Epiphanies Rewire the Brain for Better Learning

How the study worked

In the study, the researchers used a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record people’s brain activity while they tried to solve visual brain teasers. The puzzles required them to ”fill in the blanks” of a series of two-tone images with minimal detail, using their perception to complete the picture and identify a real-world object.

Such hidden picture puzzles serve as small-scale proxies for bigger eureka moments. “It's just a little discovery that you are making, but it produces the same type of characteristics that exist in more important insight events,” said senior author Roberto Cabeza, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke.

For each puzzle the participants thought they solved, the researchers asked whether the solution just popped into their awareness in a flash of sudden insight, or whether they worked it out in a more deliberate and methodical way, and how certain they were of their answer.

The results were striking.

Participants tended to recall solutions that came to them in a flash of insight far better than ones they arrived at without this sense of epiphany. Furthermore, the more conviction a person felt about their insight at the time, the more likely they were to remember it five days later when the researchers asked them again.

“If you have an ‘aha! moment’ while learning something, it almost doubles your memory,” said Cabeza, who has been studying memory for 30 years. “There are few memory effects that are as powerful as this.”

A number of changes in the brain may cause people to have better memory for “aha! moments,” the researchers found.

A boost for memory

They discovered that flashes of insight trigger a burst of activity in the brain’s hippocampus, a cashew-shaped structure buried deep in the temporal lobe that plays a major role in learning and memory. The more powerful the insight, the greater the boost.

They also found that the activation patterns across the participants’ neurons changed once they spotted the hidden object and saw the image in a new light -- particularly in certain parts of the brain’s ventral occipito-temporal cortex, the region responsible for recognizing visual patterns. The stronger the epiphany, the greater the change in those areas.

“During these moments of insight, the brain reorganizes how it sees the image,” said Becker, who did the work in the Cabeza lab.

Lastly, stronger “aha!” experiences were associated with greater connectivity between these different brain regions. “The different regions communicate with each other more efficiently,” Cabeza said.

The current study looked at brain activity at two specific moments in time, before and after the eureka moment when the lightbulb appeared. As a next step, the researchers plan to look more closely at what happens during the few seconds in between that allows people to finally see the answer.

“Insight is key for creativity,” Cabeza said. In addition to shedding light on how the brain comes up with creative solutions, the findings also lend support for inquiry-based learning in the classroom.

“Learning environments that encourage insight could boost long-term memory and understanding,” the researchers wrote.

Reference: Becker M, Sommer T, Cabeza R. Insight predicts subsequent memory via cortical representational change and hippocampal activity. Nat Commun. 2025;16(1):4341. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-59355-4

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