This guy, on a random day had been sitting, innocently enough, under the shade of a tree, when suddenly, after being hit in the head with a falling apple, he came up with the theory of gravity- this is pretty neat story to explain how Sir Isaac Newton came up with the Law of Gravity, but it’s almost entirely fictional. In the real world, big ideas like Newton’s – although they feel as if they’ve literally hit us over the head – are actually the culmination of hours, days, and even years of thought.
Contrary to popular belief, the abrupt “aha” moment of clarity that most of us experience- occurs often. Think about the last time you suddenly got the punchline of a joke or abruptly remembered that word that was on the tip of your tongue.
In a new study, researchers from New York, Cambridge and Zurich attempted to work out how and when this kind of thought process happens. They have now taken a new approach toward exploring what goes on in the human mind when it experiences in a moment of epiphany- a study through which they have been able to find a way to observe the moment
when information bubbles to the level of consciousness.One of the researchers, Dr Michael Shadlen, of Columbia University, said: “The vast majority of thoughts circling in our brains happen below the radar of conscious awareness, meaning that even though our brain is processing them, we are not aware.”
“How some of that information bubbles to the level of consciousness, however, remains an unsolved mystery.”
“But now, we’ve found a way to observe that moment in real time, and then apply those findings to our understanding of consciousness itself.”
The study, appearing in the journal Current Biology details how the researchers in the course of the study asked the participants to watch a group of dots sway on a screen as if in a breeze.
They were then supposed to decide whether the dots were moving generally to the right or to the left, and additionally were required to specify the exact moment in time at which they arrived at their decision.
Shadlen and his colleagues deployed a neuroscientific and mathematical model to predict how accurate decisions should be if made within a certain timeframe, based on previous studies about decision-making at the level of individual brain cells.
The degree of accuracy reported by the real participants lined up well with what their model predicted, lending credence to the idea that, yes, they in fact had their “eureka moment” at the time they later thought they did.
While the researchers stressed that this was a preliminary study, they expressed hope that by identifying this “piercing of consciousness” moment they may have opened the door to a deep understanding of the human brain’s most complex thoughts and feelings.
“Some people think that the nitty gritty of neuroscience is far from the highfalutin stuff that a philosopher would consider,” said Dr Shadlen.
“But, rest assured, explaining these concepts — whether it’s ethics, consciousness anything else — in terms of neuroscience isn’t explaining them away. Instead, I would argue that it is helping to bring the biological study of the brain closer to the philosophical study of the mind.”
“Embedded in this larger view is the implication that this big mystery that we call consciousness, philosopher’s consciousness, is within the crosshairs of neuroscience, without magic,” Shadlen concluded. “That’s the big picture.”
