Southern Cross University, Gold Coast, Australia.
University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2023 Oct;153:105363. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105363. Epub 2023 Aug 19.
Perhaps it is no accident that insight moments accompany some of humanity's most important discoveries in science, medicine, and art. Here we propose that feelings of insight play a central role in (heuristically) selecting an idea from the stream of consciousness by capturing attention and eliciting a sense of intuitive confidence permitting fast action under uncertainty. The mechanisms underlying this Eureka heuristic are explained within an active inference framework. First, implicit restructuring via Bayesian reduction leads to a higher-order prediction error (i.e., the content of insight). Second, dopaminergic precision-weighting of the prediction error accounts for the intuitive confidence, pleasure, and attentional capture (i.e., the feeling of insight). This insight as precision account is consistent with the phenomenology, accuracy, and neural unfolding of insight, as well as its effects on belief and decision-making. We conclude by reflecting on dangers of the Eureka Heuristic, including the arising and entrenchment of false beliefs and the vulnerability of insights under psychoactive substances and misinformation.
也许并非偶然，洞察时刻伴随着人类在科学、医学和艺术领域的一些最重要的发现。在这里，我们提出，洞察感在（启发式地）从意识流中选择一个想法方面起着核心作用，它吸引注意力并引起直觉信心，从而在不确定的情况下快速行动。在主动推理框架内解释了这种“尤里卡启发法”的机制。首先，通过贝叶斯简化进行的隐式重构导致了更高阶的预测误差（即洞察的内容）。其次，多巴胺能对预测误差的精确加权解释了直觉信心、愉悦感和注意力捕捉（即洞察感）。这种作为精度的洞察解释与洞察的现象学、准确性和神经展开一致，以及它对信念和决策的影响。最后，我们反思了尤里卡启发法的危险，包括错误信念的产生和根深蒂固，以及洞察在精神活性物质和错误信息下的脆弱性。
