there (as we saw earlier), the same thing can happen while you’re
sitting in a lecture hall, sitting in a training seminar, or reading a
book. Even this one.
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But, all is not lost. It turns out that when you are trying to solve
a hard problem, all of your memories are scanned—even the ones
you cannot consciously recall. It’s not the most efficient thing (I’m
envisioning something like a SQL full-table scan on a large table
with very long rows), but it does work.
Have you ever heard an old song on the radio and then several
days later you suddenly remembered the title or artist? Your R-
mode was still working on the problem, asynchronously in the
background, until it finally found the memory.
But many times the answer isn’t so easily divulged: the R-mode,
after all, cannot process language. It can retrieve chunks of it from
memory, but it can’t do anything with it. This leads to some rather
odd scenarios.
The Strange Case of Elias Howe
In 1845, one Elias Howe was struggling to invent a practical lock-
stitch sewing machine. It wasn’t going very well for him. One
night, after a long, hard, unproductive day, he had a terrify-
ing nightmare—the wake-up-screaming, projectile-sweating kind of
nightmare.
In the nightmare, he was in Africa, abducted by hungry cannibals.
About to be made into stew, he was quite literally in a lot of hot
water. As he tried to escape, the headhunters kept poking at him
with their funny-looking spears.
As he’s describing the nightmare the next morning, his attention
focuses on the “funny-looking spears.” What made them odd was
that they had holes in the end, in the barbed tip of the spear; it
was almost like holes in a handheld sewing needle but up at the
tip. Hey...
Elias went on to receive the first American-issued patent for an
automatic sewing machine, based on his hard-won inspiration that
the hole for the needle needed to be opposite the normal, handheld
orientation.
It would seem that Elias already knew the answer to this difficult
technical problem—at least, his R-mode had retrieved an answer.
But since the R-mode is nonverbal, how can it be presented to the
L-mode for processing?
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Figure 4.3: Elias Howe’s patent
The R-mode has to throw it over the fence visually, in this case
wrapped up in the disturbing—and very memorable—imagery of
an outlandish dream.
And as it turns out, you have many excel-
Many ideas are not
lent skills and ideas that are simply not
verbalizable.
verbalizable. As noted earlier (in Chap-
ter 3, This Is Your Brain, on page 57), you
can recognize thousands of faces, but try to describe even one
face—that of a spouse, parent, or child—to any degree of accuracy.
You don’t have the words to describe it. That’s because facial recog-
nition (and indeed, most pattern-based recognition) is an R-mode
activity.
You might also notice that you can’t read text that appears in
dreams, such as road signs or headlines. Most people can’t.
Let us now take a quick look at two different ways of harvesting
some of this R-mode recognition: image streaming and free-form
journaling.
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Inarticulate Ability
One group of researchers∗ experimented with showing stu-
dents random numbers flashing on different quadrants of
a computer screen. Some students were shown a jumping
number before the main number; the control group was
not. The jumping number appeared to jump around in dif-
ferent quadrants at random, but it wasn’t random at all—
there was a subtle pattern to it.
The students exposed to the jumping number could locate
the main number much more quickly than the others. How-
ever, they couldn’t explain why they could find the number
on the screen so quickly. They thought they were guess-
ing and just lucky, but in fact they had learned the pattern
unconsciously and couldn’t verbalize it.
Thanks to June Kim for this; also documented in Hare Brain,
Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think
Less [Cla00].
∗.
Acquisition of Procedural Knowledge About a Pattern of Stimuli That
Cannot Be Articulated [Lew88].
Harvesting with Image Streaming
In the case of Elias Howe, the answer he was seeking was being
presented in the form of a dream. You might experience the same
thing once you start paying more attention to the contents of your
dreams. Not all dreams “mean something.” Sometimes in a dream
“a cigar is just a cigar,” as Sigmund Freud reportedly said. But
there are many times when your R-mode is trying to tell you some-
thing, something that you want to know.
Image streaming is a technique designed to help harvest R-mode
imagery.13 The basic idea is to deliberately observe mental imagery:
pay close attention to it, and work it around in your mind a bit.
First, pose a problem to yourself, or ask yourself a question. Then
close your eyes, and maybe put your feet up on the desk (this is
perfect for doing at work) for about ten minutes or so.
13. Described in The Einstein Factor: A Proven New Method for Increasing Your Intelligence [WP96]; evidence that this technique works is largely anecdotal, but that’s somewhat to be expected in this case.
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For each image that crosses your mind, do the following:
1. Look at the image, and try to see all the details you can.
2. Describe it out loud (really use your voice; it makes a differ-
ence). Now you’re sitting with feet up on the desk and talking
to yourself.
3. Imagine the image using all five senses (or as many as practi-
cal).
4. Use present tense, even if the image was fleeting.
By explicitly paying attention to the fleeting image, you’re engaging
more pathways and strengthening connections to it. As you try to
interpret the image, you’re broadening the search parameters to
the R-mode, which may help coalesce related information. At any
rate, by paying close attention to those “random” images that flit
across your consciousness, you may begin to discover some fresh
&n
bsp; insights.
It’s not magic, and it may or may not work for you, but it does seem
to be a reasonable way of checking in with the rest of your brain.
A fair percentage of the population will not see any images in this
fashion. If that’s the case, you might try to artificially induce a
random image by gently rubbing your eyes or briefly staring at a
light source (this creates what is called a phosphene, the sensation
of seeing light from some nonvisual source).
The source of the image is not that important; how you try to inter-
pret it is. We’ll talk more about this phenomenon in just a bit.
Harvesting with Free-Form Journaling
Another simple way of harvesting your R-mode’s preconscious
treasures is to write.
Blogging has enjoyed tremendous popularity in recent years, and
probably rightfully so. In previous eras, people wrote letters—
sometimes a great many letters. We saved the best ones from
famous people such as Voltaire, Ben Franklin, Thoreau, and other
notables.
Letter writing is a great habit. Sometimes the material is relatively
dull—what the weather was doing, how the prices at the market
were up, how the scullery maid ran off with the stable boy, and so
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Tools and Interference
When you try to start any creative endeavor, such as writ-
ing on a blog, an article, or (heaven help you) a full-length
book, you will encounter massive resistance. Resistance
can take many forms, from niggling self-doubt to wildly cre-
ative procrastination to a myriad assortment of other dis-
tractions and excuses (see The War of Art: Break Through
the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles [Pre02] for a
disturbingly complete catalog of the many manifestations
of resistance).
With blogging in particular, the tool itself can get in the
way and stop you from writing. For instance, if you use a
third-party web service for blogging (such as TypePad or
Blogspot), are you set up to write blog entries while offline?
Or if inspiration strikes when you’re away from the Net, does
that become an excuse not to write? If you’ve written your
own blogging software, do you spend more time tweaking
the software or your blog design instead of creating new
articles? Not to be too much of a Luddite, but writing on
paper has worked well for many thousands of years. It can
be a lot faster to capture ideas on paper first and then
transcribe them into your blog editors.
Once you start writing, it’s important to maintain the flow.
Don’t let technical issues distract you once you get going.
Don’t worry about what needs to be edited yet; get it all
down first.
Famous letters were carefully saved and preserved; what
about yours? Do you have backups? Once you’ve writ-
ten a blog post, is it being archived anywhere other than
Google’s cache?
on. But in the detailed minutiae of everyday life were occasional
philosophical gems. This sort of free-form journaling has a long
pedigree, and those skillful thinkers from days gone by were even-
tually well regarded as “men of letters” for penning these missives.
Today, blogs are taking on this role. There’s a lot of “what I had for
breakfast” and the occasional virulent rant indicative of declining
mental health, but there are also penetrating insights and germs
of ideas that will change the world. Some already have.
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But there are many ways to write your thoughts down, and some
are more effective for our purposes than others. One of the best is
a technique known as morning pages.
The Morning Pages Technique
This is a technique that I first heard about in the
context of a writer’s workshop (also described in The
Artist’s Way [Cam02]); it’s a common technique for
authors. But I was surprised to also come across
it in a popular MBA program and in other senior
executive–level courses and workshops.
Here are the rules:
• Write your morning pages first thing in the morning—before
your coffee, before the traffic report, before talking to Mr.
Showerhead, before packing the kids off to school or letting
the dog out.
• Write at least three pages, long hand. No typing, no computer.
• Do not censor what you write. Whether it’s brilliant or banal,
just let it out.
• Do not skip a day.
It’s OK if you don’t know what to write. One executive taking this
program loudly proclaimed that this exercise was a complete waste
of time. He defiantly wrote three pages of “I don’t know what to
write. Blah blah blah.” And that’s fine.
Because after a while, he noticed other stuff started appearing in
his morning pages. Marketing plans. Product directions. Solutions.
Germs of innovative ideas. He overcame his initial resistance to the
idea and found it to be a very effective technique for harvesting
thoughts.
Why does this work? I think it’s because you’re getting an
unguarded brain dump. The first thing in the morning, you’re
not really as awake as you think. Your unconscious still has a
prominent role to play. You haven’t yet raised all the defenses and
adapted to the limited world of reality. You have a pretty good line
direct to your R-mode, at least for a little while.
Thomas Edison had an interesting twist on this idea. He’d take a
nap with a cup full of ball bearings in his hand. He knew that just
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as he started to drift off into sleep, his subconscious mind would
take up the challenge of his problem and provide a solution. As he
fell into a deep sleep, he’d drop the ball bearings, and the clatter
would wake him up. He’d then write down whatever was on his
mind.14
The “Just Write” Technique
And then there’s blogging itself. Any chance to write is a good exer-
cise. What do you really think about this topic? What do you actu-
ally know about it—not just what you think, but what can you
defend? Writing for a public audience is a great way to clarify your
own thoughts and beliefs.
But where to start? Unless you’re burning with passion for some
particular topic, it can be hard to sit down and just write about
something. You might want to try using Jerry Weinberg’s Fieldstone
method, described in Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method
[Wei06].15
Thi
s method takes its name from building fieldstone walls: you
don’t plan ahead to gather these particular stones for that wall.
You just walk around and pick up a few good-looking stones for
the future and make a pile. Then when you get around to building
the wall, you look into the stone pile and find a nice match for the
section you’re working on at the moment.
Make a habit of gathering mental fieldstones. Once you have some
piled up, the process of building walls becomes easy.
It’s a good habit to get into.
Harvesting by Walking
You can harvest R-mode cues just by walking, if you do it right. Do
you know the difference between a labyrinth and a maze?
According to the Labyrinth Society,16 a maze may have multiple
entrances and exits, and it offers you choices along the way. Walls
prevent you from seeing the way out; it’s a puzzle.
14. Cited in Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind [Smi04]; thanks to Linda Rising for suggesting it.
15. Thanks to several readers for suggesting this and to June Kim for this summary.
16. On the Web at http://www.labyrinthsociety.org.
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Figure 4.4: Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
A labyrinth is not a puzzle; it’s a tool for medita-
tion. Labyrinths offer a single path—there are no
decisions to be made. You walk the path to sort of
give the L-mode something to do and free up the
R-mode.
It’s the same idea as taking a long walk in the woods or a long
drive on a straight, lonely stretch of highway, just in a smaller
more convenient space.
Labyrinths go back thousands of years; you’ll find them today
installed in churches, hospitals, cancer treatment centers and hos-
pices, and other places of healing and reflection.
Have you ever noticed that great ideas or insights may come to you
at the oddest times? Perhaps while taking a shower, mowing the
yard, doing the dishes, or doing some other menial task.
That happens because the L-mode sort of gets bored with the rou-
tine, mundane task and tunes out—leaving the R-mode free to
present its findings. But you don’t have to start washing a lot of
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Pragmatic Thinking and Learning Page 13
