In many cases, puzzles and analytical problems are used to test an individual's cognitive ability, to reveal his creative side or used in logical tests in big companies. Some of such puzzles are named insight problems. Insight puzzles include verbal riddles, matchstick arithmetic, anagrams and rebus puzzles. The psychological process of solving the insight problems is named as eureka effect which dates back to 250 BC where Archimed attempts to reveal whether the king's crown is pure gold or not. He solves this problem in the bath with the sudden inside discovery.
Image: The nine dot problem
According to John Kounios, PhD, a professor of psychology at Drexel University in Philadelphia, creativity is not just an artistic or musical material but also, is a sudden spark while solving a problem. While there are many alternatives for use of creativity, another way of defining creativity is thinking on your feet. It is when you come up with a novel solution about a certain situation. The eureka moment is a psychological phenomenon when thinking on your feet moment appears. “We can't chase people around, predict when they're going to have an aha moment, or psychological scientists call them an insight, and then stuff them in a brain scanner and wait for it to happen, we just can't do that” said John Kounios.
So what we found in our initial study, which we published in PLOS Biology in 2004, was that for a particular type of verbal puzzle, the insight itself, the aha moment itself, corresponds to a burst of brain activity in the right temporal lobe, just above the right ear, high-frequency EEG and also electroencephalogram and also using functional magnetic resonance imaging—fMRI, an increase in blood flow just at the moment that the person has the solution pop into awareness. So we were able to then, over a series of studies, trace backwards in time, what are the precursors that lead to a person having an aha moment. We recorded people's resting-state electroencephalography, their resting-state EEGs. So they're sitting there, with no test to perform, no idea what's going to come next, they're just sitting and relaxing, we record their brain activity. And then weeks later, we give them, in this case, anagrams to solve, and we note, for each subject, which ones they solved analytically and which ones they solved insightfully, with an aha moment. We then divided the subjects into groups, which ones tended to solve the problems with a flash of insight and which ones tended to solve more problems analytically, and we compared the resting-state brain activity that we recorded weeks earlier, and we found substantial differences between these two types of people.
And what we found is that the analytical thinkers, in their resting-state, tend to have more brain activity over the frontal lobe, we could record over the frontal lobes, and the insightful thinkers tend to have more resting-state brain activity in the left, posterior parts of the brain. So the frontal lobe is the seed of what we call executive processing, cognitive control. It gives us focus. It sets goals. It focuses attention. When the frontal lobe is more deactivated, it's less active, then thinking becomes fuzzier, less goal-directed, less organized, and people who have less frontal lobe activity, at least on average, tend to have more of these aha moments, these sudden insights. In conclusion, each type of thinker uses both methods when solving a problem. It is just that some people have one way more balanced than the other.
Nigar Sadigzade
28.12.2021
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