This heightened awareness doesn’t always deliver the big “breakthrough” or some golden, clarifying idea for our paper, of course. That’s fine. If it provides a detail here or there, a sentence for the introduction, or a simple transition idea, it’s free money and it earns interest, incrementally sharpening our acuity so we can recognize bigger ideas—the flashes of clarifying insight—that creative people lust after. As the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur famously put it, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Seeing that quote always made me think, Okay, but how does one prepare for chance? I have a better idea now, thanks to social psychology. I’d put it differently than Pasteur, if less poetically: Chance feeds the tuned mind.
My favorite articulation of how this happens comes from the novelist and short story writer Eudora Welty. In a 1972 interview, Welty was asked where her dialogue comes from. “Once you’re into a story,” she replied, “everything seems to apply—what you hear on the city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you were writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story. I guess you are tuned in for it, and the right things are sort of magnetized—if you can think of your ears as magnets.”
What’s left unsaid here is that those overheard comments on the bus not only animate a character, they help move the story. The information we pick up isn’t merely dumped into a mental ledger of overheard conversation. It also causes a ripple in our thinking about the story, our research paper, our design project, or our big presentation. When working on that paper about the Emancipation Proclamation, we’re not only tuned into racial dynamics on the subway car, we’re also more aware of our reactions to what we’re noticing. This is not an obvious or trivial point. Remember, there’s an incredible cacophony of competing thoughts running through our minds at any given time. What we “hear” depends on the demands, distractions, or anxieties of the moment. I am proposing that, in this example, we’re better able to hear our internal dialogue about race above that chatter, and that that conversation, too, provides fodder for our work.
Can I prove this? No. I don’t know how anyone could. But that doesn’t mean no one’s tried—and made an invisible process visible.
• • •
Let’s return to the classroom, then.
When I was in high school or college, trying to write an essay or research paper, I was forever looking for someone else’s thinking to rely on. I would hunt for some article written by an expert that was as similar as possible to the assignment. This perfect “model” essay rarely existed, or I never found it, so I’d end up stringing together quotes and ideas from the articles and books I had looked through. If someone else said it, I figured it must be insightful. In my defense, this isn’t all bad. When looking into the emergence of Christianity in ancient Rome, we should know who the experts are and what they think. The problem is that, when we’re embarking on a research project—especially when we’re younger—we don’t necessarily know how to identify those intellectual landmarks. Often, we don’t even know they exist. Through high school and much of college, I remember longing for someone to tell me how to proceed, sinking into a passive, tentative frame of mind, a fear of embarrassment trumping any real curiosity or conviction. The result was that I rarely consulted the wisdom of the one thinker I had easy access to: myself. I was so busy looking for better, smarter opinions that I had trouble writing—or thinking—with any confidence.
In 1992, a doctoral student in Illinois noticed the same tentative, deferential quality in her students’ work. Ronda Leathers Dively, then finishing her degree in English at Illinois State University, was teaching a group of sophomores and juniors how to write for publication in an academic journal, using authoritative sources to make a cogent argument. By the end of the course, however, she was discouraged. She’d asked her students to write six essays of three to five pages, each focusing on a different social, political, or cultural controversy. Hoping for sharply argued, well-informed pieces, Dively instead received what she described as “cut-and-paste summaries of published scholars’ work.” Most alarming, the work was no better at the end of the semester than at the beginning. That was her fault, not theirs. She was failing them.
Dively decided that the curriculum she followed was preventing percolation (or incubation, as she calls it) from happening. For each essay, the students had only about two weeks to get up to speed on difficult, nuanced topics like waste disposal, the effects of day care on children, and drug legalization. The course, in other words, allowed for no time to meditate on the topics, no real downtime at all.
So Dively decided to throw out the program. She would conduct an experiment of sorts. It would be neither controlled, nor in any way rigorous by scientific standards; this was an undergraduate writing course, not a cognitive psychology lab. Nonetheless, it was a course she could rethink from top to bottom, and she did. The next semester she taught, she scrapped the six-essay structure, the ADHD-like jumping from one topic to another. The course would demand the same amount of writing, but in a very different format. Her students would write one essay, on a single topic, due at the end of the semester. But in the course of their research, they’d have five “prewriting” assignments—all on the experience of doing the research itself. One piece would describe an interview with an expert. Another piece would define a key term and its place in the larger debate (say, landfill dumping in solid waste disposal). A third piece would be a response to a controversial school of thought on their topic. Dively also required them to keep journals along the way, tracking their personal reactions to the sources they were using. Did the articles make sense? Did they agree with the main points? Was this expert or that one consistent in his or her opinions?
The purpose of these steps—the prewriting and the journal entries—was to force students to carry around their topic for the entire semester, and to think about it frequently, if not continually: to percolate, in our terminology. Dively was aware that their final essays would not necessarily be more incisive or readable than her previous class’s. More time doesn’t always add up to more authoritative writing, and sometimes means sinking deeper into indecision. In this case, however, her students showed her something extra. The biggest improvement, she wrote, was that they took on “an expert persona, an authoritative presence capable of contributing to the scholarly exchange.”
At the end of the semester she surveyed her students, asking about the new format. “As time goes by and I find more research, much of the information becomes embedded in me,” said one. “Now, I even question certain things which the author claims to be true. I realize I do not have to agree with everything in a professional journal.” Another said, “I had a more complete understanding of the material I was dealing with because I was able to ask more questions of myself” in the journal. One student openly scoffed at an article “written for a beginner in environmental health in this somewhat prestigious journal. I would only recommend the reading of this article to someone with almost no knowledge of the subject.”
In other words, her students were no longer looking to borrow someone else’s opinion. They were working to discover their own.
Again, there’s nothing particularly “scientific” about this evidence. It’s one teacher’s observations of one class. But what Dively did, in effect, was slow down the tape—and in the process reveal how a normally invisible and usually semi- or subconscious process plays out.
She made percolation visible.
Dively’s findings might seem anecdotal if they didn’t dovetail so well with the more rigorous work of experimental social psychologists. In effect, her preassignments were truncated “steps,” a form of self-interruption that kept the final paper foremost in mind, à la Zeigarnik. Having that goal (the paper) continually active—unfinished—sensitized the students’ minds consciously and subconsciously to relevant information all around them, like the thirsty participants in Henk Aarts’s study. Those are the first two elements of percolation: interruption, and the tun
ed, scavenging mind that follows. The journal entries provided the third element, conscious reflection. Remember, Dively had the students make regular entries on what they thought about the sources they used, the journal articles and interviews. Their thinking evolved, entry by entry, as they accumulated more knowledge.
Assembled into a coherent whole, this research—from Zeigarnik, Aarts, Dively, and other social psychologists who’ve spent the past decades studying goal fulfillment—takes some of the mystery out of the “creative process.” No angel or muse is whispering to anyone here. Percolation is a matter of vigilance, of finding ways to tune the mind so that it collects a mix of external perceptions and internal thoughts that are relevant to the project at hand. We can’t know in advance what those perceptions and thoughts will look like—and we don’t have to. Like the thirsty students in Aarts’s study, the information flows in.
If more fully formed ideas (as opposed to perceptions) seem to arrive “out of the blue,” it only means that that mixing happened outside of direct conscious awareness. Among scientists, there’s a debate about whether percolation is largely conscious or subconscious, and the answer has interesting theoretical implications. Yet for our purposes, it’s beside the point. Me, I tend to agree with the writer Stephen King, who describes percolation as the marinating of ideas “in that place that’s not quite the conscious but not quite the subconscious.” Either way, we take what we can get, when we get it.
What does this mean for a learning strategy? It suggests that we should start work on large projects as soon as possible and stop when we get stuck, with the confidence that we are initiating percolation, not quitting. My tendency as a student was always to procrastinate on big research papers and take care of the smaller stuff first. Do the easy reading. Clean the kitchen. Check some things off the to-do list. Then, once I finally sat down to face the big beast, I’d push myself frantically toward the finish line and despair if I didn’t make it.
Wrong.
Quitting before I’m ahead doesn’t put the project to sleep; it keeps it awake. That’s Phase 1, and it initiates Phase 2, the period of gathering string, of casual data collecting. Phase 3 is listening to what I think about all those incoming bits and pieces. Percolation depends on all three elements, and in that order.
Over the years, I’ve found that starting in on a labor-intensive project before doing the smaller stuff has an added bonus. Psychologically speaking, it shrinks the job. The project doesn’t continue to grow each day. I’ve already broken the skin and, as a result, the job becomes more manageable; it’s easier to sit down and resume working. And even if I can’t “get my head around” some concept after a few hours of work (doing integrals in calculus comes to mind), I know that taking a break is only a first step. As one of my favorite professors used to say, “The definition of a mathematician is a person who carries around the concept in their head for long enough that, one day, they sit down and realize that it’s familiar.”
I see percolation as a means of using procrastination in my favor. When I’m engrossed in a complex assignment, I try to do a little each day, and if I get some momentum in one session, I ride it for a while—and then stop, in the middle of some section, when I’m stalled. I return and complete it the next workday.
Admittedly, we have focused largely on one kind of creating in this chapter—writing—but that’s because writers talk about it endlessly and because, in a critical sense, writing about something is discovering what you think about it. Yet anyone who becomes a productive artist, builder, designer, or scientist engages in similar psychological processes to refine and finish their work and often have a hard time turning them off. They allow percolation to happen instinctively, because they’ve discovered through experience that a tuned mind usually delivers the goods, or at least some of the goods. (Remember the poet A. E. Housman’s quote, that there are gaps to be filled, gaps “that had to be taken in hand and completed by the mind.” You get pieces.) Knowing just that will help you move through complex creative projects with much more confidence—and much less despair.
* * *
* I’ll leave it to others to explain Mozart.
Chapter Eight
Being Mixed Up
Interleaving as an Aid to Comprehension
At a certain age—nine, ten, eleven, we were all there once—most of us are capable of the kind of blind devotion it takes to master some single, obscure skill that we’ve decided is central to our identity. Maybe it’s drawing a horse, or copying a guitar solo, or dribbling a basketball behind our back. Maybe it’s an ollie, that elementary skateboarding move, a kind of standing jump where the feet never leave the board. We don’t need a manual to tell us what to do, we just do it. Repeatedly. Head-down, nose-to-the-grindstone, just like we’ve been told. A belief in repetition is in the cultural water supply, in every how-to-succeed manual and handbook, every sports and business autobiography. There’s a reason that coaches, music instructors, and math teachers often run their students through drills, followed by more drills: Perform one hundred A-minor scales (or free throws, or wedge shots) in an afternoon and you will see progress. Do another two hundred and you’ll see more still.
Our faith in repetition never leaves us, not entirely. I sometimes think—if only I could channel my childlike devotion today when trying to learn something new. I’d channel it into the piano, or genetics, or mechanics. I’d practice like a machine, one skill at a time, until each one was automatic, driven deep into the marrow. Play Elgar, save some lives, fix the car when it broke down. At some level, I sort of believe it could still happen, given enough time. Some psychologists and writers have even tried to quantify that time. The path to exceptional performance, they argue, is through practice: ten thousand hours of it, to be exact. The gist of that rule is hard to resist, even if the number itself is arbitrary, because we read it in terms of repetition, as well as quantity. As the common exhortation goes: Don’t practice until you get it right. Practice until you can’t get it wrong.
Then I remember. I remember what happened in my own life when I did put in the time.
I was Mr. Repetition as a kid. As a student, as a music student, as an athlete. I was the one who did three hundred ollies in an afternoon, never quite getting it right. There I was, scraping up the driveway, only to look up and see some kid who didn’t have anywhere near my determination roll by, popping clean jumps without even thinking about it. Same for the behind-the-back dribble, the guitar solo, the inside-skate stop in hockey. I wanted it so bad, I’d throw myself into practicing but somehow never got good—while other kids who weren’t putting in nearly the same amount of dedicated time picked up the skills without seeming to sweat the details. Were they just … naturals? Did they have private teachers? Secret handshakes? I had no idea. I blamed my own lack of native gifts and kept looking for something that would come easily. What I never did was stop to ask whether my approach to practice was, in fact, the right one.
Nor did anyone else, at least not back in the early 1970s. At that time, scientists thought about practice in the same way we all did: the more, the better. To put it in precise terms, psychologists argued that any variation in the practice schedule that makes the target skill—whether in skating, algebra, or grammar—more immediate, more frequent, and more accurate improves learning. Brute-force repetition does that, and everyone who truly masters a skill has done at least some of it, usually lots. That’s the part they tend to remember later on, too—the repetition—and not other innovations or alterations they might have incorporated along the way.
One of the first hints that there might be another way came in a 1978 experiment by a pair of researchers at the University of Ottawa. Robert Kerr and Bernard Booth were trained in kinetics, the study of human movement. Kineticists often work closely with trainers and coaches, and they’re interested in the factors that contribute to athletic ability, injury recovery, and endurance. In this case, Kerr and Booth wanted to know how two distinct kinds of practice af
fected a simple, if somewhat obscure, skill: beanbag tossing. (It was an inspired choice, as it turned out; it’s a skill that most of us have tried, at a kid’s birthday party or some amusement park game, but that no one works on at home.) They recruited thirty-six eight-year-olds who were enrolled in a twelve-week Saturday morning PE course at a local gym and split them into two groups. The researchers ran both groups through a warm-up session of target practice to get the kids used to the game—and an awkward game it was, too. The children were asked to toss small golf-ball-sized beanbags from a kneeling position at bull’s-eyes on the floor. But they did so while wearing a harness that held a screen blocking their eyes. They took each shot blindly, removed the screen to see where it landed—then took the next shot.
On an initial trial, the two groups scored equally well, displaying no discernible difference in skill level.
Then they began regular practice sessions. Each child had six practice sessions, taking twenty-four shots every time. One group practiced on one target, a bull’s-eye that was just three feet away. The other group practiced on two targets, one that was two feet away and another that was four feet away, alternating their shots. That was the only difference.
At the end of the twelve-week course, the researchers gave the children a final test on performance—but only on the three-foot target. This seems unfair. One group was practicing on the three-foot target the whole time, and the other not at all. The group that practiced at three feet should have had a clear advantage. Yet it didn’t turn out that way. The kids in the mixed-target group won this competition, and handily. Their average distance away from the (three-foot) target was much smaller than their peers on the final test. What was going on? Kerr and Booth ran the same experiment again in twelve-year-olds, just to make sure the finding held up. It did. Not only that, but the result was even more dramatic in the older kids. Was it luck? Did the better groups have a few ringers? Not at all, reported Kerr and Booth. “A varied practice schedule may facilitate the initial formation of motor schema,” they wrote, the variation working to “enhance movement awareness.” In other words: Varied practice is more effective than the focused kind, because it forces us to internalize general rules of motor adjustment that apply to any hittable target.
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