According to brain researcher Micha Heilbron of the Donders Institute, something happens at such a moment that does not quite match our expectations. “Our brain makes predictions all day long. By constantly comparing those predictions with reality, we learn new things. If that reality differs greatly from the prediction, you speak of an aha experience.” So an aha moment is actually a very general feeling. Someone can experience this who discovers penicillin completely unexpectedly, but also when he finds the hole in a flat bicycle tire after a long search.
Can you see the gorilla in this optical illusion? Most people don’t see it right away. But once you know it, you never forget it. You will find the answer below this article.
“The principle also occurs in perception, especially in optical illusions,” says Heilbron. “When you look at a blotchy picture and suddenly see the monkey, or the Dalmatian. That’s the same feeling. You really get a new insight. Something changes permanently in your brain at that moment, because you cannot relive such an illusion. The same applies to speech: once you hear what is being said in a crackly sound recording, you will always understand it from now on.”
Bath, bus and bed
The aha experience – also known as the eureka moment – is therefore not reserved for genius discoveries. Although that also depends on the definition of genius, says psychologist and ideas expert Simone Ritter of Radboud University. “A child can also have an aha-experience, if it comes up with something that is completely new to that child. The formal definition of a good idea is that it is original, innovative and useful. But it can meet that on different levels.”
Great discoveries seem to indicate that such an idea always pops up at a random moment without your influence. According to Ritter, that is certainly not the case. “It can also happen if you are really looking for a solution. You can create those conditions yourself. The three famous moments when creativity is sparked are in the bath, bus and bed. Those are moments when your brain is in a kind of resting position: you are less focused.”
The famous inventor Thomas Edison firmly believed in the resting position of the brain. He reportedly took afternoon naps with a ball in his hand. The moment he fell asleep, that ball fell to the floor and he woke up with a start. Right at his most creative moment.
This is pretty much at odds with modern life. In our daily worries, we are very focused on an end goal. Finish your calendar events. Read compulsory material. Reply to emails. We often do this on autopilot, which hinders creativity. Think of a car trip with Google Maps on your dashboard. The focus on that screen ensures that you don’t get much of the route and that you don’t take an accidental turn. Without navigation, you better save where you drive, look around you more and the chance of hunches is greater. “Without focus, less strongly associated concepts are more likely to come together to form an idea. That’s creativity. And to achieve that, you have to be open to all sorts of things.”
Euphoric feeling
An aha experience can therefore be the end point of a long search and research, where you really learned something. Connections in the complex network of brain cells are then strengthened or created in the brain. This phenomenon is called synaptic plasticity and, according to current insights in brain science, it is the biological basis for learning and memory. To what extent this also works in the case of really sudden hunches is still unknown.
Suddenly or not, once such an idea falls, as the solution, it feels good. Because however high-quality inventions, ideas and solutions may be, in fact the aha experience itself is primarily a sensation. A euphoric feeling of reward and relief. According to Heilbron, this has everything to do with dopamine, a substance that is produced in the depths of our brains and released when the brain is unexpectedly rewarded, or when something turns out better than expected.
The more unexpected, the better that feeling, even if it doesn’t even yield that much. Think of the feeling of happiness when you win ten euros in a football pool, while the deposit of your monthly salary means little to you. For example, solving the Rubik’s cube can be a true aha experience, while a long-awaited solution to a problem at work feels like routine. “So it says something about the expectations of your own insight, because the phenomenon occurs when you are pleasantly surprised by that own insight – when you exceed your own expectations. You get the opposite feeling when something is on the tip of your tongue: you expect to know something, but you just can’t figure it out. If you can’t live up to that expectation, it feels disappointing.”
In a recent study, leading Princeton researchers call the aha experience a “metacognitive prediction error.” That study clearly shows that the feeling of surprise and satisfaction arises from the difference between the expectation and the outcome. “Test subjects who found the solution after a long puzzle, received an aha experience. At times like that, the dopamine skyrockets. That is also true with the tip of your tongue: the longer it takes, the more annoying it becomes.”
Creative thinking
If you would like to find what is at that point, it can help, according to Simone Ritter, to stop looking for it for a while. Hard work and studying can certainly make you see connections or arrive at the right answers. But stopping the pondering and shifting your focus is a good way to come up with a solution, to cause that aha-experience. “It’s about breaking through routines, letting go of your fixed patterns and your own frames of reference. It helps to get away for a while, take a walk or a bus ride, even if it’s just a cup of coffee. Coming up with creative solutions is not magic, because you can create excellent conditions for it.”
This doesn’t work exactly the same way for everyone. Moreover, people often look for that good idea in groups, as a team or as an organization. But according to Ritter, anyone can do this, one way or another. For example, by using creative thinking techniques, which are all based on the same theory: get rid of your entrenched thinking and behavior patterns.
“I often bet on an A, B, C brainstorm. If you have a question, look for solutions that start with that letter. For example, how do we get students to campus? I just shout something: Attention, Let the bus drive more, Community building. That forces you to get out of your comfort zone. Another example is the superhero technique: What would Spiderman do? Or Pippi Longstocking? It doesn’t always have to be in the form of a brainstorming session. It can already help to organize the environment differently, by creating space for creativity as an organization. For example, by collaborating with people outside your field, as we increasingly do multidisciplinary research in science. By listening to each other, learning to speak each other’s language, by combining theories and working methods, you come up with new ideas.”
Now look at both images. Can you see the gorilla in the top image? Feels good huh?
This article was written by Roeland Segeren and appeared earlier on NEMO Kennislink. Foto 1 door Clement Eastwood via Pexels. Foto 2 & 3 door Barbara Nordhjem.