What are the neural precursors that lead up to the epiphany? How can one, have more creative insights? How this affects our psyche? What's the psychology behind it?
The word "epiphany" has a deep, archetypal resonance for us, dating back to ancient Greece. It comes from the Greek "epiphaneia," meaning "appearance" or "manifestation," and referred to the revelations brought to us by the gods. Today "epiphany" carries a range of meanings, including "an intuitive grasp of reality," "an illuminating discovery, realization, disclosure, or insight," or simply "a revealing scene or moment."
An ephiphany may change your life and most likely the life of the people around you. It could be as simple as braking a mental model, which could open many new doors or neural pathways... For that matter, lets share an interesting examples:
Allegedly Albert Einstein was struck as a young child by being given a compass, and realizing that some unseen force in space was making it move. Another, perhaps better, example from Einstein's life occurred in 1905 after he had spent an evening unsuccessfully trying to reconcile Newtonian physics and Maxwell's equations. While taking a trolley car to home, he looked behind him at the receding clocktower in Bern and realized that if the car sped up close to the speed of light, he would see the clock slow down; with this thought, he later remarked, "a storm broke loose in my mind," which would allow him to understand special relativity. Einstein had a second epiphany two years later in 1907 which he called "the happiest thought of my life" when he imagined an elevator falling, and realized that a passenger would not be able to tell the difference between the weightlessness of falling, and the weightlessness of space - a thought which allowed him to generalize his theory of relativity to include gravity as a curvature in spacetime.
What is happening on the psychological level when one experience such "aha moment"?
EDIT: What conceptual models of epiphany are out there?
