The Nature of insight /

This significant contribution to the literature on human creativity explores the topic from several perspectives--some of them contradictory. Edited by psychologists Sternberg (Yale) and Davidson (Lewis and Clark College), the book's five sections explore history and methods, unconventional problem-solving, insights and inventions, case histories of insightful people, and the role of metaphor in exploring insight. In one of several attempts at definition, S.M. Smith refers to insight as a mature or sudden understanding of a mechanism, an analogy, a principle, or a concept. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Keith Sawyer trace the term to the Dutch word for "seeing inside," implying that one who experiences insight must have had some prior exposure to the issue, producing either "normal" or "revolutionary" insights with short-term and long-term consequences, respectively. Others present experimental data, conceptual formulations, various impasses to insight, and various examples, e.g., Archimedes, Darwin, Einstein, Faraday, Feynman, Laubert, Hemingway, Poe, Piaget, and Henry James (women and non-Westerners are notably absent). The role of humans as interpreters is a provocative theme, as is the role of emotional and social context in insight. Puzzles, riddles, and jokes add to the richness of the volume. In general, the reader will realize that insight is not a unitary phenomenon, and that the contributors have presented a complex and elegant mosaic to be found nowhere else. Upper-division undergraduate through professional. S. Krippner; Saybrook Institute