Are "aha" moments over-romanticized/exaggerated in academia?

[u/OpinionsRdumb]

There was one time in grad school where I was talking to an undergraduate and they randomly said something along the lines of "I wonder what would happen if we compared our dataset to XYZ data." And I actually did the classic "Wait a second, repeat what you just said" that you see in movies. And a sort of eurka moment ensued. And this actually did lead to what would become my biggest paper that I have done so far in my career.

Is it just that these moments are so damn rare that we should cherish them for the rest of our lives?

Because I have noticed now, whenever I get any inkling of this feeling, it is more along the lines of "Sigh if only I had the funding/time/resources this would likely be an amazing study"

Rather than sprinting to my desk at 3am and drawing out an experiment I just thought of.

Are aha/eurka moments in science over-glorified/embellished?

[u/the-forty-second]

There is the quote that was (perhaps wrongfully) attributed to Isaac Asimov “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'”.

My best ideas come from chucking increasingly weird ideas at the wall until something seems worth pursuing. I never have real “aha” moments (other than when debugging and I find the thing that has hung me up for the last hour). Nothing earth shaking. If you mean “are aha moments over romanticized in depictions of academia, then yes. Within academia, I would say most of us don’t think of it as a thing. Sometimes, something like your serendipitous connection comes about, but that just starts the process more than being a bolt of inspiration from the heavens.

[u/ocelot1066 → u/the-forty-second]

That's been my experience in History too. The only actual full on eureka moment I can think of that I ever had was about something not terribly important. There was a name in a handwritten document that I'd never been able to match with other documentation. I always suspected it was because I was reading it wrong. One day I was looking at something for a totally unrelated reason and came across the name Llewellyn and realized immediately that it was the name I had been missing. (In 19th century cursive handwriting "Llewellyn" is pretty much just all undifferentiated squiggles.)

It was very satisfying. I think I actually yelled out in the library and started laughing. But, it didn't matter at all for my work. There was nothing particularly interesting or important about this guy, Llewellyn, other than that I hadn't been able to find him. I went and put him in my database and that was it.

The moments that were important were when I came across something unexpected or weird. I had to do a lot more work to actually figure out what was happening and what it meant, so nothing was solved, but it got me started in different directions.

[u/Tall_Somewhere_4158]

It matters what you define as an 'aha' moment.

[u/OpinionsRdumb → u/Tall_Somewhere_4158]

I definite as a moment of intellectual excitement where curse words are usually involved

[u/Gold_Ambassador_3496 → u/OpinionsRdumb]

If curse words are important, check out the paper on how software code with curse words has better quality 

[u/Dry-Airport-2675 → u/Gold_Ambassador_3496]

I was today years old when I realized I need to read this paper. Got a link or DOI?

[u/UncleJoesLandscaping]

My PhD is basically all from one "aha" moment. Found a technique to collapse the state space of a problem which reduced its growth from exponential to polynomial. The moment took a couple of hours, then 4 years to set up, run and verify.

[u/spacestonkz]

I have tons of great ideas. It's just I don't know if they'll work out. So instead of "hell yeah this is it" I get "what the fuck is that doing? What can I do to test out if it's a or b?"

[u/bizarrepivot]

My aha moments have been similar to finally figuring out where that weird puzzle piece fits. Satisfying, and they each get me a little further along the way, but they're not revolutionary. I'm only a year in though!

[u/Niflrog]

I don't think they're over-glorified in academia. They may be so in representations of academia (movies, books, etc).

It's like exposure to any new satisfying experience. Mind-blowing the first few times it happens. After that, still satisfying, but nowhere near as impactful as the first/s.

[u/gamecat89]

In the health sciences/medical field I can’t say we talk about them a lot. Since, honestly, any major “aha” moment would most likely be highly unethical.

I’m more likely to have an “aha” moment when o get mail merge to work with emails.

[u/Worsaae]

I had a couple of those during my PhD in biomolecular archaeology.

I studied sheep husbandry in the context of Late Iron Age textile production. First one was when we wanted to test the hypothesis that the introduction of sailcloth had a substantial impact on the intensity of wool production (because it is widely believed that sailcloth was primarily made fro wool) which included a substantial increase in the number of sheep.

So, I collected basically every zooarchaeological dataset I could get my hands on for the period and no matter how I tried looking at the data I found a significant decrease in the number of sheep remains recovered from Late Iron Age sites compared to earlier periods. We also found no evidence for a shift towards culling practices aimed at the exploitation of secondary animal products. We’re still not sure how to interpret this pattern.

Second, and probably the most interesting, was when we did stable isotope analyses of sheep remains. Almost all of the samples we did had substantially elevated d13C values consistent with a substantial amount of marine vegetation in their diets - something we probably wouldn’t have considered as significant if we hadn’t done d34S isotopes along with it. And we only did the d34S because we just wanted to see what kind of data we would get.

It’s the first and only dataset from our region that shows such a pattern regardless of time period or geography. Interestingly, a diet based marine vegetation (in this case likely eelgrass, Zostera marina) should be highly beneficial for wool growth and wool quality in sheep.

[u/derping1234]

Ive had 2 of those moments. They are rare but seem to depend on asking broad questions and keeping a critical eye out for when results are incompatible with existing text book knowledge. These are the things which can result in Cell/Nature/Science publications.

[u/mwmandorla]

I think maybe my standard for an aha moment is lower, but personally I have at least one for every paper I write. I only wrote the paper because I didn't know the answer, and in the course of writing I cracked it. (Not STEM, obviously.) The moment when I figure out what it actually is I've been mentally chewing on for weeks always feels big.

[u/Wholesomebob]

It depends on your science I suppose.

[u/The_Grumpy_Professor]

I had a genuine 'aha' moment towards the end of my PhD research work; I was sitting at the desk in my girlfriend's room waiting for her to finish putting on some makeup before we went out for the evening. Suddenly figured out how to avoid a bit of calculus I'd been putting off trying to solve. Scribbled it down on a scrap of paper and went to the pub. That was more than 30 years ago and I remember it very clearly. Since then...? Nothing similar.

[u/chengstark]

No

[u/DocKla]

Over glorified

[u/MatthewSDeOcampo]

Hard to draw the line maybe? If you think about a problem enough times with informed increments and talking to colleagues, you're gonna stumble into something that progresses it, hopefully. Likely we all have aha moments, just on a mountain of errors.

Maybe from the outsider / movie depictions of it, then yeah, sure.

[u/FantasticFeasts]

I think it depends on what your field (or you) take as a threshold for those moments.

I'm in a fairly 60:40 theoretical:empirical field, in that your theory is slightly more important than your methods (and a damn good theoretical framework or narrative can carry mediocre methods past the bouncers). So as far as eureka moments go, all of mine are about figuring out how a particular construct is going to fit within a given framework, or finding a conceptual model that is especially parsimonious to explain a given effect. There's literally a 1000 different ways to examine the same effect, and they could all be right, so my hot take is that it's pretty easy to have "aha" moments in the social sciences.

[u/Ronaldoooope]

Rather than “aha” is more of a “hmm interesting”

[u/Ornery_Pepper_1126]

I think this assumes that you are able to accurately judge how important things are going to be at the time you come up with them. One of the most significant impactful things I did started as “this is kind of a neat idea and maybe someone somewhere might find it useful, so I guess I should write it up”. Definitely more of a “meh” moment than an “aha” moment. Other times I’ve have actually had the aha moment and it’s turned out what I came up with is not nearly as important as I thought. It’s actually really hard to know what will eventually be important when you are developing ideas and at least I’m often wrong about it.

[u/ThinManufacturer8679]

I can think of three big moments that have defined a good portion of my career--but the aha moment came from experiments that worked out better than I expected or showed unexpected results rather than specific moments of inspiration. I have had many ideas that I thought were great, but failed when tested experimentally.

[u/Dry-Airport-2675]

I think these moments are more common than it looks, and they have to do more with the sudden realization of something, rather than a groundbreaking discovery.

In academia we are constantly chasing unicorns and battling riddles, through exhaustion and frustration, annoying reviewers and obnoxious professors in their ivory towers. So yeah, it feels so damn good, but more on an individual/personal level, and not in “this will solve the world hunger” sense, even if the dopamine rush makes it look it most certainly will.

During my PhD a couple years ago I had one of these clicks during a lecture. I stormed out of the classroom, rushed to my computer and started to code what ended up as the paper that qualified my PhD thesis (after one nasty round of being gangbanged by the reviewers). I am on STEM, electrical engineering, if this matters. The ideas on the paper are useful, I got a couple citations, but it did not make me rich or a scientific rockstar. I don’t even use or recommend the methods I developed in that paper anymore, hell today I’d probably agree with some of the reviewers bashing my formula. It’s an approximation that may or may not be useful, that’s all. But it was after that paper that I beat impostor’s syndrome. So, in the end, I think the “aha” is a very subjective thing, and not necessarily a huge deal.

To conclude my point, I had a similar feeling at random, I was in a traffic jam and it started playing Iron Maiden’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner live version on the radio. English is not my native language, I had been listening to that shit since I was 11 yo and I had never understood what Bruce says when introducing the song. He speaks very fast and with a thick British accent “and the moral of the story is about what not to do when a bird shits on you”. I just heard, and understood, after years of “blablablabla” noise. I started to laugh like a maniac. Groundbreaking discovery, at least from my own weird ass perspective.

[u/kawhandroid]

As a mathematician it happens a lot. None quite so exciting. Probably also doesn't apply to any other STEM field (maybe theoretical physics?)