Topic: insight

Jaan Aru examines biological mechanisms that may matter for consciousness, including dendritic integration and interactions between cortex and thalamus. The discussion connects these mechanisms to cognition and prospects for artificial consciousness, then explores insight and creativity across ordinary problem-solving and altered experiences.

Although analogical reasoning has been assumed to involve insight and its associated “aha!” experience, the relationship between these phenomena has never been directly probed empirically. In this study we investigated the relationship between representational change and the “aha!” experience during analogical reasoning. A novel set of verbal analogy stimuli were developed for use as an insight task. Across two experiments, participants reported significantly stronger aha moments and showed greater evidence of representational change on trials with more semantically distant analogies. Further,