Chapter
Eight
Conscious and unconscious
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)There are many claims of a cosmic creative force, or a power of consciousness
beyond the mind that is deeply mysterious and beyond the reach of science, but
there is a well-known cosmic force that really is creative: the evolutionary algorithm
(Chapters 10 and 11). Could cultural evolution be a force for human creativity, with
ideas emerging from the process of copying previous ideas, but with variation and
selection?
Thinking about creativity in this way means seeing individual creators in their
social and intellectual context. When James Watt was worrying about heat loss,
it was because he had seen steam engines, and knew about the manufacturing
processes of his time. When inspiration came to Szilard, he was deeply immersed
in the atomic science of his day; when Coleridge fell into his sleep he had just
been reading a book about the palace built by the Khan Kubla. In other words,
they had been soaking up the memes of the culture around them.
On this meme-based view, what makes creative people unique is how they
recombine old memes to make new ones and have the intuition to feel which
of the billions of possible combinations is worth pursuing. The individual person
is an indispensable part of the creative act, but the real driving force is cultural
evolution.Don’t even try to talk about the learning curve. Don’t bother
citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the
unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment
leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your
lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves
there’s no other way? Heuristic software’s been learning from
experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars
learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems
and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the
only path to learning leads through sentience? You’re Stone-
age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt –
denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and
gathering was good enough for your parents.(Peter Watts, Blindsight, 2006)The other crucial context is the physical world. Some philosophers, most
famously Andy Clark, believe that from our notebooks to our smartphones and
GPS, the objects we use are part of our cognitive architecture. Linking cultural
evolution with the extended mind is the idea of the cognitive niche. In biology,
niche construction occurs whenever species act on their environments in ways
that change the factors that will be adaptive in the future (Wheeler and Clark,
2008). By building a web, a spider changes the sources of natural selection within
its niche; a beaver’s evolved niche includes the dam constructed by its parents
and the changes in the flow of the river caused by the dam. Niche-construction
leads to new feedback cycles for humans, too: think of the novice bartender
who inherits a highly structured environment to help her learn how to remem-
ber drinks orders and serve them swiftly.