Aha! Cognitive neuroscientists reveal creative brain...( own was pure gold a problem that had p...),Health

"As supposedly happened to Archimedes, prior to solving problems with insight people often reach an impasse and are not able to make any progress," said Edward Bowden, a senior research associate at Northwestern. "They need to reinterpret the problem and integrate information in a new way. Sometimes the mind does this unconsciously, and then the solution suddenly appears in consciousness. To the solver, the solution seems to have come out of thin air, yet is obviously correct."

In two experiments, Jung-Beeman and his colleagues gave study participants a series of word problems to solve. Each problem presented three words, such as fence, card and master, and asked participants to think of one word that would form a compound word or phrase for each of the words. (The answer? Post.) In addition to solving the problem, each person reported whether or not the solution felt like an insight. (The problems were designed to evoke a distinct "Aha!" moment about half the time they are solved.) Brain activity was assessed while participants tackled, and sometimes solved, these problems.

In the first experiment, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) revealed increased activity in a small part of the right temporal lobe (the anterior superior temporal gyrus) during insight solutions and little activity during non-insight solutions. No insight effect was observed anywhere within the temporal lobe of the left hemisphere. Prior evidence suggests that the right temporal area, which is associated with insight, may be important for drawing distantly related information together when comprehending complex language.

"Archimedes' sudden observation that water displacement could be used to calculate density resulted from his connecting known concepts in new ways," said Jung-Beeman. "This is the nature of many insights, the recognition of new connections across existing knowledge."
'"/>

Contact: Megan Fellman
fellman@northwestern.edu
847-491-3115
Northwestern University
13-Apr-2004