wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

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.'


Leave a Comment

Please stay on topic, be civil, and be brief.
Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. Names are displayed with all comments. WNYC reserves the right to edit any comments posted on this site. Please read the WNYC.org Comment Guidelines before posting.

Your comment


* required
The information entered into this form will not be used to send unsolicited email and will not be sold to a third party.
 
Back to Episode