FAQs Regarding FMRI/EEG Study of Insight Problem Solving

What did we find?

Is this related to “real-life” insight?

Are there any educational implications?

The main area showing unique involvement for insight solutions was in the Right Hemisphere. Does this support the view that the RH is the creative half of the brain?

This was a verbal task – why wasn’t the LEFT hemisphere involved?

Is the identified area of the brain “the insight area?”

What about other types of insight problems – would this area be involved?

Does this area contribute to other behaviors besides insight problem solving?

Could this brain activity relate just to different emotional responses to insight solutions and noninsight solutions?

How do these results relate to consciousness?

Why PloS?

Who else is working on “insight,” or related creative cognition?

Who has commented on this work?

We investigated whether different neural – and hence, cognitive – mechanisms are used when people solve problems with insight – leading to an Aha! experience – versus when people solve without insight. The biggest results from this study are:

1. Different neural circuits are engaged when people solve these problems with or without insight. This confirms and extends a variety of behavioral results from cognitive psychology that suggest the two types of solutions require different processes. (Some researchers had suggested that the solutions only differ in the type of emotional response they evoke). There may be other areas involved as well, but our study confirms at least a single difference.
2. The particular location and pattern of neural activity help constrain theories about how insight differs from straightforward (noninsight) problem solving. We conclude that at least one important difference is that insight involves processing that ties together various problem elements and the solution. Also, the information that ties the elements together emerges into consciousness quite suddenly.

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On the one hand, it’s interesting to see what goes on when we solve these little puzzles, and it certainly relates to insights we have when we solve other verbal puzzles – such as crosswords, probably riddles, and so on.

More importantly, we think our study gives us a foothold to study insight and creative cognition more generally. For seemingly as long as people have thought about thinking, they have recognized that solving problems with insight seems to differ qualitatively from straightforward problem solving. But it has been difficult to study such cognition for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that “big insights,” like new scientific theories and personal breakthroughs, are rare events. In contrast, more routine creativity is an important aspect of everyday life – not on the scale of great scientific discoveries or masterpieces of art but it is creative none-the-less for us.

The problems we use allow us to view many small insights over the course of an experiment. They also allow us to directly contrast solving with and without insight when other processes are held constant, because the problems can be solve either way, about half the time. This is a different approach than has been used in many behavioral experiments, in which subjects are presented with “insight problems” and “noninsight problems.” Two problems arise with this approach. First, a problem that I might not be able to solve unless I have an insight, you might be able to solve in straightforward manner. Second, “noninsight problems” that are just as difficult as “insight problems” likely add many additional processes (e.g., some transformation or calculation) not required by the insight problems. Our problems all required the same basic processes – verbal retrieval, testing of potential solutions, selecting a final solution, and a button press. Yet they differed in some key manner, most likely the manner in which the potential solution was generated.

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Some of the most satisfying moments during learning come when someone understands something for the first time or in a new way. To a large extent this experience is what motivates scientists and artists, and it is very motivating to anyone trying to learn new information. One thing that we hope will come from this line of research is a better understanding of what underlies creativity and problem solving. The better we understand such processes, the more likely someone will be able to apply that understanding to education.

One way this could prove useful in education is by helping teachers know how to structure learning situations so that children are more likely to experience an insight in understanding, or arrive at creative solutions. We do not mean that the solution will be creative in a large scale sense - children are unlikely to produce truly novel solutions -- yet they will produce solutions that are novel or them and give them satisfaction.

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Yes and no. We prefer to think that people use 100% of their brains! Still, there may be a grain of truth to the popular belief that the right hemisphere aids creativity. The RH may make particular types of contributions to insight, as well as other types of creative thinking. However, keep in mind that we are only showing one small part of the process. Coming up with solutions to these problems requires a large network of cortical areas performing different processes, like reading the words, verbal retrieval, comparison of possible solutions, and so on. Many brain areas were involved in solving the problems, although this one was much more active during insight solutions than noninsight solutions. (Also, other brain areas may also show this effect – this RH area showed the most robust effect, the only one strong enough for us to have great confidence in it).

It is certainly possible that the LH would produce the same solution without the aid of the RH, but maybe less frequently, or with a slightly different strategy. Optimal processing of information usually involves both hemispheres (two hemispheres are better than one!)

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This was a purely verbal task. Not only popular folklore, but indeed mainstream neurology and cognitive psychology would predict that the LH should have the advantage for this verbal task. Thus, our results show that it’s usually not simple to divide up behaviors like “verbal processing” or “insight” into one hemisphere or even one brain region. We believe that both hemispheres process verbal information, but with different processing strategies, or computations. It so happens that the strategy employed by the right hemisphere is most likely to be useful in making the distant connections necessary to overcome a solving impasse and have an insight.

Keep in mind that some left hemisphere areas were also active during insight solutions, it’s just that they were equally involved in noninsight solutions. In contrast, the right temporal lobe area was especially active during insight – and not during noninsight – solutions; it’s left hemisphere counterpart did not show much change in activity during either type of solution.

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We don’t feel we should use this label, for a number of reasons:

1. This area is involved in other tasks too (see below).
2. Other brain areas are also involved in solving these problems, this was just one component process, within a network of processes necessary to solve the problems.
3. The data also hinted at other brain areas that were more strongly involved in insight than noninsight solutions. This is a new area of inquiry and the information about what other areas and cognitive processes are involved in insight is likely to evolve.
4. It is not yet known whether this specific brain area would be involved when people solve other types of problems with insight (see next question). We predict there will be similarities in regions and temporal patterns of neural activity for other types of insight, but this exact region may not always be involved.
5. Given the importance of this area for certain language tasks, we believe its function is to help integrate (pull together) related information. This area in the LH is somewhat better at tying together closely related information, and in the RH somewhat better at tying together distantly related information. This turns out to be a critical component of many “insights.”

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Yes, for some types of verbal or semantic problems, as well as for some types of language comprehension (see next Q).

For nonverbal problems, we predict similar brain regions could be involved in other types of insight, but this exact region may not always be involved. For instance, purely visual insights may involve more inferior aspects of anterior temporal lobes; more semantic (rather than phonological) problems may involve more lateral and anterior areas of temporal lobe. This is a new area of inquiry and the information about what other areas and cognitive processes are involved in insight is likely to evolve.

We also predict that similar patterns of neural activity will occur across various types of insight. Specifically, because we (and others) believe that a critical component of “insight” is the sudden emergence into consciousness of information that was previously only weakly active, we may consistently observe a sudden burst of high frequency activity (gamma power) in the EEG signal in whatever area is processing that critical information. It is also possible that this high frequency neural activity is consistently preceded by lower frequency activity to attenuate sensory input from interfering with the weak processing that leads to solution.

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Yes. It may be important for making some inferences while comprehending discourse. It is important for deriving the theme of stories, or generating the best possible ending for a sentence. Any task that requires people to maximize semantic (meaning) overlap from a number of distantly related words.

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No. First, although fMRI does not provide very good information about timing, EEG does. The insight effect in the EEG experiment began about 4 tenths of second prior to pressing the button indicating the solution, which is about the time estimated to go from solution to response (based on other studies). Second, in fMRI, the same area active at the insight response was also briefly and weakly active when a problem was first presented to the solver – when people are unlikely to have the same emotional response. So, this area becomes engaged when solving efforts begin, but then strongly “reignites” at the moment of insight.

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Our results, particularly with EEG, demonstrate that there really is a sudden shift in processing prior to insight solutions, and suggest that the solution itself emerges into consciousness quite suddenly. EEG showed that the type of neural activity associated with insight is high-frequence (gamma band) activity, which studies in other labs have associated with the “binding of features” into a conscious representation. This effect occurred just prior to the button press, yet another effect immediately preceded it. This earlier effect shows that the brain was responding to some unconscious processing that soon led to an insight solution. No such effect occurred prior to noninsight solutions.

As noted above, the processing that leads to insight solution seems to be unconscious. People are not aware of how they arrived at the solution. Consider the case of working on a problem, then suddenly reaching solution while, say, driving to work. You may then realize that a sign you just passed gave an inadvertent hint that helped you solve the problem. Yet, you may not have realized you were thinking of the problem at all when you passed the sign and solved the problem. But if you weren’t, how did this information affect the solving process. It seems likely that you were still thinking about the problem, but below conscious awareness.

In fact, when people try to consciously monitor their solving efforts, this might stymie insight. Studies by Jonathan Schooler (U Pitt) demonstrate that talking your way through the solving process helps when you work on “noninsight problems,” but hurts when attempting “insight problems.” This might happen because talking about your solving effort causes you to focus on information that seems related, but turns out to not be useful.

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PloS is the premiere “open-access” journal, readily available to anyone with access to the Web. Although it’s a new journal, PLoS has been extremely successful already, in terms of attracting top researchers and papers, and in terms of garnering scientific and public attention. Also, for a premiere journal, PLoS allows relatively long papers, and in fact encouraged us to combine the experiments into a single paper. This was a great help in highlighting one of the strongest points of this study: the fact that the most robust effect replicates across two experiments with different groups of subjects and different methods of measuring brain activity.

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Lots of cognitive psychologists, and a nascent group of cognitive neuroscientists. Some of the leading thinkers on insight in cognitive psychology include

•  Jonathan Schooler – University of Pittsburgh
•  Steve Smith – Texas A&M University
•  Stellan Ohlsson – University of Illinois – Chicago
•  Sohee Park – Vanderbilt University
•  Jennifer Wiley – University of Illinois – Chicago

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Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Education and Cognition, Harvard Graduate School of Education, and author of Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (and other books) said “If there is one human trait that would seem impervious to scientific study, it is intuition or insight-- that seemingly nonrational "Aha" that accompanies sudden recognition or solution. In showing that distinctive cortical activity characterizes self reports of insight, while being absent on solutions bereft of insight, Jung-Beeman and colleagues have helped to demystify the creative process.”

Philip Johnson-Laird, Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, called this paper “One of the most original studies of insight I’ve ever seen.”

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