I have confined this digest to unconscious thinking; there is an equal abundance in relevant quotations which refer to the motivational, affective, and pathological aspects of the unconscious, and of the dream. My intent was not to belittle either the greatness or the originality of Freud -- that would be as stupid as trying to run down Newton because he had 'stood on the shoulders of giants'. But while Newton was aware of this -- the expression is his own -- Freud, curiously, was not. He never realized how respectable the idea was on which he built his edifice.
The Mechanization of Habits
The feeling of mystery -- or of wary scepticism -- which mention of 'the unconscious' evokes is part of our mental heritage, derived from the Cartesian tradition. The tenacity of that tradition, deeply engrained in our thinking habits, makes us constantly forget the obvious fact -- rubbed in by everyday experience -- that awareness is a matter of degrees. Conscious and unconscious experiences do not belong to different compartments of the mind; they form a continuous scale of gradations, of degrees of awareness. We may call, as Leibniz did, conscious events 'light', unconscious ones 'dark' -- provided that we remember the infinite shadings from lighter to darker grey between them. The dark end of the scale extends well below the human level to an unknown limit -- which may possibly be some form of 'protoplasmic consciousness'; Bergson even asserted that 'the unconsciousness of a falling stone is something different from the unconsciousness of a growing cabbage'.
In human beings we find at the bottom of the scale the self-regulating activities which control the viscera and glands, the circulation of the blood and other physiological processes of which we are normally unaware; yet in their ensemble they may supply that vegetative or bovine consciousness of being warmly alive and kicking. From here on the scale of awareness ascends to the more or less mechanical -- i.e. less or more conscious -- exercise of practised skills: from walking along a road to picking one's way through puddles in the rain, to climbing an exposed rock-face; from tying one's shoe-strings to knotting a broken shoe-string; humming a tune absentmindedly -- singing it to an audience; adding up a column of figures mechanically -- checking it, after a mistake has been discovered, with great attention. At the top of the scale we find the quasi-hypnotic state of utter concentration on a problem, or absorption in a thriller, blind and deaf to one's surroundings.
Equally continuous gradients of awareness are found in the exercise of perceptual and cognitive skills, the working of memory, the ebbs and tides of emotion. We are conscious only of a fraction of the input into our eyes, ears, and skin; yet the intake is registered nevertheless. We are unaware of the ticking of the clock, but aware that it has stopped. While reading we are unaware of the shape of the letters because the skill of transforming them into words is fully automatized, and awareness is focussed on the meaning behind the shapes -- a phenomenon known as the 'transparency' of language. We summon memories asleep in the dormitory of the mind, while others barge in uninvited. Oddest of all, we hold ourselves and others responsible for forgetting something which ought to have been remembered. The schoolboy who has left his gym-shoes at home, the maid who has forgotten to put sugar on the breakfast tray, are held responsible for unconscious acts of omission.
The greater mastery and ease we gain in the exercise of a skill, the more automatized it will tend to become, because the code of rules which controls it now operates below the threshold of awareness. But the degree of conscious attention which accompanies the performance depends also on a second factor: the prevailing environmental conditions, the lie of the land -- whether it is familiar, or contains unusual features. The inexperienced driver must concentrate even on an empty road. The experienced driver functions automatically; but he must concentrate in heavy traffic.
We may then, somewhat paradoxically, describe awareness as that experience which decreases and fades away with our increasing mastery of a skill exercised under monotonous conditions. Mastery of the code and stability of environment are the two factors which lead to the formation of habit; and habit-formation is accompanied by a gradual dimming and darkening of the lights of awareness. On the other hand, we may regard this tendency towards the progressive automatization of skills as an act of mental parsimony; as a handing-down of the controls to lower levels in the hierarchy of nervous functions, enabling the higher levels to turn to more challenging tasks. Thus the typist can go on transcribing letters while thinking of her boy friend; and the boy friend can drive the car while discussing with her their weekend plans -- thanks to the benevolent workings of the principle of parsimony, which seems to be an essential factor in mental progress.
To revert to an earlier example: the beginner, hopefully facing a chessboard, feels uncertain about the manner in which bishops and rooks are permitted to move, and has to consult his textbook or his teacher. After some practice it becomes impossible for him to move a rook diagonally without a feeling of aesthetic and moral revulsion, of having committed an obscenity or violated a sacred taboo: the rules have become automatized, encoded in the circuitry of his nervous system. At a still later stage he learns to apply certain stratagems just as automatically: to avoid 'pins' and 'forks', not to expose the king, to seek open rook files, etc. In games simpler than chess the same type of situation will recur over and again, and the appropriate stratagems will be codified in their turn. Computer engineers have actually built electronic brains in which both the rules and the stratagems of simple board games, such as noughts and crosses, are built into the 'memory' of the machine. They can beat any opponent if he blunders, and draw if he plays a correct game. The machine illustrates the process of relegating familiar tasks to lower levels of the mental hierarchy which function as unawares -- or nearly -- as involuntary reflexes.
But how does all this relate to mental creativity? Only indirectly. The intervention of unconscious processes in the creative act is a phenomenon quite different from the automatization of skills; and our unawareness of the sources of inspiration is of a quite different order from the unawareness of what we are doing while we tie our shoe-strings or copy a letter on the typewriter. In the creative act there is an upward surge from some unknown, fertile, underground layers of the mind; whereas the process I have described is a downward relegation of the controls of skilled techniques.
In fact I have so far discussed only one aspect or dimension of consciousness: let us call it the linear scale, or linear gradient of awareness. At one end of the scale we found routines performed without awareness; at the opposite end the single-minded, hyper-awake concentration on a problem, where consciousness is focussed into a narrow beam with darkness all round. But such a one-dimensional interpretation of the varieties of consciousness, as a line running from automatism to obsession, seems highly unsatisfactory. Consciousness is a multi-dimensional affair, as I hope to show in the pages that follow. The 'linear' gradient of awareness which I have discussed is only one of these dimensions -- though nevertheless an important one. It is along that gradient that learning is transformed into habit, that the control of new skills, once mastered, slides down under its own gravity as it were, into the basement, making room upstairs for new acquisitions.
A pianist, after practising a piece for some time, can 'reel it off in his sleep', as the saying goes. The exact opposite of this process is illustrated by the famous case of Tartini composing the Devil's Trill Sonata while asleep. The first example shows the unconscious as a repository of habits which no longer need being 'attended to'; the second, as a breeding ground of novelties.
It is essential to bear both processes in mind -- and not to confuse them. Most Behaviourists accept only the first: they regard habit-formation as the essence of mental progress; original ideas, on this view, are lucky hits among random tries, retained because of their utility value -- just as biological evolution is held to be the outcome of random mutations retained because of their survival value.
Among those prepared to accept the positive role of the unconscious, there is a frequent ten
dency to confuse 'downward' and 'upward' traffic -- to equate automatism with intuition. Some highly developed, semi-automatized skills have a great amount of flexibility -- the result of years of hard training; but their practitioners are devoid of originality. Tightrope walkers, acrobats, night-club pianists, and calculating prodigies display virtuosity; a virtuoso is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as 'a person skilled in the mechanical part of a fine art'. Needless to say, virtuosity may combine in the same person with creativity; but in itself it is no more than the highest elaboration of a routine with fixed, automatized rules of the game and a malleable strategy.
Such mechanical virtuosity has probably reached its highest development in the Japanese arts inspired by Zen Buddhism: swordsmanship, archery, Judo, calligraphic painting. The method to reach perfection has been authoritatively described as 'practice, repetition, and repetition of the repeated with ever-increasing intensity', [19] until the adept 'becomes a kind of automaton, so to speak, as far as his own consciousness is concerned'. [20]* That is the method by which Professor Skinner of Harvard University, a leader of the Behaviourist school, trained pigeons to perform circus acts, intended as an explanation of mental development in man.
Exploring the Shallows
We have heard conscious thoughts being compared to icebergs, or islands in the ocean of unconscious mentation; we have heard Einstein affirm that 'full consciousness is a limit case which can never be fully accomplished'. Let me proceed from these metaphors to a closer analogy, which may help to dispel common illusions about the clarity of conscious thought.
Most people with normal eyesight tend to the flattering belief that they see the world around them at any time in sharp focus; in fact, however, they see a blur. Only a minute fraction of the visual field -- about one-thousandth of it -- is seen distinctly; outside of this centre vision becomes increasingly vague and hazy. If you gaze fixedly at a single word in the centre of the page you are reading, and try to prevent your gaze from straying along the line (which is not easy because reading is an automatized skill), you will see only about a couple of words sharp in focus, the rest of the line on both sides trails off into a haze. And how about the whole page, and the rest of the room around you?
Focal vision subtends an angle of only about four degrees, less than the angle at the point of a pin, out of a total field of a hundred and eighty degrees. Yet we are unaware of this, because we constantly scan the field with, mostly unconscious, movements of the eye, to bring the blurred periphery into the narrow beam of focal vision -- pinpointed at the fovea, the tiny spot at the centre of the retina which alone conveys true and distinct sight.
This much every schoolboy learns (and forgets); but in 1960 experiments at McGill University led to the rather surprising discovery that the unconscious movements of the eye are not merely aids to clearer vision, but a sine qua non of vision. When the subject's gaze remained really fixed on a stationary object (by means of a mechanical device, see Book Two, X), his vision went haywire, the image of the object disintegrated and disappeared -- then reappeared after a while but in distorted shape or in fragments. Static vision does not exist; there is no seeing without exploring.
With due caution we can draw a limited analogy between visual scanning and mental scanning -- between the blurred, peripheral vision outside the focal beam, and the hazy, half-formed notions which accompany thinking on the fringes of consciousness. 'Every definite image in the mind', wrote William James, 'is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value of the image, is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it'. [21]
If one attempts to hold fast to a mental image or concept -- to hold it, immobile and isolated, in the focus of awareness, it will disintegrate, like the static, visual image on the fovea: a word, constantly repeated, becomes meaningless; an idea, stripped of its hazy penumbra, vanishes like the Cheshire Cat. Thinking is never a sharp, neat, linear process; it could rather be compared to the progress of a boat on a lake. When you day-dream you drift before the wind; when you read or listen to a narrative you travel like a barge towed by a tug. But in each case the progress of the boat causes ripples on the lake, spreading in all directions -- memories, images, associations; some of these move quicker than the boat itself and create anticipations; others penetrate into the deep. The boat symbolizes focal awareness, the ripples on the surface are the fringes of consciousness, and you can furnish the deeps, according to taste, with the nasty eddies of repressed complexes, the deepwater currents of the collective unconscious, or with archetypal coral-reefs. When thinking is in the tow of a narrative, focal awareness must stick to its course and cannot follow the ripples on their journey across the lake; but it is their presence all round the horizon, on the peripheries of awareness, which provides resonance, colour, and depth, the atmosphere and feel of the story. When it comes to productive thinking, however, the metaphor breaks down -- unless we equip it with an outboard motor, a gyro-compass, servo-steering, and other paraphernalia.
The existence of an intermediary region between the 'limit case' of sharp, narrow focal awareness and the vast unconscious regions of the mind has been recognized for a long time. Fichte (and later Freud) called it the pre-conscious (das Vorbewusstsein), James called it the fringe; Polànyi 'subsidiary awareness'; the analogy with vision yielded 'peripheral awareness'; but since awareness is a matter of degrees, it would be mistaken to draw a sharp line between pre- and unconscious processes, between the shallows and the deep. What matters is the distinction between the single event (the percept, or concept, or word, or muscle-action) which for a fleeting moment occupies the focus of attention -- and the processes on the periphery which define the context, the purpose and meaning of the former.
But how do they interact? How do pre- or unconscious processes influence the direction of thought; how do some enter focal awareness and sink back again into twilight and darkness; how do they assist mental creativity? The answers we have heard up to now were of a general nature; they all asserted that such assistance was indispensable and did in fact occur; but they had little to say regarding the concrete mechanism or procedure through which it was rendered. Perhaps the most lurid attempt in this direction was made by that versatile genius Francis Galton in a famous analogy:
When I am engaged in trying to think anything out, the process of doing so appears to me to be this: the ideas that lie at any moment within my full consciousness seem to attract of their own accord the most appropriate out of a number of other ideas that are lying close at hand, but imperfectly within the range of my consciousness. There seems to be a presence-chamber in my mind where full consciousness holds court, and where two or three ideas are at the same time in audience, and an ante-chamber full of more or less allied ideas, which is situated just beyond the full ken of consciousness. Out of this ante-chamber the ideas most nearly allied to those in the presence-chamber appear to be summoned in a mechanically logical way, and to have their turn of audience. [22]
The italics are mine, and are meant to register protest. Assuming the idea in the presence-chamber of my mind is, as it happens to be, Mr. Galton himself, I can recall six distinct occasions in the last few months when I thought of him. He helped to ease the gloom of my last birthday -- because Galton lived to the age of eighty-nine; and the idea 'most nearly allied', which was summoned from the ante-chamber 'in a mechanically logical way', was 'Methuselah'. On another occasion I read about the acquittal of a woman who had been tried for the mercy-killing of her malformed baby; Galton was summoned because he had invented the word 'eugenics'; next came, logically, the 'most nearly allied' idea of Adolf Hider, whose S.S. men practised eugenics after their own fashion. On yet another occasion the closest association was 'colour-blindness' -- first studied by Dalton which rhymes with Galton; and so forth. Each summons into the presence-chamber had its own 'm
echanical logic', if you wish to call it that; and the choice of the 'most nearly allied idea', the order of precedence in the ante-chamber, depended on what sort of logic, or rule of the game, was at the time in control of the mind. Gaiton was a pioneer of the experimental method in word-association tests; but as a follower of the English associationist school, he failed to realize that association is always controlled by a code of rules, whether the subject is aware of it or not; and that different codes are active at different times.
Thus the famous analogy of the ante-chamber of the mind does not get us much further; but it helps us to clarify the problem by showing the pitfalls of the mechanistic approach, and leading us back, as it were, to our starting point. It was the comparison between the blurred periphery of the visual field and the vague intimations which pass through the twilight of the pre-conscious. We can now venture a step further, and draw a parallel between the part-automatic visual scanning of a landscape, and the mental scanning of a kind of inner landscape in purposive thinking. In both cases, the scanning process is controlled by a specific, selective code that determines which features in the landscape are relevant and which are not. Scanning a panorama through my window purely for pleasure corresponds to the aimless drift of thought along the most gratifying features -- memories, images, pleasurable anticipations -- of the inner landscape. But if I explore with my eyes the mountain before me for the safest route to the summit, or the amount of timber it will yield; for a sign of edelweiss, or a strategic gun-site safe from air attack, the whole visual field will in each case become organized and patterned in different ways; and the scanning motions of my eyes, guiding the beam of focal vision, will automatically be governed by certain rules which I am unable to name, and by a purposeful strategy determined by the lie of the land.
The Act of Creation Page 17