I sent this email to Matthew last night:
Tuesday night I read something about J D. Bernal in Hitchens’s “God is Not Great,” which I was rereading, and I remembered that everybody called Bernal by a nickname that testified to his wisdom. I turned out the light and unsuccessfully tried to remember it for a while, then fell asleep. “I’ll think of it tonight,” I told myself.
Sure enough, I woke up at about 3 a.m. and the first thing that popped into my mind was “SAGE”. That was, of course, his nickname. Clearly my cranial neurons had been turning it over while I slept. And of course this happens to all of us: we can’t think of something and much later it suddenly comes to us. Clearly the brain was working on it in the interim.
The brain is truly a wondrous organ!
J. D. Bernal was a polymath who pioneered the study of molecular shape using X-ray crystallography. I should add that to me this is evidence for determinism. Seeing that name activated a program in my brain to dig out his nickname (which had been stored there for several decades since I read his biography), and the program kept running while I was sleeping.
I’m sure readers have similar or even weirder stories. (Matthew says that this happens to him all the time when he can’t think of a word for a crossword puzzle, but then it comes to him after he takes a break for a while and goes away.
I, and a number of other engineers I know, rely on our brain’s capacity for ‘back ground’ subconscious processing to search for solutions to problems. Many of my best solutions to problems have come to me while I’m in the shower in the morning.
Me too (though not engineering solutions). I ascribe the effect to warm water running just a couple cm from my neocortex. But I’m sure there are other explanations.
+mucho
Memory’s a weird thing. A friend recently could not think of the name “Ukraine”, but 5 minutes later was mentioning philatelists.😵💫
Oh yes this happens.
How about the other day, I suddenly recalled a dream I had 10-15 years prior.
That happens rarely. Sorta like déjà vu, but different…
Yeah, I get this, too. It’s so weird and inexplicable that the memory will arrive from seemingly nowhere. There are never any prompts from the environment, people, conversation, etc., when it happens. It just instantly arrives and is perfectly clear and vivid. I just find myself wondering where the hell that came from. And why now? What caused it?
I was reminded of a story about Donald Newman. He was trying to solve a problem but was getting nowhere. One night, in a dream, he explained the problem to John Nash who dashed off the solution. Newman woke up triumphant. Not sure if he gave Nash the credit for the solution. It was Newman’s dream, not Nash’s.
That’s a cool story! I wonder if there should be a name for this kind of thinking, perhaps “metathinking.”
It’s what Joe Moore does all the time.
My own superpower is coming up with great responses to challenging assertions days, months, years, or even decades after the original situation has passed. The brain is indeed a wonderful thing!
That’s like that old story about if fish can think, with the punchline being, ‘yes, but not fast enough!’
You surely know that there’s a French name for this: “L’esprit de l’escalier”, or the “wit of the staircase”: the stuff you think of while climbing the stairs to bed—stuff that you should have said earlier. There’s even a Wikipedia entry on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier
I think of the brain as a large Amazon warehouse where if you send a worker to retrieve something, they may be gone quite a while, and when they return you might have forgotten what you sent them for, but there it is.
…sometimes the phone lines are busy…
Or the hard drive full😬
I was talking with a friend about the great Sabres French Connection line. I could remember Gilbert Perrault and Rene Robert, but could not remember the third member. I woke up in the middle of the night and shouted Richard Martin.
Even though I’ve had the same experience, (although not with the dream I don’t think), I find your telling profound. Someone who was arguing for divine free will would have to produce a version of the story where you truly had no memory of Mr. Bernal, had never heard of him or of X-ray crystallography, and had never heard his nickname….and still dreamt it correctly because it was a vision that was planted in your brain, still remains….(never mind.)
But even then I would doubt the free-will story. Memory traces come to us from the most tenuous of places which we may not remember and a free-willer might even lie, in defence of his theory, as to never having heard Bernal’s nickname. Your recounting is biased (in a good way) toward the truth. You start off by saying you knew his nickname and we have no reason to disbelieve you. So truth is on your side from the get-go. If you were arguing in favour of free will, you would say you didn’t know it and be asking us to believe your prior. The rest of the story would collapse if we didn’t, and scoffed, “Oh, come on. You must have heard it somewhere.”
Certainly people may lie about knowing something when they really don’t, like what an enemy said outside their hearing. But there the motivation to lie is apparent and (should) arouse skepticism. In your story your statement of your prior knowledge makes it harder for your thesis that follows to be untrue, hence what I mean about a truth bias.
I hope I’m not belabouring a point. I just found your anecdote touched me inside, like the Euler equation touches the minds of mathematicians.
“and the vision that was planted in [my] brain”
That was . . . shh, quiet. It will come to me!
I frequently am triggered (in a neutral way) to remember a phrase or who said it or even a gesture when it was said, but can’t remember the context. If I go do something else, it will often come to me.
I’ve had this experience too — unable to remember something when I’m really trying to, and then it suddenly comes to me when I “think” I’ve moved on, or maybe even, as PCC(E) described, am asleep.
What I find even more mysterious is when a really good idea comes to me, even when I didn’t “think” it was a problem I was trying to solve.
I put the word “think” in scare quotes because I guess I don’t know exactly what that entails. My brain seems to operate of its own accord.
I’ve solved many problems during sleep, but most have either been trivial or even made up—not real problems, just contorted ones formed during sleep itself. An example (real) problem I solved recently during sleep is how to paint a piece of molding on our shed without getting paint on the wall. It worked!
Tonight I’ll up the stakes by falling asleep while pondering dark matter. We’ll see what happens.
I enjoyed taking calculus(solving puzzles!), but it was very challenging for me. If I could not solve a problem at night, I almost always had the answer the next morning.
When I cannot remember a name or a word that I know is somewhere in my brain, I write down the three or four words that come to mind when I think of that word. They don’t have to be real words, just whatever sounds (in the form of words) come to mind. Then I look at those words and try to find similarities in the sounds, phonemes, etc. in them. Suddenly, it’s like magic, the forgotten word is remembered!
If I can’t remember a person’s name (an increasingly frequent problem), I start running through the letters of the alphabet in my mind and, more often than not, I come to P and think “Oh yes – it’s Peter”.
Yep, someone told me about that, and it works surprisingly frequently.
Interestingly, there is a similar anecdote in Roger Penrose’s book the Emperor’s New Mind. He talked about how the answer to a thorny physics problem came to him in a flash as he crossed the road and that this was a evidence that the human mind was somehow not subject to the normal restrictions of computability.
The refutation leaped to my mind also pretty immediately and it was essentially the same as your explanation for your sudden revelation, plus he still had to sit down and prove his solution.
Years ago when you cold do minor tuneups on automobile engines yourself, I was replacing the spark plugs on my 1961 Ford. It was a straightforward process until I got to the last plug at the rear of the engine, out of sight under the alternator. No matter how hard I turned the wrench, the plug would not budge. I decided that the plug had been mis-threaded and would require a trip to the mechanic.
In the middle of the night I suddenly came awake with the thought “You’re turning it the wrong way.” The next morning I went out to the garage and tried turning it the opposite direction to great success!
I had a similar experience when the AC motor broke on my 2007 Honda CRV. At the time, I didn’t have the money for a full repair, which would have required flushing the whole air conditioning system, an expensive process that I would have needed to hire a professional to do.
Problem was, the AC motor was driven by a serpentine belt that drove everything else, and I needed the car to get to work and so forth. The engine would run, but doing so it would turn the AC motor, screaming and spewing smoke.
Stumped, I stepped away for a while before it occurred to me to bypass the AC motor entirely. Just popped into my head, more or less spontaneously. Found the right sized belt and sweated my way to work for a spell.
Clearly some part of my brain was mulling the problem while my active attention was elsewhere, but, subjectively, it felt like a notion that just popped out of the aether.
My story, which is mine and is true:
I didn’t learn to drive a car until I was in my late 20s. I was taught by my girlfriend at the time. At the beginning of this learning process, she drove me to a large, empty parking lot in her Volkswagen Beetle with a manual transmission. Her intent was to have me practice getting the car into first gear and rolling from a dead stop.
I don’t remember how long I tried that day, but not once did I succeed in getting the car into first gear and moving – the car stalled every single time. I remember being supremely frustrated and discouraged as my girlfriend drove us home.
The very next morning, when I awoke I immediately realized I could “feel” with my legs and feet the timing for releasing the clutch and the timing of the pressure I had to put on the gas pedal. I told my girlfriend that I wanted to try again.
That day we returned to that empty parking lot and I succeeded in getting the car into first gear and moving almost every single time. I wasn’t perfect at the task yet, but I was much, much better. The frustration and discouragement were gone.
Rather than the brain working on the problem, it may be the opposite. When trying to remember, multiple competing mental representations are activated and compete with one another. Mutual inhibition keeps the correct answer suppressed. When we stop thinking about it, the “noise” weakens and the name now stands out. Retrieval becomes more difficult as we age, perhaps because the filter doesn’t work as well.
I used to work with a welder who had a toolbox full of a massive disorganized jumble of tools. One day another guy asked him how he could ever find anything in that mess. He replied, “I just get a big stick and stir it around until the thing I want comes up on top.” That’s how my brain works.
I often wake up in the middle of the night with a newly formulated complete sentence or paragraph for a book or paper I’d been struggling to write. Indeed, I keep a pen and piece of paper near my bed so that I can immediately write down the otherwise elusive passage, so I won’t forget it.
“The brain is truly a wondrous organ!”
Yes! It starts working the moment you wake up, and doesn’t stop until you get to school.
Amazing! I just told about my similar experiences to my dentist, when a word escapes us but minutes later, when we are thinking of something else, our brain comes up with it. It shows that the brain is still working on the problem without our knowing it! I have also used the alphabet process when I need to find the word right away, and it works most of the time…except when the brain comes up with it faster. A fascinating phenomenon that shows the continual operating of the brain seeking something even when we have moved on to something else. WOW
There is the seemingly related phenomenon of déjà vu, where you remember that you’ve done this (whatever you are doing) before, but apparently hadn’t. I’ve had many of these kinds of experiences, and some are so intense that my hairs stand up.
I spent 3.6 wonderful years in Sweden as a post-doc, and made and effort to learn Swedish from the start, just picking it up from wherever I could, like a 3y/o. By the time I left most people thought that I was reasonably OK. Then, about 6mos after returning to the US where I got almost no practice, I went back for a meeting and was surprised to feel that my Swedish had improved. Many of my friends said the same. I was convinced that my brain had been refining things during off-hours.
I’ve had the exact same experience with foreign languages, specifically. Things I struggled with my first time around with them, after a prolonged break (years) came to me naturally the second time. As though my brain had been steeping in it. I found it amazing.
I once had a friend who used to annoy me sometimes with his surly attitude. I couldn’t think of a spiteful nickname for him then woke up with a name, Mason, because he was built like a brick. I wrote it down in the dark. I thought I was quite hilarious but now it’s not as good as my other jokes and names. Perhaps I was just young and my wit was to come.