Eureka effect
Insight is a psychological term that attempts to describe the process in problem solving when a previously unsolvable puzzle becomes suddenly clear and obvious.
These four attributes are not separate but can be combined because the experience of processing fluency, especially when it occurs surprisingly (for example, because it is sudden), elicits both positive affect and judged truth.
experience requires the problem solver to come upon an impasse, where they become stuck and even though they may seemingly have explored all the possibilities, are still unable to retrieve or generate a solution.
Insight is believed to occur with a break in mental fixation, allowing the solution to appear transparent and obvious.
Having discovered how to measure the volume of an irregular object, and conceiving of a method to solve the king's problem, Archimedes allegedly leaped out and ran home naked, shouting εὕρηκα (eureka, "I have found it!").
[2] Subjects spend a considerable amount of time attempting to solve the problem, and initially it was hypothesized that elaboration towards comprehension may play a role in increased recall.
The essence of the aha feeling underlining insight problem solving was systemically investigated by Danek et al.[10] and Shen and his colleagues.
It is believed that effort made to comprehend something when encoding induces activation of alternative cues that later participate in recall.
Some unconscious processing may take place while a person is asleep, and there are several cases of scientific discoveries coming to people in their dreams.
Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz claimed that the ring structure of benzene came to him in a dream where a snake was eating its own tail.
Ohlsson believes that this impasse drives unconscious processes which change the mental representation of a problem, and cause novel solutions to occur.
Resting-state neural activity has a standing influence on cognitive strategies used when solving problems, particularly in the case of deriving solutions by methodical search or by sudden insight.
Discriminating between HI and LI individuals were important as both groups use different cognitive strategies to solve anagram problems used in this study.
It has been suggested that individuals who are highly creative exhibit diffuse attention, thus allowing them a greater range of environmental stimuli.
[25] It was found that individuals who displayed HI would have less resting state occipital alpha-band activity, meaning there would be less inhibition of the visual system.
[6] Another significant finding of this study was a late positive component (LPC) in successful guessing and then recognition of the answer at 600 and 700 ms, post-stimulus, in the parahippocampal gyrus (BA34).
The data suggests that the parahippocampus is involved in searching for a correct answer by manipulating it in working memory, and integrating relationships.
If subjects failed to solve the riddle, and then were shown the correct answer, they displayed the feeling of insight, which was reflected on the electroencephalogram recordings.
[27] The fMRI results for this study showed that when participants were given the answer to an unsolved riddle, the activity in their right hippocampus increased significantly during these Aha!
Kershaw & Ohlsson[29] report that in a laboratory setting with a time limit of 2 or 3 minutes, the expected solution rate is 0%.
The difficulty with the Nine Dot Problem is that it requires respondents to look beyond the conventional figure-ground relationships that create subtle, illusory spatial constraints and (literally) "think outside of the box".
Breaking the spatial constraints shows a shift in attention in working memory and utilizing new knowledge factors to solve the puzzle.
The link between words is associative, and does not follow rules of logic, concept formation or problem solving, and thus requires the respondent to work outside of these common heuristical constraints.
The pool of insight problems currently employed by psychologists is small and tepid, and due to its heterogeneity and often high difficulty level, is not conducive of validity or reliability.
[36] As Weisberg (1996) points out, the existence of hybrid problems in insight research poses a significant threat to any evidence gleaned from studies that employ them.
In the case of studies using hybrid problems, the final sample is at even greater risk of being very small by way of having to exclude whatever percentage of respondents solved their given puzzle without utilizing insight.
One of the key insights in developing his special theory of relativity came to Albert Einstein while talking to his friend Michele Besso: I started the conversation with him in the following way: "Recently I have been working on a difficult problem.
"[37]However, Einstein has said that the whole idea of special relativity did not come to him as a sudden, single eureka moment,[38] and that he was "led to it by steps arising from the individual laws derived from experience".
[40][41] Within about half an hour, he realized the scope of DNA profiling, which uses variations in the genetic code to identify individuals.
The method has become important in forensic science to assist detective work, and in resolving paternity and immigration disputes.
