Aha! Moments
Pop Up from Below
the Level of
Conscious Awareness
People in a study handily solved
puzzles while juggling an unrelated
mental task by relying on spontane-
ous insight, not analytic thinking
Most of us have had the experience
of struggling mightily to solve a
problem only to find, while taking
a walk or doing the dishes, that the
answer comes to us seemingly from
nowhere. Psychologists call these
sudden aha! moments “insight.” They
occur not only when we are faced
with a problem but also when we
suddenly “get” a joke or crossword
puzzle clue or are jolted by a personal
realization. Scientists have identified
distinctive brain activity patterns that
signal moments of insight, but there
is still some debate about whether
insight is simply the final, most
satisfying step in a deliberative
thought process or a wholly separate
form of thinking.
An ingenious new study by a team
of Belgian psychologists provides
additional evidence that insight
engages unconscious mechanisms
that differ from analytic, step-by-step
reasoning. Even when people are
managing multiple demands on their
brainpower, the research suggests
their intuitive thought processes may
still be readily accessible.
“You can be overloaded by all this
type of stuff, cell phones or whatev-
er, and your insights remain shield-
ed,” says Hans Stuyck, a doctoral
student at Université Libre deBruxelles and KU Leuven in Bel-
gium, who led the study.
For that investigation, which was
first published online in December
2021 in the journal Cognition, the
psychologists created 70 word
puzzles that undergraduate students
could solve using either insight or
analytic reasoning. Each puzzle
consisted of three Dutch words
displayed on a computer screen.
The task was to find a fourth word
that pairs with each. (For example, ifthe test were conducted in English,
people might be given the words
“artist,” “hatch” and “route,” with
the answer being “escape” because
“escape artist,” “escape hatch”
and “escape route” are all recogniz-
able phrases.)
The 105 undergraduates, most of
whom were women, had up to 25
seconds to solve each problem. After
typing an answer, they indicated
whether they had reached it “with
aha!”—which they were told meant Iya Forbes/Getty ImagesNEWS