New research spots the signs

They feel like lightning—sudden, brilliant and seemingly impossible to predict. But according to new research, those mind-flashing “aha” moments of insight may leave detectable traces before they strike.

Scientists have developed a way to identify subtle behavioral changes that happen minutes before a breakthrough, offering a new window into the elusive mechanics of human creativity.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Shadab Tabatabaeian, who earned her Ph.D. in Cognitive and Information Sciences from the University of California, Merced, is lead author, and Tyler Marghetis, UC Merced assistant professor of Cognitive and Information Sciences, is senior author. Co-authors are Artemisia O’bi (Indiana University) and David Landy (Netflix and Indiana University).

Their work builds on theories from statistical physics and ecology to answer an old question with a modern twist: Can we spot the approach of a eureka moment in real time?

The team video-recorded six Ph.D.-level mathematicians as they wrestled with notoriously tough problems from the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. Filming took place in the mathematicians’ offices and in seminar rooms, chalk in hand. The researchers documented more than 4,600 moment-to-moment interactions with blackboard “inscriptions”—writing, pointing, erasing and shifting attention.

They found a striking pattern. In the minutes before, a mathematician suddenly exclaimed “aha!” or “I see it!” their behavior became measurably less predictable. Familiar patterns of moving between ideas gave way to novel, unprecedented connections.

Using a measure from information theory, the researchers quantified this unpredictability and found it reliably ramped up before verbalized insights.

“This is one of those discoveries that was possible only because we made connections between very different scientific disciplines,” Marghetis said. “We took ideas from ecology and physics, added tools from information theory, and combined them with a century of work on the psychology of creativity.

“The resulting discovery belongs to all of those disciplines but also to none of them. It’s its own thing.”

Though the experiment focused on expert mathematics, the researchers said the method could work in any field where thinking unfolds in observable steps, such as a chemist sketching molecular bonds, a designer shifting between prototypes, or an artist exploring new forms.

The authors suggest their approach could help scientists better understand the micro-dynamics of creativity and, perhaps, even predict breakthroughs before they happen.