"I had become a [scientist] in large part because I considered science - pure science, the search for knowledge for its own sake - to be the noblest and most meaningful of human endeavors. We are here to figure out why we are here. What other purpose is worthy of us?"
I like puzzles. I played Set until I mastered it. (Nineteen seconds was my personal record. Pardon me if I brag a little bit. ;) Some might say that I get a daily paper primarily for the Sudoku puzzle. And then there is the word scramble...
LYRCIAT
Normally you solve this puzzle by systematically re-ordering subsets of the letters to make recognizable pairings. EX: 'LY' is commonly seen at the end of words. You keep doing this until you recognize where all the letters fit to form the unscrambled word. ('No kidding!' you are thinking.)
The point is, that solving this puzzle usually involves 1) a serial set of tasks, 2) which are performed consciously. You are aware of the process that results in the solution. Well, usually...
Many times when I have played this puzzle, I have had the experience of looking at the scrambled word - not staring at it, mind you, but looking at it for a second or so - and then looking up to begin the systematic process of unscrambling the word. And before I can begin the process, the unscrambled word appears in my conscious awareness, before any conscious processing could take place. (And it's right.) This is a little bit disturbing to experience, for the following reasons...
1) There is only a matter of a second or two between the time the scrambled word was acquired for processing, and the time the solution appears in consciousness. This is not enough time to complete the serial set of tasks needed solve the puzzle in the conventional way.
2) I haven't played this puzzle so much that I could be familiar with all the possible words used and all possible recombinations of the letters of those words.
3) There is no context from which the word can be inferred. And these aren't words that you see every day, though the combination of letters in them are not usually unique enough to make the word obvious.
One day, after I had spent a few minutes thinking about that 'instant solution' experience, I had the thought - 'I wonder if this is what it's like to be a quantum computer.'
These experiences led me to ask the following questions...
Was I really bypassing the serial tasks involved in solving the puzzle? Or were they happening, but just at a much faster rate than what can be shunted through conscious awareness? And if that was the case, what does that say about the concept of time? Does it imply that our ability to consciously perceive time is drastically slower than the speed at which processing in our brain can/does occur?
My experience with the Set puzzle was an ongoing study in the process of pattern recognition. When I began to play Set, it took me 5 to 6 minutes to solve the puzzles. Eventually I broke the 60 second barrier. Then I was consistently solving the puzzle in less than 30 seconds. The sets began to 'jump out' at me. I had managed to train some part of my brain to recognize a very specific set of cues in a very specific setting. I was recognizing the sets more quickly each time I played the puzzle, despite the fact that the actually cards in the sets were not the same ever time, nor was I limited to searching for only one or two patterns. (Seriously, read the rules and try the game. It's fun!)
Had some similar kind of complex pattern recognition network been building all the while I had been playing the word scramble puzzle? If so, how did it get so fast?
Or, was I pulling the solution into awareness from a future point in time? Perhaps from a point in time after I had verified the solution? Hmm...
(Have you figured out the word yet?)
