by Guy Claxton
19. Bruner, Jerome, Matter, Jean and Papanek, Miriam, ‘Breadth of learning as a function of drive level and mechanisation’, Psychobgical Review, Vol. 62 (1955), pp. 1–10.
20. Hughes, Ted, Poetry in the Making (London: Faber, 1967).
21. Emerson, R. W., ‘Self-reliance’, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. II (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979).
22. Lynn, Steven and Rhue, Judith, ‘The fantasy-prone person: hypnosis, imagination and creativity’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychobgy, Vol. 51 (1986), pp. 404–8; and Bastick, Tony, Intuition: How We Think and Act (Chichester Wiley, 1982).
23. Hillman, James, Insearch: Psychobgy and Religion (Dallas, TX: Spring, 1967); and Archetypal Psychobgy: A Brief Account (Dallas: Spring, 1983).
24. Lawrence, D. H., ‘Making pictures’, in Ghiselin, op cit.
25. Quoted by Zervos, C., ‘Conversation with Picasso’, in Ghiselin, op cit.
Chapter 6
1. From Goodman, N. G. (ed), A Benjamin Franklin Reader (New York: Crowell, 1945). Quoted in Wilson, Timothy and Schooler, Jonathan, ‘Thinking too much: introspection can reduce the quality of preferences and decisions’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychobgy, Vol. 60 (1991), pp. 181–92. The experiments discussed in the first part of this chapter come from several papers by Schooler and his associates, including this one, and: Schooler, Jonathan and Engstler-Schooler, Tonya, ‘Verbal overshadowing of visual memories: some things are better left unsaid’, Cognitive Psychobgy, Vol. 22 (1990), pp. 36–71; Schooler, Jonathan, Ohlsson, Stellan and Brooks, Kevin, ‘Thought beyond words: when language overshadows insight’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol. 122 (1993), pp. 166–83; and Schooler, Jonathan and Melcher, Joseph, ‘The ineffability of insight’, in Smith et al (eds), The Creative Cognition Approach, op cit.
2. Raiffa, H., Decision Analysis (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1968). Quoted in Wilson and Schooler, op cit.
3. The solutions to the two ‘insight’ problems are:
Figure 13. Solutions to coin and pig-pen problems, page 89.
The solutions to the two ‘analytical’ problems are:
a) The three playing cards, left to right, are: Jack of Hearts; King of Diamonds; Queen of Spades
b) Bob is telling the truth. Alan committed the crime.
4. Things, as always, are more complicated than we would like them to be. Shifting from d-mode to responding ‘impulsively’ also has its risks, especially in situations that are emotionally charged. Daniel Goleman in Emotional Intelligence (op cit) has pointed out that a habit of impulsiveness leaves us open to being ‘emotionally hi-jacked by reflexes that may have served us well in the jungle, but which can now be extremely dangerous and counter-productive.’
5. Henri Poincaré quoted in Ghiselin, op cit.
6. Mozart, ‘A letter’, quoted in Ghiselin, op cit.
7. Dryden, John, ‘Dedication of “The Rival-Ladies’’,’ quoted in Ghiselin, op cit.
8. Wordsworth, William, ‘Preface to Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads’, quoted in Ghiselin, op cit.
9. Moore, Henry, ‘Notes on sculpture’, quoted in Ghiselin, op cit.
10. Gerard, R. W., ‘The biological basis of the imagination’, Scientific Monthly (June 1946).
11. Edelman, Gerald, Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (New York: Basic Books, 1992). I shall postpone any further discussion of brain mechanisms till Chapter 9.
12. Lowell, Amy, quoted in Ghiselin, op cit.
13. Housman, A. E., ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’, quoted in Ghiselin, op cit.
14. Belenky, Mary Field, Clinchy, Blythe McVicker, Goldberger, Nancy Rule and Tarule, Jill Mattuck, Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
15. Weil, Simone, Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge, 1972). Quoted by Belenky et al, op cit, p. 99.
Chapter 7
1. The existence of unconscious perception is almost universally accepted now by cognitive scientists. There are one or two die-hards, such as Douglas Holender, who wrote a long review article in 1986 attempting to find methodological flaws in every study that claimed to show unconscious perception. Norman Dixon, the doyen of the field of subliminal processing, concluded his response to Holender’s paper by saying: ‘the most interesting phenomenon to which Holender’s paper draws attention is the extraordinary antipathy some people still have toward the idea that we might be influenced by filings of which we are unaware. Would it be putting it too strongly to say it reminds one of the skepticism of “flat earth theorists” when confronted with the alarming theory that the world is round?’ See Holender, D., ‘Semantic activation without conscious identification in dichotic listening, parafoveal vision and visual masking: a survey and appraisal’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 9 (1986), pp. 1–23; and Dixon, N.F., ‘On private events and brain events’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 9 (1986), pp. 29–30.
2. This study is described by Pittman, Thane, ‘Perception without awareness in the stream of behavior: processes that produce and limit nonconscious biasing effects’, in Bornstein, R. F. and Pittman, T. S. (eds), Perception without Awareness: Cognitive, Clinical and Social Perspectives (New York: Guildford Press, 1992).
3. This phenomenon is discussed in a paper by Simpson, Brian, ‘The escalator effect’, The Psychologist, Vol. 5 (1992), pp. 462–3.
4. Sidis, B., The Psychology of Suggestion (New York: Appleton, 1898), quoted by Merikle, P. M. and Reingold, E. M., ‘Measuring unconscious perceptual processes’, in Bornstein and Pittman, op cit.
5. Pierce, C. S. and Jastrow, J., ‘On small differences in sensation’, Memoirs of the National Academy of Science, Vol. 3 (1884), pp. 75–83. Quoted by Kihlstrom, J. F., Barnhardt, T. M. and Tataryn, D. J., ‘Implicit perception’, in Bornstein and Pittman, op cit.
6. Both the Poetzl studies and the more recent follow-ups are described in Ionescu, M. D. and Erdelyi, M. H., ‘The direct recovery of subliminal stimuli’, in Bornstein and Pittman, op cit.
7. Bradshaw, John, ‘Peripherally presented and unreported words may bias the perceived meaning of a centrally fixated homograph’, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol. 103 (1974), pp. 1200–2.
8. Patton, C. J., ‘Fear of abandonment and binge eating: a subliminal psychodynamic activation investigation’, cited in Masling, Joseph, ‘What does it all mean?’, in Bornstein and Pittman, op cit. The fact that it may be hard consciously to accept that the subliminal perception of ‘Mummy is leaving me’ can have such a dramatic effect on behaviour is itself further evidence of Patton’s effect.
9. Darley, J. M. and Gross, P. H., ‘A hypothesis-confirming bias in labeling effects’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 44 (1983), pp. 20–33.
10. Whittlesea, B. W., Jacoby, L. L., Girard, K. A., ‘Illusions of immediate memory: evidence of an attributional basis for feelings of familiarity and perceptual quality’, Journal of Memory and Language, Vol. 29 (1990), pp. 716–32.
11. Schacter, Daniel (ed.), Memory Distortions: How Minds, Brains and Societies Reconstruct the Past (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
12. I shall say more about the way in which we can protect ourselves from our own unconscious assumptions in the discussion of ‘mindfulness’ in Chapter 11.
13. See Nisbett, R. and Wilson, T., ‘Telling more than we know: verbal reports on mental processes’, Psychological Review, Vol. 84 (1977), pp. 231–59.
14. Latane, B. and Darley, J. M., The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn’t He Help? (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970).
15. Fitzgerald, F. Scott, Tender is the Night (New York: Scribner, 1934).
16. The case of Flournoy and Helen Smith is discussed by Ellenberger, Henri, The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York: Basic Books, 1970), p. 316.
Chapter 8
1. Masling, Joseph M., ‘What does it all mean?’, in Bornstein and Pittman, op cit.
2. Bruner,
Jerome and Postman, Leo, ‘Emotional selectivity in perception and reaction’, Journal of Personality, Vol. 16 (1947), pp. 69–77.
3. It is surprising how frequently well-educated adults in our society fear that any kind of psychological trick or test is liable to expose something unwelcome about their mental powers. Television quiz shows, for example, both reflect and promote the ridiculous assumption that rapid retrieval of trivia is a valid index of ‘intelligence’ – though schools, with somewhat more pretension, may fall into the same trap.
4. A similar interpretation of the Zajonc studies has been offered by Reber, op cit.
5. Quoted by Reber, op cit, p. 18.
6. These studies of ‘implicit memory’, as it is called, are comprehensively reviewed by Schacter, Daniel, ‘Implicit memory: history and current status’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, Vol. 13 (1987), pp. 501–18.
7. Marcel, Tony, ‘Slippage in the unity of consciousness’, in CIBA Symposium 174, Experimental and Theoretical Studies of Consciousness (Chichester: Wiley, 1993).
8. Cumming, Geoff, ‘Visual perception and metacontrast at rapid input rates’, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford (1971).
9. Marcel, op cit.
10. The best discussions of ‘functional blindness’ are still those provided by P. Janet in his classic text The Major Symptoms of Hysteria (New York: Macmillan, 1907). A marvellous fictionalised description is provided by William Wharton in Last Lovers (London: Granta, 1991).
11. See Wall, Patrick, in CIBA Symposium 174, op cit.
12. Sutcliffe, J. P., ‘“Credulous” and “skeptical” views of hypnotic phenomena: experiments in esthesia, hallucination and delusion’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 62 (1961), pp. 189–200.
13. Langer, E., Dillon, M., Kurtz, R. and Katz, M., ‘Believing is seeing’, unpublished paper, Harvard University, referred to in Langer, Ellen, Mindfulness: Choice and Control in Everyday Life (London: Harvill, 1991).
14. For a review of blindsight studies, see Weiskrantz, Lawrence, Blindsight: A Case Study and Its Implications (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986).
15. Humphrey, Nicholas, comments in discussion, in CIBA Symposium 174, op cit, p. 161.
16. I once asked Tony Marcel whether a thirsty blindsight patient would spontaneously reach for a glass of water that was within the blind field. In practice, he pointed out, this would be an almost impossible test to carry out, as none of these patients is ‘blind’ in all areas of the visual field, so when their eyes are free to move about, as they normally are, any significant objects in their world would rapidly be picked up through the areas of normal sight. But (for what it’s worth) his strong intuition, having worked with such patients for some time, is that they would not.
17. Freud, Sigmund, ‘Recommendations to physicians practising psychoanalysis’, in Strachey, J. (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12 (London: Hogarth Press, 1958/1912).
18. Granger, G. W., ‘Night vision and psychiatric disorders’, Journal of Mental Science, Vol. 103 (1957), pp. 48–79.
19. Bahrick, H. P., Fitts, P. M. and Rankin, R. E., ‘Effect of incentives upon reactions to peripheral stimuli’, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol. 44 (1952), pp. 400–6.
20. Bursill, A. E., ‘The restriction of peripheral vision during exposure to hot and humid conditions’, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol. 10 (1958), pp. 113–29.
21. Bruner, J. S., Matter, J. and Papanek, M. L., op cit.
Chapter 9
1. Dickinson, Emily, ‘The Brain’, in Complete Poems (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), reprinted in Mitchell, S. (ed), The Enlightened Heart (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
2. We now know that the three ‘systems’ are so tightly integrated with each other that it is more accurate to see them as three aspects of what is in effect a single system. Indeed, if we are to appreciate the physical underpinnings of the slow ways of knowing we need to reinstall the brain in its bodily context, and we shall do so in Chapter 10. But it makes sense to start with the brain on its own.
3. So far the cells that have shown LTP, in an area of the midbrain called the hippocampus, do tend to revert to their original recalcitrant state eventually, so they themselves cannot be responsible for the memories of a lifetime. It will not be long before some similar but even more permanent mechanism is found that will weld together cells in the cortex. But for the moment this remains just beyond the leading edge of what it is technically possible to investigate.
4. Hebb, D. O., The Organization of Behavior (New York: McGraw Hill, 1949).
5. See for example Minsky, Marvin, The Society of Mind (London: Picador, 1988).
6. This evidence is reviewed in Greenfield, Susan, Journey to the Centers of the Mind (Oxford: Freeman, 1955). My image of brain organisation, a preliminary version of which was first published in my Cognitive Psychology: New Directions (London: Routledge, 1980) is in many respects similar to Susan Greenfield’s, a coincidence that may be not unrelated to the fact that we were graduate students together in Oxford in the early 1970s. The major differences are that my model tries to find a place for language; and our views on the role of arousal are somewhat divergent.
Chapter 10
1. This evidence is reviewed in Martindale, Colin, ‘Creativity and connectionism’, in Smith, Ward and Finke, op cit.
2. This illustration is a development of one used by Edward de Bono in The Mechanism of Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).
3. Luria, A. R., The Mind of a Mnemonist (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).
4. There is some direct evidence for this obvious assumption: see Grossberg (1980), cited in Martindale, op cit; Kahneman, D., Attention and Effort (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973); Baddeley, A. D. and Weiskrantz, L. (eds), Attention: Selection, Awareness and Control (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993).
5. The influences of culture and experience cannot in practice be separated in the neat way that this picture might imply. Much if not all of a child’s direct experience with the words is both mediated by ‘agents’ of the culture, and saturated with cultural assumptions. Parents, older siblings and teachers are continually guiding a young person’s attention, implicitly instructing her as to what is worth attention, and what significance these selected experiences are to be assigned. (Children are quick to pick up value judgements – such as phobias, for example – from observing the reactions of their seniors.) And even if no agent is physically present, the child’s world is full of objects and experiences that embody the values and assumptions of the culture: toys, games, artifacts and rituals of all kinds. Even the buildings which she inhabits, and the physical landscape through which she moves, are repositories of cultural meaning.
The two-plane model which I am using here is a simple version of the kind of ‘hybrid’ model that many neural network theorists are currently exploring. See for example Churchland, P. S. and Sejnowski, T. J., The Computational Brain (Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press, 1992).
6. I am drawing on some of Gelernter’s ideas in the paragraphs that follow. See Gelernter, David, The Muse in the Machine: Computers and Creative Thought (London: Fourth Estate, 1994).
7. Dennett, Daniel, Consciousness Explained (London: Viking, 1992).
8. Young, A. W. and De Haan, E. H., ‘Face recognition and awareness after brain injury’, in Milner, A. D. and Rugg, M. D. (eds), The Neuropsychology of Consciousness (London: Academic Press, 1992).
9. Research quoted by Greenfield, op cit.
10. Libet, Benjamin, ‘The neural time factor in conscious and unconscious events’, in CIBA Symposium 174, op cit.
11. Experiment by Jensen (1979), quoted by Libet, op cit, p. 126.
12. I have elaborated this argument in my Noises from the Darkroom: the Science and Mystery of the Mind (London: HarperCollins, 1994).
13. For an elaboration of this argument, see my article ‘Structure, strategy and self in the fabrication
of conscious experience’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 3 (1996), pp. 98–111.
14. Kihlstrom, John, ‘The psychological unconscious and the self’, in CIBA Symposium 174, op cit, p. 152.
15. Libet, op cit.
16. I have argued this point of view in more detail in my Noises from the Darkroom: The Science and Mystery of the Mind, op cit; as also has Velmans, Max, ‘Is human information processing conscious?’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 14 (1992), pp. 651–726; and Mandler, George, Mind and Emotion (New York: Wiley, 1975). The argument is very similar to Keith Oatley’s, in Best Laid Schemes (Cambridge: CUP, 1992).
17. Churchland, Patricia, Neurophilosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).
Chapter 11
1. Ginzburg, Carlo, Myths, Emblems, Clues (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990). I am grateful to Alan Bleakley for putting Ginzburg’s work my way.
2. Cited in Ginzburg, op cit, p. 211.
3. Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, ‘The Cardboard Box’, first published in the Strand magazine, Vol. 5 (1893), pp. 61–73. Quoted by Ginzburg, op cit.
4. Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’ (1914), in Collected Papers (New York: Hogarth Press, 1959). Quoted by Ginzburg, op cit.
5. Reiser, Stanley, Medicine and the Reign of Technology (Cambridge: CUP, 1978). Quoted in Postman, op cit.
6. From Seltzer, Richard, Mortal Lessons (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974). Reprinted in Feldman, Christina and Kornfield, Jack (eds), Stories of the Spirit, Stories of the Heart (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991).
7. This research, as well as details of the focusing process, are described in Gendlin, Eugene, Focusing (New York: Bantam, 1981).
8. I can vouch both for the effectiveness of focusing, and for its subtle, slippery quality, as I have taken two training courses in it. Some people find it easier and quicker to grasp than others, and it needs coaching, feedback and modelling, as well as direct tuition, if one is to get the hang of it. Learning to ‘focus’ is of the same order of difficulty as any other form of delicate perceptual learning – wine-tasting, reading X-rays or animal tracks, and so on.
