“By Jove, I think I’ve got it!” A-ha moments can feel electrifying, but where do these bursts of insight come from? John Kounios is professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and director of the Creativity Research Lab at Drexel University. He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss what scientists understand about how the brain solves problems – and how we might tap into this phenomenon more often. His article “The Brain Science of Elusive ‘Aha! Moments’” was published in Scientific American.
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] You know how raw cauliflower sometimes gets those little black spots on the surface? It’s oxidation, not mold, so there’s no danger in eating it that way. But it looks less than appetizing, and using a knife to cut away the exterior makes the cauliflower look weird. One day I was out for a walk, just letting my mind wander, and for some reason it occurred to me that I could maybe shave those spots off with a microplane grater meant for spices. I was interested to get home and give it a try, and straight up thrilled about how well my idea worked. And ever since, I’ve wondered why creative insights seem to happen out of nowhere. From KERA in Dallas. This is Think I’m Krys Boyd. We’ve all had those moments. Maybe yours have been more substantial than my life hack, but I’ll take what I can get. We can’t really predict them in advance. But are there things we can do to prime our brains for inspired ideas? John Kounios has done a lot of work on this. He is professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and director of the Creativity Research Lab at Drexel University. Together with Yvette Kounios, he published an article about this in Scientific American titled “The Brain Science of Elusive ‘Aha’ Moments.” John, welcome to Think.
John Kounios [00:01:10] Thanks. Thanks for inviting me.
Krys Boyd [00:01:12] Is there a scientific definition of an ‘aha’ moment?
John Kounios [00:01:15] Yes. Different people have slightly different definitions of it, but they all center around the idea that an aha moment involves some new idea, a new solution to a problem, a new perspective that pops into one’s consciousness suddenly. And that’s a little bit different from the popular definition. The popular definition is usually more like just any deep understanding, but the scientific definition of an aha moment or a psychological scientist called them insights is that it has to be sudden. It doesn’t have to be a particularly deep or amazing idea. It could be something very simple, very everyday, or it could be something cosmic, but the suddenness and the differentness and the unexpectedness are key elements of them.
Krys Boyd [00:02:04] So the term itself seems to have been coined by Oprah Winfrey, who is not a brain scientist as brilliant as she is, but as a scientist yourself, do you think the phrase captures these experiences pretty well?
John Kounios [00:02:15] Well, the term aha moment actually precedes Oprah Winfrey by a long time. It goes back at least to the 1930s, and the term “aha” itself goes back centuries. But she’s the one who not only popularized the term, but popularized the idea of having some kind of new insight, some new understanding of things that can enhance one’s life, propel one to a better future, etc., etc.. So she gets credit for that.
Krys Boyd [00:02:44] What sort of work did the scientists of the Gestalt school do in the early 20th century to explore this phenomenon?
John Kounios [00:02:51] Yeah, so around the time of World War I, there was a group of German psychological scientists. They were called the Gestalt School, and their original interest was primarily perception. Especially visual perception how we recognize objects, how we see things. And they were particularly interested with visual illusions and ambiguous sorts of figures. You could see something in one way at one moment, and then all of a sudden see it in a different way. A classic example of that. I mean, we’ve all seen these three dimensional looking stick figure cubes, and with those kinds of cubes, you can look at them in at least two ways, with one side facing forward and the other side in the back. Or if you shift your attention, you can reverse it. And what was the back side becomes the front side. So it’s a matter of reinterpreting. And when you reinterpret it like that, you can’t see it in both ways at the same time. It’s a new experience and it’s sudden it snaps into place. So they were very interested in this idea that how we recognize objects involves interpretation. We interpret what we see and then we understand what it is. And then they started applying that. And this was, I think, a brilliant leap on their part. They started generalizing this to problem solving. So we could be working on a problem and we’re stuck. We don’t know how to proceed. And then all of a sudden you can see the problem in a new light and it suddenly becomes something else, like, oh, I was thinking about it the wrong way. If I think about it this way, the answer is simple. It’s this is very straightforward. Often that kind of sudden insight, that kind of aha moment can come during, you could be taking a shower or walking the dog, or it could wake you up in the middle of the night, or you could have the idea in the morning before you’re fully awake. It could come at odd times when you suddenly realize that the way you were looking at it was wrong, and this other way is much better. You can solve a problem, you can find a new path forward, etc.. So the early Gestalt psychologist pioneered the study of insights or aha moments during problem solving. And that was carried on till the current times. Although now we use neuroscience methods as well to study it.
Krys Boyd [00:05:13] We associate these flashes of inspiration with scientists and artists, but they can happen to any one of us, right? Pertaining to all kinds of problem solving and creativity.
John Kounios [00:05:22] Oh, absolutely. I mean, it’s a matter of scale. I mean, a person could have an aha moment that provides a new theory of the origin of the galaxy or something like that. Or they could have a sudden aha moment about how to get a toddler to eat vegetables, something like that. It could be so simple and so everyday the people might not realize that they’re having one of these insights. They might not realize sort of the important psychological and brain processes that go on, that allow that kind of new idea to pop into one’s awareness all of a sudden.
Krys Boyd [00:05:55] I know I’m not alone in loving stories about these sudden bursts of insight. Will you share the anecdote you have in the article about the astronomer William Wilson Morgan?
John Kounios [00:06:05] Oh, yeah. It’s a wonderful story. So William Wilson Morgan was one of the great astronomers, and he was working at the Yerkes Observatory. This was in the early 1950s, and he was classifying stars called OB associations. OB associations are young, hot, bright stars that are sort of in like star nurseries in the galaxy. And he knew that these, these clusters of young stars were in the arms of spiral galaxies. But they’re all kinds of different kinds of galaxies at the time. In the early 1950s, nobody knew for sure what type of galaxy we live in the Milky Way, what’s its shape? What’s its structure? So he was studying these OB associations one night, and he was computing the distances from the earth of these OB associations. And he finished his work for the night and he started walking home. It was still nighttime. And he looked up at the night sky. And in that moment he had what he described as a created intuitional burst. And what it was was the flat image of the night sky, the stars, when you look up that merged with his knowledge of the distances of these OB associations, and he could see in his mind, all of a sudden these OB associations in three dimensions. It’s sort of like, can you imagine looking at a painting? And then all of a sudden it comes to life as a three dimensional image instead of being flat? And he could see that these OB associations were strung out in depth in the night sky, and he could see that this was the arm of a spiral galaxy. In that instant, he had an insight of galactic, literally galactic proportions. He directly apprehended the shape of our galaxy, the Milky Way. And I think this is one of the great unsung aha moments in scientific history.
Krys Boyd [00:08:05] And it wasn’t just that Morgan suddenly understood something that would have huge implications for astronomy, which, you know, is huge in and of itself. It sounds like he remembered that moment of insight as like an important emotional event in his life.
John Kounios [00:08:20] Oh, absolutely. Well, we know from recent research that there’s something called the insight memory advantage, which has been particularly studied by cognitive neuroscientists. And what’s known is that when you have one of these sudden insights, aha moments, you’re more likely to remember the content of it than other information, which you did not come across as an aha moment. So, for example, if you’re given a problem or a puzzle and you solve it with an aha moment, you’re more likely to remember that solution than if you had solved it in a deliberate, analytical fashion, sort of grinding through it. So these aha moments, they have particular emotional impact, particular motivational impact that lead to more durable memories. Very impactful. We tend to remember our aha moments, although sometimes, you know, if it’s sort of a trivial aha moment again, about how to get a toddler to eat vegetables or something like that. You might not remember that so vividly later on, but certainly if you directly apprehend the structure of our galaxy, you’re going to remember that that’s something that that’s easily forgotten.
Krys Boyd [00:09:31] It’s a bigger deal than shaving the cauliflower, is what you’re saying.
John Kounios [00:09:35] Yes, yes, I would I would say that although, you know, the cauliflower has to be shaved too.
Krys Boyd [00:09:40] So you know what I think fascinating component of these moments that I wouldn’t have expected is this mood boosts. Do these boosts last long enough to have any durable effect on our overall mental health?
John Kounios [00:09:54] I think so. We have some new scientific results. Christine Cesaro, who was at the time a doctoral student in my lab as part of her doctoral dissertation research. She did a study in which she created analogies, verbal analogies that lead to what’s called conceptual expansion. Do you think that there’s a certain metaphor or analogy that’s applying to a situation? Then you realize, oh, this is much larger. This is a much larger thing. And she reported in that, that those kinds of analogies boost mood, and that that boost lasts at least for the duration of a, an experimental session. So at least an hour, maybe they last longer. We don’t know. But in our book, “The Eureka Factor,” we speculate that this kind of mood boost from these insights may actually underlie certain forms of psychotherapy.
Krys Boyd [00:10:51] Like what?
John Kounios [00:10:52] So, for example, Freud, Sigmund Freud, when he developed his psychoanalytic method, it involves a person usually lying on a couch or in some other relaxed setting. They could be staring up at the ceiling and they’re supposed to free associate, say, whatever comes into one’s mind. And the idea of this kind of therapy is that psychological disorders or symptoms are the result of conflicts, emotional conflicts that could be emotional conflicts that are a person’s not consciously aware of, but they’re still there. And that tension causes psychological symptoms. Well, the idea of the of the the psychodynamic therapy is you free associate you free associate session after session, week after week, month after month, and your chain of associations will eventually go back to the original. Psychological trauma or conflict, and you’ll have a sudden insight. And once you have that insight into the source of your symptoms, then the symptoms are diminished or go away. Now, Freudian psychoanalysis is not usually endorsed by contemporary psychological science. It’s not really very scientific. There isn’t a lot of research that really supports it. However, if you think about it this way, let’s say a person has insights during therapy. They have this feeling of these moments about themselves or about the people around them that would cause a mood boost, as we know now. Now the insight itself could be false. Maybe they’re not understanding themselves correctly or someone else correctly. It could be a wrong idea, but the fact that it pops into your awareness all of a sudden like that as an insight will probably boost your mood. And if you have enough of these insights session after session, week after week, month after month, it could have theoretically, hypothetically, a mood boosting effect. In other words, the therapy might make you feel better, even if the insights you have about yourself are wrong. It could be the process, not so much the content of what you experience and think during these therapeutic sessions. So something like this might be an underlying source of of benefit from these sorts of talking therapies.
Krys Boyd [00:13:16] John William Wilson Morgan could have had his insight in a lab hunched over a stack of equations. But in fact, it happened while he was doing something else, maybe not even thinking hard about his problem. Is there a difference between the way our brain arrives at perhaps the same conclusion using analysis, as opposed to this sudden insight that feels as if it comes out of nowhere.
John Kounios [00:13:44] Absolutely. When a person has an insight, there is at that moment a burst of high frequency brain activity. But then we can trace that backward to a series of brain states and brain processes that lead up to that moment. And that series of brain processes and states actually go all the way back to individual differences people have in their, what we call resting state brain activity. What your brain is doing when it’s not doing anything in particular, when you have no task to perform. So it’s absolutely the case that these insights feel like they’re coming out of nowhere. They’re just popping into your brain spontaneously. But there is a series of unconscious processes that lead up to that.
Krys Boyd [00:14:32] What did Janet Metcalfe at Columbia. Describe about the way we experience. She described it as warmth. As we approach a solution to a challenging problem.
John Kounios [00:14:40] Yeah. So Janet Metcalfe, who’s a professor of psychology at Columbia University, she did some pioneering research on insight starting in the mid 1980s. And what she did was she she had people solve puzzles and problems of different kinds, things like arithmetic problems, which you can really only solve in what we call an analytic fashion. You do it consciously, deliberately, in a step by step fashion. But she also gave people puzzles that they can solve with a sudden insight, like anagrams, where you get a series of letters that are jumbled and you can unscramble them to find a word that’s buried in there. And what she found was she she had people rate their warmth as they were working on each of these from by warmth. It’s how close do you feel to the solution? And what she found was that for so-called analytic problems, things like arithmetic problems, people can chart out like, I’m feeling warmer, I’m feeling warmer. Every few seconds. She would ask them, I’m feeling warmer because they people realize since they’re doing it consciously and deliberately, they know how close they are to the solution. But a puzzle that’s solved with insight, usually people, they don’t feel the sense of warmth as the solution approaches until the very end. So it’s sort of a black box. You don’t feel it coming, usually until it happens. The insight itself, the aha moment, is often surprising. Now, sometimes people can have an intuition that they’re about to have one of these ideas, but often they’re surprising. They come in context situations that are really unexpected. And so that’s what she found is there is a different profile for different kinds of problems that show your awareness of how close you are to the solution.
Krys Boyd [00:16:34] You wanted to understand what is actually happening within the brain during these events. What do moments of insight look like on a brain scan?
John Kounios [00:16:42] So our first study, which we Mark Beaman of Northwestern University and I did back about 20 years ago now we use two different types of brain scanning techniques. One is functional MRI. So it’s like the kind of MRI when you hurt your knee or your shoulder. But there’s a difference. And it shows not just a static image. It shows patterns of blood flow in the brain. So you can it can show what parts of the brain are using the most blood or working the hardest. And we also used EEG, electroencephalography, brainwaves. EEGs are really good at telling you when something’s happening in the brain. They’re not so good at telling you where something’s happened. The brain can give you some information, but they’re limited. Functional MRI is great at telling you where something’s happening in the brain. Not as good at telling you when something’s happened in the brain. So we wanted to identify an moment in both space. Like where? In the brain and in time when the moment is occurring. That would allow us to find sort of this brain signature of insight. Now, we couldn’t look at the kinds of William Wilson Morgan insights. I mean, we can’t chase a great scientist around and then determine when she’s about to have a great aha moment and then stuff her in a brain scanner and measure what’s going on and hope that the aha moment actually cause then we also need for brain imaging. You need to get a lot of examples. You can’t just get one aha moment and then say what’s going on in the brain. You need lots of these. So we decided to use simpler puzzles. Things like anagrams, things like they’re another type of puzzle called compound remote associates. These are little three word puzzles. An example would be pine, crab and sauce. And you have to come up with a fourth word that makes a compound word or a familiar phrase with eat to them. So pine crab sauce. The solution would be apple pineapple, crab apple, apple sauce. And sometimes when people solve these problems, it’s in an analytical fashion. They try different things out like pine. What goes with pine cone goes with pine. Pine cone does that. Oh, with sauce. No cone sauce. So I’ll try something else. But sometimes people look at these, these puzzles and the solution pops into awareness as a sudden insight. So when people are able to solve these kinds of puzzles, they can usually do it in a few seconds. They don’t always solve them. They can do it within a few seconds. So you can give people lots and lots of these puzzles, and we can measure their brain activity while they solve the puzzles and watch what happens leading up to that brain activity. And we found with those little three word puzzles that at the moment of insight, at the moment, bursts into consciousness. There is a sudden burst of high frequency brain waves, EEG waves, and a surge of blood flowing to the right temporal lobe. It’s sort of just above the right ear. And that is, we’d say, is the neural correlate of insight what’s happening in the brain when you have that moment? We later found for other types of puzzles, that burst of activity can occur in other parts of the brain. So for anagrams, these unscrambled words, it’s in the frontal part of the brain. So the location in the brain depends on the type of puzzle. But these insights all seem to involve a burst of high frequency brain waves surging blood flowing to that area of the brain. And then in subsequent studies, we found that there were processes leading up to that. So with the three word puzzles, just before that burst of activity in the right temporal lobe, there’s also a burst of alpha waves in the back of the brain in what’s called visual cortex, the part of the brain primarily responsible for vision. So alpha waves indicate a part of the brain idling or turning off or not processing information. So what seems to be the case is when you solve one of these little three word puzzles, just before the solution pops into awareness, your sense of the environment dims slightly. You don’t see as much. You’re not taking in as much visual information. It’s sort of like the brain’s focusing inwardly. So you can find that idea, that solution, and bring it into consciousness. It’s well known that people often anecdotally, that they tend to have moments when they’re in situations with sort of low sensory information. You go in the shower, right? And this white noise, the sound of the water, you can’t see very much because your, your sense of vision’s blurred by the water. The water’s warm so you don’t feel the difference between the inside of your body and the outside of your body. And that’s often where people get their aha moments. There’s sudden insights.
Krys Boyd [00:21:50] It occurs to me that the situations you’ve just described are also some of the very few situations left in modern life where we’re probably not taking in any source of media.
John Kounios [00:22:01] Well, it’s not always the case that the media blocks people from having moments. So there is another phenomenon called opportunistic assimilation. This is say you’re working on a problem and you’re stuck, and your brain sets up what’s called a failure index. In other words, you. It has a record in it that you did not solve this problem. It’s sticking in your craw that you did not solve this problem. So you go about your business and you see things. You do things. You go, you know, your normal daily life and you may encounter something. It could be something like a baseball cap in a store window. It could be a funny license plate, and it can trigger in a aha moment because it has some relationship, some association to the solution. And it’s sort of like you’re finding that key for the lock and it it triggers it. So I don’t want to dump on social media or spending too much time on TikTok or YouTube too much. I mean, there there has to be some balance. But I often find it’s the case that I’m working on something, and then I take a break and I just surf the web and sometimes I encounter something that sparks an idea in me, that triggers an moment that allows me to solve a problem. Now, you obviously there are limits to this. Certain types of problems or puzzles, difficulties that you have in life are not going to be solved by ideas that are triggered by external stimuli like that. And depending on what you’re looking at, you know, if you’re looking at mind numbing videos, it’s not going to be helpful if you’re instead reading about current events or history or something like that, that’s more likely to to trigger some interesting idea. But yes, if your mind is always occupied with something like that and does not relax and does not occasionally cut off, you know, have sort of a retreat from the environment like that, then you’re limiting the the number and the types of these sudden insights that you can have.
Krys Boyd [00:24:16] This is pretty remarkable, John. These experiences can also make us better able to discern the difference between accurate information and misinformation, real news and fake news, if you will. Why might that happen?
John Kounios [00:24:29] You know, we don’t know yet. So there are the latest trend in research on insight is not so much to look at the processes leading up to and a ha moment, not so much. How do we make moments more likely to occur? But what are the consequences of having an moment? What does an moment do to your brain? And there are several things that we’ve learned just in the last few years about this. So one is that when people have an aha moment, most people will find that that triggers the reward system of the brain. So your brain has a reward system that’s involved in craving and pleasure, and it’s the same reward system involved in things like eating delicious desserts, taking addictive drugs, orgasms, anything that’s pleasurable. And what we’ve learned from the research of young tech, who was at the time a doctoral student in my laboratory a few years ago, is that having an moment can trigger the reward system of the brain? Not so. It’s to different degrees and different people. People who have very sensitized reward systems will have more of this rush than other people. Some people, you know, it’s just it barely registers. But on average moments do trigger the reward system of the brain, which is probably why we find them so, so pleasurable is why people do crossword puzzles, why they read murder mysteries, why they like they have hobbies, like writing songs, etc. people often crave that kind of of trigger, of the triggering of the reward system as a result of creativity. And in fact, there’s a phenomenon of, you know, we can use in quotes. The starving artists who people who have such a need, possibly even an addiction, to experiencing the neural rewards of creativity that they’ll forgo getting jobs that will pay them, you know, a lot of money sometimes in order to pursue their their art could be potentially a form of, of addiction, a good kind of addiction because society, human culture benefits from the things that people who have that addiction produce. So that that’s one of the things that we learned about the consequences of insight. Another I’ve already mentioned the insight memory effect. You remember the content of insights better than other kinds of ideas. And recently, Carola Salvi of John Cabot University in Italy has shown that people who experience insights that they have these ideas, they can distinguish between meaningful sentences, meaningful statements, and pseudo profound statements that sound meaningful at first but don’t really have any content to them. They’re also better able to distinguish between fake news headlines and stories and real headlines. Real stories. So. So Carola saw these theory and her colleagues as well. Their theory about this is that people are overwhelmed by a torrent of information these days from all the different cable channels. From social media. There’s just too much information for our brains to handle in a conscious, deliberate way. So our conscious mind is limited in the amount of capacity and the capacity to process information. We can really only think, you know, 1 or 2 things at a time and do it in sequence. And we can’t handle much more information than that. But the unconscious mental processes that generate insights, they’re not capacity limited in the same way. They don’t become overwhelmed. They take in large amounts of information from around. And they they process it. It’s sort of an unconscious level and they can produce insights from that. But the your unconscious mind does not get overwhelmed by information like that. So people who are good at having insight. Having unconscious processing that produces, that produces these ideas. Those people are not as overwhelmed by the torrent of information around them, and they can better distinguish between fake news and real news, between profound, meaningful statements and pseudo profound bs, so that that’s a surprising benefit of of of having these moments, these insights.
Krys Boyd [00:29:40] John, given that these insights make us feel so good, make our brains work particularly well, at least for a while. Are there things we can do to prime ourselves to experience them?
John Kounios [00:29:52] Yes. Oh, and I should also add that the Scientific American article was coauthored with Yvette Kounios, who is my wife and who is a college writing instructor, and that journalist as well. So yes, there are things we’ve learned some things about what to do to have more of these insights now. Insights moments there. There’s sort of like cats. You can’t, you know, command them. You can’t order a cat to do something. You can’t have insights on demand, but you can create the conditions to coax them. So one of the most powerful conditions to create in order to make insights more likely is positive mood. If you’re in a good mood, you’re more likely to have moments than if you are in a bad mood, especially if you’re anxious. So one way to think about that, and there’s a lot of research that shows that creativity in general works better when people are in a positive mood and is inhibited when people are in a bad mood, particularly anxious. So here’s a story to sort of understand why this is the case. Let’s say you’re on the African savanna. You’re an early human. Tens of thousands of years ago, and you see a lion off in the distance. You immediately become fixated on that. Your attention is focused on that like a laser. Because if you make a mistake, you become lunch for the lion. So your attention is focused on the line. You start calculating things very explicitly. You. You are. How far away is the line? Am I upwind or downwind of the line? If can the line hear me? If I make noise? If I make a run for it to that tree or that cave. Can the line catch me? So you cannot afford to make a mistake. You think in a very deliberate, analytical fashion. Now let’s say you get away from the line. That night, you’re back in the cave with your clan. There’s plenty of food. There’s a nice warm fire. It’s safe in the cave. Everyone can relax. There’s no sense of threat. And people just start talking. And they. When there’s no threat, you’re allowed. You have permission to make mistakes. Because if you say something goofy or stupid or wrong. There’s nothing to lose. You’re around your family, your friends, your clan, etc.. So your attention, your your scope of thought expands to include things that, you know. Maybe they’re not right, but they’re interesting. And that’s that’s where creativity comes. The term psychological scientists use for this is psychological safety. When there is psychological safety which means low or no threat, no sense of threat, your attention expands, your mind expands, and you can have ideas. You can entertain ideas that you know might seem crazy or stupid, but every once in a while there could be something really useful or interesting or creative in that. So a positive mood indicates low sense of threat and makes insights more likely. Also, anything that expands your attention. So if you’re in a small, narrow cubicle and your attention cannot expand, your visual attention cannot expand, then your mind does not expand. Your mind becomes narrow and you think analytically. But if you’re in a large room with high ceilings, or even better, you’re outside in the great outdoors, your attention expands to fill the space, and likewise, your mind expands. The scope of thought expands to entertain ideas. But excuse me. Any any stimulus around you, the grabs and narrows your attention will cause subtle anxiety, will narrow the scope of thought and induce you to think more analytically. So, you know, to sort of a silly example would be if a person you go into someone’s office and there’s a letter opener shaped like a dagger on the, on the, the desk, that’s that can induce a subtle sense of threat. And right then and there that can narrow one’s scope of thought. So attention, mood, all of those things are very beneficial to having insights, change of context. So sometimes you could be stuck on a problem and you’re thinking about it in the wrong way, but that problem has a vice grip on you that mean that that incorrect solution or that incorrect idea about how to solve it. The incorrect interpretation. But if you take a break from that and you go to a different location and you do something else, that wrong idea starts to dissipate in your mind. You start, it recedes from awareness, and then you become more open to a new idea popping into awareness. So change of context. Taking a break. Sleep supercharges creativity and insight because when you sleep, you have several benefits. One is that it’s a change of context. It’s a break. When you sleep, it puts you in a better mood. You feel better. That better mood can also enhance insight. And there’s increasing research to suggest that during sleep, your knowledge becomes reconstructed, restructured or Consolidated in ways that can bring out hidden features or associations of a memory and can lead to ideas. So there there are so many examples of people who’ve had great ideas that have awakened them in the middle of the night or when they get up in the morning. So, for example, Paul McCartney, back in the 1960s, he was awakened by a melody for a song, and at first he didn’t know where this came from. He thought maybe he had heard it somewhere, so he ran it by John Lennon. John Lennon had never heard of this before. It’s a great tune. He ran it by the Beatles manager who said, never heard of it before. Great tune. And then Paul McCartney realized he came up with it himself in his sleep. And first he didn’t have words to it, and he made up words to go with the melody. And it became the huge hit yesterday. And it was something that happened either during his sleep or just as he was awaking, awakening from sleep. So those are sort of the the main things. We know that there’s some recent studies which show that electrical brain stimulation can increase the likelihood of solving certain types of puzzles. I don’t recommend this as a do it yourself thing. And I don’t know that this is ever going to become a standard practice, because it may involve different kinds of brain stimulation for different, different types of problems. We don’t know yet. Psychedelic drugs. People often claim that they bring on moments insights. There’s no rigorous research yet to show that. Certainly, psychedelic drugs can make make you feel like you’re having a profound idea. That doesn’t necessarily mean the idea is profound. But it’s too early to tell. There is some research that shows that a modest amount of alcohol can. Can help people solve problems by insight. Again, I don’t recommend that people drink to have insights and having too much alcohol. Of course, you won’t be able to solve any kinds of problems, so we’re talking about relatively small amounts of alcohol as well. So this science of of how to enhance insight. It’s it’s ongoing. We’re learning new things almost every month about that. And I expect, you know, that we’ll there’ll be new developments in this in the near future. And perhaps someday a person will be able to pop a pill and just have a bunch of insights. I mean, who’s to say that won’t happen? We don’t know yet.
Krys Boyd [00:38:39] Any relationship between aha moments and risk taking or openness to risk taking?
John Kounios [00:38:45] Yes. Some fascinating Recent research by Yuhua Yu was at the time a doctoral student, Mark Beeman, and is now a postdoc, which she showed. And this is, again, it’s a surprising thing, and it probably has to do with the fact that insights trigger the reward system of the brain is that if you solve a puzzle by insight and are given a choice between taking a risk for a high reward or a gambling for high reward versus no reward, or taking a sure bet, a sure thing that is a low reward. People are more likely to take a chance to win the big reward to gamble for a big reward versus getting nothing compared to if they solve a puzzle in a deliberate, analytical fashion. So having an moment seems to make people more likely to gamble or take risks for larger rewards. Now, I don’t think having moments is going to, you know, send someone to the casino in Las Vegas. But it’s it’s an interesting they’re interesting possibilities. If you think about sort of the image of the entrepreneur entrepreneur as someone who has these, these ideas, these moments, and is willing to take risks in order to pursue them. So the moment itself, it can put the person in a positive mood. It could make them have more likely to take risks. It can be motivational compared to someone who has the same idea, but didn’t arrive at it as an insight, or maybe arrived at it in sort of a a more analytical fashion.
Krys Boyd [00:40:37] John, we all experience those intrinsic rewards you’ve talked about when we have a moment of insight. So what about extrinsic rewards? Does it help if we think solving a particular problem might get us a big cash prize or some coveted award?
John Kounios [00:40:51] Actually, no, it does not. So offering prizes or rewards or raises or promotions for having an idea that can motivate people to work on a problem, but it’s more likely to to put them in a, in a framework, a mental framework for solving it analytically rather than as an moment. So going back to the early 1960s, a psychological scientist named Sam Glucksberg showed that if you give people problems that do not require any kind of creativity, they’re more likely to solve those problems if you you offer them a reward compared a larger reward compared to a small reward. But if you give them problems or puzzles that require a creative twist to solve, then offering them a larger reward means they’re less likely to solve the problem compared to a small reward or no reward. So when you’re offered an explicit prize or reward for solving a problem, or coming up with an idea that narrows the scope of thought it you become fixated on the prize and it it alters your thinking, your thought processes, into to making it more deliberate and analytical. And in fact, you know, a lot of people. They come up with ideas not for a prize. The prize is the neural reward, the experience of pleasure, the thrill, the rush of having the idea. So in in a practical context, in an organization, in a business setting. I mean, clearly you want to reward people for having ideas, but the rewards should be subtle and vague, just sort of the knowledge that if you know, if the employee has the knowledge that if they come up with good ideas, they will see benefits from that down the line in terms of promotions or, or bonuses or things like that. But if the boss says to them, you know, come up with an idea that solves problem X, and I’ll give you a bonus of so many dollars, that’s that will certainly motivate them to work on the problem, but it’s less likely for the solution to be creative. And if it’s a problem that requires a creative solution, it’ll be they’ll be less likely to solve the problem at all.
Krys Boyd [00:43:35] Do you think we can somehow teach people to approach challenges in ways that might lead to insights like could we work aha moments into an educational curriculum?
John Kounios [00:43:45] I think there would be big benefits to doing that. Certainly we can teach students to, if they’re stuck on a problem, to put it aside for a little while, work on something else, and then come back to it, even if it’s just a brief period of time, even if it’s just for a few minutes.
Krys Boyd [00:44:03] John Kounios is professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and director of the Creativity Research Lab at Drexel University. Together with Yvette Kounios, he is author of an article in Scientific American titled “The Brain Science of Elusive ‘aha’ Moments.” John, thanks for making time to talk about this.
John Kounios [00:44:21] Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
Krys Boyd [00:44:23] Think is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. We’re on Instagram and Facebook at all the podcast platforms. Or you can find us at our website think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
