The Eureka Factor
John Kounios & Mark Beeman
In The Eureka Factor, John Kounios and Mark Beeman explain how insights arise and what the scientific research says about stimulating more of them. They discuss how various conditions affect the likelihood of your having an insight, when insight is helpful and when deliberate methodical thought is better suited to a task, what the relationship is between insight and intuition, and how the brain’s right hemisphere contributes to creative thought.
John Kounios, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at Drexel University and director of its doctoral program in Applied Cognitive and Brain Sciences. He has published cognitive neuroscience research on insight, creativity, problem solving, memory, and Alzheimer’s disease. His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Psychonomic Society and serves on a National Science Foundation advisory panel.
Mark Beeman, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, where he studies the brain bases of creative cognition and problem solving, how mood affects attention and cognition, and how the right and left sides of the brain differ in function. His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research. He is a Kavli fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and serves on a National Science Foundation advisory panel.
