analytic thinking

Can Artificial Intelligence Think Like a Human?

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Athanassios S. Fokas argues that AI, despite its advancements, is still far from matching human thought, as it lacks the ability to fully replicate the complexity of human cognition, including emotions, creativity, and unconscious processes.

In a new perspective recently published in the journal PNAS Nexus, Athanassios S. Fokas explores a timely question: the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to achieve and possibly exceed human cognitive capabilities. Historically, the focus has been on assessing computer models based on their proficiency in complex tasks, like triumphing in Go or engaging in conversations indistinguishable from those with humans.

According to Fokas, this approach has a key methodological limitation. Any AI would have to be tested on every single conceivable human goal before anyone could claim that the program was thinking as well as a human.

Alternative methodologies are therefore needed.

The Limitations of AI

In addition, the “complex goal” focus does not capture features of human thought, such as emotion, subjective experience, or understanding.

Furthermore, AI is not truly creative: AI cannot make connections between widely disparate topics, using methods such as metaphor and imagination, to arrive at novel results that were never explicit goals.

AI models are often conceptualized as artificial neural networks, but human thinking is not limited to the neurons; thinking involves the entire body, and many types of brain cells, such as glia cells, that are not neurons.

Fokas argues that computations reflect a small part of conscious thinking and that conscious thought itself is just one part of human cognition. An immense amount of unconscious work goes on behind the scenes. Fokas concludes that AI is a long way from surpassing humans in thought.

Science finds ‘aha!’ moments are better than slow, analytical thinking

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When it comes to difficult puzzles, we’re often told to take our time and think the problem through carefully, as any impulsive responses we come up with stand a good chance of being wrong. But a new study suggests it might be better to trust your gut after all.

Researchers in the US say that Eureka or Aha! moments – when all the pieces of a puzzle suddenly fall into place so we can spot the solution to a difficult problem – are real, and that instances of sudden insight are actually more reliable than finding an answer via the drawn-out process of methodical thought.

 “Conscious, analytic thinking can sometimes be rushed or sloppy, leading to mistakes while solving a problem,” said John Kounios from Drexel University. “However, insight is unconscious and automatic – it can’t be rushed.”

To test their hypothesis that Aha! moments could deliver more accurate responses than analytical thinking, Kounios and his team challenged participants with a range of puzzles. Some were linguistic puzzles, some visual-based, and others combined both linguistic and visual elements.

In the linguistic puzzles, the participants had to perform tasks such as finding the right word given a number of related word clues. In visual puzzles, an image might be scrambled, and they’d have to say what they thought the unscrambled image originally depicted.

In either case, each experiment consisted of between 50 and 180 puzzles, with each puzzle being limited to about 15 seconds. Once participants gave their response, they reported whether they came to the solution through a moment of insight or via a process of analytical thinking.

The findings, reported in Thinking & Reasoning, suggest that insight – or at least the extent to which participants chalked up their success to insight – wins out over analytical thought.

In the linguistic puzzles, 94 percent of insight responses were correct, against 78 percent for analytic thinking. In visual puzzles the contrast was even more pronounced: 78 percent versus 42 percent.

Of course, research like this is only as solid as the participants’ self-reporting – and in experiments like this, their perceived sense of how they arrived at the solutions is a pretty blurry concept to accurately measure – but even so, the observable gap between insight and analytic thinking is interesting to note.

According to the researchers, one of the reasons analytic responses fared poorly against insight is because the puzzles were timed – leading to rushed, late responses with just seconds to spare, often the result of guessing based on analytical but incomplete deduction.

“Deadlines create a subtle – or not so subtle – background feeling of anxiety,”said Kounios. “Anxiety shifts one’s thinking from insightful to analytic. Deadlines are helpful to keep people on task, but if creative ideas are needed, it’s better to have a soft target date. A drop-dead deadline will get results, but they are less likely to be creative results.”

Which isn’t to say sudden moments of insight will necessarily help you to solve any kind of problem. As the researchers point out, complex problems that have known strategic solutions – such as arithmetic, for example – are often best solved via analytic thinking.

But for puzzles where a set path hasn’t already been well established, waiting for your insight to surface might just be the better approach.

“This means that in all kinds of personal and professional situations, when a person has a genuine, sudden insight, then the idea has to be taken seriously,”said Kounios. “It may not always be correct, but it can have a higher probability of being right than an idea that is methodically worked out.”