Who am I?
I am a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from Milan who studies creativity and insight problem solving. My research examines the mechanisms underlying the creative process: how an idea is born, emerges, and develops in the mind.
One recurring question is how the visual and attention systems behave while a person reaches a solution through sudden insight rather than through deliberate step-by-step analysis.
What does our attention system do when we “think outside the box”?
Looking outside of the box to think outside the box
People often report getting good ideas while shutting their eyes, looking at a blank wall, or looking out a window. Research has compared eye movements and blinking around insight and analytic solutions.
In the reported experiments, eye-movement and blink patterns differed by problem-solving style. The findings were interpreted as evidence that insight can involve reduced sampling of external information and a stronger inward focus of attention.
“Aha is right!” — should we trust our insights?
Another line of work asks whether the subjective certainty that accompanies insight corresponds to higher solution accuracy. This question was tested across linguistic, visual, and mixed problems.
A later peer-reviewed study reported that, across four experiments, participants’ self-judged insight solutions were on average more accurate than their analytic solutions. That result does not mean every intuitive feeling is reliable; it applies to the specific problem-solving tasks and procedures used in the experiments.
Insight research in Italy
Work begun in 2013 focused on creating and validating Italian versions of rebus problems and Compound Remote Associate word problems, in collaboration with researchers connected to Northwestern University and the University of Milano-Bicocca.
Where the research has moved
Current work in the field continues to examine the neural architecture of insight. In 2026, a BMC Psychology paper co-authored by Carola Salvi used diffusion tensor imaging to investigate how white-matter microstructure relates to a tendency to solve Compound Remote Associate problems through insight versus step-by-step reasoning.