Chapter
Eight
Conscious and unconscious
INTUITION AND CREATIVITY
Intuition is often thought to be strange, inexplicable, or even paranormal, but
need it be?
There are at least three components to intuition. First are the cognitive processes
in which the brain extracts information from complex patterns to guide behaviour,
such as when finding your way around new software or guessing which queue will
be shortest in the supermarket. Second are all the social skills and implicit impres-
sions which we cannot articulate or formalise, from the ‘feeling’ that someone is
untrustworthy, to judging the best time to break bad news to a friend. These have
tended to be undervalued in comparison with explicit, intellectual skills, perhaps
because children readily pick them up and adults do not appreciate the complex-
ity of what is involved. Take the example of judging someone untrustworthy. This
may depend on long years of meeting people who look, stand, move their eyes,
and twitch other muscles in different ways, and then noting (quite unconsciously)
whether they kept their word or not. None of us can explain how we do this,
whether we find it easy or a real struggle. People with autism, for example, may find
it difficult to understand complex social emotions or adopt other people’s points of
view, while those with social anxiety disorder may compulsively overinterpret their
own and others’ words and actions, usually in negative ways.
The notion of ‘women’s intuition’ is sometimes laughed at, but women may be
more intuitive, in this sense, because they generally have better verbal skills, are
more interested in relationships, and gossip more about social matters than men
PRACTICE 8.2
WAS THIS DECISION CONSCIOUS?Going about your ordinary activities, you make countless
large and small decisions, from exactly where to put your
foot as you walk upstairs, to where to go for your holiday,
or whether to take that job. But perhaps it might be more
accurate to say that your whole body is making decisions,
rather than that ‘you’ are. Watch these decisions as they
happen, and for each one that you notice ask yourself
‘Was this decision conscious?’ As you begin to notice
more and more decisions being made, what happens?
Is it obvious which are made consciously and which
unconsciously? Are there certain types of decision that are
more often conscious? Does anything happen to your sense
of agency? What?
FIGURE 8.15 • Super-blindsight. Imagine that a
person with blindsight is trained
to make spontaneous guesses
about things he cannot see.