+Sudden Insight+
[an excerpt from the feature article, published electronically in April 2009 as my master's thesis]
.....The idea of the ‘aha’ moment is appealing, but how big of a player is it in the creative process? With new tools, scientist have begun to untangle the ‘aha’ moment, the legendary marker of a creative mind, from other kinds of thinking. Sudden insights, as it turns out, are not the only brain processes involved in making a scientific discovery or writing a manuscript, but may be a marker of a truly unique solution.
From an office lying just below ground level at USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute, Dr. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh studies moments of insight that often occur during the solving of word problems. By studying small ‘aha’ moments, which work the same way as larger ‘aha’ moments, she can begin to model what is happening in the brain during creative thinking. For the past year, she has been examining the thought processes of anagram solvers, people who push around letters in their brain to rearrange them into different words or phrases, forming axiom from oxmia, for instance.
The anagram solvers are chosen from a large cross-section of ordinary individuals,
screened for their proficiency in solving these word problems. No specific discipline or lifestyle makes people proficient in this task. No specific personality or level of education bars people from the ability to solve an anagram. These small creative moments can happen to anyone who has knowledge of the English language and understanding of how anagrams work.
It only takes 20 seconds to solve an anagram, but if Dr. Aziz-Zadeh can follow brain activity during this brief interval of time, she might be able to pick out how an ‘aha’ moment differs from a more logical path the solution.
She follows what the brain is doing during each type of problem-solving using an fMRI machine, a brain imaging tool that was developed in the 1990s and has recently been widely adopted in psychology as a way to connect human behaviors with corresponding activity in the brain. This tool has been somewhat liberating—scientists can now peer further into the brain function than ever before. Researchers who have long been studying mental conditions ranging from exceptional intelligence to mental illness, now have a way to match extraordinary behaviors with patterns of brain activation. The fMRI machine can now visualize strokes and seizures in the brains of epileptic patients and find areas of the brain that impair emotional function in disturbed individuals.
fMRI--which stands for functional magnetic resonance imaging-- displays activity in the brain as red spots on a black computer-generated image with the brain’s crevices traced in grey. The red spots indicate a high blood oxygen level, which means that the blood in nearby blood vessels is releasing oxygen to the neurons in this particular part of the brain. The oxygenated neurons now have the fuel to channel electrical signals all over the brain to form thoughts, feelings, and anything else we experience.
During her trials, she asks the anagram solvers to indicate whether the solution “popped into their mind seemingly from nowhere” or whether they solved the anagram “in steps.” The anagram solvers used each technique about half the time. The solution that “popped into their mind seemingly from nowhere” is Dr. Aziz-Zadeh’s way of identifying the “aha moment.” Her studies have shown that many specific spots on both sides of the brain are active at the same time during a sudden insight. She theorizes that before and during a sudden insight, information that has been stored in distant areas of the brain is being brought together. As these areas are linked, the information held at these distant spots is suddenly fit together like a puzzle to form a creative solution.
“At the exact moment of ‘aha’, several areas of the brain are connected at once, often at long distances, to produce a unique response,” she says.......