The Elusive Brain Science of ‘Aha! Moments’

One evening in 1951 astronomer William Wilson Morgan was strolling home from Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin when he looked up at the night sky and had a “flash inspiration … a creative intuitional burst.” It solved one of the great mysteries of astronomy.

The observable universe contains billions, possibly even trillions, of galaxies. With a modest telescope, their varied forms are discernible—spirals, ellipsoids and others with irregular structures. But what about our own galaxy, the Milky Way?

Morgan had been calculating the distances from Earth of groups of big, hot, bright stars, nowadays called OB associations. He knew that in spiral galaxies these clusters reside in the trailing arms. Gazing at the sky while walking home, he located the familiar dots of the OB associations. But this time the flat image of the night sky merged in his mind with the star distances that he had calculated and committed to memory, and it sprang to three-dimensional life. Morgan’s vision: the stars of the OB association are arranged in a long strand—an arm of our spiral galaxy.

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An “aha! moment,” such as Morgan’s marvelous insight that the Milky Way is a spiral, is a new idea or perspective that arrives abruptly, often bursting into an ongoing stream of thought. It may pop up while someone is actively trying to solve a problem, but it can also arrive spontaneously. “When I write songs, it’s never a conscious decision—it’s an idea that floats down in front of me at four in the morning or in the middle of a conversation or on a tour bus or in the mall or in an airport bathroom,” singer-songwriter Taylor Swift related to an interviewer. “I never know when I’m gonna get an idea and I never know what it’s gonna be.”

These revelations feel pleasing, even thrilling, and they can be portals to a scientific breakthrough, an innovative business proposal, a hit song or the plot of a best-selling novel. Or they may provide a life-changing perspective on a personal dilemma. People can overcome many challenges by analyzing them step by arduous step, but leaps of insight are more often associated with out-of-the-box ideas. And though often obvious in hindsight, the revelation can be astounding when it arrives.

Scholars have sought to capture the elusive essence of the aha! moment for more than a century, and it is finally within our grasp. We now know where it happens in the brain and when it’s more likely to happen. And we’re discovering some surprising benefits of insight, including elevated mood, memory and, oddly, the ability to distinguish fake news from real.

Psychologists of the Gestalt school, based in Germany in the 1910s, were the first to systematically study insight. The term “aha! moment” was popularized by media magnate Oprah Winfrey. Defined by Merriam-Webster as a “sudden realization, insight, recognition or comprehension,” the aha! moment is also known as the Eureka! moment, as Archimedes is said to have exclaimed the Greek word eureka when he realized an object displaces a volume of water equal to its own. The Gestalt psychologists, who were interested in how the mind interprets patterns or forms, used visual illusions to argue that a problem could have features that mislead one’s brain into misinterpreting it. The correct interpretation emerges when a shift of attention enables a person to restructure their understanding and see the problem in a new light.

These pioneering psychologists tasked people with complex brainteasers designed to reveal how and when humans are likely to have revelatory insights. They were the first to demonstrate that insight is driven by unconscious processes. Later, during the 1980s and 1990s, cognitive psychologists applied more powerful experimental methods that tracked progress toward solving a problem. Janet Metcalfe of Columbia University showed that “warmth,” a person’s feeling of being close to a solution, increases gradually while they work on a problem that requires step-by-step, analytical thinking, such as one involving algebra, but more sharply just before they solve a brainteaser through insight. Jonathan Schooler of the University of California, Santa Barbara, discovered that requiring participants to describe their thought processes while they solve problems suppresses insight but not analysis.

The 1990s saw rapid developments in neuroimaging. By the early 2000s cognitive neuroscientist Mark Beeman and one of us (John), both then at the University of Pennsylvania, concluded that imaging technologies were advanced enough for us to try to see what happens in the brain when a person has an insight. We used two complementary methods: electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). EEG measures the electrical activity of the brain with electrodes placed on a person’s scalp. It provides very precise information about when something is happening in the brain. In contrast, fMRI measures slower changes in blood flow (when a region of the brain is working harder, it draws more blood) and provides very detailed maps of where things are happening. By using EEG and fMRI in parallel experiments with different people solving the same puzzles, we were able to isolate the brain’s aha! moments in both space and time.

We couldn’t rely on difficult brainteasers, because to get statistically significant results, we needed each test subject to solve many problems. Instead we used little verbal puzzles such as compound remote associates (CRAs), which people can solve either insightfully or analytically. Each CRA consists of three words, such as “pine,” “crab” and “sauce.” The participant’s job is to think of a fourth word that can be used to form a compound word or familiar phrase with each of the three given words. Immediately after a volunteer solved one of these puzzles, they reported whether the solution had popped into awareness suddenly or been discovered through deliberate, step-by-step thinking. We were thus able to isolate aha! moments and compare the brain activity during them with the brain activity for analytical solutions. (If you’re curious, the answer to the CRA in this paragraph is “apple.”)

Our key result: an aha! solution corresponds to a burst of high-frequency brain waves in the brain’s right temporal lobe, just above the right ear. That part of the brain, the right anterior superior temporal gyrus, connects with many other brain regions. It is associated with our ability to realize connections between concepts that may initially seem unrelated, as occurs when comprehending metaphors, jokes and the gist of conversations. Our findings linking this specific area of the brain to the aha! experience supported previous work by Edward M. Bowden of the University of Wisconsin–Parkside and Beeman suggesting that the solution to such a problem can be unconsciously present in the right hemisphere, ready to emerge into awareness as an insight.

The number of puzzles people solved by insight—but not analysis—predicted how well they could discriminate between real news stories and fake ones.

Our later research revealed, however, that aha! moments may excite other areas of the brain, depending on the type of puzzle. In 2020 John and his co-workers showed that insights that solve pattern-reorganization problems activate the frontal lobe rather than the right temporal lobe. Anagrams—for example, rearranging the letters in BELAT to get the solution TABLE—are among such problems. Thus, the distinctive feature of an insight is the sudden burst of high-frequency brain-wave activity, which can occur in various parts of the brain, depending on the type of problem solved.

Some problems lend themselves to an analytical, as opposed to an insightful, solution. Analytical problem-solving recruits areas of the brain involved in “executive” processes such as “working” memory that rely on the brain’s frontal lobes. Virtually everyone can use either insightful or analytical methods, but many people tend to use one rather than the other. Nobel laureate physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose, for example, can obviously think analytically but seems to be inherently insightful: “I had this strange feeling of elation, and I couldn’t quite work out why I was feeling like that,” he once said in an interview. It turned out he’d had an epiphany about the formation of black holes while crossing a road. “I do most of my thinking in visual terms,” he related, “rather than writing down equations.”

In the 2010s Brian Erickson, then a doctoral student in John’s laboratory at Drexel University, and his colleagues demonstrated that people’s tendency toward insightful or analytical thinking is evident during “resting-state” brain activity—while a person relaxes with no task to perform or expectation about what is to come. Erickson recorded people’s resting-state EEGs and then, weeks later, tasked the same participants with solving a series of anagrams. The astonishing result: a few minutes of EEG predicted, up to seven weeks in advance, whether a person would solve the puzzles mostly insightfully or analytically. Our predominant thinking style is stable over time.

The subjects who relied mostly on insight had greater resting-state activity at the back of the brain, whereas the analytical subjects had greater activity in frontal areas. The frontal lobes, the seat of a person’s executive processes, organize activity in the rest of the brain. These executive processes enable people to think in a focused and strategic way, but they can also curb creativity by limiting thought to straightforward plans, just as a horse’s blinders block out distractions that would lead it to meander from its path. When frontal lobe activity is relatively low, as it was for the insightful subjects, posterior areas can be disinhibited and “go rogue,” sometimes resulting in aha! moments.

Although individuals may be inclined toward more analytical or insightful thinking, we aren’t locked into one or the other. Your thinking style can shift or be nudged, at least temporarily, to the other strategy. One factor is mood. In a 2009 study led by Karuna Subramaniam, then a doctoral student in Beeman’s lab at Northwestern University, researchers found that participants who reported feeling more positive solved more puzzles by insight, whereas those who reported greater anxiety solved more puzzles analytically.

Why might that be? Consider the following example, courtesy of Beeman. Imagine you are in Africa 25,000 years ago. You see a lion off in the distance and are gripped with fear. Your thinking immediately becomes very careful and deliberate—analytical—because one mistake and you are finished. Can the lion see me or hear me? Am I upwind or downwind? If I run, is the lion close enough to catch up?

You manage to escape. That evening you are back in the cave with your people. There’s a fire, so it’s warm, and the day’s catch is cooking on a rack. You are enjoying what researchers call psychological safety. In your protected haven, you don’t have to suppress rambling, fanciful thoughts—the stuff of creativity. You are empowered to say or do something imaginative. That may be why, 25,000 years later, we find the innovative, practical flint tools and breathtaking cave paintings that sustained and inspired the lives of the ancients.

Creative insight has an evolutionary purpose: it helps us and our offspring survive and thrive. This relation is evinced by the fact that, like feasting or procreating, insight is enjoyable. In 2020 Yongtaek Oh, then a doctoral candidate in John’s lab at Drexel, identified a distinct neural signature of this pleasure: a second eruption of high-frequency brain waves immediately after the initial pulse signaling an insight. (Only participants who had at least some “reward sensitivity,” the motivation to approach or acquire things, had this second burst; the others did not appear to respond with pleasure to solving the puzzles.) This second brain-wave pulse was in the front of the brain behind the right eyebrow, in the orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the reward system that responds to delicious foods, addictive substances, orgasms—and, evidently, aha! moments.

To discover whether more complex insights could lift mood over a longer time, Christine Chesebrough, then a doctoral student in John’s lab, developed word pairs that formed ongoing analogies, such as steering wheel/car followed by rudder/boat, both of which suggest an implement that guides a vehicle. The next word pair could be either handlebars/bicycle, which continues this theme, or voting/government, which forces the subject to reinterpret the ongoing analogy in a more abstract way as one entity controlling another. This conceptual expansion sparked strong aha! experiences that elevated participants’ moods for at least the hour-long test session—the more insights, the better their mood. The vibe persists. The joy of insights can thus impel scientists, artists, writers, and others to feel such a strong drive to express their creativity that they forgo a well-paying job to immerse themselves in their vocation, contributing essential ideas to culture and science.

The thrill of an aha! moment can increase risk-taking. As a doctoral student in Beeman’s lab, Yuhua Yu led a study in which she and her colleagues gave people CRA puzzles to solve. Between some of these puzzles, they offered the participants a choice between taking a small payment—a sure thing—and taking a chance to win a larger prize with the risk of no payoff. After finding an analytical solution, the volunteers tended to take the smaller, guaranteed payoff. But after enjoying an insight, participants were more likely to gamble on winning the bigger prize. Experiencing an aha! moment can therefore promote an appetite for risk, which, as Maxi Becker of Humboldt University of Berlin and her colleagues showed in 2023, involves the nucleus accumbens, a dopamine-rich part of the brain’s reward system.

Tolerance for risk can be good or bad depending on the circumstances. But one unequivocal benefit conferred by insightful thinking is reduced “bullshit receptivity,” as Carola Salvi of John Cabot University in Rome and her collaborators have found. People are flooded by biased information and slanted reporting, and their limited capacity to deal with this torrent of information makes them vulnerable to false messages. Fortunately, insightful thinking is largely unconscious and does not tax attention or working memory the way analytical thinking does. Salvi and her co-workers observed that the number of puzzles the participants in their study solved by insight—but not analysis—predicted how well they could discriminate between real news stories and fake ones, as well as between meaningful statements and “pseudo-profound bullshit” statements. Insightfulness is not only for dreamers: it confers real-world skills that help people navigate the overwhelming information landscape.

Insight also enhances learning and memory. Amory H. Danek of Heidelberg University in Germany and her colleagues showed participants videos of magic tricks and asked them to explain how the tricks were done. Later the subjects remembered the solutions that were experienced as aha! moments better than explanations that were not. Danek and Jennifer Wiley of the University of Illinois at Chicago followed up this study by showing that the pleasure accompanying insights made them easier to recall. Jasmin Kizilirmark of the University of Hildesheim in Germany and her colleagues have been exploring how this so-called insight memory advantage can be applied to improve memory in older adults.

Aha! moments can have a downside. Insights are more likely to be correct than analytical solutions—but they are not always correct. The dilemma is that people tend to be particularly confident about their insights, even the false ones. Furthermore, work by Ruben Laukkonen of Southern Cross University in Australia and his colleagues suggests that statements presented along with anagrams that people solve by insight also feel more believable than statements presented with anagrams solved by analysis. Aha! moments may create an aura of truth that envelops accompanying information.

The fact that mood can alter one’s thinking style has profound implications for our understanding of creativity. Subramaniam’s fMRI analyses isolated the lone area of the brain that responds to both differences in mood and differences in thinking style. This area, the anterior cingulate cortex, located in the middle of the front of the brain, detects conflicting strategies. When you are relaxed, your anterior cingulate cortex is better able to detect the presence of an alternative to the most obvious, but possibly ineffective, problem-solving strategy and switch to it, sparking an aha! moment. But when you are anxious, it is less able to detect the subtler strategy, and you will continue to grind through the problem in a straightforward, analytical manner.

An obvious way to increase insightfulness is therefore to relax and carve out a span of time when you aren’t anxious or rushed. Another way is expansion in space: When you are in a large room or the great outdoors—under a starry sky, as Morgan was—your attention expands to take in the large space. That broadened awareness shifts the mind toward considering the whole rather than the parts, thereby enhancing insightful thinking. Filtering out the world around you can have a similar effect: aha! moments are often preceded by eye blinks and looking away from a problem to reduce distractions. People solve more thinking problems when they close their eyes. In contrast, objects that grab attention will narrow your focus on details and induce you to think analytically.

Steven Smith of Texas A&M University and his collaborators have also shown that if you take a break from a problem to do something else, preferably a relatively undemanding task such as light gardening or housework, any misleading information or misinterpretation will loosen its grip, and you will be more likely to achieve an insight. Kristin Sanders, now at the University of Notre Dame, and Beeman showed that sleep can enhance this process, supporting the many stories of scientists who have experienced great ideas during or right after sleep. Colleen Seifert and David E. Meyer of the University of Michigan and their colleagues reported another benefit of breaks: you may encounter a trigger—a person, a street sign, anything—that can spark an aha! moment because the trigger bears some resemblance to or association with the needed solution.

How about drugs? The thought of popping a pill that would unlock creative insights may be appealing for some people. Microdosing psychedelic drugs has been proposed to increase innovative thinking. We are not aware of any rigorous scientific evidence that psychedelics can increase the likelihood of insights, although they may cause a person to feel creative and profound. But alcohol, if not taken to extremes, does seem to enhance insightful solving. (That is not an endorsement!)

Perhaps there are other ways to directly intervene in brain function to produce aha! moments. Several researchers, including Beeman, Salvi, Amna Ghani of Charité–Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Caroline Di Bernardi Luft of Brunel University London and Joydeep Bhattacharya of Goldsmiths, University of London, have shown that direct electrical stimulation of test subjects’ right temporal lobes with electrodes placed on their heads—in some cases, synchronized with hints—can increase the likelihood that they will solve CRA puzzles using insight. For various reasons, though—including the fact that different types of insight involve different areas of the brain—it is unlikely that electrical stimulation will become useful as a technique for sparking aha! moments.

Here’s what does not work: expectations of monetary prizes or bonuses. Payments can coax a person to tackle a problem—and people should certainly be compensated for their work—but they can also inhibit insights. A focus on an expected payoff grabs and narrows one’s attention, limiting creative thought. Messages about rewards can enhance insight—but only when they are displayed so briefly that a person cannot consciously perceive them. When innovation is the goal, conspicuous rewards may therefore be counterproductive, as are strict deadlines that switch one’s thinking to an analytical mode by inducing anxiety and narrowing mental focus.

Alternatively, you could just go get groceries. Vishal Rao, an oncologist in India, endured years of frustration before a surprising twist enabled him and his unique team to create an amazing medical device. As a surgeon specializing in neck and throat cancer, Rao knew that most of the tens of thousands of new patients with throat cancer each year in India could not afford the prohibitive cost of surgery to replace their diseased voice box with an artificial one. So, in 2013, Rao formed a team that developed an inexpensive artificial voice box costing less than a dollar.

But there was one roadblock remaining. The artificial voice box had to be replaced yearly in a surgical procedure that costs hundreds of dollars, a regular expense way beyond the means of most of his patients. He needed an inexpensive, nonsurgical tool that a patient could use to remove an old artificial voice box and implant a new one—a challenge that seemed insurmountable.

One day Rao went to the supermarket with his toddler. The boy broke free and started running down the aisles, gleefully knocking things off the shelves. Rao chased and caught him, but only after the boy had knocked down a box of tampons, the contents of which spilled out onto the floor. When Rao saw the tampon applicator, it sparked an aha! moment: here was a safe, inexpensive, nonsurgical implement that could be a model for a voice-box applicator.

When Rao explained this idea to others, they said the device he wanted sounded more like a toy than a surgical instrument. This comment triggered the doctor’s second aha! moment. He recalled that Channapatna, a nearby city, is nicknamed “toy town” because of its centuries-old tradition of master craftsmen who design and make inexpensive wood toys. After interviewing Channapatna toy makers, he found Kouser Pasha, who was intrigued by the idea. It took Pasha just a couple of hours to come up with a design for an inexpensive voice-box applicator.

Just as hungry people tend to notice anything related to food, Rao’s initial failure to imagine an inexpensive applicator sensitized his brain to anything around him that looked like it could help him solve the problem. When he took a break from his problem, his old ways of thinking relaxed their grip as he was exposed to a variety of objects in the supermarket. One of those objects, the tampon applicator, was potentially related to the problem, so it grabbed his attention. Once he figured out that a similar device would work, the surgeon still had to figure out how to design and manufacture it. The need for a solution sensitized him to the word “toy,” which triggered his insight about recruiting a toy maker from “toy town.”

The upshot: when you are stuck, take a break and expose yourself to a variety of environments and people to increase the chance you will encounter a triggering stimulus. Perhaps the most important scientific lesson about insight, though, is that it is as fragile as it is beneficial. The aha! moment brings new ideas and perspectives, lifts mood, increases tolerance for risk, and enhances the ability to discern truth from fiction. But anxiety and sleep deprivation can squash these precious gifts.

Modern society’s unrelenting demand for productivity and speed often denies insight the time and opportunity to work wonders at its own pace. Even so, we need to remember the value and power of insights and the conditions that spark them. As Morgan’s galactic epiphany shows, when it comes to aha! moments, the sky is the limit.