Intuition, insight, and the right hemisphere: Emergence of higher sociocognitive functions

Abstract

Intuition is the ability to understand immediately without conscious reasoning and is sometimes explained as a ‘gut feeling’ about the rightness or wrongness of a person, place, situation, temporal episode or object. In contrast, insight is the capacity to gain accurate and a deep understanding of a problem and it is often associated with movement beyond existing paradigms. Examples include Darwin, Einstein and Freud’s theories of natural selection, relativity, or the unconscious; respectively. Many cultures name these concepts and acknowledge their value, and insight is recognized as particularly characteristic of eminent achievements in the arts, sciences and politics. Considerable data suggests that these two concepts are more related than distinct, and that a more distributed intuitive network may feed into a predominately right hemispheric insight-based functional neuronal architecture. The preparation and incubation stages of insight may rely on the incorporation of domain-specific automatized expertise schema associated with intuition. In this manuscript the neural networks associated with intuition and insight are reviewed. Case studies of anomalous subjects with ability–achievement discrepancies are summarized. This theoretical review proposes the prospect that atypical localization of cognitive modules may enhance intuitive and insightful functions and thereby explain individual achievement beyond that expected by conventionally measured intelligence tests. A model and theory of intuition and insight’s neuroanatomical basis is proposed which could be used as a starting point for future research and better understanding of the nature of these two distinctly human and highly complex poorly understood abilities.

Dissociable Posterior and Anterior Insula Activations in Processing Negative Stimulus Before and After the Application of Cognitive Reappraisals

“…This possibility was also consistent with, for example, Taylor and colleague's study that found the anterior insula was co-activated with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) to form an essential part of the salience network, which detected salient events and initiated appropriate control signals to regulate behavior and the homeostatic state (Taylor et al, 2009). It was also generally consistent with the findings of previous neuroimaging studies, which suggested that the anterior insular cortex was involved in cognitive control (Wager and Feldman Barrett, 2004;Ochsner and Gross, 2008;Aziz-Zadeh et al, 2009;McCrea, 2010) given the obvious need for executive functions, such as working memory capacity, inhibition, and category shift in emotion regulation, and the fact that the cognitive reappraisals have to be sustained against competing bias (Schmeichel et al, 2008;Gyurak et al, 2012). In summary, we compared the involvement of the posterior and anterior insular cortex in processing negative stimuli before and after cognitive reappraisal regulation and found that reappraisal could alter the internal bodily and emotional feeling representation in the insular cortex in a posterior-toanterior progression manner.…”

New advances in the neural correlates of insight: A decade in review of the insightful brain

“…The insula may also be linked with the "Aha!" experience [74], but it requires further investigation.…”

Real‐time biofeedback integrated into neuromuscular training reduces high‐risk knee biomechanics and increases functional brain connectivity: A preliminary longitudinal investigation

“…As the thalamus is important for transmitting information throughout the entire cortex (Sherman & Guillery, ), it is interesting that strengthened left and right thalamic connectivity was localized to right sensorimotor regions. Though a clear behavioral role for each hemisphere is inconclusive (i.e., right vs. left brain dominance) (Corballis, ), there is accumulating evidence that the right hemisphere is particularly involved in intuition and “insight‐based” functions (McCrea, ), which are highly related to implicit learning in general (Lieberman, ). Though cognitive‐based measures of intuition were not obtained, many nonverbal coding skills (e.g., processing the tone of a voice) have been shown to rely heavily on networks and associated neural substrates primarily within the right hemisphere (Borod, ; Lieberman, ; McCrea, ).…”

“…Though a clear behavioral role for each hemisphere is inconclusive (i.e., right vs. left brain dominance) (Corballis, ), there is accumulating evidence that the right hemisphere is particularly involved in intuition and “insight‐based” functions (McCrea, ), which are highly related to implicit learning in general (Lieberman, ). Though cognitive‐based measures of intuition were not obtained, many nonverbal coding skills (e.g., processing the tone of a voice) have been shown to rely heavily on networks and associated neural substrates primarily within the right hemisphere (Borod, ; Lieberman, ; McCrea, ). aNMT abstractly displays information that an athlete must use to learn how to coordinate multiple biomechanics variables without explicit instruction (Bonnette, DiCesare, Kiefer, et al, ; Bonnette et al, ).…”