I tried a couple of times to tune my cognitive strategies. What I expected was that by finding the types of thinking and the pivotal points in chains/trains of thought that lead to the ‘ah-ha’ moment of insight. I could learn to cultivate the mental state where I was more prone or conducive to those a-ha moments, in the same way that actors may use Sense Memory in order to revisit certain emotions.
Was this expectation wrong?
It seemed like all I found was a kind of more effective way of noticing that I was “in a rut”. However that in itself didn’t propagate any more insights, which was disappointing. It has some value, but certainly not as much as I was expecting.
When I have been journalling my thoughts and find that I have an ‘a-ha’ moment after a meandering garden path. I try to think of it faster so I try to dive down into the details of my mind just prior to the a-ha moment. What was on the cusp of my consciousness, what mental images was I ‘seeing’, what aspects of particular ideas was I focusing on.
All the a-ha moments always were due to the Availability Heuristic. Something that had recently, say 7 days or less ago, entered my consciousness and I managed to call back to it. Indeed it seems like the easiest way to make myself think of things faster is to just cycle through random memories, random stimuli, completely unrelated, just churn through for some kind of strategic serendipity. Maybe. I’m almost certainly doing it wrong.
I realize that you’re supposed to use this exercise on logical puzzle tasks, but I just… can’t do a puzzle task and record my thoughts simultaneously. Nor are puzzle tasks the kind of things I see much ‘alpha’ to be gained by thinking faster.
I tried a couple of times to tune my cognitive strategies. What I expected was that by finding the types of thinking and the pivotal points in chains/trains of thought that lead to the ‘ah-ha’ moment of insight. I could learn to cultivate the mental state where I was more prone or conducive to those a-ha moments, in the same way that actors may use Sense Memory in order to revisit certain emotions.
Was this expectation wrong?
It seemed like all I found was a kind of more effective way of noticing that I was “in a rut”. However that in itself didn’t propagate any more insights, which was disappointing. It has some value, but certainly not as much as I was expecting.
When I have been journalling my thoughts and find that I have an ‘a-ha’ moment after a meandering garden path. I try to think of it faster so I try to dive down into the details of my mind just prior to the a-ha moment. What was on the cusp of my consciousness, what mental images was I ‘seeing’, what aspects of particular ideas was I focusing on.
All the a-ha moments always were due to the Availability Heuristic. Something that had recently, say 7 days or less ago, entered my consciousness and I managed to call back to it. Indeed it seems like the easiest way to make myself think of things faster is to just cycle through random memories, random stimuli, completely unrelated, just churn through for some kind of strategic serendipity. Maybe. I’m almost certainly doing it wrong.
I realize that you’re supposed to use this exercise on logical puzzle tasks, but I just… can’t do a puzzle task and record my thoughts simultaneously. Nor are puzzle tasks the kind of things I see much ‘alpha’ to be gained by thinking faster.