part0025

“There’s so much information on the Internet. But people don’t need more information, they need ‘Aha! Moments,’ they need awareness, they need things that actually shift and change them.”
—Jack Canfield

O N A FALL AFTERNOON IN 1933, Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard (1898–1964) had just attended a lecture at the British Museum on the subject of the atom. The lecturer declared that although there was tremendous energy inside an atom, it couldn’t be harnessed. Szilard listened to the lecture with fascination and continued to think about it after he left the museum. He was both annoyed and captivated by the presenter’s dismissal of atomic energy as “moonshine.”

Szilard often took random strolls around the city and let his mind wander as he walked. That afternoon as he stepped off a curb to cross the street, a world-changing thought flashed through his mind. Szilard had a vision of a small particle crashing into the heavy nucleus of an atom, like a cue ball breaking a set of billiard balls. He imagined those billiard balls crashing into other sets of billiard balls and then more and more until a giant explosion took place. The lecturer was wrong. The energy in the atom could indeed be retrieved and used. By the time he got to the other side of the street, Szilard had formulated an idea that would impact the world forever.

A few years later, a team of scientists successfully split the atom, and the Nuclear Age began. Today, entire cities are powered by the atom, an inexhaustible source of energy that came to life because of Szilard’s unexpected insight in the middle of a London street in 1933.

For weeks, French mathematician Henri Poincare (1854-1912) had been unsuccessfully trying to prove a new mathematical theory. Disheartened and stuck, he took a break from his work and went on a trip. During this time of mental relaxation, the elusive answer arrived.

Just at this time I left…to go on a geologic excursion…. The changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go someplace or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. I did not verify the idea; I should not have had time, as upon taking my seat in the omnibus, I went on with a conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty. On my return to Caen, for conscience sake, I verified the result at my leisure. 64

A few days later while working on other mathematical problems, Poincare writes of his discouragement with his lack of progress and of another similar insightful experience. “Disgusted with my failure, I went to spend a few days at the seaside and thought of something else. One morning, walking on the bluff, the idea came to me with just the same characteristics of brevity, suddenness, and immediate certainty, that the arithmetic transformations of indeterminate ternary quadratic forms were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.” 65

In both Szilard’s and Poincare’s experiences, fully formed answers arrived in what are commonly called Aha! Moments—those sudden bursts of insight, illumination, and understanding that seemingly come out of nowhere. Had he been hooked up to an electroencephalogram machine when he stepped on the bus or as he strolled on the bluff, Poincare’s dominant brainwaves would have been alpha. In both instances, his mind was at rest—always the state that immediately precedes a Big Idea or an Aha! Moment.

But the resting brain is anything but idle. Poincare’s brain unconsciously but actively processed the information he had been working on in the previous weeks. In this daydreaming-like alpha state, his brain quietly and efficiently assembled, connected, and organized the information it had gathered while in beta.

Once the unconscious brain connects the appropriate information it has gathered, it shares the new connections with its conscious counterpart in a moment of illumination called a gamma spike or an Aha! Moment. Gamma spikes originate in the thalamus and sweep the brain from front to back at a rate of forty times per second, aligning and drawing different neuronal circuits to temporarily operate in complete harmony. Three-tenths of a second later, the experience transitions to the conscious brain, and in Poincare’s case, he knew the solution to his problem.

Brain studies on creativity reveal what goes on in the brain when a sudden insight takes place. The brain is in alpha mode before a flash of inspiration, then high gamma wave activity comes 300 milliseconds before the Aha! Moment. 66 Neurons bind together, and disconnected brain cells link in a new neural network. Immediately after the gamma spike, the new idea enters the consciousness, as it did with Poincare as he boarded the bus. Daniel Goleman explains, “[Once the neurons] have collected more information and put it together in a novel organization…the gamma spike signals that the brain has a new insight.” 67

John Kounios, PhD and co-author of The Eureka Factor: Aha! Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain , has done extensive study on gamma spikes. “We were amazed at the abruptness of this burst of activity—just what one would expect from a sudden insight.” 68

Gamma brainwaves are the fastest documented brainwave activity, and they last mere milliseconds. “There’s a physical marker we sometimes feel during a gamma spike: pleasure. With the ‘Aha!’ comes joy. When the gamma spike hits, the heart rate rises and the brain releases ‘feel good’ neurotransmitters: dopamine, serotonin, and an array of endorphins, and like Archimedes, who, as we noted, jubilantly ran naked through the streets of Greece shouting, ‘Eureka, Eureka,’ you have a sense of joy, completeness, and a feeling of ‘rightness’ that cannot be duplicated any other way.” 69

Gamma waves link and process unconnected information from all areas in the brain. People with healthy gamma wave activity tend to have better problem-solving skills, more compassion, greater self-control, higher intelligence, and keener memorization skills.

Experiments on Tibetan Buddhist monks have shown a correlation between those who regularly meditate and the production of gamma waves. A 2004 study took eight Tibetan Buddhist practitioners of meditation and monitored the patterns of electrical activity in their brains when they meditated. The researchers compared the brain activity of the monks to a group of people who meditated an hour a day for one week prior to the study.

In a normal meditative state, both groups were shown to have similar brain activity. But when the monks were asked to generate feelings of compassion during meditation, their brain activity began to fire in a rhythmic, coherent manner, suggesting gamma wave production. These gamma oscillations were the largest seen in healthy humans. Such gamma waves were almost non-existent in the novice meditators. 70

Moments of insight that accompany gamma wave production usually prove to be very valuable. Through a series of experiments, Kounios determined that gamma spike insights often give better and more accurate solutions to problems than solutions reached by analytic thinking. “Conscious, analytic thinking can sometimes be rushed or sloppy, leading to mistakes while solving a problem. However, insight is unconscious and automatic—it can’t be rushed. When the process runs to completion in its own time and all the dots are connected unconsciously, the solution pops into awareness as an Aha! Moment. This means that when a really creative, breakthrough idea is needed, it’s often best to wait for the insight rather than settling for an idea that resulted from analytical thinking.” 71

Carola Salvi, PhD at Northwestern University and lead author of Insightful Solutions Are Correct More Often Than Analytic Solutions , writes, “The history of great discoveries is full of successful insight episodes, fostering a common belief that when people have an insightful thought, they are likely to be correct. Our study tests the hypothesis that the confidence people often have about their insights is justified.” 72

Without knowing it, Jason’s coworker Nicole has discovered a thinking model that has been used by creators, thinkers, and inventors since the beginning of time. She has learned how to access wisdom, creativity, and innovative ideas by slowing her brain and allowing it to connect information in new and original ways.

At a very early age, British mathematician and author Marcus Du Sautoy became addicted to the pleasant feeling that accompanied learning new things. That feeling was so wonderful, he chose to continue learning just to have it more often. Du Sautoy believes this amazing feeling is nature’s way of telling us learning is a good thing, valuable for individuals and the entire human race. 73

The feeling Du Sautoy describes is similar to the empowering feeling that accompanies an Aha! Moment or a Big Idea. It is one of the most profound emotional and intellectual experiences a person can have, often a defining moment easily recalled in detail years later that changes everything from that moment forward.