Can You Trust a Eureka Moment?

Scientific American:

Aha! moments are satisfying in part because they feel so right; all the pieces of a puzzle appear to fall into place with little conscious effort. But can you trust such sudden solutions? Yes, according to new research published in Thinking & Reasoning. The results support the conventional wisdom that this type of insight can provide correct answers to challenging problems.

In four experiments, Carola Salvi, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University, John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University, and their colleagues presented college students with mind teasers, such as anagrams and rebus puzzles. At the completion of a timed trial, subjects were asked to report if they had arrived at their answer by thinking the problem through step by step (analytical problem solving) or if the solution had sprung to mind (insight).

In all four experiments, aha! solutions were more often correct than those achieved deliberately. For instance, in one experiment, in which 38 participants had to think of a single word that could form a compound phrase with three previously presented words (such as “apple” for the trio “crab,” “pine” and “sauce”), aha! solutions were correct 94 percent of the time compared with 78 percent accuracy for analytical solutions.

Read the whole story: Scientific American