Have you ever had a friend tell you
a joke, and you don’t understand what it means, and suddenly while you’re doing
something, it finally comes to you, “Aha! That’s what she/he meant” OR when you’re
working on a crossword puzzle, and you finally get the missing word, or when
you’re stuck on solving an equation, and the solution finally comes to you. All
of these sudden realizations or solutions that appear to come to us out of nowhere
are referred to as the Eureka moments or our “Aha!” moments. More
scientifically, this is called Insight, which is a very new and prospering field
of study in Neuroscience.
In the talk given by Dr. Carola
Salvi on Insight, she explained how her research helps us understand Insight.
She explains how the brain helps us achieve those Eureka moments, which parts
of our brain are active during those Eureka moments, and she also explains how
reliable these Eureka moments are. Dr.
Salvi approached testing insight in two different ways. First, she tried to
understand insight by providing her subjects with problems, to see which areas
of the brain were more active while solving with insight. The second part to
her study was, she stimulated those areas of the brain while presenting the
subjects with Insight problems to see how they would respond. She made the
brain the Independent variable in this case and their response (insight) as the
dependent variable. With both parts, she discovered that the right temporal
lobe is more active during the time insight is taking place in a person’s
brain. Dr. Salvi was also able to explain that some of our Insights or Eureka moments
that occur are majority of the times accurate. Our brain works in a way that
those sudden realizations that we get on a solution can often times be the right
idea.
In the New York Times article, “Eureka?
Yes, Eureka!” Mark Zuckerberg warns graduate students not to believe the Hollywood
belief of how a single Eureka moment can lead to groundbreaking discoveries, he
refers to this idea “as ‘a dangerous lie’ that discourages real creativity.”
This not only contradicts the talk that was given in class by Dr. Carola Salvi,
it also contradicts many of the other research done by other scientists. Mark Zuckerberg’s
statement contradicts history as well, which has continued to show us that the
most brilliant ideas and discoveries were made through single Eureka moments.
For example, the article discusses Otto Loewi and his realization about how
nerve cells communicate with one another which led to his discovery of
Neurotransmitters, and this was all because Otto Loewi had an insight or a Eureka
moment where he realized this. The article also supports how Eureka-style
insights don’t come to us out of nowhere, they happen because our brain makes
connections between things that we already know; some of those connections can
be new and root from the things we already know. With this knowledge, it makes
sense that our eureka moments can be accurate, as our brain is making these
connection about knowledge that we already have.
This information about insight can
help us in future research, as insight helps us make these important
connections in our brain that help us to think to our full potential. I think
one way this can help us in the future is if we can make a pharmacological drug
that enhances insight and creates a lot more “aha!” moments in our brains, that
way we’ll be able to think to our full potential, and not only understand but
also make connections between ideas faster.
Kounios, John. “Eureka? Yes, Eureka!” The New York
Times, The New York Times, 10 June 2017,www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/opinion/sunday/eureka-yes-eureka.html.
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