by Guy Claxton
In another study, Smith elicited the incubation effect using the ‘tip-of-the-tongue’ (TOT) phenomenon, which occurs when you are trying to recall something – a name, typically – which just won’t come to mind, though you have the strong feeling that it is ‘on the tip of your tongue’. Using computer graphics, Smith invented pictures of imaginary animals, to which he attached names and a brief description of their supposed habits, habitats and diets. Subjects were given twelve such animals to study briefly, and then were asked to recall their names. As in the previous study, for the names they were unable to remember they were given a second recall test either immediately or after a five-minute delay. On this second test, they were asked to indicate, if they still could not get the name, what the first letter might be, if they thought they would recognise the name if they were shown it, and whether they felt that the name was on the tip of their tongue or not. The delay improved memory by between 17 per cent and 44 per cent And furthermore, even if subjects were unable to recall the whole name, their ‘guesses’ as to the first letter were more accurate when they said they were in the TOT state.
Smith suggests that in both studies there is a common explanation for the positive effect of incubation: the delay allows time for wrong guesses and blind alleys to be forgotten, so that when you come back to the task, you do so with a more open mind. There is a tendency to get fixated on a particular approach, even when it is patently not working. The delay increases the chances that your mind will stop barking up the wrong tree. ‘When the thinker makes a false start, he slides insensibly into a groove and may not be able to escape at the moment. The incubation period allows time for an erroneous set to die out and leave the thinker free to take a fresh look at the problem.’16
The idea that delay encourages a release from fixation, that it enables you to shake off unpromising approaches or assumptions that have been blocking progress, is certainly one aspect of incubation, but it cannot be the whole story, for it fails to take into account the active workings of unconscious intelligence. The fact that we can tell with a fair degree of accuracy when we are in the TOT state, whether we would be able to recognise the name if it were shown to us, and even, sometimes, retrieve its initial letter, or some other characteristic such as the number of syllables, suggests that the undermind has an idea what the word is, but for some reason is not yet willing or able to release that hypothesis fully into consciousness.
Yaniv and Meyer have shown directly that this sort of subliminal knowledge does exist. Like Smith, they investigated the TOT effect, this time reading to their subjects definitions of rare words and collecting those that subjects could not recall but felt sure they knew. They then used these words, along with other new words, in a ‘lexical decision task’, in which strings of letters were flashed on to a computer screen, and subjects had to press one of two keys to indicate, as quickly as they could, whether the string was a real word or not. It has been shown previously that words which have recently been seen, prior to the test, are recognised as being real words faster than other words which are equally familiar but which have not been recently ‘activated’ in memory. Yaniv and Meyer found that, even though the TOT words had not been consciously recalled, they still showed this ‘priming’ effect, indicating that they had been activated in memory, despite the fact that the ‘strength’ of the activation had not been great enough to exceed the threshold required for consciousness.17
One of the effects of this partial activation is to increase the likelihood that some chance event may provide the extra little ‘nudge’ that is needed to get the word to tip over the threshold into consciousness – and this provides another way in which incubation can come about. Consciously you may think that you have made no progress towards the solution of the problem, and may even feel that you have given up. But unconsciously some progress might have been made; not enough to satisfy the criteria for consciousness, but enough to leave the ‘candidate’ somewhat primed. If some random daily occurrence serves to remind you, even if only subliminally, of the same word or concept, that may be sufficient to tip the scales, and you have the kind of sudden, out-of-the-blue experience of insight to which personal accounts of creativity often refer. Many people have had the experience of suddenly remembering a dream during the course of the day, when some trivial stimulus, such as a fragment of overheard conversation, acts as a sufficient trigger for conscious recollection.
In the discussion of ‘learning by osmosis’, we saw that the undermind may be making progress in picking out a useful pattern of which the conscious mind is unaware. In such situations, we can show that we know more than we think we know. Does the same apply to the kinds of problem-solving that we are looking at in this chapter? Can we demonstrate directly that the undermind is closer to the solution of a problem than we think? And can we learn to be more sensitive to the subtle clues or indications that this is the case? Should we place greater trust, perhaps, in ideas that just pop into our minds, rather than treating them as random noise in the system, to be ignored? Recent studies by Kenneth Bowers and his colleagues at the University of Waterloo in Canada have suggested positive answers to these questions.
Like Smith, Bowers assumes that intuition is closely related to the ability to detect the underlying link or pattern that makes sense of seemingly disparate elements, and he has used both visual and verbal stimuli to explore the ways in which the undermind can home in on such patterns before conscious, deliberate thought has any idea what is going on. Consider the images shown in Figure 5.
One of each pair of pictures, either A or B, shows a highly degraded image of a real object.18 The other shows the same visual elements arranged in a different configuration. Subjects were shown a series of such pairs, and asked to write down the name of the object depicted in one of the drawings. If they were unable to do so, they were asked to guess which of the two images actually represented the real object, and to indicate their degree of confidence in this ‘guess’. The results showed that people’s guesses were better than chance, and that this was so even when they indicated that they had zero confidence in their guess. The possibility that the visual fragments of the real objects were somehow more coherently arranged, and that it was this perceptual clue, rather than any unconscious activity, that was informing the guesses, was discounted by showing the pairs of shapes to naïve subjects and asking them to rate directly which looked the more ‘coherent’. There was no difference in this judgement between the real and the rearranged images. Thus it appears, just as with the tip-of-the-tongue state, that the unconscious is able to indicate, in the form of what consciousness judges to be a complete guess, that it has got some way towards detecting the pattern, even when it has not yet been unequivocally identified.
Figure 5. Bowers’ degraded images. One of each pair represents a real object: a camera (top) and a camel (bottom)
The same finding is obtained with verbal rather than visual stimuli. Below are three pairs of three words. Within each pair, one of the sets of three words has a common (but not very obvious) associate – a single word that is related in some way to each of the three – while the other set of words is not connected in this way.19
A B
1 STICK PARTY
LIGHT ROUND
BIRTHDAY MARK
2 HOUSE MAGIC
LION PLUSH
BUTTER FLOOR
3 WATER SIXTEEN
TOBACCO SPIN
LINE TENDER
As with the pictures, people were asked to try to spot the connection, and if they could not, to indicate which of the two sets was the one that did have the (undetected) link. The results were essentially the same as with the visual stimuli: people were able, some of the time, to detect the presence of a pattern that they could not identify, and were able to do so more reliably than their own confidence ratings would suggest.
In an ingenious elaboration of this last study, Bowers devised what he called the ‘accumulated clues task’. The problem was similar to t
he one just described: subjects had to discover the single word that formed the common associate to a number of other words. But now there was a list of fifteen such words, and they were presented in sequence, one at a time, rather than all together.20
Accumulated Clues Test
1. RED
2. NUT
3. BOWL
4. FRESH
5. PUNCH
6. CUP
7. BASKET
8. JELLY
9. COCKTAIL
10. GUM
11. PIE
12. TREE
13. BAKED
14. SALAD
15. FLY
The first word was presented for ten seconds or so, during which time subjects were obliged to write down at least one association. Then the second cue word was revealed, and another response was required; and so on. When subjects thought that they had found a response that was a viable hunch or hypothesis, they marked it, but continued making further responses until they either changed their mind or were convinced that they had found the target word. Typically, over a number of such tests, people found a viable candidate on about the tenth word, and settled on a firm answer after receiving about twelve of the cue words.
If the unconscious can run ahead of consciousness, then people’s ‘guesses’ might begin to converge on the target word before they realise it. In order to check this, the responses that subjects gave before they settled on a plausible hypothesis were presented to a panel of judges, to see if they bore any meaningful relationship to the as yet unidentified target word. Sure enough, they did. If they looked back over people’s guesses, independent judges, who knew the solution, could see a pattern of steady approximation to the target; a pattern of which the subjects themselves were unaware. It appears that the ideas that just pop into our heads may have greater validity than we think, and that we therefore deprive ourselves of useful information if we ignore them, or treat them as ‘complete guesses’.
Bowers himself notes one important way in which these stylised problems are unrepresentative of problem-solving in real life. In the real world, a major part of the ‘problem’ is often that one does not know in advance what is relevant and what is not. The predicaments confronted by a business executive, an architect, a research scientist or a teacher are ‘messy’, in the sense that it is often not at all clear, at the beginning, how to conceptualise the problem, or what aspects of the available information to pay attention to and what to discard. The novice driver or medical student frequently feel overwhelmed with data because they have not yet discovered through experience what matters and what does not; what needs placing in the foreground of awareness and what can recede into the background. Bowers’ puzzles, like many of those used by psychologists (and by those who design school curricula), are carefully tidied up before they are presented. The image of the camera is degraded, but there is no ‘noise’ in it. So in his most recent experiments, Bowers has made his problems more messy, and more lifelike. His tests now include some information that is irrelevant or distracting, as well as information that is relevant and valuable. Similar results seem to be emerging. For example, as they get closer (unbeknownst to themselves) to a solution, so subjects get better at ‘guessing’ which of the details of the problem are actually relevant.
We now have empirical evidence for the existence of the mysterious ‘guiding hand’ that told Nobel laureate Michael Brown which step to take next, and Stanley Cohen which result to ‘believe’ and which to doubt. There is evidence, in other words, for the undermind, the intelligent unconscious that works quietly below, and in some cases ahead of, conscious apprehension. Both poets and scientists have always suspected as much. If they are observant, as they must be, they know it through their direct experience. When Amy Lowell was asked, ‘How are poems made?’, she replied: ‘I don’t know. It makes not the slightest difference that the question as asked refers solely to my own poems, for I know as little of how they are made as I do of anyone else’s. What I do know about them is only a millionth part of what there must be to know. I meet them where they touch consciousness, and that is already a considerable distance along the road of evolution’ (Emphasis added)
While R. W. Gerard, writing in The Scientific Monthly in 1946, foreshadowed, with his acute speculations, much of what cognitive science is finally beginning to demonstrate beyond question.
Much attention has been given to the phenomena of learning: by the slow cumulation of a correct response in the course of experience [‘learning by osmosis’]; and by the sudden grasp of a solution and abrupt performance of the correct response [‘intuition’]. They seem very different . . . but it is possible, perhaps probable, that they are basically quite similar. In both cases, new functional connections must be established in the brain; and this process may be more gradual and cumulative in the case of ‘insight’ than it appears. For here, also, much brain work precedes the imaginative flash – the theory of gravitation may result only when the metaphorical apple falls on the prepared mind – and only when the process has progressed to some threshold level does it overflow into a conscious insight.
CHAPTER 5
Having an Idea: the Gentle Art of Mental Gestation
You cannot go into the womb to form the child; it is there and makes itself and comes forth whole . . . Of course you have a little more control over your writing than that; but let it take you and if it seems to take you off the track don’t hold back.
Gertruda Stein
There are a number of metaphors that creators use to describe their process, but none more common than that of gestation. ‘Having’ a good idea is akin, they say, to having a baby. It is something that needs a seed to get started. It needs a ‘womb’ to grow in that is safe and nurturing, and which is inaccessible. The progenitor is a host, providing the conditions for growth, but is not the manufacturer. You ‘have’ a baby, you do not ‘make’ it – and so with insight and inspiration. Gestation has its own timetable: psychologically, as biologically, it is the process par excellence that cannot be hurried. And it cannot be controlled; once the process has been set in motion it happens by itself, and will, barring any major accident or intervention, carry through to fruition.
It is not just romantics who see the mind this way. Even the arch-behaviourist B. F. Skinner once gave a lecture at the Poetry Center in New York which he entitled ‘On “Having” a Poem’, and which he started by explaining that his talk had the curious property of illustrating itself, in that he was at that moment in the throes of ‘having’ a lecture.1 And he went on to develop the metaphor in more detail. ‘When we say that a woman “bears” a child, we suggest little by way of creative achievement. The verb refers to carrying the foetus to term.’ And then, after she has ‘given’ birth to the child – as if birth were some kind of property or gift that can be bestowed – we tend to say merely that she has ‘had’ a baby, where ‘had’ can seem to mean little more than ‘came into possession of’.
What precisely is the nature of the mother’s contribution? She does not decide upon the colour of the baby’s eyes or skin. She gives it her genes, but are they really ‘hers’, when she inherited them from her parents, and through them from an entirely unwilled lineage? She surely cannot take much personal pride in the hazel eyes and the auburn hair she is handing on. ‘A biologist’, says Skinner, ‘has no difficulty in describing the role of the mother. She is a place, a locus in which a very important biological process takes place. She provides warmth, protection and nourishment, but she does not design the baby who profits from them. The poet is also a locus, a place in which certain genetic and environmental causes come together.’ And, as we have seen, what is true of the poet can be equally true of the scientist, the novelist, the sculptor or the product designer.
The analogy reminds us that, although the process of creativity is essentially organic rather than mechanical, nevertheless the nature of the ‘incubator’ is vital to the germination of the seed. The mother does not engineer her c
hild’s intrauterine development, but she influences it enormously through her lifestyle and her sensitivity, her anxieties, appetites and attitudes, her history and her constitution. Who she is, and the physical and emotional environment that she herself inhabits, affects the nature and the quality of the sanctum that she provides for the growing form of life within her. And so it seems to be with intuition: there are conditions which render the mental womb more or less hospitable to the growth and birth of ideas; and differing ways in which, and extents to which, different people are able, wittingly or unwittingly, to provide those conducive conditions. The more clearly we can identify what these conditions are, the more able we shall be to see how they can be fostered.
First, one needs to find the seed – and this process, for the creator, requires curiosity: an openness to what is new or puzzling. One must allow oneself to be impregnated. Unless one is piqued by a detail that obstinately refuses to fit the conventional pattern, or a chance remark that somehow resonates with one’s own unexplicated views or feelings, there is nothing for the creative process to work upon. A. E. Housman breaths life into a hackneyed image when he says: ‘If I were obliged to name the class of things to which [poetry] belongs, I should call it a secretion; whether a natural secretion, like turpentine in the fir, or a morbid secretion, like the pearl in the oyster. I think that my own case, though I may not deal with the material so cleverly as the oyster does, is the latter.’2