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Description: Perhaps it is no accident that “Eureka” moments accompany some of humanity’s most important discoveries in science, medicine, and art. Here we describe an account where insight experiences play an adaptive role, by aiding humans to choose the right solution to a problem. Experiments reveal that feelings of insight—without any conscious verification or deliberation—predict confidence and accurate solutions to problems. There is also evidence that humans self interpret their Aha! experiences. One possibility is that humans use insight phenomenology heuristically in order to appraise new ideas that appear in consciousness. This functional view of insight speaks to a number of open questions in the literature: Why do insight experiences occur in certain contexts but not others? Why do insight experiences predict confidence and objective performance in some contexts but not others? Why are some insights more intense than others? What leads to false insights? We also propose the insight fallacy to describe situations where a person incorrectly concludes that a solution or idea must be true solely based on the fact that it was accompanied by an insight experience.