Cortical reinstatement of causally related events sparks narrative insights by updating neural representation patterns (opens in new tab)

We make sense of everyday events by reasoning about their underlying causes. When we connect causal links between events separated in time, we often experience a sudden feeling of “aha!”, or insight. To understand its cognitive and neural mechanisms, we designed an fMRI study in which participants watched a temporally scrambled TV episode. Participants pressed an “aha” button whenever they understood something new and explained their reasoning. More than 40% of insight explanations reference ...