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Chapter 5

Insight.

How Does Insight Work

Insight is "the act or result of apprehending the inner nature of things" according to Merriam-Webster.  It seems that we can know about things in general based on a wide range of knowing many details.

To prove this ask yourself this question.  Who is the mayor of Petaluma, California?  Most people know they don't know. (The answer is that Teresa Barrett has been the mayor since 2019.) How can this be?

If you think of the brain as a computer, all the facts we know would have to be stored in a huge memory device.  The memory of the brain is huge compared to terabyte memories that are popular today in home computers.

It would take perhaps years to read every bit of memory stored in the brain and then sort it to find any associations with Petaluma and mayors.

One of the ways to know what is going on is to assume when the brain works slowly, it is doing a lot of processing and when it works fast there is much less processing taking place. processing.

The only way this could be done nearly instantly is to have a summary of what we know already prepared.  This could be done by assuming that the brain has billions of hierarchies which manufacture composite of meaning of billions and billions of little facts we know.

Picture your house.  There a thousands and thousands of items in your house.  Most of the time you know where most of your stuff is located.  This is because a map of your house is pre-built within the brain.

It is most likely that the brain builds maps of everything it knows.  From these maps, the brain may build models. These models involve not only words and physical descriptions, but abstractions models of ideas and concepts.  The probably are models of everything we can think about including models of models.

 The ability to extract meaning from a huge reservoir of small amounts of information allow us to build models containing  wisdom and insight and of wisdom and insight themselves.  The mind can conceive of its own mind, but in a probably incomplete and simplified manner.

From these models, we can tell what we don't know rapidly, as we don't have to build models from scratch all the time.  It is only when we think of something new, we need to build a model.

So we can say that we preprocess information that allows us to form concepts.  These concepts are used to form tasks at an abstract level.

To help us make the models work, a master model in the superconscious helps give us insight we would otherwise not have.

 Insight is not merely as a means of acquiring knowledge, but rather as the act of becoming aware of solutions.