![]() ![]() “Just before you have an insight you become momentarily less aware of your environment,” says Kounios. There’s a rush of alpha waves in the back of the brain, shutting down activity in the visual cortex (the part of the brain that processes visual and perceptual information) in the same way that you might close your eyes or look away from a problem before reaching an epiphany. It’s also the area associated with our understanding of jokes and metaphors, which sometimes require a mental leap to “get it.” More interestingly, the brain “blinks” right before an aha! moment. It seems to make connections or associations between different ideas or sensations,” says Kounios. “It’s a particular area that’s connected to lots of other areas of the brain. They found that participants who solved the problems through insight experienced a burst of activity in the right temporal lobe of the brain. For their experiments, they asked participants to solve a series of verbal puzzles and used EEG and fMRI imaging to examine the brain’s activity. Recently, thanks to the advances in neuroimaging technology, he and his collaborator Mark Beeman from Northwestern University have been able to see what actually happens in the brain when we have a mental or creative breakthrough. Kounios has been studying these moments of insight for many years. “It seems disconnected from your ongoing stream of thought,” says Kounios. Then, there’s insight, where a solution seems to pop into our heads out of nowhere, a so-called aha! moment. There’s analytical path, where we deliberately and methodically work through a problem by trying out different solutions. According to John Kounios, a professor of psychology at Drexel University and co-author of “The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain”, there are two paths the brain can take to solve a problem. Why does this happen? Our brains have a method for this creative madness, when an insight seems to emerge suddenly and magically and we break through a mental barrier. Out of the blue, a flood of words and sentences poured forth and my thesis was suddenly clear. ![]() As soon as I stepped into the tub, it’s as if the water unleashed another part of my brain. ![]() After procrastinating with a few episodes of “The Americans” (sorry editors!), I decided to take a break and shower. I had my research and interview notes in front of me but just couldn’t figure out the best way to pull everything together. In fact, it happened again today as I was thinking about writing this article. ![]()
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