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The "Aha!" Moment

Thursday, August 07, 2008

The very moment when a perfect solution arrives in the brain may now be boiled down to a series of synapses. New Yorker contributor Jonah Lehrer breaks down the science of insight.


Comments

  • [1] Robert from NYC August 07, 2008 - 10:49AM

    I haven't really had any great ideas yet but I know, I KNOW that if I ever do have a great idea it will come from my great and brilliant mind. I just know that, I can feel it.


  • [2] Tami from New Jersey August 07, 2008 - 10:53AM

    That Dodge guy must have read Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie. Her parents did the same thing in a prairie fire - they set an escape fire all around their house.


  • [3] tilman from nycity August 07, 2008 - 10:58AM

    Standing atop a tall factory, long abandoned and silent, and seeing mile upon mile of empty rotting buildings in upstate NY---I realized that giving our manufacturing base to China & elsewhere is the root of our economic malaise.


  • [4] O from Forest Hills August 07, 2008 - 10:58AM

    Do dreams we have at night play a part of focusing on insight?

    I know for me, sometimes I have certain dreams and when I wake up I get an insight about how to proceed in the situation I was dreaming about.


  • [5] Basia Mosinski from Brooklyn August 07, 2008 - 11:05AM

    I was in the classroom teaching a video editing class to undergraduate students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At that moment, I understood how editing software could be an effective element in treatment for diminishing the impact of flashbacks in someone suffering from PTSD. I was a teacher with an MFA but I was also a MA (in Art Therapy) student interning at the Marjorie Kovler Center for Survivors of Torture, also in Chicago. I am now living in New York putting the pieces together to eventually conduct a study.


  • [6] Ida Spaulding from Eugene Oregon August 07, 2008 - 06:46PM

    Sometimes at night when I wake up I'll find a line for a poem or an image I want. And sometimes I feel I have an incite and it isn't. I think that may be an incite to realize I can fool myself. I really like your book, 'Proust was a Neuroscientist.'


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