Kim Mills: Have you ever worked on a problem for hours or days or even weeks, turning it over in your mind until you were ready to give up finding a solution, but then the answer came to you in a flash, maybe in the shower or while you were taking a walk or doing the dishes? Many of us are fortunate enough to experience these spurts of insight at least occasionally. Aha or eureka moments have led to some of humanity's greatest achievements in science, medicine, mathematics and art, from classic songs to life-saving cancer treatments, even to the invention of the Slinky. But most of the time, these insights are more prosaic—maybe a crossword puzzle answer that's eluded you for days comes to your mind in the shower, or the perfect title for a paper you're writing pops into your head while you're digging a hole in the garden.
Eureka moments like these are a form of creativity. They involve coming up with a new idea or novel solution to a problem. So how does this type of creative insight differ from more analytical or methodical thinking? Where in the brain does creative insight happen? Are some people naturally more creative thinkers than others? And how can you encourage more creativity in yourself and set yourself up to experience more of these aha moments?
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. Our guest today is Dr. John Kounios, a professor of psychology at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Two decades ago, his work provided some of the first evidence from brain imaging studies that creative insight is a distinct form of thinking separate from analytical thought, since then, he has continued to study what's happening in people's brains during moments of creativity and insight. He is also author of the book, The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain.
Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Kounios.
John Kounios, PhD: Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.
Mills: So a moment ago, I said that aha moments or eureka moments are a form of creative thinking, let's talk about that a little more. A lot of people think of creativity more in terms of things like musical or artistic ability—what makes an aha moment a type of creativity?
Kounios: Okay. Well, let's first start with what creativity is. Creativity is not just in the arts, creativity occurs in science, creativity occurs in everyday life, in all aspects of life, so probably the most common definition is that for something to be creative, it involves coming up with an idea or a product that is both novel and useful. I'm not crazy about that definition, it seems to be as close to a standard definition as we have at this point. So for something to be novel, obviously, it has to be novel for the individual, so if I have never read Shakespeare's Hamlet, but I sit down and I write Hamlet, then it's novel to me. It's not novel to the world, but at least it's novel to me. It would be very creative if I could do that, not having read Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Useful, that's a little bit harder. Useful to whom? Certainly there are, for example, brilliant theorems that have been proven in mathematics that at the time were of no use to anyone and perhaps a hundred years later, theoretical physicists used it to come up with a novel understanding of, say, particle physics or string theory or whatever. So something could be useful at one time and not be useful anymore later, so that's not a great definition either. Maybe a little bit better is to say that something is appropriate. So you could come up with an idea that is new to you and it may not be right, perhaps it's a brilliant failure. We all have had brilliant failures. They were creative, but they just didn't pan out, but at least they were appropriate to a particular problem or question of some interest. So novel and useful, novel and appropriate, that's one way of thinking of creativity.
Another approach, which I like a little better, is that creativity is the ability to take the elements of thought and break them down and reorganize them into something that is new. So for example, you could take the notes of the musical scale and rearrange those to come up with a beautiful melody. You could take words, rearrange those to come up with a poem. You could take the elements of mathematical equations, rearrange those to come up with a new theorem, a new equation. So I like that, it gets away from the useful part. It still has to have something appropriate to it. So for example, if you have someone who has schizophrenia, they may be reorganizing all of their associations in novel ways, but those could be random. We wouldn't call it creative because it could be just gibberish. If it has some purpose, some appropriateness, then we can still call that creativity.
Yet another possible way to think of creativity is the ability to think on your feet. So this is what cognitive psychologists call fluid intelligence. So it's your ability to deal with novel situations, where you can't rely that much on past experience, you have to improvise, think on your feet, that would be one potential form of creativity. And as we can talk about later, from our studies of musical improvisation, creativity can be different for people who are novices in a particular field versus being experts in that field. So those are just different ways of defining creativity, and you can apply that to all areas of life, whether it's arts, the humanities, science, practical aspects of daily life, trying to get a toddler to eat vegetables, you might come up with some great idea to do that. Those are all forms of creativity.
Mills: So how do you study this? You use neuroimaging to look at what's happening in people's brains when they're having insights, but you can't necessarily predict when an insight will happen, so how do you measure when someone is having an actual eureka moment?
Kounios: Okay. So these eureka moments or aha moments, they're one form of creativity. So one way to look at this is that, since it's difficult to come up with a definition of creativity that everyone agrees on, the approach that I've mostly taken in my research is to take some phenomenon that everyone agrees is a manifestation of creativity, and these aha moments or eureka moments, researchers seem to have a consensus that those are one manifestation of creativity, so we can focus on that. Now, the famous eureka moments, it could be Isaac Newton with the apple falling and gravity, or Paul McCartney having a dream which gave him the melody for the song Yesterday, all of these things.
These are rare events. We can't chase people around, predict when they're going to have an aha moment, or psychological scientists call them an insight, and then stuff them in a brain scanner and wait for it to happen, we just can't do that. And neuroimaging also requires not just a single instance of an aha moment, it requires multiple instances. We have to average over many of these things in order to extract the brain activity that's associated with the aha moment. So my colleague and collaborator, longstanding, Mark Beeman, who's at Northwestern University, who also coauthored the book, The Eureka Factor with me, many years ago we decided to take a different approach, and that is, instead of waiting for these insights to come, we would use little verbal puzzles that a person could solve in a few seconds, and we could give people many of these.
So the analogy might be that biomedical researchers studying a disease, trying to come up with a cure for disease, they use, say, a mouse model, and the mouse model is in many respects—mice are not humans, but they've been engineered genetically to have certain characteristics that would allow us to predict based on how a mouse responds to things, whether this drug, for example, might be helpful for humans. So we're using a mouse model in a way. We use these little problems, which we have every reason to believe differ from the big eureka moments only in their size or scope. We can give people many of these little puzzles and study the brain activity when people solve little puzzles, either with a flash of insight or solve them analytically.
So we've selected types of puzzles such as anagrams or other types called compound remote associates. These are little puzzles that a person can solve in one of two ways, they can solve it—say you have an anagram, one way to solve the anagram is you consciously, deliberately, methodically, rearrange the letters to find a word, we would call that analytical thinking, that term goes back over a hundred years. And another way is you look at the anagram and then after a second or two, the solution just pops into your awareness. It could take longer than second or two. You have your aha moment that gives you the word, that would be insight or an aha moment. So by giving people lots of these puzzles, and for each one that they solve, we ask them, "Did that just pop into your head or did that result from working it out in a conscious, deliberate way?" We can sort the solutions into aha-moments solutions and analytic solutions and compare the brain activity for the two of these. And we can look at, what are the brain areas that are uniquely activated when a person solves the problem with a sudden insight versus solving it analytically?
Mills: So you've found evidence that some people tend more toward analytical thinking and some more toward insightful thinking, but what are the actual differences between the two, and do most people tend more strongly in one direction than the other?
Kounios: So yes. So actually let me back up a little bit. So what we found in our initial study, which we published in PLOS Biology in 2004, was that for a particular type of verbal puzzle, the insight itself, the aha moment itself, corresponds to a burst of brain activity in the right temporal lobe, just above the right ear, high-frequency EEG and also electroencephalogram and also using functional magnetic resonance imaging—fMRI, an increase in blood flow just at the moment that the person has the solution pop into awareness. So we were able to then, over a series of studies, trace backwards in time, what are the precursors that lead to a person having an aha moment.
And so you're talking about individual differences between people, are some people more likely to solve these puzzles or any kind of puzzles by insight, and others more likely to solve them analytically? And the answer is yes. So in a study led in my lab by Brian Erickson, who's now a research professor at Drexel University, this was part of his doctoral dissertation research in my lab, and the study was funded by the National Science Foundation. We recorded people's resting-state electroencephalography, their resting-state EEGs. So they're sitting there, no test to performed, no idea what's going to come next, they're just sitting and relaxing, we record their brain activity. And then weeks later, we give them, in this case, anagrams to solve, and we note, for each subject, which ones they solved analytically and which ones they solved insightfully, with an aha moment. We then divided the subjects into groups, which ones tended to solve the problems with a flash of insight and which ones tended to solve more problems analytically, and we compared the resting-state brain activity that we recorded weeks earlier, and we found substantial differences between these two types of people.
So first of all, it's amazing that recordings of resting-state brain activity can predict your cognitive style, insightful versus analytic, weeks in advance, up to seven weeks in advance at least, maybe longer, we haven't determined that yet. And what we found is that the analytical thinkers, in their resting-state, tend to have more brain activity over the frontal lobe, we could record over the frontal lobes, and the insightful thinkers tend to have more resting-state brain activity in left, posterior parts of the brain. So the frontal lobe is the seed of what we call executive processing, cognitive control. It gives us focus. It sets goals. It focuses attention. When the frontal lobe is more deactivated, it's less active, then thinking becomes fuzzier, less goal-directed, less organized, and people who have less frontal lobe activity, at least on average, tend to have more of these aha moments, these sudden insights
And that's why people tend to have these aha moments when they're, say, in the shower, taking a nice warm shower, they're relaxed, it feels good. They don't have anything else to do at the moment. Their minds wander. They get relaxed and in that fuzzy state, then they can have aha moments. But if you have a couple of cups of coffee, you have a test to perform, you maybe have a deadline, you're very focused, that boosts analytical thinking, and you tend to work things out in a more methodical, deliberate way. So yes, so there are analytical thinkers, there are insightful thinkers. Virtually all of the subjects we've tested, and we've tested hundreds of subjects over the years, virtually all of them solve some puzzles with insight and some puzzles analytically. There's no one who's never has an aha moment that we found, and no one who never thinks analytically, it's just that some people tend to be balanced more one way or the other, and you can nudge people one way or the other in various ways, and we can talk about that too.
Mills: That really resonates. I'm a great fan of the New York Times Spelling Bee, which you get seven words every morning and you have to arrange them into words, and I see myself, sometimes I'm thinking analytically to come up with them, and other times I just look at all the letters and boom, there's a word. So I get exactly what you're talking about. So let's talk about the different hemispheres of the brain. There's an accepted wisdom that one side of the brain is where we do our creative thinking, the right side, and that the left side controls our analytical abilities such as speech, mathematics, things like that, and in some sense, we're told that never the twain meet. Now, you've done some research with jazz musicians that has pretty much turned that thinking on its head, to make a bad pun. What did you learn from that research about creativity and the two hemispheres of the brain?
Kounios: Okay. So the study that you're talking about was published last year in NeuroImage, also funded by the National Science Foundation, and it was led by David Rosen, who at the time, was a graduate student in my lab. All right, so the topic of the hemispheres of the brain and creativity is a very controversial topic among psychologists and neuroscientists. So the pop wisdom, going back at least to the 1960s, is that the right hemisphere of the brain is creative, the left hemisphere is logical and analytical, and that is a leap from early studies that were done on patients who had the hemispheres of their brains separated to help inhibit epileptic seizures.
Mills: Right, so surgically separated, yeah.
Kounios: Surgically separated, and it was quite a leap. But the idea infused the pop culture, and we talk about right-brain thinkers and left-brain thinkers. So neuroscientists correctly say that the normal brain is not cut in half, the two hemispheres of the brain work together, they work together almost all the time, so it can't be that the right hemisphere is the creative hemisphere and the left hemisphere is the analytical hemisphere. It can't be, the whole brain is involved. Well, that's going a bit far too, because what the research has shown, in our case with our study of particular types of these puzzles, is that the aha moment, the brain activity at the moment of insight, is a burst of activity in the right temporal lobe, and that's the right hemisphere, it's suggested right there, there's something going on.
Work that my colleague Mark Beeman and his longtime collaborator Ed Bowden have done, behavioral work mostly and also research that presents information directly to one hemisphere of the brain or the other, suggests that the right hemisphere of the brain processes what we call remote associations. So for example, if I say the word water, you might think of the word glass, that's a word that comes to mind immediately because those are close associations, you think of a glass of water. If I were to say the word water and then you came up with the word table, like water table, that is a remote association, it's not the first thing that comes to most people's minds. Bowden and Beeman's research suggests that these remote associations tend to be stored in the right hemisphere of the brain, and that the left hemisphere of the brain processes close associations. So if I say water and you say glass, that's left hemisphere, if I say water and you say table, that's right hemisphere.
And the right hemisphere is necessary, for example, understanding the gist, understanding humor, understanding things that are not face value, straightforward, and that work still holds up and there's something to it, but we can take that a step further. So what we found in our study of jazz improvisation, we measured people's EEGs while they improvised on the guitar—jazz. And some of these musicians were experts who had been performing jazz gigs for decades and decades, they were really good at it, others were novices and hadn't been doing it for very long, and then we had people who were in between. So for each subject, we looked at their—they did a series of improvisations and we had experts, later on, rate the creativity of each improvisation, not knowing who actually performed.
So we looked at the best versus the worst improvisations for each subject, in terms of most creative versus least creative, and what we found is that, experts improvisation, their best versus their worst, activated the left posterior parts of the brain; for the novices, their best versus their worst activated the right hemisphere, mostly right frontal areas of the brain. We found this surprising. So looking around in the literature, there's an old theory of the hemispheres and creativity that was first proposed by a neuropsychologist named Elkhonon Goldberg, and what he argued is that the right hemisphere processes novel—it’s stimuli novel experiences—when there's something new for you, a new task, a new stimulus, it's the right hemisphere that's engaged. As you become more and more practiced at it, as it becomes more and more familiar, that activity moves to the left hemisphere.
So for example, in most people, the left hemisphere is dominant for language because adults are so practiced at language. It moves from the left to the right. So what this looks like, in our case, with our jazz musicians, is that for the novices, improvisation is still not that familiar for them, it's still a new experience, and when they have to improvise—they improvise in our study, to set chord and rhythm sequences that we gave them. This was an unfamiliar task, so they work it out deliberately, analytically, if you will. They're consciously strategizing, "All right, I'll do this, now I'll do that. That didn't sound so good now, I'll try this. That worked better. Okay." The experts don't do that. The experts, if they've been doing this long enough, and they really have been, many of them did it for decades and decades, they just turn it on like a faucet and it just flows. It just flows.
So the novices are using more of this think-on-your-feet type of creativity, but as the years of practice go by, it shifts to the left hemisphere and it becomes more just turn it on, it's automatic, it flows, you don't have to think about it. And that may relate to this idea, this older idea—it's not that old, of Beeman and Bowden, and that I've worked on also, of remote association. So when you get something that's new, it's remote, it's a remote association, you don't think of that normally. So if I were to say water table, water table, that might be a new idea for you, but if you start thinking and reading about water tables a lot, it might move from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere eventually, because it becomes practiced.
So this might be a way of thinking about the hemispheres and creativity. It may be that it's not creative in the right hemisphere versus uncreative in the left hemisphere, what it may be and what the newest data suggests is that the right hemisphere, and especially the right frontal lobe, is especially good at and very important for creativity, in terms of thinking on your feet, dealing with a novel situation, something that's unfamiliar, it might be what intelligence researchers call fluid intelligence, whereas the left hemisphere is more focused on this practiced creativity. It would practice in that particular genre or tests, say musical improvisation, could be other things. It gets baked in. It becomes more effortless. You don't—a lot of it becomes unconscious. The music just flows and goes right to your hands as you're performing.
So that is our latest way of thinking about creativity in the brain. And so in a sense, the right hemisphere, according to this idea, is the seat of one form of creativity, and that is this ability to deal with novelty, whereas the left hemisphere is this ability to take from baked-in experience, longstanding experience and process the information unconsciously, and then it just flows.
Mills: That speaks to the idea of the creative geniuses in human history, like you mentioned, Isaac Newton and the falling apple, Thomas Edison and the electric light, for example, and there's some thinking that these insights arise spontaneously, and yet if you look more closely at the lives of some of these people, they've actually spent hundreds of hours working at their craft or their science before they reach these achievements. I'm just wondering, how much of genius, as we call it, consists of aha moments, and how much is only possible because of the obsessive focus on a particular specialty, whether it's music or science or painting, whatever it is that you're obsessed with?
Kounios: It depends on what you want to be creative about. So everyone is an expert at something. Everyone is an expert at daily life. Nobody knows your daily life better than you do, so since you're an expert at daily life, you're in a position to have these aha moments about how to do things in your daily life. Not everyone is in a position to have aha moments about particle physics, that takes years of study. It takes a lot of analytical ability to understand the mathematics and the experimentation involved, so if you want to be creative at particle physics, you've got to do your homework, years and years of homework, and then you'll be in a position to have these amazing insights.
You need the immersion and the practice to gain the specialized knowledge, but you don't necessarily need to have immersion in a particular question or problem. So for example, it's well known the idea that you have a question or a problem and you might have an aha moment later on while you're in the shower, or it wakes you up during the night or something like that. But there are instances where people have an aha moment that gives them a solution or an idea, it's a solution to a problem they didn't even know they had. So one example that I really love of this is that there was this engineer aboard a Navy ship, U.S. Navy ship in 1943. His name was Richard James, and his job was to install springs, shock absorbers, to cushion instruments, so that when there was a rough sea and the ship was being buffeted about, the instruments would be stabilized, like gauges and things like that. So he was installing the springs and then one of the springs got loose and started bouncing around like it had a life of its own. So he looked at that, he thought, "Wow, this would make a great toy," and after some development, it became the Slinky.
Now, was he thinking about toys before that? I doubt it. There's no evidence of that. It just, he saw this, it sparked this idea in his head, and it wasn't as if he had been incubating or struggling with this problem for a long time, it was just a great idea that was a solution to a problem he didn't know he had. Again, so insight, creativity can be spontaneous, it doesn't have to be triggered by a problem, it could just happen. And that's one of the amazing things about creativity, is that the spontaneity of it as well as it being the product, occasionally, of deliberate grappling with a problem or a goal.
Mills: What can people do to encourage this kind of creative insight? Are there things that we can do that will spark more aha moments in our lives, because I think we'd all like to be more creative?
Kounios: Yes. So there are, and this is ongoing research that will be—some of it is well established, some is emerging, other aspects of it will—in a number of years, we'll know for sure, but let's start with the basics of what we know. So there's a principle in psychology called psychological safety, you can feel safe and unthreatened or you can feel threatened and anxious. So for example, say you're an early human on the savannah in Africa and you see a lion way off in the distance. At that moment, you're going to become very focused and anxious because if that lion detects you, you're finished. So you're going to freeze, you're going to focus on the lion, you're going to think, "All right, has the lion detected me? What can I do to avoid being detected? Am I upwind or downwind of the lion? Am I going to make noise? If I run away, will the lion see the motion?" You're going to be really careful. That is analytical thinking. It's deliberate. It's focused. It's very organized because you can't afford to make a mistake.
On the other hand, you're still that early human, you're in your cave at night with your clan, you're all well fed, you're all safe, you feel relaxed. When you're relaxed, there's no threat, when there's no threat, your attention expands. There's no risk. There's no risk to thinking crazy thoughts. There's no risk to exploring off-the-wall ideas, and it's very different from the lion situation, because in the lion situation, you can't make a mistake, you have to be really careful. You can't try things out.
So what we know, from longstanding research by many researchers, is that creativity is enhanced by a positive mood. When you're in a positive mood, you have this feeling of psychological safety, your attention expands, you become less self-critical, but when you're anxious, and anxiety could be caused by a lot of things, it could be fear of embarrassment, it could be a deadline, it could be a lot of things, you become more analytical. You do things in a very careful way. And analytical thinking can still result in a creative product. So for example, if I give you a task to come up with a number of ideas and say, they all have to be creative, and you have like 10 minutes to do it, that deadline will make you focus and be very analytical, but you'll probably consciously reject all of the non-creative ideas, so what you present will be the most creative of your thinking. You filter, you use your analytical focused thinking to filter yourself out.
But in general, positive mood enhances insightful thinking, anxiety and anything that causes focus will result in more analytical thinking. And this also, you can extend this to this idea of expanding attention. So for example, if a person is in an expansive environment, they go outside, or they're in a big room with high ceilings, there's a link between what's called perceptual attention and conceptual attention, the two are linked.
When your attention expands to fill a large space, that expansion of perceptual attention also expands conceptual attention, so that's why a lot of creative figures, they like to take walks in nature. Or even in the shower, there's white noise, your vision is blurred, it's a hot shower, you can't sense the boundary between what's outside of your skin and what's inside, you feel almost disembodied, and that allows your attention to expand, and you can get these crazy wonderful ideas. But if you're in a cubicle and you're guzzling coffee and you've got something due in an hour, your attention will narrow and focus and become analytic. So you can jumpstart this expansion of attention by being in wide-open spaces and avoiding things that grab your attention. It could be striking works of art, anything grabs your attention, bright colors, that will narrow focus. So being in fuzzy, warm environments, new agey, all of that, attention expands and it expands the scope of thought.
Another thing is doing your creative work when your thinking is a little fuzzy. So some people are morning people, some people are evening people, you do your best analytical thinking at your peak time, whether it's morning or evening or afternoon. You're more likely to think in an insightful creative way during your off-peak hours, when your thinking is a little fuzzy and not so analytical. Also, and I'm not recommending that people drink alcohol because there are health repercussions, but there's plenty of research now that shows that an alcoholic beverage, we're talking just in moderation, it makes your thinking a little fuzzy and you can start making these connections that are harder to make if you're more focused and analytical.
Probably one of the most powerful ways to jumpstart creativity is sleep, and for three reasons: One, if you sleep, then that puts you in a better mood. If you're sleep-deprived, you're cranky, you don't feel good, but if you get enough sleep, you're in a positive mood and that helps creativity. Sleep also helps with what's called fixation forgetting. A lot of creativity is blocked because you're focused on a bad idea or bad ideas or non-creative ideas. When you sleep—and this is the reason why breaks help. If you're stuck on something, you take a break, you do fixation forgetting, it flushes, you forget the wrong idea that you're stuck on. Sleep supercharges fixations forgetting and flushes out bad ideas, so you can start with more like a blank slate and come up with creative ideas.
Sleep also promotes what's called memory consolidation, so the information you take in during the day, while you sleep, it becomes consolidated in the brain, and part of that is a reorganization of the knowledge, the information. That reorganization can bring out non-obvious ideas, non-obvious features, which is why a lot of people have—they get ideas, sometimes they wake up in the middle of the night with an idea or the idea presents itself in the morning, just as you wake up and you're not fully there yet. For example, Paul McCartney got the melody for the song Yesterday in his sleep. He woke up, there it was, he wrote it down. He didn't even know if this melody was something he had come up with or something he'd heard somewhere else. So he ran the tune by John Lennon, John Lennon said, "Never heard it before, it sounds great." He ran it by their manager, the manager said, "Never heard it before, it sounds great." So he put words to it, he said, "It must've been my idea," and he wrote it and it was voted as the greatest pop song of the 20th century.
Mills: Yeah, that's amazing.
Kounios: Right there. So sleep, even a short nap, sleep can super-charge creativity. All right, so that's the more established science. Looking forward, there's emerging research that suggests that electrical or magnetic brain stimulation may eventually be—protocols may be developed that will enhance creativity. Now, I don't think this will become a practical solution for people in general, like, "Oh, I have to come up with an idea for an advertising campaign, let me juice my brain electricity." I don't think that's going to become a practical solution, but it's interesting, and there may be some very selected situations in which might be helpful.
Another possibility is using drugs to enhance creativity. Since the 1960s, people have been talking about psychedelic drugs, for example, to enhance creativity. And there's been research, most of it is not very rigorous, most of it shouldn't be taken too seriously, but starting now, is starting to be some research that looks at the question of whether psychedelic drugs or other drugs may enhance creativity, and the jury's out. I do not recommend people use psychedelic drugs. We don't really know what the health implications will be, and we don't even know if it'll really help with creativity. It may help people to feel like they're being creative, even if it doesn't help them to actually be creative. So we don't really know at this point, but in the future, I wouldn't be surprised if there was developed a pharmacology of creativity, that might even be helpful. Maybe even nutrition, certain foods, chemicals in certain foods may eventually be shown to enhance creativity.
So that's the future, and we don't really know at this point. But the general principle of positive mood, feeling safe and getting a lot of sleep, feeling good, being in an environment where your attention can expand, we know that can promote insightful creativity. And the little bit of stress, little bit of anxiety, not too much because of course, if you're too stressed, you won't be thinking clearly about anything, but just a little bit of pressure, a little bit of stress promotes more analytical thinking, and the ideal thing of course is to be able to alternate between these two things.
In an insightful frame of mind, you generate ideas, then you narrow your focus and you edit it, you evaluate it, you can maybe tweak it, make it better, maybe you can just throw out your ideas, if they’re no good, and then you go back to idea generation and then back to idea analysis, that's the ideal thing. And it's not clear whether people can control or learn to control going back and forth between these two modes of thinking, certainly a lot of people can naturally swing back and forth, and when they're in a particular frame of mind, they can do a particular type of work, when they go to another frame of mind, they can do another way of thinking, another cognitive style. But it would be great if we can develop a technique to train people to shift back and forth at will, and that would be fantastic, but that's, I think, a ways off.
Mills: I think you've offered a lot of good advice for people to basically put ourselves in places and positions where we can have more of these aha moments. I hope our listeners have gained some insights from your insights. Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Kounios.
Kounios: Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for inviting me.
Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology at www.speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org, that's speakingofpsychology, all one word, @apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman, our sound editor is Chris Condayan.
Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.
John Kounios, PhD, is a professor of psychology at Drexel University in Philadelphia, where he studies the neural and cognitive bases of creativity, insight, and problem solving. He specializes in high-density electroencephalogram (EEG) recording of brain activity and, through collaborations, also uses transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). His research has been reported on by the New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, U.S. News & World Report, Scientific American, The Times (London) and other print and electronic media. He is author of the book The Eureka Factor: Creative Insights and the Brain, with coauthor Mark Beeman, PhD.
