How To Experience More Epiphanies

The neuroscience of creative awakening

A fit-looking Archimedes just before his Eureka! moment. From Wikipedia.

The Neuroscience of Creative Awakening

I live in State College, Pennsylvania, which means that nearly every new acquaintance assumes I work for Penn State. That minor heartburn aside, it’s a good place to be an intellectual since a good share of the people I meet are practicing academics. That small talk is blessedly free of trivialities, and sometimes it even turns to my work on neuroscience and literature.

A certain switch gets flipped when one scholar asks about another’s expertise. It’s not unlike the babble between gearheads in a bike shop. Within seconds I’ll be off to the races with blending theory, embodied cognition, and intersubjectivity. Research is good stuff, and I miss it. But I am also aware how quickly those jargony barriers come back up, like the walls my children build for their indoor forts. 

While reading the Fancy Nancy series with my daughter recently, I remembered how impressed my Ph.D. mentor had been when I used the word “iatrochemistry” in an essay on The Scarlet Letter. Iatrochemistry! Ooh La La! Toss “iatro” at the beginning of a word, and it will relate in some way to medicine. But I think my mentor was impressed because I’d made my essay harder to understand. 

Part of being a recovering academic means making research more accessible. So let’s have a go at one of my essays on neuroscience and literature, where I tackle a timeless question: where do epiphanies come from? Science offers some tentative answers to that question, but I’ve found equally compelling insights into the creative mind in Willa Cather’s fiction.

In fact, Cather sometimes seems to be asking herself, through characters closely modeled after her own inner life, “Where do my epiphanies come from? And how do I know?” 

There is some debate among researchers about whether epiphanies actually exist. Some say there is no essential difference between solving a problem gradually, through careful reasoning, and solving it in a flash. But John Kounios, of Drexel University, has conducted brain scans of people while they are solving simple word problems, and he claims that “sudden insight” — that flash of understanding — lights up a unique part of the brain. 

You can tell the difference between regular insight and sudden insight by solving remote associates problems. These puzzles start with three words, and you try to think of one word that could work with each of them to form a compound or familiar phrase. 

Example: Cream / skate / water

You might systematically reason your way toward an answer. Maybe “skate” makes you think of “skateboard.” “Waterboard” would work, too. But, alas, there is no such thing as “boardcream” or “creamboard.” Back to the start. If you were to exhaust all of the possibilities but the right answer, you would achieve insight, but it would not be sudden. However, if you saw in an instant that the answer was “ice,” you’d have experienced a little epiphany. (If you want a much harder one, try piece / mind / dating.)

We love epiphanies because they feel good. There might be a tired satisfaction in toiling along toward a solution, but there is nothing quite like the elation that comes from a sudden breakthrough. This is why Archimedes is rumored to have run naked down the street shouting “Eureka!” after solving his famous problem in a flash. He was sitting in the bath, the story goes, when he realized that he could prove the king’s crown was made of gold by how much water it displaced. That story might have been embellished over time, but it’s a good example of how the mind is the fullest expression of our physical being. So when an idea detonates in the brain, it floods us with sensory pleasure.

But back to the central question: where does that sudden burst of insight come from? The simplest answer, for many, is from the divine. One of the most common metaphors for epiphany in the nineteenth century was the Aeolian harp, which made music when the wind blew through it. Aeolus was the Greek god or keeper of the winds. Romantics thought of the poet as a vessel for the sublime in that way: not so much the creator of art as the instrument that art plays upon. 

Neuroscientists don’t often speak of the sublime, but they do concede that sudden insight can’t be forced or manufactured purely from within. This is a delightful yet maddening paradox. We experience epiphanies internally, but they often require an external spark. Long sightlines, such as the view from a mountaintop, or roomy spaces like cathedrals are thought to foster more creative freedom than cramped quarters. It’s why Cather’s characters often have to remove themselves from oppressive environments, like grimy Chicago, and retreat into the Arizona desert to experience awakening. 

Sometimes what’s coming at us externally can get in the way of epiphany. John Kounios and his coauthor, Mark Beeman, discuss the importance of diversion in The Eureka Factor. The more you bang your head against a mental wall, the less likely you are to break through. This is why, when someone asks us a challenging question, we instinctively look away, upward or downward, like Rodin’s Thinker. We are trying to simplify our visual inputs. We can’t gaze into a conversation partner’s face without a host of emotions and interfering thoughts getting in the way of what we’re trying to process. This is also why many people say they have Eureka moments in the shower. The water is warm, which removes interfering touch sensations. The sound is monotonous, like white noise. Our eyes are usually closed. All of this creates space for ideas, which may have been percolating beneath the surface, to flash into our thoughts. 

Rodin’s “The Thinker.” From The Economic Times.

Maybe the best example of diversion in popular culture is the misanthropic physician Gregory House. Nearly every episode of House, M.D. hinges on a puzzling illness. The plot includes a lot of trial-and-error, but House’s breakthrough diagnosis often comes during an activity that has nothing whatsoever to do with the hospital. He might be listening to jazz, tossing a stuffed ball in the air, or sitting at a monster truck competition when he’ll suddenly freeze, stare off into space, and solve the case. The show never says this explicitly, but House’s eccentricity — the fact that his interests are broad and sometimes transgressive, creating ample opportunities for diversion and remote association — might contribute just as much to his epiphanies as his outsized intelligence.¹ 

House also illustrates the difference between pseudo-insight and a real epiphany. His epiphanies are all fictional, but they are often based on real cases and represent actual solutions to baffling ailments. By contrast, pseudo-insight occurs when someone experiences a sudden rush of feeling from a thought that doesn’t actually resolve a practical or existential problem. Just because a thought pops to mind suddenly and seems to set off all the physical bells of a real epiphany doesn’t mean it’s the real thing.

I will happily concede that there are dimensions of human experience where the difference between pseudo-insight and authentic epiphany are intractably subjective. Christopher Hitchens might regard all religious epiphanies as delusions, but a devout person who experiences a spiritual breakthrough that gives them real resilience during a time of grief will feel differently. In that case, epiphany might be defined less by an objective fact — such as whether a patient is cured by a diagnosis — than by the staying power of the idea for an individual. 

Take, for example, the case of Cather’s Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark. Thea is born into a Methodist family in rural Colorado. She is no prodigy — she is not “quick” — but she is ambitious and cares deeply about music. Thea’s problem is that she originally imagines herself to be a pianist. She travels to Chicago and grinds away at that ambition until she reaches the limits of her potential. Deeply frustrated, and nearly ready to abandon her calling, she vacations in the Arizona desert, where she spends weeks in solitude, slowly forgetting who she’d become in the city and absorbing new impressions from the heat and light and from Anasazi ruins. When Thea emerges from the desert, she has been effectively reborn as a singer.

You could say that Thea illustrates an extreme example of diversion: she has to escape into nature to discover her true artistic vision. This breakthrough isn’t just a conceptual one. It comes from lying in the sun, bathing in the river, gazing long distances from the edge of a cliff, and holding shards of pottery in her hands.

In one of the novel’s lovely scenes, Thea is splashing in the canyon when she has her Eureka! moment:

The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself,—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars. In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been caught in a flash of arrested motion. In singing, one made a vessel of one's throat and nostrils and held it on one's breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals.

Thea’s character is modeled after Olive Fremstad, a Swedish-American opera diva, but her inner life is a faithful representation of what Cather, herself, experienced as an artist who often sought solace in wild places when she felt stuck in her life. Cather wasn’t imagining what it felt like to be Thea bathing in the desert stream, she was remembering. 

So what do we learn from The Song of the Lark and The Eureka Factor about the sources of epiphany? It turns out that the best Cather, Kounios, and Beeman can do is advise us on how to optimize the conditions for epiphany in our bodies and in our surroundings. 

If you are feeling stuck, a change of scenery will not just do you good, it might unlock a flash of understanding. Trade the claustrophobia of a city for the Arizona wilderness. Leave your dirty apartment for open skies and long sightlines. Don’t think about what you’re going to do with your life. Think about something else, like Anasazi pottery or the geology of a canyon. Lie in the sun with your eyes closed. Bathe in the river. Stare into a crackling fire. Feel the warmth of the fire on your face and the chill of the night against your back. Soak up the woodsmoke and the smell of pine. It might take a week or two, maybe a month, maybe longer. But when the time is right, the idea you’ve been waiting for, the solution to your trouble, will take possession of you.

The actual source of that joyful AHA remains, as yet, inscrutable. John Kounios can locate the part of the brain where epiphany flashes into view, but he can’t explain its origin. Epiphany seems to come from outside of us, from what we see and touch and hear. But it also comes from within us, sometimes popping up as if it had been buried in our thoughts all along. 

When I think of the elusive nature of epiphany, I’m reminded of a waterfall I once saw in the Idaho wilderness. I was standing in a little clearing, looking out over a valley, and I could just make out a smear of white against the rocks far in the distance. When I turned my gaze, the falls began to move, cascading down the bluff at the edge of my sight. When I looked directly at the water again, it was like paint dried against the cliff. 

So it is with the creative life. Every day I show up, pen in hand, fingers on the keyboard, ready for inspiration to strike. And sometimes it does. But often the work only comes alive if I allow myself to look momentarily away. 

1. The same might be said of House’s literary prototype, Sherlock Holmes, a hoarder of arcana and occasional cocaine user. Is it any wonder that the staid Dr. Wilson, who has no remarkable interests or vices, and his counterpart in House, Dr. Watson, seem to experience no epiphanies whatsoever? OK, OK — they are characters, not real people. But their creators seem to be making a point about the creative mind. Perhaps you don’t need to be a genius to experience more epiphanies — you just need to be curious and open to a wide range of experience.