by Guy Claxton
6. It should be clear that what I am talking about here is not a thinly disguised version of the distinction between the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brain, which was popular a few years ago as a way of thinking about the brain’s lost capacities. Though it persists in the literature of ‘pop psychology’, this distinction has run out of steam. First, in all but a few unfortunate people, the brain works as a whole. Functionally it does not have two separate halves. To ask people to switch from a ‘left-brain’ to a ‘right-brain’ way of thinking would be like insisting that people switched from driving an ‘engine car’ to a ‘steering-wheel car’.
Secondly, people’s aspirations for the ‘right brain’ ran wildly out of control: far ahead of what the scientific research could possibly justify. Certainly there is a greater linguistic ability, for most right-handed people, in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain than in the right; but the research shows that there is language on the left side, just as there are ‘holistic’ properties on the right, as well. Michael Gazzaniga, one of the scientists, along with Nobel laureate Roger Sperry, whose work on so-called ‘split-brain’ patients was the inspiration of the ‘left brain, right brain’ distinction, wrote despairingly as long ago as 1985: ‘How did some laboratory findings of limited generality get so outrageously misinterpreted? . . . The image of one part of the brain doing one thing and the other part something entirely different was there [in the popular literature], and [the fact] that it was a confused concept seemed to make no difference.’ (Gazzaniga, M., The Social Brain: Discovering the Networks of the Mind, New York: Basic Books, 1985).
When I talk here about ‘tortoise mind’, the ‘undermind’ or the ‘intelligent unconscious’ I am not talking about a new bit of the brain. I am talking about a set of different modes of mind that, above all, require a less busy, less purposeful, less problem-orientated mental ambience.
Chapter 2
1. Gardner, Howard, ‘The theory of multiple intelligences’. Presentation to the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society Division of Educational and Child Psychologists, York, (January 1996).
2. Goleman, Daniel, Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam, 1995).
3. Rozin, Paul, ‘The evolution of intelligence and access to the cognitive unconscious’, in Sprague, J. M., and Epstein, A. N. (eds), Progress in Psychobiology and Physiological Psychology, Vol. 6 (New York: Academic Press, 1976). Rozin was one of the first to use the term ‘cognitive unconscious’, and I have borrowed other arguments and examples in this section from his seminal paper.
4. See Wooldridge, D., The Machinery of the Brain (New York: McGraw Hill, 1963).
5. Studies by Aronson (1951), reported by Rozin, op cit, p. 252.
6. See Smith, Ronald, Sarason, Irwin and Sarason, Barbara, Psychology: the Frontiers of Behavior, 2nd edition (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982), p. 273.
7. The research that confirms these differences has been recently summarised by Reber, Arthur, Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: an Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious (Oxford: OUP, 1993).
8. Some of the studies that lead to this conclusion will be discussed in Chapter 8.
9. Carraher, T. N., Carraher, D. and Schliemann, A. D., ‘Mathematics in the street and in schools’, British Journal of Developmental Psychology, Vol. 3 (1985), pp. 21–9. Ceci, S. J. and Liker, J., ‘A day at the races: a study of IQ, expertise and cognitive complexity’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol. 115 (1986), pp. 255–66.
10. Berry, Dianne C. and Broadbent, Donald E., ‘On the relationship between task performance and associated verbalizable knowledge’, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol. 36A (1984), pp. 209–31. See also the recent overview of these results in Berry, Dianne and Dienes, Zoltan, Implicit Learning (London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992).
11. Watzlawick, Paul, Weakland, John and Fisch, Richard, Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution (New York: Norton, 1974).
12. A great body of this work is summarised in Lewicki P, Hill, T. and Czyzewaka, M. ‘Nonconscious acquisition of information’, American Psychologist, Vol. 47 (1992), pp. 796–801.
13. Reber, op cit.
Chapter 3
1. Developmental psychologist Annette Karmiloff-Smith makes the same observation in her book Beyond Modularity: a Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1992).
2. These studies are comprehensively reviewed in Berry and Dienes, op cit.
3. In fact there is research to show that our faith in articulation, as a measure of competence, is misguided in the ‘real world’. Medical students’ performance in written examinations, for example, is quite unrelated to their clinical skill and judgement. Yet our implicit (in the sense, this time, of ‘unquestioned’) faith in good old exams is such that we continue to put generations of students through them. See Skernberg, R. T., and Wagner, R. K. (eds), Mind in Context (Cambridge: CUP, 1994).
4. See Wason, Peter, and Johnson-Laird, Philip, The Psychology of Reasoning: Structure and Content (London: Batsford, 1972).
5. Coulson, Mark, ‘The cognitive function of confusion’, paper presented to the British Psychological Conference, London (December 1995).
6. Lewicki et al, op cit.
7. Master, R. S. W., ‘Knowledge, knerves and know-how: the role of explicit versus implicit knowledge in the breakdown of a complex skill under pressure’, British Journal of Psychology, Vol. 83 (1992), pp. 343–58.
8. The polar planimeter, as a metaphor for know-how, is described by Runeson, Sverker, ‘On the possibility of “smart” perceptual mechanisms’, Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, Vol. 18 (1977), pp. 172–9.
9. Bourdieu, Pierre, In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).
10. Huxley, Aldous, Island (London: Chatto, 1962).
11. Korzybski was the founder of the intellectual movement known as ‘general semantics’, influential in the 1940s and 1950s, that explored the relationship between language and human experience: see, for instance, his book Science and Sanity (New York: W.W. Norton, 1949).
Chapter 4
1. From Spencer, Herbert, An Autobiography, quoted in Ghiselin, Brewster (ed), The Creative Process (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1952).
2. This sense of ‘intuition’ is associated with a long tradition of religious and philosophical writers, which includes pre-eminently Spinoza, and later Henri Bergson, who see intuition as being the royal road to some higher or ‘spiritual’ truth. In Spinoza’s use of the term, intuition refers to a kind of profound, unmediated understanding of the ‘nature of things’ which arises through a deep contemplative communion with people and objects. This ‘intuition’, according to Spinoza, is inevitably accurate; it carries with it an unquestionable certainty and authority, and only makes its appearance after the purposeful questings of reason have exhausted themselves.
3. All these first three problems can be solved by filling the largest jar, and from it filling the middle-sized jar once and the smallest jar twice. You are then left with the desired volume in the big one. For an account of these studies, see Rokeach, Milton, ‘The effect of perception time upon the rigidity and concreteness of thinking’, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol. 40 (1950), pp. 206–16.
4. All you have to remember from your school maths is that the circumference of a circle is 6.28 times as big as the radius (i.e. twice the product of the radius and the constant ‘pi’, which is 3.14).
Suppose the radius of the smoothed-out Earth is R.
Then the original length of string is 6.28 times R.
If the size of the gap we are interested in is called ‘r’, then the new total radius is R+r, and the new total length of string is therefore 6.28 times (R+r).
But this is the original length, 6.28R, plus 2m, or 200cm. So
6.28(R+r) = 6.28R + 200.
Take away the = 6.28R from both sides of the equation, and divide both s
ides by 6.28. This leaves
r = 200/6.28, or about 32cm.
5. This tension between reason and intuition has been known since antiquity. It is recorded, for example, that the Athenian general Nicias, at the siege of Syracuse, decided to follow an intuitive interpretation of a lunar eclipse and, against his ‘better’ – i.e. rational – judgement, to postpone a tactical retreat, his faith in intuition leading to a decisive defeat.
6. See, for example, McCloskey, M., ‘Intuitive physics’, Scientific American, Vol. 248 (1983), pp. 114–22.
7. Ceci, S. J. and Bronfenbrenner, U., ‘Don’t forget to take the cupcakes out of the oven: strategic time-monitoring, prospective memory and context’, Child Development, Vol. 56 (1985), pp. 175–90.
8. This example actually relies on ‘learning by osmosis’ rather than the kind of intuition that is the main focus of this chapter. But it makes graphically a point which applies to both sorts of slow knowing.
9. Kahneman, Daniel and Tversky, Amos, ‘Intuitive prediction: biases and corrective procedures’, in Kahneman, D., Slovic, P. and Tversky, A. (eds), Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge: CUP, 1982).
10. These quotations come from a survey carried out in 1992, in which eighty-three Nobel laureates in science – physics, chemistry and medicine – answered the question: ‘Do you believe in scientific intuition?’ The vast majority were in no doubt that a vital stage on the road to their discoveries was listening to hunches about their results, or promptings about the direction to take, which were quite incapable of rational defence or explanation. See Fensham, Peter, and Marton, Ference, ‘What has happened to intuition in science education?’, Research in Science Education, Vol. 22 (1992), pp. 114–22.
11. Spencer Brown, George, Laws of Form (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969).
12. Noddings, Nel and Shore, Paul, Awakening the Inner Eye: Intuition in Education (New York: Teachers’ College Press, 1984).
13. Lowe, John Livingston, The Road to Xanadu (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927).
14. Quoted by Gerard in Ghiselin, op cit.
15. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, ‘Prefatory note to Kubla Kahn’, quoted in Ghiselin, op cit.
16. Quotation from Woodworth, R. S. and Schlosberg, H., Experimental Psychology (1954), quoted in Smith, S. M. and Blankenship, S. E., ‘Incubation and the persistence of fixation in problem-solving’, American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 104 (1991), pp. 61–87. See also Smith, S. M., Brown, J. M. and Balfour, S. P., ‘TOTimals: a controlled experimental method for studying tip-of-tongue states’, Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, Vol. 29 (1991), pp. 445–7; and Smith, S. M., ‘Fixation, incubation and insight in memory and creative thinking’, in Smith, S. M., Ward, T. B. and Finke, R. A. (eds), The Creative Cognition Approach (Cambridge, MA: Bradford/ MIT Press, 1995).
17. Yaniv, I. and Meyer, D. E., ‘Activation and metacognition of inaccessible stored information: potential bases for incubation effects in problem-solving’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, Vol. 13 (1987), pp. 187–205.
18. These studies are reported in Bowers, K. S., Regehr, G., Balthazard, C. and Parker, K., ‘Intuition in the context of discovery’, Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 22 (1990), pp. 72–110; and Bowers, K. S., Farvolden P. and Mermigis, L., ‘Intuitive antecedents of insight’, in Smith, S. M. et al (eds), The Creative Cognition Approach, op cit. The solutions to the picture puzzles are: 1A shows a camera; 2A shows a camel.
19. The words in 1A are all associates of ‘candle’; the words in 2B are all associates of ‘carpet’; the words in 3A are all associates of ‘pipe’.
20. The common associate to all fifteen words is ‘fruit’. If you feel inclined to argue with some of these associations, bear in mind that they were all statistically defined as low-frequency associative responses to the cue word from a large-scale survey of American students.
Chapter 5
1. Skinner, B. F., ‘On “Having” a Poem’, reprinted in Cumulative Record (New York: Appleton-Century-Croft, 1972).
2. Quoted in Ghiselin, op cit.
3. These last two examples were used to illustrate a television programme, broadcast on 1 September 1996 on Channel 4, called ‘Break the Science Barrier with Richard Dawkins’.
4. James, Henry, ‘Preface to The Spoils of Poynton’, in Ghiselin, op cit.
5. Canfield, Dorothy, ‘How Flint and Fire Started and Grew’, in Ghiselin, op cit.
6. Simonton, D. K., Genius, Creativity and Leadership: Historiometric Inquiries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
7. The example is discussed by Schooler, Jonathan and Melcher, Joseph, ‘The ineffability of insight’, in Smith, Stephen et al (eds), The Creative Cognition Approach op cit. A general survey of the evidence of an ‘inverted U’-shaped relationship between knowledgeability and creativity is provided by Simonton, op cit.
8. Westcott’s ‘successful intuitives’ are similar to the character type identified by C. G. Jung as ‘introverted intuitive’. These people are not only socially somewhat introverted, as Westcott’s intuitives were; they are also those who, according to Jung, have the closest relationship with their own unconscious. See, for example, Jung’s classic Psychological Types, translated by H. G. Baynes (London: Routledge, 1926). For Jung, intuition is one of four basic mental functions, the other three being ‘thinking’, ‘feeling’ and ‘sensing’. It is a rather nebulous faculty which detects possibilities and implications in a holistic fashion, at the expense of details. Jung’s view is that every person has one of these four modes which is more developed than, and used in preference to, the others. One has a disposition to be a thinking or an intuitive ‘type’, for example. In addition to these four functions, Jung proposed that we also differ in the extent to which our basic orientation is towards the external or the internal world – whether one is an ‘extravert’ or an ‘introvert’.
Jung, as is well known, also distinguishes between two layers of the unconscious mind, the personal and the collective. In the personal unconscious lie those memories and perceptions which are too weak ever to make it over the borderline into consciousness, or which have been repressed. The collective unconscious contains the archetypes, forms of universal human-species knowledge derived from one’s whole ancestral lineage, and reborn in each individual’s brain structure. The collective unconscious makes itself known through our innate understanding of ubiquitous human situations and relationships, and through universal systems of symbols. ‘Introverted intuitives’, in Jung’s scheme, do, in a sense, have access to a ‘higher’ knowledge than the other types by virtue of their more intimate relationship with the symbolic life and fundamental knowings of the collective unconscious.
Jung’s typology (and the variety of personality tests, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory, based upon it) now looks rather coarse in the light of our better, more empirically based, understanding of the way in which the unconscious itself generates intuitions. (Jung held to a view of intuition as a way of seeing into the unconscious, rather than as a product of it.) And there is a second important way in which Jung’s pioneering work has been superseded. He, rather fatalistically, tended to talk of the four basic personality types as if they were constitutional, and therefore largely unalterable. We now know that the intuitive way of knowing is educable, capable of being enhanced and sharpened. It is for these reasons that Jung’s ideas receive less attention in this book than some readers might have expected.
9. Westcott, Malcolm, Toward a Contemporary Psychology of Intuition (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968).
10. Schon, Donald, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
11. Rokeach, op cit.
12. Cowen, Emory L., ‘The influence of varying degrees of psychological stress on problem-solving rigidity’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 47 (1952), pp. 512–19.
13. Combs, Arthur and Taylor, Charles, ‘The effect of perception
of mild degrees of threat on performance’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 47 (1952), pp. 420–4.
14. Kruglansky, A. W. and Freund, T., ‘The freezing and unfreezing of lay inferences: effects on impressional primacy, ethnic stereotyping and numerical anchoring’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 19 (1983), pp. 448–68.
15. Wright, Morgan, ‘A study of anxiety in a general hospital setting’, Canadian Journal of Psychology, Vol. 8 (1954), pp. 195–203.
16. Prince, George, ‘Creativity, self and power’, in Taylor, I. A. and Getzels, J. W. (eds), Perspectives in Creativity (Chicago: Aldine, 1975).
17. Fischbein, Efraim, Intuition in Science and Mathematics (Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer, 1987), p. 198.
18. Viesti, Carl, ‘Effect of monetary rewards on an insight learning task’, Psychonomic Science, Vol. 23 (1971), pp. 181–3.
