in the whole… I’m going to propose to you another thing, but don’t give up on that. That’s relevant, and many of you are still pursuing a critical line about this, and that’s good. And if you notice, I rewarded you for doing so in your remarks that I have on the mark, some of your stuff. It’s very… I mean, I’m making an argument, and I think I’m trying to make something plausible, because that’s what you should do. Education should be persuasion. But also, importantly, I want to see that I’m training important skills in all of you. Yes? I guess my question is, like, more in line with the first question, because I guess I didn’t completely understand. I guess, yeah, like, both of those… Like, both insight and the keeping the soccer ball, like, they’re both… They’re both procedural, but it’s, like, different procedures. Like, maybe, like, one procedure is for, like, automized activity, and the other activity is… The other sort of procedure is for insight problems, which requires de-automatization. So it seems like it’s fundamentally different. Well, let me try and put it this way. I mean, what you guys are trying to do is do something we’ve already rejected. You’re trying to get back to the single difficulty hypothesis. You’re trying to get back to, all I have to do is break the frame, and that will solve my insight problem. But we have good evidence and argument for thinking that’s not right. And I’m going to add to it in one minute. Namely, is it enough to break the inappropriate frame in the 9-dot problem, to solve the 9-dot problem? You have to reconstruct another frame. Right, and so if you keep breaking and breaking when you need to restructure, what is to restructure? Which direction do you have to move to restructure? You have to move back. Right, so if you just keep breaking frame, you’re going to choke, because you have to be able to do that shift, right, to the right. Oh, that’s the argument I’m making. That’s why the argument also means the next point I’m making. Okay, so in order so that we can talk about these two directions, right, and because they got this term from me, I’m allowed to make up the other term, right, I’m going to call this breaking frame and this making frame. What I want to show you right now is that we have evidence that moving in this opposite direction is also powerfully facilitary for insight. So if you start to add this all together, trying to get the single difficulty hypothesis becomes increasingly difficult. Okay. Sorry, that was self-referential. Yeah. It’s sort of ironically postmodern, the way I said it. Honest. So a lot of time, I think, you see that, and then you keep pointing out the problem with sort of mapping on procedural tasks with sort of action-based behaviors and so on. That we can do procedural stuff potentially in a purely cognitive context. Language. Or body language. Okay. Procedural things with language we can do sort of foreign, differential things in a body way when we need to do our own tasks. There are new skills for this. Sure. Although I think ultimately these processes turn out to be deeply embodied in nature. I’m going to give you your argument coming up for that. Okay. Go ahead. Yeah. I just wanted to point out something. I was wondering with respect to that particular task in the experiment, so what we’re seeing in the one hand is we’re having a sort of motor activation, right? Sure. With the left hand and so that’s where it’s part of the right hemisphere. Right. Activated in that. And so. So in some ways it’s similar, very similar to what the TDCS is doing for people. I was wondering, do you think that if we had someone trying to do, in a condition that was otherwise facilitating automatic skills in the software condition, for example, if we had something that was an unrelated or de-automatized task with the hand, does that facilitate or interfere with the automaticity of the other task in terms of coming back to the question that I was asking for, whether it’s relaxing the ability sort of to allow that process to be automated despite the questions. I’m not sure. That’s a very long question. I’m not quite sure how to answer. I think if people can get into a state in which the cognitive flexibility, and this goes back, way back to what I said to Ainsley, it’s not in either hemisphere but the ability to shift between them in a fluid manner. And I think you can make a plausible case that that’s probably what the flow state is measuring. And so the research seems to show that people can get into the flow state, they will optimize their performance on these kinds of tasks. But that’s the best answer I can give you. I guess, but some of that knowledge is really too much knowledge to reach down this sort of line. Which line? You’re pointing at the blackboard. Yeah, exactly the blackboard. Sorry. Well, I mean, yeah, it’s a fairly recent experiment. There’s similar stuff going on, but we only get the results and we don’t get the reports because it’s being done by Delta. And they’re using PDCS and stuff to try and induce the flow state to improve the speed and accuracy of the sharpshooters, things like that. So that’s where some of that research is being done. They’re doing research on also inducing temporary, turning you temporarily into a psychopath by shutting off areas of the brain that are conducive to empathy and mind-sight. And I read a report of somebody from First-Handed Experience, used TMS to turn himself temporarily into a psychopath, you know, like Dexter. And he talked about how clear everything becomes, because it’s not all messy and ill-defined by human emotions and moral values and other people’s mental states and plans. It all becomes very clear what you should do. It was terrifying when he came out of it. But yeah, the military is toying with that. Toying is probably the exact wrong verb to have used. So let’s keep going. All right, you already have one instance of this, clearly. Think about what cognitive leaping is. You go from features to the gestalt, and you go from looking at the gestalt, right, to looking at the picture to looking through it. So first you’re getting dots, and then you configure the dots, and do all this right into the picture of the sofa, and then very quickly you go from looking at it to looking through it, thinking about sofas. You’re doing this. That’s exactly what cognitive leaping is. It’s making frame. It’s going from feature to gestalt, and it’s going and it’s doing an opacity to transparency shift. You go from looking at it to looking through it. We have work from Forrester et al. in 2004, and Hunting Carroll from 2008. This is from construal level theory. If you push people to a higher level of construal, to the gestalt level, right, you will actually also enhance their problems, their ability to solve inside problems, which also lines up with what we saw with the finger experiment. If you push people up, I’m sorry, the McCrann Lewis, if you push them up to a higher level, you will increase, right, the gestalt task by face recognition. If you push people up into a higher level of construal, you will get enhancement of their capacity for solving inside problems. But of course, we already know, and this is old and ancient within the insight literature, cognitive leaping is also a disaster. If I show you these nine dots and you cognitively leap to this square, what happens? Fixation. So automatic cognitive leaping can also be detrimental to inside problem solving. So this is facilitary, but it can be detrimental. This is facilitary, but it can be detrimental. Are you asking a question? No. Okay. Okay, so if we pick up on the idea that attention is this complex, multi-layered self-organizing process, then there’s a way of responding to this. Because if attention is this kind of self-organizing process, right, it would behave according to what dynamical systems theory says. And in dynamical systems theory, what you have to pay attention to, the timing matters. Unlike in a formal computational system where what matters is order before and after relationship, in a dynamical system, timing matters. So for example, what’s really important are things like a phase function fit. Phase function fit is, right, you want to be using the correct function, right, at the correct phase, right, in a problem solving situation. So for example, if you need to break frame, then you should do this. So in a paper that myself and Neil Ferraro, well, it’s a book chapter, it came out in 2016, we can see that the phase function fit is going this way. If you need to break up an inappropriate problem formulation, you should break frame, and you break frame by scaling attention down. But you also need an alternative problem formulation. You need to engage the right hemisphere, right? And in order to do that, you need to engage the right hemisphere. And in order to do that, you should make frame, and you should make frame by scaling up attention. We’ll wait for all the distractors. Yes, I’m going to go through the whole thing, because the distractors came in, and they were very interesting. They were more interesting than me. The pencil seemed to have a mind of its own and wanted to flee towards Lauren, and I know had a very interesting distractor come on in school. Okay, so the idea is, if you track an inappropriate problem formulation, perhaps because it’s called a total explosive, or it hasn’t sufficiently turned your ill-definedness into well-definedness, then you should break up that structural functional organization. You break up that problem formulation, that problem framing, by scaling down attention and breaking frame. But you also, of course, need to come up with an alternative frame, an alternative problem formulation. When you’re in that phase, you should scale attention up in order to trigger the processes of frame making. And part of the skill insight, and this, of course, where I’ve been arguing that it’s procedural and skill-like in nature, is of getting that phase function fit, coordinated well. Now, there’s two ways of trying to substantiate this with argument and empirical evidence. One would be to show how this helps us to better understand the potential for mindfulness practices for facilitating insight. Secondly, do we have independent evidence that attention is working, or at least the processes that work in insight are showing this kind of self-organizing, restructuring capacity. That’s when we’ll take a look at the work of Stefan and Dixon about self-organizing criticality within insight problem solving. So those are the two things I’m going to now pursue in order to try and further argue for this dynamical model. Now, what’s the promise of doing this? Why should we do this? Well, the thing about dynamical models, especially because they run very well on things like neural networks, because neural networks are already working in a self-organizing parallel fashion, is they give us a good account of how skills work. And it also is, and I’ll make a case for this, it gives us a formal theory for talking about self-organizing processes. We’ll be able to integrate aspects of such dynamical theories so that we can think about several mathematical formalisms, I won’t do any heavy math with you, that could be brought to bear to talk about all these processes and are being already brought to bear. If that’s the case, then we could have a way of talking about all of this that is non-computational, but yet nevertheless is based on existing theory that already is successfully being used in science and on mathematical formalisms that are already in existence. In other words, to put it in a sentence, we could have as rigorous a theoretical framework as a search inference framework. What I’m proposing to you is that perhaps we’re getting to a place, and so this is not going to be in this lecture, maybe not even in the next lecture, where I’m going to try and argue that the debate between the gestaltist and the search inference framework hasn’t been resolved, it’s been transcended, that there’s a new framework emerging that takes aspects from both to come up with a different way of trying to rigorously talk about inside problem solving, in a way that also is giving us much tighter connections to what’s happening in the neuroscience of insight. So that’s where the argument is going. So there are three big steps. The mindfulness step, the self-organizing step, and then getting into this way of trying to come up with an alternative framework for talking about insight that would capture the best of both worlds. Okay, the mindfulness stuff, which many people often find the most interesting part of the course, which now by saying that, you’ll concentrate on the feature of interestingness, and it will disappear for you because you will have de-automatized your interest in the future. It’s like the last thing you should do when you look at somebody and you think they’re beautiful is wonder, gee, I wonder why I think that person’s beautiful, because you know what will happen? They will stop being beautiful for you, because beauty tends to be a gestalt thing, and it will drop down to the future level, and the left hemisphere is rapidly looking for the feature that is beauty. Oh, let’s write and people will find it. So some questions perhaps shouldn’t be asked, or at least they shouldn’t be asked at the wrong time. Although you can use it in the other way. Like I’ve said before, a really great thing to do when you’re in martial arts sparring is compliment somebody on something they’ve just done. That was really good. How did you do that? Because then I can’t do it again. Okay, so first of all, I’m going to talk about the way that we think about the world. Okay, so first of all, I won’t go into too much detail. I do this in other courses, and when I do 471, which I won’t be doing this year, but I’ll probably do again the following year, when we talk about the mindfulness construct, I have a whole fourth year seminar course dedicated. Did any of you take that? Anybody do 471? Oh, that’s too bad. It’s always good to have at least one person in the course. Okay, so what we have is we have a series of experiments that seem to show that practicing mindfulness enhances insight. So read it out in 2010, or 2011. And then Ostafen and Cash, Casman, my Ostafen contacted me. He wants to do some work together on this stuff, which is kind of cool. What do I have? Ostafen and Casman, which is 2012. Some of you know this. You’ve got it in your topic proposals. And then Greenberg, Reiner, and Mirren in 2012 also. That’s okay. Read it out. There’s a whole bunch of it. It’s Ostafen. It’s called Stepping Out of History. And then I read you the list of names, but I’m just going to put here Greenberg et al. from 2012. There’s been some more recent ones, but I’ve got to go over them before I include them in the lecture. So all of these showing that if you, so for example in the Reddit, you have people following your breath. Classic, basic Vipassana mindfulness exercise. So people are following their breath, and what they’re doing is they’re counting their breath, and they either put up their hand every 10 breaths or every 100 breaths. And then you have a control group, and then unexpectedly people are given insight problems to solve, and people who are following their breath do significantly better than people who weren’t, et cetera. So in the class of Enic Asimov, we’re able to show that both trait and state mindfulness improve your capacity for solving insight problems. So state mindfulness is when, I don’t like these terms, they should use dispositional and current rather than state, rather than trait and state. But anyway, state mindfulness is when you do some sort of mindfulness practice in order to put yourself into a mindfulness state of mind. Mindfulness is how much you dispositionally sort of set to go into mindfulness states. And what they were able to show is both improve your insight problem solving ability. Greenberg and I were able to show that mindfulness training especially helps for a particular form of insight problem, which is overcoming what’s called the Einstein effect. Einstein effect is basically a kind of, the Einstein effect is interesting because it’s an interaction between sort of familiarity and fixateness. The Einstein effect goes like this. You give somebody a problem to solve and they solve it with a particular strategy. Then you give them another problem that can be solved with that strategy, but it will be a really clunky and horrible solution. But that second problem could be solved much better with another strategy. And the Einstein effect is that people tend to stick with the strategy that worked, even though a better strategy is available to them, readily available to them. And the Einstein effect is very, typically when things have a German name, that means they’re robust. They’ve stood around for a while. So the Einstein effect is very robust. And what Greenberg and I were able to show is that you can overcome the Einstein effect if you have had mindfulness training. Yes? How do you spell that? Einstein effect. I don’t need to write the word effect. I don’t need to write the word effect, which is useless. Yes? Do you mind just expanding on faith mindfulness? Faith mindfulness is dispositional mindfulness. As opposed to currently being in a mindful state, faith mindfulness is how disposed, how probable is it that you will go into mindful states spontaneously? So of course, one of the things you’re doing when you’re doing mindfulness training is you’re after dispositional mindfulness. You don’t just want, the point of meditation is not to get just mindfulness in that time. You want it so that that will transfer to the rest of your life. You’ll get trait mindfulness. Arthur Dyckman said this well a long time ago. It’s not about altered states of consciousness. It’s about altered traits of character. Interestingly enough, by the way, the same Arthur Dyckman who said that wonderful quote in 1967 proposed that one of the primary functions of mindfulness is to de-automatize cognition. Great question. Kang et al. have found similar evidence, Kang et al. in 2013, that one of the things that mindfulness does is seem to de-automatize cognition. Specific evidence for that is Moore and Malinowski 2008 and also 2009 and more recently that people with training in mindfulness practice are able to significantly reduce the? Stroop effect. Stroop effect, which is a capacity to de-automatize by doing a transparency to opacity shift. If you take a look at things like following the breath, specifically used here, but also presupposed in most of the training, think about what you’re being taught to do. I can talk about this because I’ve been teaching this. I’ve been teaching Vipassana for what, 12 years? 15? How old am I? How old am I? I’ve been practicing it for 25 years. I think I’ve been teaching it for 15? One of the standard things people do in one of the most, I have to be careful here, because I’m going to be very critical about how the West has imported. I’m going to say the way the West has imported mindfulness has been very skewed and misrepresentational. But that being said, so remember I’m going to come back to that criticism. Nevertheless, the most popular kinds of meditation practices, mindfulness practices, sorry, are meditation practices that do things like follow the breath. So what’s happening when you’re following the breath is you’re trying to pay attention to your sensations, which is a radical kind of transparency opacity shifting. And you’re trying to be open and non-judgmental, which is you’re trying to de-automatize your cognition very powerfully. You’re doing a lot of things that we already saw, for example, when we talked about Fleck and Weisberg. You’re supposed to not engage in any kind of elaborative or inferential processing. You’re trying to disengage from inferential computational processing. And of course, you’re breaking up the gestalt of your experience because you’re trying to focus on and become aware of all the little differences, all the different feature differences in your sensation that you normally don’t pay attention to. So one of the things you’re training in meditation, things like the past of meditation, if you can remember my cultural criticism by the last one, is you’re training the scaling down. Training, practicing scaling down. And what’s really interesting when you do it, how many of you have done some mindfulness practice? So the thing that faces you, of course, is that there’s something like a cognitive stoop effect. That was very powerful. That’s actually par. Parity? That’s actually par. You have more powerful stoop effect? Yeah. That’s an interesting superpower. So the thing that happens is, if you’ll allow me the metaphor, and I’ve given you enough so that you know that I’m not just speaking metaphorically. So this is the metaphors for pedagogical purposes. And we talked about this before when we were talking about the transparency of constantly. Normally we’re looking through how we’re framing our experience, like my glasses. And what you’re doing in mindfulness practice is you’re actually stepping back and trying to look at your mind. You’re trying to look at the sensations and how your mind is trying to gestalt and frame things. And you’re trying to hold off from going into the gestalting and the framing. And what happens is there’s a cognitive stoop effect. Just like it’s very hard for you to pay attention to the medium of the word, instead of looking through the medium, at the end of the word, what happens is when you’re trying to meditate, your mind keeps going and you keep thinking about things. It’s called monkey mind. It’s like a monkey chattering and jumping around. And then what you have to do is you have to step back. This language is almost used in fact. And what you have to do is you don’t get involved with the content of your distraction. You don’t get involved with the propositional, conceitual, and the materialistic. You don’t get involved with the content of your distraction. You actually label the process within ING work, like thinking, imagining, wondering, complaining, listening. And then you return your attention to the breath. So what you’re constantly doing is you’re constantly scaling down attention again and again and again and again. And what happens of course, as I said, is you can get, I mean for extended practices, you can get down to what’s called a pure consciousness event. You’re not thinking about anything. There’s absolutely no transparency. And there is no gestalt. There is nothing. You’re not even thinking about your own consciousness. You’re just conscious. And that might not mean anything to you. I’m sorry I can’t do anything about it. All I can do is point out something to you. You have a fringe of that right now. How many of you are conscious to put up your hands? Okay. I’m interested in the people that didn’t put up their hands. What did you do to know that you were conscious? Okay. So there’s an aspect of what’s called by some people knowledge by identity, where knowing that you’re conscious and being conscious are exactly the same. It’s probably a feature only of pure consciousness. It’s not a feature of knowledge in general. Yes? So from the mindfulness practices to where I feel like this is often never been like, we don’t say it to you this way. But it’s not really the paying attention to your breath. It’s just being able to scale down. Because you could theoretically pay attention to your breathing and also pay attention to your breathing. But I think that’s a little bit of a different aspect of what’s called by identity. So the important part is being able to scale down. Because you could theoretically pay attention to your breathing and also pay attention to a feature or object at the same time. You could do lots of things. So the important part is, so people say, oh just pay attention to your breathing. Well that’s not helping if you’re not also scaling down. Right. So that’s completely right. Except for the fact that try to remember that in meditation you’re trying to do things other than the cognitive attentional stuff. So paying attention to the breathing also tends to have a relaxing effect on people. It tends to drown them. It tends to keep enough oxygen in the bloodstream so you don’t fall asleep. So it has a lot of other benefits. I think that’s why it’s a typical focus. I agree with what you’re saying. I’m just saying there’s other practical reasons why it’s emphasized. Now I think there’s a critique in what you’re saying, which I think is right. And this is part of the mystique of mindfulness that you heard me criticizing earlier in class. Right. So you’re talking about the spiritual spirit associated with the breath. And some people get all weird and creepy about it. Like you know, breath. The original meaning of the word spirit was breath. And so this is a spirit. And I want these people to get away from me. Right. So although I do think people are being relived, there’s practical reasons why it’s good to focus on the breath. But you should understand what Chloe’s doing. And I think that’s the point that really is the cognitive attentional processes, the attentional processes that are efficacious there. Not anything intrinsically to the breath per se. Sorry, I ranted a bit, but you gave me a good opportunity to do so. Emma? Is the aim or one of the aims, try to sort of like apply that to every situation? So like for example when you’re studying, you’re trying to like identify all those different things that are coming across your consciousness. You say, no, I’m not doing that right now. I’m studying. So that’s, again, I think that’s a misinterpretation that’s been taken into the West, which is that mindfulness is the state that you’re supposed to get. The mindfulness state is equivalent to the state you get into when you’re meditating. Which isn’t necessarily correct. Right? Mindfulness is, meditation is a good way of training mindfulness. Think about Vipassana, the term that labels, do you know what Vipassana translates as? Insight. The point of this practice is to generate insight. So typically when people, and this is how I was taught, you’re not taught just meditative practices, you’re also taught contemplative practices as well. And you’re also taught a moving flow induction practice. So I was taught Vipassana, Metta, and Tai Chi Chuan. Because the point is the cognitive flexibility. The point is to not only train this, but to train this and to train the capacity for flow. So that what you’re actually trying to enhance is the cognitive flexibility of breaking frame and making frame. You’re trying to train that skill. So you’re not a by meditating tribe who have that meditative existence throughout their life. You’re trying to get better at being mindful. Right, so I think mindfulness is the frame awareness that you have to have for both breaking frame and making frame. Now I can’t give you that full argument here. You can read the article and the evidence that we marshal for defending that. Okay. So the breaking frame is the meditation. It’s the meditation aspect of it. Following the breath. Making frame is what you would find in Metta and Tai Chi Chuan. Metta I think is where you’re doing making frame. No, I think Tai Chi Chuan is constantly about getting fluid in breaking and making. Look, you do a move and then you break it and then you make a new move. You break it and then you make a new move. You’re constantly breaking and making. And the form will even do stuff like you’ll do one move and then you’ll have to do its opposite right after it. You have to break, right, any automaticity and generate. It’s like doing figure of fluency with your whole body. Now that’s part of the cultural critique. The West has done what it likes to do, which is, ooh, I can take this technique out of this whole ecology of practice. I can transport it over here and I can mark it as the single universal panacea for all of our ills. But if you pay attention, right, there’s evidence that, you know, breaking frame facilitates insight because of course we have evidence that breaking frame facilitates insight. But what we also have evidence for is that you should be also training making frame and training the cognitive flexibility of moving between making frame and breaking frame and breaking frame and making. And that’s what these traditions in their actual cultural settings do. People very rarely do one thing. In fact, what you should be doing typically is doing a meditative practice, a contemplative practice, some martial art practice, and also a healing practice. That’s the typical training regime. Just turn your hand just up. See, my peripheral vision now is ignoring you because you were doing this so much. Can hallucinogenic drugs have a similar effect to meditation? Yeah, I mean, I’ve got a couple talks. There’s one on YouTube on altered states of consciousness. I just gave one that was filmed taped on my cell phone about the thing I know. The thing I know about is psilocybin and what it does to this kind of machinery. Drugs can powerfully interact with this kind of training. I have to be careful here, right? There’s legal implications. But you won’t get what you’re looking for if what you’re looking for is the enhancement of your cognitive processes through the recreational use of this. They have to be used in a particular context within, like I’m arguing, a whole ecology of practice in order to get the kinds of effects you’re asking me about. Also, in both meditation and my experiments with hallucinogens, I’ve noticed an increased ability to notice other people’s emotions. Sure, and there’s good reason for that. Yeah. So when you’re doing this kind of stuff, especially when you’re practicing, that’s by the way when you do a healing art as well. Okay. You know what interoception is? Interoception is your awareness of what’s going on inside your own body. Yeah. Okay, so the part of the brain that does that is the insula. We have some preliminary evidence, and it stands to reason, that meditative practice would actually increase the functioning of the insula. But the insula is also what you use to pick up on other people’s mental states. In fact, this is a pretty robust test. The heart rate test is a good test of how empathic you are. So without touching yourself, sorry for that sentence, what you have to do in the next 15 seconds is tell me how many heartbeats you have. And then in the next 15 seconds, or when you’re no longer anxious about it, actually measure how many heartbeats you have and see what the ratio is. How good you are at that is predictive of how good you are at picking up on other people’s mental states. So there seems to be the machinery that you, and this seems to be part, this is what neural network theory is basically pointing towards. The machinery that we use to sort of generate our abilities is the machinery we’re using to recognize it in other people. Okay. That actually falls in line with what I was thinking before, because I was thinking before the reason why doing mushrooms or meditation makes you better at reading others is because every other person has a sort of emotional energy they’re giving off, and when you’re around them that energy comes into you. And if you meditate or you do mushrooms, you become more in touch with yourself, and you can notice the energy coming into you better, and as a result, you decipher their emotions a lot. That’s fine. I mean, and I get that you’re using that language poetically and metaphorically, but you don’t have to talk about emotional energy and things like that if you talk about the language of the insula and this kind of stuff. So I mean, one of the things that will happen is if, I mean, there’s lots of people doing work on this, right, but if this keeps going forward, right, a lot of the magic and woo-woo and crazy stuff is going to disappear from a lot of this literature, and some people won’t like that, but some people will like it because we’ll actually get a better understanding, I think, of what’s going on in these processes. Well, I think the poetic language describes it better, like, phenomenologically rather than like… Sure, but that’s only because we haven’t had the other language yet. Yeah. That’s true. Can I just… It never fails when I get to here. Wait till we do the, when I do flow, too. The lecture will crack. How can I flow more? Just a clarification question. About the empathy, you can actually train empathy. Yes. In fact, you can train all kinds of interesting lead structuring and reconnections. So it is now pretty well documented. There’s increasing empirical evidence for acquired synesthesia for extensive mindfulness practice. You can become more sympathetic if you want to. Okay. So, as you heard me mention, many mindfulness practices are also contemplative practices. Now, part of the problem here is I want to go back to what these terms actually mean because of this weird reductionism in the appropriation of mindfulness. So I’m engaging in some critique of cultural appropriation here, right? What’s happened is we’ve tended to make these two terms, we’ve tended to make a bunch of terms all synonymous. We’ve tended to make meditation and contemplation synonymous terms. There are just two different ways of talking about the same thing. We’ve also tended to think that the words mindfulness and watchfulness in most of the sutras are the same term. We’ve forgotten that they’re not, by the way. They’re different terms. We’ve forgotten that the word for mindfulness in the Buddhist literature of sattva is not the same term. The word for mindfulness in the Buddhist literature of sattva is not just about paying attention. The original meaning of this is remembering, keeping in mind. It’s about restructuring, not just paying attention. All of that. Okay. So, again, I’m trying to collapse what I take an entire seminar course to do. Contemplation. Meditation comes from words that mean moving towards the center. The oldest meditation manual we have, in fact, right, it simply translates as centering. Okay. This word, contemplation, comes from the Latin word, right, contemplatio, within the Western wisdom tradition, spiritual exercises, you know, what people are doing in monasteries and deserts and stuff. This is a Latin translation of a Greek word. Greek word, I actually have a tattoo on my right leg. Theoria. Now, what word does that make you think of? Theory. Theory. But, of course, they’re not talking about theory in our sense of a set of propositions that are influential to the link. They’re talking about something that happens in awareness. But what does a theory allow you to do? What does a theory allow you to do? Explain. Pardon me? Explain. Right. But what does explaining mean? Well, you need to be aware of stuff. You need to explain things. It helps you be aware of things. Sure. It helps you construct a frame. Right. But what it allows you to do is it allows you to see deeper connections between things, right? It allows you to see below the surface of things. That’s what you’re doing when you’re explaining them. That’s what a theory does. Right? And this actually comes from, right, seeing the gods. Oreo? Yeah. The eyes, seeing. It means seeing into the depths of things. What a theory does is it allows you to understand, to think of the word, to see deeply into things. But when it was used in this tradition, it didn’t mean through propositions. It meant through training your attention and awareness to see more deeply into things. So for example, that’s why I want to use the word contemplation for going this way. This is meditation. This is contemplation. So for example, in a Buddhist practice, you can, and this is the word that’s actually, you can contemplate the three marks of existence. You try to learn not to think, but to see everything as impermanent. To actually realize everything as impermanent. To see everything as interconnected. To see everything as lacking a substantial self. These are called the three marks of existence. This is a contemplative exercise. It’s not about looking in at your breath. It’s about trying to make an alternative framing for all of reality. It’s trying to create a huge gestalt and a huge opacity to transparency shift. You’re trying to stop looking at these things. Don’t see them as solid independent things, but look through them to how everything is interdependent and impermanent. Yes? Is that similar to the Yes. Now, this isn’t as familiar to you, which is my point. These practices are considered as important, if not more important, than meditation if you look, right, at the original set, the original ecology of practices. The point of meditation was so that you could then engage in better contemplation, so that you could have insight into the nature of experience and reality. So if you look, right, these traditions have mindfulness practices that go this way, mindfulness practices that go this way, and often practices for getting a fluency and a flexibility in breaking frame and making frame. So what I tried to show you is that this way of thinking about attention helps us understand what’s going on in insight, especially if we take all of these processes, attentional processes, and put them within what attention is, which is a dynamically self-organizing, recursive process. And that way of understanding attention also helps us to make sense of the Western empirical evidence for the relationship between mindfulness and insight, but also helps us to better go back and criticize that Western understanding of mindfulness and reorient it. And more and more people are doing this, I’m not like a lone voice in the wilderness, reorient and pay attention to what is actually going on in these wisdom traditions that are attempting to train insight and wisdom and compassion. So that’s an argument for why this is a better framework than this search-like metaphor for attention. And so that closes now my argument against verbal overshadowing. You wouldn’t have gotten any of this with a search-like metaphor for attention. Okay, that’s it for today. Thank you very much for your time. And thanks guys. I like your enthusiasm for the weirdness.