Idle Minds and What They May Say About Intelligence(scientificamerican.com)

23 pointsby pratvor 17 Jahren7 comments

Idle Minds and What They May Say About Intelligence

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=idle-minds-intelligence&print=true

3 comments

jerfvor 17 Jahren

How many times do we have to learn this? While "at rest" is a meaningful thing for a biological system to be in, it pretty much never equates to "no activity/changes", if ever. Everything in your body is always up to something; you can't press pause on chemistry. If nothing appears to be happening, that just means that the processes that do X and the processes that do opposite-of-X are currently in balance or homeostasis, not that they are not happening at all.

Another example: Many people have the mental model of fat cells as mostly sitting there doing nothing, grabbing energy when in excess and only letting out energy when needed. Radio-tagged water studies have shown that in fact they are always taking in energy and always releasing energy (I'm glossing over the exact forms of "energy" since they don't matter to my point here), and what changes is not whether they are sitting there idle, but the difference in intake vs. outflow rates. They are not passive bags, but things constantly in motion.

It still boggles my mind how many stories we get coming out like this, amazed that yet another process is never really "stopped". The amazing thing is when processes really do stop. (I can think of a few cases where this might happen, like when those anti-freeze blood frogs freeze, but I wouldn't care to bet that there isn't still some processes going on anyhow...)

pratvor 17 Jahren

Those are good points.. the important thing here though is, that "nothing stops" has been well established, however not only is there activity but a different kind of activity compared to the situation when mind is not at "REST"

richcollinsvor 17 Jahren

I see some parallels with insight as described in David Rock's talk at Google: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeJSXfXep4M

MrSafevor 17 Jahren

I wonder if these long distance connections in the brain can be formed through a specific studying technique? For example drawing analogies between seemingly unrelated subjects.

tungstenfurnacevor 17 Jahren

Yes, it's called day dreaming :-)

This corroborates the theory that long periods of doing nothing help to develop creativity. (Day dreaming makes you smarter; meditation makes you well.)

Alex3917vor 17 Jahren

It probably works exactly the way you'd think. When you read books, are they mostly lists of specific facts (e.g. programming books) or books that are insightful? When you're not really doing anything, is your brain just processing the environment or reliving past experiences, or are you looking for patterns and connections?

pratvor 17 Jahren

Or maybe that's how the "system idle process" naturally looks like - and as soon as mind is focused, all connections get clustered together.