Divine inspiration, creative possession: how insights emerge fully formed

A discipline-hopping investigation of spontaneous insight

Abbott Handerson Thayer, Minerva in a Chariot (public domain)

I’ve been researching a book proposal for months, and I’m at the stage of putting the proposal’s pieces together. The project involves looking at historical figures, historical minds, from a new angle. (You might guess what that angle is).

I’d been blocked for a while on one of the figures, a medieval nun. I felt I had really gotten to know her — what motivated her, the way her mind worked, how she related to others. But there was one piece I hadn’t figured out.

She had divine visions which, she said, revealed to her the interpretation of scripture. It wasn’t in her nature to lie, to falsely claim that these visions were divine. Which means that she truly believed them to be revelations from God.

So, assuming that 1. she had a true belief in a divine author (and a corresponding true belief that she was not the real author), and 2. these visions weren’t actually divine (which I confess I’m powerless to rule out!), what accounts for them?

How do we explain why the nun believed that God, and not she herself, was behind the interpretations that sprang from her own mind?

Yesterday, I had a flash of insight, which I get during periods of deep research and study.

This time, my insight was about insight. What if the nun’s visions were — themselves — simply flashes of insight? That they only seemed to come from an external source, because she wasn’t conscious of actively producing them?

I suppose this explanation seems obvious when I say it now, but I can promise that it had never entered my mind before. Nor do the many biographies and articles about this person explain her visions this way.

(Some historians have suggested that she was being disingenuous in claiming divine authorship; that the interpretations were the product of intentional, conscious effort that she falsely promoted as divine. I think this flies in the face of everything we know about her, and is no better than idle speculation. I’ll reserve further comment for the book.)

This nun, of course, wasn’t the first person to attribute a creative solution to an external agent. Speak, muse is the way ancient poets began, casting themselves as mere vessels for knowledge imparted by the divine muse of poetry, Calliope.

What led to my late-breaking insight about the nun had been this: the day before, I was researching another figure for my book proposal — this one, a modern novelist.

I read a foreword in which the novelist’s longtime editor explained that the novelist believed her writing “happened to her.” It seemed to the novelist that she was a passive channel for her work; she lacked autonomy and authority. The novel “possessed her” and “would dictate its own shape and atmosphere.”

Although the novelist felt she lacked autonomy, the work was obviously hers. Her novels were always highly autobiographical, turning her life experiences into thinly-veiled fictions. This foreword was important, because it showed me for the first time that a mind can create something significant — not a single idea, but an entire narrative structure — in the recesses of its subconscious. Which then lifts suddenly to the mind’s conscious layer, already fully formed.

That foreword simmered in my mind until the next day, when I put two and two together. The novelist’s account of her writing sparked my insight about the nun¹ — that what the novelist described, the nun had experienced too. In both cases, spontaneous insight was the reason their ideas felt like visitations (for the nun), or being possessed (for the novelist).

I didn’t make this connection consciously. It appeared in my mind, unbidden, probably while I was eating cereal (which I, somehow, always seem to be doing). Just like her novels’ shape and atmosphere would suddenly parachute into the novelist’s awareness, the connection parachuted into mine.

In a sense, you might view the belated realization that gave rise to my recent insight — the nun is like the novelist, the novelist is like the nun — as a delayed processing of the information I’ve absorbed while working on this project.

Because I see a potential connection to another kind of experience I have that’s characterized by sudden onset, which as I’ve written — in a funny parallel to what I’m talking about today — “seem to come from nowhere.” These are my sudden meltdowns that stem from emotional processing delays. Are insights and meltdowns two sides of the same coin?

Having connected the novelist’s flashes of insight to the nun’s, I became hungry for more examples.

They’re everywhere in history. Here’s a smattering:

• Samuel Taylor-Coleridge said that Kubla Khan (1816) came to him in an opium-induced dream. When he awoke, he began writing it down, a fully formed “composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.”

• Harriet Beecher Stowe recounted that her bestselling antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), entered her mind as a completed story. “The story can less be said to have been composed by her than imposed upon her,” she wrote of herself in the third person (emphasis mine).

• Mozart (1756-1791) said that entire compositions would come to him all at once. He simply recorded what was already in his head.

• The Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) claimed that many of his equations and formulas came to him in dreams, sent by the Hindu goddess Namagiri. He wrote them down as revealed, without articulating the steps to derive them — puzzling later mathematicians when they initially tried to recreate the solutions. (Validity would ultimately be confirmed, after much effort.)

• In 1890, Friedrich August Kekulé discovered the ring structure of benzene one night after he set aside his work and dozed off, and fell into a dream where he saw a snake devouring its own tail. The solution of benzene’s structure came to him suddenly: the carbon atoms must be organized in a circle. “As if by a flash of lightening I awoke; and this time I also spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis,” Kekulé explained.

It’s the property described by Coleridge — the emergence of a work “without any sensation or consciousness of effort” — that seems key to why many have credited their insights to a divine author.

If something pours out of you and you have no memory of creating it, nor of even intending to create it, how should you account for it? Particularly before modern science and psychology, when the facticity of religion was taken for granted?

In that light, explaining sudden insights as matters of divine revelation seems perfectly reasonable to me.

The book project I’m working on has to do with figures in history who were aligned with autistic cognition. (Surprise, surprise …)

So, given that I have autism, and that I suspect both the novelist and the nun did too, I wondered: might there be a connection between insight and autism?

I pose this question cautiously, because the aha! moment is universally recognized (Oprah says she coined the term!). Everyone seems to have them. So why would I think to connect such moments with autism, which everyone decidedly doesn’t have (even if sometimes it seems otherwise)?

Well, as I’ve written before, autistic traits are not the exclusive domain of autism. We don’t have a monopoly on sensory sensitivity, or desire for routine, or clumsiness.

So, it’s possible that even if spontaneous insight is universal, it can be more concentrated in autism. Possible, yes, but is it at all likely?

That’s what I turned to next.

Insight is a hot research topic. That’s unsurprising; sudden insights have been essential to scientific progress. There are countless stories of spontaneous realizations that catapulted scientific discovery ahead. No wonder scientists are eager to study a mechanism that has underwritten their discipline.

I found an academic book chapter² surveying decades of research on insight. In it, there’s a compelling description of what insight feels like. This description was given to research study participants, who were asked to push a button when they felt it arise:

A feeling of insight is a kind of ‘Aha!’ characterized by suddenness and obviousness. You may not be sure how you came up with the answer but are relatively confident that it is correct without having to mentally check it. It is as though the answer came into mind all at once — when you first thought of the [solution], you simply knew it was the answer. This feeling does not have to be overwhelming but should resemble what was just described.

Research confirms that insights do arrive in our consciousness fully formed (“all at once”), a thesis that psychologists had posited before neuroscience provided confirmation. Advanced brain imaging techniques have revealed that what seems to be happening — sudden awareness of a solution, as opposed to gradual, stepwise problem-solving — is indeed what’s happening in the brain.

What is an insight made up of? As reported in the book, moments of insight involve a “sudden representational change seen during the perceptual switch of ambiguous figures.” In plain terms, it’s like the mental reorganization that occurs when you’re looking at an optical illusion, and your perception suddenly flips. Your brain doesn't gradually morph one image into the other — it snaps into the new interpretation.

From what I can tell, no one has investigated a potential link between autism and insight. But there are indicators that such a study would be worthwhile:

• Research shows that aha! moments are not evenly distributed. Some individuals are more likely to experience spontaneous insight than others. So, what determines that likelihood?

• EEG recordings of brain activity during moments of insight show neural activity that has been linked in other studies with “feature integration and pattern recognition during perceptual processing.” (Whenever I read “pattern recognition,” I sit up straighter.)

• fMRI readings point to the same thing. When an insight happens, there’s increased blood flow in the right anterior superior temporal gyrus (rSTG). The rSTG “has a specific role in semantic integration of distantly related associations.” For the researchers, this finding “established that connections across distantly related pieces of information can facilitate insight by allowing solvers to discover new associations among concepts.” Making connections? Across distantly related pieces of information? To form new associations among concepts? That’s pattern recognition, baby! (All these studies are discussed in the book chapter.)

What these points demonstrate is that 1. not everyone experiences insight to the same degree, and 2. insight is the product of subconscious pattern recognition.

Which cognitive profile is highly prone to pattern thinking? Autism.

I’d say there’s enough here to justify research on potential links between insight and autism, if anyone’s listening.

People consistently report that insights come when they least expect. The problem or creative work has been set aside; an easy, calming task has been taken up, and boom! Inspiration strikes.

(A famous saying, attributed to multiple different scientists so who really knows, is that the greatest discoveries arrive via the “three Bs”: bus, bath, and bed.)

Science corroborates this idea.

In the studies discussed in the book, researchers took EEG and fMRI readings before the insight occurred. What was happening immediately prior? They found that “participants tended to direct their gaze away from the problem itself and were more likely to fixate on a blank portion of the screen,” just before the insight’s emergence.

They also found that insight frequency was positively correlated with “the degree to which subjects reported being in a positive mood at the outset of the experiment.” Researchers theorize that “being in a positive mood may facilitate insight” by allowing the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) “to notice weakly activated prepotent solutions in memory,” that is, small salient details that otherwise escape notice.

So, turning away from a project — and being in a good mood — makes your brain more likely to make subtle linkages of things burrowed in your gray matter, sparking insight.

Mozart, for his part, agreed on the importance of a positive mental state: “Pray do not write me any more melancholy letters,” he complained to his father, “for I require at this time a cheerful spirit, a clear head, and inclination to work, and these no one can have who is sad at heart.”

Likewise, Richard Feynman emphasized the importance of a playful, relaxed state of mind. He found that insights came to him when he was not actively focused on a problem, like when he came up with a Nobel-prize winning insight while looking at the wobble of a spinning plate in a cafeteria.

Another reason there might be a correlation between experiencing insights and autism: monotropic focus.

A hallmark of autism is the deep mining of a subject. Autistic individuals research things deeply and recursively — that is, they return to the subject again and again, exploring from different angles, tentacling out to related ideas.

In the process, they amass a ton of relevant, but haphazardly organized information.

That information is steeping in the brain, infusing the unconscious, so that in a quiet moment — brushing your teeth, eating breakfast — a connection crystallizes, and with it, an impression of sudden discovery.

This is essentially what Harriet Beecher Stowe described in her Author’s Introduction to the 1879 edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Over many pages, she inventories the accounts of slavery she’d absorbed over many years: specific incidents discussed among friends, newspaper reports, moral debates. A long list of the ways she’d encountered the problem of slavery. The result was layers of accumulated knowledge steeping in her mind.

The final spark came from an antislavery magazine article — an eyewitness account of a woman escaping across the frozen Ohio River with her child. After reading it, “she began to meditate.” (Stowe writes about herself in the third person.) “The faithful slave husband [from the story] occurred to her as a pattern of Uncle Tom, and the scenes of the story began to gradually form themselves in her mind.”

The first section she wrote was the death of Uncle Tom. “This scene presented itself almost as a tangible vision to her mind,” Stowe recounted. “From that time the story can less be said to have been composed by her than imposed upon her.” (All emphasis mine.)

You might object that spontaneous clarity on an elusive scientific problem (as for Ramanujan, Kekulé, and Feynman) is vastly different from the sudden appearance of an artistic work (in the case of Coleridge, Stowe, and Mozart).

But are they really all that different? I wonder.

Traditionally, we categorize scientific insight as that which is verifiable, and creative production as that which is ineffable. But many scientific breakthroughs began as intuitive flashes, inexplicable realizations, that were only confirmed through conscious analysis after the fact. These breakthroughs were ineffable at the beginning, too.

When Ramanujan’s formulas arrived in dreams, how were they different from Coleridge’s dream of Kubla Khan?

I think the real difference lies not in how these insights arise, nor how they feel to the person when they do, but in whether we demand an after-the-fact justification. Scientific insights are required to be confirmed through proof; artistic ones are allowed to stand on their own.

So, perhaps the boundary between scientific discovery and artistic creation isn’t as solid as we think.

The nun and the novelist both described insights that arrived as if imposed on them, not generated by them. So have many others, across centuries and disciplines. Whether the content is mathematical, scientific, or artistic, the deeper truth may be this: there is a mode of thinking — unfocused, calm, perceptually attuned to small details — that gives rise to insight.

And we might ask whether some of us default to that mode more often, as a function of how our minds have been designed to operate.

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Looking for more to read? Check out these past posts:

• The root of storytelling is pattern

• The empathy penalty: a startling study on girls, math, and social sensitivity

1. The nun is Hildegard of Bingen, and the novelist is Jean Rhys. To find out more… stay tuned for the book! (fingers crossed)

2. Chesebrough, Christine & Salvi, Carola & Beeman, Mark & Oh, Yongtaek & Kounios, John. (2024). Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight Waves of Insight A Historical Overview of the Neuroscience of Insight.