“In the light of knowledge attained, the happy achievement seems almost a matter of course, and any intelligent student can grasp it without too much trouble. But the years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternations of confidence and exhaustion, and the final emergence into the light -- only those who have themselves experienced it can understand that.”
Helmholtz would have understood it.
How Does Insight Work?
Insight is the least controllable aspect of scientific research. It can be encouraged, however, by immersion in an examination of all relevant evidence, followed by relaxation and temporary abandonment of the problem. Furthermore, we know that conditions such as interruptions can prevent insight. But what is the mechanism of insight? What marriage between data and pattern recognition is performed in the brain, resulting in the birth of insight? I don’t know, but I think we have seen some clues.
J.E. Teeple, a respondent to Platt and Baker’s [1931] questionnaire, may have hit upon the most decisive element, concentration:
“It is this deep concentration that is the most valuable asset in the solution of any problem. We speak of thinking and try to divide it into conscious, subconscious, and completely unconscious, which I think is an error. In deep concentration on any subject you are not only unconscious that you are thinking but you are unconscious of everything else around you.”
Imagine substituting the word ‘concentration’ for ‘insight’ in the previous sections on conditions favoring insight and obstacles to insight; usually the discussions still would be valid. It appears that concentration is a necessary but not sufficient condition for insight.
Another clue to the mechanism of insight may come from the relationships of data and hypothesis generation to insight. We usually feel that there are too few data to force a conclusion, or more likely not enough data of the needed type. In contrast, the geometric expansion of science in this century often creates the converse problem: there are too many data of too many relevant but somewhat different types to grasp and consider simultaneously. One is left with the vague hunch that the answer is hidden somewhere in the masses of data; perhaps, some filter or new perspective is needed to extract the key observations and their relationships.
Do we achieve insight through subconscious processing of all possible permutations of the evidence, or of only a subset? Consider the following two contrasting viewpoints on hypothesis generation:
“Mathematical creation does not consist in making new combinations with mathematical entities already known. Anyone could do that, but the combinations so made would be infinite in number and most of them absolutely without interest. . . The true work of the inventor consists in choosing among these combinations so as to eliminate the useless ones, or rather to avoid the trouble of making them.” [Poincaré, 1905]
“The effort to solve a problem mentally is a constant series of trials and errors. The mind in searching for a solution considers in rapid succession a long series of conceivable answers, each of which is almost instantly rejected on account of some
