The Renaissance Man

@CARDOZZO Yes, more as a hobby

@001 watch out I'm coming

This is my attempt at explaining what insight is, after watching and thoroughly analyzing Leo's video from 4 months ago "What is insight?". As Leo said, insight is sudden understanding. Not to the logical level, but true understanding. I think this is called internalization. A smoker knows smoking is bad for his health, but he keeps smoking. That's logical understanding. Then a friend of his gets lung cancer, and he now quits immediately. He has internalized the knowledge. It's unconscious understanding. That's why we don't have control over the generation of insight, and that's why it's so deep right away. It goes straight to the unconscious level. Internalization. What is insight? Insight is a form of understanding. A deep one maybe, but still a form of understanding. I think understanding is ultimately the brain's ability to make sense of multiple pieces of information. The pieces are connected, and some sort of meaning comes out of it. Insight is one of those connections. But it feels so real, so different. My hypothesis I think these connections happen all the time. ALL THE TIME. From input coming from the outside, to thoughts we have in the back of our minds, to habits, and so on. We are not aware of those. Of almost all of them at least. Some are obvious, some are probably just tested by the brain and discarded because not useful. But sometimes, we DESIRE a solution. It's not about a massive craving. It's just about an unconscious, but clear desire for the solution. We want it in some way. Then we connect two dots that satisfy that desire. INSIGHT! So, I think what we call insight, especially the very pleasurable ones, are connections + emotion, derived from this desire. Again, read what I've written in the "what is insight" section of this post. I see understanding as the connection of dots, which creates meaning. So I think insight isn't something per se, but instead an emotion. The combination of a phenomenon that occurs all the time, with the desire of it occurring. Examples from Leo's video These are examples taken from Leo's video "what is insight?". They are examples of insights he gave in the first 30 minutes of the video to explain what insight is. I haven't added any of my examples. These are what Leo provided. If you observe carefully, you'll see how there's ALWAYS a component of desire, and when the right connection occurs... INSIGHT! Every single example, even the one with chimps, shows this. - Archimede’s Eureka moment. He was sitting in a bathtub, playing with an object, and as he submerged it the insight came that he could use the submerging of objects to measure the volume of irregular shapes. - Newton’s apple. The story says an apple fell on his head, he then looked at the moon, and thought: if the apple is falling towards the Earth, why isn’t the Moon falling towards the Earth? He understood it was falling, but it was moving so fast it was in an orbit. - Charles Darwin. When travelling around in South America, being around all these diverse animals, at some point it must have hit him that animal features were so specialized because everything is evolving. - Einstein’s relativity. With his thought experiments of thinking what would happened if he was travelling at the speed of light towards a clock with a flashbeam, etc, etc. He understood there’s no fixed time and space. It’s relative to your velocity and frame of reference. - Mathematical proofs in general. Something clicks when you’re doing a mathematical proof. Or logical proofs. - The 9 dot problem. But most puzzles in general really. Puzzles require insight to solve. They test your lateral thinking ability. - The comprehension of jokes. While comedy is something everybody likes and can appreciate, it’s taken for granted the amount of intelligence required to understand it. - Plot twists in movies usually come with insights. - Scientists observed that animals like chimps can have insights. If you place bananas where the chimp can’t reach them, and there’s boxes in a corner, at a certain point the chimp will have the insight of stacking the boxes to get the banana. - In psychotherapy. Insight doesn’t have to be academic. It can also be personal. About yourself, about why you do the things you do. Leo says this is the best thing a psychotherapist can do. Giving his patients an aha moment. And you can do it by yourself through introspection. - When you go to work the wrong day of the week and when you see nobody you understand… “ooooh… it’s Saturday!”. When you forget about an appointment but then it hits you suddenly “oh! I had an appointment!”

@Oppositionless Absolutely agree, helped me connecting so many dots, and even after months it's still increasing my understanding of the power of awareness

Insight & Truth Leo @Leo Gura in the video also asked about insight and truth. Are all insights true? I think what I said above can explain this too in a way: When insight feels true, it's because it unlocks and improves our logical understanding. Insights feel true because they're better than what we had before the insight. But this doesn't make them objectively true. They're more true based on our current beliefs and understanding. In 3 years from now an insights I had today may be proven wrong. Conclusion So, in my opinion, insights aren't a window into Truth, but they feel so righteous because we can perceive the stark improvement compared to what we had before