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Does your subconscious solve problems?

majamin

Critical Thinker
majamin
Joined
Aug 2, 2009
Messages
310
I've searched the JREF forums and elsewhere on the internet, but I haven't been able to find good evidence supporting the claim that your subconscious will solve "a problem" if you just take a break from thinking about it, perhaps by sleeping on it, with an answer suddenly coming to your conscious the next day or soon after.

Is this an actual mechanism of the brain?
Is there a legitimate effect of "taking a break" from a problem, and one's ability to solve it on a second (third, etc.) attempt?
Is it just simply that time-spent correlates to probability of success?
How misconstrued or exaggerated is the claim?

Thanks for your comments and thoughts.
 
Yea, the subconscious mind is active whether you are consciously thinking of something or not, and it can send you a thought or signals, and this can help the creative process, problem solving, etc,.....

Of course, focussing the conscious mind can help too.

Both are part of you.
 
majamin said:
I haven't been able to find good evidence supporting the claim that your subconscious will solve "a problem" if you just take a break from thinking about it, perhaps by sleeping on it, with an answer suddenly coming to your conscious the next day or soon after.
Click to expand...
Problem solving often takes place after looking at the problem with a fresh perspective. That freshness could come from other people. Or, it could come from yourself, after you mull over the problem in different contexts and in different ways. "Sleeping" on the problem can induce enough freshness of thought, to help you tackle the problem.

Not all of those "different ways" of thinking about a problem are entirely conscious. There are parts of the brain that assess emotional impact of ideas, without you even thinking about them directly, for example.

majamin said:
Is this an actual mechanism of the brain?
Click to expand...

Someone else might have more time to go over the specifics of neuro-anatomy. But, I believe many of the mechanisms are being worked out with fMRI and other things.


majamin said:
Is there a legitimate effect of "taking a break" from a problem, and one's ability to solve it on a second (third, etc.) attempt?
Click to expand...
As I stated, sometimes "taking a break" is needed to gain fresh perspective.

majamin said:
Is it just simply that time-spent correlates to probability of success?
Click to expand...
Amount of time spent on a problem is also a factor. These two ideas ("time spent" and "taking a break") are not mutually exclusive.

majamin said:
How misconstrued or exaggerated is the claim?
Click to expand...
It's certainly a lot more reliable than the idea of a "collective consciousness", which lacks scientific merit.
 
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majamin said:
good evidence supporting the claim that your subconscious will solve "a problem" if you just take a break from thinking about it, perhaps by sleeping on it, with an answer suddenly coming to your conscious the next day or soon after.
Click to expand...
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.
 
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majamin said:
I've searched the JREF forums and elsewhere on the internet, but I haven't been able to find good evidence supporting the claim that your subconscious will solve "a problem" if you just take a break from thinking about it, perhaps by sleeping on it, with an answer suddenly coming to your conscious the next day or soon after.

Is this an actual mechanism of the brain?
Is there a legitimate effect of "taking a break" from a problem, and one's ability to solve it on a second (third, etc.) attempt?
Is it just simply that time-spent correlates to probability of success?
How misconstrued or exaggerated is the claim?

Thanks for your comments and thoughts.
Click to expand...

Here are a few examples of research:

http://www.psych.lancs.ac.uk/people/uploads/tomormerod20090227T152723.pdf
http://ocean.otr.usm.edu/~w785427/PSY425_SPRING_2010/incubation.pdf
http://www.sjdm.org/~baron/journal/9711/jdm9711.pdf
http://ecologylab.cse.tamu.edu/research/publications/SmithBlankenship1991.pdf
https://agora.cs.illinois.edu/downl...ct+of+Interruptions+and+Breaks+on+Insight.pdf
http://ecologylab.cse.tamu.edu/research/publications/DoddsSmithWardChapter.pdf
http://people.delphiforums.com/Sappho110/The Deliberation-Without_Attention.pdf
http://med-legend.com/mt/archives/images/2006/04/Dijksterhuis.pdf
http://unconsciouslab.com/publicati...e generative power of Unconscious Thought.pdf
http://repository.tamu.edu/bitstream/handle/1969.1/4964/etd-tamu-2005C-PSYC-Kohn.pdf?sequence=1
http://pluto.huji.ac.il/~msilan/files/YanivMeyer1987JEPLMC.pdf
http://danielzinzow.synthasite.com/resources/Implicit_Learning/Implicit Learning and Incubation.pdf
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/25/10130.full
http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/mbeeman/pubs/PBR_2003_Aha.pdf
http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/mbeeman/documents/TiCS_insight.pdf
http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/mbeeman/pubs/Psych_Sci_1998_Insight.pdf
http://einstein.pslc.cs.cmu.edu/research/wiki/images/9/90/Schooleretal.pdf
http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/facBios/file/Unconscious Thought and Creativity Psych Sci.pdf
 
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.
 
Arnold Swartzschild. He played "Igor".
The mad scientist was... no, no, I'll remember in a minute...

Actually, my subconscious is at least as dim as the rest of my mind. It comes up with all sorts of ideas, but they're all useless.
 
Soapy Sam said:
Arnold Swartzschild. He played "Igor".
The mad scientist was... no, no, I'll remember in a minute...

Actually, my subconscious is at least as dim as the rest of my mind. It comes up with all sorts of ideas, but they're all useless.
Click to expand...
Not so! And as far as I'm concerned, this answer, as many of your posts that I read do, has made me smile, as I take a break from writing Christmas cards to see what's going on on JREF!:)
 
majamin said:
I've searched the JREF forums and elsewhere on the internet, but I haven't been able to find good evidence supporting the claim that your subconscious will solve "a problem" if you just take a break from thinking about it, perhaps by sleeping on it, with an answer suddenly coming to your conscious the next day or soon after.

Is this an actual mechanism of the brain?
Is there a legitimate effect of "taking a break" from a problem, and one's ability to solve it on a second (third, etc.) attempt?
Is it just simply that time-spent correlates to probability of success?
How misconstrued or exaggerated is the claim?

Thanks for your comments and thoughts.
Click to expand...

Well the problem is with the term 'unconscious', there are many processes of the brain that do not involve verbal cognition. And they do exist and are likely to 'solve problems', the main issue is with the freudian tern 'unconscious'.
 
JJM 777 said:
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.
Click to expand...

I would be curious to know if our most important thoughts come unexpectedly, or if we just remember those epiphanies more often then the non-dramatic, conscious, problem-solving of everyday life / academia.

You said something similar here:

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.
Click to expand...
 
I doubt conscious processing solves many problems without far more subconscious processing alongside it. Also, if consciousness is generated by subconscious processes, then perhaps all problem solving is ultimately carried out by the subconscious, with consciousness acting as a low-bandwidth terminal/monitor to the subconscious.
 
JJM 777 said:
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.
Click to expand...
Fresh ideas are not always correct. But, the fact that they are "fresh" means you at least have new ways of attacking the problem, giving you a better chance of figuring out the "correct" one.
 
It happens to me all of the time.

Consciousness is rarely involved in our brain's activities.
 
I think most of us have experienced "putting something on the back burner" -- that is, moving it out of our conscious focus -- and upon thinking about the problem later, coming up with an answer we had no glimpse of the first time we looked at the issue. Whether this is actually "subconscious" or just unfocussed thinking is not a question I can answer.

A related issue, and one that I have a lot of experience with (both doing and observing in others) is deciding what of a myriad of possible areas of concern to look at first/ more closely when troubleshooting a complex problem. It's not a conscious process, you just look at the data and suddenly something seems worth checking into...and a lot of the time, it's the right place. I suspect a lot of the software people on this Forum know exactly what I'm referring to; it's the soul of troubleshooting. "We have this error message coming from somewhere in this collection of modules and datafiles used for this transaction; what's causing it?" The most common phrase used is, "You get a feel for it" and it's a very real thing.

The brain is complex and it works very quickly and in multiple arenas at once. That we can shower, lather, sing lyrics accurately, note how much time we're taking, balance, and avoid getting water or soap in the wrong orifices is just a single example of the non-conscious multi-tasking we do all the time in daily life. Our conscious focus is as much about the input we're suppressing as that we're accepting and using.

As my kid would say, "Cool beans!"
 
There's a Nova episode on dreaming where studies have shown that dreaming is sort of practice work for a number of issues we are facing, and they've shown with video games in studies how people who dream of the video game process actually show marked improvement upon waking when playing the same game.

I know I have a completely accurate alarm clock in my head I have no conscious method of using, it just works. I awake exactly at the time I need to, and this is not with something I've developed a pattern for. If I need to awaken at an usual time, I just need to think about it for a second, and sure enough I wake up at the approx time. When I have an alarm clock, I always wake up before the clock, it's annoying. I just need to make sure I'm not exhausted and am getting at least 4-5 hours of sleep.
 
Wowbagger said:
Problem solving often takes place after looking at the problem with a fresh perspective. That freshness could come from other people. Or, it could come from yourself, after you mull over the problem in different contexts and in different ways.
Click to expand...

Back when I was a fresh-faced young programmer an old hand gave me a very good tip. When you're wrestling with a coding bug and just can't bust it, get someone else involved and explain the problem to them. Most times you won't finish describing it before you say "OK, I see it now, you can go away thanks". Putting it into words for someone else to follow can kick your thinking out of the ruts you've dug going over and over it in your mind.
 
CapelDodger said:
Back when I was a fresh-faced young programmer an old hand gave me a very good tip. When you're wrestling with a coding bug and just can't bust it, get someone else involved and explain the problem to them. Most times you won't finish describing it before you say "OK, I see it now, you can go away thanks". Putting it into words for someone else to follow can kick your thinking out of the ruts you've dug going over and over it in your mind.
Click to expand...

I've used this technique many times - even trying to describe the programming problem to my wife, who didn't even understand what I was talking about. Solved the problem though. Now I have to talk to my cat who has even less interest.
 
Dikken said:
I've used this technique many times - even trying to describe the programming problem to my wife, who didn't even understand what I was talking about. Solved the problem though. Now I have to talk to my cat who has even less interest.
Click to expand...

The listener's interest is not the issue :). It's whether you can get them to stay within hearing-range long enough.
 
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