 On August 5th, 1949, a team of parachuters landed in manned gulch in Montana to put out a wildfire that was blazing on one side of the canyon. They landed on the other side of the gulch, and with the wind at their backs, they started descending into the canyon. But all of a sudden, the wind flipped direction and jumped over to their side of the canyon and started ascending rapidly. This picture was taken at that spot after the fire. They were looking down into the canyon, seeing the fire rush up toward them. So they dropped their equipment, turned around, and started running up the canyon. But they were not going to be fast enough. The fire was just rushing too quickly. At that point, the team leader, Wagdage, stopped. He turned around with his back to the flames, his back to the wind. He pulled out a match. He lit the grass in front of him. The grass burned quickly and left a patch of charred ground. He crawled onto it, and he waited as the flames surrounded that patch of ground and flowed on. Wagdage survived, 13 of the other 14 firefighters perished. What happened in Wagdage's brain? What was the aha moment that enabled him to think of fire not just as the problem, but also as the solution? What happens in your brain when you have a creative insight? Mark Beeman and I decided we wanted to try to find out what this is. So we scanned people's brains as they solved problems. We gave them a series of little verbal puzzles, and we noted each time that they solved a problem with a flash of insight, and each time they solved it in a more deliberate analytical fashion. And we measured their brain activity. And this is what we found. There was a moment of insight where there was a burst of activity right in the right hemisphere of the brain. That was the aha moment itself, and it was in the right hemisphere. Now, the interesting thing about that is it does support the idea that the right hemisphere does play a key role in creative insight. And more specifically, what the right hemisphere seems to do is to make connections between things that don't really seem to fit together well at first. So that's interesting, but what everyone really wants to know is, of course, how do I have more creative insights? So to look at that, what we did is we started at the moment of insight itself, and we worked our way backward in time to reveal what all the neural precursors were that led up to that aha moment. And as it turns out, there are several of these neural precursors, each of which can be influenced to enhance creative insight. Right now, let's consider just one of them. Louis Pasteur famously said, chance favors only the prepared mind. We put this to the test, and we did it by looking at brain activity just before each of these puzzles was presented. And what we found here, this is EEG activity preceding each little puzzle that a person solved in a deliberate analytical fashion. You can see the back of the head is lighting up. This is where visual cortex is. This is the part of the brain responsible for visual perception. So what subjects were doing, what our subjects were doing was they were looking, they were staring at the blank screen on which a puzzle was about to be displayed. And when they were doing that, when they finally got the puzzle, they would end up solving it in an analytical, deliberate sort of fashion. So you might think of analytical reasoning really as instead of insight, it's outside. You're looking outward, you're taking into information. Now, when we look at EEG activity preceding each puzzle that a person would solve with a flesh of insight, we see something different. We see the temporal lobes of the brain lighting up. These are areas of the brain that process words and concepts. But importantly, there's less activity in visual cortex. This is the mind turning in on itself. This is the mind disengaging from the world. This empowers a person to imagine new and different ways to transform reality creatively into something better. This is what enabled Wagdodge to think of fire not just as the problem, but also as the solution. Now, it should be simple to develop this kind of inner directed thought. In fact, the artist Paul Gauguin said, I close my eyes in order to see. Things are more complicated nowadays. So if you want to develop this inner directed thought, you have to do a few little things first. If you really want to solve a problem, turn off the cell phone, turn off the iPad, turn off the computer, get rid of all the distractions, get rid of the potential distractions that would yank you back to reality as it is and prevent you from formulating your own new reality. And listen to that subtle voice from within. Thank you.