it’s immediately clear when I’ve landed on the right solution (even before I execute it), because all of the constraints I’ve been holding in my head get satisfied at once. I think that’s the “clicking” feeling.
John Nash, a mathematician and Nobel laureate, was asked why he believed that he was being recruited by aliens to save the world. He responded, “…the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously”
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we hypothesized that facts would appear more true if they were artificially accompanied by an Aha! moment elicited using an anagram task. In a preregistered experiment, we found that participants (n = 300) provided higher truth ratings for statements accompanied by solved anagrams even if the facts were false, and the effect was particularly pronounced when participants reported an Aha! experience (d = .629). Recent work suggests that feelings of insight usually accompany correct ideas. However, here we show that feelings of insight can be overgeneralized and bias how true an idea or fact appears, simply if it occurs in the temporal ‘neighbourhood’ of an Aha! moment. We raise the possibility that feelings of insight, epiphanies, and Aha! moments have a dark side, and discuss some circumstances where they may even inspire false beliefs and delusions, with potential clinical importance.
Insight is also relevant to mental illness, psychedelic experiences, and meditation so you might find some papers about it in these fields too.
It’s worth noting that insight does not guarantee you have the right solution: from the paper “The dark side of Eureka: Artificially induced Aha moments make facts feel true” by Laukkonen et al.
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Insight is also relevant to mental illness, psychedelic experiences, and meditation so you might find some papers about it in these fields too.