I cannot WAIT to read your book. My adult life, especially, has been determined (upended?) by two epiphanies I've had in the last 15 years. And there's really no better way to describe them -- new information (about myself, the direction I should go) was revealed to me all at once, seemingly out of the blue.
Ooooh thank you for saying that! They say you should have a huge platform to pitch a nonfiction book proposal, which I don't have - but I can point to feedback like yours in support! I'm so glad to hear about your two epiphanies. Without knowing more I'll assume they were net positives, since better understanding usually leads to good things. Did the experiences you had after going those new directions provide validation for the original insights?
Most certainly. The first was that I needed to have a child (despite a lifetime of saying 'no, never' and meaning it) and then finding out my health/disability would only allow for 1 pregnancy ever. I ended up with exquisite identical twins.
The second insight, several years later, was that I was actually not just failing at being a woman (how I'd felt since age 9 or so), but that I was trans, and might be happier living in a more masculine body (despite never even having had a brother or boyfriend or any up-close real life knowledge thereof). Despite plenty of clues visible in hindsight, I'd never once considered the possibility until it CLANGED fully-formed into my brain, driving down the interstate after a family trip. (I cried through the next three states, and for most of the next few weeks. The initial arrival of the info is tidy, but the reckoning...not so much.) Still, every move in that direction that I've made since -- and there have been many over the last 7 years -- has validated that original epiphany. My only regret is that I didn't know 20 or 30 years sooner.
Fascinating! It describes how I most enjoy working on things and having insights and ideas: not by thinking through it linearly but by being curious and thinking about it from different angles and allowing a picture to form.
I always thought that was a universal experience…!
Yes, I agree! Definitely seems to be a universal experience, I don't want to claim otherwise. I'm only wondering whether autistic people experience insight with a greater frequency, given the neurological connection to pattern recognition. Sort of like how everyone can get sensory overloaded, but the autistic threshold is different.
I'm getting ready to publish my 4th story Divine intervention and how, in the midst of not having a career and everything falling apart, the idea of a catering company came to me. Even without a culinary degree or business experience, I went for it and built a successful career that was (unconsciously) tailored around my AuDHD.
I would love to collaborate with you on one of our podcasts about this. We're going to Minneapolis soon to record with Echo Bodine on how Spirit works through us as creatives.
I love that you connected your insight about your career trajectory to this post! The more I read about cognition and information processing and autism (although it's not exclusive to us), the more I firmly believe that we know things deeply that we're not aware that we know. The "trust your gut" adage is not fru-fru, it's rooted in something real.
I'd love to hear more about the podcast! Can you link me to some info or send it to me via DM?
Fascinating article. This brings up many thoughts for me, here are a few:
Carl Jung said "People don't have ideas; ideas have people." Seems very relevant to your study of how people seem taken by ideas and how insights arrive fully formed to them – the mystical language might be a product of Jung's time and the state of cognitive research at the time, but the essence of it might be what you're saying. That ideas and patterns are silently absorbed from the culture, present as diffuse patterns, until ambiguous forms into collapse into concrete new representations i.e insights.
Are you aware of Julian Jaynes's "The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind"? He proposed a crazy idea which I might be butchering here: The ancient Greeks did not believe in Gods as supernatural entities that lived up on Olympus. Rather, people heard "voices" which they interpreted as the voices of the Gods. What people perceive as their "internal voice" today is just one thread of a fully integrated mind, but to the Greeks, their thoughts and feelings were commands from external Gods with distinct personalities and they "listened" to these voices as they would to a cosmic entity. This would explain the concept of talking and listening to muses. Of course, this cannot be proven, because it was a cognitive phenomenon and we don't have mental photographs of the inner workings of people's minds – but there are signs that can be perceived in the literature of those times.
Mathematicians stumbling upon insight has a rich history. Mathematical rigor is a very precise field, but insight, like you note with Ramanujan is a poetic and almost mystical area. A number of mathematical conjectures and theorems arrived fully formed, with their proofs being delayed by centuries. Some remain unsolved. Where did these leaps of logic come from? Anybody's guess. (Would be happy to discuss this more if it helps your book)
What you said about a diffuse, relaxed state of mind being necessary for the creation of insight is something that a number of people have echoed. The writer Morgan Housel said in a recent podcast that most of his original insight comes from just lying around on the couch and walking. Paul Graham had this piece on shower thoughts: https://paulgraham.com/top.html
Curious to see where your book goes. The psychology of insight is indeed fascinating!
I cannot WAIT to read your book. My adult life, especially, has been determined (upended?) by two epiphanies I've had in the last 15 years. And there's really no better way to describe them -- new information (about myself, the direction I should go) was revealed to me all at once, seemingly out of the blue.
Ooooh thank you for saying that! They say you should have a huge platform to pitch a nonfiction book proposal, which I don't have - but I can point to feedback like yours in support! I'm so glad to hear about your two epiphanies. Without knowing more I'll assume they were net positives, since better understanding usually leads to good things. Did the experiences you had after going those new directions provide validation for the original insights?
Most certainly. The first was that I needed to have a child (despite a lifetime of saying 'no, never' and meaning it) and then finding out my health/disability would only allow for 1 pregnancy ever. I ended up with exquisite identical twins.
The second insight, several years later, was that I was actually not just failing at being a woman (how I'd felt since age 9 or so), but that I was trans, and might be happier living in a more masculine body (despite never even having had a brother or boyfriend or any up-close real life knowledge thereof). Despite plenty of clues visible in hindsight, I'd never once considered the possibility until it CLANGED fully-formed into my brain, driving down the interstate after a family trip. (I cried through the next three states, and for most of the next few weeks. The initial arrival of the info is tidy, but the reckoning...not so much.) Still, every move in that direction that I've made since -- and there have been many over the last 7 years -- has validated that original epiphany. My only regret is that I didn't know 20 or 30 years sooner.
Fascinating! It describes how I most enjoy working on things and having insights and ideas: not by thinking through it linearly but by being curious and thinking about it from different angles and allowing a picture to form.
I always thought that was a universal experience…!
Yes, I agree! Definitely seems to be a universal experience, I don't want to claim otherwise. I'm only wondering whether autistic people experience insight with a greater frequency, given the neurological connection to pattern recognition. Sort of like how everyone can get sensory overloaded, but the autistic threshold is different.
Thank you for the read!
I'm getting ready to publish my 4th story Divine intervention and how, in the midst of not having a career and everything falling apart, the idea of a catering company came to me. Even without a culinary degree or business experience, I went for it and built a successful career that was (unconsciously) tailored around my AuDHD.
I would love to collaborate with you on one of our podcasts about this. We're going to Minneapolis soon to record with Echo Bodine on how Spirit works through us as creatives.
I love that you connected your insight about your career trajectory to this post! The more I read about cognition and information processing and autism (although it's not exclusive to us), the more I firmly believe that we know things deeply that we're not aware that we know. The "trust your gut" adage is not fru-fru, it's rooted in something real.
I'd love to hear more about the podcast! Can you link me to some info or send it to me via DM?
Here is the podcast - sending you a DM with more information: https://anonymousfork.substack.com/p/the-podcast-1
Fascinating article. This brings up many thoughts for me, here are a few:
Carl Jung said "People don't have ideas; ideas have people." Seems very relevant to your study of how people seem taken by ideas and how insights arrive fully formed to them – the mystical language might be a product of Jung's time and the state of cognitive research at the time, but the essence of it might be what you're saying. That ideas and patterns are silently absorbed from the culture, present as diffuse patterns, until ambiguous forms into collapse into concrete new representations i.e insights.
Are you aware of Julian Jaynes's "The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind"? He proposed a crazy idea which I might be butchering here: The ancient Greeks did not believe in Gods as supernatural entities that lived up on Olympus. Rather, people heard "voices" which they interpreted as the voices of the Gods. What people perceive as their "internal voice" today is just one thread of a fully integrated mind, but to the Greeks, their thoughts and feelings were commands from external Gods with distinct personalities and they "listened" to these voices as they would to a cosmic entity. This would explain the concept of talking and listening to muses. Of course, this cannot be proven, because it was a cognitive phenomenon and we don't have mental photographs of the inner workings of people's minds – but there are signs that can be perceived in the literature of those times.
Mathematicians stumbling upon insight has a rich history. Mathematical rigor is a very precise field, but insight, like you note with Ramanujan is a poetic and almost mystical area. A number of mathematical conjectures and theorems arrived fully formed, with their proofs being delayed by centuries. Some remain unsolved. Where did these leaps of logic come from? Anybody's guess. (Would be happy to discuss this more if it helps your book)
What you said about a diffuse, relaxed state of mind being necessary for the creation of insight is something that a number of people have echoed. The writer Morgan Housel said in a recent podcast that most of his original insight comes from just lying around on the couch and walking. Paul Graham had this piece on shower thoughts: https://paulgraham.com/top.html
Curious to see where your book goes. The psychology of insight is indeed fascinating!