Having insights can be a product of whats in your working memory at any one time.
> there's a bunch of studies trying to catalog case studies of how it is that people have flashes of insight...
You're reading through the newspaper and you see that people have finally figured out how to do X and you're like, “Wait
a minute, that means if I combine it with this other thing, like we'd be able to do Y!” or something like that. Now
that's only possible if the other thing is in your memory. If you have to think to look up the other thing, the
newspaper wouldn't seem so salient to you.
I’ve noticed that lens which I see my research work is heavily determined by what I read at that time. It could be a interesting exercise to try and not think about working memory!
Correlation due to availability not some deep truth
AM talks about how whats in our working memory can affect how we think. For instance, the books I’m currently reading heavily influence my daily thoughts and project work. It might be necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes you notice some correlation due to availability rather than some deep truth.
It’s similar to that human need to create a story, or see narratives. For instance, I was reading ‘Zen and the Art..’ I viewed an uncertainty analysis as probing the ‘quality’ of model. This isn’t necessarily wrong but its not some objective definition for an uncertainty analysis, nor is it necessarily something unique (as in a new thought).