If the correct answer happens to be a weaker association, people may feel stuck, he says, yet beneath the surface, unbeknownst to them, their mind may be ushering it into awareness. For example, when people attempt the puzzle “pine/crab/sauce,” multiple word associations get activated but only the strongest are accessible to the conscious mind. Stuyck believes that during moments of insight, there is a give-and-take between conscious and unconscious processes. “There is so much debate within the literature,” Stuyck says. But cognitive psychologists disagree about whether actual reasoning can occur below the level of awareness. “That’s the most interesting result.”Ī significant amount of brain activity is unconscious-that is why we can seemingly drive to work automatically and why we are not always aware of the biases that affect our decisions. “Whether they don’t have the memory task or they have a low-demand memory task or a high-demand memory task, the number of puzzles they solve with insight remains constant,” Stuyck says. These participants accurately completed between 17 and 19 puzzles, on average, in all three groups. Yet when people relied on insight, not only was their success rate higher, it was unaffected by the number-recall task. Indeed, when participants used analytical thinking-by, for example, generating a phrase such as “con artist,” checking whether “con” was a match with “hatch” or “route” and then moving on-they experienced diminishing returns, solving, on average, 16 puzzles when they had no numbers to remember but only 12 puzzles when they had to remember two digits and eight puzzles when they had to remember four. The question was whether insightful thinking would be similarly affected. “These cognitive resources, this pool that we can tap into to do anything consciously, is limited,” Stuyck says. The purpose of making people remember random numbers was to burden their mind with an unrelated task, which was expected to interfere with conscious problem-solving. The third group was identical to the second except that people had to try to remember four digits instead of two. In the second group, two random digits flashed sequentially on the screen before the words appeared, and people had to try to recall those numbers after finishing the puzzle. Participants were divided into three groups. After typing an answer, they indicated whether they had reached it “with Aha!”-which they were told meant becoming “aware of the solution suddenly and clearly,” like a lightbulb illuminating a dark room-or calculated it step-by-step “without Aha!”-as if their brain was a room slowly being lit with a dimmer switch. The 105 undergraduates, most of whom were women, had up to 25 seconds to solve each problem. (For example, if the test were conducted in English, people might be given the words “artist,” “hatch” and “route,” with the answer being “escape” because “escape artist,” “escape hatch” and “escape route” are all recognizable phrases.) The task was to find a fourth word that pairs with each. Each puzzle consisted of three Dutch words displayed on a computer screen. “You can be overloaded by all this type of stuff, cell phones or whatever, and your insights remain shielded,” says Hans Stuyck, a doctoral student at Université Libre de Bruxelles and KU Leuven in Belgium, who led the study.įor that investigation, which was first published online in December 2021 in the journal Cognition, the psychologists created 70 word puzzles that undergraduate students could solve using either insight or analytic reasoning. Even when people are managing multiple demands on their brainpower, the research suggests their intuitive thought processes may still be readily accessible. Scientists have identified distinctive brain activity patterns that signal moments of insight, but there is still some debate about whether insight is simply the final, most satisfying step in a deliberative thought process or a wholly separate form of thinking.Īn ingenious new study by a team of Belgian psychologists provides additional evidence that insight engages unconscious mechanisms that differ from analytic, step-by-step reasoning. Psychologists call these sudden aha! moments “insight.” They occur not only when we are faced with a problem but also when we suddenly “get” a joke or crossword puzzle clue or are jolted by a personal realization. ![]() Most of us have had the experience of struggling mightily to solve a problem only to find, while taking a walk or doing the dishes, that the answer comes to us seemingly from nowhere.
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