"Some clinicians have an uncanny quality. A colleague describes herself and others with this instinct as "witchy"-a capacity to know things about patients they haven't said yet, to follow a stray association to a song lyric or a half-remembered cultural reference and arrive, reliably, at something the patient urgently needed to say but couldn't reach on their own. We see with artificial intelligence these intriguing possibilities for discovery, especially as connections that human beings never would see pop out of apparently unrelated data."
"AI mirrors this "witchy" instinct. In medicine, key findings have surfaced from apparently unrelated retinal scans (Zhou et al. 2023). RETFound, for example, predicted Parkinson's or heart attacks from eye images meant for glaucoma detection, which humans can't determine from routine exams. With safeguards against errors, AI promises to systematize serendipity, transforming clinical hunches into scalable discoveries for millions. It is becoming increasingly evident that information surrounds us, and we can draw meaning from it if we know how to look."
Clinical intuition and spontaneous mind wandering can function as computationally optimal strategies in complex, noisy environments where signals are widely distributed. Simulated communities of agents that collected data, built theories, and shared findings show that random experimentation often produced accurate accounts of reality and sometimes outperformed disciplined, theory-driven strategies. Artificial intelligence mirrors this capacity by surfacing surprising connections in unrelated data, exemplified by retinal images predicting Parkinson's disease and heart attacks. Random probes and unfocused thinking can disrupt unconscious scripts, reveal latent signals, and systematize serendipity when paired with safeguards against errors.
Read at Psychology Today
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