The Light Bulb
On an extremely cool and rainy night, I am lost in a very deep sleep. I find myself dreaming about the next time I get to savor the perfectly warm syrupy goodness of a sausage Mcgriddles. Right when I am about to consume my fantasized delicacy, an epiphany struck me across the face. Eureka! I instantly woke up from my dream at 3 a.m. to post my own theory on love and hate on my blog.
Has that imaginary light bulb ever flashed over your head especially when you were doing something idle, ordinary and your mind was wandering? Trust me, it definitely has. It was at that moment my brain suddenly came up with a theory. That moment also helped broaden my perspective of certain things but how can I explain it?
Well studies have shown that the brain is most actively engaged when the mind is wandering and if a person has lost tracks of his or her thoughts.
“By most measures, we spend about a third of our time daydreaming, yet our brain is unusually active during these seemingly idle moments,” Science Journal Columnist Robert Lee Hotz wrote.
“Left to its own devices, our brain activates several areas associated with complex problem solving, which researchers had previously assumed were dormant during daydreams. Moreover, it appears to be the only time these areas work in unison.” Hotz added.
Some instant flash bulb moments have led to amazing scientific discoveries and wonderful insights.
When Isaac Newton had his light bulb flash over his head, he was sitting in an orchard and watched an apple fall. As a result that led to his amazing breakthrough of what the world now knows as universal gravitation.
Albert Einstein’s light bulb idea hit him like a bolt from the blue when he was imagining trains and lightening. He later came up with the theory of special relativity.
“To be sure, we’ve all had our ‘Aha’ moments. They materialize without warning, often through an unconscious shift in mental perspective that can abruptly alter how we perceive a problem. An ‘aha’ moment is any sudden comprehension that allows you to see something in a different light,” says psychologist John Kounios from Drexel University in Philadelphia.
Now the light bulb moment does not mean it always leads to some ground breaking scientific discovery. Some light bulb moments can include something as simple finding the solution to that stubborn math problem, getting that joke you might have missed earlier or coming up with a better way to end this sentence here.
“People assumed that when your mind wandered it was empty. Mind wandering is a much more active state than we ever imagined, much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem,” cognitive neuroscientist Kalina Christoff at the University of British Columbia said.
I strongly agree with these findings. My brain was definitely active to have come up with a theory for why human beings love and hate while I was dreaming of McDonald’s. It is beyond me and I am still not sure how I came up with the systematic process known as Emotion Stimulate Response (ESR, but that is a whole another story.)
Even renowned psychologists such as Joydeep Bhattacharya regarding this matter can explain how the brain works and gives us the light bulb ideas. However he cannot explain why as he tested several subjects on solving puzzles
“By monitoring their brain waves, he saw a pattern of high frequency neural activity in the right frontal cortex that identified in advance who would solve a puzzle through insight and who would not. It appeared up to eight seconds before the answer to a problem dawned on the test subject, Dr. Bhattacharya reported in the current edition of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.” Hotz wrote
“It’s unsettling, the brain knows but we don’t.” Bhattacharya said.
Now that I think about it, I can explain how the brain does this. It’s simple, God. Even though we human beings have finite minds, God still gives us this amazing capacity to flash our light bulbs and come up with genius discoveries, theories and reasoning at such a level no other species can achieve. Next time the light bulb flashes, think about “Who” actually turned on the switch.