by Guy Claxton
Karmiloff-Smith argues that these dips in performance are symptomatic of exactly the kind of searching for coherence and conceptualisation that I have described. It is as if, when faced with a challenge, children use whatever is at hand to respond to it, like someone after a shipwreck constructing an emergency raft out of all kinds of flotsam in order to keep afloat. But later, when they have a little more leisure, after the storm has passed, they move into a more reflective mode in which they experiment with taking this lash-up to bits again to see what happens, and where it might fruitfully draw on pre-existing pockets of know-how developed to cope with different situations, to make their know-how as a whole more elegant, integrated and powerful.
Language, and the ways of knowing which it affords, liberates; but it comes with snares of its own. Although it allows us to learn from the experience of others, and to segment and recombine our own knowledge in novel ways, it creates a different kind of rigidity. As Aldous Huxley said: ‘Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born – the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience; the victim insofar as it . . . bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.’10 Know-how is tied to particular domains and purposes, but within those bounds it is detailed, accurate, efficient and flexible. D-mode creates a superordinate stratum of knowledge that transcends particular contexts, but is, by the same token, more abstract, and liable to become detached from the shifting layers of experience that originally underpinned it. As the Lewicki experiment showed, once this detachment has taken place, know-how can develop pliably in response to new exigencies of experience while knowledge is left unaltered, cast in stone.
Language is not only the internal code in which knowledge is inscribed; it also relies upon, and enshrines, a public system of categories. A language represents a consensus about how the world is to be segmented, and thus determines heavily how things are categorised, talked about, and even perceived. Much has been written about the relationship between language and ‘reality’, but the only point to note here is that we are obliged to articulate our know-how in terms that we ourselves have not chosen, and which may well not be the most congenial or accurate descriptors of our personal experience. As we articulate our experience, so we have to pour what is intrinsically fluid and ill-defined into moulds that are more clear-cut, and not of our own making. The language of d-mode implies a ‘reality’ that is neater, more solid, more impersonal and more agreed-upon than the one that often confronts us. It is both an approximation – leaving out much of the detail – and a distortion – introducing fictional elements that actually have no referent.
D-mode is like map-reading: with a map we are able to get our bearings, and see how one area relates geographically to another. But maps must be simpler and more static than the world they represent; and they contain conventions that aid the interpretation of the map, but which are not ‘real’. As we climb the mountain, we do not periodically have to step over the contour lines. As we cross from England to Wales, the terrain does not change from pink to blue. It is not the case that we cannot go where there is no track, nor, certainly, that the motorway is always the best route. When the map is good enough, and we understand the status of the conventions, then d-mode works well. When we forget, as Alfred Korz-ybski11 insisted, that ‘the map is not the territory’, or when we need, to resolve a predicament, a finer-grain, more subtle or more holistic image than language provides – it is then that we need recourse to our other, slower ways of knowing. Some predicaments cannot be dealt with effectively with the tools of analysis and reason. And there are some, too, that will not succumb to an increase in expertise, such as learning by osmosis delivers. To deal with such problems, we need access to those slow ways of knowing we have preliminarily called rumination or contemplation; mental modes which deliver, it is claimed, forms of creativity and intuition.
CHAPTER 4
Knowing More than We Think: Intuition and Creativity
‘Did you make that song up?’
‘Well, I sort of made it up,’ said Pooh. ‘It isn’t Brain . . . but it comes to me sometimes.’
‘Ah,’ said Rabbit, who never let things come to him, but always went and fetched them.
A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner
In his autobiography the nineteenth-century English philosopher Herbert Spencer recounts a conversation with his friend Mary Ann Evans – the novelist George Eliot. They had been discussing Spencer’s recently published book Social Statics, and George Eliot suddenly observed that, given the amount of thinking he must have done, his forehead remained remarkably unlined. ‘I suppose it is because I am never puzzled,’ said Spencer – to which Eliot, understandably, replied that this was the most arrogant remark she had ever heard. Spencer says that he went on to justify his remark by explaining that
my mode of thinking does not involve the concentrated effort which is commonly accompanied by wrinkling of the brows. The conclusions, at which I have from time to time arrived . . . have been arrived at unawares – each as the ultimate outcome of a body of thoughts that slowly grew from a germ . . . Little by little, in unobtrusive ways, without conscious intention or appreciable effort, there would grow up a coherent and organised theory. Habitually the process was one of slow unforced development, often extending over years; and it was, I believe, because the thinking done went on in this gradual, almost spontaneous way, without strain, that there was an absence of those lines of thought which Miss Evans remarked.
In Spencer’s opinion ‘a solution reached in the way described is more likely to be true than one reached in pursuance of a determined effort to find a solution. The determined effort causes perversion of thought. . . An effort to arrive forthwith at some answer to a problem acts as a distorting factor in consciousness and causes error, [whereas] a quiet contemplation of the problem from time to time allows those proclivities of thought which have probably been caused unawares by experience, to make themselves felt, and to guide the mind to the right conclusion.’ (Emphasis added)1
The ways of knowing with which both Pooh Bear and Herbert Spencer are familiar are different from d-mode in a number of ways. Most obviously, they take time, and therefore they require patience: a relaxed, unhurried, unanxious approach to problems. In this they resemble ‘learning by osmosis’, but they are not the same. In learning by osmosis, the undermind gradually uncovers patterns that are embedded in, or distributed across, a wide variety of experiences. Know-how is distilled from the residue of hundreds of specific instances and events. But while Spencer’s insights into the organisation of society undoubtedly drew on much prior thought and observation, the process that he is referring to is one that goes beyond this unconscious distillation. This process seems to reflect not the acquisition of new information so much as the mind’s ability to discover, over time, new patterns or meanings within the information which it already possesses, and to register these consciously as insight or intuition. Though experience provides the data, the process is not acquisitive but ruminative. Pooh’s song that prompted Rabbit’s question demonstrates the same process on a smaller scale. He was not announcing the inductive discovery of a new generalisation, but simply producing something which came ‘out of the blue’.
Despite the widely-held assumption that d-mode represents the most powerful thinking tool we possess – which makes it the one we call upon, or revert to, in the face of urgent demands for solutions – the truth is that our ideas, and often our best, most ingenious ideas, do not arrive as the result of faultless chains of reasoning. They ‘occur to us’. They ‘pop into our heads’. They come out of the blue. When we are relaxed we operate very largely by intuition. We don’t usually offer a detailed rationale for our restaurant preference: we say ‘I feel like Thai’. We happily allow ourselves to be nudged by feelings and impulses that do not come with an
explicit justification. Yet when we are put ‘on the spot’ in a meeting, or are faced with an urgent ‘problem’ that demands ‘solution’, we may act as if these promptings were weak, unreliable or negligible. We feel as if intuition will not stand up to scrutiny, and will not bear much weight. There is now a body of research which shows that intuition is more valuable and more trustworthy than we think; and that we disdain it, when we are ‘on duty’, to our practical detriment.
We need a more accurate understanding of the nature and status of intuition: one which neither under nor overvalues it. Those who disparage intuition are reacting, often unwittingly, against the presumption that intuition constitutes a form of knowledge that is ‘higher’ than mere reason, or even infallible. The dictionary definitions still carry some of that inflated view, and by doing so they create expectations that are patently false. Chambers’ dictionary gives intuition as ‘the power of the mind by which it immediately perceives the truth of things, without reasoning or analysis’. The Shorter Oxford is more poetic and more presumptuous still: it gives intuition as ‘the immediate knowledge ascribed to angelic and spiritual beings, with whom vision and knowledge are identical’.2 Now while it may be the case that there is a certain quality of intuition, one which may take much careful cultivation to acquire, which does give access to a qualitatively different kind of knowledge, it is self-evident that everyday intuition falls far short of this ideal. Our promptings are notoriously fallible, whether they concern a career move or a life partner, a book that we misjudged by its cover or a new route that the ‘nose’ confidently said was a short cut, but which only succeeded in getting us lost.
Intuitions can be wrong, but that does not mean they are worthless. Intuitions are properly seen as ‘good guesses’; hunches or hypotheses thrown up by the undermind which deserve serious, but not uncritical, attention. They offer an overall ‘take’ on a situation that manifests not – not yet – as a reasoned analysis, but as an inkling or an image. Behind the scenes, the undermind may have integrated into this tangible prompt a host of different considerations, including analogies to past experience and aspects of the present situation, of which the conscious mind may not have even been aware. And this integration can happen, as the dictionary definitions say, ‘immediately’, or it may take time – even, as in Spencer’s case, up to years. But the result, when it does ‘pop up’, is always provisional. It is a pudding, served up by the unconscious, whose proof is in the eating: a critical testing which may be the reaction of the audience to an impromptu witticism, à la Pooh, the rigorous checking of logical implications, or the detailed working out of a creative poetic or artistic theme.
Fast intuitions – ‘snap judgements’ and quick reactions – are vital responses for the human being, just as they are for animals. When the present event is a variation on a familiar theme, it pays to be able to classify it and react in habitual fashion. To spend time pondering on insignificant details is sometimes wasteful, or even dangerous. No need to inspect the number plate of the bus as it bears down upon you. But these reflexes work to our detriment when a new situation looks similar to ones we have experienced in the past, but is actually different. Then the balance of priorities shifts, and it is now the quick, stereotyped response that is the risky one, while more leisurely scrutiny can pay dividends.
The importance of this shift from fast to slow thinking was graphically demonstrated in the laboratory by Abraham and Edith Luchins as long ago as the 1950s. They set people puzzles of the following sort. ‘Imagine that you are standing beside a lake, and that you are given three empty jars of different sizes. The first jar holds 17 pints of water; the second holds 37 pints; and the third holds 6 pints. Your job is to see whether, using these three jars, you can measure out exactly 8 pints.’ After some thought (which may, to start with, be quite logical), most people are able to end up with 8 pints in the largest jar. Then they are set another problem of the same type, except this time the jars hold respectively 31, 61 and 4 pints, and the target is to get 22 pints. And then another, with jars holding 10, 39 and 4 pints where the target is 21 pints. (You may like to try to solve these puzzles before consulting the notes for the solutions.)3 You will find that the same strategy will work for all three problems. But now comes the critical shift. You are next given jars of capacity 23, 49 and 3 pints, and asked to make 20 pints. If you have stopped thinking, and are now applying your new-found rule mindlessly, you will solve the problem – but you will not spot that there is now a much simpler solution. The problem looks the same, but this particular one admits of two solutions, one of which is more elegant and economical than the other.
We can easily imagine a business company – or any other kind of organisation – falling into the same trap. They may ‘think they are thinking’ about each problem as it comes along; but if they are unable to think freshly, they will keep coming up with the same kinds of answers – even when circumstances have changed and new possibilities are there to be discovered. And one of the strongest forces that prevents the discovery of these new avenues may be the habit of thinking fast: of taking your first intuitive assessment of the situation for granted, and not bothering to stop and check. Milton Rokeach tested this hypothesis, using the Luchins jars, by forcing people to slow down when they were looking at the new problems. If they were allowed to give the ‘solution’ in their own time, most people immediately applied the rule that had worked previously without question. But when they were prevented from writing down their answer for a minute, some of them pondered the problem in greater detail – and were able to discover the new solution.
Not surprisingly, this benefit only accrued to people who did actually attend to the details of the new problem during the delay. Many people reported that they made up their minds quickly about the answer, and then spent the enforced interval thinking about all kinds of unrelated things – ‘making plans for Saturday night’s party’, ‘thinking about letters I had to write’, ‘counting the holes in the tiles on the ceiling’, and so on – and for them, the extra time obviously did nothing to improve their creativity. What was more interesting, however, was the mental activity of the subjects who did find the new solution. They were not earnestly figuring out the answers, or making calculations on bits of scrap paper. They were actually musing in a much more general way on what type of questions were being asked, and what the experimenter was up to. One said, ‘I was wondering what the experiment was trying to prove.’ Another said, ‘I was thinking what the results would indicate.’ It was this kind of ‘meta-level’ questioning that led to the insight, not the disciplined application of procedures.
Let me illustrate how intuition works with the aid of a slightly more complicated example (one, incidentally, that Wittgenstein was fond of using in his philosophy seminars). Imagine that the Earth has been smoothed over so that it forms a perfect sphere, and that a piece of (non-elastic) string has been tied snugly round the equator. Now suppose that the string is untied, and another 2 metres added to the total length, which is then spaced out so that the gap which has been created between the string and the Earth’s surface is the same all the way round. How big is this gap? Could you slide a hair under the string? A coin? A paperback book? Could you crawl under it? Most people’s strong intuition is that the gap would be tiny, of the order of a millimetre or two at the most. In fact, it is easy to prove mathematically that it is about 32 centimetres, or just over a foot; so you could indeed crawl under the string. (The proof is in the notes, for those who wish to follow it.)4 The strange thing, when you work out the geometry, is that the size of the gap turns out to be independent of the size of the original sphere (or circle: the problem is not essentially three-dimensional). So you would get the same-sized gap whether you started with a tennis ball, a circus ring, or the universe. Most people’s intuition, on the other hand, insists that the larger the original object, the less ‘difference’ the 2 metre extension is going to make: in other words, the smaller the gap.
Intuiti
on goes awry here because it is based on the unconscious assumption that this situation is analogous to other, apparently similar, situations where the idea that ‘the larger the object, the smaller the change’ does apply. If we were to change the puzzle slightly, and say: ‘Supposing the oceans were neatened up into a huge cylinder, how much would the level rise if we added 20 litres of water?’, then the answer is indeed ‘not very much’; and we would be right, in this instance, to assume that the larger the original volume, the smaller the difference to its depth. The 20 litres would make much more difference to the depth of a paddling pool. It just turns out that this plausible assumption works for the height of cylinders, but not for the radius of circles. It is a good guess that in one case turns out to be right, and in the other case wrong. Fast intuitions depend on the undermind taking a quick look at the situation and finding an analogy which seems to offer understanding and prediction. These unconscious analogies surface as intuitions. Whether they are right or not depends not on how ‘intuitive’ they are, but on the appropriateness of the underlying analogy. Often we are absolutely right. But sometimes the undermind is fooled by appearances, and then it leads us off in the wrong direction.
This example also demonstrates how the way of knowing you employ may give different answers to the very same question. D-mode and intuition may well draw on different processes, knowledge and beliefs, and thus may produce conflicting solutions. If you followed the mathematics in the notes, then you might be rationally persuaded that the gap is a foot, while intuitively you persist in believing it to be minute. Below the surface, some assumptions are being made that lead to one answer. Above the surface, so it seems, different premises lead to a different answer. In this case, it turns out that the ‘rational’ answer is the right one. In other cases (as when intuition told you that there was something suspicious about the well-spoken woman at the door ‘collecting for charity’, but you persuaded yourself you were being ‘silly’) it may be intuition that is right and reason that is wrong. It is an empirical issue.5