How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect - NYTimes.com - The Diigo Meta page

• 06 Nov 09
  

  Jennifer Groff

  creativity innovation cognition MBE

  • life serves up the occasional pink unicorn
  • An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation
  • 22 more annotations...
  • • philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,

    • At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.

      Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss

    • “We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,”
    • We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.
    • Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened
    • argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.
    • When those patterns break down
    • the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense.
    • It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward
    • and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.
    • more research to be done on the theory
    • it may be that nervousness, not a search for meaning, leads to heightened vigilance
    • The test is a standard measure of what researchers call implicit learning: knowledge gained without awareness.
    • The students had no idea what patterns their brain was sensing or how well they were performing.
    • But perform they did
    • The fact that the group who read the absurd story identified more letter strings suggests that they were more motivated to look for patterns than the others
    • “And the fact that they were more accurate means, we think, that they’re forming new patterns they wouldn’t be able to form otherwise.”
    • Brain-imaging studies of people evaluating anomalies, or working out unsettling dilemmas, show that activity in an area called the anterior cingulate cortex spikes significantly.
    • “The idea that we may be able to increase that motivation,
    • For another, studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories
    • The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.
    • disorientation begets creative thinking.
• 23 Oct 09
  

  Tom Krieglstein

  A wonderful look at new research on how disorientation can lead to better creative thinking

  creativethinking dft research brain nytimes blender flashmob psychology

  • An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation.
  • At best, the feeling is disorienting.
  • 12 more annotations...
  • • “We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,”
    • “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”
    • Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. After thinking about their own inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less tolerant of outsiders, studies find. When insulted, they profess more loyalty to friends — and when told they’ve done poorly on a trivia test, they even identify more strongly with their school’s winning teams.
    • The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.
    • It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.
    • implicit learning: knowledge gained without awareness.
    • They chose about 30 percent more of the letter strings, and were almost twice as accurate in their choices, than a comparison group of 20 students who had read a different short story, a coherent one.
    • “The fact that the group who read the absurd story identified more letter strings suggests that they were more motivated to look for patterns than the others,” Dr. Heine said. “And the fact that they were more accurate means, we think, that they’re forming new patterns they wouldn’t be able to form otherwise.”
    • Brain-imaging studies of people evaluating anomalies, or working out unsettling dilemmas, show that activity in an area called the anterior cingulate cortex spikes significantly
    • no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like memorizing French
    • For another, studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories, for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.
    • disorientation begets creative thinking.
• 20 Oct 09
  

  c newsom

  Nonsense and the absurd presented as a way of strengthening thinking styles. Freud's The Uncanny is cited.

  nonsense absurd thinking brain

• 

  Amy VanDonsel

  diigo

• 15 Oct 09
  

  Mike H

  Absurdity and disorientation may spur creativity and learning.

  kafka absurdity disorientation learningtheory johncage

• 14 Oct 09
  

  Jared Stein

  absurdity literature psychology brain

• 10 Oct 09
  

  Cherice Montgomery

  Suggests that our quest for patterns may be a response to a desire to rid ourselves of feelings of disorientation caused by things we don't understand. "Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened."

  cognition creativity patterns pyschology

• 

  Lee Barry

  core perception FAE

  • life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.
  • this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.
  • 11 more annotations...
  • • people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened.
    • The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.
    • When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense
    • The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.
    • , the students studied a series of 45 strings of 6 to 9 letters, like “X, M, X, R, T, V.” They later took a test on the letter strings
    • The test is a standard measure of what researchers call implicit learning: knowledge gained without awareness. The students had no idea what patterns their brain was sensing or how well they were performing.
    • it would be premature to incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John Cage into school curriculums.
    • no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like memorizing French.
    • studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories
    • The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.
    • the new research supports what many experimental artists, habitual travelers and other novel seekers have always insisted: at least some of the time, disorientation begets creative thinking.
• 07 Oct 09
  

  Ken Pitts

  psychology weird news nytimes

• 06 Oct 09
  

  Marco Graziosi

  Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. New York Times, 6 October 2009

  BoB nonsense psychology

  • The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,”
  • Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”
• 

  Rudy Garns

  Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.

  mind intellect cogsci

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