ABSTRACT
The vast majority of studies of human cognition, whether behavioral or neuroscience, examine the directed form of cognition in which a subject is given a specific task to perform. Comparing neural activity for insight and analytic solutions at the point of problem solution, functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed one statistically significant brain activation. What was found was that the high-insight and high-analytical groups differed in resting-state activity in every electroencephalograms (EEG) frequency band. Then, the resting-state EEG activity of these groups was analyzed separately and compared in terms of EEG power and topography using the standard classical EEG frequency bands. In general, individual differences in resting-state activity are known to be fairly stable over time and genetically influenced. The presence of the alpha burst showed that, even though the phenomenal awareness of an insight is sudden, discrete, and unpredictable, the "Aha!" itself has a neural antecedent which presumably facilitates the insight.
