'to know' and 'to understand' -- what's the difference?

or...


"I knew I was going to take the wrong train, so I left early."

Knowledge is fairly easy to come by. Undertsanding takes a lifetime.

Understanding is fairly easy, knowing for sure is close to impossible.

I suspect, Osso, that our disgreement is nothing more than a matter of semantics.

I know, Merry - I understandboth points of view and agree with them...










edit to playfully add italics

i think andrew, that 'understanding' is an epiphanal intellectual event, which takes place in the mind (a factor that has lead many religious aprentices down the twisty road of 'born again'!); where there is a sudden transition from the status of interested data gatherer, to the possition of 'one who actually grasps the concept' of 'whatever', and has an 'understanding' of how it works, what it 'means', and its 'about'!

[the eureka, response]

Mine was also a eureka response.

(I live in Eureka.)

I'm with Merry

I understand you know him

I think you are referring to the "aha!" moment, Bogowo. Freud suggested that knowledge goes
through transformation while stored.

Interesting question. In my previous post I
asserted that I may understand the theorem,
but if I don't know it (commit it to memory) I will
be in trouble at exam time........

However, I might know (be able to recall) the
theorem, but if I dont understand it, trouble also
looms....

I have often heard people say....."My mind
went blank in the exam and I couldn't remember
anything". I only experienced that when my mind WAS blank (through doing no work) prior to the exam, therefore nothing to recall .....didn't know nothing in other words!!

Exactly, shepaints, but I think that the cognitive psychologists are the ones who coined the "AHA" look at the mental processes. I know that Piaget talked about accommodation and assimilation in higher mental functions, but his ideas were more developmental. As I recall (heh heh), Freud didn't have a sudden insight theory.

.....Letty, as I recall it, you wont get an 'aha' unless your unconscious mind is working overtime!

Great thread, Andrew. It has sent me to the drawing board several times.

shepaints, I found this in my undying search for stuff:


Neural Basis of Solving Problems with Insight
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020111


Published April 13, 2004

Copyright: © 2004 Public Library of Science. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Citation: (2004) Neural Basis of Solving Problems with Insight. PLoS Biol 2(4): e111.

If you're one of those insufferable people who can finish the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle, you probably have a gift for insight. The puzzles always have an underlying hint to solving them, but on Saturdays that clue is insanely obtuse. If you had all day, you could try a zillion different combinations and eventually figure it out. But with insight, you'd experience the usual clueless confusion, until?-voilà?-the fog clears and you get the clue, which suddenly seems obvious. The sudden flash of insight that precedes such "Aha!" moments is characteristic of many types of cognitive processes besides problem-solving, including memory retrieval, language comprehension, and various forms of creativity. Although different problem-solving strategies share many common attributes, insight-derived solutions appear to be unique in several ways. In this issue, researchers from Northwestern and Drexel Universities report on studies revealing a unique neural signature of such insight solutions.


Insight lights up the brain
Mark Jung-Beeman, John Kounios, Ed Bowden, and their colleagues recount the storied origin of the term Eureka!, which Archimedes reportedly shouted upon realizing that water displacement could be used to compute density. Illustrating the strong emotional response elicited by such a sudden insight, Archimedes is said to have run home from the baths in euphoric glee?-without his clothes.

Among other characteristics that typically distinguish insight from "noninsight" solutions, people feel stuck before insight strikes; they can't explain how they solved the problem and might say they were not even thinking about it; the solution appears suddenly and is immediately seen as correct. But are the neural processes involved in arriving at a solution through insight actually distinct from those related to more mundane problem-solving?

Recent findings suggest that people think about solutions, at an unconscious level, prior to solving insight problems, and that the right cerebral hemisphere (RH) appears to be preferentially involved. Jung-Beeman et al. predicted that a particular region of the RH, called the anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG), is likely involved in insight because it seems critical for tasks that require recognizing broad associative semantic relationships?-exactly the type of process that could facilitate reinterpretation of problems and lead to insight.

To test this hypothesis, Jung-Beeman et al. mapped both the location and electrical signature of neural activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and the electroencephalogram (EEG). In the first experiment, thirteen people were given three words (pine, crab, sauce) and asked to think of one word that would form a compound word or phrase for each of the words (can you figure it out?). Neural activity was mapped with fMRI while the participants were given 124 similar word problems?-which can be solved quickly with or without insight, and evoke a distinct Aha! moment about half the time they're solved. Subjects pressed a button to indicate whether they had solved the problem using insight, which they had been told leads to an Aha! experience characterized by suddenness and obviousness.

While several cortical regions showed about the same heightened activity for both insight and noninsight-derived solutions, only the aSTG in the RH showed a robust insight effect. Given that neural activity in this area also increased when subjects first encountered the problem (perhaps reflecting unconscious processing), the authors conclude that the increase does not simply reflect the emotional jolt associated with insight.

In a second experiment, 19 new participants engaged in the same type of problem-solving tasks as the first group while their brain waves were measured with an EEG. The researchers then analyzed the EEG recordings to look for differences between insight and noninsight solutions in brain wave activity. The researchers found that 0.3 seconds before the subjects indicated solutions achieved through insight, there was a burst of neural activity of one particular type: high-frequency (gamma band) activity that is often thought to reflect complex cognitive processing. This activity was also mapped to the aSTG of the RH, providing compelling convergence across experiments and methods.

Problem-solving involves a complex cortical network to encode, retrieve, and evaluate information, but these results show that solving verbal problems with insight requires at least one additional component. Further, the fact that the effect occurred in RH aSTG suggests what that process may be: integration of distantly related information. Distinct neural processes, the authors conclude, underlie the sudden flash of insight that allows people to "see connections that previously eluded them."

Sorry it's so long, but well worth the reading.

Thanks Letty, great article. You are right, I don't believe Freud used the term aha or eureka....

This is what I was trying to get at....

"Recent findings suggest that people think about solutions, at an unconscious level, prior to solving insight problems"

It has been a while since I read Freud. From what I remember, he said that while material is stored
in memory, it is not passive. It can be retranscribed and rearranged, especially when confronted with new information or circumstances.

People often say "I'll sleep on it" when trying to solve a complicated problem. I think they are referring to what Freud would call "dreamwork". The solution to the problem may occur seemingly spontaneously at a later time in a different context. Meanwhile, the unconscious mind has been hard at work solving the problem.....deferred action, I
think it is called.

shepaints, it has been sooooooo long since I studied Freud, almost as long as it has since I did Skinner, or read Walden II.

I just know that this thread has been a learning thread for me.

Re: 'to know' and 'to understand' -- what's the difference?


Young people often display "know-it-all" attitudes.

"I KNOW, I KNOW," they exclaim in exasperation when their parents attempt to explain the complexities of life. It is difficult to impart to them the wisdom that comes with age because they think they already KNOW it all and/or are hell-bent on learning it for themselves through experience.

The older I get, the more I realize how much I don't KNOW. The tree of knowledge is infinite. The branches are gnarled, intertwined, and fork off in so many directions that it takes a lifetime just to learn a few small segments of a few branches.

Life should be a quest for learning and growing. Some people open their minds and develop a unsatiable thirst for knowledge. They have the attitude, "You're never too old to learn." They will question traditional beliefs and explore the tree of knowledge in the hope of gaining wisdom and understanding, but with the realization that no one person can know and understand everything.

Other people close their minds and grab hold of their beliefs -- what they think they KNOW -- and they won't venture or explore. They are satisfied with the smallness of their knowledge. They may even deny the existence of the infinite nature of knowledge. They have the attitude, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." They are unbending and inflexible.

Understanding is enlightenment, but we are not an enlightened society. We are trudging forward, but I doubt that human beings will ever reach true enlightenment. I suspect our species will become extinct and leave most of the branches on the tree of knowledge unexplored.

Love your last paragraph, Debra. I would add to it that I suspect, at our present stage in evolution, we are quite incapable of understanding some things and, thus, incapable of achieving any true "enlightenment." Just as you not only can't teach a dog to read but can't even teach it understand the concept of "reading", so there are things in this world that we not only don't understand but have no notion of what they are or how any undefrstanding could be reached. We may evolve further, we may not.

These are two things that come to mind:

1.
To know something one must first pass it though rational though, otherwise it would only be true that: "Someone claimed that..." and not know it themselves.
If Nancy tells Mike that the earth is not flat, Mike only knows that Nancy said the earth is not flat. Mike could only know via corroborating, experimenting or understanding the fact.

2.
If John knows something but can't explain it, then he doesn't understand it. Comes from here