Why do people voluntarily spend time struggling with problems like sudoku or crossword puzzles? According to neuroscientist Daniel Bor, a research fellow at the University of Sussex in England and author of the new book The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning, it’s because we take great pleasure in pattern-finding. What’s more, that conclusion has big implications for understanding the brain, consciousness and even neurological disorders like autism. We spoke with Bor recently.
Interesting interview. A selection of responses:
Human brains have an extreme form of consciousness: they’re ravenous for new innovative solutions to problems in the world, ravenous for optimizing our lives, for building pyramids of knowledge. I was trying to capture [the sense of hunger that] extreme forms of consciousness have about searching for knowledge and for understanding.
In terms of the mind, consciousness is the product of attention, so we can focus only on a small subset of the world that’s most important to us. It isn’t so much about automatic habits, which we are barely conscious of. Instead, it’s about trying to solve novel or complex problems. We have a mental space dedicated to complex problem solving. What makes human consciousness unique is our ravenous appetite for these innovative lessons that help us solve these novel or complex problems.
Choice is a huge separate issue. It can at least appear that we have choice. If I’m in a crowded train station, looking for my wife who is wearing red, I can constrain my attention by looking for red [and the parts of the brain that represent red are more likely to win] than any other bits.
Attention in the standard textbooks is divided into two kinds, one is voluntary, where we set some goal, and the other is extrinsic, where something in the environment takes over what we attend to. A looming animal coming straight at us — we wouldn’t have much choice in attending to that.
I think the purpose of it [consciousness] is to draw all the relevant information together in a larger space. It’s almost as if we can’t spot it because we are doing it all the time. Why do we love crossword puzzles and why are people addicted to sudoku? That’s what a huge bit of the cortex is primed to do — to spot [patterns] — and once we spot them we can assimilate them into our pyramid of knowledge and build more layers of strategy, and knowing how to do that makes us incredibly successful at controlling the world.
We get streams of pleasure when we find something that can really help us understand some deep pattern. Sudoku isn’t the most [fun activity], but it sure feels good when you put in that last number. It’s why scientists love doing research. The way I approach my job, it’s like trying to solve a really big fuzzy crossword puzzle and when you do put in that new clue and see the deeper pattern, that’s incredibly pleasurable.