5. Cultivating those elusive "Ah-Ha" Moments

An AH-HA moment is that split second of sudden inspiration, insight, recognition, or some kind of comprehension. We might call it a light bulb moment and it comes from in our brain was a spontaneous insight. It has nothing to do with analytic thinking. In psychotherapy, an ah-ha moment is a client's sudden insight into her motives for thoughts or feelings or behaviors. Oprah describes the AHA moment as remembering what you already knew.  It's hearing something articulated in a way that resonates with your own truth and understanding. The moment isn't somebody teaching you something. It's somebody helping you remember and make connections. 

Neuropsychology studies show that insight is really accumulation of a series of brain states.  We think about things, we look at things and then a different set of processes takes over and that it all happens in a different timescale.  But it's interesting when you think about your ah-ha moments...they don't come while we're thinking about the problem necessarily. They show up for us after we've been pondering a problem for a while and we've maybe even put it aside. These kinds of creative breakthroughs really come along with two feeling states satisfaction and certainty.