Buff's Stuff: INSIGHT INTENTIONALITY INTUITION

Jung-Beeman

Moments of insight usually come in the morning, when the brain is most relaxed after sleep or during that first warm shower. The drowsy brain being unwound and disorganised is open to all sorts of unconventional ideas. The right hemisphere of the brain is also unusually active. According to Mark Jung-Beeman and John Kounios we do some of our best thinking when we’re half asleep.

Kounios

A sudden comprehension that solves a problem, reinterprets a situation, explains a joke, or resolves an ambiguous percept is called an insight (i.e., the “Aha! moment”). Psychologists have studied insight using behavioural methods for nearly a century. Recently, the tools of cognitive neuroscience have been applied to this phenomenon. A series of studies have used electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the neural correlates of the “Aha! moment” and its antecedents. Although the experience of insight is sudden and can seem disconnected from the immediately preceding thought, these studies show that insight is the culmination of a series of brain states and processes operating at different time scales. Elucidation of these precursors suggests interventional opportunities for the facilitation of insight.

Husserl

Why do I bring this up? In Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1913), Edmund Husserl introduced the terms "noema" and "noesis" to designate correlated elements of the structure of any intentional act - for example, an act of perceiving, or judging, or remembering.

Intentionality is a philosophical concept defined by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as "the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs." The term refers to the ability of the mind to form representations and has nothing to do with intentio. The term dates from medieval Scholastic philosophy, but was resurrected by Franz Brentano and adopted by Edmund Husserl. The earliest theory of intentionality is associated with St. Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God and his tenets distinguishing between objects that exist in the understanding and objects that exist in reality.

Every intentional act has noetic content (or a noesis - from the Greek nous, "mind"). This noetic content, to which the noema corresponds, is that which gives meaning or sense to an intentional act. Every act also has a noema, which is the object of the act - that which is meant by it. In other words, every intentional act has an "I-pole (or noesis)" and an "object-pole (or noema)." Husserl also refers to the noema as the Sinn or sense (meaning) of the act, and sometimes appears to use the terms interchangeably. Nevertheless, the Sinn does not represent what Husserl calls the "full noema": Sinn belongs to the noema, but the full noema is the object of the act as meant in the act, the perceived object as perceived, the judged object as judged, and so on.

In other words, the noema seems to be whatever is intended by acts of perception or judgement in general, whether it be "a material object, a picture, a word, a mathematical entity, another person" precisely as being perceived, judged or otherwise thought about.

Brentano

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction towards an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. This intentional in-existence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We could, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.

Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, edited by Linda L. McAlister (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 88–89

Pronin

Which brings us to thought. According to Emily Pronin “Thought speed can be altered via controlled exposure to stimuli such as temporally paced text. Experiments show that thinking quickly induces positive mood and that the effect cannot be attributed to alterations of thought content or fluency. The effect is obtained across varied manipulations, including ones that alter the pace of thought involved in reading, problem solving, and visual comprehension. The experience of thinking fast signals a basic imperative for action and triggers a set of responses that mobilize the individual to act. These responses include not only heightened positive affect but also changes in behavior (i.e., increased risk taking), self-perception (i.e., increased self-confidence), and problem solving (i.e., increased creative insight). Implications of these thought-speed effects are discussed with respect to both everyday experiences that induce fast thinking and clinical psychiatric conditions (e.g., depression and mania) that are characterized by thought-speed abnormalities.

Hampton

In Thinking Intuitively: The Rich (and at Times Illogical) World of Concepts James Hampton states: Intuitive knowledge of the world involves knowing what kinds of things have which properties. We express this knowledge in generalities, such as “Ducks lay eggs.” Intuitive knowledge contrasts with extensional knowledge about actual entities in the world, which we express in quantified statements, such as “All U.S. presidents are male.” Reasoning based on this intuitive knowledge, while highly fluent and plausible, may in fact lead us into logical fallacy. Several lines of research have pointed to conceptual memory as the source of such logical failure. We represent concepts with prototypical properties, rather than with logical definitions, and we judge likelihood and argument strength on the basis of similarity between these prototypes instead of using correct notions of probability or logical inference. Evidence that our minds represent the world in this intuitive way can be seen in a range of phenomena, including people’s interpretations of logical connectives applied to everyday concepts, the effects of creativity and emergent features in conceptual combination, and the logically inconsistent beliefs that people express in their everyday language.

So what has all this to do with Writing and Sign and the Performance and display of social identity? How we read is all to do with thought, intentionality, insight and intuition - from where else do we develop perception and judgement.

Speaking of which, this little bit of romance reflects quite a bit of intuition, insight, intentionality and sort of quick thinking:

From the New York Times 23^rd August 2008

Emily Beth Pronin and Dr. Joshua Denison Rabinowitz were married on Saturday evening by Rabbi Craig Axler at Riverview Park in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. The bride, 33, and the bridegroom, 36, are assistant professors at Princeton, she in the department of psychology and at the Woodrow Wilsonn School of Public and International Affairs, he in the department of chemistry and at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. They graduated from Stanford, from which she received a Ph.D. in psychology and he received both a medical degree and a Ph.D. in biophysics.

Dr. Pronin, who is keeping her name, graduated summa cum laude from Yale. Her father, Irwin Pronin of New York, is a senior regulatory lawyer in Jersey City with Broadridge Financial Solutions, a brokerage firm. Her mother, Vivian R. Pronin of Hastings-on-Hudson, is an independent geriatric care manager there.

Dr. Rabinowitz is a founder of Alexza Pharmaceuticals, a research company in Mountain View, Calif., specializing in inhalation products for faster delivery of medications. He graduated with highest distinction from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where his parents, Stuart Elaine Macdonald and George Rabinowitz, both professors of political science, live and work.

Dr. Pronin and Dr. Rabinowitz met 10 years ago when they arrived at the same time for an open house for a rental property in Menlo Park, Calif., in Silicon Valley.

“I had thought I had an appointment for a private showing and was surprised to find five other people there,” Dr. Rabinowitz said. “I was kind of sulking around about having to apartment-hunt, and suddenly I’m talking to this gorgeous smiling woman,” he said. “She has this vivacious beauty that I found simply irresistible.”

Dr. Pronin had come up and said “hi” and introduced herself. “I was kind of happy about that,” Dr. Rabinowitz said, “so I thought maybe she is interested in me.”

Neither liked the apartment, but when they left they stood on the street corner and had a playful 20-minute conversation after which, she told him, “If you happen to find an apartment that’s good for a woman but not a guy, here’s my phone number.”

“I was like, ‘Wow! — normally I’m not very good at this, but this is too straightforward to mess up,’ ” Dr. Rabinowitz said. “I just couldn’t believe someone so pretty was also smart, funny and open.” He called three days later.

Her first words were straightforward, but not in the way he was hoping. “Did you find an apartment for me?” she asked.

Then she realized she was being asked on a date. “I didn’t see it coming,” Dr. Pronin said. “Then I became excited and happy.”