Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind

by Guy Claxton

  the beliefs that the primary, if not the only goal of human labour and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by ‘experts.’3

  In such a culture, time spent exploring the question is only justified to the extent that it clearly leads towards a solution to the problem. To spend time dwelling on the question to see if it may lead to a deeper question seems inefficient, self-indulgent or perverse.

  In contemporary ‘Western’ society (which now effectively covers the globe), we seem to have generated an inner, psychological culture of speed, pressure and the need for control – mirroring the outer culture of efficiency and productivity – in which access to the slower modes of mind has been lost. People are in a hurry to know, to have answers, to plan and solve. We urgently want explanations: Theories of Everything, from marital mishaps to the origin of the universe. We want more data, more ideas; we want them faster; and we want them, with just a little thought, to tell us clearly what to do.

  We find ourselves in a culture which has lost sight (not least in its education system) of some fundamental distinctions, like those between being wise, being clever, having your ‘wits’ about you, and being merely well informed. We have been inadvertently trapped in a single mode of mind that is characterised by information-gathering, intellect and impatience, one that requires you to be explicit, articulate, purposeful and to show your reasoning. We are thus committed (and restricted) to those ways of knowing that can function in such a high-speed mental climate: predominantly those that use language (or other symbol systems) as a medium and deliberation as a method. As a culture we are, in consequence, very good at solving analytic and technological problems. The trouble is that we tend, increasingly, to treat all human predicaments as if they were of this type, including those for which such mental tools are inappropriate. We meet with cleverness, focus and deliberation those challenges that can only properly be handled with patience, intuition and relaxation.

  To tap into the leisurely ways of knowing, one must dare to wait. Knowing emerges from, and is a response to, not-knowing. Learning – the process of coming to know – emerges from uncertainty. Ambivalently, learning seeks to reduce uncertainty, by transmuting the strange into the familiar, but it also needs to tolerate uncertainty, as the seedbed in which ideas germinate and responses form. If either one of these two aspects of learning predominates, then the balance of the mind is disturbed. If the passive acceptance of not-knowing overwhelms the active search for meaning and control, then one may fall into fatalism and dependency. While if the need for certainty becomes intemperate, undermining the ability to tolerate confusion, then one may develop a vulnerability to demagoguery and dogma, liable to cling to opinions and beliefs that may not fit the bill, but which do assuage the anxiety.

  Perhaps the most fundamental cause of the decline of slow knowing, though, is that as a culture we have lost our sense of the unconscious intelligence to which these more patient modes of mind give access, a loss for which René Descartes conventionally takes the blame. If the busy conscious mind is to allow itself to wait, mute, for something to come, presumably from a source beyond its ken and its control, it has, minimally, to acknowledge the existence of such a source. Modern Western culture has so neglected the intelligent unconscious – the undermind, I shall sometimes call it – that we no longer know that we have it, do not remember what it is for, and so cannot find it when we need it.4 We do not think of the unconscious as a valuable resource, but (if we think of it at all) as a wild and unruly ‘thing’ that threatens our reason and control, and lives in the dangerous Freudian dungeon of the mind.5 Instead, we give exclusive credence to conscious, deliberate, purposeful thinking – d-mode. Broader than strict logic or scientific reasoning, though it includes these, d-mode has a number of different facets.

  D-mode is much more interested in finding answers and solutions than in examining the questions. Being the primary instrument of technopoly, and as such centrally concerned with problem-solving, d-mode treats any unwanted or inconvenient condition in life as if it were a ‘fault’ in need of fixing; as if one’s loss of libido or turnover were technical malfunctions which one ought – either by oneself, or with the aid of an ‘expert’, such as a counsellor or a market analyst – to be able to put right.

  D-mode treats perception as unproblematic. It assumes that the way it sees the situation is the way it is. The diagnosis is taken for granted. The idea that the fault may be in the way the situation is perceived or ‘framed’, or that things might look different ‘on closer inspection’, does not come naturally to d-mode.

  D-mode sees conscious, articulate understanding as the essential basis for action, and thought as the essential problem-solving tool. The activity in d-mode is predominantly that of gaining a mental grasp, or figuring out. This may involve the impeccable rationality of the prototypical scientist, with her equations and flow charts and technical terms. Or it may involve the more common-or-garden kinds of thinking: weighing up the pros and cons of a decision; talking things through with a friend; jotting down thoughts or making lists on the back of an envelope; trying out arguments over dinner, discussing family arrangements, making a sales pitch. Though this latter kind of thinking may not match up to the exacting standards of the professional philosopher or mathematician, and is often full of unnoticed holes, nevertheless it is, in its form and intent, ‘quasi’ or ‘proto’-rational.

  D-mode values explanation over observation, and is more concerned about ‘why’ than ‘what’. Sometimes figuring out is designed to get directly to the point of action. But commonly, either as a means or an end in itself, what it seeks is understanding or explanation. The need to have a mental grasp, to be able to offer, to oneself if not to others, an acceptable account of things, is an integral part of d-mode. Right from playschool, adults will be asking children: ‘What are you trying to do?’, or ‘That’s interesting; why did you do that?’ And children quickly get the idea that they ought to know what they are up to, what they are trying to achieve; and to be able to give an account of themselves, their actions and their motives, to other people. They come to assume, with their parents and teachers, that it is normal to be intentional, and proper to have explanations to offer. As ever, there is no problem with this per se; it is a very useful ability. But when this purposeful, justificatory, ‘always-show-your-reasoning’ attitude becomes part of the dominant default mode of the mind, it then tends to suppress other ways of knowing, and makes one sceptical of any activity whose ‘point’ you cannot immediately, consciously see.

  D-mode likes explanations and plans that are ‘reasonable’ and justifiable, rather than intuitive. The demand that ideas always come with supporting arguments and explanations may lead one to reject out of hand thoughts that are in fact extremely fruitful, but which arrive without any indication of their pedigree or antecedents. The productive intuition can be overlooked in favour of the well-argued case. And if explanation comes to be seen as a necessary intermediary between a problem and a plan of action – if one does not feel qualified to act without a conscious rationale – then again one might miss out on some short cuts and bright ideas. Doubt, in the sense of a lack of conscious comprehension, becomes stultifying rather than facilitating; a trap rather than a springboard.

  D-mode seeks and prefers clarity, and neither likes nor values confusion. Because of its concern with justification, d-mode likes to move along a well-lit path from problem to solution, preserving, as it goes, as much of a mental grasp as it can. It prefers learning that hops from stepping-stone to stepping-stone, without getting its feet wet, like a mathematical proof, or a well-argued report that progresses smoothly from a problem, to a clear analysi
s, to a plausible solution, to an action plan. And while some learning may proceed in this point-by-point fashion, much does not. Often learning emerges in a more gradual, holistic way, only after a period of casting around for a vague sense of direction, like a pack of hounds that has lost the scent. An artist composing a still life, a client in psychotherapy, even a scientist on the verge of a breakthrough: none of these (as we shall see) would be functioning optimally in d-mode. To undertake this kind of slow learning, one needs to be able to feel comfortable being ‘at sea’ for a while.

  D-mode operates with a sense of urgency and impatience. It is accompanied by a subtle – or sometimes gross – sense of not having enough time; of wanting things to be sorted out soon; of getting irritable when the fix is not quick enough. Fuelled by this sense of urgency, we find ourselves living, increasingly, in the fast lane. And the technology – be it planes or Powerbooks, microwaves or modems – tracks this need, but also channels and exacerbates it. If you have to wait for the TV news, or tomorrow’s newspapers, to hear about the rumours on Wall Street, or a small earthquake in Peru, you’re not a serious player. Our intolerance of dissatisfaction, or even of a delay in information, comes to dictate the kind of mind-mode with which we meet any kind of adversity.

  D-mode is purposeful and effortful rather than playful. With problem-solving and impatience comes a feeling of mental strain, of pushing for answers that would not arrive by themselves, or certainly not quickly enough. In d-mode there is always this sense, vague or acute, of being under time pressure, and of being intentional, purposeful, questing: of needing to have an answer to a pre-existing question, whether it concerns a fault in the production line or the meaning of life. Once this busy activity becomes all we know how to do, the default mode, then we are going to miss any fruits of relaxed cognition.

  D-mode is precise; it tends to work with propositions made up of clearly defined symbols, preferably the hyper-precise languages of mathematics and science, where every term seems to be transparent and complete. A model of the national economy which can be represented as a sophisticated computer program, in which everything that counts can be given a measure – and in which therefore everything which has no measure has no place and no value – is taken more seriously than one which may subsume a richer view of human nature, but which is less explicit and precise. The history of scientific psychology – a d-mode enterprise if ever there was one – is full of precise theories about how memory works, for example, which make quantitative predictions about arcane laboratory tasks, but which simply ignore almost everything that people find interesting about their own powers of retention. When I was working on memory for my doctorate, I stopped telling people at parties because they would inevitably start to ask me all kinds of fascinating questions to which my detailed knowledge was embarrassingly irrelevant. (Happily things in memory research have improved somewhat in the last twenty-five years.)

  D-mode relies on language that appears to be literal and explicit, and tends to be suspicious of what it sees as the slippery, evocative world of metaphor and imagery. If something can be understood, it can be understood clearly and unambiguously, says the intellect. An intimation of understanding that does not quite reveal itself, that remains shrouded or indistinct, is, to d-mode, only an impoverished kind of understanding; one that should either be forced to explain itself more fully, or treated with disdain. Poetry does not capture anything that cannot ultimately be better, more clearly rendered in prose, and rhetoric is a poor cousin of reasoned explanation.

  D-mode works with concepts and generalizations, and likes to apply ‘rules’ and ‘principles’ where possible. D-mode favours abstraction over particularity. It works with what is generic or prototypical. It talks about ‘the workforce’, ‘the rational consumer’, ‘the typical teacher’, ‘the environment’, ‘holidays’, ‘feelings’. Even individuals are treated as generalizations, collections of traits and dispositions. ‘John Major’ and ‘Cher’ are as much abstractions as ‘the national debt’ or ‘the state of Welsh rugby’. The idea that a kind of truth could be derived from a close, sustained but unthinking attention to a single object is foreign to d-mode.

  Language necessarily imposes a certain speed, a particular time frame, on cognition, so d-mode must operate at the rates at which language can be received, produced and processed. If you speed speech up it soon becomes unintelligible. If you slow it down beyond a certain point it loses its meaning. (Old-fashioned vinyl ‘45s’, when played at either 33 or 78 revolutions per minute, demonstrate this phenomenon nicely.) Those modes of mind that work very slowly (or, for that matter, very fast) cannot, therefore, operate with the familiar tools of words and sentences. They need different contents, different elements – or perhaps no conscious elements at all. And without the familiar ticker tape of words rolling across the screen of consciousness, there may come a disconcerting feeling of having lost predictability and control. Thus d-mode maintains a sense of thinking as being controlled and deliberate, rather than spontaneous or wilful.

  D-mode works well when tackling problems which can be treated as an assemblage of nameable parts. It is in the nature of language to segment and analyse. The world seen through language is one that is perforated, capable of being gently pulled apart into concepts that seem, for the most part, self-evidently ‘real’ or ‘natural’, and which can be analysed in terms of the relationships between these concepts. Much of traditional science works so well precisely because the world of which it treats is this kind of world. But when the mind turns its attention to situations that are ecological or ‘systemic’, too intricate to be decomposed in this way without serious misrepresentation, the limitations of d-mode’s linguistic, analytical approach are quickly reached. Any situation that is organic rather than mechanical is likely to be of this kind. The new ‘sciences’ of chaos and complexity are in part a response to the realisation that d-mode is in principle unequal to the task of explaining systems as complicated as the weather, or the behaviour of animals in the natural world. Along with the rise of these new sciences must come a re-evaluation of the slower ways of knowing; of intuition as an essential complement to reason.

  The fact that language can handle only so much complexity is easy to demonstrate. Take the sentence

  The ecologist hated the accountant.

  This is trivially easy to understand. Now take

  The accountant the ecologist hated abused the waiter.

  This is still perfectly manageable. Add another (quite grammatical) embedded clause

  The waiter the accountant the ecologist hated abused loved the archbishop.

  Understanding begins to get slightly tenuous. And when we get to

  The archbishop the waiter the accountant the ecologist hated abused loved joined the conspiracy

  you have to work quite hard. You begin to need some kind of cognitive prosthesis, like a diagram, if you are to overcome the limitations of memory and understanding that are being revealed. Without the build-up, it would take some very deliberate unpacking to figure out who it was who abused whom. D-mode stretched to its limit becomes cumbersome and inept.

  Here are two other examples of perfectly grammatical language that are, in practice, virtually incomprehensible.

  We cannot prove the statement which is arrived at by substituting for the variable in the statement form ‘We cannot prove the statement which is arrived at by substituting for the variable in the statement form Y the name of the statement form in question’, the name of the statement form in question.

  And:

  Both is preferable to neither; but naturally both both and neither is preferable to neither both nor neither; but naturally both both both and neither and neither both nor neither is preferable to neither both both and neither nor neither both nor neither; but – naturally – both both both both and neither and neither both nor neither and neither both both and neither nor neither both nor neither is preferable to neither both both both and neither and neither both nor neit
her nor neither both both and neither nor neither both nor neither.

  Unless we have spent years getting used to statements like this, d-mode simply has to give up. A professor of logic might be able to make her way through these abstract jungles, but the fact that d-mode admits of levels of expertise should not blind us to its inherent limitations. Even language and logic can rapidly get out of control if we let them. And it is therefore an open question whether there are kinds and degrees of complexity which might be handled better in a different way.

  If we see d-mode as the only form of intelligence, we must suppose, when it fails, that we are not ‘bright’ enough, or did not think ‘hard’ enough, or have not got enough ‘data’. The lesson we learn from such failures is that we must develop better models, collect more data, and ponder more carefully. What we do not learn is that we may have been thinking in the wrong way. While this epistemological stance remains invisible and unchallenged, therefore, the search for better answers to personal, social, political and environmental predicaments has to be conducted by the light of conscious thought. Our efforts are like those of the man who was searching for his car keys under the streetlight – though he has lost them elsewhere – because that was the only place he could see. Thus scientists, researchers, intellectuals and those who program computers with complicated formulae in order to try to predict economic trends remain the people on whom we tend to pin our hopes in the face of difficulties and uncertainties. They are the ones who, by general acclaim, have the best, most explicit models; who have the most information; and who are the most skilled thinkers. We trust them. Where else could we look for guidance?