We are all familiar with “eureka!” or “aha!” moments, as we ourselves may have experienced it, or we are familiar with famous historical eureka moments. Sir Isaac Newton, for example, had his eureka moment because of a falling apple. That falling apple sparked a spontaneous idea, which led him to develop his theory of universal gravitation. But do you ever wonder what sparks your creative ideas? How is it that Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Paul McCartney and more were able to have these aha moments and shape history in such a fundamental way? Well, it’s all because of insight.
During Dr. Carola Salvi’s talk on “the neuroscience behind creative ideas” at Loyola University Chicago, she explained how one way to thought process is through analysis, which comes from step by step processing. But when focusing on eureka moments specifically, this is done through insight. Insight, according to Dr. Salvi, is when a thought or idea occurs all at once spontaneously. Insight is the “aha!” moment and an individual typically cannot explain how the idea came into their mind, but they are usually certain that they are right. Dr. Salvi went on to say that not only are the individuals themselves certain that they are right, more often than not, they are indeed correct with their insightful problem solving. Insight is also found to be a quicker tool than analytical problem solving is. Dr. Salvi’s research on insight fixates on the right hemisphere of the brain, which is the hemisphere most associated with creative thoughts.
New York Times Magazine also comments on these eureka moments, and how they tend to come when a person is in a relaxed and positive state. That means that a person who is bored or zoning out is more likely to have an insightful moment. This finding also goes along with what Dr. Salvi stated in her talk as well. New York Times then goes as far as critiquing Facebook chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, for suggesting eureka moments are a dangerous lie and that it discourages real creativity, in a speech he delivered. The Article defends insight, also known as this eureka moment, by saying that the eureka moment is a “real and benevolent force of innovation and progress” and “solutions tend to be more reliable than consciously, methodically worked-out answers”. The article backs up what Dr. Salvi’s talk centered around, by providing its audience with the authors lab findings which showed eureka moments associated with “high-frequency activity in the brain’s right temporal lobe”. The article explains that as being insight because those neural patterns would not have shown up if the problem was solved analytically verses insightfully. Interestingly enough, John Kounios, who wrote this article in The New York Times, also happens to be one of the authors of the journal to which the speaker Dr. Carola Salvi referenced during her talk.
According to the research done at Drexel University by John Kounios and Mark Beeman, which is the article Dr. Salvi referenced, the article states that the “conscious experience of insight directly related to unconscious processing that precedes it”. This is what makes the moment of realization so spontaneous, because it involves unconscious thinking, which is what causes this spark of thought to occur. This allows for problem solving to be done rather quickly, but the fault in this tactic is that an individual can never be certain when insight will strike.
Sources:
Kounios, John and Beeman, Mark. “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight”
Annual Review of Psychology 2014. 65:71-93.
Kounious, John. “Eureka? Yes, Eureka!” June 10, 2017. The New York Times.
Falk, Dan. “Great Eureka Moments in History”. Sept 2, 2005. University of Toronto Magazine.
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