Accessing different tiers of thought
Nearly every time I meditate, around the 3–5 minute mark, scatter brain thoughts stop and immediately, less than a second later, intuitive thoughts come up that solve problems I was thinking about earlier. This also seems to happen quite a lot in the shower and while exercising.
Thoughts in the mind seem to have priority queues. Which makes sense because you can only be aware of one verbal thought at a time. There aren’t multiple voices stacked on top of each other, just one voice running constantly.
The brain is obviously doing way more than calculating one sentence at a time. So what gets queued into consciousness?
Tier 1 thoughts, the thoughts that come up most frequently, seem to be around processing your immediate environmental stimulus. What you see in front of you, TV, what’s on your phone, etc. Basically, the surface distractions of life. These thoughts seem to be very reactionary and are going on constantly.
Tier 2 thoughts, the intuitive, deeply creative thoughts, seem to be queued up underneath tier 1 thoughts.
Because life is filled with so many distractions, and you can only hear one sentence of thought at a time, and there’s only so much time in a day, if every moment of your waking life is filled with tier 1 thoughts, you won’t get to experience tier 2 at all unless they have the room to surface. That tier is where the brilliant stuff is. Where the dots connect. Where the inspiration occurs and where the real breakthroughs happen. And if it surfaces, will you even have the time to notice before it’s back to trivial thoughts?
It’s interesting to have direct first-hand experiences of the experiences outlined in The Art of Scientific Investigation. William Beveridge interviewed many prominent scientists, including Einstein, on how they achieved their greatest breakthroughs.
He summarized his findings:
The most characteristic circumstances of an intuition are a period of intense work on the problem accompanied by a desire for its solution, abandonment of the work perhaps with attention to something else, then the appearance of the idea with dramatic suddenness and often a sense of certainty. Often there is a feeling of exhilaration and perhaps surprise that the idea had not been thought of previously.
What incredible innovations has humanity missed because we were simply too distracted — or too focused — to notice? What have I missed? What have you? It is staggeringly incredible to think about.
