Aha, Uh-Oh, and D’oh! The Psychology of Insight
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
How to think outside the box and have more original ideas.
The word ‘insight’ is sometimes used to mean something like ‘self-awareness’, including awareness of our thought processes, beliefs, desires, emotions, and so on, and of how they relate to one another and to the truth.
Of course, self-awareness comes by types and degrees. Owing to chemical receptors in their tendrils, vining plants know not to coil around themselves, and in that much can be said to have awareness of self and not-self. Infants only begin to develop reflective self-awareness at around 18 months of age, enabling them to recognise themselves in pictures and mirrors.
But insight is also used to mean something like ‘penetrating discernment’: a deep understanding of a person, problem, or situation. Such understanding may emerge gradually, but it can also arrive all at once, with a previously hidden truth—or the solution to a previously intractable problem—suddenly flooding the mind. This sudden apprehension of an insight is sometimes called an epiphany (Greek, ‘manifestation’, ‘coming into the light’), revelation, or ‘aha’ moment.
It is this epiphanic form of insight with which I am principally concerned. Unlike analytical thinking, which proceeds consciously and laboriously from one step to the next, it seems to come from nowhere. One moment, we are staring helplessly at the problem; the next, we can see straight through it. It is rather like climbing a mountain in fog, turning round, and suddenly seeing the entire landscape spread out below.
The Anatomy of Insight
Such ‘aha moments’, epitomised by Archimedes’ cry of Eureka! Eureka! (Greek, ‘I found it! I found it!’), involve a sudden shift in understanding, often by seeing something familiar in a new light or bringing previously disconnected elements together. They carry a characteristic feeling of clarity and conviction, and often delight—though they can also devastate, depending on what has been apprehended.
It is said that, upon sinking into his bath, Archimedes noticed the water level rising and suddenly understood that the volume of water displaced corresponded to the volume of the parts of his body that had been submerged. Less rarefied examples of aha moments include suddenly understanding a joke, or suddenly ‘seeing’ the other aspect of a reversal image such as the duck-rabbit (pictured).
Aha moments, it seems, primarily arise from unconscious and automatic processes, and—you might have noticed—our eyes naturally tend, when mulling over insight problems, to look away from visual stimuli. Brain-imaging studies suggest that this withdrawal of attention, or ‘looking inside’, may be part of the mechanism of insight. By screening out the immediate environment, the mind creates the spare capacity for loose associations to come together. The flash of insight may be sudden, but the work that produces it is not. Indeed, that work may draw upon a lifetime of experience and study.
This helps explain the so-called incubation effect. We wrestle with a problem, reach an impasse, and put it aside—only for the answer to come to us in the shower, on a walk, or upon waking. Had Archimedes not already been wrestling with the problem of measurement, his bath would not have become so famous.
Insight is closely related to intuition. If an intuition is a disposition to believe without conscious deliberation, an epiphanic insight is the sudden apprehension of a previously hidden relation. Intuition may lead to insight, but it can also remain no more than a hunch—rather than a sudden coming together.
Aha moments of the Archimedean kind might be distinguished from uh-oh moments, in which we become aware of an unforeseen problem, and from d’oh moments, popularised by the Simpson patriarch, when a foreseeable but unforeseen problem hits us or we have a flash of insight into our complete lack of insight.
In all three cases, something previously hidden is suddenly revealed, be it an answer, a danger, or our own stupidity.
Although insight often puts us in touch with some truth, there can also be false insights. Insight, therefore, is not exempt from analytical verification. Insight proposes; reason disposes. The highest thinking is not the one or the other, but both together.
The Price of Seeing Differently
‘Thinking outside the box’ is a cognitive feat. When we understand something in a particular way, it is very difficult to apprehend it in any other way, even in the face of the strongest contradictory evidence. It is not merely that we cannot imagine the answer; often, we are trapped inside the wrong question or assumption.
In When Prophecy Fails (1956), the social psychologist Leon Festinger discusses his experience of infiltrating a UFO doomsday cult whose leader had prophesied the end of the world. When the end of the world failed to materialise, most of the cult members dealt with the dissonance that arose from the cognitions ‘the leader said that the world would end’ and ‘the world did not end’ not by ditching the cult or its leader, as you might expect, but by rationalising that the world had been saved by the strength of their faith. Taking their assumptions for facts, the cult members simply reinterpreted the evidence in a way that preserved their existing beliefs.
Very often, to see something in a different light also means to see ourselves and the whole world in that new light, which can threaten and undermine our sense of self and raise atavistic defences. It is more a matter of emotion or self-conception than of reason or intelligence, which explains why even leading scientists can struggle with contravening evidence.
As the physicist Max Planck (d. 1947) observed, ‘A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’ Or, to put it more pithily, science advances one funeral at a time.
What is true of eminent scientists is true also of us. Our life cannot possibly have been a long list of mistakes. A new insight can demand a new self—which is a higher price than we are willing or able to pay. Younger people, having less to lose, can still afford to be open to ideas—but not for long. By the age of about 22, there is little left of the god in them.
Our attachment to our beliefs is so strong that contravening evidence or attempts to convince us otherwise can in fact entrench them—which is why, as a psychiatrist, I rarely challenge my patients, or indeed anyone, directly. But you don’t have to take my word for it: in a study, supplying ‘corrective information’ to people with serious concerns about the adverse effects of the flu jab made them less willing to receive it. This more than substantiates the German proverb: ‘Never give uninvited advice. The wise won’t need it, the fools won’t heed it.’
Some Insights Into Having Insights
So, short of dissolving our egos, which might take twenty years in a temple, or, ironically, an unusually strong ego, what can we do to increase our cognitive flexibility?
Naturally, it helps to have the tools of thought, including language fluency and multiple frames of reference as given by knowledge and experience. But more important is to develop that first sense of insight—namely, insight as self-awareness.
Self-awareness enables us to distinguish the problem from the assumptions that we have brought to it. At a practical level, we can change the way in which the problem is represented: draw it, explain it aloud, reverse it, reduce it, enlarge it, or translate it into an analogy. More searchingly, we can ask: What am I taking for granted? What would someone from another discipline, culture, or period see here? What if the opposite were true? What am I reluctant to notice because noticing it would cost me something? And how much more is it costing me to be that sort of person?
More benignly, we need to create the time and conditions for thoughts to connect. My own associative thinking is much more active when I’m both well-rested and at rest, for example, standing under the shower or ambling in the park. The very title of this essay came to me while cooking dinner and pouring a glass of wine, after the essay had been written. Jack Welch (d. 2020), as Chairman and CEO of General Electric, spent an hour each day in what he called ‘looking out of the window time’. And August Kekulé (d. 1896) claimed to have discovered the ring structure of the benzene molecule while daydreaming about a snake biting its own tail.
We tend to treat looking out of the window as the opposite of thinking. Often, it is thinking relieved of its supervisor. In my early twenties, as a strategy consultant in Paris, I would get told off for going out for walks. I once responded, ‘How do you expect me to think, locked up in a cubicle?’ (They didn’t like me.) Modern life supplies endless stimulation and very little mental vacancy, leaving us rich in information but poor in opportunities for this information to reorganise itself.
Time is a very strange thing and not at all linear: sometimes, the best way of using it is to waste it.
Continue Exploring
If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking and How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.
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