by Guy Claxton
In this case a ‘snap judgement’ is more reliable than a considered one. ‘Decide first, and ask questions afterwards’ may be the right strategy when dealing with non-verbal information. One can escape from the negative effects of d-mode by responding faster than thought, as well as more slowly.4 The conventional wisdom that says we should always benefit from thinking and reflecting more is again seen to be in need of revision. There are interesting practical implications from this study for the handling of eye-witness testimony, identity parades, and so on. Asking witnesses to ‘think carefully’, and to describe what they have seen, may well interfere with their subsequent ability to recognise a face from a photograph or a line-up.
Schooler’s studies have extended the range of everyday mental tasks with which articulation has been shown to interfere. In Chapter 3 we saw that learning to manage complex and unfamiliar situations, and to perform under pressure, can both be undermined by too strong a commitment to intellectual comprehension and control. Now we know that the same can be true when we are making choices and decisions, solving problems that involve insight, and even when we are simply recognising faces or other visual stimuli. However, again we should beware of falling into the trap of exaggerating the downside of d-mode. There is no value in demonising the intellect. There are many situations in life where an explicit grasp is useful or necessary. When we have to communicate our ideas to other people, in order to get practical tasks accomplished, we must obviously articulate as clearly as we can.
But we do not need d-mode just for communication. There are times when we need its analytical powers to test and refine ideas that have been thrown up by the undermind. The study of creativity in many different areas shows that what is required for optimal cognition is a fluid balance between modes of mind that are effortful, purposeful, detailed and explicit on the one hand, and those that are playful, patient and implicit on the other. We need to be able both to generate ideas, and also to evaluate them. Intuition is the primary mode of generation. D-mode is the primary mode of evaluation. Henri Poincaré summed it up when he said: ‘It is by logic we prove; it is by intuition we discover.’ For the scientist, intuition and contemplation may provide the vital creative insight that is both preceded and followed by the more disciplined procedures of d-mode. The chemist Kekulé, having first seen the cyclical form of the benzene carbon ring in a drowsy fantasy, concluded the report of his breakthrough to the Royal Society with the words ‘Gentlemen, let us learn to dream. But before we publish our dreams, let us put them to the test of waking reason.’ And Poincaré, having vaunted the need for patience, said: ‘There is another remark to be made about the conditions of this unconscious work: it is possible, and of a certainty it is only fruitful, if it is on the one hand preceded and on the other followed by a period of conscious work.’5 If we can think too much, it is also possible to think too little.
The classic formulation of scientific creativity, developed from Poincaré’s observations by Graham Wallas in his 1926 book The Art of Thought, sees it as emerging from the interplay between four different mental modes or phases: preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. In the preparation phase, one gathers information, carries out experiments, and seeks, as hard as one can, for a satisfactory explanation – which obstinately refuses to come. D-mode is employed to the limit, and finally admits defeat. Then, as we saw in Chapter 5, the problem is put to one side to rest and incubate. If all goes well, at some unpredictable moment a new idea – novel, unexpected, but somehow full of promise – surfaces. And then, after this revelation or ‘illumination’, comes the return of d-mode, to apply its tests and checks, probing to see if the promise is fulfilled, and seeking ways to turn the illumination into a form which can be communicated, and which can compel the assent of others.
But it is not just scientists who value d-mode. Artists and poets too, though they are wary of its ability to strangle the creative impulse in its cradle, know that it is also a tool of which they have need. They are clear, as A. E. Housman said, that ‘the intellect is not the fount of poetry, it may actually hinder its production, and it cannot even be trusted to recognise poetry when it is produced’. Yet many creative artists also speak of the value of a more deliberate, controlled, conscious mode of mind in sorting through the products of intuition, and shaping them into a finished product. Mozart distinguished between the conditions of creativity, and those of selection, when he said: ‘When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer . . . it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not: nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me, I retain in memory . . .’6 Not all the ideas that ‘flow freely’ are retained for future use: only those ‘that please me’. John Dryden talks of intuition, or ‘Fancy’, ‘moving the Sleeping Images of things towards the Light, there to be distinguish’d, and then either chosen or rejected by the Judgment’.7 Even the Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth are equally clear that ‘Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced . . . but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply. For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts.’8
Sculptor Henry Moore expressed in rather more detail the Janus-faced quality of the discriminating intellect.
It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work. By trying to express his aims with rounded-off logical exactness; he can easily become a theorist whose actual work is only a caged-in exposition of concepts evolved in terms of logic and words. But though the nonlogical, instinctive, subconscious part of the mind must play its part in his work, he also has a conscious mind which is not inactive. The artist works with a concentration of his whole personality, and the conscious part of it resolves conflicts, organises memories, and prevents him from trying to walk in two directions at the same time.9
It seems as if full-blown creativity works in a way that is not unlike biological evolution. As long ago as 1946, R. W. Gerard suggested that imagination and intuition are to ideas what mutation is to animals: they create a diversity of new forms, many of which are less viable, less well suited to the demands of the environment, than those that existed already, but some of which, perhaps only a few, contain features and properties that are adaptive as well as novel. The undermind accounts for the ‘arrival’ of ideas, both fit and unfit. Reason and logic then act like the environment, putting each of these candidates to the test, and ensuring that it is only the fittest that survive.10 (More recently neuroscientist Gerald Edelman has proposed, with his idea of ‘neural Darwinism’, that the development of different pathways in the brain itself is determined by a similar process. Those connections that ‘work’ to the animal’s advantage are strengthened; those that do not fade away.)11 The analogy is limited, however, by the fact that the undermind, unlike the process of genetic mutation, generates not just random variations of what exists already, but complex, well-worked-out candidates; not just guesses but good guesses, educated guesses. The undermind is intelligent in a way that mutation, as far as we know, is not.
Several artists talk of the need for conscious thought to come to the rescue of the creative process when intuition ‘stalls’, as it not infrequently does. If one is lucky, like Coleridge with ‘Kubla Khan’, the undermind does the whole thing for you. The creative product is ‘channelled’, and the only role left for the conscious mind is that of scribe. However, it is not always thus. Intuition will not be managed, and sometimes it seems to down tools before the job is completed. As Amy Lowell says: ‘The subconscious is . . . a most temperamental ally. Often he will strike work at some critical point and not another word is to be got out of him. Here is where the conscious training of the poet comes in, for he must fill in what the subconscious has left . . . This is the reason that a poet must be both born and made. He must be bom with a subconscious factory al
ways working for him, or he can never be a poet at all, and he must have knowledge and talent enough to “putty” up his holes.’12
Housman, he who is most aware of the destructive power of the critical intellect, nevertheless had to draw on it in order to get a poem finished.
Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon . . . I would go out for a walk of two or three hours. As I went along, thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once, accompanied, not preceded, by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form part of . . . When I got home I wrote them down, leaving gaps, and hoping that further inspiration might be forthcoming another day. Sometimes it was, if I took my walks in a receptive and expectant frame of mind; but sometimes the poem had to be taken in hand and completed by the brain, which was apt to be a matter of trouble and anxiety, involving trial and disappointment, and sometimes ending in failure.
I happen to remember distinctly the genesis of the piece which stands last in my first volume. Two of the stanzas, I do not say which, came into my head, just as they are printed, while I was crossing the corner of Hampstead Heath between Spaniard’s Inn and the footpath to Temple Fortune. A third stanza came with a little coaxing after tea. One more was needed, but it did not come: I had to turn to and compose it myself, and that was a laborious business. I wrote it thirteen times, and it was more than a twelvemonth before I got it right.13
The creative mind possesses a dynamic, integrated balance between deliberation and contemplation. It is able to swing flexibly between its focused, analytical, articulated mode of conscious thought, and its diffused, synthetic, shadowy mode of intuition. But the mind may lose its poise and get stuck in one mode or the other. And if its balance has been disturbed in this way, it takes time and effort to free it up again.
This process of rediscovering the complementarity of the mind’s different modes has been graphically charted in a study of ‘women’s ways of knowing’ by Mary Field Belenky and others.14 They made a detailed study of the experiences of women of a wide variety of ages and backgrounds who were studying within the formal education system, and identified five stages through which these women seemed to pass on their journey towards expanded sophistication and confidence as ‘knowers’. In the early stages of this development, they claim, many women, particularly those who have previously had little successful experience of formal education, start out feeling very powerless and inept in the face of the rational, articulate way of knowing. They feel as if they have no ‘voice’ of their own, and are in awe of others (principally but not exclusively men) whose d-mode voices sound loud, self-confident and authoritative.
But at some point, they may realise that they do ‘know’, and that there is validity to their experiences, feelings – and intuitions. In this stage of what the authors call ‘subjective knowing’, their respondents feel the first stirrings of their own ‘epistemological authority’; though this is associated not with their ability to be rational and explicit, but with the emergence of a new respect for ‘the inner voice’. ‘Truth’ is discovered not through argument and articulation, but through the promptings of gut feelings. It is as if there is ‘some oracle within that stands opposed to the voices and the dictums of the outside world’.
I just know. I try not to think about stuff because usually the decision is already made up inside you and then when the time comes, if you trust yourself, you just know the answer.
There’s a part of me I didn’t even know I had until recently – instinct, intuition, whatever. It helps me and protects me. It’s perceptive and astute. I just listen to the inside of me and I know what to do . . . I can only know with my gut. My gut is my best friend – the only thing in the world that won’t let me down or lie to me or back away from me.
This discovery is experienced as vital and welcome; but it is accompanied, for some women, by an over-reaction in which thought-out knowledge is disdained as ‘remote’ and ‘academic’, while the inner voice is accepted as inevitably right and trustworthy simply by virtue of its ‘innerness’. If it ‘feels right’, it is impossible for it to be wrong; even for it to be questioned can be taken as a mark of disrespect or felt as a violation. The sense of self as a valid knower is so precious, and yet so tenuous, that its source has to be defended against all conceivable threats, real or imagined. Instead of there being an absolute authority which is external, now this absolute is shifted inside. The feeling that there is an omniscient source of certainty remains; it is just relocated. In this move, the domains of logic, articulation and science may be completely rejected. The authors comment that: ‘It was as if, by turning inward for answers, they had to deny strategies for knowing that they perceived as belonging to the masculine world.’
It is not that these women have become familiar with logic and theory as tools for knowing and have chosen to reject them; they have only a vague and untested prejudice against a mode of thought that they sense is unfeminine and inhuman and may be detrimental to their capacity for feeling. This anti-rationalist attitude is primarily a characteristic of women during the period of subjectivism in which they value intuition as a safer and more fruitful approach to truth.
For some women this attitude may become as arrogant and offensive as that which they are at pains to denounce.
A few of the women . . . were stubbornly committed to their view of things and unwilling to expose themselves to alternative conceptions. Although they might have described themselves as generous and caring, they could be, in fact, impatient and dismissive of other people’s interpretations. They easily resorted to expletives when faced with others’ viewpoints – ‘That’s bullshit!’ . . . These were women at their most belligerent . . . adept at turning the tables on authorities by bludgeoning them with wordy, offensive arguments. In the classroom, as in life, they warded off others’ words and influence via ploys to isolate, shout down, denigrate and undo the other.
When women look back on this stage later, from the more balanced, integrated perspective that Belenky refers to as ‘procedural knowing’,
now they argue that intuitions may deceive; that gut reactions can be irresponsible and no one’s gut feeling is infallible; that some truths are truer than others; that they can know things that they have never seen or touched; that truth is shared; and that expertise can be respected . . . They have learned that truth is not immediately accessible, that you cannot ‘just know’. Things are not always what they seem to be. Truth lies hidden beneath the surface, and you must ferret it out. Knowing requires careful observation and analysis. You must ‘really look’ and ‘listen hard’.
They have realised that their love affair with the inner intuitive voice – and particularly with the brittle certainty of its ‘snap judgements’ – was a vital stage on the road to establishing their confidence in their own minds, and in developing their portfolios of ways of knowing; but that it was also tainted by the fear of uncertainty, and driven by more than a little wishful thinking. The ‘inner voice’ can easily be interpreted as telling you that things are the way you want them to be. As Minna, emerging slowly from a bad marriage and studying to become an occupational therapist, reflected: ‘I was confused about everything. I was unrealistic about things. I was more in a fantasy world. You have to see things for what they are, not for what you want to see them. I don’t want to live in a dream world [any more].’
At this later stage, knowing is characterised more by a respect for plurality and relativity, complexity and patience. The women in this study seem now to be discovering a more contemplative, less impulsive, form of intuition. The forced choice between feeling-laden subjectivity and remote objectivity begins to collapse, and knowing emerges from interaction and respect. It is no coincidence that, for these women, an interest in poetry often resurfaced at this stage. One of the women, a college senior, s
poke scornfully of critics who use their ‘so-called interpretations’ as ‘an excuse to get their own ideas off the ground’. She felt that to understand a text, you had to ‘treat it as you would a friend’; accept it as ‘real’ and as ‘independent of your existence’, rather than ‘using it for your own convenience and reinforcement’. She had become capable, in the words of Simone Weil, of a way of knowing that ‘is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being that it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.’15
CHAPTER 7
Perception without Consciousness
At every moment there is in us an infinity of perceptions, unaccompanied by awareness or reflection; that is, of alterations in the soul itself, of which we are unaware because the impressions are either too minute or too numerous.
Leibniz
We are more in touch with, and more influenced by, the world around us than we know. In the 1960s, there was a belief that cinema audiences were being unconsciously manipulated into buying soft drinks that they didn’t really want by messages flashed on to the screen too briefly to be detected consciously. Though it turns out that subliminal advertising is much less effective in persuading us to act against our best interests than we might fear, subliminal influences are indeed ubiquitous. They do not just occur when we are watching a screen or listening to a tape; they are present the whole time, and we could not manage without them. The undermind stays in continuous communication with the outside world without many of these conversations appearing in consciousness. Not only do we fail to comprehend what is going on in our own minds; we may not even see what is happening either.