What is understanding?
What is epiphany?
Neuroscience has answers for you
Let me start with a very common scenario
Two people reading the same book
After reading it alone, say
It makes sense.
And I put the book down.
What to do
The other person gets a page and they freeze.
heart rate
pupil dilation
An electrical current runs up the base of the spine and up the top of the head.
He puts down the book.
Close your eyes.
I feel as if I suddenly understand something
Things I couldn't figure out before
From that day on
He has changed
The disparity between these two people
We usually use one word to sum it up
comprehension
But what is understanding?
It's a genetic gift.
Is another word for IQ
Still a trainable
Capabilities that can be improved
If understanding can be improved
What exactly is its training method?
In today's video
I'm going to use the latest neuroscience research from 2025
To answer these questions
But I'll give you a spoiler on what I'm most excited about: the scale of understanding.
It doesn't really depend on how smart your brain is.
It depends on how willing your brain is to be changed
Hello
Hello.
I am Wang Lijie
To understand understanding
We need to figure out the epiphany first
What's going on inside the brain?
May 2025
Humboldt University of Berlin
A joint cognitive neuroscience team from the University of Hamburg and Duke University
Published a very important paper in Nature Communications
They conducted a clever experiment
Put the participant in the MRI machine
Looking at something called a Mooney Picture.
This kind of picture
It's taking the contrast of a normal photograph to the extreme.
Into pure black and pure white color blocks
At first glance, you look like a complete mess.
I have no idea what this is.
But at some point
Your brain suddenly puts the pieces together
You see a dog
Or a coffee mug.
This Moment
It was a tiny epiphany.
And there were three key findings.
first
The moment of epiphany
The visual cortex of the participants' brains
There was a dramatic reconfiguration of the representation.
Their nerve cells are not fine-tuned in their original pattern
It's a structural shift in the mode of activation.
This is not gradual change
Is a mutation
Let's use an analogy.
What you're doing is you're not turning up the volume on the radio by one notch.
He changed the channel.
second
While characterizing recombination
The hippocampus and amygdala are strongly activated.
The hippocampus is responsible for memory
The amygdala is responsible for emotion.
Their synchronization with the visual cortex increases dramatically
That is to say
During the epiphany
cognition
Emotion and memory all fire at the same time
They form a unified neural network
third
It's also the most shocking to me
The answer through epiphany
It lasts almost twice as long as progressive learning.
Professor Cabeza's exact words were
If you're learning something and you have an epiphany.
Your memory almost doubles
Few memory effects are more powerful than this
Do you know what that means?
And that means that epiphanies are not just about feeling good.
It physically reshapes the way your brain represents information.
And put this new representation
Burned deep into long-term memory
OK
Remember these three findings
Because I'm going to report the results of this experiment
Translate into the predictive coding framework our channel has been using
Remember what I was talking about when I was meditating?
Your brain is not a passive receiver of information
It's an active predictor.
It's like the big language models today.
It generates predictions about the world all the time from the top down
Sensory data only returns the difference between prediction and reality
And that's called the prediction error.
And every prior belief has a precision weight
How convinced is your brain of this belief?
How high is this weight?
Now let me ask you a question.
In the framework of predictive coding
What was an epiphany?
The answer is very clear
epiphany
It's a massive prior belief renewal event.
When you look at that picture of Mooney
Your brain is interpreting it with old prior beliefs.
This is a random bunch of black and white.
The predictions generated by this prior belief
Huge prediction error between the actual visual input
But your brain can't find a better model to eliminate this error
So the error signal keeps accumulating
In places you don't realize
Constantly pounding the walls of the old model
And then at some critical point
The wall collapsed
A whole new transcendental belief
This is a dog.
suddenly emerge
This new model suddenly eliminates most of the prediction errors
This cascade of errors triggers the release of dopamine.
And that's where the high comes from.
The hippocampus is simultaneously activated
The entire emergent process of this new model
Packed with the corresponding emotional state
Deposit to long-term memory
So the recombination of the representations that we saw in Becker's experiment
And that's what predictive coding is.
The internal model of the brain underwent an irreversible structural transition
Old transcendental beliefs
By a brand new
More efficient transcendental beliefs are replaced
Did you find it?
This is a phase transition in physics
They're logically consistent.
Water below zero is ice
You heat it up.
The temperature rises by one degree
The internal structure of ice is slowly accumulating changes at the microscopic level
But from the outside
It's still ice.
Until the moment it reaches zero
There was a phase transition.
Ice doesn't slowly turn into water
It's at a tipping point.
Suddenly jumped to a whole new state
epiphany
It's a phase transition of the brain.
And as I talked about in the < Trillion Parameters > issue, AI
Grokking in the field
It's mathematically almost identical to this mechanism.
Neural networks are just rote at the beginning of training
The error curve drops very slowly.
But after the amount of data and training time accumulate to a certain critical point
All of a sudden
Error cliff drop
Models are no longer mechanical memories.
They suddenly understood the general rules.
That Wu
In mathematics
That is, the parameters are in high-dimensional space
Collapses from chaos into a low-entropy geometry
This is a recombination of the brain representations seen in Becker's experiments
Are different scales of the same phenomenon
OK
If epiphanies are phase transitions in the brain
So what does that mean?
high comprehension
It's not that your phase transition results are better than others
It's not that the dog you see is clearer than someone else's
high comprehension
Your brain's threshold for reaching that critical point is lower than other people's.
It's the same input.
Your brain is more susceptible to phase transitions.
Then the problem becomes
What determines the level of this threshold?
The answer lies in predictive coding theory
precision weight
The higher the precision weight of your old prior beliefs
The less willing your brain is to update it
Because of the high precision weight
It means that the brain thinks that belief is very reliable.
Even with a large number of forecast error signals
The brain also tends to dismiss them.
Rather than renewing beliefs
This is why stubborn people rarely have epiphanies
Their prior weight is too high
So high that the prediction error signal simply cannot penetrate
reverse
A savvy person
The accuracy of his prior beliefs
It's a delicate balance.
High enough for him to form a coherent model of the world
But low enough for a new prediction error signal
The opportunity to shock and update the model.
Imagine you build a castle out of sand.
If reinforced concrete is poured
The waves came unscathed
That's stubbornness.
If it is a plate of loose sand
When the wind blows, it's gone
Chaos.
What is understanding?
It's a sandcastle. It's standing.
But when the waves come
It is willing to be reshaped into a new shape
Did you notice
This is related to the self-organizing criticality we talked about in the < Emergence > issue
Is exactly the same
Buck and his sandpile model tell us
Complex systems are located near critical states
Most likely to generate large-scale cascade reactions
The sand is too flat
Add a grain of sand and nothing happens.
The sand is too steep
It's already collapsed.
In a steady state
Only when it is just at the critical point
A single grain of sand can cause an avalanche
comprehension
It's the ability of your cognitive system to stay near that critical state.
This explains why the same book
The same sentence
And it works incredibly well for different people.
The six ancestors' wisdom can hear that there should be nothing to live in and their hearts are born
These eight words are enlightened
You have also read these eight words
I also read
Why are we not enlightened?
It's not because we're not smart enough.
It's because we haven't reached the critical mass of cognitive sand.
Hui Neng before hearing this sentence
His life experience
His inner search
His face to pain
Has pushed his cognitive system to the brink
Eight words fell
It's the last grain of sand.
Certainly.
Enlightenment in the Buddhist sense
It was more than just a cognitive epiphany.
But the core logic of that critical instant
Is the same
So you see
Understanding is not a gift out of thin air
It's your whole life experience.
A specific topological state accumulated in the cognitive parameter space
Innate genes influence our cognitive origins
It determines the initial cognitive terrain
But it can't be locked. Can you reach the critical point of phase transition?
The length of the road varies
But the road never stops
This also answers the core consensus that our channel proposed earlier
The ceiling of textual interpretation is not linguistic competence.
It's about the experiential dimension.
Same text
A person who has experienced the death of a loved one
With someone who has never faced death
It's going to read something completely different.
It's not that they can't read.
But because of his cognitive parameter space
Missing some dimensions
Those dimensions can only be opened through authentic experience
Once opened
The same text can resonate in a higher dimensional space
And when the resonance reaches critical strength
A phase transition occurs
OK
If the essence of understanding is the flexibility of the cognitive system around the critical state
How to improve it?
And I've summarized it into four levels.
The first level
accumulation of sand
Expand your experience
It's intuitive.
The higher your cognitive sand pile
more multidimensional
The closer you are to the tipping point
read
travel
In-depth conversations with people from different fields
Learn a whole new skill
Even experienced a major setback
All of this adds sand to your sand.
But notice
There's a catch.
If you only pile sand in the same field
Your sand pile may become tall but narrow
It has long passed the critical point in that direction and has collapsed
In a steady state
Adding more sand won't cause an avalanche
What really works is to pile sand across dimensions.
You know physics?
You also study Buddhism
You have also made investments
Study on the technical principles of oversized language models
You've actually written the code yourself.
These sands from completely different fields are piled together
Easier to push the system to a critical state
And that's why the greatest epiphany in history
It happens where there's cross-disciplinary learning.
The second level
Lower precision weight
Practice cognitive relaxation
This is the core mechanism of the practice that we talked about repeatedly in the meditation issue
You can feel it
What is your strongest belief at the moment?
Whatever it is
Did you notice?
When I ask you to look at it
Your body has a subtle tightening
It seems that something is being threatened
The austerity
It's the physical expression of precision and weight.
The precision weights of many of your prior beliefs have been adjusted too high
I have to understand it this way
The world must be like that
It can't be wrong.
These excessive weights reinforce your old model like steel
Let the new forecast error signal fail to come in
How to turn it down?
Meditation is a well-researched path
Numerous neuroimaging studies of meditation
And related findings based on predictive coding frameworks all point to the same conclusion
In deep meditation
The precision weights of higher-level prior beliefs are reduced
Default mode network activity drops
The whole brain becomes more open.
More flexible state
But meditation is not the only way.
Any practice that puts you on hold for a while I know how it feels
Are doing the same thing
For example
When you read a statement that contradicts your point of view
Try not to rush to refute
But ask yourself first
If he is right
Where does my model need to be modified?
This simple exercise
Is manually lowering your prior weights
The third level
Increased signal strength for prediction errors
As mentioned earlier
Astronauts looking at Earth from space can cause an overview effect
It's because the precision weight of that visual stimulus has been pulled to the highest level.
Total Sensory Immersion
Existential crisis blessing
There's no attention-competing stimuli whatsoever.
The same information is seen on TV
Very low precision weight
Can't beat a priori beliefs at all
The implications of this for daily learning are
The way you get information
It's as important as the information itself.
The same book is there
Are you flipping through on the sofa?
Or is it because you are going through a real dilemma?
Read with a question that is etched in the deepest part of my heart
Same information.
When you are truly confused
Real need
When real pain comes into contact with it
Your brain assigns a completely different weight to accuracy.
That's why learning with problems
Much more effective than general learning
It's not because you tried harder.
It's because your brain has a neural mechanism.
They take their input more seriously.
Fourth level
It is also the deepest layer
Let the primordial spirit intervene
I'm talking about "There are two of you in my mind"
One is saying
One of them mentioned in the video
The Taoist concept of knowing God is the one who keeps talking
non-stop analysis
Local intelligent little model that is constantly judging
Primordial spirit is when all the noise subsides
A deeper system of awareness that has just emerged
Your consciousness
Or say your Tathagata hide
A lot of great epiphanies don't come by thinking.
Quite the contrary.
They appear when you stop thinking.
Archimedes was in the bath
The idea of using the drainage method to measure the volume of irregular objects
This solves the puzzle of adulterating the crown
It also laid the core foundation for the later principle of buoyancy
Kekule was dozing off
Dreaming about the benzene ring structure
Poincaré was the moment he stepped on the bus steps
Solved a math puzzle
Ramanujan's thousands of mathematical equations are even more amazing
We had a video dedicated to it before.
These stories all point to the same pattern
After a period of intense thinking
A period of relaxation or mind-wandering
And then the epiphany came.
Translate with our framework
Consciousness desperately piles sand in the previous stage
Accumulated prediction error
But the precision weights are too high
The old model never broke
Then the mind is tired
Temporarily down
At this point, the default mode, the authoritarian control of the network, is loosened.
Yuan Shen has a chance to intervene
Primordial spirit is not linear analysis like consciousness
It's global.
intuitive
You can see all the connections simultaneously in a high-dimensional space.
It's in that fleeting window
Completed what consciousness cannot do
A cross-dimensional pattern recognition
A Holistic Representational Reconstruction
This is the neuroscientific explanation that epiphanies often occur during relaxation
It's not that relaxation itself produces the answer.
It's because relaxation allows consciousness to give up bandwidth
Let the primordial spirit finally have the opportunity to connect with the wisdom of Gao Wei
Got the information
So if you want to improve your savvy
And the last piece of advice is perhaps the most counterintuitive.
Don't keep thinking
Leave room for your brain not to think
take a walk
in a daze
take a shower
Listen to music
Do some mindless physical work
These seemingly time-consuming things
It is precisely the window for the primordial spirit to create intervention
Finally, I would like to say that the content of this issue touched me the most
I've always found the word comprehension to be mysterious
Some people just get it right
Some people just can't make sense of it.
I used to be inclined to attribute it to differences in talent
Then I don't want to
But when I reunderstood understanding with predictive coding and phase transition theory
And I realized it wasn't about talent.
It's a matter of status.
Are you savvy?
You are the cognitive system of the moment.
Is it near the critical state?
And this state
It can be adjusted actively.
You can build sand by enriching the experience dimension
You can lower the prior weight of rigidity by practicing cognitive relaxation.
You can improve by learning with real problems.
Precision weight of the input signal
You can let the primordial spirit intervene by leaving blank space in the brain
Understanding is not a fixed attribute assigned to you at birth
It has nothing to do with your IQ or education
On the contrary.
IQ and education are too high
On the contrary, it is easy to produce the knowledge barrier of Buddhist teaching
Understanding is the dynamic state of your cognitive system at the moment
And state
Forever can change
This is also why the Buddha said
All beings have Buddha-nature
Buddha-nature doesn't mean you're born enlightened.
It's about your cognitive system
It naturally has the potential for phase transitions.
The tipping point is always there.
The sand can always go on
Precision weight can always be adjusted
The only problem is that
Are you willing to let your old model be smashed?
Are you willing to endure the chaos and anxiety on the eve of that phase change?
The most profound epiphany
It happens in the most painful moments.
Not because there is something sacred about pain itself
It's because pain is the strongest predictive error signal
It's telling you with the highest precision weights
Your current model
Wrong.
Would you like to listen
If the content of this video has triggered any thoughts in you
Or maybe you had an epiphany you wanted to share.
Welcome to leave a message in the comment area.
Your Story
It could happen to be the last grain of sand on the pile that another person knows
You are also welcome to tell me what topics you are most looking forward to in the next issue
I am Wang Lijie
See you next time.