The Aha! Moment: The Science Behind Creative Insight » Brain World - 0 views
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The Aha! Moment: The Science Behind Creative Insight
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To Archimedes, it happened in the bathtub. Newton experienced it while wandering an apple orchard. Arthur Fry: church. Each encountered an epiphany, that powerful moment of spontaneous insight. Archimedes shouted Eureka! upon realizing how to calculate density and volume; to Newton came the law of universal gravity; to Arthur Fry, Post-it notes.
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Behold the proverbial “aha!” moment — a key phenomenon that emerges in a range of situations, from offering a solution to a problem or a new interpretation of a situation to more simple feats such as understanding a joke or solving a crossword puzzle.
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There are many different representations we use colloquially to describe good ideas — sparks, flashes, light-bulb moments; inspirations and innovations; muses and visions.
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Laboratories and psychologists have attempted to study this phenomenon using behavioral methods for nearly a century, resulting merely in speculations as to where these ideas come from and how they form. Lately, though, with recent advancements and tools of cognitive neuroscience, researchers are able to explain the inner workings of the brain during moments of insigh
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Findings also suggest that we require more neural processes operating at different time scales in these moments than we use when solving a problem analytically or methodically.
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Participants were presented with three words (e.g., crab, pine, sauce), and were instructed to think of a single word that forms a familiar two-word phrase with all three (e.g., apple can join with crab, pine, and sauce to form pineapple, crabapple, and applesauce). As soon as participants thought of a solution word, they pressed a button to indicate whether the answer had come to them suddenly (through insight), or if they used a methodical hypothesis testing approach — in other words, a trial-and-error approach.
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Gamma activity indicates a constellation of neurons binding together for the first time in the brain to create a new neural network pathway.
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This is the creation of a new idea. Immediately following that gamma spike, the new idea pops into our consciousness, which we identify as the aha! moment.