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Edward Flores4 said:Questions like "what is the capital of the White Coast" are actually pretty straightforward for the brain to process. If someone is hearing about the White Coast for the very first time... it’s instantly obvious they wouldn't know the capital. On the other hand, if you already know the capital, that city's name is already mentally linked to the country itself—so the question basically just triggers that existing association to pull up the answer. And if you know the country exists but haven't ever made that connection to its capital? Well, then you know right away that you don't know.
I don't really see any deep mystery behind a question like that, though maybe I'm missing the point here 🤷
ps: I think Olivia Evans8 has a valid point too. A lot of the time, what we're seeing is just learned behavior—people often tell themselves they don't know something, but once you give them the answer, they realize they actually did! 😁
I agree with much of this, but I simply cannot stomach that particular point. I happen to know exactly what e^(i+Pi) equals, yet there are many times when I struggle to calculate -1+2...
I’ve been chewing on this idea for a while now, but it finally crossed my mind again today and I just felt compelled to get it down on paper. It might seem like nothing to most people, but I find it absolutely fascinating...
Of course, I realize the human brain is an incredibly passionate and still largely enigmatic organ, but purely
from a philosophical standpoint, I wanted to pose this question. We are all more or less familiar with the widely accepted theory regarding the brain as a complex web of interconnected information where impulses travel through pathways, and forgetting occurs when those connections weaken... and so on.
Now, consider when someone asks us a direct question—for instance, what is the capital of the United States (Washington, D.C.)? That falls under declarative memory; we either possess that fact or we don't. In this specific case, we would all answer "Washington, D.C." (bravo!), assuming we aren't simply experiencing a momentary lapse in retrieval. The cognitive process involved would essentially be a search through our neural architecture to locate that data point and pull it into working memory to provide the answer. In this scenario, the brain's job is made significantly easier because the data exists and can easily find its way to the surface. So far, there's no ambiguity there. However, if the question were, say, "What is the capital of the White Coast?" (and let's assume I have no idea what that is), what exactly does the brain have to do to arrive at the response "I don't know"? How does one search for something that simply isn't there??? We wouldn't be able to categorically state "I don't know" until the brain has scanned the entire memory bank—which some studies suggest is virtually limitless—unless the brain actually knows exactly where that non-existent data *should* be located, realizes it's missing, and then stops. Just try to visualize that: we are searching through an infinite memory, and if we don't find it, we conclude that we don't know. Furthermore, why does searching through this perceived infinity take roughly the same amount of time as searching for something finite that we know how to find? To clarify, it takes us about the same amount of time to answer "Washington, D.C." as it does to answer "I don't know." To me, that fact serves as further evidence for the theory that the brain knows precisely where the information ought to be, even if it isn't there, thereby reducing the search to a finite task.
Call me crazy if you want, but I truly don't care.