[cf. introspection illusion] …In his 1902 book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James wrote that one feature of a mystical-type experience is this “noetic quality”, or a feeling of deep knowing. “They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority”, he wrote.

But how can we tell if the insights received while under psychedelics are true? In a recent talk for the UCL Society for the Application of Psychedelics, Johns Hopkins’ cognitive neuropsychopharmacologist Manoj Doss said it’s likely that psychedelics can evoke illusory insights, or the feeling of a profound insight that is misattributed to ideas that arise during a psychedelic experience. [eg. presque vu]

This too, James was familiar with. After inhaling a large amount of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, James wrote furiously on the topic of Hegelian dialectics, a complex kind of philosophical argument. “At the moment of transcribing”, his thoughts “were fused in the fire of infinite rationality”, he wrote. But when he was sober again, his revelatory insights were incomprehensible. “Meaningless drivel”, James called them. He published an excerpt from his notebook in the journal Mind:

…John Kounios, a professor of psychological & brain sciences at Drexel University and coauthor of The Eureka Factor, has shown through brain imaging and behavioral experiments that insights do seem to be the result of a real and distinct kind of emotional and cognitive process, not just a typical new idea with an emotional flourish tacked onto it.

There is also research showing that when an Aha moment accompanies a solution, it’s more likely to be right, said Ruben Laukkonen, a postdoctoral fellow at The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In studies using a task called the “remote associates”, people are given 3 words, and they have to come up with a corresponding fourth word. When people solve these problems, sometimes they have an Aha moment and a solution pops into their mind. Other times, they solve it through more slow and careful analysis. In these studies, if people had an Aha moment, they were more likely, on average, to have gotten the correct answer.

People may have learned that this Aha feeling is often associated with correct solutions throughout their lives, Kounios said. It might be why when people have an idea that feels like an Aha, and it’s accompanied with a sense of profundity, they’re more likely to think those ideas are true. When we have Aha moments, we often treat its content as sacred. James Joyce wrote in Stephen Hero, his posthumously published autobiographical novel, that epiphanies must be recorded “with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.”

But even in those laboratory studies, Laukkonen said, false insights were lurking amongst the true ones. False insights were when people had the same feeling of sudden knowing, but what they “knew” wasn’t correct. Researchers have mostly followed and tried to characterize true insights, but recent work has turned to examine these false insights. In 2020, Laukkonen and colleagues gave people an anagram to solve, and then presented them with a fact that was either true or false. When people successfully unscrambled the letters in the anagram, and felt an Aha moment doing so, they were more likely to think that false facts were true—misattributing the Aha feeling from the anagram to whatever the fact was.

This worked for world views, too: people were more likely to endorse statements like “free will is an illusion” if they were given a key word, like “illusion”, in a scrambled format first. “If we elicit a little insight experience, even using something as trivial as an anagram, that feeling that is elicited can color anything that’s happening at that moment”, Laukkonen said. The feeling of insight could essentially be moved around and put onto other things.

In another recent study from this year, Hilary Grimmer, a PhD candidate at The University of Queensland, Laukkonen, and others were able to elicit an Aha feeling in people who were objectively having a false insight. People were given a list of words that all shared an association, like ‘wheelbarrow’, ‘seedlings’, ‘glove’, and ‘soil’. Then, they were given an anagram that looked like a word that would belong with that list, but actually didn’t. For example, paired with the list of gardening words, they would be given the anagram for “endanger”, which shares a lot of letters with the word “gardener.” People would solve the anagram as “gardener” [swapping an ‘r’ for an ‘n’], and feel like they had an Aha moment even though their solution was incorrect.

These studies showed different kinds of false insights: In one, people who had a true Aha moment from solving an anagram misattributed that feeling to other, untrue, facts. In Grimmer’s study the Aha moment occurred around a solution that was objectively wrong. But both reveal how the feeling itself of the Aha moment isn’t always paired with the truth. “It seems like that feeling can just exist on its own”, Grimmer said. “We can have the same feeling of insight, regardless of actual truth.”

…Another important lesson from insight research is that some people may be more swayed by insights, and the positive feeling that comes with them. In 2020, Kounios and his colleagues used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure brain activity when people solved anagrams with Aha moments, finding that in the moment of insight, there was a sudden burst of high frequency brainwaves.

Some people in the study were high in a personality trait called ‘reward sensitivity’, a trait that is found in thrill seekers and others motivated by pleasure. In those people, there was another burst of brain activity a tenth of a second after the insight in the brain’s reward system, the same area that is engaged when people eat delicious food, take addictive drugs, or have orgasms. People who were not high in reward sensitivity didn’t exhibit this. Kounios said it suggests that some people can have an insight without always having the feeling of pleasure or emotion alongside it.

Though the study didn’t collect subjective reports, Kounios said that anecdotally, those who were high in reward sensitivity got really into the tests, and thought they were fun. “People like having insights”, Kounios said. “It’s why a lot of people like to do crossword puzzles, read murder mysteries, have creative hobbies, do research—they get a thrill from Aha moments.”

…“There’s certain types of insights that I think that people need to be very cautious with”, Doss said…“Some people suggest that once we’ve had an Aha moment, whether it’s true or false, some amount of us will kind of always believe it because of that unique way with which it arrives in our consciousness”, Grimmer said. “They seem kind of sticky.”

See Also: