by Guy Claxton
The ‘slow ways of knowing’ are, in general, those that lack any or all of the characteristics of d-mode. They spend time on uncovering what may lie behind a particular question. They do not rush into conceptualisation, but are content to explore more fully the situation itself before deciding what to make of it. They like to stay close to the particular. They are tolerant of information that is faint, fleeting, ephemeral, marginal or ambiguous; they like to dwell on details which do not ‘fit’ or immediately make sense. They are relaxed, leisurely and playful; willing to explore without knowing what they are looking for. They see ignorance and confusion as the ground from which understanding may spring. They use the rich, allusive media of imagination, myth and dream. They are receptive rather than proactive. They are happy to relinquish the sense of control over the directions that the mind spontaneously takes. And they are prepared to take seriously ideas that come ‘out of the blue’, without any ready-made train of rational thought to justify them. These are the modes of mind that the following chapters will explore, in order both to reveal their nature and their value and also to uncover ways in which they might be rehabilitated.
In order to rehabilitate the slow ways of knowing, we need to adopt a different view of the mind as a whole: one which embraces sources of knowledge that are less articulate, less conscious and less predictable. The undermind is the key resource on which slow knowing draws, so we need new metaphors and images for the relationship between conscious and unconscious which escape from the polarisation to which both Descartes and Freud, from their different sides, subscribed. Only in the light of new models of the mind will we see the possibility and the point of more patient, receptive ways of knowing, and be able to cultivate – and tolerate – the conditions which they require.
The crucial step in this recovery is not the acquisition of a new psychological technology (brainstorming, visualisation, mnemonics and so on), but a revised understanding of the human mind, and a willingness to move into, and to enjoy, the life of the mind as it is lived in the shadowlands rather than under the bright lights of consciousness. Clever mental techniques – devices that ‘tap’ the resources of the ‘right hemisphere’, as if it were a barrel of beer – miss the point if they leave in place the same questing, restless attitude of mind. In many courses on ‘creative management’ or ‘experiential learning’, it is a case of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Instead of calling a meeting to ‘discuss’ the problem, you call one to ‘brainstorm’ it, or to get people to draw it with crayons. But the pressure for results, the underlying impatience, is still there. The key to the undermind is not an overlay of technique but radical reconceptualisation. When the mind slows and relaxes, other ways of knowing automatically reappear. If and when this shift of mental mood takes place, then some different strategies of thought may indeed be helpful, but, without it, they are useless. (This, incidentally, explains why the enthusiasm for each new, much-hyped mental technology has such a disappointingly short half-life.)6
Another step in the recovery of the slower ways of knowing is to recognise that these forms of cognition are not the exclusive province of special groups of people – poets, mystics or sages – nor do they appear only on special occasions. They have sometimes been talked about in rather mystifying ways, as the work of ‘the muse’, or as signifying great gifts, or special states of grace. Such talk makes slow knowing look rather awesome and arcane. One feels intimidated, as if such mental modes were beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, or had little to do with the mundane realities of modern life. This is a false and unhelpful impression. A ‘poetic way of knowing’ is not the special prerogative of those who string words together in certain ways. It is accessible, and of value, to anyone. And though it cannot be trained, taught or engineered, it can be cultivated by anyone.
So Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind is about why it is a good idea to pull off the Information Super-Highway into the Information Super Lay-By; to stop chasing after more data and better solutions and to rest for a while. It is about why it is sometimes more intelligent to be less busy; why there are ideas one can gain access to by loafing which are inaccessible to earnest, purposeful cognition. And it is about the reasons why these natural endowments of the human mind have become neglected in twentieth-century Euro-American culture, and why, in this culture, they are sorely missed.
CHAPTER 2
Basic Intelligence: Learning by Osmosis
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copybooks and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in battle – they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
A. N. Whitehead
It is February: summer in New Zealand. I am closeted with my laptop in a beach-house on the west coast of the North Island (overlooking what surfers tell me is the best left-hand break in the Southern Hemisphere), and there are a lot of flies. I find them, especially the big brown ones, very distracting, so, despite my Buddhist leanings, I swat them. There are also a number of spiders, long-legged and small-bodied, which I rather like. This morning I dropped a freshly swatted fly into the web of one of the spiders. I then proceeded to watch, rapt, for twenty minutes as the spider manoeuvred the fly from where I had placed it to its own dining area, a distance of some twelve centimetres. First it spun a coat round the fly to hold it secure. Then it delicately cut away the strands of web that were supporting it, until it was left dangling only by a few threads. Holding on to the web above with two legs, and clasping the fly with the others, it pulled it towards its destination by about half a centimetre, and secured it with another thread. It released the strands that were now holding the fly back, allowing it to swing a little towards the goal, and spun some more ties to hold it in its new position. Taking up the diagonal position, it hauled its prize sideways again, secured it, and then cast off the ropes that were restraining it. And so it went, until lunch was finally in the right place.
The equivalent task for me, I computed, would have been something like single-handedly transporting a blue whale a distance of 120 metres across a bottomless abyss, equipped only with some very strong elastic, grappling hooks, and a sharp knife. This perilous feat of engineering would have taken a great deal of thought and calculation to counter the constant risk that one false move, such as cutting the wrong string at the wrong moment, would send the whale, and very possibly me as well, plummeting into the void. The spider; whose whole body was two millimetres long, with a minute brain, didn’t make a mistake. I was impressed. I did not feel obliged to credit the spider with consciousness; but I had to marvel at its intelligence.
There is a resurgence of interest in the concept of ‘intelligence’ these days, prompted, in large measure, by a growing dissatisfaction with the assumption that d-mode is the be-all and end-all of human cognition. Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner has suggested that there are ‘multiple intelligences’, of which he claims to have identified eight and a half, and which resemble quite closely the subjects of the traditional school curriculum.1 Daniel Goleman argues for a rapprochement between reason and feeling with his notion of ‘emotional intelligence’.2 But to understand more broadly how the different facets of intelligence fit together, we have to find an approach that does not presuppose the primacy of the intellect.
At its most basic, intelligence is what enables an organism to pursue its goals and interests as successfully as possible in the whole intricate predicament in which it finds itself. My spider had been designed by evolution to perform, within its own world, the most challenging of tasks in an efficient and sophisticated way. These miracles of intelligent adaptation are commonplace in the animal kingdom, and many of them have been documented rather more systematically than my spid
er. If a rat eats a meal that consists of a mixture of a familiar and an unfamiliar food, and subsequently becomes sick, it will in future avoid the new food but not the familiar one.3 That, I think, is intelligent.
Much of human intelligence, too, has little to do with d-mode. A baby is being intelligent when it smiles hopefully at its mother, or turns its head away from a looming object. A teenager is being intelligent when learning to get along in school by blending into the background, or deploying a disarming humour. A poet is being intelligent when considering a variety of candidates for the mot juste. And though a mathematician is also being intelligent as she tries to work out the solution to a complex problem, her finely honed intellectual ability is just one variety of intelligence, and a rather peculiar and arcane one at that. Intelligence may be associated with words, logical argument, explicit trains of thought or articulate explanation, but it may equally well not be. Fundamentally, intelligence helps animals, including human beings, to survive.
The most basic of these strategies, common to all levels of life from amoebas to archbishops, is the bred-in-the-bone tendency to approach and maintain conditions which favour survival, and to avoid or escape from conditions which are aversive. The former conditions we call ‘needs’; the latter ‘threats’. Evolution has equipped every animal with a repertoire, large or small, of ways to minimise the risk of damage and enhance its wellbeing. The spider weaves its web, manoeuvres its prey, and freezes when the air moves in a disturbing way. The digger wasp, sphex ichneumoneus, which cleverly buries a paralysed cricket alongside her eggs for the newborn grubs to feed on, always leaves the cricket outside her burrow while she goes in to make sure all is well, before dragging it in.4 Even potential threats are allowed for in such reflex behaviour.
But the genetically given reactions to threats of ‘fight, flight, freeze and check’, though helpful, are by no means infallible. A spider may go still, despite being dangerously highlighted against the background of a white bathtub. If an interfering ethologist steals the cricket every time sphex makes her subterranean safety check, she cannot adapt. She never realises that in this new world it may make more sense to drag the cricket in with her first time. A baby shows distress even though the looming object is actually a rapidly inflated balloon, and not a projectile. Reflexes, though intelligent, may be turned on their heads by unprecedented events: those for which evolution has not had time to prepare you. Such reflexes provide a vital starter kit of survival intelligence, but if the ability to build on these wired-in, entry-level responses is lacking, an animal remains highly vulnerable to change.
So the next stage in the evolution of intelligence is learning. Gathering knowledge and developing expertise are survival strategies. In unfamiliar situations, animals are at risk. They are unable to predict and control what is going on. Potential sources of succour may go unrecognised. Actual threats may not be perceived until it is too late. Uncertainty may always conceal danger. The ability to reduce uncertainty, to convert strangeness into known-ness, therefore offers a powerful evolutionary advantage. All the different ways of learning and knowing which human beings possess, however sophisticated, spring ultimately from this biological imperative. Crudely, we might say that ‘knowing’ is a state in which useful patterns in the world have been registered, and can be used to guide future action. ‘Learning’ is the activity whereby these patterns are detected. And, at this level, ‘intelligence’ refers to the resources that make learning, and therefore knowing, possible.
This ability to detect, register and make use of the patterns of relationships that happen to characterise your particular environment is widespread in the animal world. Take the gobiid fish, for example. It has been shown that certain of these fish can find their way from one rock-pool to another, at low tide, by jumping accurately across the exposed rocks. Jumping in this way is a high-risk exercise; if they get it wrong the fish are stranded or injured. In fact, they do it without error. Studies of these fish have ruled out the possibility that they are using some sensory clues such as reflections or smells. If they are placed in an unfamiliar pool, they will not jump. The only possible explanation for this remarkable ability is that, during high tide, the fish swim over and around the crevices and hollows in the sea floor, forming a detailed map of the area which is stored in their memories and used as the basis on which to compute their jumps when they are ‘imprisoned’ in the low-tide pools.5
In the same way, the baby soon comes to know not just the difference between a ball, a balloon and a face, but between her mother’s and her father’s faces, and tunes her responses accordingly. Her brain is malleable: it is formed not just by the experience of her ancestors, but is also moulded – like that of the gobiid fish, but enormously more so – by the idiosyncrasies of her own experience. A brain is plastic: it transmutes ignorance into competence, and is extraordinarily adept at doing so. Categories and concepts are distilled from particular encounters so that, by a process of spontaneous analogy, ‘what I do next’ can be informed by records of ‘what happened before’. Past mistakes can be avoided and new mistakes made, until, with luck, an effective way of dealing with ‘this type of thing’ – a big dog, a puncture, an angry face, a new teacher – emerges and confidence is restored. Coming to know the world in this way, to register its patterns and to develop and coordinate skilful responses, is what a sophisticated nervous system – what I shall call a ‘brain-mind’ – does. It is built to tune itself to certain wavebands of information, and to coordinate these with its own expanding range of capabilities.
After plasticity, the next great development in the evolution of knowing is curiosity. Instead of learning simply by reacting to uncertainty, animals became proactive – inquisitive, adventurous, playful. When no more urgent need is occupying your attention, it pays to extend your knowledge, and hence your competence and your security, by going out and actively exploring. So useful is this that evolution has installed it in many species as one of their basic drives. Rats who are allowed to become thoroughly familiar with a maze will quickly explore a new section that is added to it, even though they are being consistently and adequately fed elsewhere. Monkeys kept in a box will repeatedly push open a heavy door to see what is going on outside, and will spend hours fiddling with mechanical puzzles even though they receive no reward for doing so. Human beings who have volunteered to take part in a ‘sensory deprivation’ experiment, in which all they have to do, to earn forty dollars a day, is to stay in a room with no stimulation, rapidly become desperate for something – anything – to feed their minds, and will repeatedly press a button to hear a voice reading out-of-date stock market quotations.6
Being receptive, attentive and experimental, seeking to expand competence and reduce uncertainty, are the design functions of a plastic and enquiring brain-mind. No added encouragement or discipline – no conscious intention, no effort, no deliberation, no articulation – is needed to fulfil this brilliant function. The original design specification of learning does not include the production of conscious rationales. Knowing, at root, is implicit, practical, intuitive. The brain discovers patterns and tunes responses, it is programmed by experience, but this programming is recorded in millions of minute functional changes in the neurons, and manifested in the way the whole organism behaves.
Given the evolutionary priority of this unconscious intelligence – the primacy of know-how over knowledge – what would we expect the main differences between unconscious and conscious ways of knowing to be?7 First, we might expect the unconscious to be more robust and resilient, more resistant to disruption, than our conscious abilities. This is exactly what neurological studies of brain damage reveal. When memory, perception or the control of action are degraded, it is the conscious aspects that tend to be lost first, while abilities that are managed unconsciously are spared.8
If unconscious abilities are more primitive, more a function of evolution than of culture, we might also expect them to vary less from person to person than do their c
onscious deliberations. In particular, we should not expect intuitive know-how to show much correlation with measures of ‘conscious intelligence’ such as IQ – and it doesn’t. People’s ability to pick up the skills that their everyday lives require – their ‘practical intelligence’, as Harvard psychologist Robert Sternberg calls it – is independent of their intellectual or linguistic facility. Brazilian street children are able to do the mental arithmetic that their businesses require – quite complex sums, by school standards – without error, despite having very low mathematical ability as measured by tests. People who work as handicappers at American racecourses are able to make calculations, based on a highly intricate model involving as many as seven different variables, yet their ability to do so is completely unrelated to their IQ score.9
The minds of children, being immature, must rely more on unconscious than conscious operations. Babies learn to recognise the important people in their lives, and to take an increasingly sophisticated part in the rituals of family life – bathtimes, mealtimes, bedtimes and so on – long before they are able to comment or reflect on what they are doing. They learn to walk by a vast amount of trial and error, out of which is gradually distilled thousands of inarticulate correspondences between the muscles of shoulders, torso and legs, and the sensations of vision, touch and balance. They learn to speak by picking up the language of their culture without any explicit knowledge of grammar. They develop styles of relating without recourse to any instruction book. And as they get older they will learn to ride bicycles, play violins, kick balls, take part in meetings, prepare meals, shop, catch planes and make love, for the most part without being able to explain how it is that they do what they do, or how they learnt it.
