After the AI answers

Why epiphanies still happen in the shower

Why do our best ideas often come to us in the shower? It's not the water or the solitude. It's that we've finally stopped trying so hard to think our way to an answer. In that warm, monotonous space, with our eyes closed and our minds wandering. A moment when something deeper than logic takes over. Something our AI-saturated age could be in danger of forgetting.

Credit: Death to Stock Photo

The False Promise of Infinite Information

We live in an time when we can generate answers faster than we can form questions. AI is accelerating our ability to connect dots on an information level, helping us understand complex ideas and even ourselves with unprecedented speed. I have a friend who sends me screenshots of her deep midnight conversations with ChatGPT, jokingly calling it her "wise, funny, in-tune boyfriend." She's learning about herself through these exchanges, and dare I say maybe even developing feelings for her AI companion? There are clearly moments that truly mark her, ones that unveil something novel about herself and her connection to the world. Sometimes I wonder if she’s having epiphanies - major transcendental ‘aha’ moments.

But here's what's crucial: it's not the information that's transformative - it's how the information makes her feel.

This reveals the central truth that our age of infinite information obscures: information is not the only thing that guides epiphanies. Feeling has much to do with it.

What Makes an Epiphany

Epiphanies are those sudden realizations that shift our entire perspective. The word dates back to ancient Greece where "epiphaneia" meant "appearance" or "manifestation"; revelations brought by the gods themselves.

But epiphanies aren't simply random moments of downloaded knowledge. As Maya Angelou described: "It probably has a million definitions. It's the occurrence when the mind, the body, the heart, and the soul focus together and see an old thing in a new way." They're generated by a complex combination of experience, memory, knowledge, predisposition, and context.

Even neuroscientists, who don't often speak of the sublime, concede that sudden insight can't be forced or manufactured purely from within. This creates a delightful yet maddening paradox: we do experience epiphanies internally, but they often require an external spark.

The Conditions for Breakthrough

Understanding this paradox reveals why our physical and emotional states matter so much for insight. When someone asks us a challenging question, we instinctively look away—upward or downward. Research led by the Milano-Bicocca University explored how our brains solve problems differently when it’s sudden insight (the ‘aha’ phenomemon). We're trying to simplify our visual inputs, removing the emotions and interfering thoughts that come from direct eye contact. We’re trying to somehow insulate ourselves.

This is also why so many people report eureka moments in the shower. ““You have some mild sensory deprivation. You can’t see very much. There’s the white noise of the water. The water is warm so you can’t feel the difference between your skin and the air,” says John Kounios, a professor of psychology at Drexel University and co-author of “The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain. “This sensory restriction is like an extended brain blink. You cut out the outside world and ideas bubble up into awareness.” All of this creates space for ideas that have been percolating beneath the surface to flash into consciousness.

If you're feeling stuck, a change of scenery might unlock understanding in ways that pure thinking cannot. Trading your desk for a walk in a park. Leaving your cluttered apartment to be able to see the open sky. When we don't actively think about our problem and instead focus on the feeling of the warm orange glow of the sun glowing through our eye-lids. Smelling wet pine and letting it trigger a memory from childhood.

It might take a week, or two, maybe a month, perhaps longer. But when the time is right, the idea, the realization, the ‘aha’ will take possession of you. As though it was just waiting for the moment you were open to feeling it’s presence, instead of thinking it into existence.

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The Power of Feeling Through Systems

This is why feeling is so crucial to layer onto thinking. Only by combining both can we create conditions where these genuine spark moments emerge. Moments where we can start feeling through our understanding of a problem. And that's where things become transformative.

For the last couple weeks, my partner and I have been having deep conversations about AI, one that circles around both hope and fear. We believe AI will enhance human capability, amplifying our creativity, judgment, problem-solving, and collaboration. We want to see countries in the Majority World leapfrog into the AI age, creating more positive externalities than negative ones, truly accomplishing the United Nations' "Nobody gets left behind" framework for action towards the Sustainable Development Goals. Somehow, that feels closer to becoming real because of AI.

As someone whose built their entire career on the hope that we’ll finally collectively arrive at a place of understanding that human and planetary challenges are deeply entangled (we need systems thinking more than ever), I see AI as helping us put the pieces together in unprecedented ways. We finally have tools that can make crystal clear how global wars are inextricably connected to climate catastrophe, which connects to systems of economic oppression, which connects back to histories of colonialism... and on and on. We now have a ridiculously easy way to access these facts and map these interconnections.

Yet here's the crucial gap: to have the genuine ‘aha’ moment that leads to action, we need more than those facts. To act on knowledge, we need more than knowing—we need feeling.

If we can feel through a problem, especially those that are wickedly complicated, entangled, and obscure, we can better understand what our next best step should be. We can feel through the systems we're part of, and that layering of systems feeling onto systems thinking becomes one of the most powerful tools we have to navigate our current metacrisis.

The story of Srinivasa Ramanujan comes to mind. Known today as the ‘Intuitive Mathematician’, Ramanujan was a self-taught mathematics genius guided by a deep sense of mathematical beauty and intuition, often working on formulas that "felt right" to him even when he couldn't initially prove them. His insights came not just from calculation, but from an almost mysterious sense of following feeling, as well as through his dreams.

Indigenous cultures have long understood this wisdom. In traditions like Umbanda, spiritual guides serve as intermediaries who help people access deeper insights. These mentors understand that true revelation requires more than intellectual understanding—it demands a higher level of engagement with knowledge and wisdom, feeling our way through to understanding.

The Future of Wonder

So as AI becomes ubiquitous, the place we go for confession, insight, and enlightenment, our new ‘digital gods’, we must ask: are these gods supportive of our epiphanies? If they can provide the external spark that epiphanies often require, what happens to our human capacity for felt understanding?

Yes, AI is here to stay. But will phrases like "let me think..." or "have a think about it" or "I wonder if..." lose their meaning entirely?

I hope not. In fact, I want there to be much more wondering, even when answers are so much easier to reach. This wondering will sometimes happen in the body, sparked by what we see, smell, touch, feel. It might come through the sensation you get standing in the rain, suddenly aware of your place in the water cycle. Or the collective gasp in a cinema during a tense scene, reminding you of our shared humanity.

That feeling is what will make you wonder. Not the answers that AI generates, but the embodied experience of being human in an interconnected world.

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Can AI Have Epiphanies?

This raises a fascinating question: can artificial intelligence have its own epiphanies? While we're still grappling with questions of digital consciousness, what seems clear is that the human capacity for felt understanding, for emotional resonance with ideas, remains uniquely valuable.

The future doesn't belong to those who can process the most information, but to those who can feel their way through complexity toward understanding. These awe-inspiring moments of epiphany can lead us to understand the systems we're deeply entangled with on a profound level.

In our rush toward an AI-integrated future, we must preserve space in our day, in our routines, in our culture, for wonder. For the kind of deep feeling-through that transforms mere information into genuine knowing. Only then can we harness both human insight and artificial intelligence to make the next right steps through our interconnected challenges.

In preserving our capacity for epiphany - that superpower we have too often ignored - we preserve something essentially human and essentially necessary for navigating the world ahead.

With kindness and curiosity,
Laura

Micro updates & re-emergence

I've been quiet here for a while—there have been seasons for many things, beautiful human things that pull us away from the keyboard and into the messiness of living! But I'm excited to share that much has been happening behind the scenes.

We're publishing a book with Slanted Publishers, slated for September release (pre-orders and more details coming soon!), and we've just relaunched our Feast of Awe cards for those wanting to host their own gatherings of wonder and connection.

I'm grateful to be back here with you, with renewed energy and perspective on this work.