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Sudden insight

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Sudden insight

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SUDDEN INSIGHT

by
Casey Rentz

____________________________________________________________
A Thesis Project Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM)

May 2009

Copyright 2009 Casey Rentz
ii
Table of Contents

Abstract……………….…………………………………………………………………..iii
Body………………………………………………………………………………………1
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………22

ii iv
Abstract
Sudden Insight is an anomaly in the human thought process that is often heralded for its
ability to get us through problems in our life. But, this cognitive phenomenon is simply a
part of the larger process of creativity. As scientific researchers use new tools to try to
understand ‘aha’ moments as a part of the process that ignites progress in a number of
disciplines in human societies, societies continue to Romanticize the work or artists,
scientists, and writers who experience sudden insights.
1
Los Angeles artist Shannon Ebner plays with words—drawing them,
repeating them, pushing them around in her head--in some cases even
traveling long distances with large cardboard letters in her car.
Ebner makes text-based art; she creates words or signs and sets them up in the middle
of the desert, the letters swaying in the desert wind. She photographs the fragile scene
from afar. The resulting images give the words a tragic feel, as if they have been
stripped of their power, hinting at the limits of words in modern dialogue. A few of
Ebner’s artworks were featured in the 2008 Whitney Biennial in New York, a showcase
for upcoming contemporary art.
Ebner’s recent work OPIC is a bit different than her previous work; it is much less
bleak. Tiled letters spelling the word “entropic” peak out from a shiny blue sign that
takes up an entire photograph. Light plays on the surface of the sign like the sun on a
shimmering pool, partly obscuring the word. The glistening surface becomes an active
landscape in the work, moving around and interacting with the letters, uniting
foreground and background. The work represents a new direction in Ebners artistic
process.
Much led up to this turning point, Ebner says, but one particular experience stands out.

During the process of making OPIC, Ebner decided to leave Los Angeles and drive east
to the Salton Sea, a dilapidated desert-oasis-turned-cess pool, with the reflective blue
entropic sign in tow. After getting out and moving the sign around in the sun, trying it
2
out against different desert backdrops for her photograph, she realized it wasn’t
working—she wasn’t finding an angle that satisfied her artistic lens.
On the drive back to Los Angeles, she thought intently about her next step—if the sign
couldn’t work the same as her others, what would she do with it? Back in her Highland
Park studio, she sat with the blue reflective sign, the door open to the light outside. As
the sun came in and an orange tree outside reflected itself on the sign like a mirror,
Ebner suddenly realized she had to “take the sign out of the landscape and let the
landscape happen on the surface of the image,” she recalled a year later.
The insight came quick and was pivotal for Ebner, allowing her to bound forward and
finish the work as it stands now, an animated blue image, and opened up new avenues
for her future work.
The development of a work of art is a hard process to understand. Yet the creativity that
goes into making art is not so different from the ingenuity associated with everyday
triumphs. Creative realizations can have a small impact—help you come up with a new
recipe for quiche or invent new dance moves to your favorite song—or they can be
giant, paradigm shifting ideas that change the outlook and future of an entire society. At
the societal level, creativity can lead to new art movements, business strategies, and
concepts in science.
Sudden ‘aha’ moments have long been fabled as the most important part of the creative
experience. Most artist claim to arrive at an innovative idea through the celebrated
eureka moment. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge recounted writing his famed poem,
3
Kublai Khan in one sitting—after falling asleep in an opium stupor at an English
farmhouse in 1797. As the story goes, the poem suddenly came to him in his dream-
state, and he awoke to furiously write it down before he forgot. The result was a poem
that was widely heralded for its depiction of the beauty of creation.
But, Coleridge overly dramatized the story of Kublai Khan’s creation. It turns out that
he was partly lying; literary scholars have since found several partial revisions of this
poem. Though this particular ‘aha’ moment was not all it was cracked up to be,
Coleridge was not just being insincere—he was reflecting the thought paradigm of his
time.
The idea of the ‘aha’ moment is appealing, but how big of a player is it in the creative
process? With new tools, scientist have begun to untangle the ‘aha’ moment, the
legendary marker of a creative mind, from other kinds of thinking. Sudden insights, as
it turns out, are not the only brain processes involved in making a scientific discovery
or writing a manuscript, but may be a marker of a truly unique solution.
From an office lying just below ground level at USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute,
Dr. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh studies moments of insight that often occur during the solving of
word problems. By studying small ‘aha’ moments, which work the same way as larger
‘aha’ moments, she can begin to model what is happening in the brain during creative
thinking. For the past year, she has been examining the thought processes of anagram
solvers, people who push around letters in their brain to rearrange them into different
words or phrases, forming axiom from oxmia, for instance.
4
The anagram solvers are chosen from a large cross-section of ordinary individuals,
screened for their proficiency in solving these word problems. No specific discipline or
lifestyle makes people proficient in this task. No specific personality or level of
education bars people from the ability to solve an anagram.
These small creative moments can happen to anyone who has knowledge of the English
language and understanding of how anagrams work.
It only takes 20 seconds to solve an anagram, but if Dr. Aziz-Zadeh can follow brain
activity during this brief interval of time, she might be able to pick out how an ‘aha’
moment differs from a more logical path the solution.
She follows what the brain is doing during each type of problem-solving using an fMRI
machine, a brain imaging tool that was developed in the 1990s and has recently been
widely adopted in psychology as a way to connect human behaviors with corresponding
activity in the brain. This tool has been somewhat liberating—scientists can now peer
further into the brain function than ever before. Researchers who have long been
studying mental conditions ranging from exceptional intelligence to mental illness, now
have a way to match extraordinary behaviors with patterns of brain activation. The
fMRI machine can now visualize strokes and seizures in the brains of epileptic patients
and find areas of the brain that impair emotional function in disturbed individuals.
fMRI--which stands for functional magnetic resonance imaging-- displays activity in
the brain as red spots on a black computer-generated image with the brain’s crevices
traced in grey. The red spots indicate a high blood oxygen level, which means that the
5
blood in nearby blood vessels is releasing oxygen to the neurons in this particular part
of the brain. The oxygenated neurons now have the fuel to channel electrical signals all
over the brain to form thoughts, feelings, and anything else we experience.
During her trials, she asks the anagram solvers to indicate whether the solution “popped
into their mind seemingly from nowhere” or whether they solved the anagram “in
steps.” The anagram solvers used each technique about half the time. The solution that
“popped into their mind seemingly from nowhere” is Dr. Aziz-Zadeh’s way of
identifying the “aha moment.” Her studies have shown that many specific spots on both
sides of the brain are active at the same time during a sudden insight. She theorizes that
before and during a sudden insight, information that has been stored in distant areas of
the brain is being brought together. As these areas are linked, the information held at
these distant spots is suddenly fit together like a puzzle to form a creative solution.
“At the exact moment of ‘aha’, several areas of the brain are connected at once, often at
long distances, to produce a unique response,” she says.
Psychologists have long associated this bilateral brain activity with creative behavior.
Dr. Aziz-Zadeh, like other ‘eureka’ researchers, has also found that a part of the right
hemisphere of the brain (called the anterior superior temporal gyrus) has a larger role in
producing a eureka moment than any other areas of the brain. This area might serve as a
lasso of these distant ideas, an organizer of these sudden insight solutions.
The activity of the brain during an ‘aha’ moment contrasts sharply with its behavior
during more logical problem solving activity, according to Lisa Aziz-Zadeh’s
6
experiments. Subjects who recalled solving an anagram in steps, envisioning the root ax
before figuring out the full word transformation axiom for instance, used only one side
of their brain. fMRI showed that only the left hemisphere was busy, in this case,
because a word problem was being solved. The left hemisphere of the brain is usually
thought to represent linear reasoning and language. If a visual spatial task such as
working a rubix cube had been presented, the right brain might have been activated.
Isolated and brain activity, as opposed to the bilateral brain patterns of sudden insights,
is a characteristic of step problem-solving. The fMRI also showed organizational areas
of the brain either less active or completely deactivated compared to an ‘aha’ moment.
The ‘aha’ moment and the conscious step-by-step problem solving are not the only
ways to solve an anagram. There is yet another possible path--simply remembering the
solution. If an anagram or life conundrum is not new, the brain need not use insight of
any kind and can consciously recall a solution already stored in memory. Millions of
parents send their kids to school every day in hopes that what they learn will lead to
quick solutions to problems later in life. It is useful to be able to recall something
without searching the brain—rote memory saves us time and energy.
Of these three ways to hurdle over a problem—memory, stepwise, and ‘aha’ moments--
the ‘aha’ solution seems to come along with the most novel solutions, a measure of
great thinking. Anyone can have an ‘aha’ moment, but people that are considered
creative typically have an abundance of these types of experiences.

7
“The aha path to solution is considered the most creative form of problem solving,”
says Dr. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh who was, at one point in her career, torn between pursuing
science and pursuing art.
Fifteen years ago, Lisa Aziz-Zaden was an art major as a young undergraduate at
UCLA. Her artwork was mostly expressionistic and sometimes abstract in style. She
was drawn to the spatial aspect of painting, and spent much time in her studio stroking
paint on canvas to compose the perfect color arrangement in order to express a feeling
or outcrop of her imagination.
At the same time, she was excited by science and surrounded with innovative scientific
research. Halfway through her undergraduate studies, she decided she would instead
pursue a career as a scientist.
Aziz-Zadeh considers science and art both to be creative endeavors. Both involve
coming up with the right questions such as how to successfully create a shadow effect
in a landscape painting or how to test which neurons are involved in memory. The
difference is that in art, she worked to express a personal emotion or image while in
science she works to discover objective physical laws.
“It’s more about uncovering a mystery or trying to figure out a technique to answer a
question. In science, you actually want to take yourself out of it as much as possible and
be as objective as you can,” she says.

8
As most of us do, she has small ‘aha’ moments occasionally. Though a definite mark of
creative behavior, the ‘aha’ moment might not actually produce creative solutions. In
fact, it might not be that important at all. While popular culture might applaud it, some
researchers actually devalue it enough to think of it as mere punctuation in the creative
process.
“I don’t believe insight as being terribly important,” says Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
Professor or Psychology and Management at Claremont University and author of the
popular psychology book Finding Flow, “it is not qualitatively different than what
happens otherwise.” The ‘aha’ could just be a sped-up moment, no different from the
moment before, like the dip at the bottom of a tall sledding hill, in the creative process.
Dr. Robert Epstein, well-known Behavioral Psyhologist and celebrated author and
speaker, agrees. “Im pretty sure [the aha moment] is nothing special, as far as I can
tell.” Your personal history and the given circumstance build up to give you the
momentum to go down that steep hill, gain speed, make connections in the brain, and
have a sudden ‘aha’ moment.
So, if there’s a lot more to creativity than the sudden insight that dots its landscape,
what else is going on during this important enterprise?
Artist Shannon Ebner does a lot of different kinds of things as a part of the artistic
process that allows her to come up with her unconventional text artworks.

9
Strike, one of her new works that was featured in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, includes
dozens of palindromes, words or phrases that say the same thing spelled backward and
forward, in one large sign. The line “IT IS AN ACTION / NO /IT IS OPPOSITION” is
typical of political messages that emanate Ebner’s artwork. Raw War, her famous 2004
photograph of flimsy, dark cardboard letters that spell out RAW, read backwards as
WAR and forming the Star of David from its reflection on the pond below, also
employs palindromes to affect a strong political message.
Ebner remembers the process of coming up with the idea for RAW WAR as gradual.
She used to think about the effects of reading palindromes when her mind wandered.
She slowly began to think about palindromes as a structure to help remove an overly
politicized word from common usage. While teaching a high school photography
course, she would give her students advice as they developed their photographs and, at
the same time, would turn the palindrome raw and war, two sides of the same concept,
over and over in her mind. During breaks, she would write the word raw over and over
again in her notebook. On one of the scribbled iterations of raw, she suddenly realized
the word could form the Star of David, and, in a provocative moment of sudden insight,
she knew how she would begin to construct her artwork.
She continues to use word play to untangle common usages in language.

Ebner says she doesn’t arrive at an exact plan before she constructs her words in their
oversized physical form. “I just know enough of what I’m trying to do to begin. Not
10
that the idea is good, it’s just worthy of being explored,” she says. She sees sudden
insight as a good jumping off point.
The human brain is so vast and complex, it is very difficult to call one thing creativity.
The brain is made up of one hundred billion neurons, an incredibly large palette on
which all kinds mental activity is inscribed. Each neuron can make at least one
thousand connections with other neurons at any time. If all these combinations are
taken into account, the number of possible states of brain connectedness is larger than
the number of elementary particles in the known universe, V.S. Ramachandran reminds
us in his book A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness.
It is almost impossible to comprehend exactly how our brain produces thoughts and
feelings in any specific thought pattern--psychologists spend decades trying to sort out
what is happening during simple brain tasks.
From what we about sudden insight, it might just be the tip of the iceberg of brain
function—a symptom of creativity. Underlying creative behavior is the interesting part,
yet very tough to define. After thirty years of creativity research, Dr. Robert Epstein
sees creativity as an ordered stewing of certain mental activities.
One such activity, providing fertile ground for creativity, is the acquiring of a rich and
diffuse bed of knowledge. A diverse diet of knowledge makes possible insights like the
‘aha’ moment and catalyzes creative progress by providing a greater chance of neural
connections, like stepping stones in the brain, from information in one discipline to
another.
11
Another such activity is what is known as unordered brainstorming—letting ideas flow
without hindering them or judging them. Salvidore Dali used to take advantage of the
unordered flood of ideas he experienced just before falling asleep. Dali, an eccentric
Spanish surrealist painter who turned out some of the most brilliant artwork in the 20
th

century, used to deliberately nap in the middle of the day to generate these kinds of
thoughts. To capture them, he would hold a spoon or metal key in his hand over a plate.
As he fell asleep, the object would fall and hit a plate below, making a loud sound and
waking him so he could record any thoughts or images that had passed through his
mind during these fertile moments.
Unordered brainstorming can also occur while distracted with an unrelated task. Often,
ideas flow and come into consciousness haphazardly while away from work, while out
for a hike, or while letting the mind wander during a movie. The mind relaxes during
those moments and lets novel viewpoints take shape.
Willingness to accept challenges also provides grounds for creative thinking. No
creative person in history has ever been described as lazy. Constantly tackling tough
problems exercises the brain. Accepting a new job responsibility, joining a new social
group, or even learning a new board game gives the mind experience in different modes
of thinking. This can give a person the confidence and motivation to think freely and
creatively.
If all these mental exercises are practiced, Epstein implies, creativity follows. His work
has proved very practical to Western society since, according to Dr. Epstein, it seems
12
creativity, an ability so valued in Western society for igniting progress in many
disciplines, can almost be prescribed.
So, creativity may not be as elusive as it seems--it involves a collection of actions like
learning, researching, and thinking--that have conscious goals. Insight happens
occasionally in the midst of all this creative stewing, but most great creative writers,
advertising agents, economists, scientists, painters, and musicians all worked hard at
their chosen discipline.
Pulitzer Prize winning poet Anthony Hecht was greatly discouraged from his art by
family members and even close friend Theodore Geisel—commonly known as Dr.
Seuss. But, he continued to write powerful poetry about World War II and the
Holocaust, and eventually rose to be well respected for his art. Hecht makes little
mention of ‘aha’ moments, but describes his working process as very deliberate. “There
is an awful lot of fussing and fiddling; I feel that writing a poem is a very conscious
act.” He has gone on to win the Ruth Lily Prize and the Frost Medal for his more recent
poetry.
Creativity can be hard work, but often produces astounding results in both art and
science.

Charles Darwin, the English naturalist who voyaged to the Galapagos Islands in the
1830s, spent many years gathering information and coming up with ideas until he
13
finally arrived at his famous theory of natural selection. It’s possible Darwin had a few
‘aha’ moments along the way. But, most of his effort was observation, methodical
calculation, and imagination.
Darwin journeyed to the Galapagos as a geologist, and couldn’t help his naturalist
tendencies; he was compelled to record the myriad of species he encountered as the
HSS Beagle rounded through the seas of Africa, South Africa, and Australia. He
catalogued species of finch, recorded their geographic distribution, and began to realize
there was more than just a taxonomic relationship between them.
Darwin’s sketched his ‘Tree of Life’ during this journey--the only illustration of the
creative idea of natural selection included in the resulting manuscript The Origin of
Species, 200 years old this year. This integral image went through many
transformations before it reached its final shape, indicative of the transformative mental
processes that shaped Darwin’s thoughts. In Darwin’s first simple branch sketch he was
able to express and account for differences in the way certain species looked. This
certainly involved much observation of finches, experience with their behavior, and
reasoning on the subject.

A more elaborate second sketch, including more branches of different lengths, is titled
“I think.” At this point, Darwin was able to contemplate the degree of physical
differences between birds, humans, and reptiles. After more time went by, Darwin was
able to detail human’s relationship to apes and suggest their evolutionary closeness in
14
his final drawing. These revisions are indicative of continual deep deliberation and
observation, given the foundations of biology he already knew.
The common assumption for that time period was that all birds were created at one time
in the earth’s history and exist unchanged over time. John Gould, a conservative
taxonomist that worked with Darwin upon his return to Europe, could not even leap to
the conclusion that one bird species may have evolved from another. After all his hard
work, Darwin was able to step back from the societal paradigm and make this creative
leap.
The creative idea of natural selection was novel and downright radical. In its time, the
implications of this theory were ridiculed and often the butt of jokes and newspaper
cartoons—humans as descendants of monkeys was a funny idea. Now, Darwin’s
picture of evolution is accepted as the foundation of modern genetics.
As Darwin’s history shows, societal forces interact with novel ideas and often define
what is creative and what it is not. These forces can often be as important as mental
facets of the process.
Dr. Mihalyi Csikszentmihayli, longtime creativity researcher, focuses on these social
forces: He believes the an individual can make leaps and bounds in problem-solving
using creativity, but creativity and novel ideas can never be divorced from society and
culture.

15
Societies can both stimulate and define creativity.
One of the most obvious modern models of social stimulation of creativity is President
Barack Obama’s pioneering run for the White House in 2008. His campaign played to a
new generation of Americans who were proficient with technology and those who were
eager for a change in leadership of the United States.
Obama realized the power of new communications technologies like the Internet and
text messaging to reach and identify with masses of American people. In August 2008,
Obama’s campaign sent out a text message alert, announcing his pick for running mate,
Joe Biden, to all American people who signed up for the service. Being the first to
know his choice excited younger voters and, in addition to his innovative website and
overall tech savvy, probably helped to incite the second largest youth voter turnout in
history—second only to the 1972 election after the Vietnam War.
Obama also concentrated his efforts on elegant speeches, distancing himself from the
George W. Bush administration, a blatantly unpopular figure in American politics.
Bush was not an eloquent speaker and was never particularly candid with his political
goals and intentions. Bush held very few press conferences to communicate with
American public. Barack Obama, by contrast, presented himself as open for dialog
throughout his campaign. His moving promises, candid conversations with the
American public, and his simple and powerful yet strategically vague slogan of
“Change” allowed voters to identify him with any of their personal hope for a better
nation.
16
These ideas and progressive actions represented brilliance in American politics that will
be studied for years to come.
Once great ideas have been put forward by the leaders and artists of a civilization, the
judgments of a society or culture can determine if they persist in history as truly great,
and define which people are truly creative. In other words, creativity always stands the
test of time.
In that way, history might be the most important social force in creativity. And the
writers of history tend to be the experts in the field. Since creativity necessarily
involves the learning of the language of a specific discipline, even if that knowledge is
revolutionized in the process, experts are the ones who usually judge what ideas are
historically incendiary. Art critics, poetry editors, business owners, music aficionados,
and scientists at peer review journals judge whether a product is novel and whether it
has worth to society. In this way, they define and guide what is considered creative just
as much as the individual does, who produces the idea.
Sometimes, experts are good at instilling the most brilliant ideas into the public
consciousness. Sometimes they look over or reject important human triumphs because
they don’t yet understand them.
Many an unrecognized genius has labored away in their workshop for a lifetime
without being considered a formidable creative force. Vincent Van Gogh—now revered
for his avant-garde style of painting, Nicolas Copernicus—now championed for his
correct theory of heliocentric planetary orbits, and Giordano Bruno—now recognized
17
for upholding heliocentrism and suggesting the infinity of the universe all went
unrecognized in their time. Yet, they are now considered some of the most innovative
practitioners of art and science. Their society and surroundings stimulated their novel
behavior, but the cultural selection for their work lagged behind.
Creativity can be thought of in a Darwinian paradigm. If the products of creativity are
judged as useful, they can be passed on through time, like genes are passed from one
generation to the next. “Creativity is the cultural equivalent of the process of genetic
changes that result in biological evolution, where random variations take place in the
chemistry of our chromosomes, below the threshold of consciousness,” says Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi in his 1997 book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery
and Invention.
This idea is similar to the concept of a meme, a package of valuable cultural
information that is passed down, like genetic information, and selected through
generations. Human language is the foremost example of a memetic heritage—humans
parents pass language through teaching and cultural environment. Though this
inheritance does not occur through DNA, it might be equally as predictable.
However mechanistic social science makes creativity, attitudes in popular culture
certainly don’t match that reality. In Western society, creativity is often thought of as
being given to us--not a product of anything an artist, musician, or writer can
consciously nurture. “[The aha moment] is the modern analog of getting inspiration
from the muses,” says Dr. Keith Simonton, researcher of genius and leadership in
18
Western culture at University of California, Davis. Creativity has a reputation for being
one of the most mysterious workings of the human mind, a myth with deep historical
roots.
The myth of creativity is bound by the meaning of the word itself. Creativity was
coined during the Rennaissance by Polish poet Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski. ‘Create,’
the root of the word is literally synonymous for the Christian notion of creation by God.
Artists from the Rennaissance period forward were considered divinely gifted. The
modern play Amadeus portrays Mozart’s supposedly divine creative advantage over his
contemporary Salieri, an opposite temperament if there ever was one. Mozart was a
lazy bum. Salieri was extremely learned, disciplined, and well-behaved. Salieri was a
successful court-composer, but Mozart was a surpassing talent. Because no one could
give an explanation for this incongruence, Mozart’s genius was looked at as divinely
bestowed.
Sanctity of the creative process was reinforced by Romantic ideals. Members of the
Romantic Movement included mostly artists, poets, and musicians. Writers such as
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Edgar Allen Poe, the philosopher Rousseau, and
composers Chopin and Wagner all espoused Romantic ideal versions of the artist and
the artistic process. Most importantly, they upheld the importance of emotion in
aesthetic experience.
In Cooleridge’s deceptive recap of writing Kublai Khan, he was vindicating what he
thought it should be like to write a great poem. No amount of deliberate revisions, he
19
thought, could have possibly produced a worthwhile work of literature. The Romantic
society he lived in quickly accepted his impassioned story as truth.
The same kind of Romantic valorization of emotion and spontaneity has been revived,
every so often, in Western culture—notable after World War II and in counterculture
social circles in the 60’s.
The emotionality of having a sudden insight lends well to Romanticism; it’s hard to
ignore the intensity of feeling that comes with the ‘aha’ moment. And, the longer a
problem is worked on, the bigger the ‘aha’ moment and sense triumph is experienced.
The science behind the elusive ‘aha’ moment is hard to do without modern tools like
fMRI, which is why it has only recently been studied, and has remained a scientific
mystery for such a long time. But, the reason for the sudden emotional response in
humans that Romanticism has so upheld has been well known since the 1950’s.
A positive emotion attached to a human action or experience like the ‘aha’ moment
means that the associate brain processes are advantageous to that person. Sudden
emotion or feeling is a reward in the brain.
“A lot of the ‘aha’ moment also has to do with an emotional component---it feels great
to have an aha moment. So the reward mechanisms in the brain must also be involved,”
says Dr. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh.
These reward systems make sure humans cultivate and pass on through evolution the
traits that are useful to our species. Creativity has proved immeasurably useful to
20
humans personally and human societies over the entire history of the human race. The
ingenuity to forge a spear from a stick and sharp stone was likely the result of decades
of human testing and thinking about the concepts of ‘sharpness’ ‘hardness’ and
‘momentum.’ In modern ages, Leonardo daVinci and Ben Franklin harnessed their
obvious predilection for creativity towards naturalist ends, for painting, and for
inventions like the human wing and the lightening rod.
Humans, in general, prefer novelty and situations where they can gain more
information. Since creativity often gives human beings a new perspective on a situation,
more information is gained and human beings feel more prepared for future challenges.
A jazz musician, for instance, might extrapolate on a known rhythm to compose a
completely different melody. In time, this bravery and creativity could lead to a new
tune or a new style of music altogether.
The fact that the ‘aha’ moment is reinforced with emotion means that the biology of our
bodies ensures creativity and the ‘aha’ moment, its symptom, will be a mark of human
behavior far in the future.
If creativity is a meaningful and gratifying way to navigate through life, maybe the
‘aha’s, though not that important in themselves, act as guides or serve as milestones in
great thinking.

In the scientific community, more work on the ‘aha’ moment as a gateway into the
creative process is needed to solve the scientific question of what exactly neurons are
21
doing in our brain. From a neuropsychology standpoint, “The aha is still a mystery,”
says Lisa Aziz-Zadeh.

But, that scientific mystery seems to be a productive one--one that sparks the curiosity of
more and more psychologists. Scientists are making leaps and bounds in the field using
new technologies. As they attempt to work out what is happening during such a complex
process as creativity, maybe it is the ‘aha’ moments themselves that will let them know
which direction to go.

22
Bibliography
Aziz-Zadeh, Lisa. Personal interview. 4 March 2009.
Czikzentmihalyi, Mihalyi. Personal interview. 16 February 2009.
Epstein, Robert. Personal interview. 10 February 2009.
Simonton, Keith. Personal interview. 10 March 2009.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Sudden Insight is an anomaly in the human thought process that is often heralded for its ability to get us through problems in our life. But, this cognitive phenomenon is simply a part of the larger process of creativity. As scientific researchers use new tools to try to understand 'aha' moments as a part of the process that ignites progress in a number of disciplines in human societies, societies continue to Romanticize the work or artists, scientists, and writers who experience sudden insights.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Rentz, Casey (author)

Core Title Sudden insight

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Journalism (Print Journalism)

Publication Date 05/13/2009

Defense Date 04/01/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag art,brain,Neuroscience,OAI-PMH Harvest,sudden insight

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Cole, K. C. (committee chair), Anawalt, Sasha M. (committee member), Winstein, Carolee J. (committee member)

Creator Email caseyrentz@gmail.com,crentz@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2243

Unique identifier UC1281293

Identifier etd-rentz-2798 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-236357 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2243 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-rentz-2798.pdf

Dmrecord 236357

Document Type Project

Rights Rentz, Casey

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu