Aha Moments
There’s some evidence that “aha moments”—sudden insights that seem to arrive out of nowhere—use different cognitive processes than analytical problem-solving and more generalized thinking.
An experiment in early-2022 looked into this possibility, researchers tasking subjects with solving word puzzles and then asking them whether they used an analytical, multi-step process to solve them, or if the answer came to them in a flash, fully-realized, seemingly out of nowhere.
Some of the subjects performed this (timed) task while also being told to memorize a pair of numbers they were given just before the word puzzles arrived on their screens, and a third group was also given numbers to memorize, but were given four digits instead of two.
This study showed that when subjects’ were told to memorize numbers before attempting to solve the puzzles, their analytical approaches slowed substantially (in many cases they failed to arrive at a solution before their time was up), but their intuitive, aha-powers were undiminished, suggesting that the two processes use different mental resources because the latter wasn’t influenced by the additional cognitive load of memorizing numbers.
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