You’re in a meeting, working through something hard, and one person goes quiet.

Eyes up at the ceiling. Or off out the window.

And you think, well, I’ve lost her.

So, you say her name. You ask what she thinks. You fill the silence, because silence in a meeting feels like something just went wrong.

But without knowing it…You just interrupted something.

Two researchers, John Kounios and Mark Beeman, have spent years hooking people up to EEG caps and sliding them into MRI machines while they solve word puzzles. Little brain teasers where the answer arrives slowly, piece by piece, or appears all at once.

That second kind is the aha. And they can see it happen.

There’s a burst of activity just above the right ear, and it fires about a third of a second before the person consciously knows she has the answer. Her brain gets there first. She catches up.

Right before that burst, though, there’s a different one at the back of the head, over the part of the brain that processes what you’re seeing. The way they read it, the brain is briefly turning down the visual signal coming in. Less noise from the outside so the answer can float up from the inside.

Those participants were told to keep their eyes open and stare at a fixed point on the screen. They weren’t allowed to look away or shut their eyes the way we all do when we’re thinking hard.

So, the brain did it anyway, on the inside. A blink without the blink.

The woman staring at the ceiling isn’t checking out. She’s clearing the noise in her brain.

The second finding is the one that I think you will find most interesting.

Kounios and Beeman could predict whether someone would solve a problem in a flash of insight by looking at her brain activity before she ever saw the problem. Not during. Before. And people who showed up in a good mood had more of those flashes. Anxiety pushed it the other direction.

So, the mood in the room before you ask the question shapes whether anyone can answer it.
So you have two things to try this week!

Let the silence be. When someone goes quiet and looks away, count to ten before you open your mouth. It will feel endless. But it’s ten seconds.

And watch what “weather” you carry in. If you walk in wound tight and lead with how behind everyone is, you’ve already narrowed what your team can see. You can’t demand a breakthrough from people you just made anxious.

Let me know how it works!  🙂