Does your subconscious solve problems?

[quarky]

As my brain gradually becomes more pickled, I frequently find myself walking to another room to fetch something, and totally forgetting what it was, on the way to that room.

Try as I may to retrieve the lost orders as i stand there, befuddled, there is nothing.
So i go back to where i was when i hatched the command to myself to fetch something.

It works very well indeed. Usually, there's a subtle visual cue that connects to an idea that connects to an piece of internal dialog, and voila! I remember!


(Too bad all I can do at that point, is to walk back into that room to fetch that thing that I forgot.)

Any Phillip K. Dick fans around?

That damn 'pink-beam' rarely gives me any peace.

 

[Rolfe]

I'm sure my PhD thesis was much better for having been put on the back burner for two years before I did the final write-up.

The most clear-cut memory I have of the subconscious doing the work was when I couldn't remember two lines from the second verse of a very silly song. No way. They'd gone. Several days later, I was lying in the garden sunbathing, thinking of nothing at all, when suddenly there popped into my head, unbidden, in isolation, the words, "Saxon you can waste your stitches, building beds for bugs in britches; we have woad to clothe us which is not a nest for fleas." The missing two lines.

Last Sunday evening a friend at choir said to me, can you think of anything we could sing as a duet at the Christmas concert. I mumbled something about giving it some thought, and promptly forgot all about it. Monday morning at work a tune started playing in the back of my head. Abends will ich schlafen geh'n.... Christmas-appropriate? Check. Duet for soprano and mezzo? Check. Dead easy? Check. Drop-dead gorgeous? Check. Have copies of the music? Check.

Maybe I should just stop thinking entirely.

Rolfe.

 

[Bikewer]

I believe it was Archimedes who first reported "the Eureka moment", solving his problem while relaxing in the bath....
The chemist who puzzled out the structure of the benzene "ring" likewise.

 

[rocketdodger]

Its quite mysterious, the process of retrieving a memory.
Someone asks a trivial question, "Who's that actor that was in that dumb movie, etc..."

Sometimes, with no apparent effort, the answer pops up! It may even be hours later.
What a strange mechanism.

Not mysterious -- I would bet good money the network topology of memory ( and most of the brain in general ) is similar to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopfield_network

Note that the behavior of the Hopfield net ( and similar associative memory networks ) is *exactly* what you get with human memory.

 

[rocketdodger]

Is this an actual mechanism of the brain?

Most likely.

First, it isn't clear how many thoughts are consciously generated vs. merely consciously perceived. You could basically say the distinction between "conscious" and "subconscious" isn't well defined, at best, and at worst may not even exist as we think of it.

Second, it is easy to imagine that if you have a partially constructed inference chain residing in memory, having a missing component in that chain "dropped" in so to speak would seem like subconsciously solving a problem.

Third, it is easy to confirm that when it comes to associative memory ( which is also the kind of memory that neural networks can form ) the time it takes to converge on a "memory" is affected by how close a "suggestion" state is in the network topology.

Let me elaborate using a contrived chain of events:

1) you are trying to solve a problem, and in the process you construct a chain of inference that is at least partially imprinted somewhere in your neural networks.

2) you try to remember something that is necessary to complete the chain of inference, but cannot.

3) a day later, an event occurs. Your brain filters this input and at least some of your associative networks automatically assume a state that represents this new event.

4) by coincidence, that state is fairly close in the state space to the state corresponding to the missing memory you failed to access on the previous day

5) due to the proximity of this new state, that portion of the network quickly converges on the other memory

6) this in turn is associated with the chain of inference you were thinking of the day prior, and the thought pops into your head that you solved the problem

Does that make sense?

If you think of neural hardware as a series of associative networks ( which is in all likelihood exactly what it is, for the most part ) then it becomes pretty clear how most these things can happen.

 

[majamin]

Does that make sense?

If you think of neural hardware as a series of associative networks ( which is in all likelihood exactly what it is, for the most part ) then it becomes pretty clear how most these things can happen.

Nicely hypothesized. Do you have a background in NNs of the computer or brain varieties? Because you certainly sound like you do.

I never considered a "coincidence" hypothesis to this. Neat.

 

[Complexity]

As my brain gradually becomes more pickled, I frequently find myself walking to another room to fetch something, and totally forgetting what it was, on the way to that room.

Try as I may to retrieve the lost orders as i stand there, befuddled, there is nothing.
So i go back to where i was when i hatched the command to myself to fetch something.

It works very well indeed. Usually, there's a subtle visual cue that connects to an idea that connects to an piece of internal dialog, and voila! I remember!

I heard recently on NPR that some researchers think that we use spaces to provide context for our memories, so that as we move from one room to another, something of a context switch occurs. The original room is the one in which we formed the intent to walk to another, and it can take walking back to the original room to restore the context in which the decision was made.

I read a lot of Philip K. Dick when I was young.

 

[billydkid]

It is too much promised if you claim that the subconcious certainly will do something, if you just go to sleep. But it can sometimes do something, possibly.

I don´t have any "good evidence", but my personal experience is that when I write a larger literary work, be it fact or fiction, time helps a lot to refine the thoughts and style. When the work is done, just wait and let it marinate, in unexpected situations (in daily life or when going to sleep, sometimes when waking up) you may get better second thoughts about something what you have written, even if you were thinking about something completely else at the moment.

Also when I have an active period of composing music, I often get melodic ideas in unexpected situations (in daily life or when going to sleep, sometimes when waking up in middle of the night). This doesn´t happen when I am not having an active period of composing music. The subconscious or semi-conscious gets triggered by the conscious.

Nobody knows precisely what the brain does at night and why. Some theories say that the brain processes and reorganizes information which has been handled during the day. This theory would fit in with the experiences of getting half-asleep fresh new ideas about the topic which you have been actively thinking about in daytime.

What comes to "solving problems", there is no guarantee that the fresh new ideas half-asleep will be better or more correct than the ideas you get in daytime. Often they can be, but not always.

Isn't the dream, really, to be able to tap into the "powers of the subconscious" at will? It seems obvious there is something vastly more creative and insightful inside my brain than I am ever consciously able to be. I have always wished for the ability to cultivate access to the creativity of my subconscious and have never found a way to do it. What we are/I am left with is the rare, occasional "ah ha!" moment. And this only occurs when I am actively making an effort to create something or figure something out. It's like a muscle, if you don't use it, you lose it.

 

[Rolfe]

I remember a friend of mine who was a physics teacher was doing some maths coaching, and she phoned me because she thought the answer in the back of the book to one of the maths problems she had set her students was wrong.

The answer given was 0.84. I managed to explain to her that this was definitely wrong, because it was impossible for the answer to be more than 0.50. But that was as far as I could get it.

I went to bed. I woke up in the morning knowing clearly that the correct answer was 0.48, and why. The printer had reversed the digits. I remember phoning her before I went to work and trying to explain, but the embarrassing bit was I didn't manage to get it over to her why the answer was 0.48. She ended up being happy enough to know what the right answer was, and to be able to explain why the book was wrong.

I never thought that problem through to the answer consciously. I just woke up and it was perfectly clear, when it had been a complete mystery the night before.

Rolfe.

 

[Perpetual Student]

What is a "subconscious"?

Is there a universally accepted scientific definition for a subconscious?

What is the scientific evidence for a "subconscious"?

 

[Complexity]

What is a "subconscious"?

Is there a universally accepted scientific definition for a subconscious?

What is the scientific evidence for a "subconscious"?

(you are beginning to sound like a brand of jeans)

 

[Beerina]

Your subconscious may be the only thing that solves problems, with your conscious mind being little more than an post-hoc rationalizer.

The sentences you say and think are probably generated subconsciously, too, and just run through your conscious mind for experiencing like any other external sensation.

 

[Perpetual Student]

(you are beginning to sound like a brand of jeans)

Woo!

 

[Jeff Corey]

What is a "subconscious"?

Is there a universally accepted scientific definition for a subconscious?

What is the scientific evidence for a "subconscious"?

No and none. The "unconscious" was stressed by Freud and the "subconscious" was a Jungian term. In both cases , they were non-falifiable concepts.

 

[yy2bggggs]

No and none. The "unconscious" was stressed by Freud and the "subconscious" was a Jungian term. In both cases , they were non-falifiable concepts.

Could you explain what you mean by a non-falsifiable concept?

 

[Jeff Corey]

As Karl Popper put it, " ...it must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience," (Popper, 1958, p. 41)

 

[yy2bggggs]

As Karl Popper put it, " ...it must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience," (Popper, 1958, p. 41)

That doesn't help me. The notion of a non-falsifiable claim makes sense to me, but I don't understand what it means in terms of a concept per se.

I can imagine meaningless concepts, but I don't know what it means for a concept in general to be falsifiable. How would I falsify the concept of a cup?

 

[Jeff Corey]

Scientists have to test theories, or specific predictions derived from theories that can potentially be shown to be false. If I say that I have ESP, but it only works with people who really, truely believe in ESP, then that's not falsifiable because if I fail the test, it's because you didn't believe enough or your negative, skeptical vibes suppressed it.
The Freudian unconscious mind fit into the class of unfalsfiable notions because there's no way to test if it isn't true.

 

[yy2bggggs]

Jeff:

You're just confusing me more.

Scientists have to test theories, or specific predictions derived from theories that can potentially be shown to be false.

Red herring. The question is about what it means for a concept per se to be falsifiable.

If I say that I have ESP, but it only works with people who really, truely believe in ESP, then that's not falsifiable because if I fail the test, it's because you didn't believe enough or your negative, skeptical vibes suppressed it.

That is an excellent example of a falsifiable claim. But I explicitly stated that I have no problems understanding what it means for a claim to be unfalsifiable.

The Freudian unconscious mind fit into the class of unfalsfiable notions because there's no way to test if it isn't true.

But I don't know what it means to say that a notion per se is unfalsifiable, because I don't know what it means to say that a notion is falsifiable. There's something a wee bit more fundamental about my question that you don't seem to be addressing.

Somehow it's supposed to be a problem that there's no way to test that a Freudian unconscious mind is true. But I don't know what to make of problems of this nature because I don't even understand what it would mean to test that a Freudian unconscious mind were "true" if it "could" be tested. At the very least there's something severely ungrammatical going on here (is that it? Is this a language barrier?).

Getting back to cups, how would you test that a cup is true? How would you falsify a cup?

 

[Perpetual Student]

For some notion to gain the status of a scientific theory there must be some observation or test that has the potential of demonstrating it is false. If all such observations or tests -- that have the potential to falsify some notion -- fail to falsify that notion, it maintains the status of a valid scientific theory. If there is no conceivable test or observation that could possibly demonstrate that some notion is false, it cannot be considered to be a candidate to become a scientific theory. Unless, someone can demonstrate otherwise, "subconscious" seems to be such a notion -- one that that cannot be falsified. Consequently, it is mere woo.

Examples:

Scientific theory: Einstein's theory of general relativity. It could be falsified tomorrow if someone were to measure something moving in excess of c -- the speed of light.

Woo: There is a parallel universe to the one we live in that is not detectable by any possible experiment or observation. By its very description it cannot be falsified.