airfoilmod,
Originally Posted by airfoilmod
As you may be aware, "grocking" (sic) relates to a novel by Heinlein, "Stranger in a Strange Land". The author spells it "grok" (king).
No, I wasn't. I just picked it up from my pals. Thanks for the background! (Being a Brit, spelling it without the "c" grates on me; I think I'll leave it in.)
PLovett,
Originally Posted by PLovett
What some in aviation would refer to as "situational awareness".
Well, not quite. It is obviously related, but it is both more and less. (Not that everybody in aviation uses the term in the same way!) When mathematicians or computer scientists or physicists suddenly understand how to solve a problem, or how a particular construction works, that is not appropriately described as "attaining situational awareness". But it is grocking.
And on the other hand, if you are in a airplane, and you are situationally fully aware, you cannot just suddenly lose that in an instant if nothing else changes. But you can "lose the bubble" that quickly. There is a cognitive switch.
It is a bit like Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit picture, that you can see as a duck or as a rabbit, but not both at the same time. Your brain switches between the two (and you can help it, but sometimes it just does it by itself). Or the 2D cube outline which can be interpreted as being seen from different spatial positions relative to the cube. These are in an obvious sense symmetric states, whereas grocking and failing to grock are not. But grocking, and failing, has some of that cognitive duck/rabbit feel about it. I don't know whether, from a neuropsych point of view, similar things happen in the brain (I don't even know if the CAT-scan people can trace duck-rabbit changes), but I wouldn't be surprised if they did.
The TAO "bubble" concept that Rochlin was talking about obviously has to do with integrating complex sets of information, and there are obviously times when one can integrate more and times when less. Just as there are times when I can read faster than at other times, with the same level of comprehension. But mathematical grocking is not like that at all. It is more or less sudden comprehension. And the information may not be complex (indeed, often it is sparse).
It is related to being "with the airplane" versus "behind the airplane".
There are indeed slight differences between all these examples that I think we can remark, but I am suggesting that there is a cognitive phenomenon common to them. I wonder if the CAT-scanner people could find a signature?
PBL