Designed Purpose of Your "eureka moments"

I will praise Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are Thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.
Psalm 139:14

"We've all experienced that "aha! moment," that sudden clarity or magical epiphany you feel when a new idea or perspective pops into your head as if out of nowhere.
Now, new evidence from brain imaging research shows that these flashes of insight aren't just satisfying—

--they actually reshape how your brain represents information, 

--and help sear it into memory.

Led by researchers at Duke University and Humboldt and Hamburg Universities in Germany, the work has implications for education, suggesting that fostering "eureka moments" could help make learning last beyond the classroom.

Such hidden picture puzzles serve as small-scale proxies for bigger eureka moments. "It's just a little discovery that you are making, but it produces the same type of characteristics that exist in more important insight events," said senior author Roberto Cabeza.
Participants tended to recall solutions that came to them in a flash of insight far better than ones they arrived at without this sense of epiphany.

"If you have an 'aha! moment' while learning something, it almost doubles your memory," said Cabeza, who has been studying memory for 30 years.

They discovered that flashes of insight trigger a burst of activity in

the brain's hippocampus, a cashew-shaped structure buried deep in the temporal lobe that plays a major role in learning and memory. The more powerful the insight, the greater the boost.

They also found that the activation patterns across the participants' neurons changed once they spotted the hidden object and saw the image in a new light—particularly in certain parts of the brain's ventral occipito-temporal cortex, the region responsible for recognizing visual patterns. The stronger the epiphany, the greater the change in those areas." 

MedicalXpress