Drexel University
When a solution to a problem seems to have come to you out of thin air, it turns out you've more than likely been struck with the right idea, according to a new study.
A
series of experiments conducted by a team of researchers determined that a
person's sudden insights are often more accurate at solving problems than
thinking them through analytically.
"Conscious,
analytic thinking can sometimes be rushed or sloppy, leading to mistakes while
solving a problem," said team member John Kounios, PhD, professor in
Drexel University's College of Arts and Sciences and the co-author of the book "The
Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight and the Brain."
"However, insight is unconscious and automatic -- it can't be rushed. When the process runs to completion in its own time and all the dots are connected unconsciously, the solution pops into awareness as an Aha! moment. This means that when a really creative, breakthrough idea is needed, it's often best to wait for the insight rather than settling for an idea that resulted from analytical thinking."
Experiments
with four different types of timed puzzles showed that those answers that
occurred as sudden insights (also described as Aha! moments) were more likely
to be correct.
Moreover, people who tended to have more of these insights were
also more likely to miss the deadline rather than provide an incorrect, but
in-time, answer.
Those who responded based on analytic thought (described as
being an idea that is worked out consciously and deliberately) were more likely
to provide an answer by the deadline, though these last-minute answers were
often wrong.
Trust Yourself
Carola
Salvi, PhD, of Northwestern University, was lead author on the paper
"Insightful solutions are correct more often than analytic solutions"
in the journal Thinking &
Reasoning.
"The
history of great discoveries is full of successful insight episodes, fostering
a common belief that when people have an insightful thought, they are likely to
be correct," Salvi explained. "However, this belief has never been
tested and may be a fallacy based on the tendency to report only positive cases
and neglect insights that did not work. Our study tests the hypothesis that the
confidence people often have about their insights is justified."
Other
co-authors on the paper with Salvi and Kounios were Mark Beeman (co-author of
"The Eureka Factor" with Kounios), also of Northwestern, Edward
Bowden, of the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, and Emanuela Bricolo, of
Milano-Bicocca University in Italy.
Putting Insight to The Test
Each
experiment making up the study used one group of distinct puzzles: one
experiment used only linguistic puzzles, another used strictly visual ones, and
two used puzzles with both linguistic and visual elements.
For
example, one type of linguistic puzzle showed three different words:
"Crab," "pine" and "sauce." The experiment
participant was then asked to provide the word that could fit all of them to
make a compound word, which was "apple," in this case. The visual
puzzle provided a scrambled image and required the participant to say what
object they thought the puzzle depicted.
Each
experiment consisted of between 50 and 180 puzzles. Participants were given 15
or 16 seconds to respond after seeing a puzzle. As soon as the participant
thought they solved the puzzle, they pressed a button and said their answer.
Then they reported whether the solution came through insight or analytical
thinking.
Overwhelmingly,
responses derived from insight proved correct. In the linguistic puzzles, 94
percent of the responses classified as insight were correct, compared to 78
percent for the analytic thinking responses. For the visual puzzles, 78 percent
of the responses were correct, versus 42 percent for the analytic responses.
Bad Guesses, Good Insights
When
taking the timing into account, answers given during the last five seconds
before the deadline had a lower probability of being correct. For the
linguistic puzzles, 34 percent of the responses were wrong, compared to 10
percent of the responses being wrong for quicker answers; for the visual
puzzles, 72 percent of the answers given during the last five seconds were
wrong.
The
majority of those late wrong answers were based on analytic thinking. In one of
the experiments, the number of incorrect responses related to analytic thinking
recorded in the last five seconds was more than double the number of incorrect
responses recorded as insights.
Those
numbers for the last five seconds pointed to some participants guessing at the
puzzles' solutions. These participants were analytical thinkers.
"Deadlines
create a subtle -- or not so subtle -- background feeling of anxiety,"
Kounios said. "Anxiety shifts one's thinking from insightful to analytic.
Deadlines are helpful to keep people on task, but if creative ideas are needed,
it's better to have a soft target date. A drop-dead deadline will get results,
but they are less likely to be creative results."
Insightful
thinkers tend not to guess. They don't give an answer until they have had an
Aha! moment.
"Because
insight solutions are produced below the threshold of consciousness, it is not
possible to monitor and adjust processing before the solution enters
awareness," Salvi said.
Hmm vs. Aha!
Analytical
thinking is best used for problems in which known strategies have been laid out
for solutions, such as arithmetic, Kounios said. But for new problems without a
set path for finding a solution, insight is often best. The new study shows
that more weight should be placed on these sudden thoughts.
"This
means that in all kinds of personal and professional situations, when a person
has a genuine, sudden insight, then the idea has to be taken seriously,"
Kounios said. "It may not always be correct, but it can have a higher
probability of being right than an idea that is methodically worked out."
