Chapter One
Insight
I was at a thing the other night with a handful of other Boulder, Colorado, authors, ostensibly to talk about writerly stuff but actually to drink beer and swap stories. After a couple of Left Hand Brewing Wake Up Dead Stouts, a defense lawyer turned biographer turned crime writer named Mark told a story about his book in progress, the fifth in a series of crime novels. Set in south Florida, it features hit men with guns, a corpse filled with bullets, and more than a pinch of courtroom drama. Mark talked about how he’d peppered the first two-thirds of the book with clues leading to his meticulously pre-planned conclusion that, in hindsight and in the great tradition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Perry Mason, and Angela Lansbury as amateur detective Jessica Fletcher, could’ve gone no other way.
Only, it did.
For a couple of weeks, in the back of Mark’s mind had been the disappointment that this fifth book was going in the same direction as his first four—not the details, per se, but the mechanism of clue-sprinkling that eventually leads the only place it could lead: to the true killer. You know, the crime-novel thing. One morning he sat down to type as he always does, imagining that in a couple of hours, he’d be two thousand words closer to his scripted finish.
But then—bang!—something happened.
The clues came together in his head like the melding of the two panels of a 3D stereogram, only instead of bringing the killer’s face into focus (spoiler alert!), the sum of these clues was no killer at all. The hit men found an already-dead body and claimed the crime in order to get paid. Mark described his absolute confidence that the left turn he took meshed with the interconnected web of clues woven into his novel’s previous two hundred pages.
He just knew it was right. And in this state of knowing, the words in his head outpaced his typing skills. He found himself attacking the keyboard in a frenzy to crystalize his insight. One day and fifteen thousand words later, Mark had his newest crime novel.
Crime writer Mark’s insight is the stuff we all hope for when presented with a tricky problem: a simple, brilliant solution that strikes us seemingly out of the blue. But it seems serendipitous, impossible to re-create.
In fact, while Mark’s crime-novel insight was serendipitous in that he didn’t necessarily mean to discover clues clicking into new configurations when he sat down at his computer that morning, the insight itself was anything but luck. Without knowing it, he’d entered a state of brain- and knowledge-readiness that made insight nearly inevitable. You can learn to put your brain in the same state.
First, here’s why insight can be difficult: It requires a paradoxical mix of experience with openness. Usually, experience leads to set-in-stone ways of doing things. Typically, openness is only present when you’re forced by inexperience to remain available in your search for solutions. Experience mixed with openness is a rare cocktail.
Let’s unpack this a bit. Insight is the novel connection of far-flung bits of information floating around in your head. And so in order to make connections, you have to have the needed information in your brain already. This is what we think of as experience, or expertise; researchers call it problem-specific knowledge. These chunks of information and know-how form the building blocks of insight. If you’re a physicist, your insights come from combining your problem-specific knowledge of physics facts in novel ways; if you’re a chef, an insightful dish comes from knowing ingredients and techniques and then melding them together to make something new.
The more problem-specific knowledge you accumulate, the more building blocks you have to use when constructing insight. There’s no pill you can take that will instantly implant you with problem-specific knowledge—although chapter 7 on expertise can help you develop it sooner rather than later.
For now, though, we’ll focus on the second half of insight: openness. Again, this second step is why insight is dear: it’s a rare person who can know the old solutions but keep an open mind to new ones. And it turns out you can make your brain ready and able to link together whatever problem-specific knowledge you have in new, insightful ways. Researchers John Kounios of Drexel University and Mark Jung-Beeman of Northwestern University know how. They pinpointed the brain state of “readiness for insight” by watching subjects’ gray matter as they solved remote-association problems—for example: What one word melds with each of the words tank, hill, and secret to make a compound word or common phrase? This kind of remote-association problem gives itself up to insight or analysis, and use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) shows that depending on which strategy you use, distinct areas of the brain are at work.
Ready for another paradox? Rather than opening your mind to insight, Kounios and Jung-Beeman show that if you want insight, the best thing you can do is to close it.
A closed mind shows up on an fMRI as activation of the anterior cingulate cortex, your brain’s home of inhibiting distraction. It’s as if your ACC is a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, and with these headphones in place you’re more able to hear your brain’s quiet, insightful whispers. But what’s even cooler is that fMRI shows that “these brain states are likely linked to distinct types of mental preparation,” say Kounios and Jung-Beeman. In other words, by readying your brain, you can increase the chance of insight. The researchers describe this state as the brain shutting its eyes. Here’s how to do it:
First, turn off as much outside stimulus as possible so your brain doesn’t have to work to inhibit it. Once you’ve turned off the outside world, turn off the inside world too—release distracting thoughts and the tempting golden apples of the tried-and-true solutions you know from experience. Then, the researchers say, get ready to close your mind even further—prepare to inhibit not only the distracting things that already exist inside and outside your skull but also any new false whispers your brain offers. For example, remember the words tank, hill, and secret? As you look at the word “secret,” the whisper of “service” might pop into your mind. Sure, it makes “secret service” but after you discover “hill service” and “service hill” are nonsense, be ready to inhibit the false insight of “service” as surely as you’ve inhibited background noise and irrelevant thoughts. Shove it quickly and securely into your brain’s locked waste vault so that it doesn’t compete with other, possibly correct, whispers.
Close your mind.
Assuming you have the problem-specific knowledge, the correct insight is tumbling around in there somewhere. Your job is to silence everything else so that you can hear it. This process of focusing inward, inhibiting irrelevant thoughts, and getting ready to switch to new thinking styles makes you measurably more likely to experience sudden insight, which, in the case of tank, hill, and secret is the word “top,” as in tank top, hilltop, and top secret.
Of course, this is unintentionally your mental state when you’re sleepy and is why insight tends to strike in bed, in the shower, or while groping for predawn coffee. This generally held opinion of insight-while-sleepy is more than folk wisdom—it’s fact. Michigan researchers Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks showed this by asking 428 undergrads if they considered themselves night owls or early birds, and then having them solve insight problems. Here’s the trick: half were tested in the morning and half at night. Students were most insightful when their test time mismatched their preferred time. They did better when they were groggy.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t sleep. In fact, the opposite is true. A 2004 article in Nature showed that when you sleep, you reorganize your thoughts. Science has known that during sleep the brain’s hippocampus—the structure responsible for encoding new memories—replays the day’s experiences from short-term storage and filters them into the neocortex, where experiences are integrated into what the article calls “preexisting knowledge representations.” Insight is the novel connection of knowledge, and sleep knocks knowledge into new configurations. The Nature article asked subjects to figure out the next digit in a tricky, coded string of numbers. And it turned out that subjects who were allowed to “sleep on” the problem’s difficult instructions were more likely to reach the insightful solution that the second number in each coded string was also the eventual answer. Aha!
Other insight strategies that have earned the stamp of science include being in a good mood and drinking booze. Really: in a 2012 study in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, University of Chicago researchers showed that subjects with a blood alcohol content (BAC) of .075 solved more remote-association problems “in less time, and were more likely to perceive their solutions as the result of a sudden insight.” In an article in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Jung-Beeman shows that rather than anything independent and magical about joviality and vodka, these two wonder drugs are shortcuts to the same state of brain readiness seen in earlier experiments. You can train yourself or trick yourself into readiness for insight.
This sleepy, unfocused, uncluttered brain state was the serendipitous preparation that Boulder crime writer Mark had as he sat down to type the last third of his novel. Through his past work as a defense lawyer and as a crime novelist, he’d preloaded problem-specific knowledge—he was expert at connecting the events of a crime based on the constellation of its clues. Then when he sat down in the morning at his computer with a mind free of distractions and the false whispers of the way he meant the plot to unfold—bam!—insight crashed into his brain like a football team bursting from the locker room tunnel.
The following exercises will help you learn to hear the whispers of insight. First we’ll train the necessary brain state and then we’ll work on disentangling problem-specific knowledge from the false assumptions that sometimes accompany experience. Finally, you will be tested.
Exercise 1
Remote Association
Researchers John Kounios and Mark Jung-Beeman show that mental preparation leads to insight. But what kind of mental preparation? This exercise will help you find this insightful state of mind.
In each of the following sets of words, your task is to find one word that melds with each of the three provided words to make a compound word or common phrase. For example, if the three given words were pine/crab/juice, the answer would be apple as in pineapple, crabapple, and apple juice. These are remote-association problems, used by Kounios, Jung-Beeman, and many others to test and train insight. Remember, the trick of insightful solutions isn’t necessarily boosting the volume of your insightful whisperings but turning down the volume of everything else so that you can hear them. It’s as much a task of inhibiting distraction as it is in encouraging insight.
So in each of the following remote-association problems, practice closing your mind in a way that allows insight to be heard over the roar of your usual cognitive background noise. Sit in a quiet place and, after reading the three words, close your eyes, clear your mind, and listen for quiet whispers from the back of your brain. Importantly, when your brain inevitably feeds you incorrect insight, work to quickly inhibit it as powerfully as you inhibit all other distractions. Lock away incorrect insight so that it doesn’t intrude on your tabula rasa of readiness.
Over time, this practice should increase your ability to slip seamlessly into a state of mind primed for insight—a state you’ll be able to call upon next time you’re faced with a real-world problem that requires an “aha!” solution. But don’t expect every insightful answer to be immediate! Rather, researchers find that another frequent ingredient of insight is an incubation period—sometimes it helps to sleep on it or at least let the problem breathe for a bit. So if an insightful solution resists your mental preparation, rather than immediately checking the back of this book for the answer, let a difficult remote-association problem linger in your brain. You might only get through one or two problems before getting stymied—in that case, move on to another exercise and allow insight to strike when you least expect it. Move into and away from these problems as your insight permits—and then apply the exact same strategy when confronting your real-world problems of insight.
fire/ranger/tropical
carpet/alert/herring
forest/fly/fighter
cane/daddy/plum
friend/flower/scout
duct/worm/video
sense/room/place
Pope/eggs/Arnold
fair/mind/dating
date/duck/fold
cadet/outer/ship
dew/badger/bee
ash/luck/belly
break/food/forward
nuclear/feud/values
collector/duck/fold
car/French/shoe
office/mail/step
circus/around/car
sand/age/mile
catcher/dirty/hot
fly/milk/peanut
tank/notch/secret
thief/cash/larceny
artist/great/route
hammer/line/hunter
blank/gut/mate
list/circuit/cake
master/child/piano
cover/line/wear
beer/pot/laugh
trip/left/goal
blue/light/rocket
man/sonic/star
bus/illness/computer
type/ghost/sky
full/punk/engine
break/black/cake
car/human/drag
liberty/bottom/curve
drunk/line/fruit
buster/bird/wash
fruit/hour/napkin
old/dog/joke
toad/sample/foot
Exercise 2
Functional Fixedness
A screwdriver is used to turn screws, not to anchor a tent. A fan is used to cool rooms, not blow leaves. These are examples of functional fixedness—the tendency to get stuck in the rut of an object’s name or common use. It’s also a special kind of false assumption that frequently needs breaking on the way to insight. In fact, in an experiment with 872 subjects, Temple University researcher Evangelia Chrysikou and her colleagues showed that learning to break functional fixedness led to higher performance on completely unrelated insight problems—breaking this assumption boosts insight in general.
Psychologist Karl Duncker designed the classic problem of functional fixedness—the candle problem—in which you have a candle, matches, and a box of flat thumbtacks, and you must hook the candle to a wall so that when lit it won’t drip onto a table below. Of course, the key is releasing your assumption that the box can be used only to hold tacks. Instead, it can also be a shelf, which you tack to the wall. Voilà!
Another more modern psychologist, Harvard researcher Tony McCaffrey, knows how to break this functional fixation. His generic-parts technique teaches you to mentally deconstruct an object into its pieces and then ask two questions—(1) can it be broken down further? and (2) does your description imply a use? “Along the way, alternative uses emerge,” McCaffrey writes. For example, take a candle. You can divide it into wax and wick. But “wick” still implies a use—better to call it a twelve-inch length of braided cotton. Now you can see that in addition to burning it, you could use the string to tie things together. A study by McCaffrey found that people trained in his generic-parts technique solved 67 percent more insight problems than untrained subjects.
Copyright © 2014 by Garth Sundem. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
