It was 1951 when the astronomer William Wilson Morgan came out of the Yerkes observatory, after hours of calculations on star clusters. Looking up at the sky, he had a sudden intuition: the stars he was studying were not randomly distributed, but formed a spiral. In that instant he had “seen” the structure of the Milky Way. That moment of lightning, which he himself defined as “an intuitive explosion”, is the perfect model of what neuroscientists today call insights — the “Eureka” moment (from the Greek “I have found”). It’s a rare occurrence but universalcapable of changing the direction of a research, solving a mathematical problem or giving birth to a creative idea. Behind that flash lies a complex brain process: a balance between periods of unconscious preparation, a “right” mental state and a sudden reorientation of neural networks. The experiments of John Kounios and Mark Beeman, pioneers of the neuroscience of insight, showed that these moments do not arise out of nowhere. In reality, the brain prepares for a long time before the flash of genius. From the studies of these two researchers it emerged that it is the right hemisphere that is most involved in “Eureka” moments – famous quote by Archimedes, and that good humor and positivity make us more inclined to have brilliant intuitions!
What happens in the brain in the seconds before an intuition
In 2006, a group of researchers led by John Kounios tried to understand what happens in the brain in the seconds before an intuition. To achieve this he observed the mind at work with two complementary tools: theelectroencephalogram (EEG), useful for recording in real time the tiny electrical waves produced by neurons, and the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which instead shows which areas are activated when blood flows into a busy brain area.
Nineteen volunteers tested themselves with 186 small language puzzlescalled Compound Remote Associates. In each appeared three seemingly unrelated words — for example pine, crab And sauce (pine, crab and sauce) — and the task was to find a fourth word that united them all. In this case the solution was apple (apple), which allows you to form compound words like in pineapple, crabapple, applesauce (pineapple, crab apple and apple sauce).
After each answer, participants explained whether the solution was arrived at step by step, with reasoning, or bysuddenlike a flash. And this is where the results got interesting: more than half of the solutions, approximately 56%was born for insightsMeaning what suddenly, without intermediate steps.
Measurements carried out with the instruments showed that already two seconds before the “Eureka” moment the brain changed configuration. Whoever was about to have an intuition activated above all the medial frontal cortexwhich serves to manage attention and mental flexibility, and the left temporal lobelinked to the meaning of words. Those who reasoned more logically and analytically showed greater activity in the occipital areathe back part of the brain where vision is processed.
In essence, before an idea the brain stops looking outward and turns inward. He relaxes, but remains alert: he lets hidden connections come to the surface. It is as if, for a moment, the mind suspended control to allow the solution to emerge. And Pasteur was right: luck helps the prepared mind, but also the one that knows how to let go.
The role of mental rest
Two years later, the same authors showed that the “insight” brain type is recognisable even at rest. In a study on Neuropsychology in 2008, participants were recorded with EEG before they even knew what kind of task they would face. Those who subsequently solved more anagrams with insight showed, at rest, less alpha occipital activity (i.e. less inhibition of visual areas) and greater asymmetry towards the right hemisphere, the one most capable of connecting distant ideas. In other words, the mind is predisposed to a flash of genius more “open”, more dispersiveless inclined to filter out irrelevant stimuli — just like those who, distracted by a thousand details, end up seeing what others don’t notice.
Attention and mood are two factors that open the mind
In 2012, Wegbreit and colleagues showed that manipulating attention can change the way we solve a problem and find solutions. In their experiment, forty people they solved two sets of small word problems, but in the middle they had to do a visual task. Part of the volunteers had to perform the so-called flanker test: arrows appeared on the screen and you had to concentrate only on the central one, ignoring the others.
It is an exercise that requires a lot of attention narrow and focused. After doing so, these people tended to solve the problems in a way analyticalthat is, reasoning step by step.
The other participants, however, faced an opposite test: a game of rapid object recognitionin which the gaze had to move continuously over the entire image. Here the attention broadened, became widespreadmore ready to grasp lateral stimuli or unusual connections. And in fact, after this exercise, the solutions found increased intuitionthe classic flashes of genius.
The difference is all in the breadth of the mental gaze: when we focus too much, we risk excluding the weakest signals, those that lead to new ideas; when the mind is more open, distant connections can emerge on their own.
There is also another ingredient that favors these moments: good mood. Magnetic resonance imaging studies – such as that of Subramaniam and colleagues carried out in 2009 – show that an area of the brain called anterior cingulate cortex it is activated both when we are in a good mood and just before an intuition. It seems that positivity makes the mind more elastic, more capable of changing perspective and “seeing” new paths.
The brain of intuition
In more recent studies, John Kounios and Mark Beeman have drawn a rather clear map of how a sudden idea is born. They discovered that the protagonist, in many cases, is the right hemisphere of the brain: the one that does not reason with logic step by step, but works by connecting distant, apparently unrelated concepts. It’s like he’s looking “weak” associationsthin threads that connect words or images that we wouldn’t usually put together.
When intuition is about to come, the EEG shows a peak of gamma waves in the upper part of the right temporal lobe. Gamma waves are very rapid vibrations that appear when the brain puts together scattered pieces of information: this is the moment when the spark goes off and the solution becomes clear all at once. Before that flash, however, the mind goes through a more silent phase. The visual areas, those that make us look at the outside world, they “turn off” for a moment, While internal activities related to imagination increase. It’s as if the brain retreats for a few seconds, incubating the response without us realizing it.
In the end, all this proves that intuition it is not a magical giftbut a different way of thinking. For a brief moment the mind finds a perfect balance: it leaves rigid control and opens up, mixing concentration and freedom, reason and creativity.
