False insights—moments of sudden, incorrect understanding—can be triggered in anyone under the right conditions, not just people prone to psychosis or delusional thinking. In an experiment with 200 participants who completed an adapted version of the FIAT paradigm, which elicits false 'Aha' moments for unsolvable anagrams, no association was found between these experimentally induced false insights and measures of schizotypy, need for cognition, jumping to conclusions, aberrant salience, faith in intuition, or cognitive reflection. The findings suggest that experiencing false insights may be a general human phenomenon rather than a marker of particular thinking styles or psychosis proneness.
Feelings of insight help people select ideas from the stream of consciousness by capturing attention and generating intuitive confidence, enabling fast action under uncertainty. This 'Eureka heuristic' is explained through active inference: implicit restructuring via Bayesian reduction produces a higher-order prediction error (the content of insight), while dopaminergic precision-weighting of that error accounts for the confidence, pleasure, and attentional capture (the feeling of insight). The account aligns with the phenomenology, accuracy, and neural unfolding of insight, as well as its effects on belief and decision-making. Dangers include the formation and entrenchment of false beliefs and vulnerability of insights under psychoactive substances and misinformation.