Those Eureka Moments

Phoe6 writes "If you're one of those insufferable people who can finish the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle, you probably have a gift for insight. The puzzles always have an underlying hint to solving them, but on Saturdays that clue is insanely obtuse. If you had all day, you could try a zillion different combinations and eventually figure it out. But with insight, you'd experience the usual clueless confusion, until--voilà--the fog clears and you get the clue, which suddenly seems obvious. The sudden flash of insight that precedes such "Aha!" moments is characteristic of many types of cognitive processes besides problem-solving, including memory retrieval, language comprehension, and various forms of creativity. Although different problem-solving strategies share many common attributes, insight-derived solutions appear to be unique in several ways. PLoS Biology explains the Neural Basis of Solving Problems with Insight. The Complete Research Article is here."

Comments

Eureka is overrated

[Plutor]

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I've found it!), but 'That's funny...'"
-Isaac Asimov.

Excellent book with examples

[Don'tTreadOnMe]

"Aha! Insight"

Sorry for the Amazon link, but it was easy to find there. Strangely, going through this book, especially if you don't resort to the hintws and answers in the back, helps develop just the sort of insight mentioned.

As always, your mileage may vary.

The word is...

[dcw3]

epiphany
n. pl. epiphanies

A comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization: "I experienced an epiphany, a spiritual flash that would change the way I viewed myself" (Frank Maier).