Your 10-step plan for achieving a creative breakthrough

Need to know

In his autobiography, Charles Darwin wrote that one day, simply ‘for amusement’, he happened to read an essay discussing the Malthusian principle, a theory proposing that a population grows while the available resources don’t change. In the process, he said, it ‘at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed,’ resulting in the formation of new species. In this way, Darwin’s unintentional realisation laid the foundation for one of the most influential theories in the history of science.

While Darwin’s revelation might seem like a rare happy accident, such moments are ubiquitous in our lives. It is documented that many crucial discoveries in the arts, medicine and science were achieved precisely through such sudden moments of clarity. Apart from Darwin’s example, it is enough to recall famous or apocryphal anecdotes such as Archimedes’ bath-time revelation, Newton’s fallen apple, and Paul McCartney’s dream-inspired song ‘Yesterday’. I’d bet that you too have experienced it at least once in your lifetime. We use many names to describe this experience: a eureka effect; a breakthrough; a revelation; a lightbulb, insight or, simply, an Aha! moment.

What exactly are these Aha! moments, and how do they come about? Let’s break it down. Typically, when presented with a problem, we use our prior knowledge to solve it, and this works fine for most day-to-day issues. However, for more complex problems that require out-of-the-box thinking, our pre-existing solutions often fall short. Frustrated, we feel like we’ve hit a wall, unsure of how to proceed. This is when the brain switches its mode of functioning. Instead of relying on prior knowledge, it starts to actively seek fresh perspectives by rearranging what we know and forging novel connections, all beneath our conscious awareness. This is why insights appear to come out of nowhere – it’s because the brain has already completed its work behind the scenes. As a result, the way we perceive the situation is transformed, and we’re left with that satisfying ‘A-a-ah, now I get it!’ moment.

Psychologists have been studying insights for more than 100 years. For example, already in 1917, Wolfgang Köhler made the chimp named Sultan famous by prompting him to gain Aha! moments. To illustrate, Köhler would hang a banana out of Sultan’s reach. After a period of struggling, the chimp would suddenly stack several boxes on top of each other to grab the fruit. In this regard, people are not very different. For instance, when asked to decipher a magician’s trick, people bump into an impasse – there is no obvious answer. After some period of hesitation and internal search, they report a sudden Aha! moment and successfully disentangle the puzzle.

Insights are different from conventional solutions, both subjectively and at a neural level. Conventional solutions are characterised by a conscious process of methodical, analytical thinking, involving the chunking and sequencing of information, such as when you solve an equation. By contrast, during Aha! moments, people lack control over achieving solutions – they are unaware of, and can’t describe, the process that lead them to their insights. Furthermore, in 2009, John Kounios and Mark Beeman found that sudden insights have a distinct brain signature. When people solve problems with Aha! moments, there is a sharp surge of high-frequency gamma waves in the right temporal lobe (just above the right ear), above and beyond the neural activity seen when people solve problems with conventional analytic solutions.

Aha insights also offer a number of benefits compared with conventional problem-solving. People tend to enjoy these moments of insight in learning contexts, and solutions reached through insight tend to be remembered better. Besides evoking positive emotions, insights broaden the horizons of our knowledge, sometimes creating something completely innovative. Often, we cannot even ‘unsee’ some profound realisation, which totally transforms how we view ourselves and the surrounding world. Undoubtedly, anyone who has ever had a profound eye-opening experience would likely want to experience more of them in the future.

With that in mind, can we somehow increase the possibility of gaining insights? Yes, irrespective of who you are – a scientist struggling with an experiment design, a software developer debugging your code, or a football coach inventing a novel tactic – there are ways to deliberately increase your chance of experiencing a sudden insight. Furthermore, Aha! moments aren’t restricted to just intellectual problems, like solving a brainteaser. They can also apply to personal issues, such as understanding how your past affects your present.

Recently, researchers from the University of Tartu in Estonia, spearheaded by Kadi Tulver, published a potential recipe for Aha! moments – that is, what must happen in one’s mind or brain in order for insight to occur. Inspired by their work, I’ve put together a guide on how to deliberately cultivate Aha! moments, organised under the three major stages – Preparation, Incubation and Insight itself – that are typically found on the road towards a creative breakthrough.

What to do

Preparation stage

Hit an impasse!

You may think, given how extraordinary insight is as a phenomenon, that achieving it must require something equally extraordinary. This isn’t necessarily the case. If I were asked to identify the most crucial condition for achieving insights, I would say it is when you have hit an impasse – that moment when you feel you have exhausted all conventional ways of solving a problem and yet you’re stuck. First, reviews show that an impasse is one of the most frequently reported features of insight, which means that if you’ve hit an impasse, it’s more probable that you will achieve insight than if you don’t have an impasse. Second, by recognising an impasse for what it is, you can experience a sense of hope and agency that will help pave the way toward insight.

Stay positive

The next time you hit an impasse, rather than getting frustrated, try to calm down and consciously recognise that you are stuck. Be grateful for this development – once you’ve hit an impasse, you’ve taken your first step on the road leading to an Aha! moment. Hope for insight, get ready to attain insight, and anticipate that you will experience insight! You need to feel it on the tip of your tongue. After all, multiple studies have shown that a positive mood can increase the possibility of arriving at a solution. If you are upset, you tend to fixate on a particular approach to your problem and you end up going in circles around it. By contrast, when you are in a good mood, your attention flows more freely from topic to topic, which enhances so-called ‘associative thinking’ – seeing the links between apparently disparate ideas. This can sometimes result in the formation of novel connections and sudden Aha! moments.

Seek out novel information

Often, when you cannot solve a problem directly, it’s because you are relying on your habitual mental shortcuts – the same ones that have proved successful in the past. It’s as if your brain is trying to solve the problem by searching its existing database of possible solutions. To find a way out, you might simply need to incorporate novel information into your mental database. This is a method that I often use when I hit a dead end: I set aside a few hours for intensive exploratory work. Do thorough research, gather every possible resource applicable to your predicament, and examine it carefully until you feel intellectual exhaustion. This will be the sign to stop and let your brain abstract all the necessary information and connect the dots. Research indicates that after conscious work of this kind, there is a need for some unconscious processing.

To give you an example – imagine that you’re an artist at a creative dead end. Now is the time to explore online exhibitions and digital galleries, delve into specific themes or techniques (especially unfamiliar ones) that pique your interest, read about the history and conceptual ideas behind some styles, listen to a podcast discussing your field of art, and to collect any novel information that you find and make notes. After all this, stop – and leave your brain alone for an incubation period.

Incubation stage

Sleep on your problem

Incubation refers to a period of time during which you need to set aside a problem and allow your brain to continue working on it without active conscious effort. A colloquial wisdom to ‘sleep on your problem’ has been backed by scientific evidence. Studies show that sleeping or immersing yourself in another activity can help to evoke insights effortlessly. While you sleep, the brain processes the information gained during the day. During the sleep process, you remove redundant pieces of information and leave only the necessary ones. Furthermore, in sleep, your brain enters the stage of increased synaptic plasticity that promotes the restructuring of your knowledge and memories – making it more likely that you will arrive at novel solutions.

Engage in non-engaging activities

In the daytime, briefly redirecting your focus to another task can be similarly beneficial because it allows your brain some room to process and recontextualise the information. In 2019, Shelly Gable and her team at the University of California, Santa Barbara asked professional writers and physicists to keep a log of their insights – where and when they occur. The researchers found that approximately 20 per cent of insights happened while the participants were engaged in tasks completely unrelated to their work, especially during tasks requiring mild-to-moderate engagement, such as showering, dishwashing or simply walking. They attributed this to the state of mind-wandering – when your thoughts shift aimlessly from one topic to another, sometimes resulting in unexpected connections. Thus, intentionally allowing some time for mind-wandering can be particularly beneficial if your area of work requires creative or innovative thinking.

Cultivate open-mindedness

As well as sleeping on a problem and deliberately taking your mind away from it, you can also intentionally foster your open-mindedness. This will help you to achieve a state of enhanced flexibility of attention and reduced control over your thoughts. Research demonstrates that insights are often preceded by such states of mind. To do this, avoid overly repetitive routines, where your days and tasks become indistinguishable from each other, and highly scheduled work environments populated by individuals who consistently echo your own ideas. For instance, you might consider working at a different time of the day, actively seeking a variety of social interactions, travelling and exploring interdisciplinary subjects, brainstorming, or simply reminding yourself to rely on your intuition more frequently. In essence, you should aim to expose yourself to new concepts and perspectives while staying entirely open-minded and unbiased. This is different from the active process of exploratory research I mentioned earlier. What I’m describing now comes after that phase and is more about your overall mindset. Try to adopt this open-mindedness for at least one day with the specific aim of inviting fresh perspectives.

Insight stage

Turn your attention inwards

Once you’ve given your brain ample opportunity to work on your problem at a subconscious level, there are some further steps you can take to make it more likely that the solution comes to mind. One of these is directed self-reflection. This might include simply observing your thoughts and feelings, as well as actively asking yourself Socratic questions aimed at refining your thinking (eg, What do I think? Why do I think so? Where might I be wrong?)

Notably, during this experience, you will direct your attention inward, which research has shown tends to precede insights, probably because it shuts down visual inputs and allows the brain to focus on internal information.

In addition, Jaan Aru at the University of Tartu in Estonia and colleagues recently conceptualised the problem-solving process as mental navigation – the exploration of our inner world akin to the spatial navigation of physical environments. They believe that insights work similarly to finding shortcuts in physical environments, but only when we navigate through our conceptual space of thoughts and ideas. In my previous Psyche Idea, I provided some examples of how you can navigate your inner world in search of mental shortcuts, such as by mapping out your cognitive landscape as you would a physical city.

Meditate

One of the prominent methods of directed self-reflection is meditation. In general, meditation and mindfulness practices have been shown to increase cognitive flexibility and creativity. More specifically, Vipassana meditation, along with Western alternatives, such as mindfulness and open awareness meditations, are often considered ‘insight meditations’, which aim to bring long-lasting changes in cognition.

The common feature of such meditations is that they help to achieve insights by facilitating awareness of the mind’s activity while adopting an attitude of curiosity, openness and acceptance. By consciously attending to your mental life, you increase your metacognitive awareness (your conscious awareness of your own thought processes) and facilitate clarity by detaching from mental content. In this way, you will better understand how your mind works and notice previously hidden tendencies, associations or shortcuts. Notably, research has shown that longer meditation sessions are more likely to evoke a deep concentrative state, which is more conducive to mental breakthroughs.

Use rubber duck debugging

Another method for uncovering a hidden insight is called rubber duck debugging, often used by software developers who are stuck while coding. It involves explaining your code line by line to an inanimate object, such as a rubber duck (simply not to bother other people). A thorough self-explanation of your problem can help identify possible blindspots and mistakes, and unearth a previously unconscious solution. This principle can be used irrespective of your profession and perhaps even more effectively when talking to real people (since they can probe you). Suppose you’re a writer struggling to see how your characters should react in a particular scenario. You could call a friend and lay out the background and inherent logic that defines your characters’ personas and behaviours. By delving deep into the psychology of your characters, you may attain insight into the most plausible course of action they would take.

Capture and verify

Sometimes, insights might be fleeting, especially during the night-time. Therefore, it’s crucial to capture them immediately by jotting down a short note in whatever is near at hand. Remember, the confidence that you’ll recall your insights later can often be misleading, so it’s important to record your Aha! moments even if you feel certain you’re able to remember them.

Additionally, do be aware that sudden insights can be deceptive. It’s true that research has shown that insights are more likely to offer a correct solution than those reached through a more gradual thought process. However, the exhilaration accompanying such breakthroughs can lead to an inflated sense of confidence, thereby potentially triggering biases. It is important to be aware of this and verify your insights with a cool head. For example, if you’re a scientist and you’ve come up with a great idea, describe it to your supervisor or colleagues first and get feedback from the team to understand the real value of your insight. It’s notable that Darwin waited four years from his initial insight before he allowed himself to write a brief formulation of his theory.

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