by Guy Claxton
Even stress that is not particularly related to the problem-solving task itself increases this rigidity. Hospital patients who are awaiting an operation give more stereotyped responses than control subjects to the Rorschach ink-blot test, and are much less fluent and creative in thinking up ways to complete similes such as ‘as angry (or “interesting” or “painful”) as —’. They also, incidentally, become physically more clumsy and more forgetful.15
One of the people who has worked most intensively on increasing the quality of intuition in practical, real-life settings is George Prince, the founder, with William Gordon, of the well-known ‘Synectics’ programme for enhancing creativity. Prince started out with the assumption that people needed to be trained in the art of generating more and better ideas. ‘I was convinced that people tended to come to us weakly creative and leave strongly creative.’ But slowly he became convinced that this was not the nub of the problem. He realised that speculation, the process of expressing and exploring tentative ideas in public, made people, especially in the work setting, intensely vulnerable, and that, all too frequently, in a variety of subtle (or not so subtle) ways, people came to experience their workplace meetings as unsafe.
People’s willingness to engage in delicate explorations on the edge of their thinking could be easily suppressed by an atmosphere of even minimal competition and judgement. ‘Seemingly acceptable actions such as close questioning of the offerer of an idea, good-natured kidding about someone’s idea, or ignoring the idea – any action that results in the offerer of the idea feeling defensive – tend to reduce not only his speculation but that of others in the group.’ Prince’s depressing conclusion is that adults in the workplace are much more susceptible to ‘hurt feelings’ than we commonly admit, and that equally prevalent is the largely unacknowledged tendency for workers at all levels, and in all vocations, to see themselves as engaged in a competitive struggle to preserve and enhance a rather fragile sense of self-esteem. He concludes: ‘The victim of the win-lose or competitive posture is always speculation, and therefore idea production and problem solving. When one speculates he becomes vulnerable. It is too easy to make him look like a loser.’16
Just as mothers-to-be may become rather particular about the conditions in which their gestation, and eventually the birth, takes place – traditionally demanding special foods or comforts that may seem to others somewhat eccentric – so too do creators, according to their own testimony, sometimes develop personal rituals and requirements that establish the conditions which are felt to be safe and conducive to intuition. Pearl S. Buck could not work without a vase of fresh flowers on her desk, and a view of the New England countryside, while Jean-Paul Sartre hated the country, and needed to look out on to the bricks and chimneys of a Parisian street. Kipling claimed to be unable to write anything worthwhile with a lead pencil. The poet Schiller liked to fill his writing desk with rotting apples, claiming that the aroma stimulated his creativity. Walter de la Mare, Sigmund Freud and Stephen Spender, along with many others, had to chain-smoke while writing. Though collective ‘brainstorming’ is valuable for throwing up novel ideas, the conditions for deeper insight and intuition seem most often to be solitary and free from outside pressure of any kind. Carlyle tried to build a soundproof room. Emerson would leave home and family for periods and live in a hotel room. I can do three months’ good work in a fortnight in my New Zealand beach-house.
It is not only a hostile external environment that can reduce creativity. If our own belief systems are threatened, by, for example, some unanticipated implications that seem to be emerging from a seemingly innocuous line of thought, we may suppress our own intuition and speculation. What started out as an intriguing puzzle may, as we dig deeper into it, turn out to have unwanted reper-cussions for the way we think about and organise our lives. The more fundamental a belief is to our view of ourselves, or to a position on which we have staked our reputation, the harder it is going to be to re-examine. Sometimes this mental inertia is entirely reasonable: wholesale reorganisation of the mental household is not to be undertaken lightly. If someone suggests that we rearrange the furniture, so to speak, we might be willing to try it; but if they propose that the house would look better if we were to move the foundations a few metres to the right, they are likely to meet rather stronger resistance. Just so with fundamental changes to the structure of our knowledge.
Efraim Fischbein from Tel Aviv University comments on the inertia of science in this regard, but the same principle applies to the informal, everyday mind just as well.
A scientist who has formulated a certain hypothesis did not formulate it by chance; it optimally suits his general philosophy in the given domain, his usual way of interpretation, his knowledge and his research methodology. He is certainly very anxious to preserve his initial interpretation not only for his own prestige – which is certainly an important factor – but chiefly because it is the hypothesis which is best integrated in the structure of his reasoning. He will be unwilling to give up this first hypothesis because by renouncing it he has to re-evaluate a whole system of conceptions.17
Hence what has come to be referred to as ‘Planck’s dictum’, after the German physicist Max Planck: major advances in science occur not because the proponents of the established view are forced by the weight of evidence to change their minds, but because they retire and eventually die.
It is not only the whole class of things that we refer to as ‘threats’ which militates against the relaxed and hospitable mood that encourages creativity: anything that simply makes you try too hard has the same effect. Wanting an answer too much can interfere with the process of gestation. In one study, Carl Viesti asked his subjects to try to detect which of three complicated patterns was the odd one out, and looked at the extent to which their performance improved over a series of such tests. Although they were given plenty of time to examine each set, those subjects who were offered significant rewards for correct detection performed worse, and learnt less, than those who were given only a token payment. Viesti concludes that ‘regardless of their size, monetary utilities [sic] do not appreciably increase performance on insight learning tasks, rather, their presence may interfere with such performance’.18
Interestingly, the same counterproductive effect of incentives has also been observed in the animal world. Rats and monkeys who have to learn a skill in order to get food discover less about their environment in general if they are ravenous than if they are only mildly hungry. The more pressing is the requirement to reach the goal or solve the problem, the less do animals or human beings attend to the overall patterns in their world, and the more they try to pick out just those few pointers that will get the job done. This is adaptive up to a point; but if the world then changes, so that there are new contingencies to be discovered, such an attitude is exposed as blinkered and narrow.19 Incentives may increase routine productivity, it seems; but they do not create conditions conducive to top-quality insights and solutions. Too many carrots, as well as too much stick, are inimical to creative intuition.
The next quality which encourages creative intuition we might call ‘feeling it kick’. As the seed of an idea grows, it is as if the host gradually becomes aware of the autonomous movements of new creative life inside her. And how sensitive she is to these small signals, and how she responds to them, has a significant influence on the creative process. How mental gestation turns out depends particularly on the ability to turn on to the borderlands between consciousness and the unconscious a kind of awareness that is welcoming without being predatory, and perceptive without being blinding. Crucially, skilled intuiters seem to be able to watch the emergence of their creations without chivvying them, neatening them up or trying to turn them too quickly into words.
In the 1960s poet Ted Hughes gave a series of talks for young people on the radio about writing. In one of these, he described very beautifully this quality of gentle attentiveness to one’s own mind.
At school . . . I became
very interested in those thoughts of mine that I could never catch. Sometimes they were hardly what you could call a thought – they were a dim sort of a feeling about something . . . [and] for the most part they were useless to me because I could never get hold of them. Most people have the same trouble. What thoughts they have are fleeting thoughts – just a flash of it, then gone – or, though they know they know something, or have ideas about something, they just cannot dig those ideas up when they are wanted. Their minds, in fact, seem out of their reach . . . The thinking process by which we break into that inner life . . . is the kind of thinking we have to learn, and if we do not somehow learn it, our minds lie in us like fish in the pond of a man who cannot fish . . . Perhaps I ought not to call it thinking at all. I am talking about whatever kind of trick or skill it is that enables us to catch these elusive or shadowy thoughts, and collect them together, and hold them still so we can get a really good look at them.20
Hughes goes on to say that he is not very good at this kind of mental fishing, but that what skill he does have he acquired not at school, but through . . . fishing: literally coarse fishing, with a rod and a float. When you are spending hours gazing at the red or yellow dot in the water in front of you, all the normal little nagging impulses that are competing for your attention gradually dissolve away, and you are left with the whole field of your awareness resting lightly but very attentively on the float, and on the invisible, autonomous world of water things suspended below it, and moving – perhaps – towards the surface, and towards your lure. Your imagination and your perception are both working on and in the water world. Thus fishing is an exercise which cultivates the kind of relaxed-yet-attentive, perceptive-yet-imaginative mode of mind that fosters intuition; and at the same time it offers a metaphor for the way in which such a mental attitude mediates between consciousness and the undermind.
This way of gathering and inspecting the fruits of intuition without bruising them, or avidly turning them into jams and pies, is, as Hughes says, something which people are differentially good at, or familiar with; and it is also an art which can be cultivated not just through literal fishing but through any form of contemplation that invites you to observe without interfering with the crepuscular world that lies between consciousness and the undermind; between light and dark; between waking and sleep. In the gloaming of the mind, if one is quiet and watchful, one can observe the precursors of conscious intelligence at play, and in so doing may be lucky enough to catch the gleam of an original or useful thought. As Emerson said in his essay on ‘Self-reliance’, talking of creativity: ‘A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within . . . In every word of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.’21 Several studies show that there are large differences between how well people are able to access these states of reverie, and that these correlate with how creative they are judged to be. People who have vivid imaginations, for example, being able to lose themselves at will in fantasy, or to recall childhood memories in great sensory detail, also score highly on standard tests of creativity.22
In similar vein, analytical psychologist James Hillman deplores the post-Freudian party game of ‘interpreting’ one’s dreams. The dream, says Hillman, often has an integrity, an aura of both meaning and mystery, that is simply lost if one tries to dismember it into the familiar categories of thought. It is in the very nature of dreams to hint and allude. ‘An image always seems more profound, more powerful and more beautiful than the comprehension of it.’ To ask of a dream ‘What does it mean?’ is as misguided as to ask the same question of a painting or a poem – or of a sunset, come to that. ‘To give a dream the meanings of the rational mind is . . . a kind of dredging up and hauling all the material from one side of the bridge to the other. It is an attitude of wanting from the unconscious, using it to gain information, power, energy, exploiting it for the sake of the ego: make it mine, make it mine.’23 The proper attitude towards a dream, according to analytical psychology, is to ‘befriend’ it: ‘to participate in it, to enter into its imagery and mood, to . . . play with, live with, carry and become familiar with – as one would do with a friend.’ So ‘the first thing in this non-interpretative approach to the dream is that we give time and patience to it, jumping to no conclusions, fixing it in no solutions . . . This kind of exploration meets the dream on its own imaginative ground and gives it a chance to reveal itself further.’
In some of the everyday problems we face, the ‘goal’ is clearly established in advance, and the value of the ‘solution’ has to be measured against predetermined criteria. If your car dies on the motorway, you want the emergency service person to get it going and fix the fault; you do not want them to start reupholstering the seats. But if a company’s sales figures are declining, there is a whole range of possible ‘goals’ that one might pursue: advertising, customer service, market research, downsizing, product development, reorganising the structure . . . To have decided prematurely which aspect of the enterprise needs fixing may be to have missed a creative opportunity. The good intuiter is sometimes capable of delaying her decision about where she is going, even after she has set out. One of the areas where the value of this reluctance to specify the goal has been demonstrated most clearly is painting. Many artists have described the thrill of embarking on a canvas without knowing what will emerge. D. H. Lawrence, an enthusiastic amateur painter, described this vertiginous feeling.
It is to me the most exciting moment – when you have a blank canvas and a big brush full of wet colour, and you plunge. It is just like diving into a pond – then you start frantically to swim. So far as I am concerned, it is like swimming in a baffling current and being rather frightened and very thrilled, gasping and striking out for all you’re worth. The knowing eye watches sharp as a needle; but the picture comes clean out of instinct, intuition and sheer physical action. Once the instinct and intuition gets into the brush-tip, the picture happens, if it is to be a picture at all.24
A study of art students at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago by Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi looked in detail at the different working methods of the students as they tackled this task, and investigated whether there were any aspects of their modus operandi that correlated with the quality of the finished picture – as judged by the art tutors and practising artists. The students did indeed work in very different ways. From the large selection of objects available, from which to compose their still life, some students selected and handled as few as two, while others played with many more before settling on their selection. And some of them did ‘play’: they did not just pick the objects up; they stroked them, threw them in the air, smelled them, bit into them, moved their parts, held them up to the light and so on. The students also varied in the actual objects they selected. Some chose from the ‘pool’ those that were conventional, even clichéd, still-life subjects – a leather-bound book, a bunch of grapes. Others went for objects that were more surprising, or less hackneyed. Most interesting, though, were the differences in working practice once the students had started on their pictures. Some continued to change the composition of the objects, or even the objects themselves, for quite a long time, so that the finished structure of the picture did not emerge until rather late in the creative process. Others, once they had made their composition, stuck to it religiously, and their pictures took on recognisable form rather early.
The findings of the study were clear. The pictures produced by the students who had considered more objects, and more unusual ones, who played with them more, and who delayed foreclosing on the final form of the picture for as long as possible, changing their minds as they went along, were judged of greater originality and ‘aesthetic value’ than the others. What is more, when the students were followed up seven years later, of those who were still practising artists, the most successful were those who had adopted the more playful and patient modus operandi. These were clearly peop
le who had learnt how to stay open to the promptings of their intuition, and who were comfortable setting out on a journey of discovery without the reassurance of knowing in advance where they were going. They are in good company. Picasso said of his own painting: ‘The picture is not thought out and determined beforehand, rather while it is being made it follows the mobility of thought.’25
There is a whole variety of ways in which people differ with respect to intuition – and therefore an equal variety of ways in which we can set about trying to improve the hospitality of the conditions, both inner and outer, within which intuition can blossom. Being a ‘mother of invention’ is an art that we can learn. We can learn to acknowledge, and to take more seriously, the small seeds of poignancy and puzzlement that occur to us, and the gleams of thought that flash across the periphery of the mind’s eye. We can discover the contexts and moods in which we are most creative and receptive, and make sure that we make time for these in our lives. We can guard against becoming too invested in a problem, and trying too hard. We can practise the art of not neatening problems up too quickly, and of not making up our minds too soon about what would count as a ‘solution’. And we can cultivate patience. As the Tao Te Ching asks: