Tik, Martin; Sladky, Ronald; Di Bernardi Luft, Caroline; Willinger, David; Hoffman, Andre; Banissy, Michael J.; Bhattacharya, Joydeep and Windischberger, Christian. 2018. Ultra-high-field fMRI insights on insight: Neural correlates of 2 the Aha!-moment. Human Brain Mapping, 39(8), pp. 3241-3252. ISSN 1065-9471 [Article]

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Abstract or Description

Finding creative solutions to difficult problems is a fundamental aspect of human culture and a skill highly needed. However, the exact neural processes underlying creative problem solving remain unclear. Insightful problem solving tasks were shown to be a valid method for investigating one subcomponent of creativity: the Aha!-Moment. Finding insightful solutions during a remote associates task (RAT) was found to elicit specific cortical activity changes. Considering the strong affective components of Aha!-Moments, as manifested in the subjectively experienced feeling of relief following the sudden emergence of the solution of the problem without any conscious forewarning, we hypothesized the subcortical dopaminergic reward network to be critically engaged during Aha. To investigate those subcortical contributions to insight, we employed ultra-high field 7-Tesla fMRI during a German Version of the RAT. During this task subjects were exposed to word triplets and instructed to find a solution word being associated with all of the three given words. They were supposed to press a button as soon as they felt confident about their solution without further revision, allowing us to capture the exact event of Aha!-Moment. Besides the finding on cortical involvement of the left anterior middle temporal gyrus (aMTG), here we showed for the first time robust subcortical activity changes related to insightful problem solving in the bilateral thalamus, hippocampus and the dopaminergic midbrain comprising ventral tegmental area (VTA), nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and caudate nucleus. These results shed new light on the affective neural mechanisms underlying insightful problem solving.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.24073
Additional Information:	European Commission, Grant/AwardNumber: 612022 (FP7 ICT 2013-10)
Keywords:	7 Tesla fMRI; affect; creativity; dopamine; insight; language processing; learning; RAT; subcortical
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Psychology
Dates:	Date Event 14 July 2018 Published 17 April 2018 Published Online 26 March 2018 Accepted
Item ID:	23139
Date Deposited:	06 Apr 2018 13:41
Last Modified:	11 Mar 2021 12:20
Peer Reviewed:	Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/23139

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