ArticleNature communications2026
Cortical reinstatement of causally related events sparks narrative insights by updating neural representation patterns.
Article in Nature communications, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Ongoing thoughts at rest reflect functional brain organization and behaviour.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Cortical reinstatement of causally related events sparks narrative insights by updating neural representation patterns.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Narrative "twist" shifts within-individual neural representations of dissociable story features.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Music-evoked reactivation during continuous perception is associated with enhanced subsequent recall of naturalistic events.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Narrative 'twist' shifts within-individual neural representations of dissociable story features.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
We make sense of everyday events by reasoning about their underlying causes. When we connect causal links between events separated in time, we often experience a sudden feeling of "aha!", or insight. To understand its cognitive and neural mechanisms, we designed an fMRI study in which participants watched a temporally scrambled TV episode. Participants pressed an "aha" button whenever they understood something new and explained their reasoning. More than 40% of insight explanations reference past events causally related to the current event. Neural patterns representing these causally related past events are reinstated across the cortex. This neural reinstatement drives sudden shifts in cortical activity patterns ~2 s prior to aha button presses, reflecting updates in situational representation. Moreover, distributed brain areas represent causally related events with similar neural patterns, beyond shared semantic or perceptual features. Together, the study suggests that we comprehend events by retrieving causally related past events, followed by updating neural patterns at moments of insight.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.