“Eureka!”

That three syllable word is synonymous with discovery, with epiphany, with sudden answers coming to us out of the blue – and with a 28-year-old Albert Einstein, who, to cut a long story short, figured out gravity while daydreaming at his day job.

Also commonly known as an ‘aha! moment’ or a ‘lightbulb moment’, the feeling feels almost magical, and it’s easy to get carried away by the sudden inspiration or insight that comes with that ‘aha!’ flooding your brain.

It’s been pondered for a long time, but now researchers from Duke University (US) and Humboldt and Hamburg Universities (Germany) have, in a bizarre twist, had something of an ‘aha! moment’ about ‘aha! moments’, as they explored brain activity both during and after the flash of insight itself.

According to their study, which was recently published in the journal Nature Communications, those epiphanies actually have a lasting effect on the brain, helping it to both generate and remember information into the future.

And as Duke Professor Roberto Cabeza explained in a statement, Eureka! moments can be life changing – albeit usually on a smaller scale than for Einstein:

“If you have an ‘aha! moment’ while learning something, it almost doubles your memory. There are few memory effects that are as powerful as this.”

To study the effects of an ‘aha! moment’, the research team monitored participants’ brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) whilst they completed puzzles and brain teasers. Then, they were asked whether they solved the puzzles using a methodical approach, or whether they had an ‘aha! moment’ at some point, allowing them to fill the blanks.

Impressively, those who had ‘aha! moments’ were not only better able to recall the solutions they discovered on being asked the question, they were also significantly more likely to remember those epiphany discoveries five days later, than the things that they’d figured out through a deliberate process.

Why? Well because not unlike a lightbulb above a character’s head illuminating in a cartoon, when you have a big idea a flash of energy happens in your brain, specifically in the learning and memory centre, the hippocampus.

This sudden, illuminating burst of information was a much powerful way of learning concepts for long-term retention, the study suggests, thanks to the power of self-discovery.

While interesting, this has particularly important implications for the classroom, in which students who work answers out for themselves (with a little guidance, or ‘scaffolding’, from a teacher) are much more likely to retain the information in the long-run, as well as boosting their own self confidence in the topic area.

As far as learning is concerned, the ‘aha! moment’ is a win-win, as the study confirmed.

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