Epiphanies and Understanding, Pain, Eureka-Moments.
TL;DR - mental-pain rushing in conveys urgent information, this experience is similar to when understanding rushes in when it is pleasurable - such as the sudden feeling of understanding of a philosophical idea or a joke. Can we reverse engineer these mechanisms to have Eureka-Moments more frequently?
Could I Eureka-that faster?
Recently I've been thinking about a throw away statement by Jerry Seinfeld that pain is the "sudden rushing in of information". I have my theories about where this sentiment originated from because Ray Dalio says "pain is the signal". Pain is of course a source of information: when you stub your toe in the middle of the night, that is the immediate intrusion of information about your and objects positions in space. When you cut yourself or feel a muscle pain - that too is information: urgent information that requires immediate action. But in the sense that Seinfeld and Dalio are using "pain" is figurative to describe what we might call psychic or mental pain: embarrassment. depression. regret. anguish. anger. etc. But also ugh fields. Chronic pain is information, but it is not sudden or immediate information. The feelings associated with depression too is non-urgent or non-immediate but still information.
Another sudden and painful psychic experience is the L'esprit de l'escalier or (lit. the spirit of the staircase). Which describes how only after the fact, usually after an insult, we have that forehead slapping moment of insight of what we should have said but didn't think of in the moment. The most famous pop-culture example, to relate it back to Mr. Seinfeld is the "Comeback" or "Jerkstore" episode of his sitcom where he goes to the effort of trying to engineer the same situation again so he can lob his response.
This is probably the same mechanism as the A-Ha, or the Eurkea or Lightbublb moment. Such as when Kekulé awoke from his dream and could envision the structure of the Benzene molecule, or Archimedes having witnessed the effect of his body on displacing water found the solution to the measuring of the crown.
There are methods to cultivate sudden insight....
Daniel Dennett described a rhetorical device which is designed for creating these moments - the Intuition Pump. It too is not the sudden rushing in of information as it relies on leveraging things the reader already understands as a way of making them have the feeling that they should have always understood a philosophical idea. Examples Dennett gives range from the pejorative, he's not a fan of Searle's Chinese Room but considers it a pump for intuition nevertheless. But he also believes that Plato's Cave is a good example of an intuition pump.
I often wonder if Paraprosdokian sentences are sort of like micro-Intuition-Pumps in they are both stylistic devices that cause a sudden rushing in of understanding.
A paraprosdokian is a sentence where the meaning appears to change mid-way through, the most famous example is probably Groucho Marx's line:
Last night I shot an elephant in my pyjamas, how he got into my pyjamas I'll never know
The first time you hear it, you may have a little "a-ha" moment as there is a sudden shifting of your mental image of what the Elephant was doing last night, and who was wearing Groucho's Pyjamas. This is the inversion of L'espirit de l'escalier in that it is not your wit, but the comedians, it should be edifying in that it makes you laugh rather than painful.
What makes these significant is that Epiphanies, Eureka moments, A-ha, and Intuition Pumps are perceived as sudden rushes. Most learning is iterative, progressive, marked by trial and error. What is different about Epiphanies and L'espirit de l'escalier that makes them, at the very least appear to be instantaneous? And is that appearance of instantaneous a good representation of what is happening on a cognitive level.
One explanation is that it is in fact an iterative and slow process, but it is happening on a subconscious level and the A-ha, the Eureka only happens when it finally passes the threshold into our awareness. This may have something to do with the Elaboration-Likelihood Model of attitude change model whereby information is processes by the “peripheral route” that culminates in the final conclusive attitude change we experience as the lightbulb, eureka moment. There is much more to the model than that, but it is beyond the remit of this article for me to explain it here.
I personally suspect that the answer lies in Marvin Minsky’s Frame Theory and can be described with Tversky and Kahneman’s Availability Heuristic. I must admit this is not a fully worked out explanation on my part – but which particular ‘frame’ is activated determines whether we feel we understand it or not. And which frame becomes activated is often determined by what stimuli or thoughts we have had immediately prior. Most people when they hear me discuss the films of Fassbinder think Michael, not his Uncle Reiner Werner – even if they are aware of both. Elsewhere I’ve commented on how even LLMs assume that if I ask a question about the Grand Prix driver “Rosberg” they mean Nico, not his father Keke.
I would like to expand practically on this theory so that I could think of things faster. But I think firstly it is necessary to determine if the appearance and feeling of the rushing in of insight is actually indicative of how sudden it is; or if the theories of subconscious and peripheral processing beyond the threshold of awareness are true. (that is – am I really having a sudden rush of understanding, or has this been a slow build-up of understanding that I’m only aware of the ice-berg tip of?)
If it does turn out that the understanding is instantaneous, then the question becomes what is the actual mechanism that allows us to have sudden understanding in some situations but does not furnish us with it in others, even as the Intuition Pump Rhetorical Device shows: we have the exact same information. I suspect the clue may lie in the paraprosdokian if that is the case. How we may employ that clue – I do not yet know.