The Art of Manliness - #530： How to Get More ＂Aha＂ Insights

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. You've probably

00:00:11.220 experienced a few aha moments in your life. Moments where an idea for a new business or a

00:00:15.300 piece of art or solution to a sticky technical relational or philosophical problem suddenly

00:00:19.420 popped into your head. What causes these proverbial light bulbs to go off in our heads

00:00:23.520 and what's going on in our brain when we experience an insight and can we do anything

00:00:27.720 to encourage more aha moments. My guest today has spent his career researching the answer

00:00:31.760 to these questions. His name is John Cunyos. He's a professor of psychology and the author

00:00:35.180 of the book The Eureka Factor, AHA Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain. We begin our

00:00:39.880 conversation discussing how researchers define what an insight is and examples of how scientists

00:00:43.860 and musicians have experienced them. John then walks us through the stages that lead up

00:00:47.460 to getting an insight and explains what is going on in our brains right before and at

00:00:51.080 the moment we experience one. And we end our conversation discussing ways you can increase

00:00:54.860 your chances of receiving insights, including the kind of environment, even color, that

00:00:58.820 encourages them the most. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash

00:01:02.680 eureka. John joins me now via Skype.

00:01:16.080 John Cunyos, welcome to the show.

00:01:18.420 Thanks for having me.

00:01:19.240 So, you are a psychologist and the co-author of the book The Eureka Factor, AHA Moments,

00:01:25.820 Creative Insight, and the Brain. Now, I know everyone listening has probably had one of those

00:01:31.040 AHA moments in their life, an insight. But as a scientist, how do you define an insight?

00:01:38.600 Yeah, well, the term insight, which in the popular mind is the same thing as the term AHA moment,

00:01:44.600 has various definitions. And I think sort of a person on the street may just identify

00:01:51.080 insight or AHA moment with any sort of deep understanding of something, a new idea, deep

00:01:57.960 understanding. Psychological scientists who've been studying insight now for about a century

00:02:03.860 have a much more specific definition of what an insight is or an AHA moment. And it revolves

00:02:11.460 around the idea that these realizations are sudden and often unexpected. So, an insight would be any

00:02:19.980 kind of sudden, unexpected solution to a problem, realization about something, a new perspective,

00:02:29.760 a new perception of something. It has to impinge on the mind sort of suddenly and almost in a jarring

00:02:37.300 fashion because it's very different from the way you had been thinking about it. And these insights,

00:02:43.460 these AHA moments can convey a solution to a problem. It could convey an idea for an invention.

00:02:50.660 It could convey a piece of music. It could be anything or just a new way of thinking about

00:02:56.640 social relationships or anything. Whereas we contrast that with analytical thinking.

00:03:03.280 And experimental psychologists define analytical thinking as being kind of slower, very deliberate,

00:03:11.000 very conscious. It's the kind of thing you do when somebody gives you a column of numbers to add up

00:03:16.740 and you get your pencil out and you use the method that you used in elementary school to, you know,

00:03:22.320 you line up the columns of numbers and you go through them and you carry the remainders over,

00:03:27.680 et cetera. Use analytical thinking when you already have a strategy, you kind of know how to do it,

00:03:34.680 either specifically or generally. So, when you follow a recipe to cook something,

00:03:39.560 you have it all laid out as a roadmap. You know exactly what to do. In other situations,

00:03:45.300 you may not know precisely what to do, but you have a pretty good general idea of, you know,

00:03:51.200 how to get from point A to point B and you follow through those steps in a deliberate way.

00:03:56.180 And you have conscious access to what you're doing. You have some control over it. Whereas

00:04:02.640 insights, they're kind of like, like cats. I mean, they don't take orders. They don't come when

00:04:08.100 they're called. You can sort of, there are things you can do to coax them, but you don't, you don't

00:04:13.000 have direct voluntary control over having an aha moment. You can't will yourself to have an aha moment.

00:04:20.120 Well, yeah, that idea that you can't will yourself, you know, anciently, they would have called an

00:04:23.980 aha moment. The muses, like the muses or the gods or a diamond or a genius was responsible for putting

00:04:30.460 that idea into you. Yes. And in fact, a lot of people still think about these aha moments as

00:04:38.440 being religious experience, even if the content isn't religious. I was speaking a couple of months

00:04:43.920 ago with a noted chemist who had this amazing idea in the middle of the night and he ran down to his

00:04:53.560 office and he, he wrote out a new chemical process, all the steps involved. And he said,

00:04:59.520 God put that idea into my head. Now, maybe God did, or maybe, maybe God didn't, but that expression,

00:05:07.200 it shows this feeling that it's out of one's control, that it's something that's conveyed to

00:05:14.720 you, to your consciousness from some other realm, whether it's your own unconscious mind or from God

00:05:21.480 or something. And as you highlight in the book, a lot of the, a lot of the big breakthroughs that

00:05:28.040 have been made in science, art, music, they didn't come about through this sort of very deliberate

00:05:34.260 analytical thinking. It was these insight moments where someone just like the chemist here had an

00:05:39.720 idea and the solution just popped into his brain. Absolutely. And now sometimes the, the various

00:05:46.560 scientists or artists or whoever, they don't always later on remember or recognize their own insights.

00:05:54.260 I remember a few years ago reading an article that they interviewed a scientist, I think it was the

00:06:00.600 University of Michigan. And they asked him, did you have any particular aha moment that led to your

00:06:05.740 breakthrough? And he said, no, there was no aha moment. There was no insight. It was just years

00:06:11.380 and years of gradual incremental work led me to this idea. I says, I don't believe in aha moments.

00:06:18.480 And then later on in the interview, he was describing a situation where he was stuck on a problem

00:06:23.600 and then he was taking a shower and an idea popped into his head. And that was the solution to,

00:06:29.840 you know, to the whole thing. And that, that is an insight. He said he didn't believe it. So he didn't

00:06:34.800 even recognize his own insights as being, you know, what they were. And sometimes, you know, if you look

00:06:42.260 back, if you talk to scientists who have had long careers, sometimes what stands out in their minds

00:06:48.420 is the years of grueling, backbreaking, incremental work rather than the breakthrough moments. And

00:06:56.460 sometimes you have to sort of dig a little to get them to, to recognize those. Whereas other times,

00:07:03.260 you know, as in the case of this chemist, that was really right at the top of his mind because it was

00:07:07.800 a, a very intense experience for him and very unusual. Yeah. I think Einstein said he had aha

00:07:14.360 moments. Like he, he played the violin. I guess that's when he had his aha moments. Paul McCartney,

00:07:19.780 like the song yesterday, just like popped up in his head and he played it and that was it.

00:07:24.940 That's right. It came to him in his sleep or as he was waking up from sleep. Paul McCartney heard

00:07:31.260 this melody and he thought it was cool. And he got up and he played it at the piano and he thought,

00:07:36.860 well, this is, this is a great tune. I wonder who wrote it. He thought someone else had written it

00:07:41.800 and that he had heard it somewhere and it just came to his mind. So he went to John Lennon.

00:07:45.980 He played it for John Lennon and said, John Lennon said, you know, it's great,

00:07:50.500 but I've never heard this before. I don't think anyone else wrote it. McCartney went to their

00:07:54.560 producer, the Beatles producer, producer, never heard it before. And it was only then that McCartney

00:07:59.900 realized that he had come up with this melody. It didn't feel like he created it. It just came to

00:08:07.060 him. So he must, he assumed that it was just something he had heard before and was recalling from

00:08:13.360 memory in some way. Now the melody came to him, but not the words, the words he came up with

00:08:18.420 sometime later to fit the melody. But again, that's an example where it's a great example of

00:08:25.040 a situation where an insight occurs and someone feels like it's given to them because they don't

00:08:31.780 feel like it was the product of their own efforts or thought. So while a insight feels effortless,

00:08:39.540 right? It feels like it wasn't, you didn't do anything. Scientists, psychologists have found

00:08:44.480 that there are stages that people go through that lead to an insight. Can you walk us through those

00:08:50.080 stages? Sure. Now the set of stages, it's not the same for all situations. It's not the same for

00:08:57.820 everyone, but this is sort of the classic series or sequence of stages. So first you have a problem,

00:09:04.000 you recognize it as a problem. So you need to solve this problem. So you immerse yourself in the

00:09:10.440 problem. You study it from every angle. You gather background information that might be helpful.

00:09:17.220 You make some efforts towards solving the problem. And then the classical sort of situation is that

00:09:24.840 you're stuck. You're not making progress. You've reached what's called an impasse and you don't know

00:09:31.580 what to do. So after a while you give up on it or just put it aside for a while. And we might call

00:09:37.960 that diversion. You go off and do something else. You might take a nap, you might go play tennis or

00:09:43.360 watch TV or anything like that. And then at some point you'll have an aha moment, a sudden insight

00:09:49.160 that confers the solution to you. And this can happen when you least expect it. I mean,

00:09:55.100 often people have these insights while taking a shower. That's actually very common. There are many

00:10:00.960 stories of that. And people always tell me they get their best ideas in the shower. And in fact,

00:10:06.120 the screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, has said in interviews that sometimes he takes six or seven

00:10:12.440 showers a day just to get ideas for his writing. So some people actually make use of that. So that's

00:10:20.260 sort of the standard sequence. You immerse yourself. And then finally, I should mention,

00:10:25.720 after people have the insight, often there's an extra stage where they verify the correctness

00:10:31.920 of the solution. They check it to make sure it's correct. So not all of these stages are necessary.

00:10:37.700 So sometimes people are not immersing themselves in a problem. They just have an idea. They may not

00:10:42.660 even recognize they have a problem. Sometimes aha moments can confer the solution to a problem you

00:10:50.060 didn't even know you had. So for example, in 1943, Richard James was an engineer aboard a U.S. Navy

00:10:59.460 ship. And he was installing springs on instruments to sort of cushion them from the buffeting of the

00:11:07.880 sea during choppy weather. And one of these springs got loose and started bouncing around. And in that

00:11:16.000 instant, he had this aha moment that, wow, this would make a great toy. And he had to tinker with

00:11:22.820 it for a couple of years to perfect it. But that became the slinky. Now, I highly doubt that while he

00:11:29.380 was installing springs on these instruments to cushion them, the shock absorbers, he was thinking

00:11:36.100 about toys. In fact, there's no evidence he'd been thinking about toys prior to that at all. But what he

00:11:41.980 saw the springs bouncing around like that, it suddenly occurred to him that this could be a

00:11:47.980 great toy or at least be fashioned into one. So that's an example of a situation where there was

00:11:55.340 no immersion in a problem beforehand. There was no recognition of a problem. It's just an idea.

00:12:02.280 There was no impasse either. He wasn't stuck because he hadn't been working on anything. He just had this

00:12:07.880 great insight and then later on verified it and refined it and thought about it to make it work.

00:12:15.000 So that's an example right there of a different sequence of steps. Sometimes people don't need

00:12:22.320 the diversion. They could be working on a problem and have a sudden insight while they're working on

00:12:28.560 the problem. And that insight may be very different from the strategy they were taking when they were

00:12:34.800 working on a problem. So you might be trying to solve some problem about from work or personal

00:12:41.440 relationships. And you think, well, maybe this strategy would work. And you're thinking about

00:12:45.740 that. And then some other thought pops into your head as an insight. That's the solution. That would

00:12:50.920 be an example of having an aha moment without that diversion from the problem right there. So yeah,

00:12:57.780 the classical sequence of immersion, impasse, diversion, insight, and then verification,

00:13:04.800 those are all the steps, but you don't need all of those steps to have an insight.

00:13:09.840 Interesting. Well, what this book does that I found helpful and useful and enlightening was

00:13:16.580 what goes on in our brain when we experience insight? Because you and other scientists, thanks to

00:13:22.580 new technology, have been able to look at the brain when people experience insight.

00:13:26.700 So let's talk about that moment when someone has that aha experience. What is going on in the brain?

00:13:33.560 What parts of our brain are firing? Yeah. Well, let me go back about a little bit more than 15 years

00:13:41.240 and give a shout out to my main research collaborator, Mark Beeman at Northwestern University.

00:13:48.680 We did together the first neuroimaging study of insight. So as I mentioned earlier,

00:13:56.620 psychological scientists have been studying insight for almost a century, going back to around the time

00:14:02.360 of World War I. But only starting about 15 years ago did anyone, in this case it was us and shortly

00:14:10.180 thereafter, other people decide, well, you know, let's look inside the black box. Let's use brain imaging

00:14:16.660 to see what's going on in the brain when a person has insight. And it took all that time because

00:14:23.240 earlier than that, say in the 1980s or 90s, we didn't have the technology to do this. We didn't have

00:14:31.620 not just the hardware, but also the analytic methods, the mathematics, things like that to

00:14:39.420 figure out how to do this kind of brain imaging experiment. So you can't just follow someone

00:14:45.540 around, wait for them to have an insight or anticipate that they're going to have one and

00:14:49.660 then stuff them in a brain scanner and hope it happens. And there's several reasons why you can't

00:14:54.220 do that. One is that to do brain imaging, you need lots and lots of insights or lots of repetitions

00:15:01.700 of something. You can't just do a brain imaging of a single instance of something. There's just too

00:15:07.280 much noise. You need repetitions of it to get a refined end product. And you can't really anticipate

00:15:15.220 when someone's going to have an insight. And the German gestalt psychologists of a hundred years ago,

00:15:21.360 they gave people these complicated brain teaser problems. And we couldn't use those because most

00:15:28.880 of the time people can't solve them. They're just too difficult. When they do solve them, it's usually

00:15:34.180 with an aha moment, but they just weren't, it's just too hard. So what we did was we decided to use

00:15:40.240 little verbal puzzles and give people dozens and dozens of these. So for example, one kind of puzzle

00:15:48.160 might be an anagram where you have to give in a series of letters and you have to rearrange them

00:15:53.820 to find the word. And, you know, we have hundreds of these. There are other kinds of puzzles as well.

00:16:00.920 And so we can give people lots of puzzles and while they're in a brain scanner and they can solve a lot

00:16:08.000 of them, sometimes most of them. And after each solution, we ask them, well, how did you solve that

00:16:13.300 one? Did you work it out in a deliberate methodical fashion or did the solution just pop into your

00:16:19.780 awareness? And so we sort the solutions into, you know, these are the insight solutions. Those are

00:16:26.280 the analytic solutions. And we compare the brain activity. And in our, in our first neuroimaging

00:16:31.260 study, which was published in 2004 in the journal PLOS Biology, we found that at the moment of insight,

00:16:39.080 there was a burst of activity in the right hemisphere of the brain in a part of the right

00:16:45.160 temporal lobe. And so that was sort of the brain activity corresponding to the insight. We think it's

00:16:51.720 the brain activity corresponding to the solution actually popping into awareness. But the thing that

00:16:58.940 surprised us, and perhaps it shouldn't have surprised us, was that there are other brain processes

00:17:04.800 that are unconscious that led up to this. So when you have an aha moment, it feels like it's coming

00:17:12.480 to existence from nothing. But actually, that's not true. Your brain is doing various things

00:17:19.680 unconsciously that lead up to that aha moment. So sometimes there are examples where a person has

00:17:28.560 already solved the problem. And that solution is unconscious. And it's just waiting for the right

00:17:36.140 moment to pop into awareness. So you may have the solution and not know it, but because it's

00:17:43.060 unconscious, but brain imaging can show activity in the brain corresponding to the existence of that

00:17:50.580 solution prior to becoming conscious. So we found a series of steps leading up to insight, and we decided

00:17:58.220 in a series of studies sort of trace the aha moment backwards in time to look at what all its precursors

00:18:04.880 were in the brain. And what are those precursors? Do they follow those stages a bit that we talked

00:18:12.740 about just now? Loosely speaking, but not exactly. So the first precursor that we identify, which is only

00:18:20.740 about a second before you have an aha moment, is what we call a brain blink. So we found the

00:18:28.120 aha moment is this burst of activity in the right hemisphere of the brain. But we found a sudden

00:18:33.900 decrease in activity in the visual cortex of the brain, which is in the back of the head, the area

00:18:40.060 that processes visual information from the eyes. And I guess a good way to think about this is if you look

00:18:46.560 someone right in the face and you ask them a difficult question, often what they'll do is they'll look

00:18:53.760 away. They might look down at their shoes or they might look up at the blank ceiling or a blank wall

00:18:59.340 or they might even close their eyes to think, to avoid the distractions around them so that they can

00:19:06.520 focus their attention inwardly. And in our experiments, people weren't allowed to do that.

00:19:11.460 They couldn't move their heads. They couldn't close their eyes at specific times or even move their eyes.

00:19:17.260 But their brains did it for them. So what seems to happen is that the brain can detect that there is

00:19:24.340 this unconscious solution or idea. And it shuts down briefly some of the visual inputs. It's sort of

00:19:32.640 like closing your eyes, but it's really your brain cutting off visual inputs to cut off some of that

00:19:39.160 distraction, that noise, so that this unconscious idea can bubble up. So we called it a brain blink.

00:19:47.160 People don't realize that often when they have an aha moment, for just a brief instant before that

00:19:53.840 moment, they may have reduced awareness of their environment because their attention is being

00:20:00.040 focused inwardly. So that was sort of the first surprise. We didn't expect that finding at all.

00:20:07.880 And then if you go further back in time, we found that in the two seconds before each puzzle is presented,

00:20:14.640 the brain activity will, in that two seconds before the puzzle, predicts whether you will solve that

00:20:21.880 upcoming puzzle with a flesh of insight or solve it analytically. And that's kind of bizarre. I mean,

00:20:28.580 what it means is that how you go about solving a puzzle, it depends on the state of your brain or the state

00:20:36.000 of your mind, your mindset when you get the puzzle. And specifically what we found is that when you're

00:20:43.500 going to solve an upcoming puzzle analytically by working it out in a deliberate fashion,

00:20:49.900 your attention is focused outwardly. In this case, on the screen on which we flashed the puzzle,

00:20:56.880 there's more activity in the visual areas of the brain. You're focusing on it. When you're going to

00:21:03.540 solve an upcoming problem with an insight, there's reduced visual activity. You're focusing your

00:21:09.540 attention inwardly. And then other areas of the brain that are involved in processing ideas,

00:21:15.900 those become more active. And there's a really interesting area of the brain that becomes more

00:21:20.220 active. It's called the interior cingulate. And it's sort of in the front of the brain,

00:21:24.900 right in the middle. And the interior cingulate does, it's been a very hot topic

00:21:30.280 in cognitive neuroscience for, oh, 20, 25 years. It does a variety of things. But what it seems to

00:21:36.740 be doing in this case is that it monitors the rest of the brain for activity. And so, for example,

00:21:45.520 in certain situations, you kind of have mental blinders on. You know exactly what to do. You have

00:21:52.180 a problem. You take it at face value. You don't consider other options. That's what happens when the

00:21:58.660 interior cingulate is not very active. It's not expanding the scope of your thought. It's narrowing

00:22:04.220 the scope of your thought. But when the interior cingulate fires up, it detects all of this activity

00:22:10.420 in other parts of the brain. Sometimes these are weakly held ideas, unconscious ideas. And it expands

00:22:17.820 the scope of your thought and allows you to switch your attention to some crazy long shot hypothesis

00:22:24.380 about what's going on. It takes the blinders off. So if your anterior cingulate, that area between the

00:22:33.140 two hemispheres of your brain right in the middle, if that's all fired up, you will be open to all

00:22:40.280 kinds of crazy long shot ideas, which are particularly creative, which may be correct. And those pop into

00:22:47.600 awareness all of a sudden as aha moments. So that was a precursor we looked for. We didn't know what

00:22:55.860 we would find, but we found that. That's another step leading towards insight. And then going even

00:23:01.820 further back in time, we found something that we found kind of mind-boggling. And that is, in one

00:23:08.340 experiment, we recorded people's EEGs while they just sat and did nothing. They were just relaxing.

00:23:15.460 They weren't given any kind of task to perform. They didn't know what they would be doing next.

00:23:21.300 We just recorded their brain activity while they let their minds wander. And then weeks later,

00:23:27.740 we gave them puzzles to solve. And we looked at which participants solved more of these puzzles

00:23:34.940 with a flesh of insight and which of them solved them more analytically. And then we went back to

00:23:41.340 their EEGs and we compared their EEGs. And we found really amazing differences between

00:23:47.260 the brains of people who tend to solve problems with a flesh of insight and those who tend to solve

00:23:54.380 them analytically. And we found is that the analytical solvers had more activity in the frontal lobes of

00:24:01.640 their brain. This is when they weren't even working on a problem. And the more insightful people,

00:24:07.040 we call them insightfuls, had more activity in posterior regions of the brain. The frontal lobe

00:24:15.920 of the brain, it organizes thought, it sets goals, it focuses your attention. And it seems like these

00:24:24.160 analytical thinkers are habitually like that. And the insightful thinkers, they don't have that

00:24:30.400 frontal lobe cognitive control as strongly. And their thinking kind of goes rogue. They may not be

00:24:38.180 as organized, as focused. In fact, creative people tend to be distractible. They tend to be a little

00:24:46.240 less organized and kind of perhaps even a little rambly from time to time. But that ability allows them

00:24:54.620 to try out all sorts of crazy ideas, crazy thoughts on the periphery of awareness that

00:25:01.400 are often really useful and creative. So your brain activity that we measure, what you're doing

00:25:08.360 nothing, can predict how you're going to solve problems weeks later, which we found we were very

00:25:15.620 surprised at that. So those are some of the precursors that we found.

00:25:21.600 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show.

00:25:27.380 And so those precursors, though, can give you insights about, I mean, so you can't control

00:25:31.800 insights, but you can, I guess, make, you can provide an environment for them to happen more often.

00:25:38.720 So like that idea, that precursor that happens like a two seconds before that insight happens,

00:25:43.640 where you're either, you decide whether you're going to solve this analytically or with an insight.

00:25:48.400 If you're going at a problem, just like, I'm going to solve this with brute force, like you're never

00:25:54.040 going to solve it with an insight probably, like at that moment, because you're already in that

00:25:57.740 mindset of solving it analytically.

00:26:00.020 Yes. I mean, so as I said, you can't force insights. You can decide consciously to voluntarily

00:26:08.620 attack a problem in an analytical fashion, a systematic, methodical way. You can try to coax an

00:26:15.640 insight by sort of shutting all that thought down, relaxing, closing your eyes. Perhaps there are

00:26:21.860 other things we can talk about too, that, that will do that. But, but the important thing to keep in

00:26:26.760 mind is, although there are some people who are naturally more analytical and some who are more,

00:26:32.280 are naturally more insightful, virtually everyone we've studied, and we've tested hundreds and

00:26:37.260 hundreds of people, they can solve problems in either way, either with an aha moment or analytically.

00:26:43.760 The thing is that they just are naturally inclined to do it one way or the other. But that means that

00:26:49.340 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

00:31:42.020 brain where they can have more insights?

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, 1.00

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.

00:45:18.840 Right.

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. 0.99

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.

00:49:37.140 Thank you. It's been fun.

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

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The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2019

#530： How to Get More ＂Aha＂ Insights

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