The Ghost in the Machine (28 page)

 

 

But to undo a mental habit sanctified by dogma or tradition, one has to
overcome immensely powerful intellectual and emotional obstacles. I mean
not only the inertial forces of society; the primary locus of resistance
against heretical novelty is inside the skull of the individual who
conceives of it. It reverberates in Kepler's agonised cry when he
discovered that the planets move not in circular but in elliptical
pathways: 'Who am I, Johannes Kepler, to destroy the divine symmetry of
the circular orbits!' On a more down-to-earth level the same agony is
reflected in Jerome Bruner's experimental subjects who, when shown for
a split second a playing card with a black queen of hearts, saw it as
red, as it should be; and when the card was shown again, reacted with
nausea at such a perversion of the laws of Nature. [7] To unlearn is
more difficult than to learn; and it seems that the task of breaking up
rigid cognitive structures and reassembling them into a new synthesis
cannot, as a rule, be performed in the full daylight of the conscious,
rational mind. It can only be done by reverting to those more fluid,
less committed and specialised forms of thinking which normally operate
in the twilight zones of awareness.

 

 

 

Science and the Unconscious

 

 

There is a popular superstition, according to which scientists arrive
at their discoveries by reasoning in strictly rational, precise, verbal
terms. The evidence indicates that they do nothing of the sort.* To
quote a single example: in 1945, Jacques Hadamard organised a nation-wide
inquiry among eminent mathematicians in America to find out their working
methods. The result showed that all of them, with only two exceptions,
thought neither in verbal terms, nor in algebraic symbols, but relied
on visual imagery of a vague, hazy kind. Einstein was among those who
answered the questionnaire; he wrote: 'The words of the language as they
are written or spoken do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of
thought, which relies on more or less clear images of a visual and some of
a muscular type. It seems to me that what you call full consciousness is
a limit case which can never be fully accomplished because consciousness
is a narrow thing.' [8]

 

* Cf. The Act of Creation, Book One, Chapters V-XI.

 

Einstein's statement is typical. On the testimony of those original
thinkers who have taken the trouble to record their methods of work,
not only verbal thinking but conscious thinking in general plays only
a subordinate part in the brief, decisive phase of the creative act
itself
. Their virtually unanimous emphasis on spontaneous intuitions
and hunches of unconscious origin, which they are at a loss to explain,
suggests that the role of strictly rational and verbal processes in
scientific discovery has been vastly over-estimated since the age of
enlightenment. There are always large chunks of irrationality embedded in
the creative process, not only in art (where we are ready to accept it)
but in the exact sciences as well.

 

 

The scientist who, facing an obstinate problem, regresses from precise
verbal thinking to vague visual imagery, seems to follow Woodworth's
advice: 'Often we have to get away from speech in order to think clearly.'
Language can become a screen between the thinker and reality; and
creativity often starts where language ends, that is, by regressing to
pre-verbal levels of mental activity.

 

 

Now I do not mean, of course, that there is a little Socratic daemon
housed in the scientist's or artist's skull, who does his homework for
him; nor should one confuse unconscious mentation with Freud's 'primary
process'. The primary process is defined by Freud as devoid of logic,
governed by the pleasure-principle, accompanied by massive discharges of
affect, and apt to confuse perception and hallucination. It seems that
between this very primary process, and the so-called secondary process,
governed by the reality-principle, we must interpolate several levels of
mental activity which are not just mixtures of'primary' and 'secondary',
but are cognitive systems in their own right, each governed by its
own canon of rules. The paranoid delusion, the dream, the daydream,
free association, the mentality of children at various ages, and of
primitives at various stages should not be lumped together, for each has
its own logic or rules of the game. But while clearly different in many
respects, all these forms of mentation have certain features in common,
since they are ontogenetically, and perhaps phylogenetically, older
than those of the civilised adult. They are less rigid, more tolerant,
ready to combine seemingly incompatible ideas, and to perceive hidden
analogies between cabbages and kings. One might call them 'games of
the underground', because if not kept under restraint, they would play
havoc with the routines of disciplined thinking. But under exceptional
conditions, when disciplined thinking is at the end of its tether, a
temporary indulgence in these underground games may suddenly produce
a solution -- some far-fetched, reckless combination of ideas, which
would be beyond the reach of, or seem to be unacceptable to, the sober,
rational mind. I have proposed the term 'bisociation' for these sudden
leaps of creative imagination, to set them apart from the more pedestrian
or associative routines. I shall come back to this in a moment; the point
to retain is that the creative act in mental evolution again reflects
the pattern of reculer pour mieux sauter, of a temporary regression,
followed by a forward leap. We can carry the analogy further and interpret
the Eureka cry as the signal of a happy escape from a blind alley --
an act of mental self-repair.

 

 

 

Association and Bisociation

 

 

A convenient definition of associative thinking is given by Humphrey:
'The term "association", or "mental association", is a general name
often used in psychology to express the conditions under which mental
events, whether of experience or behaviour, arise.' [9] In other words,
the term 'association' simply indicates the process by which one idea
leads to another.

 

 

But an idea has associative connections with many other ideas established
by past experiences; and which of these connections will be activated
in a given situation depends on the
type
of thinking we are
engaged in at the moment. Orderly thinking is always rule-governed, and
even dreaming, or daydreaming, has its own rules. In the psychological
laboratory, the experimenter lays down the rule 'name opposites'. Then
he says 'dark', and the subject promptly says 'light'. But if the rule
is 'synonyms', then the subject will associate 'dark' with 'black'
or 'night' or 'shadow'. To talk of stimuli as if they were acting
in a vacuum is meaningless; what response a given stimulus will evoke
depends on the rules of the game we are playing at the time -- the canon
(see
Chapter III
) of that particular mental
skill. But we do not live in laboratories where the rules of the game
are laid down by explicit orders; in the normal routines of thinking
and talking the rules are implicit and unconscious.

 

 

This applies not only to the rules of grammar, syntax, and
common-or-garden logic, but also to those which govern the more complex
structures we call 'frames of reference', 'universes of discourse' or
'associative contexts'; and to the 'hidden persuaders' which prejudice
our reasoning. In
The Act of Creation
I proposed the term 'matrix'
as a unifying formula to refer to such cognitive structures, that is to
say, to all mental habits and skills governed by a fixed set of rules
but capable of varied strategies in attacking a problem. In other words,
matrices are cognitive holons and display all the characteristics of
holons discussed in previous chapters. They are controlled by their
canons, but guided by feedback from the environment -- the distribution
of the men on the chessboard, the features of the problem in hand. They
range from extremes of pedantic rigidity to liberal open-mindedness --
within limits. They are ordered into 'vertical' abstractive hierarchies,
which interlace in 'horizontal' associative networks and cross-references.

 

 

Let me repeat: all routine thinking is comparable to playing a game
according to fixed rules and more or less flexible strategies. The game
of chess allows for more varied strategies than draughts, a vaster
number of choices among moves permitted by the rules. But there is a
limit to them; and there are hopeless situatiom in chess when the most
subtle strategies won't save you -- short of offering your opponent a
jumbo-sized Martini. Now in fact there is no rule in chess preventing
you from doing that. But making a person drunk while remaining sober
oneself is a different sort of game with a different context. Combining
the two games is a bisociation. In other words, associative routine
means thinking according to a given set of rules on a single plane,
as it were. The bisociative act means combining two different sets of
rules, to live on several planes at once.

 

 

I do not mean to belittle the value of law-abiding routines. They
lend coherence and stability to behaviour, and structured order to
thought. But when the challenge exceeds a critical limit, adaptive
routines are no longer sufficient. The world moves on and new facts
arise, creating problems which cannot be solved within the conventional
frames of reference, by applying to them the accepted rules of the
game. Then the crisis is on, with its desperate search for a remedy,
the unorthodox improvisation which will lead to the new synthesis --
the act of mental self-repair.

 

 

The Latin
cogito
comes from
coagitare
, to shake together.
Bisociation means combining two hitherto unrelated cognitive matrices
in such a way that a new level is added to the hierarchy, which contains
the previously separate structures as its members.
The motions of
the tides were known to man from time immemorial. So were the motions of
the moon. But the idea to relate the two, the idea that the tides were
due to the attraction of the moon, occurred, as far as we know, for the
first time to a German astronomer in the seventeenth century; and when
Galileo read about it, he laughed it off as an occult fancy. Moral:
the more familiar the previously unrelated structures are, the more
striking the emergent synthesis, and the more obvious it looks in the
driver's mirror of hindsight. The history of science is a history of
marriages between ideas which were previously strangers to each other,
and frequently comidered as incompatible. Lodestones -- magnets -- were
known in antiquity as a curiosity of Nature. In the Middle Ages they
were used for two purposes: as navigators' compasses and as a means to
attract an estranged wife back to her husband. Equally well known were
the curious properties of amber which, when rubbed, acquired the virtue
of attracting flimsy objects. The Greek for amber is
elektron
, but
the Greeks were not much interested in electricity; nor were the Middle
Ages. For nearly two thousand years, electricity and magnetism were
considered as separate phenomena, in no way related to each other. In
1820 Hans Christian Oersted discovered that an electric current flowing
through a wire deflected a magnetic compass which happened to be lying
on his table. At that moment the two contexts began to fuse into one:
electro-magnetism, creating a kind of chain-reaction which is still
continuing and gaining in momentum.

 

 

 

The AHA Reaction

 

 

From Pythagoras, who combined arithmetic and geometry, to Newton, who
combined Galileo's studies of the motion of projectiles with Kepler's
equations of planetary orbits, to Einstein, who unified energy and
matter in a single sinister equation, the pattern is always the same. The
creative act does not create something out of nothing, like the God of
the Old Testament; it combines, reshuffles and relates already existing
but hitherto separate ideas, facts, frames of perception, associative
contexts. This act of cross-fertilisation -- or self-fertilisation within
a single brain -- seems to be the essence of creativity, and to justify
the term 'bisociation'.*

 

* Similar views have been put forward, among others, by the
mathematician Henri Poincaré, who in an oft-quoted lecture
explained discovery as the happy meeting of 'hooked atoms of thought'
in the unconscious mind. According to Sir Frederick Bartlett,
'the most important features of original experimental thinking is
the discovery of overlap . . . where formerly only isolation and
difference were recognised'. [10]  Jerome Bruner considers all
forms of creativity as a result of 'combinatorial activity'. [11]
McKellar talks of the 'fusion' of perceptions [12], Kubie of the
'discovery of unexpected connections between things' [13]; and so
on, back to Goethe's 'connect, always connect'.

 

Take the example of Gutenberg, who invented the printing press (or at
least invented it independently from others). His first idea was to
cast letter-types like signet rings or seals. But how could he assemble
thousands of little seals in such a way that they made an even imprint
on paper? He struggled with the problem for years, until one day he went
to a wine harvest in his native Rhineland, and presumably got drunk. He
wrote in a letter: 'I watched the wine flowing, and going back from the
effect to the cause, I studied the power of the wine press which nothing
can resist . . .'. At that moment the penny dropped: seals and the wine
press combined gave the letter press.

 

 

Gestalt psychologists have coined a word for that moment of truth,
the flash of illumination, when bits of the puzzle suddenly click into
place -- they call it the AHA experience. But this is not the only type
of reaction which the bisociative click can produce. A quite different
kind of response is aroused by telling a story like the following: