Consciousness

• seCtIon tHRee: BoDY AnD WoRLD
  do. So, if they spend a lot of time soaking up the covariations in our vastly com-
  plex social world, they may more often be right when they say ‘I don’t trust that
  man’ or ‘I think those two are falling in love’, even if they cannot articulate the
  reasons for their judgement.
  The third component, though not separate from the others, is emotion, as when
  people say ‘it just felt wrong’ or ‘I just knew it was the house for me’. Although
  emotion and reason have traditionally been opposed, they are equally integral to
  a process which helps flexibly guide appropriate actions (Frijda, 2007). Portuguese
  neurologist Antonio Damasio (1994) is famous for arguing that reason cannot
  operate without emotion. He studied many patients with frontal lobe damage who
  became emotionally flat, yet far from turning into super-rational decision-makers,
  they became paralysed with indecision, every little choice becoming a nerve-wrack-
  ing dilemma. They could still rationally compare alternatives but lacked the feelings
  that make decisions ‘seem right’. This implies that Star Trek’s Spock would not be the
  impressive Starfleet first officer he is portrayed as, for suppressing his feelings in
  favour of logic would make him unable to decide whether to get up in the morning,
  when to speak to Captain Kirk, or whether the Klingons are bluffing.
  This interpretation needs caution, though, because the fact that frontal lobe dam-
  age affects both emotion and decision-making does not prove that emotion is
  needed for decision-making; both might depend on some other affected capac-
  ity, for example.
  Creativity might also entail these explicit and intuitive skills coming together
  to generate new insight. Many creative writers, thinkers, scientists, and artists
  claim that their best work just ‘comes’ to them. They have no idea how they
  do it, and may feel as though the poem, painting, or solution to the scien-
  tific problem just shaped itself without their conscious effort or awareness.
  Creative people tend to score high on measures of imagery, fantasy-prone-
  ness, hypnotisability, and ‘absorption’; that is, they can easily become so
  absorbed in a book, film, or their work that they are oblivious to everything
  else. Some describe this timeless feeling of total immersion as a selfless state
  of ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975; see our website for more detail). Finding flow
  depends on getting the right balance between the challenge you
  face and the skills you bring to tackling it. When a challenge is too
  great, anxiety results; when too slight, boredom sets in. But when
  challenges and skills are perfectly matched, flow can take over.
  Although flow is usually described as a state of consciousness,
  it might better be described as a state in which the distinctions
  between conscious and unconscious processing disappear. All of
  a person’s skills are called upon, and there is no longer any self to
  say just what ‘I’ am conscious of.

Creativity also often involves working hard on a problem and failing to

solve it. Then, after resting or doing something else, the solution just

‘pops into mind’. The hard work is essential but so are the unconscious

processes, and these need time and leaving alone. This process, called

incubation, complicates the simple fast/slow distinctions just discussed, since it

seems to rely on conscious effort, extended unconscious processing, and then a

sudden moment of inspiration. Studying incubation in the real world is difficult, but

tricky puzzles and devious brain-teasers may provide something of the same effect.

‘The mechanisms of

consciousness are

also embodied in our

comportment within the

(social) world, and not

just limited within our

brain’

(Froese et al., 2014, p. 8)

‘emotions and feelings

may not be intruders

in the bastion of

reason at all: they may

be enmeshed in its

networks, for worse

and for better’

(Damasio, 1994, p. xxii)

‘all the contents of

consciousness are in

harmony with each

other, and with the

goals that define the

person’s self ’

(Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszent-
mihalyi, 1988, p. 24)

‘it is sometimes a

good idea to pull

off the Information

Super-Highway into

the Information Super

Lay-By’

(Claxton, 1997, p. 14)

FLOW

Boredom

Panic

Anxiety

Worry

CHALLENGE

• demand of
  the situation

CAPABILITIES - individual skills

FIGURE 8.16 • According to Csikszentmihalyi,
the state of flow occurs when the
challenges presented by a task
are proportional to the person’s
capabilities, thus avoiding both
boredom and anxiety.