27/09/2008 by admin.

In a recent ScienceDaily item was a summary of Joydeep Bhattacharya’s work on the ‘eureka’ moment.

“Real-world problems come in two broad flavors: those requiring sequential reasoning and those requiring transformative reasoning: a break from past thinking and restructuring followed by an insight (also known as Eureka or “Aha!”), which is a process by which a problem solver abruptly, through a quantum leap of understanding with no conscious forewarning, moves from a state of not knowing how to solve a problem to a state of knowing how to solve it.

Despite its widespread reports, the brain mechanism underlying eureka is poorly understood. What happens in the brain during that particular moment? Is that moment purely sudden as often reported by the solver or is there any (neural) precursor to it? Can we predict whether and when, if at all, the solver will hit upon the final eureka moment?

In a new study led by Joydeep Bhattacharya at Goldsmiths, University of London, these questions were addressed by measuring brainwaves of human participants as they attempted to solve puzzles or brainteasers that call for intuitive strategies and novel insight. They detected an array of specific patterns in characteristic brainwaves which occurred several (up to eight) seconds before the participant was consciously aware of an insight. Right hemisphere was further found to be critically involved in transformative reasoning.

These results indicate that insight is a distinct spectral, spatial, and temporal pattern of unconscious neural activity corresponding to pre-solution cognitive processes, and not to one’s self-assessment of their insight or the emotional “Aha!” that accompanies problem solution. Further, this study also postulates that consciousness is like an emergent tip of an iceberg of neuronal information processing, and remote brainwave patterns could reveal the underlying structure leading to that emergence.”

It is interesting that conscious concentration on a problem can postpone the eureka type solution. As Richard Highfield’s Telegraphy article puts it, “Scientists have discovered why Archimedes had to relax in a bath before discovering his famous principle.” One might also say we know why Newton was relaxing under an apple tree or Kekule was falling off to sleep.

The stages that can be traced in combined behaviour, verbal reporting and brain wave measurements are: mental impasse including attention overload, relaxation of attention allowing the restructuring the problem, deeper understanding or insight into the problem and its solution, sudden consciousness of the correct solution or the insightful path to it.

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