A recent study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that subtle and measurable changes in behavior are apparent minutes before problem-solvers and inventors announce a “eureka moment”.
How Can We Predict a “Eureka Moment”?
The new research suggests that the breakthrough moment is foreshadowed by changes in mannerisms, writing, and shifting attention while they think. The team discovered this by video-recording six Ph.D.-level mathematicians as they worked on notoriously difficult problems from the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition.
During the sessions, researchers documented more than 4,600 moment-to-moment interactions with blackboard “inscriptions,” writing, pointing, erasing, and redirecting attention. Among those interactions, they identified moments where participants expressed a sudden realization or sense of understanding.
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“These moments were often accompanied by sudden movements and emotional exclamations, not unlike Archimedes running naked through the streets of ancient Syracuse yelling ‘eureka’, though admittedly less dramatic,” the authors write.
Interestingly, the few minutes preceding these realizations were accompanied by certain unpredictable behaviors or signals. Using tools from information theory, the researchers quantified unpredictability and found it “reliably ramped up before verbalized insights.”
More specifically, “behavior unpredictability” increased approximately two minutes before a eureka moment, peaked about one minute after the insight, and then returned to normal afterwards.
“In the minutes leading up to an insight, mathematicians’ shifts of attention between inscriptions enacted increasingly unprecedented connections,” they write. “This associative or combinatorial thinking is a hallmark of creativity, including in scientific arenas such as biomedical research and technological innovation … We captured this combinatorial process as it unfolded moment-to-moment in mathematicians’ embodied activity.”
According to Interesting Engineering, researchers behind the study believe that these observable insights could also occur in other creative and scientific fields. As far as why these changes occur, study authors suggest a few theories, including that “at a biological level, this increase in behavioural unpredictability might reflect a destabilisation of underlying brain dynamics.”
