This is Part 3 of 4 of my summary of “How We Learn” by Benedict Carey. Other parts:
Distraction
Have you ever felt a solution to a problem spontaneously come to you after you’ve been distracted from focusing on the problem? Any great ideas in the shower? It is a common phenomenon, which is the primary subject of another book, “The Net and the Butterfly” by Olivia Fox Cabane and Judah Pollack. They argue that there are two networks in our brain: the top-of-the-mind “executive” network and a default “background” network. The book “How We Learn” breaks the interruptions that allow the background network to kick in into short-term (incubation) and long-term (percolation). Incubation is a distraction lasting for some number of minutes and involving playing a video game, just spacing out, reading a book, whereas percolation is a longer-term repeated interruption spanning days, weeks and months.
Short-term distraction: Incubation
Incubation refers to distraction periods of 5-20 minutes that work best for problems that have a single solution that is not readily apparent. The process involving incubation consists of three stages. The first is preparation that can last hours or days (or longer) when we struggle to solve a problem at hand. The second is incubation that starts when we temporarily abandon the problem. It is essential that at this point we’ve reached an impasse and got stuck rather than just experienced a bump. “Knock off and play a videogame too soon and you get nothing.” The third stage is illumination, or the “aha” moment. The final stage is verifying that the idea that came during illumination works.
“The Net and the Butterfly” tells us that the “aha” moments are fleeting and that we need to write down the ideas and insights before they fade away. Also, several practical techniques are useful to increase the frequency of the “aha” moments by understanding how and when they occur.
There are “two mental operations that aid incubation: picking up clues from the environment, and breaking fixed assumptions.” An example of a fixed assumption is the “puzzle” of “A doctor in Boston has a brother who is a doctor in Chicago, but the doctor in Chicago doesn’t have a brother at all.” The fixed assumption is that a doctor must be a male, and the answer is, of course, that the doctor in Boston is a woman. Numerous puzzles and experiments investigate the fixed assumptions. Incubation helps break the fixed assumptions and therefore solve problems from a different angle.
Long-term distraction: Percolation
Percolation is a long-term cumulative process that is distinct from the short-term incubation. “Percolation is for building something that was not there before, whether it’s a term paper, a robot, an orchestral piece, or some other labyrinthine project.” In my mind, percolation is a process of thinking about a project or a problem on and off, keeping it in mind the whole time. The “off” time is when percolation happens, often, subconsciously. Again, the trick is to catch the moment and write down the ideas coming from percolation before they disappear.
“Quitting before I’m ahead doesn’t put the project to sleep; it keeps it awake. That’s Phase 1, and it initiates Phase 2, the period of … casual data collecting. Phase 3 is listening to what I think about all those incoming bits and pieces. Percolation depends on all three elements, and in that order.”
Interruptions
Part of the discussion of percolation in the book deals with interruptions. Studies show that an activity that was interrupted, especially in the worst possible moment, remains top-of-mind for some time because we tend to think of unfinished tasks as goals. This finding leads to two distinct use cases, one of which is described in “How We Learn.” Deliberate self-interruption causes the brain to keep being attuned to information that may be relevant to the problem at hand, and make connections with already stored information, while in the “background” mode.
A different use case is described in the book “Deep Work” by Cal Newport and has to do with purging out unfinished tasks from your at the end of the workday so that you can relax at night and not think about work.
Next: Summary of “How We Learn” – Part 4: Interleaving and Perceptual Learning
All quotes above are from the book “How We Learn“.
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