A sudden Eureka moment can trick you into believing something false

Science is littered with stories of “Eureka!” or “Aha!” moments – the sudden realisation of a great truth. But it turns out that these flashes of inspiration may sometimes lead us astray.

Ruben Laukkonen at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and his colleagues asked 300 people to look at a series of statements and decide, on a 12-point scale, how certain they felt about whether the statement was true or not.

The team split the participants into three equal groups, giving each a slightly different version of the task.

The first group had to solve…