I love being an armchair neuroanatomist
Apr. 25th, 2004 03:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
novapsycheEureka! Scientists map the moment
Mark Jung-Beeman and Edward Bowden of Northwestern University, and John Kounios of Drexel University, report in the Public Library of Science journal Biology today that the so-called "Aha!" moment is accompanied by a burst of telltale neural activity in the right hemisphere of the brain.
[...] The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to watch what happened in the brain as volunteers tackled word puzzles such as, "What word links the following three: fence, card and master? Answer: Post." Each volunteer was asked to record whether the answer was arrived at gradually or in a flash that felt like insight. Most of the laborious thinking activity seemed to be in the brain's left hemisphere. But the "aha!" moment was recorded in the right temporal lobe, in a region called the anterior superior temporal gyrus.
[...] "People often reach an impasse and are not able to make any progress," Dr Bowden said. "They need to reinterpret and integrate information in a new way. Sometimes the mind does this unconsciously and then the solution suddenly appears in the conscious. To the solver, the solution seems to have come out of thin air, yet is obviously correct.
Dr Jung-Beeman said: "Archimedes sudden observation that water displacement could be used to calculate density resulted from his connecting known concepts in new ways. This is the nature of many insights, the recognition of new connections across existing knowledge."
Mark Jung-Beeman and Edward Bowden of Northwestern University, and John Kounios of Drexel University, report in the Public Library of Science journal Biology today that the so-called "Aha!" moment is accompanied by a burst of telltale neural activity in the right hemisphere of the brain.
[...] The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to watch what happened in the brain as volunteers tackled word puzzles such as, "What word links the following three: fence, card and master? Answer: Post." Each volunteer was asked to record whether the answer was arrived at gradually or in a flash that felt like insight. Most of the laborious thinking activity seemed to be in the brain's left hemisphere. But the "aha!" moment was recorded in the right temporal lobe, in a region called the anterior superior temporal gyrus.
[...] "People often reach an impasse and are not able to make any progress," Dr Bowden said. "They need to reinterpret and integrate information in a new way. Sometimes the mind does this unconsciously and then the solution suddenly appears in the conscious. To the solver, the solution seems to have come out of thin air, yet is obviously correct.
Dr Jung-Beeman said: "Archimedes sudden observation that water displacement could be used to calculate density resulted from his connecting known concepts in new ways. This is the nature of many insights, the recognition of new connections across existing knowledge."