I didn’t see the post itself, but it sounds like Unconscious Thought Theory. The experimental evidence is pretty weak, and imo the theory as it stands is just too poorly specified to really test experimentally.
There is some evidence that offline processing matters for eg motor learning or statistical learning. I haven’t looked in enough detail to know whether to trust it or not.
It could just be the effects of taking a break; i.e., the benefits of not consciously thinking about the problem, instead of a benefit stemming from unconscious thought.
Could you expand on what you mean with benefits coming from not consciously thinking about a problem and how you think those benefits would accure in a way that presupposes that the are not created by another process being able to work in the absence of the conscious thinking?
Generally: Resting/Taking a break. (There might be more information on this in neuroscience, I’m not deeply familiar with that.)
Specifically: Starting over.
Normally if you stick with might be the benefits of:
1. if you’re productive you can continue to be
2. Not having to spend time re-loading context, figuring out what you were thinking/doing before
Sometimes 2 is an advantage. (Particularly if you stop doing something that isn’t productive.) If your approach isn’t working, ‘starting over’ can be very beneficial without thinking about the problem in the mean time. For an extreme example, if you stop doing something for not just days but weeks or months, and don’t think about it, and then you do it again, you have to figure things out again (knowledge, approach, etc.) to a fair extent (and restart context).
This can help in moving from ‘this isn’t working’ equilibria to ‘things working great’.
(Having a different perspective can also be related to ‘unconscious’ thought or making (random) connections. Over a larger time frame there’s more things that connections can be made between. Above I emphasized losing context and starting afresh, rather than connecting/borrowing contexts.)
I didn’t see the post itself, but it sounds like Unconscious Thought Theory. The experimental evidence is pretty weak, and imo the theory as it stands is just too poorly specified to really test experimentally.
There is some evidence that offline processing matters for eg motor learning or statistical learning. I haven’t looked in enough detail to know whether to trust it or not.
Thanks, this seems to be the term I’m looking for.
As far as I can see from Wikipedia the core criticism questions the claim that Unconscious Thought outperforms Conscious Thought.
Even if that isn’t true, Unconscious Thought could still play a major role in our thinking.
It could just be the effects of taking a break; i.e., the benefits of not consciously thinking about the problem, instead of a benefit stemming from unconscious thought.
Could you expand on what you mean with benefits coming from not consciously thinking about a problem and how you think those benefits would accure in a way that presupposes that the are not created by another process being able to work in the absence of the conscious thinking?
Benefits:
Generally: Resting/Taking a break. (There might be more information on this in neuroscience, I’m not deeply familiar with that.)
Specifically: Starting over.
Normally if you stick with might be the benefits of:
1. if you’re productive you can continue to be
2. Not having to spend time re-loading context, figuring out what you were thinking/doing before
Sometimes 2 is an advantage. (Particularly if you stop doing something that isn’t productive.) If your approach isn’t working, ‘starting over’ can be very beneficial without thinking about the problem in the mean time. For an extreme example, if you stop doing something for not just days but weeks or months, and don’t think about it, and then you do it again, you have to figure things out again (knowledge, approach, etc.) to a fair extent (and restart context).
This can help in moving from ‘this isn’t working’ equilibria to ‘things working great’.
(Having a different perspective can also be related to ‘unconscious’ thought or making (random) connections. Over a larger time frame there’s more things that connections can be made between. Above I emphasized losing context and starting afresh, rather than connecting/borrowing contexts.)