Health and Medicine
You know how sometimes you can spend ages thinking about a problem, and then suddenly, the answer just clicks? These moments of insight are super-satisfying, but it turns out they can also reveal really important things about how our brains hold onto memories, as a new study from scientists in the US and Germany has uncovered.
There’s a reason why the story of Archimedes, the ancient Greek master mathematician and bath enthusiast, resonates with so many people. The possibly apocryphal tale of the great thinker running naked through the streets yelling “Eureka!” is, if not exactly relatable, at least understandable. It feels really great to solve a puzzle that’s been bugging you, especially when it comes with a satisfying flash of insight – an “aha!” moment.
“I’ve always found those sudden moments of insight – those ‘Aha!’ experiences – deeply fascinating,” study first author Maxi Becker, a postdoctoral fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin, told IFLScience. “They’re powerful emotionally, giving you a rush of pleasure, and they’re also striking cognitively, because once the answer clicks into place, it suddenly feels obvious and perfectly fitting with what you already know.”
“Since my PhD, I’ve been curious about how the brain produces these moments – what’s going on under the hood, so to speak.”
I wasn’t expecting the patterns to emerge as clearly and reliably as they did.
Maxi Becker
Teaming up with co-author Tobias Sommer and senior author Roberto Cabeza, Becker conducted a study with 31 volunteers aged between 19 and 33. The participants were asked to solve visual puzzles while lying in an MRI scanner, and functional MRI data was collected to try to capture the moment the answers came to them.
“With these methods, we can now actually observe how brain activity shifts as a person moves from confusion to clarity – from searching for meaning to that sudden moment when everything makes sense,” Becker explained.
The idea behind the puzzles, called Mooney images, is simple. You look at a black and white, high-contrast photo and try to figure out what real-world object it is depicting.
“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,” said Cabeza in a statement.
Each time, the participants were asked whether the solution had suddenly come to them, or whether they had figured out the answer more methodically. Later, some of the images they had already seen were shown to the participants again as a memory recall exercise.
“I was genuinely surprised by how consistent the results turned out to be,” Becker told IFLScience. “Neuroimaging tends to be quite noisy, especially when examining something as complex and abstract as insight. So I wasn’t expecting the patterns to emerge as clearly and reliably as they did.”
What the team saw was that solutions that came with an “aha!” moment were remembered much better by participants than those they had worked out more deliberately. The more strongly someone felt that their flash of inspiration was correct, the more likely they’d be to remember it five days later.
Cabeza commented, “If you have an ‘aha! moment’ while learning something, it almost doubles your memory. There are few memory effects that are as powerful as this.”
“The effect of insight on memory is striking and has meaningful implications for how we understand and support human learning,” Becker told us, explaining that this research could have applications in teaching and education.
“This points to the value of learning experiences that promote insight – such as encouraging students to generate solutions, grapple with ambiguity, or engage in ways that spark ‘aha’ moments. Such approaches may not only improve retention but also foster deeper, more conceptual understanding.”
“While further research is needed to explore how broadly this applies, especially beyond visual problems, our results highlight the potential of insight-driven learning as a powerful tool for education.”
The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.
