Strata Lucida

The mind's eye

There was an interesting story on NPR's Morning Edition today, talking about eureka moments, or flashes of inspiration when an insight arrives very suddenly. Researchers used functional MRI and EEGs to map brain activity while the subjects were solving a series of word problems. Their results suggest a spike of right-hemisphere cortical activity -- the area "associated with making connections across distantly related information during comprehension" -- immediately precedes an "aha" moment. This area is implicated not just in insightful problem solving, but in the understanding of jokes, story themes, and metaphors.

What's even more interesting to me is that the insight moments are preceded by a suppression of activity in the visual cortex. The study glosses this as "attenuating bottom-up activation or other neural activity not related to solution that would decrease the signal-to-noise ratio for the actual solution". In other words, an associative insight temporarily and partially blinds you to the outside world. This is quite analogous to the way a metaphor crystallizes an understanding, but also stands in the way of direct perception. A good metaphor congeals, until all you can see is the literalized metaphor. "Insight" turns out to be "blindsight", or your mind's eye at work.

It's no surprise to me that there's neurological confirmation of this. I want to add the usual hedge that neurological imaging can act as an uncritical confirmation of doctrinal truths, but the truth expressed here is too compelling to ignore -- perhaps because it's confirming my own doctrinal truths. Indeed, just writing up this metaphorical similarity between insightful problem solving and literary thematics tempts me to elide the distinction between them: to see artful metonymy as a species of plain old neurochemistry.

Posted by Chris at April 15, 2004 07:26 AM