Strategic Intuition

Over the past decade, cognitive and neuroscience research have made significant methodological progress in studying insight from three different angles.  First, psychology experiments show that subjects solve problems better after sleep than subjects who focus continuously on the problems.  Second, research on arousal and stress shows that the physiology of the relaxed mental state fosters this kind of ‘offline’ problem-solving.  Third, cognitive neuroscience provides preliminary evidence that defocused attention contributes to flashes of insight.  This chapter provides an overview of recent developments in our understanding of the insight process and suggests directions for future research.