#530： How to Get More ＂Aha＂ Insights
Episode Stats
Summary
What causes these proverbial light bulbs to go off in our heads and what s going on in our brains when we experience an insight? And can we do anything to encourage more AHA moments? My guest today has spent his career researching the answer to these questions. His name is John Cunyos, and he is the author of the book The Eureka Factor: AHA Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. You've probably
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experienced a few aha moments in your life. Moments where an idea for a new business or a
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piece of art or solution to a sticky technical relational or philosophical problem suddenly
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popped into your head. What causes these proverbial light bulbs to go off in our heads
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and what's going on in our brain when we experience an insight and can we do anything
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to encourage more aha moments. My guest today has spent his career researching the answer
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to these questions. His name is John Cunyos. He's a professor of psychology and the author
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of the book The Eureka Factor, AHA Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain. We begin our
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conversation discussing how researchers define what an insight is and examples of how scientists
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and musicians have experienced them. John then walks us through the stages that lead up
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to getting an insight and explains what is going on in our brains right before and at
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the moment we experience one. And we end our conversation discussing ways you can increase
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your chances of receiving insights, including the kind of environment, even color, that
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encourages them the most. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash
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So, you are a psychologist and the co-author of the book The Eureka Factor, AHA Moments,
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Creative Insight, and the Brain. Now, I know everyone listening has probably had one of those
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AHA moments in their life, an insight. But as a scientist, how do you define an insight?
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Yeah, well, the term insight, which in the popular mind is the same thing as the term AHA moment,
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has various definitions. And I think sort of a person on the street may just identify
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insight or AHA moment with any sort of deep understanding of something, a new idea, deep
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understanding. Psychological scientists who've been studying insight now for about a century
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have a much more specific definition of what an insight is or an AHA moment. And it revolves
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around the idea that these realizations are sudden and often unexpected. So, an insight would be any
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kind of sudden, unexpected solution to a problem, realization about something, a new perspective,
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a new perception of something. It has to impinge on the mind sort of suddenly and almost in a jarring
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fashion because it's very different from the way you had been thinking about it. And these insights,
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these AHA moments can convey a solution to a problem. It could convey an idea for an invention.
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It could convey a piece of music. It could be anything or just a new way of thinking about
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social relationships or anything. Whereas we contrast that with analytical thinking.
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And experimental psychologists define analytical thinking as being kind of slower, very deliberate,
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very conscious. It's the kind of thing you do when somebody gives you a column of numbers to add up
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and you get your pencil out and you use the method that you used in elementary school to, you know,
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you line up the columns of numbers and you go through them and you carry the remainders over,
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et cetera. Use analytical thinking when you already have a strategy, you kind of know how to do it,
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either specifically or generally. So, when you follow a recipe to cook something,
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you have it all laid out as a roadmap. You know exactly what to do. In other situations,
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you may not know precisely what to do, but you have a pretty good general idea of, you know,
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how to get from point A to point B and you follow through those steps in a deliberate way.
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And you have conscious access to what you're doing. You have some control over it. Whereas
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insights, they're kind of like, like cats. I mean, they don't take orders. They don't come when
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they're called. You can sort of, there are things you can do to coax them, but you don't, you don't
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have direct voluntary control over having an aha moment. You can't will yourself to have an aha moment.
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Well, yeah, that idea that you can't will yourself, you know, anciently, they would have called an
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aha moment. The muses, like the muses or the gods or a diamond or a genius was responsible for putting
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that idea into you. Yes. And in fact, a lot of people still think about these aha moments as
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being religious experience, even if the content isn't religious. I was speaking a couple of months
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ago with a noted chemist who had this amazing idea in the middle of the night and he ran down to his
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office and he, he wrote out a new chemical process, all the steps involved. And he said,
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God put that idea into my head. Now, maybe God did, or maybe, maybe God didn't, but that expression,
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it shows this feeling that it's out of one's control, that it's something that's conveyed to
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you, to your consciousness from some other realm, whether it's your own unconscious mind or from God
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or something. And as you highlight in the book, a lot of the, a lot of the big breakthroughs that
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have been made in science, art, music, they didn't come about through this sort of very deliberate
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analytical thinking. It was these insight moments where someone just like the chemist here had an
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idea and the solution just popped into his brain. Absolutely. And now sometimes the, the various
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scientists or artists or whoever, they don't always later on remember or recognize their own insights.
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I remember a few years ago reading an article that they interviewed a scientist, I think it was the
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University of Michigan. And they asked him, did you have any particular aha moment that led to your
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breakthrough? And he said, no, there was no aha moment. There was no insight. It was just years
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and years of gradual incremental work led me to this idea. I says, I don't believe in aha moments.
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And then later on in the interview, he was describing a situation where he was stuck on a problem
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and then he was taking a shower and an idea popped into his head. And that was the solution to,
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you know, to the whole thing. And that, that is an insight. He said he didn't believe it. So he didn't
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even recognize his own insights as being, you know, what they were. And sometimes, you know, if you look
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back, if you talk to scientists who have had long careers, sometimes what stands out in their minds
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is the years of grueling, backbreaking, incremental work rather than the breakthrough moments. And
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sometimes you have to sort of dig a little to get them to, to recognize those. Whereas other times,
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you know, as in the case of this chemist, that was really right at the top of his mind because it was
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a, a very intense experience for him and very unusual. Yeah. I think Einstein said he had aha
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moments. Like he, he played the violin. I guess that's when he had his aha moments. Paul McCartney,
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like the song yesterday, just like popped up in his head and he played it and that was it.
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That's right. It came to him in his sleep or as he was waking up from sleep. Paul McCartney heard
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this melody and he thought it was cool. And he got up and he played it at the piano and he thought,
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well, this is, this is a great tune. I wonder who wrote it. He thought someone else had written it
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and that he had heard it somewhere and it just came to his mind. So he went to John Lennon.
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He played it for John Lennon and said, John Lennon said, you know, it's great,
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but I've never heard this before. I don't think anyone else wrote it. McCartney went to their
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producer, the Beatles producer, producer, never heard it before. And it was only then that McCartney
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realized that he had come up with this melody. It didn't feel like he created it. It just came to
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him. So he must, he assumed that it was just something he had heard before and was recalling from
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memory in some way. Now the melody came to him, but not the words, the words he came up with
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sometime later to fit the melody. But again, that's an example where it's a great example of
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a situation where an insight occurs and someone feels like it's given to them because they don't
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feel like it was the product of their own efforts or thought. So while a insight feels effortless,
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right? It feels like it wasn't, you didn't do anything. Scientists, psychologists have found
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that there are stages that people go through that lead to an insight. Can you walk us through those
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stages? Sure. Now the set of stages, it's not the same for all situations. It's not the same for
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everyone, but this is sort of the classic series or sequence of stages. So first you have a problem,
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you recognize it as a problem. So you need to solve this problem. So you immerse yourself in the
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problem. You study it from every angle. You gather background information that might be helpful.
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You make some efforts towards solving the problem. And then the classical sort of situation is that
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you're stuck. You're not making progress. You've reached what's called an impasse and you don't know
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what to do. So after a while you give up on it or just put it aside for a while. And we might call
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that diversion. You go off and do something else. You might take a nap, you might go play tennis or
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watch TV or anything like that. And then at some point you'll have an aha moment, a sudden insight
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that confers the solution to you. And this can happen when you least expect it. I mean,
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often people have these insights while taking a shower. That's actually very common. There are many
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stories of that. And people always tell me they get their best ideas in the shower. And in fact,
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the screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, has said in interviews that sometimes he takes six or seven
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showers a day just to get ideas for his writing. So some people actually make use of that. So that's
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sort of the standard sequence. You immerse yourself. And then finally, I should mention,
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after people have the insight, often there's an extra stage where they verify the correctness
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of the solution. They check it to make sure it's correct. So not all of these stages are necessary.
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So sometimes people are not immersing themselves in a problem. They just have an idea. They may not
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even recognize they have a problem. Sometimes aha moments can confer the solution to a problem you
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didn't even know you had. So for example, in 1943, Richard James was an engineer aboard a U.S. Navy
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ship. And he was installing springs on instruments to sort of cushion them from the buffeting of the
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sea during choppy weather. And one of these springs got loose and started bouncing around. And in that
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instant, he had this aha moment that, wow, this would make a great toy. And he had to tinker with
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it for a couple of years to perfect it. But that became the slinky. Now, I highly doubt that while he
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was installing springs on these instruments to cushion them, the shock absorbers, he was thinking
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about toys. In fact, there's no evidence he'd been thinking about toys prior to that at all. But what he
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saw the springs bouncing around like that, it suddenly occurred to him that this could be a
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great toy or at least be fashioned into one. So that's an example of a situation where there was
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no immersion in a problem beforehand. There was no recognition of a problem. It's just an idea.
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There was no impasse either. He wasn't stuck because he hadn't been working on anything. He just had this
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great insight and then later on verified it and refined it and thought about it to make it work.
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So that's an example right there of a different sequence of steps. Sometimes people don't need
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the diversion. They could be working on a problem and have a sudden insight while they're working on
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the problem. And that insight may be very different from the strategy they were taking when they were
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working on a problem. So you might be trying to solve some problem about from work or personal
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relationships. And you think, well, maybe this strategy would work. And you're thinking about
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that. And then some other thought pops into your head as an insight. That's the solution. That would
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be an example of having an aha moment without that diversion from the problem right there. So yeah,
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the classical sequence of immersion, impasse, diversion, insight, and then verification,
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those are all the steps, but you don't need all of those steps to have an insight.
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Interesting. Well, what this book does that I found helpful and useful and enlightening was
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what goes on in our brain when we experience insight? Because you and other scientists, thanks to
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new technology, have been able to look at the brain when people experience insight.
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So let's talk about that moment when someone has that aha experience. What is going on in the brain?
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What parts of our brain are firing? Yeah. Well, let me go back about a little bit more than 15 years
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and give a shout out to my main research collaborator, Mark Beeman at Northwestern University.
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We did together the first neuroimaging study of insight. So as I mentioned earlier,
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psychological scientists have been studying insight for almost a century, going back to around the time
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of World War I. But only starting about 15 years ago did anyone, in this case it was us and shortly
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thereafter, other people decide, well, you know, let's look inside the black box. Let's use brain imaging
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to see what's going on in the brain when a person has insight. And it took all that time because
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earlier than that, say in the 1980s or 90s, we didn't have the technology to do this. We didn't have
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not just the hardware, but also the analytic methods, the mathematics, things like that to
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figure out how to do this kind of brain imaging experiment. So you can't just follow someone
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around, wait for them to have an insight or anticipate that they're going to have one and
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then stuff them in a brain scanner and hope it happens. And there's several reasons why you can't
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do that. One is that to do brain imaging, you need lots and lots of insights or lots of repetitions
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of something. You can't just do a brain imaging of a single instance of something. There's just too
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much noise. You need repetitions of it to get a refined end product. And you can't really anticipate
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when someone's going to have an insight. And the German gestalt psychologists of a hundred years ago,
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they gave people these complicated brain teaser problems. And we couldn't use those because most
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of the time people can't solve them. They're just too difficult. When they do solve them, it's usually
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with an aha moment, but they just weren't, it's just too hard. So what we did was we decided to use
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little verbal puzzles and give people dozens and dozens of these. So for example, one kind of puzzle
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might be an anagram where you have to give in a series of letters and you have to rearrange them
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to find the word. And, you know, we have hundreds of these. There are other kinds of puzzles as well.
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And so we can give people lots of puzzles and while they're in a brain scanner and they can solve a lot
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of them, sometimes most of them. And after each solution, we ask them, well, how did you solve that
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one? Did you work it out in a deliberate methodical fashion or did the solution just pop into your
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awareness? And so we sort the solutions into, you know, these are the insight solutions. Those are
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the analytic solutions. And we compare the brain activity. And in our, in our first neuroimaging
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study, which was published in 2004 in the journal PLOS Biology, we found that at the moment of insight,
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there was a burst of activity in the right hemisphere of the brain in a part of the right
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temporal lobe. And so that was sort of the brain activity corresponding to the insight. We think it's
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the brain activity corresponding to the solution actually popping into awareness. But the thing that
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surprised us, and perhaps it shouldn't have surprised us, was that there are other brain processes
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that are unconscious that led up to this. So when you have an aha moment, it feels like it's coming
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to existence from nothing. But actually, that's not true. Your brain is doing various things
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unconsciously that lead up to that aha moment. So sometimes there are examples where a person has
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already solved the problem. And that solution is unconscious. And it's just waiting for the right
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moment to pop into awareness. So you may have the solution and not know it, but because it's
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unconscious, but brain imaging can show activity in the brain corresponding to the existence of that
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solution prior to becoming conscious. So we found a series of steps leading up to insight, and we decided
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in a series of studies sort of trace the aha moment backwards in time to look at what all its precursors
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were in the brain. And what are those precursors? Do they follow those stages a bit that we talked
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about just now? Loosely speaking, but not exactly. So the first precursor that we identify, which is only
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about a second before you have an aha moment, is what we call a brain blink. So we found the
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aha moment is this burst of activity in the right hemisphere of the brain. But we found a sudden
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decrease in activity in the visual cortex of the brain, which is in the back of the head, the area
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that processes visual information from the eyes. And I guess a good way to think about this is if you look
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someone right in the face and you ask them a difficult question, often what they'll do is they'll look
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away. They might look down at their shoes or they might look up at the blank ceiling or a blank wall
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or they might even close their eyes to think, to avoid the distractions around them so that they can
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focus their attention inwardly. And in our experiments, people weren't allowed to do that.
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They couldn't move their heads. They couldn't close their eyes at specific times or even move their eyes.
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But their brains did it for them. So what seems to happen is that the brain can detect that there is
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this unconscious solution or idea. And it shuts down briefly some of the visual inputs. It's sort of
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like closing your eyes, but it's really your brain cutting off visual inputs to cut off some of that
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distraction, that noise, so that this unconscious idea can bubble up. So we called it a brain blink.
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People don't realize that often when they have an aha moment, for just a brief instant before that
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moment, they may have reduced awareness of their environment because their attention is being
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focused inwardly. So that was sort of the first surprise. We didn't expect that finding at all.
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And then if you go further back in time, we found that in the two seconds before each puzzle is presented,
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the brain activity will, in that two seconds before the puzzle, predicts whether you will solve that
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upcoming puzzle with a flesh of insight or solve it analytically. And that's kind of bizarre. I mean,
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what it means is that how you go about solving a puzzle, it depends on the state of your brain or the state
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of your mind, your mindset when you get the puzzle. And specifically what we found is that when you're
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going to solve an upcoming puzzle analytically by working it out in a deliberate fashion,
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your attention is focused outwardly. In this case, on the screen on which we flashed the puzzle,
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there's more activity in the visual areas of the brain. You're focusing on it. When you're going to
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solve an upcoming problem with an insight, there's reduced visual activity. You're focusing your
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attention inwardly. And then other areas of the brain that are involved in processing ideas,
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those become more active. And there's a really interesting area of the brain that becomes more
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active. It's called the interior cingulate. And it's sort of in the front of the brain,
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right in the middle. And the interior cingulate does, it's been a very hot topic
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in cognitive neuroscience for, oh, 20, 25 years. It does a variety of things. But what it seems to
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be doing in this case is that it monitors the rest of the brain for activity. And so, for example,
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in certain situations, you kind of have mental blinders on. You know exactly what to do. You have
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a problem. You take it at face value. You don't consider other options. That's what happens when the
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interior cingulate is not very active. It's not expanding the scope of your thought. It's narrowing
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the scope of your thought. But when the interior cingulate fires up, it detects all of this activity
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in other parts of the brain. Sometimes these are weakly held ideas, unconscious ideas. And it expands
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the scope of your thought and allows you to switch your attention to some crazy long shot hypothesis
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about what's going on. It takes the blinders off. So if your anterior cingulate, that area between the
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two hemispheres of your brain right in the middle, if that's all fired up, you will be open to all
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kinds of crazy long shot ideas, which are particularly creative, which may be correct. And those pop into
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awareness all of a sudden as aha moments. So that was a precursor we looked for. We didn't know what
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we would find, but we found that. That's another step leading towards insight. And then going even
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further back in time, we found something that we found kind of mind-boggling. And that is, in one
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experiment, we recorded people's EEGs while they just sat and did nothing. They were just relaxing.
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They weren't given any kind of task to perform. They didn't know what they would be doing next.
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We just recorded their brain activity while they let their minds wander. And then weeks later,
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we gave them puzzles to solve. And we looked at which participants solved more of these puzzles
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with a flesh of insight and which of them solved them more analytically. And then we went back to
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their EEGs and we compared their EEGs. And we found really amazing differences between
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the brains of people who tend to solve problems with a flesh of insight and those who tend to solve
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them analytically. And we found is that the analytical solvers had more activity in the frontal lobes of
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their brain. This is when they weren't even working on a problem. And the more insightful people,
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we call them insightfuls, had more activity in posterior regions of the brain. The frontal lobe
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of the brain, it organizes thought, it sets goals, it focuses your attention. And it seems like these
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analytical thinkers are habitually like that. And the insightful thinkers, they don't have that
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frontal lobe cognitive control as strongly. And their thinking kind of goes rogue. They may not be
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as organized, as focused. In fact, creative people tend to be distractible. They tend to be a little
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less organized and kind of perhaps even a little rambly from time to time. But that ability allows them
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to try out all sorts of crazy ideas, crazy thoughts on the periphery of awareness that
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are often really useful and creative. So your brain activity that we measure, what you're doing
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nothing, can predict how you're going to solve problems weeks later, which we found we were very
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surprised at that. So those are some of the precursors that we found.
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We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show.
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And so those precursors, though, can give you insights about, I mean, so you can't control
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insights, but you can, I guess, make, you can provide an environment for them to happen more often.
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So like that idea, that precursor that happens like a two seconds before that insight happens,
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where you're either, you decide whether you're going to solve this analytically or with an insight.
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If you're going at a problem, just like, I'm going to solve this with brute force, like you're never
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going to solve it with an insight probably, like at that moment, because you're already in that
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Yes. I mean, so as I said, you can't force insights. You can decide consciously to voluntarily
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attack a problem in an analytical fashion, a systematic, methodical way. You can try to coax an
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insight by sort of shutting all that thought down, relaxing, closing your eyes. Perhaps there are
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other things we can talk about too, that, that will do that. But, but the important thing to keep in
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mind is, although there are some people who are naturally more analytical and some who are more,
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are naturally more insightful, virtually everyone we've studied, and we've tested hundreds and
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hundreds of people, they can solve problems in either way, either with an aha moment or analytically.
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The thing is that they just are naturally inclined to do it one way or the other. But that means that
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everybody or almost everybody has the capability to do it either way. And if you have the capability
00:26:56.300
to do it either way, then there are strategies that you can use to enhance whichever one of those
00:27:05.240
you're weaker at. So there's nobody who's a pure, I mean, if someone were a pure insightful and only
00:27:12.840
thought in aha moments, you know, I don't think they would last very long. I mean, you can't go through
00:27:17.500
life just having epiphanies and revelations and, you know, and waiting for them. I mean, that,
00:27:24.260
that kind of person would not survive. Similarly, if a person is just purely analytical and only thinks in
00:27:31.500
that way, I mean, that's not anyone that I would really want to sit down and, and talk to, they
00:27:35.800
might survive, but there are certain kinds of situations. They, they just want certain types
00:27:42.020
of problems or realizations. They just won't be able to achieve. One of my, one of my favorite quotes
00:27:48.000
is the English writer Somerset Maugham once said, there are three rules for writing a novel.
00:27:55.320
Well, unfortunately, no one knows what they are. So the, I mean, the, the idea is that certain kinds
00:28:03.040
of creative thought, and I don't mean just writing a novel. I mean, we're talking about creative thought
00:28:07.900
in everyday life. I mean, you know, how do you get your car started? How do you get a toddler to eat
00:28:13.000
vegetables? Things like that often take a leap of creative insight and someone who doesn't have
00:28:20.520
leaps of creative insight. Well, you know, they can fill out their, their income tax forms or a lot
00:28:26.880
of things they can do, but there are a lot of things that we take for granted that they won't
00:28:32.540
be able to do. So it's important that we have the ability to do both. Both of these ways of thinking
00:28:38.420
are necessary and valuable and complimentary, but, you know, often we want to have more insights
00:28:46.200
because those seem more out of reach, more transformative. They give us really unusual
00:28:53.540
ideas that can advance our lives in important ways. Whereas the analytical thinking, that's
00:29:00.680
something that, you know, by and large, you know, your laptop computer can do.
00:29:04.700
Well, this is more of a philosophical question, but also you touch on this in your book, but the idea is
00:29:09.600
like, okay, so your, your brain has that mind blink, brain blink before it recognizes the insight and
00:29:15.780
your right prefrontal lobe. So like, and so basically it's saying that it recognizes the idea. So like
00:29:21.560
the idea was, was the idea always there? And like, how did it get there? It's like your subconscious
00:29:27.080
working on the, the problem. Like where do those insights come from that we recognize in the insight
00:29:33.680
moment? That's a great question. And we have a little bit of scientific evidence about this,
00:29:41.800
but not a whole lot. And this whole field is so new and it's advancing very rapidly. So we're,
00:29:47.200
you know, it's kind of a moving target. So as I mentioned, there are everyday instances or anecdotes
00:29:53.280
where the idea probably did not exist prior to the insight. So the example of the engineer,
00:30:01.420
Richard James and the slinky, he probably did not have an idea for a slinky until he had the idea
00:30:07.740
because that wasn't a problem he was working on, but we do have laboratory evidence.
00:30:14.640
And this comes from, from work that Edward Bowden and Mark Beeman, my colleagues have experiments
00:30:20.880
they did back in the 1990s and early two thousands in which they would present a problem to someone.
00:30:28.740
And then before they had a chance to solve it, they would show potential solutions like solution words
00:30:35.580
and ask them just to read those words as quickly as possible. And what they found is that often they
00:30:42.420
could read those words more quickly, the words that were actually solution words more quickly compared
00:30:48.680
to words that were not the solutions to the problem. So in other words, the brain must already have
00:30:54.380
derived the solution word. It was unconscious, but when they saw that word on the screen, they could read
00:31:01.000
it very quickly because it was already primed in their brains. So there is good evidence that sometimes we have
00:31:09.700
the solution already. We're just not aware of it. And we have to sort of grease the path a little bit or,
00:31:15.720
or, you know, kick the side of the TV or whatever analogy you want to use to shake it loose so that it pops
00:31:21.760
into consciousness and we can have conscious access and use it.
00:31:25.340
Well, let's walk through some things that, cause you highlight this in the book and you've done
00:31:29.420
research on this that, so you can't force insights, but you can nudge it a bit. What, what are some
00:31:35.720
things or environments or proactive things that people can do to create an environment within their
00:31:44.640
Sure. There, there are a number of things that have been studied over the years. So probably the single
00:31:51.000
most powerful factor that's been identified that increases insights and creativity more generally
00:31:58.340
is mood. When you're in a positive mood, you are more creative. When you're in a negative mood, like if
00:32:06.240
you're anxious, that primes analytical thinking. And now there are examples of people who have great ideas
00:32:14.020
when they're in a bad mood, but we're talking on average. So the, the basic idea is that the notion is of
00:32:20.820
psychological safety. So for example, if you are in a situation where you feel anxious, now we could
00:32:29.180
think back to, you know, early humans on the savanna in Africa, and you see a lion way off in the distance,
00:32:38.020
you don't want to be detected by that lion. You certainly don't want to be eaten by the lion.
00:32:41.980
So you think in a very deliberate, careful fashion, that anxiety, that sense of threat makes you think
00:32:49.640
analytically because you can't afford to make a mistake. A mistake will be fatal. If you do anything
00:32:56.180
that allows the lion to detect your presence, you're dinner, right? So anxiety, even mild anxiety,
00:33:05.440
the kind that we experience nowadays when we have a deadline approaching or something like that,
00:33:10.800
shifts us into analytical thinking. You can't afford to make a mistake. On the other hand,
00:33:16.180
if you're in a positive mood, that usually means that you don't feel a sense of threat. When you
00:33:22.900
don't feel a sense of threat, then you can take chances because there's, there's no downside and
00:33:30.080
you can try things out. You can try out crazy ideas. You could try out long shot ideas. And that seems to
00:33:38.780
be, you know, sort of a basic principle of how mood influences creative thought. It gives you a
00:33:46.120
positive mood, gives you permission. It gives you license to try out things that may be just wrong,
00:33:54.060
that are in a sense risky. So anything you do that can put you in a positive mood is something that
00:34:01.360
that will make it more likely that you'll have an insight. Now, there are some people who under
00:34:08.220
extreme threats, under real pressure, under in light threatening situations, will have life-saving
00:34:15.400
insights. And we don't really understand those people. There aren't that many of them. And it'd be
00:34:21.420
hard to sort of gather them and do studies of them. My speculation is that people who are able to
00:34:29.140
function under that kind of stress. I'll give you, I'll tell you a quick anecdote. One of my favorite
00:34:33.340
anecdotes about this. Back in 1949, there was a, a wildfire in Mann Gulch in Montana, and it was
00:34:43.000
spreading quickly. So the, the government sent in a team of firefighters who dropped by parachutes
00:34:50.140
and the fire was on one side of the canyon, the Gulch, and the team parachuted into the other side
00:34:57.300
of the Gulch. And then they started to descend into the Gulch to fight the fire. But then the wind
00:35:04.240
changed direction and started, it jumped to their side of the canyon and started going up the wall
00:35:11.000
of the canyon, chasing them. And it was moving very quickly. So the, uh, the team of firefighters,
00:35:16.720
they dropped their equipment and they started running, climbing away from the fire, but the fire was just
00:35:23.240
going too quickly. They, they, they were not going to be saved by running away. And the leader of the
00:35:28.960
team, his name was Wag Dodge. He all of a sudden stopped. And the other men must've thought he was
00:35:35.260
crazy or that he was giving up. He stopped. He turned his back towards the fire. He took out a match.
00:35:43.180
He lit the grass in front of him so that it burned a patch of ground. He crawled onto that patch of bare
00:35:51.500
ground. And then the fire came up around him and passed him on both sides. And he was spared and
00:35:58.620
13 of the other 15 firefighters perished in the flames. So he, now this idea of an escape fire
00:36:05.980
that was already known to the Plains Indians, but it was not known to the U S forest service at the time.
00:36:13.980
And when he was asked about, he said, I don't know where it came from. I just thought of it all of a
00:36:18.040
sudden I had nothing to lose. I tried it. So this was a situation where, you know, this was as
00:36:26.220
life-threatening as it gets. And he had this fantastic aha moment. Now one possibility is that
00:36:32.520
he was just sort of immune to stress, immune to fear. Another possibility is that maybe he had
00:36:40.760
accepted death and that might have lifted some of the anxiety and put him in a state where he could
00:36:49.360
have this creative idea. No one knows. And this is actually a really important topic to be studied
00:36:57.500
because we all want leaders who will be able to think creatively under the most extreme stress
00:37:05.080
imaginable. And if we can figure out how that works and how to encourage it, that would be a
00:37:11.380
fantastic thing. But that, that just hasn't been studied much or at all actually. All right. So
00:37:16.820
positive mood, uh, it's conducive to insights. Yes. Are there times of the day when we're more
00:37:21.840
receptive to insights or where insights are more likely to happen? Yes. So most people have a peak
00:37:27.460
time of day. There are early birds. There are night owls. There are people who peak in the
00:37:33.520
afternoon. I don't know what you call those. And when you're at your peak, then that's when your
00:37:39.020
analytical abilities are strongest and they tend to swamp your, your more fragile, unconscious,
00:37:45.500
insightful thinking. So if you are a morning person, you'll get your best creative ideas at night.
00:37:51.220
If you're a night owl, you'll get your best creative ideas in the morning. So essentially when you're a
00:37:57.040
little bit fuzzy thinking, when you're not as sharp, you know, an alcoholic drink, I'm not encouraging
00:38:03.300
people to drink, but studies have shown that when a person has a drink, that that can increase their
00:38:11.020
probability of having a sudden insight. Now, of course, more than a little bit of alcohol, and
00:38:16.420
you won't be able to do any kind of thinking, whether insightful or analytics. So we're talking
00:38:20.400
about, you know, a very modest amount of drinking. So anything like that, that, uh, that will dull
00:38:27.280
your analytical ability, will help, will allow or enable these unconscious ideas to pop into awareness.
00:38:34.500
Other factors that can play a role is anything that will spread your attention out, that will broaden
00:38:41.280
your attention. Because if you broaden your attention, you're expanding your scope of thought.
00:38:47.060
So for example, a lot of noted creative figures like to spend time walking outdoors.
00:38:53.260
They get their ideas in nature, walking around. Now that improves their mood, of course, which helps
00:39:00.120
insight, but also expanding your attention to fill a larger space. So for example, if you're in a,
00:39:08.360
if you're talking about office work, little cubicles, that will encourage analytical thinking
00:39:14.700
because it narrows and focuses your attention. But larger open spaces, say rooms with high ceilings and
00:39:22.260
that are open, your attention will expand to fill the space. And that broadens the scope of your
00:39:28.200
thought. Now, of course, there's a big controversy about open offices because those can be also very
00:39:33.740
distracting if you're around a lot of colleagues who will be interrupting you. And that, that's not good.
00:39:38.960
But the open spaces help. Also, anything that, uh, with associations to sort of open space and nature and
00:39:49.400
positive mood and relaxation, like the color blue, the color blue tends to expand awareness and
00:39:56.120
attention because it reminds one of the sky and the ocean. And that encourages aha moments. Whereas
00:40:02.200
the color red, which has associations like blood, stop signs, fire engines, those all call cause subtle
00:40:11.120
anxiety and narrow the scope of thought and make you more analytical. Any objects that grab and focus
00:40:20.460
your attention will also encourage analytical thought and discourage insightful thinking. So
00:40:27.120
an example would be, you know, if you have a letter opener on your desk, that looks like a dagger
00:40:32.960
that might cause a subtle sense of anxiety, put the, put the thing in your drawer, keep it out of sight.
00:40:39.760
Even soft things that have edges, like furniture that has sharp edges and things like that can cause this
00:40:50.160
subtle feeling of threat because it could potentially hurt you. Uh, in particular, one pattern that really
00:40:57.920
causes subtle anxiety is sort of a, a sawtooth pattern. And that, cause it kind of resembles teeth
00:41:05.920
or serration on a, on a, on a, uh, a knife or a saw. So the, the, the ideal creative environment for having
00:41:14.380
insights has a color blue, perhaps green sort of nature colors, open, airy spaces, and it's quiet, no
00:41:25.500
distractions. There are no objects like you wouldn't want to have striking pieces of art that grab your
00:41:31.540
attention. You want to have soft rounded surfaces where nothing grabs and focuses your attention.
00:41:37.940
So those are, are, uh, some of the, uh, environmental conditions that'll promote insight.
00:41:43.340
And then there's probably one of the strongest factors to sleep. Sleep is a very powerful way
00:41:49.700
to have insights. Often people that there are many examples, historical examples and examples from common
00:41:57.840
everyday experience of people awakening in the middle of the night with a great idea or having
00:42:03.820
that great idea while they're lying in bed in the morning before they're fully awake. And, uh, sleep
00:42:10.140
does several things to supercharge insights. One is when you get sleep, when you've had been rested,
00:42:17.760
you feel better, you're in a better mood. And right there, that improved mood enhances creative insight.
00:42:24.400
Uh, another is that during sleep, there's a process called memory consolidation in which the memories
00:42:32.000
you've acquired during the day are restructured and put into a different form in memory. And often
00:42:37.740
that, that memory consolidation process will bring out certain details in your experiences and in your
00:42:44.820
knowledge, which can, uh, are not obvious, which can form the basis for a sudden insight.
00:42:50.340
And then also sleep, what it helps you to do is it helps you to overcome impasses. When you're stuck
00:42:57.680
on a problem, that wrong idea that you've been working on, that's that you're stuck on, it has a
00:43:05.200
certain hold over the mind. But when you sleep, you kind of partially forget that idea, the bad idea,
00:43:11.560
it recedes into the background and it allows weaker, perhaps unconscious ideas to bubble up into the
00:43:18.520
surface. So sleep is a really powerful way to have creative insight. In fact, you know, there's
00:43:25.480
this, I think really wrong idea that people who sleep more are in a sense, weak or lazy. And I think
00:43:34.020
it's exemplified by, uh, something that Napoleon once said, uh, someone once asked Napoleon, what's the
00:43:40.600
right amount of sleep for a person to get? And Napoleon said four hours for a man, six hours for
00:43:50.100
a woman, eight hours for a fool. And that's completely wrong because, uh, and of course,
00:43:57.840
you know, maybe that's why he ended up exiled on an Island in the Atlantic. That's completely wrong
00:44:03.480
because sleep is not just rest. It's not a sign of weakness. I believe that sleep is mental work
00:44:11.900
while you're asleep. Your mind is working to reorganize your thinking, reorganize your knowledge
00:44:19.460
and working on solving problems. And sleep is, you know, I mean, I wish we were paid for the time
00:44:27.760
that we sleep because that is a part of work. So sleep is very powerful. Also we get an idea of
00:44:34.640
sleep. We've written an article about Salvador Dali. One thing he did to get his crazy surrealistic
00:44:40.880
insights was he would nap while holding a key in his hand and like had his hand beneath above a pie pan
00:44:48.140
so that when he kind of, he did that dozing off his body relaxes, his hand opens up and drops the key
00:44:55.160
in the pan and he'd wake up and whatever thought was in his mind, he would like write it down.
00:45:00.680
It was sort of a tactic he's using because usually for me, whenever I've noticed, whenever I had those
00:45:04.480
insights, when I'm going, falling asleep, it's usually when I'm falling asleep or like right when I wake
00:45:09.480
up. It's like in that in-between phases of awake and sleep time. That's when I get them.
00:45:14.140
Yeah. And you may have had other ideas while you're asleep and just not remember them too.
00:45:19.260
It's hard to know. It's important to write them down. In fact, there's a, uh, uh, a story of, uh,
00:45:24.220
a famous neuroscientist, uh, Otto Loewy back in the 1920s. And he had this great idea that awakened
00:45:30.920
him in the middle of the night and he got up and he wrote the idea down. And then in the morning,
00:45:36.700
he looked at the paper and he couldn't read his handwriting and he was really angry at himself.
00:45:41.560
So that night, uh, he went back to sleep the next night and he had, uh, he was awakened again by this
00:45:48.260
great idea. And in this time, instead of writing it down, he went straight to the laboratory.
00:45:54.200
And the experiment was actually, the idea for the experiment was actually fairly simple.
00:45:58.080
He did the experiment right there that night and he got a Nobel prize for it. So, uh, sometimes,
00:46:05.020
you know, I mean, in his case, the first time he did write it down, he didn't remember it later.
00:46:10.580
He wrote it down, but couldn't read his handwriting because I guess he'd been too drowsy.
00:46:13.960
So it really is important. Uh, if you are awakened during the night by an idea to make sure it's
00:46:20.360
documented in a way that you can recover it later, because there is a tendency for people to forget
00:46:27.860
their, their dreams later on. And, uh, you know, you, uh, I can't imagine how many great ideas have
00:46:33.980
been lost that way. Right. So you're a very, you're a scientist, so you're, you're paid to be
00:46:39.180
analytical, but I'm curious, has this research, like, has it influenced the way have you set up,
00:46:43.660
you structured your day in a way so you can receive more creative insights for your work?
00:46:48.440
Yes. And no, you know, I think, I think most professors in research universities
00:46:54.140
don't have much freedom to structure their days in ways to enhance creativity. It's just,
00:47:00.660
you know, more committees, more paperwork. There's not a lot of, of leeway to do that,
00:47:06.100
but there are things that, that, you know, I've done that other people can do as well. So
00:47:10.640
for example, I commute on the train and of course the train is, you know, it's an old train. It's
00:47:17.560
kind of noisy. It's kind of bumpy, the whole thing. So what I do, I got my, uh, noise canceling
00:47:22.860
headphones. I put those on, I put sunglasses on, I close my eyes. I think of whatever the problem is
00:47:31.040
of the day. And I just sort of let my mind drift. And, uh, I do get a number of my better ideas that
00:47:39.080
way. And, you know, nobody, I turned my cell phone off so I don't get any phone calls. So I can't be
00:47:44.440
disturbed in that way. I mean, the train is not an ideal environment because it's not particularly
00:47:50.620
comfortable and it's not very quiet, but it's at least a time when I can isolate myself. And I think,
00:47:57.680
you know, I think most people, if they can just get a little bit of time where their smartphone's
00:48:04.960
turned off, where not only will they not be interrupted, they're not getting interruptions,
00:48:10.400
there's no feeling that they might be interrupted. So for example, if I'm in my office and, you know,
00:48:17.800
a phone call or an email will be an interruption. And just thinking that that might happen
00:48:24.660
alters my thinking in a way that it diminishes my own creativity. So I have to go to say, you know,
00:48:31.820
a coffee shop at where I know no one knows where I am. And I turned my, my smartphone off. So no one,
00:48:39.000
I don't have to worry that someone is going to call me or interrupt me during a creative reverie.
00:48:46.020
But I think most of us are just busier and busier. And we just don't have the time to put into those
00:48:52.980
kinds of creative reveries anymore. I mean, you know, or even get enough sleep. So it's hard.
00:49:00.180
And you just have to make the time to do it one way or another. There's no, there's no shortcut to
00:49:05.300
that. Well, John, is there someplace people can go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:49:09.680
Yes. You can find me on Twitter at John Cunos. It's one word, J-O-H-N-K-O-U-N-I-O-S.
00:49:18.520
And from my Twitter page, you can get links to my Google sites page, which then has links to
00:49:25.180
our book website, my personal web page, my laboratory web page, et cetera. So you could,
00:49:31.100
I guess the best way is the gateway there is my Twitter page.
00:49:34.900
Fantastic. Well, John Cunos, thanks so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:49:39.040
My guest is John Cunos. He's the author of the book, The Eureka Factor. It's available on
00:49:42.400
amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more information about his work on his Twitter.
00:49:46.360
It's Twitter at John Cunos. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash Eureka,
00:49:50.880
where you find links to resources, where you delve deeper into this topic.
00:50:00.220
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at
00:50:03.800
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00:50:07.800
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00:50:38.940
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