Insight Out What Goes On In The Brain During An Aha Moment

After weeks spent trying to solve a mathematical problem, French mathematician Henri Poincaré was so fed up, he boarded a bus to the scenic town of Coutances. He needed a break. As he was stepping into the bus, a wave of clarity washed over him. In a flash of insight, he knew the answer.History is full of such tales: Archimedes shouting Eureka; Newton’s eye-opening moment involving the apple and gravity; Marie Curie’s revelation that the radiation in uranium came from within the atom.How does this happen?With advanced brain-imaging scans, researchers can finally see how this extraordinaryorgan behaves just before and after such a realisation; how such aha moments interact with memory and even pleasure; and how they differ from step-by-step logical deduction.“What psychological scientists call an ‘insight’ is any sudden change in understanding. Any abrupt emergence of an idea into consciousness,” says John Kounios, a cognitive neuroscientist and professor of psychology and brain sciences at Drexel University and co-author of the 2016 book The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain.It is accompanied by surprise, pleasure and a feeling of certainty; people know when something has clicked, he adds.Historically, such discoveries were viewed as mystical or divine. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that psychologists had the means to study insight. Among the earliest was Wolfgang Kohler, who studied chimpanzees in the 1920s, as they figured out how to stack crates to reach bananas. It was aha moments that led them to the solution, he found, rather than a measured or gradual trial-and-error approach.Over the past two decades, cognitive neuroscientists such as Kounios, Mark Beeman and Edward Bowden have used EEGs and functional MRIs to explore the phenomenon more deeply in humans. Not all aha moments originate in the same part of the brain, they have found.“All examples of insight do seem to have one feature in common,” Kounios adds, “an abrupt change in brain activity.”HIT ME ONE MORE TIME?What kind of shift? Where? And can we induce it?This is what Maxi Becker, a cognitive neuroscientist at Duke University, set out to study in 2019. Her paper, published in 2025 in Nature Communications, sought to stimulate flashes of inspiration and explore how they occurred.In order to do this, she and her team turned to a type of black-and-white image called the Mooney (named after Canadian psychologist Craig Mooney), pictures so high-contrast that one cannot at first identify the object depicted.As her study subjects tried to work out what was in each photograph, perhaps live brain scans would reveal what goes on just before inspiration strikes, Becker reasoned.It turned out that the areas of the brain that lit up before the aha moment related to the area directly in play (in this case, visual recognition), the amygdala (because of the positive emotions linked to such revelation) — and, intriguingly, the hippocampus, a deep-brain structure involved in managing memory.Kounios considers this last discovery vital. “It could potentially be used to boost learning,” he says. “If we can lead students to discover things via insight, we now have proof that they will be more likely to remember those things.”There’s more. Other studies suggest that the exhilaration of such an experience could make the individual more open to risk-taking in the moments immediately after, suggests research conducted by Yuhua Yu, a cognitive neuroscientist and postdoctoral researcher at University of Arizona, with Beeman, Becker and others.The lingering positive emotion and sudden surge of confidence spill over, influencing decisions that have nothing to do with the original problem, Yuhua says.In the next phase of her study, she plans to investigate the link between aha moments and creativity. “If creativity is a car, I would say insight is the spark plug,” Yuhua says. She wants to study how the brain works just before and after such sparks occur.LOBE AFFAIRThere is a larger implication to studying all this.Since such inspiration arises from the same “wetware” or biological machinery that supports all human cognition, “the neural mechanisms of insight are a crucial piece of the puzzle in understanding how the brain works as a whole,” Yuhua says.Unlocking these secrets could help optimise how we teach, work and even engineer artificial intelligence. Towards this end, there are studies attempting to spark aha moments using drugs or brain stimulation.“So far, research into psychedelic drugs suggests that they make ideas feel insightful when they aren’t necessarily insightful at all,” says Kounios. (Think of Ashton Kutcher in Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000): “What if the Earth is God’s pretzel, and the stars are just the salt?”)Also now being studied: the positive effects of sleep, and the prevalence of aha moments during dream states and during partial wakefulness.Who hasn’t woken up, after all, with the perfect response to the bitter argument from the day before?