In his paper, The
Psychology of Scientific Explanation, as well as in his presentation to our
seminar, J.D. Trout describes the role of understanding in scientific
explanation, the psychological cues and feelings that accompany understanding,
and how such cues can make it hard to distinguish between genuine and incorrect
understanding. Trout posits that many explanations, both good and bad, are
upheld and accepted because of the “sense of understanding” that they induce. “Sense
of understanding” is defined as the good feeling that “washes over us” when we
feel that we understand something correctly; Trout offers examples such as a
release of tension or an “Aha!” moment. At times, this sense is indeed
indicative of a good explanation and the understanding of true information.
However, it is often used to uphold bad explanations and causes us to accept
false information. Trout attributes the feeling of this “sense of understanding”
to a number of things. Among them are fluency, overconfidence and the hindsight
bias.
Fluency tells us how easy or difficult it is to think about a
certain topic, and is used to help us relegate resources for cognitive tasks. When
an explanation is fluent it means that we don’t have to think very hard about
it, making it feel easy. And when something feels easy, it is likely to feel
right and true. Overconfidence causes a similar feeling of rightness even, or
rather especially, when we are actually wrong. In general, human beings have
an overwhelming tendency to be overconfident about knowing things, causing us
to feel just as good about correct and incorrect beliefs. The hindsight bias
serves to reinforce “sense of understanding” as an indicator that an
explanation is good after the fact. Suppose that we are trying to explain
something that is already known to be true. We are likely to take the existing
evidence and construct an explanation that may not be good, but feels true
because we “knew it all along.” Working together these three factors create a “sense
of understanding,” or feeling of correctness, that accompanies good explanations
and correct knowledge almost as often as it accompanies bad explanations and
incorrect knowledge. Therefore, says Trout, this feeling is not a good
indicator of quality in an explanation and should not be relied upon as much
as, say, analytic thought. As budding neuroscientists, we may now be asking
ourselves, which functions of the brain underlie these psychological cues that
make us so susceptible to accepting bad explanations?
John Kounios and Mark Beeman of Drexel University and
Northwestern study the “Aha!” moment and the neurological processes that take place
during and preceding the moment of insight. Kounios and Beeman use EEG, MRI and
remote associate tasks to examine brain activity surrounding moment of insight.
In remote associate tasks, also mentioned by Trout to exemplify moments of insight,
participants are given three words and are asked to identify a fourth word that
can form a compound word with all three other words. These tasks are ideal
because they can be solved quickly and are commonly solved either through
analytical reasoning or in a moment of insight. After solving each task
participants were asked which method they felt they used to solve it. This
allowed researchers to subtract recorded activity linked to analytical solutions
from activity linked to insightful solutions. The only recorded “insight effect”
was a burst of activity in the right anterior superior-temporal gyrus. Researchers
then looked at brain activity right before insightful solutions. Before an
insightfully solved task more activity was found in the temporal lobes of both
hemispheres, which holds with the finding of the previous “insight effect, as
well as in the mid-frontal cortex. Analytically solved tasks on the other hand,
were preceded by more activity in the visual cortex. According to Kounios and
Beeman, this suggests that while solving a problem analytically we tend to
direct attention outward whereas while solving a problem insightfully we tend to
direct attention inward. Overall, we are offered a rather complete neural
picture of what happens when tasks are solved insightfully versus analytically.
The question remains, does this brain activity have any role
in the nice-feeling “sense of understanding” as described by Trout? If so, how?
Perhaps it is more comfortable, more fluent, for us to direct attentions inward
than outward. It certainly seems that it may be easier to focus on the self
than on outward stimuli. While I am not qualified to provide answers to these
questions, they are certainly fascinating and deserving of further thought and
perhaps research. Taken in tandem, these psychological and neurological
profiles of insight and understanding offer a fascinating portrait of how the
human brain/mind problem solves and explains the world around us.
Kounios, J., & Beeman, M. (2009). The aha! moment : The cognitive neuroscience of insight. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(4), 210-216. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01638.x
Trout, J. D. (2007). The psychology of scientific explanation.Philosophy Compass, 564-591. doi: 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00081.x
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