Neuroscience research being conducted by an assistant professor in the University of Houston Cullen College of Engineering was recently featured in an issue of The Economist.
The article spotlights Bhavin Sheth’s work with London researcher Joydeep Bhattacharya and Austria researcher Simone Sandkuhler on insight. Characterized as the clear and often sudden understanding of a complex situation or problem, the study by the three suggests insight occurs much earlier than most thought—as much as eight seconds before we are consciously aware we have solved the problem.
"Our findings indicate that insight is a distinct spectral, spatial and temporal pattern of unconscious neural activity corresponding to cognitive processes well before one becomes fully conscious of having solved the problem,” said Sheth, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. “It is not actually to one’s self-assessment of insight or the emotional ‘aha’ that typically follows problem solution.”
These findings are chronicled in the April 18 issue of The Economist. With a weekly circulation of more than a million, the publication’s primary focus is world news, politics and business; however, there are other regular sections devoted to books and art as well as science and technology, where Sheth’s research appeared in the article “Incognito.”
The research, which Sheth began several years ago at the California Institute of Technology, looked for both neural signatures of insight and transformative thought. Funding, in part, from a UH GEAR grant, aided these researchers in looking for these signatures using an electroencephalogram (EEG) test, where sensors attached to a person’s head help monitor their brain activity by way of computer.
The team’s hope was to more closely recreate insight among their 18 participants than researchers before them by using thought provoking verbal puzzles and brainteasers. The EEG test recorded and measured the electrical activity in the brain while participants answered these sixteen questions.
The results from these tests were later analyzed—revealing two significant outcomes.
The first was a decrease in beta activity in the participants. This occurrence, typically seen during high cognitive demand, was recorded in the central and parietal areas of the brain. The team also observed an increase in gamma activity in the right frontal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for a variety of higher cognitive functions that include problem solving.
Both changes in brain activity were consistently recorded several seconds prior to the moment participants offered an answer—a finding contrary to previous research in this area.
For more on Sheth’s research, read The Economist article.