New Scientist
AI can hand you answers instantly, but it may also steal the joy of figuring things out.
Why your brain needs ‘Aha!’ moments
Author: Helen Thomson
LAST week, my editor, Chelsea, said something that stopped me in my tracks. She was worried about AI, but not for the normal journalistic reasons: job losses, plagiarism, dull prose, etc. It was the possibility that by using AI, she might be missing one of life’s most reliable pleasures – the daily joy she gets from having an “Aha!” moment. “For me,” she says, “it’s almost a physical feeling, something spreading across my brain.”
It turns out that Chelsea’s description wasn’t far off. “Although it does feel like you get a jolt of dopamine, we can’t say that every insight produces a dopamine hit,” says Carola Salvi at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Italy. However, several lines of research strongly suggest the dopamine system is involved when you have those mini-epiphanies.
For instance, in 2018, Martin Tik at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria and his colleagues found that when people solved problems designed to elicit a eureka moment while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, their brain scans showed small changes in activity in midbrain structures involved in releasing dopamine.
But “Aha!” moments don’t just feel good. There is increasing evidence that they also have cognitive benefits for learning and memory, says Salvi. She believes that they function as a kind of internal “selection signal”.
By this she means that when a solution pops into our head, the accompanying feeling of accuracy and satisfaction helps capture our attention. The brain, perhaps with the help of the dopamine system, flags the idea as important. According to Salvi’s models, this helps us prioritise certain ideas for learning and future use.
“From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense,” says Salvi. “If the brain suddenly discovers a useful new pattern or solution, it would be adaptive for that information to become especially memorable.”
Which brings us back to AI. If we increasingly turn to large language models for ideas and solutions to even our smallest problems, are we depriving ourselves of an opportunity to learn, remember or perhaps something greater still?
For this, I turned to Hannah Critchlow, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge and author of The 21st Century Brain: How to future-proof your mind in the age of AI.
She pointed me to a small but fascinating study published last year that compared the neural activity of 18 people who wrote essays either using brain power alone, with the help of a search engine or with ChatGPT. Those who used AI showed consistently lower brain activity than those who used Google or brain power alone.
So, aside from deleting AI from our lives, how do we defend against this? Critchlow draws attention to a separate body of research showing that when people discuss ideas together, in a manner that’s not competitive, their brainwaves start to synchronise with each other.
She says that how well your brain synchronises with others can be used to predict how healthy your brain will be in later life. “It seems to be potentially protective against dementia and is one of the most significant predictive factors for whether a teenager is going to flourish during adolescent periods – whether they are going to be able to form bonds with others and learn from them,” says Critchlow.
So, for anyone who shares Chelsea’s concerns, there may be a simple lesson here. While it may be tempting to turn to LLMs for instant insights, exercising your own mental muscle to get to the answer yourself, whenever possible, may be the better path to take – not only for your own quick dopamine hit, but for long-term learning and brain health, too.Helen’s week
What I’m reading
The Wedding People by Alison Espach – a great poolside read as I’m on holiday this week
What I’m watching
Rivals on Disney+
What I’m working on
Our new podcast, Change Your Mind – delivering the no-nonsense neuroscience behind the latest brain-boosting claims
Credits: TCA, LLC.