Eureka! We’ve had the closest look yet at what happens in the brain when you experience a burst of genius. The insight may lead to ways to artificially push the brain into problem-solving mode.

To better understand strikes of inspiration, Christian Windischberger at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, and his colleagues used a type of fMRI to scan 29 people’s brains as they solved problems that were designed to elicit a eureka moment . These included puzzles that involved discovering that one particular word links three others, for example. When a …