Brain scans reveal what happens in the mind when insight strikes

(Press-News.org) DURHAM, N.C. -- Have you ever been stuck on a problem, puzzling over something for what felt like ages without getting anywhere, but then suddenly the answer came to you like a bolt from the blue?

We’ve all experienced that “aha! moment,” that sudden clarity or magical epiphany you feel when a new idea or perspective pops into your head as if out of nowhere.

Now, new evidence from brain imaging research shows that these flashes of insight aren’t just satisfying — they actually reshape how your brain represents information, and help sear it into memory.

Led by researchers at Duke University and Humboldt and Hamburg Universities in Germany, the work has implications for education, suggesting that fostering “eureka moments” could help make learning last beyond the classroom.

If you have an aha experience when solving something, “you're actually more likely to remember the solution,” said first author Maxi Becker, a postdoctoral fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin.

The findings were published May 9 in the journal Nature Communications.

In the study, the researchers used a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record people’s brain activity while they tried to solve visual brain teasers. The puzzles required them to "fill in the blanks" of a series of two-tone images with minimal detail, using their perception to complete the picture and identify a real-world object.

Such hidden picture puzzles serve as small-scale proxies for bigger eureka moments. “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 senior author Roberto Cabeza, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke.

For each puzzle the participants thought they solved, the researchers asked whether the solution just popped into their awareness in a flash of sudden insight, or whether they worked it out in a more deliberate and methodical way, and how certain they were of their answer.

The results were striking.

Participants tended to recall solutions that came to them in a flash of insight far better than ones they arrived at without this sense of epiphany. Furthermore, the more conviction a person felt about their insight at the time, the more likely they were to remember it five days later when the researchers asked them again.

“If you have an ‘aha! moment’ while learning something, it almost doubles your memory,” said Cabeza, who has been studying memory for 30 years. “There are few memory effects that are as powerful as this.”

A number of changes in the brain may cause people to have better memory for “aha! moments,” the researchers found.

They discovered that flashes of insight trigger a burst of activity in the brain’s hippocampus, a cashew-shaped structure buried deep in the temporal lobe that plays a major role in learning and memory. The more powerful the insight, the greater the boost.

They also found that the activation patterns across the participants’ neurons changed once they spotted the hidden object and saw the image in a new light -- particularly in certain parts of the brain’s ventral occipito-temporal cortex, the region responsible for recognizing visual patterns. The stronger the epiphany, the greater the change in those areas.

“During these moments of insight, the brain reorganizes how it sees the image,” said Becker, who did the work in the Cabeza lab.

Lastly, stronger “aha!” experiences were associated with greater connectivity between these different brain regions. “The different regions essentially communicate with each other more efficiently,” Cabeza said.

The current study looked at brain activity at two specific moments in time, before and after the eureka moment when the lightbulb appeared. As a next step, the researchers plan to look more closely at what happens during the few seconds in between that allows people to finally see the answer.

“Insight is key for creativity,” Cabeza said. In addition to shedding light on how the brain comes up with creative solutions, the findings also lend support for inquiry-based learning in the classroom.

“Learning environments that encourage insight could boost long-term memory and understanding,” the researchers wrote.

This research was funded by the Einstein Foundation Berlin (EPP-2017-423, RC) and by the Sonophilia Foundation.

CITATION: "Insight Predicts Subsequent Memory via Cortical Representational Change and Hippocampal Activity," Maxi Becker, Tobias Sommer, Roberto Cabeza. Nature Communications, May 9, 205. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-59355-4  

END