Latest news with #RobertoCabeza
Fast Company
21-05-2025
- Science
- Fast Company
Neuroscientists have discovered why ‘Aha moments' stick in your brain long after you have them
After spending forever floundering for a solution to a problem, an Aha moment can feel like magic. But a new study by researchers from Duke University and the University of Berlin has found that the Aha moment gives us more than temporary elation. 'If you have an 'aha! moment' while learning something, it almost doubles your memory,' says Roberto Cabeza, lead author of the new study, in a statement. 'There are few memory effects that are as powerful as this.' The research was published this month in Nature Communications. What is an aha moment? The study defines an 'Aha experience' as a moment where 'the solution comes to you in a sudden manner, with a strong sense of certainty and a strong positive emotion.' Suddenness, certainty, and internal reward are all important parts of the process. When we have a flash of insight, our brains go through a process called representational change where our internal representations of the insight undergoes rapid reorganization and integration, helping encode it into our memory. 'During these moments of insight, the brain reorganizes how it sees the image,' noted first author Maxi Becker. In particular, the researchers found that insights that with high certainty and positive emotion boosted activity in the amygdala and hippocampus brain structures. The more powerful the insights the more activity in the hippocampus, causing more memory retention. How was the study conducted? To test what was happening in people's brains when they have an Aha moment, the researchers used fMRI technology to scan participants' brains while they tried to identify a series of 'Moony images,'—images of common objects reduced to minimally detailed, two-tone black and white images. The high contrast of the images made them difficult to identify immediately, improving the odds of participants having Aha moments. After they identified each object, the participants were asked to rate how suddenly they found the solution, how positive they felt, and how certain they felt that their answer was correct. Five days later, the researchers tested the group of participants again to determine how well they remembered the Moony images that they'd previously identified. Strikingly, they found that participants remembered solutions that came to them in a burst of insight around twice as well as solutions worked out more methodically. Additionally, the researchers observed that Aha moments cause a chain reaction in our brains enhancing representative change in the brain's ventral occipito-temporal cortex (a region responsible for visual processing), activity in the amygdala and hippocampus, and engaging other solution-processing brain regions.
Gizmodo
18-05-2025
- Science
- Gizmodo
This Is What Your Brain Looks Like When You Solve a Problem
We've all had the aha moment, when the solution to a problem is suddenly obvious. In cartoons, that eureka feeling is usually depicted as a lightbulb floating above a character's head—which is not that far off from what actually takes place in the brain during these moments. Researchers have revealed that epiphanies physically reshape brain activity. What's more, they discovered that people remember epiphanies better than solutions reached through a more methodical approach. These results could have important implications for how instructors approach teaching in classrooms. 'If you have an 'aha! moment' while learning something, it almost doubles your memory,' Roberto Cabeza, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke, said in a university statement. 'There are few memory effects that are as powerful as this.' Cabeza is senior author of a study published earlier this month in the journal Nature Communications. As study participants solved brain teasers, he and his colleagues recorded their brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging, a technique that measures changes in blood flow associated with brain activity. The brain teasers were visual fill-in-the-blank puzzles that revealed a previously hidden picture once participants completed the image. While such an activity might seem childish, this small discovery 'produces the same type of characteristics that exist in more important insight events,' Cabeza explained. Once participants thought they'd solved a puzzle, the team asked them how certain they were of their solution, and whether they'd reached the solution suddenly (in an aha moment) or worked it out more intentionally. Overall, the researchers noted that participants who reported epiphanies remembered their solutions significantly better than those who hadn't—and the more certain they were about their flash of insight, the greater the likelihood they'd still recall it five days later. The functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that the epiphanies triggered an explosion of activity in the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in learning and memory. Stronger moments of insight caused stronger bursts of activity. When participants solved the puzzle and finally recognized the secret object, researchers also noted changes in the participants' neuron firing dynamics—especially in regions of the ventral occipito-temporal cortex, which is involved in recognizing visual patterns. Similarly, the more powerful the moment of insight, the greater the changes researchers recorded. 'During these moments of insight, the brain reorganizes how it sees the image,' said Maxi Becker, first author of the study and a cognitive neuroscientist at Humboldt University. Furthermore, the researchers linked more powerful epiphanies with more connectivity between those parts of the brain. 'The different regions communicate with each other more efficiently,' said Cabeza. As such, 'Learning environments that encourage insight could boost long-term memory and understanding,' the researchers wrote in the statement. While in this study the team imaged brain activity before and after participants' 'aha' moment, moving forward they hope to investigate what takes place in between—when the real magic happens.
