The Seduction of “Eureka!”
Many of us believe we struggle because we can’t come up with ideas.
My new opinion is that having “breakthroughs” is not the reason why we struggle with scientific discovery. Knowing what to do after you’ve had a breakthrough is where you’ll have challenges.
I have come across people who self-identify with one of two camps when it comes to “coming up with ideas”:
One camp believes it is “creative” and is good at coming up with ideas.
This creativity may be perceived as labor intensive (“I need a lot of time to think”), as idiosyncratic (“I only do my best work when I work after midnight while listening to songs from the musical “South Pacific” and writing while standing at the kitchen counter”), or as mystical (“Things just come to me when I dream, or they pop into my head in the shower”).
The other camp believes it is “not creative” and will not be able to come up with ideas.
This lack of creativity may be perceived as a biological trait (“I just wasn’t born with the creativity gene”), as practical (“I just stick to the facts and don’t let my imagination get carried away”), or as un-learnable (“I’ve just never gotten the hang of thinking up stuff”).
We all want to engineer Eureka! moments into our workflow.
“Coming up with ideas” is just another phrase for a “breakthrough”. Or in the case of science, we call these ideas or breakthroughs “scientific hypotheses” (and when they are proved right they become “scientific discoveries”).
Most people I’ve met believe that what holds them back is the inability to engineer a breakthrough moment. They think that scientific discovery eludes them because of their inability to come up with a good idea. So they believe they struggle with generating magical Eureka! or Aha! moments, where things come together and new understanding suddenly appears.
In the pilot Insight Exchange event, where I brought together academics from different science fields and at different career stages to talk in small groups about what was holding them back from scientific discoveries in their own work, the most consistent piece of feedback I got afterward was that people wanted me to give them more strategies to engineer breakthroughs.
But we already have breakthroughs daily because we’re hard-wired to see meaning and patterns.
I recently learned about the work of neuroscientist Robert Burton on the cognitive and emotional basis for feelings of “certainty” (the belief that our understanding of something is accurate). According to Burton, we are cognitively hard-wired to come up with ideas, i.e., breakthroughs.
More importantly, we are built to experience feel-good sensations when we believe we have achieved a breakthrough, i.e., when a spontaneous and unconscious understanding rises to consciousness.
That feel good sensation arrives in the form of dopamine, a chemical released in the brain that triggers the brain’s reward and pleasure centers.
There are a couple of important aspects to this finding.
First, being rewarded for achieving a feeling of certainty about our knowledge encourages us to do it again. Like any pleasurable event, we seek to repeat or renew those pleasant feelings.
So Eureka! once, and you’ll want to Eureka! again and again.
As an aspiring discoverer, this probably all sounds pretty good. It might appear like we are biologically designed to experience pleasure when we discover things, which would encourage us to discover more things. It seems like a progress-promoting positive feedback loop, right?
Maybe. But the seduction of Eureka! is a double-edged sword.
Why? Because we experience the pleasant sensations and dopamine hit when we believe that we have understood something, even if our understanding is wrong, such as when it’s based on incomplete information.
Basically, we search for meaning and patterns and our brain rewards us when we find meaning and patterns, no matter what (you can read more on this in one of Burton’s articles published in Nautilus, which I’ve linked to below).
Unfortunately, our brain’s reward system doesn’t depend on whether we’ve got the right pattern or meaning.
Our internal reward centers are indiscriminate. Come up with a wrong explanation that your brain at least perceives as a reasonable possible pattern and you can still feel the exact experience of an Aha! or Eureka! moment. Even if you’re dead wrong.
A second important aspect is that we have intentionally evolved to recognize patterns and assign meaning to information we receive.
Burton uses the classic example of our ancestors recognizing lions (a pattern) and knowing what seeing a lion means to a very tasty looking pre-historic ancestor (the meaning). We need to be able to put together growling, fur, four legs, claws, teeth, maybe a jungle or savannah plains, that the sun is high in the sky means feeding time, that lions eat smaller animals like us, etc. in order to be able to say “Aha! I’d better run before I get eaten!”
We need to be able to combine many types of sensory information (visual, auditory, smell, tactile perceptions of temperature and time of day) and experiences (seeing lions eat other animals or even other people) together in order to be able to recognize one pattern (a hungry lion) and its meaning (I’m in danger).
What I am trying to drive home is the point that the two pieces that combine to make a breakthrough–pattern recognition and meaning-making–are processes each and every one of us engage in every second of every day.
We are creating hypotheses about how people interact with us, what world events mean for our lives and livelihoods, how the weather will affect our health and plans for the day, and what the ending to the TV show we are watching or book we are reading will be.
Many of the ideas that we have about these things will be right, but many of our ideas will be wrong.
It is the same process as scientific discovery—we acquire data, we search for patterns, we perceive patterns, and we make meaning from those patterns.
I don’t need to give you strategies to experience breakthroughs. You’re doing it all the time.
But as Burton’s work highlights, the problem is that many of our breakthrough ideas are just wrong, even when we feel sure they must be right.
The real trick is to sift through all the wrong-headed Eureka’s to find the one Eureka! that’s actually accurate.
If I could go back and give my Insight Exchange participants a new take home message I would point out to them how many breakthrough ideas they had already had. They had probably already thought up and dismissed ideas about new methodologies, new sources of funding, and reasons why certain pieces of data might fit together. But they had also already discarded many of those ideas as too silly, too hard, to unlikely, to flaky, or to unfounded.
That they had discarded ideas was not the problem.
The problem was, when they dismissed those earlier ideas, they had also subconsciously and simultaneously dismissed their skill in thinking up new things.
It was this failure of self-awareness that was harmful to their forward progress.
Many of them had put themselves in the “I’m not creative” camp and so they had fixated on finding new ways to become capable of coming up with ideas.
They were focused on fixing an imaginary problem.
You have had many ideas, you are having ideas right now, and you will continue to have ideas. That’s the take home idea I wish I’d given my pilot Insight Exchange group.
So, the discovery part comes in what you do with any ideas you have.
In Burton’s Nautilus piece, he hints at the fact that that we are more likely to latch on to false meaning and patterns (which, remember, our brain finds just as rewarding as accurate meaning and patterns) when we have limited or inconclusive data.
Hence, the activities and skills we need are not just how to evaluate ideas, but also how to evaluate and gather data when what we have is inconclusive or limited.
And the mindset we need is just to be aware that no matter how much information we have, we are always, on some level, operating in a world of limited and inconclusive data.
The above two sentences might sound familiar. They are called the scientific method.
It is well-designed to help us react wisely to our internal hunger for Eureka! so that we can find the accurate, and not just the available, the explanation.
Formulating a cohesive understanding is still very much a work in progress for me and I do much of that thinking “out loud” here in the pages of The Scientist’s Log.
As Burton cautions, searching for certainty in our understanding can be a dangerous game of giving ourselves what we want, instead of giving ourselves the truth.
But Burton also proposes that the best remedy is to give up certainty in favor of “open-mindedness, mental flexibility and willingness to contemplate alternative ideas” (Scientific American, 2008).
Thus, it turns out that fighting for the alluring Eureka!, those lightbulb moments from cartoons, isn’t the struggle we discoverers have to overcome. It’s the siren song of Eureka! and its pleasurable aftermath that we need to learn not to pursue at all costs.
The word “Eureka” derives from the Greek meaning for “I found it.”
The ideas we find lurking in our minds are sometimes new sources of illumination rising from the depths of the sea of knowledge. But other times they are just jetsam and flotsam washed up on the beach of bad ideas.
The discoverer’s way is to learn to tell the good lightbulbs from the duds and to treat the pull of Eureka! like a pleasant pastime and not an alluring addiction.
Interesting Stuff Related to This Post
- Robert Burton, “Where Science and Story Meet”, Nautilus (April 22, 2013), http://nautil.us/issue/0/the-story-of-nautilus/where-science-and-story-meet.
- Robert Burton as interviewed by Jonah Lehrer, “The Certainty Bias: A Potentially Dangerous Mental Flaw”, Scientific American (October 9, 2008), https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-certainty-bias/.
- David Biello, “Fact or Fiction: Archimedes Coined the Term “Eureka!” in the Bath”, Scientific American (December 8, 2006), https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-archimede/.
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How to cite this post in a reference list:
Bernadette K. Cogswell, “The Seduction of ‘Eureka!’”, The Insightful Scientist Blog, November 15, 2019, https://insightfulscientist.com/blog/2019/the-seduction-of-eureka.
[Page feature photo: Unusual junk, a lightbulb, washed up on a beach in South Africa. Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash.]