The Intangible

by C.J. Washington

“Let’s return to the right hemisphere and coarse semantic coding. Your subconscious is working on the problem. Your left hemisphere is strongly activating nearby memories. These might be the obvious solutions, which aren’t working. Your right hemisphere, meanwhile, is weakly activating memories with less relevance. And suddenly, it hits on a nonobvious solution to the problem. This is your insight. The answer was in your mind all along, but it wasn’t activated immediately because it isn’t stored near any concepts in your problem. The really cool thing is that people who tend to solve problems by insight have more widespread activation in the right hemisphere, even at rest. So if you really want to be good at solving problems with insight, your right hemisphere should have broad activation. I can’t tell you how to make that happen, but there it is.”