Studying insight problem solving with neuroscientific methods

Insights are sporadic, unpredictable, short-lived moments of exceptional thinking where unwarranted assumptions need to be discarded before solutions to problems can be obtained. Insight requires a restructuring of the problem situation that is relatively rare and hard to elicit in the laboratory. One way of dealing with this problem is to catalyze such restructuring processes using solution hints. This allows one to obtain multiple insight events and their accurate onset times, which are required for event-related designs in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and Electroencephalogram (EEG), and to reliably record the activity associated with the restructuring component of insight. In this article, we discuss in detail the methodological challenges that brain research on insight poses and describe how we dealt with these challenges in our recent studies on insight problem solving.