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
As a self-described uncreative person, Yu has been particularly fascinated by insight’s role in the creative process. Creativity is “like a magic power,” she said. “A really big creative idea is [often] associated with insight because a creative idea is in some way a leap in your cognitive world, and a leap will often elicit an insight or ‘aha’ feeling.”
However, Yu is finding that insight’s role in creativity might depend on the kind of problem a person is solving. In a recent study, she asked participants to come up with metaphors for scientific concepts and asked whether they used insight as they did so. The insight-driven metaphors weren’t more or less creative than those created through analytic thinking, she found — and the participants were more likely to remember the science concepts behind the latter.
This may be because, unlike the task of seeing a hidden object in a Mooney image, creating a metaphor tends to rely on slower cognitive problem-solving rather than sudden moments of insight, Becker suggested. The effects of insight therefore likely depend on the context.
Next, Yu wants to investigate insight in more contexts. “Most of the insight research is looking at insight in the problem-solving context and in the lab setting,” Yu said. She hopes that researchers will begin investigating “insight within many other domains, like in psychotherapy, in meditation, even in psychedelic experiences.”
Beyond offering a better understanding of how the human brain learns, these findings could have applications in classrooms. Kounios believes that applying insight-boosting strategies to teaching could lead to better learning outcomes for students. Insight seems to be a powerful and positive experience that generates accurate solutions, confidence in our answers and strong memories.
“It’s very intensive for a teacher to do this, but a lot of really good teachers try to get the students to have the insights themselves about how something works, and that will burn it into their memories,” Kounios said. “Another aspect of that [is], it’s very motivating, too.”
It’s a nice feeling when your brain suddenly comes up with an answer. Perhaps you’ve even experienced that feeling since reading this piece’s first sentence. Maybe it even hit you like an apple on the head.