Abstract: Insight indicates a restructuring of the problem that leads to a sudden gain of solution with an “Aha” experience. However, the neural correlates of “insights” remain unknown because insights are sporadic, unpredictable and short-lived. Here, we hypothesized that “prototype activation and elicitation” might be one of the central ways to attain insight during creative thinking, and used a learning-testing paradigm to examine brain activation of “Aha” effects with event-related potentials (ERPs) and functional MRI (fMRI) during solving Chinese logogriphs. Results indicated that the precuneus might be involved in successful prototype events retrieval and the left inferior frontal/middle frontal gyrus might be involved in forming novel association and breaking mental sets. In addition, results also indicated that the neural network comprising specific brain areas in the medial frontal, temporal and cerebellum brain regions might be the potential neural basis of “successful mental preparation” for solving insight problem.

Key words: creative thinking, prototype activation, insight, precuneus, numerosity, precise representation, subitizing, approximate representation, spatial attention