Episode 94 - Addicted to Insights?

<h2 data-pm-slice="0 0 []"><strong>Summary</strong></h2> <p class="">Have you had an ‘aha’ moment lately? New research provides clues into why some of us find insights so addictive.</p> <p class="" data-rte-preserve-empty="true"> </p> <h2><strong>Transcript</strong></h2> <p class="">Hello and welcome to episode 94 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we explore the power of insights, including what’s going on in our brain when we have them, and some practical ways to have even more insights.</p> <p class="">There are few things in life better than an ‘aha’ moment - that point where you’ve been grappling with a problem and the solution just suddenly pops into your head. It can feel quite different to solving something by working away at it methodically. Ideas can come as a slow steady slog, but sometimes there are leaps. </p> <p class="">Researches earlier this year discovered that these sudden insights can, for some people, trigger the brain’s reward system. That an insight can activate the same areas that highly pleasurable activities and even addictive drugs work on.</p> <p class="">To explore this, the researchers presented each person with a series of anagrams while using a high resolution EEG to monitor brain activity. Let’s say, for example, that you were presented with the letters ABSIS. Those letters could also make up the word BASIS. But how did you solve that? The participant would press a button to confirm whether it was an insight or more of an analytical process. So the word BASIS might just pop into your head, or you might mentally start shifting the letters around in a more analytical way.</p> <p class="">Researchers can actually see the moment when the insight occurs as it is accompanied by a burst of gamma-band brainwaves right before the person indicates that they have had an insight solution. So what did they discover? Not surprisingly, they found that insight solutions were faster than analytical solutions. Insights p