[HN Gopher] Neuroscientists track the neural activity underlying...
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Neuroscientists track the neural activity underlying an "aha"
Author : wjb3
Score : 157 points
Date : 2025-11-16 21:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| pureliquidhw wrote:
| Off topic but of all the Mooney images ever made, why a scary
| clown?
|
| That aside, working with complex systems and constraints there
| often isn't an aha moment, there's just a decision to be made. As
| someone who loves that aha moment, I can get stuck trying to
| figure out perfect from good enough. Interesting to see there is
| indeed a positive emotion correlated with that aha moment that
| keeps people searching for solutions.
|
| I wonder if there's a correlation between addiction and this aha
| moment. Like you get drunk and suddenly "aha!" those big
| unresolvable problems don't matter. The next morning they matter
| again until, aha, beer:30 hits.
| gopher_space wrote:
| > I wonder if there's a correlation between addiction and this
| aha moment.
|
| Are you kidding? I've been chasing that epiphany dragon for
| decades and so has everyone else in the shop. Ever feel like
| you've got one foot out the door once you comprehend the
| systems you work with?
| carterschonwald wrote:
| Looks at the mirror and nodd
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| > working with complex systems and constraints there often
| isn't an aha moment
|
| You only get the a-ha moment when there's essentially one
| discrete piece of information needed to decide between
| alternatives. That doesn't apply to most problems.
|
| Your brain simultaneously assigns probabilities to possible
| solutions, and in certain cases there's an information update
| that sets one solution to probability 1 and the others to 0. If
| your brain is actively expending energy keeping these
| possibilities warm simultaneously, then this will naturally
| lead to a rapid change in energy which will feel like
| _something_ because it 's a change in the flow of neuro
| chemicals.
|
| It's not obvious that it would feel pleasant. But since the
| nucleus accumbens is active during problems solving then it's
| not entirely surprising that the the NAc gets extra stimulated
| in the rush of energy as the probabilities collapse and weights
| get updated to the real solution.
|
| But relatively few problems require you to simultaneously
| juggle multiple possible solutions and pieces of evidence that
| are brought together in a single instant. So chasing that
| feeling is generally a poor strategy.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| This is what came to mind for me reading the article as well:
| The difference between juggling, rotating, feeling out a
| thousand puzzle pieces that either fit or don't fit the well-
| defined hole you have, versus having the hole, having the
| puzzle-piece-'blank' that you're very slowly and deliberately
| chipping away at, sanding down, until it fits(as you know
| from the very start it will).
|
| One is a trickle, the other a rush.
| butlike wrote:
| I totally believe there's a correlation between addiction and
| the aha moment. You don't even need to "aha!" with facts;
| pairing emotion to a simple fact will suffice.
|
| Try pairing a feeling to: "So THAT'S how a mouse cursor moves"
|
| "So THAT'S why revolving doors move clockwise!"
|
| "So THAT'S why lights at night feel cosy!"
|
| With a little practice, you can arbitrarily get 'aha' moments.
| I assume the good feeling is some sort of dopamine release
| where my brain is rewarding me for "figuring something out,"
| even though I've kind if hijacked the mechanism.
| corysama wrote:
| "Hare Brain Tortoise Mind" is a great book that goes into how
| this works and how to work with/against it.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB_4YU6UtCw
|
| tldr: There is a background, non-verbal process in your brain
| that has the advantage of a larger working set size than your
| foreground verbal thinking. It is able to observe and consider
| more stuff at once and find associations better than your
| conscious thought process.
|
| But, it has several disadvantages. It takes time to do its
| processing. You can't will it into action. It communicates non-
| verbally with your foreground process. It doesn't work under
| pressure (thus the need for relaxed, unfocused time). The non-
| verbal understanding is difficult to deconstruct, generalize and
| reapply. It can lead to you solving a problem, not understanding
| how and not being able to solve a variant of the same problem.
|
| So, the general recommendation is: If you have a complex problem
| to solve, first absorb as much information about the problem as
| your brain can hold. But, do not try to solve anything. Then, go
| take a break. A walk in a natural environment is preferable.
| Don't think about the problem. Relax in a low stress environment.
| Let your background brain have a chance to chew on it and maybe
| bubble up some suggestions.
| paraknight wrote:
| Does this background process have any neurological backing
| (literally a part of your brain) or is it more of a mental
| mode?
| james_marks wrote:
| Literally part of the brain.
|
| Limbic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbic_system
|
| Frontal Lobe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontal_lobe
|
| Disclaimer: I only know this from armchair psychology books
| like Habit, Start with Why, etc.
| markussss wrote:
| Thanks for the link and tl;dr, even though it's a quite short
| video (3:16). I found your explanation very interesting because
| I have intuitively felt like this is accurate, but never knew
| what the underlying process is. I have been following this for
| years already, first absorbing information about anything where
| I need to make a decision, and then just leave it to stew in
| the back of my mind. And after a while the answer just appears
| in my mind, without me really understanding where it comes
| from.
| pramodbiligiri wrote:
| I've heard this being discussed as focused and diffuse modes
| of thinking - https://fs.blog/focused-diffuse-thinking/ -
| although not in relation to verbal and non-verbal thinking.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| There's a Paul Graham essay I happen to have read just the
| other day about this topic. In it, he refers to this concept as
| "ambient thought", though I've found the title, "The Top Idea
| in Your Mind" to be a more sticky "motto" to remind me of the
| concept.
|
| ->https://www.paulgraham.com/top.html
| hammock wrote:
| Richard Feynman suggested keeping a dozen favorite problems
| "constantly present in your mind" encouraging subconscious
| processing of challenges.
|
| By keeping problems in a dormant state, the brain can work on
| them in the background, leading to unexpected solutions when a
| new piece of knowledge is encountered
| 650 wrote:
| [Spoiler] Here are three words: pine, crab, sauce. There's a
| fourth word that combines with each of the others to create
| another common word. What is it?
|
| YXBwbGU= (Use Base64 Decoding) [/Spoiler]
| geuis wrote:
| Please, just provide the answer. Maybe it's obvious but to
| people like me all I can think of is recipes for butter sauces
| for crab legs involving pine nuts. Which actually sounds quite
| good.
| taneq wrote:
| They're deliberately avoiding spoilers, you can decode the
| answer by pasting YXBwbGU= into https://www.base64decode.org/
| tmtvl wrote:
| It's something often compared to oranges.
| covercash wrote:
| This word combines with Tim to make a meme.
| calmworm wrote:
| It is answered in the article.
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| I've played enough NYT connections that this was immediate for
| me, at the expense of the promised "Aha!" moment. :D
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| Interesting haha, I've played enough NYT connections that I
| would never have gotten it on my own because when I thought
| of the correct word with sauce, I thought "_ crab" ? no,
| can't be that...
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| Haha, I know what you mean! Though in fairness, Wyna Liu
| isn't beyond throwing in a "mostly works" category from
| time to time...
|
| Wild tangent incoming...
|
| One instance that recently bothered me with an NYT puzzle
| was the crossword clue (3 letters): "Chromebooks, but not
| MacBooks". The answer was "PCs" which doesn't make sense to
| me under any level of categorization for PC.
|
| If we go narrow/historic, then it means x86 IBM PC
| derivatives which eliminates a lot of chromebooks.
|
| If we use the "home computer" interpretation, then I think
| it's unreasonable to except Macbooks from the PC umbrella.
|
| If we go literal, well then everything is a PC, including
| smartphones, tablets, smart devices. The only reasonable
| test seems to be "Can it play Doom?". :D
|
| Using PC in a "every consumer computing device but Mac"
| probably made sense in the 80s/90s, now it seems to dilute
| the term to the point of confusion. I have personally
| _never_ thought of a Chromebook as a PC, given that it
| ships with an OS incapable of many things people generally
| associate with PC activities.
| woolion wrote:
| It seems to me that it's exactly why I don't like word
| games. They use words like "combine", but it's generally
| mixing abstractions or taxonomies.
|
| To guess it, I looked at 'crab' because it's a quite
| uncommon that has some deep relationship with a few words
| only. Then checked the most obvious one (which was the
| solution) against the other words, and determined that it
| didn't bear any significant relationship to the third
| word. So I checked the other (less obvious) potential
| solutions, and after a frustrating lack of match, I gave
| up. And then got annoyed that the first candidate was the
| right one. To be fair, I guess it's partly because I'm an
| ESL, as I think that solution/sauce can be used as a
| nominative locution enough to form a "special
| relationship".
|
| To be a designer, you have to play with people's (as in
| general crowd, not individuals) general understanding of
| the subject. In particular, that means avoiding the curse
| of knowledge, and yes for normal people PC meant "not
| Apple consumer product". So ultimately, the search
| algorithm includes:
|
| - categorize all relationships between words, ranked by
| strength
|
| - compare with what is expected to be known in popular
| culture (adjust ranks)
|
| - match against the designer's expectations of similar
| problems (look for clues to pick a best match)
|
| It's a lot of words to say it's the opposite of a aha
| moment, the result of a pure computational problem, that
| is often quite frustrating. Thank you for coming to my
| TED talk.
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| I totally get that, I am ESL too, and I have a similar
| approach for English-based word games.
|
| And yeah that often results in mild disappointment or
| frustration instead of an "Aha!" moment. Actual puzzle
| video games fair better for me at that aspect, as they
| avoid the inevitable subjectivity of natural language.
| opan wrote:
| I went from thinking this was too hard to guess on the fly to
| suddenly getting it within a minute or two. Interesting.
|
| If anyone wants an additional hint, the word you plug in here
| isn't put in the same spot for all three words.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| It's literally at the end of TFA
|
| ->https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-your-brain-creates-aha-
| mo...
| leric wrote:
| The neuroscience here hints at something that current AI systems
| still lack: a direct, internal positive signal tied to closing a
| reasoning loop.
|
| Transformers learn almost everything through language-like
| supervision. Wrong token = small penalty, right token = small
| reward. That's great for pattern induction, but it means the
| model treats a correct chain-of-thought and a beautifully phrased
| but wrong chain-of-thought as almost the same kind of object--
| just sequences with slightly different likelihoods.
|
| Human reasoning isn't like that. When a logic chain closes
| cleanly, the brain fires a strong internal reward. That "Aha"
| isn't just emotion; it's an endogenous learning signal saying:
| this structure is valid, keep this, reuse this. It's effectively
| a structural correctness reward, orthogonal to surface language.
|
| If AI ever gets a similar mechanism -- a way to mark "self-
| consistent causal closure" as positively rewarded -- we might
| finally bridge the gap between language-trained reasoning and
| true general learning. It would matter for:
|
| fast abstraction formation
|
| reliable logical inference
|
| discovering new concepts rather than remixing old ones
|
| Backprop gives us gradient-based correction, but it's mostly
| negative feedback. There's no analogue of the brain's "internal
| positive jolt" when a new idea snaps together.
|
| If AGI needs general learning, maybe the missing piece isn't more
| scale -- it's this reward for closure.
| geuis wrote:
| Is there a single repo that has all of these "aha" images? I
| could see the clown right away, and the vines/plants in the 2nd
| example were what I thought first but organic shapes are harder
| to be sure about.
|
| That also brings to mind that first exposure to this dataset
| affects the effectiveness of the rest of the dataset. If you're
| doing initial exposure, you'll definitely get the "aha" moment.
| But if all of the images in the dataset are of the same type,
| your brain quickly learns the pattern and the "aha" moment
| vanishes.
|
| If they did their study on all of the images per test subject,
| the results after maybe the first 5 are basically useless for any
| definitive conclusions.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| r/showerthoughts
| hbarka wrote:
| What are other words for "aha"? Is it also called serendipity?
| jmdeon wrote:
| eureka!
| dostick wrote:
| A Norwegian band
| danparsonson wrote:
| It's about inspiration - suddenly arriving at an answer after a
| period of time without one. A "lightbulb moment".
|
| Serendipity is more like a fortunate accident.
| cluckindan wrote:
| Epiphany
| aGHz wrote:
| From the second paragraph in the article:
|
| > You might even say "Aha!" This kind of sudden realization is
| known as insight, and a research team recently uncovered how
| the brain produces it (opens a new tab), which suggests why
| insightful ideas tend to stick in our memory.
| rkagerer wrote:
| The little puzzle the article opens with is fun, but solving it
| is not what I'd associate with an "aha" moment.
|
| To me it felt more like a brute force search, or like solving a
| Wordle puzzle.
|
| I consider "aha" more creative, like recognizing that key insight
| that crystalizes a solution to a problem you're working on. (Or
| maybe a pattern or analogy that cleanly collapses a swath of the
| complexity).
| netule wrote:
| Agreed. Although if you enjoy this very specific type of
| puzzle, I'd recommend a game called "Connections," which, as
| the name suggests, is all about making these mental connections
| between words.
| lukev wrote:
| The "aha" moment is also a cognitive _risk_ , since it's often
| the moment we stop looking for more answers.
|
| This is the premise of a really good article I reccommend to
| anyone, the Seductions of Clarity by C. Thi Nguyen
| (https://philarchive.org/rec/NGUTSO-2)
| DuperPower wrote:
| which is of course used as a trap by Charlatans Who want to
| trigger that aha hiding that they are the ones manipulating
| you. In fact the whole point of humanities is learning to build
| a shield and your own rethoric Sword against bullshit
| kirykl wrote:
| Similar to this is the Thought Terminating Cliche
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_cliche
| vacuity wrote:
| I'm convincing myself that the root of all
| evils^H^H^H^H^Hpoor thinking and argumentation generally
| arises due to not thinking further and more critically. Those
| cliches are just some nicely packaged, ready-made products to
| induce this.
| more_corn wrote:
| This happens to people when they're stoned or delusional. They
| have a false aha moment and false, but deep certainty of their
| own brilliance.
|
| It is quite literally the source of one of our most dangerous
| failure modes.
| jll29 wrote:
| Reminds me that a friend of mine wrote a Ph.D. thesis on "um" a
| couple of years ago:
|
| Nicholson, Hannele B. M. (2007) DISFLUENCY IN DIALOGUE:
| ATTENTION, STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION PhD. thesis, University of
| Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, available online:
| https://era.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/1763/Nicholson%20...
|
| But "um" may not be quite the same as "aha" for English native
| speakers (and Japanese native speakers may use both "um" and
| "ahm" as disagrement).
| hammock wrote:
| I really wish we could move beyond fMRI for brain studies. We
| have no good models for any insights beyond "this region of the
| brain lights up." It's medieval. Neurophrenology. Change my mind.
| hanjeanwat wrote:
| you're not wrong. unfortunately it's about the only thing that
| will pass an ethics board, outside of patients who are already
| having neurosurgery and consent to more invasive procedures.
| pedalpete wrote:
| I work in neurotech with EEG and many other consumer neuro
| companies are working with fNIRS.
|
| I completely agree with you that fMRI along with EEG and fNIRS
| isn't giving us true insight into how thought works.
|
| However, it doesn't mean they are completely invaluable when
| brain activity and stimulation can be manipulated, and that
| change can be measured through measures other than just the
| brain activity itself.
|
| For example, our work at https://affectablesleep.com stimulates
| slow-wave activity during sleep, a core component of what we
| refer to as sleep's restorative function.
|
| Though we measure and see the change in brain activity,
| research has also measured changes in cortisol, HRV, immune
| function, etc etc.
|
| A friend is working on neurostimulation in depression and their
| background is in fMRI, though for accessibility they are
| working with EEG.
|
| The point is, you're right, our understanding of the brain is
| not much more than medieval, but that doesn't mean it is
| completely invaluable.
|
| I believe it is not valuable when we're trying to understand
| the "aha" moment, simply by looking at blood-flow in the brain,
| as this article suggests.
| nomel wrote:
| I've always found the comparisons between "amateur" and a
| "professional" interesting [1], where professionals show
| spatially tighter activity and overall lower activity. So, it
| sometimes largely imaging areas where optimization hasn't
| happened yet.
|
| Seems like there would still be some use in looking at what's
| physically there. And, knowing that all humans have roughly the
| same activity patterns seems _very_ important, in the sense
| that we 're not some blank slate for concepts to be encoded.
| jmount wrote:
| For a introspective view of "aha" I really recommend the
| enjoyable Hadamard "The Psychology of Invention in the
| Mathematical Field."
| hammock wrote:
| Adjacent to that, for the economically inclined I highly
| recommend The Romantic Economist: Imagination in Economics by
| Richard Bronk
| fritzo wrote:
| Linda Palmer also does "aha" research at UC Irvine
| https://brain.uci.edu/uci-brain-pilot-grant-investigating-ex...
| butlike wrote:
| I have always called 'aha' moments 'eureka moments' and have
| simply hand-waived them away as my brain participating in
| domaine-seeking behavior.
| enjeyw wrote:
| I've been exploring this concept in LLMs for the last week or so,
| to see if I can RL train one into being inherently curious.
|
| I haven't got any beyond my own working notes and some basic
| plots, but I've unceremoniously dumped them into a document here
| incase anyone else finds them interesting. If so I'd _love_ to
| chat with you. enjeyw @ google's email provder.
|
| https://thealephengine.substack.com/p/67e3786f-8e84-41bd-888...
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