by Guy Claxton
Ellen Langer at Harvard has conducted a series of studies with both high school and college students in which different groups were presented with the same information in different ways. For example, in one study undergraduates were given a paper to read which described a theory about the evolution of urban neighbourhoods. For one group of students the paper was written as if the theory were the simple truth. For another group, it was presented as a theory, using phrases such as ‘You could look at the data this way’, or ‘It may be that . . .’ When tested on their ability to use the knowledge they had gained, Langer found that, though retention was the same for the two groups, the ‘could be’ group was much better at using the information in flexible and creative ways. She concluded that the fear of making children insecure about knowledge was groundless, provided teachers present its provisional status as an intrinsic feature of knowledge, and not as personal indecisiveness. ‘Children taught conditionally [in this way] are more secure, because they are better prepared for negative or unexpected outcomes.’26
How does the distinction between the content and the learning curricula bear on the old debate between traditional ‘chalk-and-talk’ teaching and ‘discovery learning’? From the point of view of the content curriculum, it can seem terribly inefficient to allow children to flounder around ‘reinventing the wheel’, when there are so many different ‘wheels’ that have to be learnt. If the important thing is the wheels, this objection is entirely valid. But within the learning curriculum, what matters most is not the wheel but the inventing – and the strengthening of the powers of invention which occurs through being allowed and encouraged to invent. Time spent discovering things for yourself, even though someone could have simply told you the answer or given you the information, may be time well spent if the outcome is greater confidence and competence as an explorer. Discovery learning both draws upon and develops the power of ‘learning by osmosis’, and like intuition and imagination, this ability to extract patterns from experience, without necessarily being able to say what they are, continues to be of inestimable use throughout life. Both the acquisition of knowledge and skill and the development of learning power are important. Learners, whether children or adults, can flounder unproductively if they are given neither the tools nor the knowledge that they may need to get started on a piece of learning. The real enemy of the learning curriculum is dogmatism, whichever side it takes.
To be resourceful, in these terms, is to have at your disposal the full range of learning resources – different ways of knowing – and to have developed a good intuitive sense of the kinds of problem which each is good for, and the kinds of knowledge that each delivers. The resourceful learner is able to attend to puzzling situations with precision and concentration, and also with relaxed diffusion. She is able to ‘let things speak’, to see what is actually there, and not, as Hesse put it, to observe everything in ‘a cloudy mirror of your own desire’. She is able to make good use of clues and hints. She is able to analyse and scrutinise, but also to daydream and ruminate. She is able to ask questions and collaborate, but is also able to keep silent and contemplate. She is able to be both literal and metaphorical, articulate and visionary, scientific and poetic: to know as Madame Curie, and to know as Emily Dickinson. To be a resourceful learner is to have had the opportunity to play, explore and experiment with each of these ways of knowing and learning, so that their power, their precision and their pertinence have all been uncovered.
The resourceful learner has also to develop the ability to be a good ‘manager’ of her own learning projects: to be able to judge when an approach to a problem appears not to be working, when to persist, when to change tack, and when to give up. Good learning requires the ability to be reflective, to take a strategic, as well as a tactical, perspective on one’s learning and knowing; to be aware of ‘how things are going’, and of what alternative approaches there might be. Thus the learning curriculum demands that learners take on, at an appropriate rate, some genuine responsibility for deciding what, when and how they will learn, and for evaluating their own efforts. Knowing how to know develops through the discovery of the strengths, weaknesses and limitations of different learning styles and strategies, as they are applied across a range of real-life learning settings.
One cannot, as I have said, treat ‘learning’ as a new ‘subject’ to be added to the content curriculum. The evidence of ‘study skills’ programmes, for example, shows that learning strategies cannot successfully be taught directly, and that any benefits that do accrue tend not to transfer from explicit lessons into spontaneous use.27 Learning power grows through experience; it cannot be reduced to formulae and transmitted into someone’s head by instruction. Thus where the content curriculum might demand tight scheduling and supervision, the learning curriculum suggests that students be given some time, freedom and encouragement to explore. On the content curriculum, it is important that learners are told how well they are doing by being measured against ‘objective’ criteria: such feedback informs them of their progress, and may ‘motivate’ them if it doesn’t demoralise them. On the learning curriculum, however, it is vital that learners are given some responsibility, encouragement and assistance to reflect upon the value of their own efforts, because only by doing so will they develop an intuitive ‘nose’ for quality; the ability to tell for themselves, in terms of their own (largely tacit, and certainly not quantifiable) values, what is ‘good work’.
On the content curriculum, it may be seen as damaging if students are set problems that are too easy – they will be bored – or too hard – failure will dent their self-esteem. On the learning curriculum, there is less need to protect students from difficulty, or from ‘biting off more than they can chew’, for learning power is strengthened and broadened by the attempt to chew, and much of value may be learnt by pondering Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’ when you are ten (if you want to), just as it may from going fishing with an elder sister, even though you are too small to lift the rod, or from ‘helping’ your mother with the crossword, even though you solve no clues. If you are always fed a diet of problems that have been neatened up and graded, you are deprived of the opportunity to develop those slow, intuitive ways of knowing that are designed precisely to work best in situations that are untidy, foggy, ill conceived.
If the learning society is to evolve, practical changes to workplace ethos and educational methods, of the kind I have been sketching, need to be encouraged. But at a deeper level we are being asked nothing less than to conceive of the human mind in a new way. Descartes’ legacy to the twentieth century is an image of the mind as ‘the theatre of consciousness’, a brightly illuminated stage on which the action of mental life takes place; or perhaps as a well-lit office in which sits an intelligent manager, coolly weighing evidence, making decisions, solving problems and issuing orders. In this executive den, human intelligence, consciousness and identity come together: they are, in effect, one and the same thing. ‘I’ am the manager. ‘I’ work in the light. I have access to all the files that comprise my ‘intelligence’. What I cannot see, or see into, either does not exist, or it is mere ‘matter’, the dumb substance of the body that can do nothing of any interest on its own. It may manage certain menial operations like digestion, respiration and circulation without supervision; but to do anything clever it has to wait for instructions from head office.
This image continues to animate and channel our sense of our own psychology, of our potentialities and resources, and it is wrong in every regard. The naïve mind-body dualism on which it rests is philosophically bankrupt and scientifically discredited. Unconscious intelligence is a proven fact. The need to wait for inspiration rather than to manufacture it – to envisage the conscious self as the recipient of gifts from a workplace to which consciousness has no access – is likewise undeniable. We need now a new conception of the unconscious – one which gives it back its intelligence, and which reinstalls it within the sense of self – if we are to regain the ways of knowing
with which it is associated. Highlighting the ways of knowing that are associated with consciousness, control and articulation enabled the extraordinary explosion of scientific thinking and technological achievement of the last two centuries; but the cost was a disabling of other faculties of mind that we cannot afford to be without. As Lancelot Law Whyte puts it:
The European and Western ideal of the self-aware individual confronting destiny with his own indomitable will and skeptical reason as the only factors on which he can rely is perhaps the noblest aim which has yet been accepted by any community . . . But it has become evident that this ideal was a moral mistake and an intellectual error, for it has exaggerated the ethical, philosophical and scientific importance of the awareness of the individual. And one of the main factors exposing this inadequate ideal is the [re-]discovery of the unconscious mind. That is why the idea of the unconscious is the supreme revolutionary conception of the modern age.28 (Emphasis added)
This conception of the unconscious – which I have been calling the undermind – is very different from the notions of the unconscious that twentieth-century European culture generally admits – such as the Freudian subconscious, the sump of the mind into which sink experiences, impulses and ideas too awful or dangerous to allow into consciousness. This representation of the unconscious is pathological and repressed. It accepts the basic Cartesian premise that consciousness is intelligent and controlled, and therefore the corollary that the unconscious must be other than, and opposed to, consciousness: emotional, irrational, wild and alien. The unconscious cannot be ‘I’; it has to be ‘it’ – ‘das Es’, as Freud originally called it, before it was gratuitously mystified by its translation into English as ‘the Id’.
Clinical practice and the development of psychotherapy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have shown that we do indeed require this sense of the unconscious to explain aspects of human experience and behaviour – but the Cartesian image is left basically unchallenged if we make the mistake of assuming that this dark, subversive corner of the mind is the only part that lies outside conscious awareness. Even if we add on, as Arthur Koestler said of Jung, a kind of exotic ‘mystical halo’ to this fundamentally pathological picture, the core alliance of consciousness, intelligence and identity survives. The images of the unconscious that have resurfaced and survived in contemporary culture are merely elaborations of, or footnotes to, an image that continues to control the way we think about ourselves.
Yet throughout the last 350 years there has been a succession of other voices, demanding that the undermind be returned to its central place in our view of the mind. Less than twenty years after the publication of Descartes’ Meditation we have Blaise Pascal reminding us that ‘the heart has its reasons of which reason itself knows nothing’. Before the end of the seventeenth century Cambridge philosopher and scientist Ralph Cudworth was writing: ‘It is certain that our human souls themselves are not always conscious of whatever they have in them; for even the sleeping geometrician hath, at that time, all his geometrical theorems some way in him. [And] we have all experience of our doing many . . . actions non-attendingly.’ And Sir William Hamilton, one of the first philosophers writing in English to be influenced by the rise of the German Romantic movement, was lecturing on the proposition that ‘The sphere of our conscious modifications is only a small circle in the centre of a far wider sphere of action and passion, of which we are conscious only through its effects.’
In 1870 the French historian and critic H. A. Taine wrote an essay, ‘Sur I’lntelligence’, in which he deliberately elaborated the image of the ‘Cartesian theatre’ to include its unconscious background.
One can therefore compare the mind of a man to a theatre of indefinite depth whose apron is very narrow but whose stage becomes larger away from the apron. On this lighted apron there is room for one actor only. He enters, gestures for a moment, and leaves; another arrives, then another, and so on . . . Among the scenery, and on the far-off backstage there are multitudes of obscure forms whom a summons can bring on to the stage or even before the lights of the apron, and unknown evolutions take place incessantly among this crowd of actors of every kind to furnish the stars who pass before our eyes one by one.
Here, finally, we may be able to turn the Cartesian image of the mind against itself, for the bare image of a ‘thought in a spotlight’ hardly does justice to our understanding of ‘theatre’. It leaves out at least two things without which theatre simply isn’t theatre: the wings, and the nature of drama itself. The action on the stage only makes sense in terms of entrances and exits. Actors are not borne on stage; they arrive, and then, after a while, they leave. And we know they arrive from somewhere, and go to somewhere. If we do not know – even when we are not consciously thinking about it – that there is a ‘behind the scenes’ of dressing-rooms, technicians, props and paraphernalia, and a hidden world of rehearsal and discussion in which interpretations and performances are much more fluid and tentative than those that finally appear, in costume, in front of the footlights, then we don’t understand what ‘theatre’ is. The visible performance presupposes an enormous amount of invisible apparatus and activity.
Likewise we are liable to become very confused if we don’t understand the distinction between the actor and the role; between drama and ‘real life’. What we watch in the theatre is a simulation, a fiction, that is designed to resemble ‘real life’, but also to dramatise it; to distort, highlight, doctor and if necessary mislead, in order to make a point or create an effect. If you forget that what is happening on stage is not ‘real’, then you will find yourself cowering in your front-row seat when the villain pulls a gun, or scrambling up on to the stage in order to save the heroine from a fate worse than death. A good ‘play’ may engage your attention and your sympathies, you may ‘lose yourself’ in its world for a while, but if ultimately you cannot tell the difference between play and reality, you will be in trouble. To assume that consciousness is showing and telling us the complete and literal truth is to make precisely that mistake. Thus once we begin to analyse the metaphor of the theatre, it starts immediately to unravel and subvert itself. We find that we cannot do without the wings of the undermind; and we cannot take what is going on in consciousness at face value.
An image such as the expanded theatre can help to convey a feeling for the new relationship between conscious and unconscious that we are seeking, but, in a d-mode culture, such images do not carry much weight. The voices of philosophy, poetry and imagery are relatively weak in a world that largely assumes that only science and reason speak with true authority. Thus, paradoxically, it is only science itself that can bring credible tidings of unscientific ways of knowing. One must speak to d-mode in its own language if it is to entertain the idea that it may itself be limited. The empirical research on the slower ways of knowing, and on the cognitive capacity of the undermind, can contribute significantly to the creation of the much-needed shift in our understanding of the mind. As this research gathers further momentum, it will, it must be hoped, seep into the culture at large, and encourage educators, executives and politicians to use mental tools more suited to the intricate jobs that confront them. The hare brain has had a good run for its money. Now it is time to give the tortoise mind its due.
Notes
Chapter 1
1. See Fensham, P. J. and Marton, F., ‘What has happened to intuition in science education?’, Research in Science Education, Vol. 22 (1992), pp. 114–22. This paragraph comprises a collection of assertions which I shall unpack and justify as the argument unfolds.
2. Norberg-Hodge, Helena, Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh (Shaftesbury: Element, 1991).
3. Postman, Neil, Technopoly (New York: Knopf, 1992).
4. The demonstration that there is a source of ‘unconscious intelligence’ in the mind is crucial to the argument of the book, and so that we can talk about the processes and properties of this source, it needs a name – or names. Sometimes I shall just call it ‘t
he unconscious’, and distinguish it from the Freudian repository of repressed memories by referring to the latter as the ‘subconscious’. Where the contrast needs making more strongly, I shall use the expressions ‘the intelligent unconscious’ or ‘the cognitive unconscious’. For variety, and where I feel there may be a danger that using the term ‘the unconscious’ may import unhelpful connotations, I shall also use my own coinage, ‘the undermind’. When we go on to discuss how unconscious intelligence is exemplified in and generated by real flesh-and-blood human beings, I shall refer to the source as ‘the unconscious biocomputer’, or sometimes just as the ‘brain-mind’. My intention is that, by using a range of different terms, I shall be able to build up a composite picture of ‘the intelligent unconscious’ that does justice to its many faces and functions.
5. There is presently an explosion of interest, both popular and scholarly, in the subject of consciousness. Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, Roger Penrose’s Shadows of the Mind and Robert Ornstein’s The Psychology of Consciousness are just four of the dozens of books that have appeared in the last few years on the nature, the evolution and the function of the conscious mind. My book is partly a reflection of this wave of enthusiasm, and partly a reaction against it. I certainly have things to say about what consciousness is and what it is for, but I also argue that we cannot understand the nature of the conscious mind without having a better image of the dark, inaccessible layers – the minds behind the mind – that underlie it, and from which it springs. Consciousness can only be understood in relation to the unconscious. If we persist in trying to make sense of consciousness in and on its own terms, we shall continue to see those modes of mind that are most associated with consciousness as pre-eminent; and continue to ignore or undervalue those that are less conscious, less deliberate, or which require a different image of mind if they are to become visible, and to make sense. Fascinating though it is, much of this wave of research and speculation on consciousness must be seen as symptomatic of our cultural obsession with the conscious intellect, and not a corrective to it. None of these books has anything to say about the practical effect on our psychology of this reconceptualisation of the relationship between conscious and unconscious.