Why your brain needs plenty of “Aha!” moments

Last week, my editor, Chelsea, said something that stopped me in my tracks. She was worried about the ubiquity of AI, but not for the normal journalistic reasons: job losses, plagiarism, dull prose, etc. It was the possibility that by using AI, she might be sacrificing one of life’s most reliable small pleasures – the daily joy she gets from having an “Aha!” moment.

“For me,” she says, “it’s almost a physical feeling, something spreading across my brain.” She wondered what might happen if we start outsourcing an increasing amount of our idea generation to AI before wrestling with it ourselves. Would we get fewer dopamine hits that come with figuring things out? And if those “Aha!” moments become rarer, what else might our brains be losing? It turns out those “Aha!” moments are indeed giving us more than just small pleasures; there is growing evidence that they change our brain entirely, shaping what we learn and remember, and perhaps even play a role in protecting our long-term brain health. Luckily, as we head into an AI-driven world, there is something we can do to protect ourselves from losing out, aside from cancelling our ChatGPT subscription altogether. Chelsea’s description of pleasure spreading through the brain at the moment of insight wasn’t far off. “Although it does feel like you get a jolt of dopamine, we can’t say that every insight produces a dopamine hit,” says Carola Salvi at John Cabot University in Italy. However, several lines of research strongly suggest that the dopamine system is involved when you have those mini-epiphanies. For instance, in 2018, Martin Tik at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria and his colleagues found that when people solved problems designed to elicit a eureka moment while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), their brain scans showed small changes in activity in midbrain structures involved in releasing dopamine . Tik told me at the time that neural activity in those areas was highest during “Aha!” moments, and scans showed significantly lower activity when people arrived at a solution without that feeling of eureka. But “Aha!” moments don’t just feel good. There is increasing evidence that they also have cognitive benefits for learning and memory, says Salvi.

Key points

• “For me,” she says, “it’s almost a physical feeling, something spreading across my brain.” She wondered what might happen if we start outsourcing an increasing amount of our idea generation to AI b…
• Would we get fewer dopamine hits that come with figuring things out?
• And if those “Aha!” moments become rarer, what else might our brains be losing?
• It turns out those “Aha!” moments are indeed giving us more than just small pleasures; there is growing evidence that they change our brain entirely, shaping what we learn and remember, and perhaps…
• Luckily, as we head into an AI-driven world, there is something we can do to protect ourselves from losing out, aside from cancelling our ChatGPT subscription altogether.