Divergent thinking + “spreading activation” model

7:25>> fascinating. Okay. Okay. This is getting good. >> It's pretty insane. So, let's talk about a little bit about um cognitive psychology. Okay. It's divided into two domains. When when it comes to creative problem solving, there's really like two ways of thinking about it. There's the convergent thinking, which is the idea that it's like super brute force and logical. If I want to solve a problem, I start with all of my parameters and then I sort of logically deduce how to get to the solution. >> Then there's divergent thinking which is I start with some nexus of a problem and then I just like look at relationships and try to like >> creatively figure out how to solve a

8:07problem. Right? >> Now with the divergent thinking there's something called a spreading activation model. The idea is that your memory is represented like a giant graph of like a graph like you know the internet is a graph. We've talked about this before on the podcast. The idea that like on the internet each web page is linked to other web pages. So you have web pages and you have links between them. That's what defines a graph stuff and then links between that stuff. Now with the spreading activation model, our semantic memory can be thought of as a complex graph because there's nodes which are the concepts like for example dog. Dog can be um furry, it can be friend, it

8:48can be >> foe if you're out hiking and you see a wolf like there's all these different relationships that you can go from dog all the way to is it an enemy or is it a friend? Is it my own dog? And then from there you can start connecting nodes. So you can imagine you start with a dog and then you have that idea of a dog and from a dog you can now go to friend you can go to does he want does he want to play does like all the stuff that I would think about when a dog comes up in my memory right there's all these connections and the idea of the spreading activation model is that you start with some connection >> and then you if you want to solve a problem around that connection you start exploring all the stuff that's related to that and you try to figure out what's

9:30the best path to get to your solution. So as an example, let's say I'm afraid of dogs, which which I'm not because I have three of them. But let's say in this example, I'm afraid of dogs. So when I then see dog a dog, >> you know, I'm immediately now making nearby connections, which in this context might be fear, I need to run, uh how to like defensive like MMA, yes, like how to kick again, only because in my head, in this specific context, I'm afraid of dogs. And so I will be thinking of these associated contexts concepts in my own head that are related to a dog and then most adjacently fear and then all the things that come >> all all the stuff that comes around

10:11that. Right. Exactly. And [clears throat] so now let's try to let's try to take this network architecture and apply it to problem solving. Right. When you're in the waking state, what ends up happening is suppose you want to solve a problem >> based on the brain state. What ends up happening is you you start with the problem statement and you try to get to the solution. During the waking state, >> my activation of all these different concepts is tightly regulated. Okay? Because there's a lot of inhibi inhibition that goes on. There's these inhibitory neurons that are firing a lot during my awake state. And so only strong obvious connections are actually the ones that are going to pop up.

10:52>> Okay? And so I might get stuck in like a fixation where I'm trying to like solve a problem and I get stuck while trying to find the solution and it's really hard for me to get out of that. And I've had this personally in my research like when I'm trying to solve something during my work or during my research. It's like I I work on it for like two hours and I'm stuck and I don't find a path forward. And that's when a lot of people say, "Why don't you just sleep on it?" The the idea is you have a problem. Imagine it like traffic >> like or you're trying to drive through Los Angeles. Yeah. >> But 50% of the roads are closed. Yeah. In your waking state and so you can't

11:32take the 405, you can't take the 101. >> That's that's really good analogy. [laughter] >> And so it's going to you can't really it's hard to get to where you need to go. You try to go the back roads. You wind and you end up somewhere in Elsaundo. >> Yeah. >> Uh