How Your Brain Creates 'Aha' Moments and Why They Stick

Summary

A few days after the initial experiment, the team tested participants’ memory by having them look at more Mooney images online, including some they had seen before. Participants were better able to remember prior images that they had rated highly on the three aspects of insight. This suggested that the insight-memory advantage was real, but the team wanted to see what was going on under the hood. Did brain activity during insight predict better memory five days later? The researchers found that the larger the activity boost in both the VOTC and the hippocampus during the initial insight, the better participants remembered the Mooney images. The big change in brain activity likely makes the experience more salient, Becker said, and salient experiences are known to better encode long-term memories. While insight creates stronger memories of an idea, it doesn’t mean the idea is correct. Previous work has shown that the quicker, more certain and more pleasurable a solution feels, the more likely it is to be correct — but false insights can and do exist. In Becker’s study, participants wrongly identified the subjects of more than half the Mooney images they saw. Of those incorrect trials (which the researchers excluded from the analysis), the participants reported experiencing insight 40% of the time. In comparison, correct trials were accompanied by feelings of insight 65% of the time. These kinds of studies of insight in the lab will set researchers up to look at how it functions in the real world. Once we decompose insight into “very simple tasks that we already understand well,” Becker said, we can “move on to more complex, truly creative tasks.” Insight Into the Future Yuhua Yu, a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at the University of Arizona, is fascinated by the role that insight plays in the creative process. As a self-described uncreative person, Yu has been particularly fascinated by insight’s role in the creative process. Creativity is “like a magic powe...