There’s something so satisfying about surprising “aha!” moments — those strange instances of insight that strike when you’re struggling with a problem and arrive at an answer suddenly, seemingly without warning. But is satisfying all that those moments are?
Apparently not, as it turns out that the flashes of inspiration you feel when a solution finally bursts into your brain are much more than pleasurable. They’re also an important part of your memory-making process.
Tied to surges of activity in your brain, these moments may shape your ideas into stronger memories, a new neuroimaging study suggests. Published in Nature Communications, the results may adjust the way we approach education, as environments that encourage learners to explore problems and experience “eureka” moments may lead to longer-lasting learning.
Read More: What’s Going On Inside Your Brain When Your Mind Goes Blank?
New Insight Into Eureka Moments
Example of the hidden picture puzzles in the black/white images on the left; corresponding real-world picture on the right. (Image Credit: Maxi Becker)
It’s a bit of a stretch to say that the relationship between “aha!” moments and memory is a sudden insight in and of itself, as eureka moments and epiphanies have been associated with memory boosts before. But little is known about how, exactly, these moments work, and about how they’re tied to memory at a neuroscientific level.
Setting out to study the neural mechanisms that connect sudden insight and memory together, the authors of the new study recorded people’s neural activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as they solved a series of visual puzzles. After the participants solved the puzzles, the researchers then prompted them to describe their thought process — particularly, whether they worked out their solutions suddenly or slowly, with a single moment of inspiration or without.
Analyzing the participants’ recordings along with their responses, the authors revealed that the puzzles that participants solved with moments of sudden insight were associated with surges of activity in the hippocampus — a small structure in the brain that’s responsible for learning and memory.
In fact, the researchers even linked stronger moments of inspiration to stronger surges of activity in the hippocampus. And these surges weren’t trivial, either, as they meant that participants were “actually more likely to remember the solution” to particular puzzles later on, said lead study author Maxi Becker, a neuroscience researcher at Humboldt University, according to a press release.
When the authors tested the participants to see whether they remembered their solutions to the puzzles several days after they solved them, the results revealed that they recalled the solutions they settled on suddenly, with a sense of epiphany, better than those they settled on slowly, without that same sense.
“If you have an ‘aha! moment’ while learning something, it almost doubles your memory,” said senior study author Roberto Cabeza, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, according to a press release. “There are few memory effects that are as powerful as this.”
Read More: What Happens in Your Brain When You Make Memories?
Measuring ‘Aha!’ Moments
Example of the hidden picture puzzles in the black/white images on the left; the corresponding real-world picture on the right. (Image Credit: Maxi Becker.)
The puzzles themselves were simple, though they were still able to encourage epiphanies on a small scale. Testing their ability to parse through patchy visual information, the puzzles prompted participants to identify ambiguous black-and-white images of objects and of animals, such as snakes, snails, and spiders.
“It’s just a little discovery that you are making, but it produces the same type of characteristics that exist in more important insight events,” Cabeza said in the release.
According to the researchers, the brain recordings also revealed bumps in activity in brain regions responsible for visual recognition, with a stronger sense of sudden insight being seen with a stronger bump in activity in the ventral occipito-temporal cortex (VOTC). Not only that, the researchers also revealed an association between more intense “aha!” moments and more intense brain connectivity between the hippocampus and the VOTC.
“The different regions essentially communicate with each other more efficiently,” Cabeza said in the release.
Ultimately, the study provides important insights into the neuroscience of some of our most sudden, most creative, and most satisfying solutions. It also supports the idea that exploratory learning, based on active inquiry and investigation, may be better for our minds by encouraging these surprising moments to occur.
“Insight is key for creativity,” Cabeza said in the release — a lesson for learning that all of us should try to remember.
Read More: How The Brain Decides Which Memories To Keep And Which To Discard
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Sam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
