How to Create Aha Moments at Events

People are more likely to remember insights that come by way of epiphanies because of the pleasure that accompanies them. Photo by Jacob Slaton / Whatever Media Group

In Convene’s June issue, I wrote in this column about the discoveries that neuroscientists have made about what happens in our brains when we experience a sudden flash of insight, and the environments that support those aha moments.

Such insights, which are accompanied by bursts of high-frequency waves in the brain’s right temporal lobe, are more likely to happen when we venture into new environments, wrote the authors of the Scientific American story, “The Brain Science of Elusive ‘Aha! Moments.’” Insights tend to occur when we take a break from grinding away at our problems, they wrote, and in expansive spaces where we feel psychologically safe and aren’t worried about being judged by others. That’s an environment, I pointed out, that meeting designers can strive to achieve.

But I left out one central point: Flashes of insight make us happy. In a 2020 study conducted in a lab run by the article’s co-author, John Kounios, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Drexel University, participants who were given tasks that sparked aha moments experienced elevated moods. The “more insights,” wrote Kounios, author of The Eureka Factor, “the better their mood.” Other research links flashes of insight to improved memory and learning — people are more likely to remember insights that come by way of epiphanies because of the pleasure that accompanies them.

One way that events can help smooth the path toward the creation of insights is by offering plentiful opportunities for participants to interact with others. When solving problems, “unless we are actively going out to collect different experiences, you’re just going to keep producing similar variations of the same stuff,” said Sheena Iyengar, a social psychologist and professor at Columbia Business School, on an episode of The Hidden Brain podcast. “If you want a new way of framing a problem or new information, it really does come from somebody that just sees the world in a different way, and they have different experiences.”

And those kinds of interactions do make participants happy, according to the survey results in the “Freeman Trends Report: 2024 Attendee Intent and Behavior,” released last year by the global events company. When asked how they liked to learn at in-person events, a majority — 56 percent — said they preferred to learn through hands-on, informal sessions with industry experts and peers. And when asked about the factors that most positively influence their networking experience at an event, 52 percent chose the opportunity to put their heads together with other participants with similar challenges.

Barbara Palmer is Convene’s deputy editor.

Read our first story on aha moments at pcma.org/science-of-aha-moments-designing-events-inspiration.