by Guy Claxton
The greater part of the useful understanding we acquire throughout life is not explicit knowledge, but implicit know-how. Our fundamental priority is not to be able to talk about what we are doing, but to do it – competently, effortlessly, and largely unconsciously and unreflectingly And the corresponding need for the kind of learning that delivers know-how – which I shall call learning by osmosis – is not one that we outgrow. The brain-mind’s ability to detect subtle regularities in experience, and to use them as a guide to the development and deployment of effective action, is our biological birthright. The evolution of more sophisticated strategies complements this basic capability; it does not supersede it. Although the presence of unconscious intelligence is much more obvious in animals and small children, not being overlaid by their conscious, articulate intellect, it is a mistake to suppose that we grow out of it as we get older.
Yet this mistake is made, and it is partly the fault of the renowned Swiss developmental psychologist (or, as he preferred, ‘genetic epistemologist’) Jean Piaget. Piaget called this ability to master the intuitive craft of living ‘sensorimotor intelligence’, and claimed that it was of pre-eminent importance during the first two years of life, but was subsequently overtaken and transformed by other more powerful, abstract and increasingly intellectual ways of knowing. In his tremendously influential ‘stage theory’ of development, Piaget implicitly accepted the cultural assumption that d-mode was the highest form of intelligence, and through the impact that his approach has had on several generations of educators, he inadvertently made sure that schools, even primary schools and kindergartens, saw their job as weaning children off their reliance on their senses and their intuition, and encouraging them to become deliberators and explainers as fast as possible.
The ability to distil out of our everyday experience useful maps and models of the world around us is very down-to-earth; so mundane that it is, in many ways, the unsung hero of the cognitive repertoire. We do this so continuously, so automatically and so unconsciously that it is very easy to overlook just how valuable, and how ‘intelligent,’ this ability is. It represents the ‘poor bloody infantry’ of the mind: much less glamorous than the flamboyant cavalry charges of conscious thought. Yet we ignore or disparage this constant honing or sharpening of our ‘wits’ (in the practical sensory sense of ‘wits’ that I used in the previous chapter) at our peril, for it turns out that there are things we can learn through this gradual, tacit process which d-mode cannot master; and also that d-mode, if used over-enthusiastically, can actively interfere with this way of knowing. The conscious human intellect stands on the shoulders of learning by osmosis. D-mode is an evolutionary and cultural parvenu, and we cannot properly reassess either its nature or its limitations without looking at its evolutionary underpinnings.
We continue throughout our lives to make use of this unsung ability to pick up patterns and tune our actions accordingly, without being able to say what we have learnt, or even, very often, that we have learnt anything at all. When you start to listen to the works of a particular composer, your mind begins to detect all kinds of characteristics of instrumentation, harmony, rhythm and so on, which enable you to say, on hearing a new piece, ‘Isn’t that Bruckner?’ Yet how you can tell, unless you are a music scholar, you may be quite unable to say. People who read a lot of whodunnits become, often unconsciously, so familiar with the genre that they know, without thinking, that the murderer is going to be some incidental character in chapter two. When we take a new job, we may consciously collect as much low-down on colleagues-to-be, and the ethos of the workplace, as we can; yet during the first few days and weeks we are also learning a tremendous amount quite automatically: how people greet each other in the morning; how to look busy when we aren’t; what kinds of jokes are ‘funny’ and what are ‘crude’ or ‘sexist’; and so on. As people gain promotions, form stable relationships, have children and are faced with bereavement, so the usefulness of this ability to soak up know-how through their pores does not diminish.
Recent research by psychologists in both Britain and America has reaffirmed the importance of this implicit learning, and shown how it gradually develops over time. Take a professional problem such as learning to regulate the flow of traffic in a city by adjusting the number of buses and the provision and cost of private parking; or to manage a school budget; or to control a complicated industrial process such as the output of a factory or a power station. Situations like this have been studied by Dianne Berry and the late Donald Broadbent at the University of Oxford.10 Consider the factory production problem. It can be simulated as a ‘computer game’ in which the levels of various factors, such as the size of the workforce, or of financial incentives, are displayed on the screen, along with the level of the output, and the ‘player’s’ job is to stabilise the output by manipulating the input variables. The effect of each of the variables is actually determined by a reasonably complex equation which the players are not explicitly told.
Players, in their role as ‘trainee managers’, come, over a period of time, to be able to make adjustments to the input variables that do in fact bring production to the required level – but they are not able to say what they are doing, or explain why it works. When asked to justify a particular ‘move’, all they may be able to say is that they ‘had a hunch’, or ‘it felt right’. They may even, having made a perfectly good move, say that they thought they were guessing. When the task is quite a difficult one, and people’s performance is monitored over several days, their practical know-how and their explicit knowledge – what they can say about their own performance – develop at startlingly different rates. The ability to do the job develops relatively quickly, and in some cases quite abruptly; but the ability to articulate that knowledge emerges, if at all, much more slowly.
Broadbent and Berry’s laboratory results are by no means unfamiliar in everyday life. Sportspeople and musicians develop high levels of expertise which they are often hard put to analyse or explain. Teachers come to be able to make on-the-spot decisions about how to present a topic or manage a classroom situation, yet may be quite unable to justify their actions to an inquisitive student. In the introduction to a fascinating account of their work on ‘principles of problem formation and problem resolution’, American psychotherapist Paul Watzlawick and his colleagues describe how the book came about. Working together over several years, they developed some powerful new ways of, as they put it, ‘intervening in human problem situations’ so as to break through apparent impasses and bring about welcome change. However, as more and more people became interested in their methods through demonstrations and training courses, they became increasingly embarrassed to realise that they had no way of explaining how or why their methods were so successful. ‘Only gradually were we ourselves able to conceptualise our approach,’ they write – the approach which, at another level, they understood inside out.11
Other aspects of this ‘implicit learning’ have been investigated experimentally by Pawel Lewicki and his colleagues at the University of Tulsa in the United States.12 Though some of their long series of experiments arc rather stylised, they are very illuminating. Like the British researchers, they explored kinds of learning in which people can get better at doing a particular job by picking up subtle patterns embedded in hundreds of examples, but the experimental designs are rather different. In one of these designs, the people taking part in the experiment sit in front of a computer screen which is divided into quarters. Every so often a random-looking array of digits appears on the screen, covering all the four quadrants, and the subjects’ job is to detect a particular predetermined number – 6, say – and to push one of four buttons in front of them to indicate which of the four quadrants the 6 is in. The computer automatically records how long it took them to spot the target, and whether their choice of button was right or wrong. There is a brief pause, and then another (different) display appears, and they have to find the 6 again; and so on, for a large number of such ‘trials’
. The trials are grouped into blocks of seven, with a short break between each block.
As you might expect, the first thing the computer shows is that people get faster at detecting the target as they get more used to, and practised at, the task. But now comes the twist. Although it looks to the subjects as if the position of the 6 varies randomly from trial to trial, in fact there is a subtle pattern. Specifically, if you take the positions of the target on the first, third, fourth and sixth trials in a block, you could theoretically predict in which quadrant it is going to appear on the seventh. For example, if the 6 had been in the upper left on trial 1, lower right on trial 3, upper right on trial 4, and lower left on trial 6, then it will appear in the lower right on trial 7. Note that you have to register the positions on each of trials 1, 3, 4 and 6, in each block of seven. Nothing less than this will give you any useful information at all. Subjects, of course, are not told about this faint pattern. The question is: do they none the less pick it up and make use of it? If they do, this will be shown by the fact that their response times to the seventh target become faster than to the other six. (The general effect of practice and familiarity would obviously not be able to account for this differential effect.)
Figure 1. ‘In which quadrant is the 6?’ – sample grid of numbers used in the Lewicki experiments
Sure enough, over a long series of blocks the response to the seventh target becomes progressively quicker than the responses to the other six. Clearly people are picking up the pattern and making use of it. However, when Lewicki showed them the results, all the subjects were surprised at the ‘seventh trial’ effect – they themselves had not noticed that they were getting selectively faster – and they had no conscious idea what the information might have been that they were, apparently, using. If they were given some more trials, and asked to make a conscious prediction for trial 7, they could do no better than chance: 1 in 4.
Lewicki tried very hard to induce in his subjects some conscious awareness of the situation. At the end of several of his studies he told subjects that there was a pattern which they had been using, and offered them unlimited time to study all the stimulus arrays, and a sizeable financial reward if they could come up with a suggestion that was close to the actual pattern which he had been using. Nobody was able to say what the pattern was. Next, he ran a group of subjects who were actually his colleagues on the faculty of the University of Tulsa Psychology Department. They should have been able to work out what was going on, if anyone could; they all knew what his research was about. But even they could not consciously detect the pattern. In fact, when they were shown the data proving that they were responding differently to the last trial in each block, some of them confidently accused Lewicki of using subliminal messages to speed them up or slow them down. Now he came to mention it, they said, they had definitely seen something ‘fishy’ about the displays. Yet there had been nothing fishy at all; merely a pattern that was perfectly visible, if only the conscious mind could have seen it.
The evidence from these studies is clear: we are able unconsciously to detect, learn and use intricate patterns of information which deliberate conscious scrutiny cannot even see, under favourable conditions, let alone register and recall. The complexity of Lewicki’s patterns (like my impossible-to-understand sentences in the last chapter) was just too great for d-mode to deal with. But when the hare of conscious comprehension ran out of ideas, tortoise mind just kept going. Simply by attending and responding to the situation, without thinking about it, people are able to extract complex patterns of useful information. Of course there are limits to the powers of observation and detection even of the unconscious brain-mind. There must be a great deal of potentially valuable information in the world that is too faint or subtle even for the undermind to detect. But we might, en passant, wonder at the wisdom of a society which ignores these unconscious powers, or treats them as ephemera; and of an education system that persists in privileging just one form of conscious, intellectual intelligence over all others.
Mention of education should remind us that even intellectual understanding itself often benefits from this gradual, soaking-it-up-through-the-pores approach. Really ‘getting your brain round’ a topic seems to depend at least as much on the slower processes of ‘mulling over’ and ‘cogitating’ as it does on being mentally busy. Yet many educators seem to be under the impression that people can (and should) master a body of knowledge entirely through d-mode, via intentional study and ‘hard work’. One of the ‘fathers’ of research on unconscious learning, Arthur Reber of Brooklyn College in New York, described in a recent overview of the field how it was that he first came to be interested in it.
I was drawn to the problem of implicit learning simply because that has always been, for me, the most natural way to get a grip on a complex problem. I just never felt comfortable with the overt, sequential struggles that characterised so much of standard learning . . . As a result of this stance I was not a particularly good ‘standard’ student . . . I found that what seemed for me to be the most satisfactory of ‘learnings’ were those that took place through what we used to call ‘osmosis’, that is, one simply steeped oneself in the material, often in an uncontrolled fashion, and allowed understanding to emerge magically over time. The kind of knowledge that seemed to result was often not easily articulated; and most interesting, the process itself seemed to occur in the absence of the effort to learn what was in fact learned.13 (Emphasis added)
The studies by Broadbent and Berry, Lewicki and others have made it very clear what learning by osmosis is, what its value is, and the conditions it needs to operate. It extracts significant patterns, contingencies and relationships that are distributed across a diversity of situations in both time and space. It works through a relaxed yet precise non-verbal attention to the details of these situations, and to the actual effect of one’s interventions, without any explicit commentary of justification or judgement, and without deliberately hunting for a conscious, articulate mental grasp. Learning by osmosis echoes the insight of the Japanese proverb: ‘Don’t learn it; get used to it’. It operates in complicated situations which cannot be clearly analysed or defined, and where the goal is to achieve a measure of practical mastery rather than to pursue explanation. And it takes time, as it gradually extracts the patterns that are latent within a whole diversity of superficially different experiences. This form of basic intelligence, inherited from our animal forebears, remains both active and valuable throughout life – if it is unimpeded. It is the first, and the most fundamental, of the slow ways of knowing. Unfortunately, it is all too easy for it to become neglected and overshadowed by d-mode.
CHAPTER 3
Premature Articulation: How Thinking Gets in the Way of Learning
Our simplest act, our most familiar gesture, could not be performed, the least of our powers might become an obstacle to us, if we had to bring it before the mind and know it thoroughly in order to exercise it. Achilles cannot win over the tortoise if he meditates on space and time.
Paul Valéry
About ten years ago, when I was involved in helping people learn to become teachers, I remember sitting at the back of a school science laboratory observing one of my students taking a lesson on photosynthesis. The class of twelve-year-olds had been set a little practical to do, and the student teacher was walking around the lab responding to the pupils’ queries. All was going well. Sitting in front of me was a pair of girls working together who had got ‘stuck’. They were chatting quietly while one of them kept her hand in the air, waiting patiently for the teacher to notice them and come across to help. The girl who had her hand up was also playing with the fashionable puzzle of the time: the Rubik cube. (This was composed of smaller cubes – each large face having nine such – cunningly engineered in such a way that the faces could be rotated with respect to each other. The mini-cubes were of different colours, and the idea was to manipulate the cube as a whole in such a way that each face of the big cube ended up compose
d of mini-cubes all of the same colour.)
Having only one free hand, the girl was holding the cube in the other, and turning the faces with her teeth – all the while keeping up her conversation with her friend. She seemed to be giving only the most minimal attention to the manipulation of the cube. Yet, as I watched, I could see that she was making some kind of progress, and every so often stopped to reverse the last few moves and take a different tack. I went over to her and asked her to tell me what she was doing with the cube. She looked startled, both because she thought I might be ticking her off in the indirect way that teachers sometimes adopt, but also because she hadn’t realised what she had been doing. It was as if she was surprised to find the Rubik cube in her hand. She looked at me to see if I was ‘cross’, and on reassuring herself that I was genuinely interested, explained, I think to the best of her ability, what she had been doing. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Just messing about.’
Figure 2. The Rubik cube
Adults, like myself, were prone to become rather frustrated – even infuriated – with ‘the stupid cube’, and to feel embarrassed and inadequate in the face of the apparent ease with which children – even not very ‘bright’ children – seemed able to master it.1 We could not understand how to do it, and after toying with it for a while, we would give it back to its small owner, as if it were too trivial to be worth bothering with, and find something with which to repair the small dent to our self-esteem. The trouble was that we grown-ups went immediately into d-mode, trying to figure it out, and, in the case of the Rubik cube, this was not the right mode to be in. It is just too complicated for that. As with Lewicki’s patterns, or the incomprehensible sentences, the powers of logic and memory needed were beyond our normal range. What was required, if one was to master the cube, was a gradual build-up of the ability to see various recurrent patterns, and to adjust one’s moves accordingly: to sharpen our wits through the non-intellectual process of observing and experimenting that we have just discussed. And this is just the kind of ‘knowing’ that my twelve-year-old scientist’s ‘messing about’ was good at delivering. She had not yet lost the knack of this casual, apparently incidental, way of learning; nor did she seem to mind if she could not articulate its results. I, a long-time d-mode addict, had, and did.