

Idle Minds and What They May Say About Intelligence - prat
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=idle-minds-intelligence&print=true

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jerf
How many times do we have to learn this? While "at rest" is a meaningful thing
for a biological system to be in, it pretty much never equates to "no
activity/changes", if ever. Everything in your body is always up to something;
you can't press pause on chemistry. If nothing appears to be happening, that
just means that the processes that do X and the processes that do opposite-
of-X are currently in balance or homeostasis, not that they are not happening
at all.

Another example: Many people have the mental model of fat cells as mostly
sitting there doing nothing, grabbing energy when in excess and only letting
out energy when needed. Radio-tagged water studies have shown that in fact
they are _always_ taking in energy and _always_ releasing energy (I'm glossing
over the exact forms of "energy" since they don't matter to my point here),
and what changes is not whether they are sitting there idle, but the
difference in intake vs. outflow rates. They are not passive bags, but things
constantly in motion.

It still boggles my mind how many stories we get coming out like this, amazed
that yet another process is never really "stopped". The amazing thing is when
processes really do stop. (I can think of a few cases where this might happen,
like when those anti-freeze blood frogs freeze, but I wouldn't care to bet
that there isn't still some processes going on anyhow...)

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prat
Those are good points.. the important thing here though is, that "nothing
stops" has been well established, however not only is there activity but a
different kind of activity compared to the situation when mind is not at
"REST"

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richcollins
I see some parallels with insight as described in David Rock's talk at Google:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeJSXfXep4M>

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MrSafe
I wonder if these long distance connections in the brain can be formed through
a specific studying technique? For example drawing analogies between seemingly
unrelated subjects.

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tungstenfurnace
Yes, it's called day dreaming :-)

This corroborates the theory that long periods of doing nothing help to
develop creativity. (Day dreaming makes you smarter; meditation makes you
well.)

