“Over the years, I’ve found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing,” explains the larger-than-life American author Norman Mailer in The Spooky Art, his book on being a writer. “A simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to write.”
Mailer’s strategy clearly worked for him. Over the course of his lengthy career, he wrote more than thirty books and became one of the most celebrated—and controversial—writers in the United States. In 1948, he published his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, about his experiences as a soldier in World War II, which catapulted him into the literary firmament at the precocious age of twenty-five. While many writers of his era would see their future creative output blocked or severely delayed after the success of a first novel—notably, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, all magnificent books—Mailer kept writing away. He threw his wild energy at nearly every genre, refusing to limit himself just to fiction: essays, reportage, biography, creative nonfiction, plays—he tried it all. While Mailer may have failed to write the Great American Novel, he was undoubtedly a Great American Writer.
Where does such artistic fecundity come from?
Mailer considered his unconscious a full partner in his writing projects—and a partner to be treated with respect. He believed that he had to establish a reliable trusting relationship with his hidden mind. If you give your unconscious such an assignment, he said, then you’d better fulfill your part of the bargain and be there the next morning to write, on schedule, and not decide to sleep in, or take the day off. Otherwise, and especially if this kept happening, your unconscious would not take you seriously the next time you made such a request, and would not prepare the material you wouldn’t be there to work on anyway.
Your unconscious knows what your important goals are by how much you think about them consciously and how much time and effort you put into them. As we saw in the last chapter, for important goals especially, your values and feelings and choices become slanted in the direction that best helps you to accomplish those goals, literally changing your mind for the sake of that goal. In this chapter the pervasive influence of the future on the hidden workings of the mind will become even more apparent. We are unconsciously working on our important goals behind the scenes: making use of downtime during the day when the conscious mind is not currently engaged on some task, and while we are at sleep at night; always vigilant like a sentinel, on the lookout for information relevant to that goal and noticing events and objects that might be helpful, which we’d otherwise miss; and trying to find answers that we are having difficulty coming up with consciously. My alligator dream was a perfect example of how my mind unconsciously came up with a solution to a problem I’d been racking my brain over for many years.
Behind the scenes, your mind is working on your future, constantly. Indeed, neuroscience has shown this is the mind’s default mode, what it spends its time doing when nothing else is going on. It is working on important problems that have not yet been solved in the past or the present, those that are still to be solved in the future. It is guiding us in every way possible toward a future in which our important goals will have been achieved, our important needs met, and our important problems solved. The research on Unconscious Thought Theory described in Chapter 6 showed how periods of unconscious thought are superior in combining and integrating many different relevant features and pieces of information. Early research on creativity, on coming up with “out of the box” solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems and dilemmas, also showed that these solutions are often produced by unconscious insights, the solution fully formed when it is delivered to consciousness.
By a very strange coincidence, the insightful problem-solving capacities of the unconscious mind were discovered in the 1930s by an American psychologist with a name eerily similar to that of the famous author of The Naked and the Dead, who had independently championed the role of unconscious thought in creative work.
Norman Mailer, meet Norman Maier.
The coincidences do not end with the nearly identical names. It turns out that Norman Maier has several connections to this book. One of his students was T. C. Schneirla, later to became the curator of the American Museum of Natural History and the author of the classic paper on “should I stay or should I go” approach-avoidance motivations, which was featured in chapter 5. Maier’s mentor while at the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1931, where he performed his famous creativity experiments, was Professor Karl Lashley, the original thinker who, as we described in Chapter 4, was the first to discover priming and mental readiness effects. Maier went from Chicago to the University of Michigan, where he served on the Psychology Department faculty for more than forty years and, in another eerie coincidence, passed away in September 1977—the very month I began my graduate work there.
Maier was a maverick, interested in reasoning and problem-solving in the era of behaviorism. His early work at Chicago under Lashley identified one major problem with conscious problem-solving, called functional fixedness, in which we dwell too much on the usual use of an object and miss other, more creative ways it might be used. This happens even more when we are under time pressure or stress. Maier discovered that unconscious mechanisms working on the problem, because they are not as bound as conscious thought by a limited focus of attention, can come up with these novel solutions where conscious reasoning can’t, and deliver them to us as sudden “aha!” moments.
In his famous experiment, Maier filled a large empty room in the Psychology Laboratory of the University of Chicago with normal, everyday objects such as extension cords, tables and chairs, poles, and pliers and clamps. Of particular importance were two long ropes that he hung from the ceiling so that they reached all the way to the floor. One rope was hung over by a wall, and the other was in the center of the room. Into this unusual and cluttered space he brought his sixty-one participants. Each of them, one at a time, was asked to solve many problems involving the various objects in the room. Some had rather simple solutions and some not so simple. But the real focus of the study was the problem involving the two ropes. Maier told each participant that his task was to tie the ends of the two cords together. The catch was that they were too far away from each other for anyone just to take one end and walk over to the other cord and tie them together. Maier started the stopwatch in his pocket without the participant knowing he did so, just as we would do sixty years later in our rude-or-polite interruption study at NYU.
The creative solution was to tie one of the heavy tools (pliers or clamps) to the end of one rope, put it in motion so it swung toward the other rope, then bring the other rope and, when it was in range, tie the two ends together. Thirty-nine percent of the participants solved the problem on their own, not needing any hints. The rest had not solved it after ten minutes had passed. At this point, they were given the first of two hints; if after another couple of minutes the first hint didn’t produce the solution, the second hint was given. Thirty-eight percent of the participants were able to solve the problem after one or more of the hints had been given—this was half of the total number of participants who eventually solved the problem, and the group that Maier was particularly interested in. The remainder of the participants, 23 percent, never solved the problem even after the second hint and additional time.
The first hint was the priming hint. Maier walked over to the window and incidentally brushed the nearby rope with his body, putting it in slight motion. (If this subtle clue did not work after a few minutes, Maier resorted to a not-so-subtle one—he just handed the participants the pliers and told them the solution involved using it.) There were sixteen participants who solved the problem after the hint involving the accidentally swaying rope. They had been puzzling over the problem for ten full minutes, but after Maier had casually put one of the ropes in motion, most of them came up with the solution, which involved tying the pliers to one of the ropes and putting it into motion, in less than forty seconds. But when asked afterward how they solved the problem, only one of the sixteen said that this event had aided them with the solution. The other fifteen participants did not mention the swaying of the cord in describing how they came up with the answer; in fact, none of them remembered having seen the cord move. According to Maier, “They insisted that if the suggestion aided them, they were certainly unconscious of it.”
Maier concluded that the most plausible explanation was that the motion hint played an important part in bringing about the solution but was not consciously experienced by the participant. He was struck also by how the solution appeared in the participants’ consciousness in a complete form: “suddenly and no development could be noted.” It was not as if steps along the way were experienced and then conscious reasoning guided the process and put together the solution. Rather, the new way of understanding the problem—seeing the ropes not as ropes but as part of a pendulum—is suddenly there in its complete form, having been produced by unconscious means.
At around the same time, another famous creativity problem was being developed by Karl Duncker, a German psychologist exiled by the Nazis in 1935. It was published posthumously in 1945. The problem involves the following material: a book of matches, a box of tacks, and a candle. You are given these items and the task of fixing the candle to the wall so that it won’t drip wax on the floor when it is lit. This is similar to Maier’s rope problem because the solution involves thinking outside the box (literally, in this case) to see the box the tacks are in as not just a box but as a potential platform for the candle. Once you see it this way, it is a simple matter to use one of the tacks to fix the box to the wall, set the candle upright inside the open box, and light it with the matches. The key to the puzzle is to think of the box as a separate item from the tacks it holds, not just as a container for the tacks, but as something useful in its own right.
One way to unconsciously induce this kind of insight is to subtly emphasize the box and tacks as being two separate things. E. Tory Higgins of Columbia University and his colleagues came up with a way to do this, using words to prime the insight, instead of a behavior—brushing against the rope—as Maier had done. The key was to emphasize, or prime, either the word and or the word of before the participant ever worked on the candle problem. Thirty male undergraduates were first presented slides of ten objects described by the experimenter using and instead of of; for example, a “bottle and water” instead of a “bottle of water,” a “crate and plates” instead of a “crate of plates.” Then they were assigned the candle problem. Just like in Maier’s study after the rope-in-motion hint, a greater number of participants solved the problem in the and condition than in either the of condition or the control condition (with just the slides and no verbal description of them). Eight out of ten students solved the problem after the and hint, but only two out of ten did so in each of the other two conditions. Again, the interesting part was when the participants were asked afterward how they solved the problem, and in particular, whether anything in the early part of the study might have affected their ability—either positively or negatively—to solve it. Just as in Maier’s rope study, none of the participants in the candle study reported any relation between the tasks. They expressed no awareness of any influence of the slide task (and versus of) on their ability to solve the candle problem. The prime was used by the unconscious to solve the problem, and participants were unaware of its help.
Researcher Janet Metcalfe, also of Columbia University, has studied these “insight” problems, difficult puzzles wherein it is just as hard to figure out how to solve the problem as it is to figure out the answer. These are problems such as “Describe how to put 27 animals in four pens in such a way that there is an odd number of animals in each pen,” or “Describe how to cut a hole in a three-by-five inch index card that is big enough for you to put your head through.” For these types of problems, your predictions about whether or not you will eventually be able to find the answer do not at all predict whether you do eventually solve the problem or not. It is as if we do not have conscious access to the answer or to the way in which it will be solved. Metcalfe concluded that for these kinds of problems, too, the solution, when it came, appeared with a sudden, unforeseen flash of illumination. This is because the solver was working on the problem unconsciously, and when she reached a solution, it was delivered to her fully formed and ready for use.
How exactly is this seemingly magical feat accomplished? As we saw in Chapter 6, Dijksterhuis and colleagues in their Unconscious Thought Theory research showed that a better, or at least equally good, choice among alternatives is made when the person makes the choice after a period of unconscious thought rather than conscious thought. A key component of this theory is that when one is distracted or prevented from consciously considering the alternatives, neural reactivation occurs, in which the same brain regions used when acquiring the information on which the decision is to be based are now active unconsciously. And recall that this finding was later confirmed by David Creswell and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University when they showed that the unconscious problem-solving process was making use of the same brain regions that had been active when consciously learning about the problem and all the relevant information. And the more those regions were active while conscious attention was elsewhere, the better the resulting solution to the problem.
This might remind you of the famous story of the old Greek in his bathtub. You know, the one who yelled “Eureka!” These insight problems studied by Maier and Duncker, Metcalfe and Higgins are being solved in the same way Archimedes suddenly solved a physics problem he’d long been puzzling over, when the answer came to him out of the blue while he was relaxing in a public bath. According to the Greek historian Plutarch, after the solution dawned on him Archimedes shouted “Eureka!” several times and then ran off naked down the streets of Syracuse without explaining himself to anyone. Indeed, there are many examples of scientific and other intellectual and artistic breakthroughs that occurred when the person least expected it and was thinking about something else—such as to Einstein while shaving, and Archimedes while bathing. And even when the person was not thinking at all, but was fast asleep.
Ah yes—dreams! The wonderful, muggy, Floridian swamp of the mind, where strange journeys occur, and breakthroughs sometimes take place. At least I think of dreams this way, since in such a place I discovered my miraculous alligator.
Benzene. An organic compound made of only two elements from the periodic table—hydrogen and carbon, six atoms of each. Colorless and toxic, it holds together many important compounds like a fantastic glue. Raw petroleum exists thanks to benzene, making it very important to modern civilization. Yet in spite of its clear importance, in the nineteenth century it was still shrouded in mystery. After the English scientific genius Michael Faraday discovered its existence in 1825, more than thirty-five years passed and chemists still didn’t understand the structure underlying its gummy molecular core. This was troubling, since it limited science’s ability to play with its full potential.
The German organic chemist August Kekulé was one of the scientists trying to unlock the secret of benzene in the 1860s. He was no newbie to the business of pondering hidden chemical truths—a few years earlier he had brilliantly theorized how carbon atoms in a sense linked arms to stay together—and he had the perfect look of the scholarly scientist: white rabbinical beard and furrowed brow. But his mind, both its conscious and unconscious components, as well as the minds of many other chemists, had been working on the problem of benzene to no avail. When might the crucial insight come?
Around this time, Kekulé was putting together a new chemistry textbook. One night at home, immersed in this project, he got sleepy. (Can you blame him?) Here is his account of what happened next:
I turned the chair to the fireplace and sank into a half sleep.The atoms flitted before my eyes . . . wriggling and turning like snakes. And see, what was that? One of the snakes seized its own tail and the image whirled scornfully before my eyes. As though from a flash of lightning I awoke. I occupied the rest of the night in working out the consequence of the hypothesis.
Another revelatory, creepy reptile—an alligator in my case, a snake in Kekulé’s. The meaning of the dream with its momentous implications for chemical theory was immediately evident to him. It directly delivered to his conscious mind the insight that he needed. The snake eating its own tail—a mythical symbol known as the ouroburos—was the key that unlocked the cabinet with the secret: the benzene ring. Like the snakes in that fiery circle, benzene’s hydrogen and carbon molecules linked themselves together in a cyclical fashion that alternated single and double bonds. Kekulé had solved the problem and his vision became as famous, or even more famous, than the discovery itself, which established him forever as one of the founding fathers of organic chemistry. But Kekulé’s dream was not a miracle or supernatural event, because the dream was made possible by a mind well prepared, from extensive conscious thought and struggle with the problem. The amount of effort he had consciously put into solving this problem was understood by his mind to reflect how important it was to him to come up with a solution to the problem. In retrospect, his future was assured.
In all of these cases, genius and creativity were the result of unconscious problem-solving capabilities. In Mailer’s case, he deliberately made use of downtime by giving his mind tasks to work on while he consciously did other things. In Maier’s and Duncker’s “think outside the box” creativity studies, unconscious solutions were produced for problems that conscious thought could not solve. The solution popped into the participants’ conscious mind fully formed, ready to go, just like it did for Archimedes and Kekulé, when they were doing something else entirely. In all of these cases, the lightbulb creativity came from unconscious mental processes working on the same problem as the person’s conscious mind. They were teammates working toward the same goal.
Frederic Myers was one of the first psychological scientists, a contemporary of William James, Pierre Janet, and Alfred Binet—all of whom are today much better known. It is actually a bit odd that Myers is not better known, because he was greatly respected and later eulogized by nearly every prominent psychologist of his era, and collaborated with Janet on the landmark research at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Among Myers’s many intellectual quests was his lifelong study of genius and creativity. Myers’s definition of genius anticipated the studies of creativity by Maier and Duncker, as well as the advice given by Norman Mailer to aspiring writers in The Spooky Art. Genius, said Myers, is the ability to make use of subliminal (unconscious) thought more than most people do or can. He said the inspiration of genius or creative breakthroughs comes from a rush of subliminal ideas into the conscious stream of ideas that the person is intentionally manipulating. Brilliant insights come from making more use of the unconscious powers of the mind than most people do.
There are people of genius in all walks of life, not only science and literature but inventors such as Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs, and songwriters and musicians such as Bob Dylan, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016 for lyrics that the Swedish Academy compared favorably to the work of the ancient Greek poets Homer and Sappho. Dylan, however, often seemed unaware of where these lyrics came from, or what they meant. When he was finally reached for his reaction to winning the Nobel Prize and was told of the comparisons made between his lyrics and the poetry of the ancient Greeks, he said he would leave such analysis to the academics, because he did not feel qualified to explain his lyrics. And guitar legend Eric Clapton recalled the time in 1975 when, on the beach at Malibu, Dylan offered him a song, “Sign Language,” for Clapton’s new album. “He told me he had written the whole song down at one sitting, without even understanding what it was about. I said I didn’t care what it was about. I just loved the words and the melody. All in all it’s my favorite track on the album.”
In the sports world geniuses proliferate as well, and once in a while there comes along an athlete who “changes the game” by being so consistently different and creative that entrenched, established ways of playing cannot constrain them. Conventions become outmoded just because of that one person. In my lifetime no athlete seemed to be playing this “different game” as much as Chicago Bulls NBA star Michael Jordan.
It was Game Two of the first round of the 1986 Eastern Conference NBA playoffs, featuring the Boston Celtics against the Chicago Bulls, on a Sunday afternoon at Boston Garden. The Celtics, along with the Los Angeles Lakers, dominated the league in the 1980s and were at the pinnacle of their powers that year. Five future Hall of Famers played for Boston that season, including their awesome front three of Larry Bird, Robert Parish, and Kevin McHale. They were the number-one playoff seed in their conference, and were playing the number-eight seed, the Bulls, in the first round.
I watched that game from a rather unusual location—the paddock area behind Belmont Park race track in Elmont, New York. It was a beautiful spring afternoon and I had taken a train called the Belmont Special from Manhattan’s Penn Station directly to the track out on Long Island. It was a great way to get out of the city and enjoy a beautiful park and fresh air and have fun watching—and placing some small bets on—the horse races.
I didn’t go there to watch the Bulls-Celtics game, but after putting down my two-dollar bet on the fourth race of the day I noticed a crowd gathered around a large TV set on the wall. The sound was up so I could see and hear it was the playoff game. Celtics fans, I concluded, and went to watch the race.
When I came back after that race to put my money down for the fifth race, however, the crowd had grown exponentially. Now hundreds of people were gathered to watch. Someone had put the sound up as high as it would go, so I stopped to see what was going on. And then I stayed for the rest of the game and forgot all about the horses.
It was late in the game, and the score was much closer than most people had expected, but that wasn’t the reason for the crowd. A rising star in the league named Michael Jordan was performing explosive alchemies on the court, driving through the vaunted Celtics defense—one of the best teams of all time, remember—like it wasn’t even there, going to the basket or pulling up suddenly for a soft midrange jumper. He had scored 30 points, then 40, then over 50—he was going to break the record for the most points in a playoff game at this point (which he did, with 63 points, a record that still stands today). The Celtics could not stop him, and he was single-handedly keeping his team in the game. How was he doing this?
What remains in my memory is a kind of blur of improbable and beautiful baskets, a highlight reel of a virtuosic Jordan as he flashed and soared, darted and levitated. He was going where these very experienced defenders were not expecting him to go, pulling up for his jumper when they thought he was driving to the basket. The Celtics’ instincts were just wrong, over and over again. Clearly Jordan was doing the unexpected, the creative and unusual, time and time again, and even when the Celtics made adjustments, he adjusted, too. Double- and triple-teaming him didn’t work. The crowd around the TV at Belmont was gasping and cheering his every move.
His teammates later said that before the game, Jordan was especially focused. This was a nationally televised game on a Sunday afternoon in an era of just a few networks or TV coverage; the entire NBA-loving country was watching. He knew that and he put on a show. This was the day that Michael Jordan the phenomenon, His Airness, No. 23, officially arrived. He and his Bulls would go on to win six championships in the next twelve years—but that Sunday afternoon was when the legend was born.
The outmanned Bulls finally lost the game, in double overtime, and the Celtics would go on to win yet another NBA championship that year, but what remains as a luminous moment in sports history wasn’t the Celtics’ win, but Jordan’s performance in the Bulls’ loss. Larry Bird captured this best himself in his summary of the game to reporters afterward. “I think he’s God disguised as Michael Jordan,” said Bird. “He is the most awesome player in the NBA. Today in Boston Garden, on national TV, in the playoffs, he put on one of the greatest shows of all time. I couldn’t believe anybody could do that against the Boston Celtics.”
There is no way Jordan could have done what he did against the mighty Celtics, playing as hard as they could in a playoff game in front of their home crowd on national television, by constantly consciously thinking and deciding what to do, what move to make, what shot to make, all through that game. Deliberate conscious thought is too slow, and the NBA game too fast, for that. He saw patterns of players and anticipated where they would go, well before anyone else did, and he constantly took advantage of that foresight. Think about it. A thousand tiny little things were happening on the court at every moment: this player moving there, that one there, an ever-whirling kaleidoscope of bodies and opportunities and risks—all of which required constant analysis and advantageous responses. Jordan’s “instincts”—which is just another word for unconscious processes—were guiding him unerringly, and no one else had such instincts. His performance that day—and over the next twelve seasons—fit Frederic Myers’s definition of a genius as someone who makes more and better use of their subliminal thought processes than do the rest of us. Because of the limits of the conscious mind in terms of how much information it can handle at any one time, and its relative slowness in dealing with that information, Jordan’s unconscious delivered strategies he needed to counter the Celtics’ increasingly desperate defenses against him fully formed, to his conscious mind, focused on the goal of winning that game. He had to be doing things this very experienced defense did not expect, that were not usual—that, in other words, were very creative. The amount of analysis and work being done unconsciously had the added benefit of freeing Jordan’s conscious mind from those details, giving him more capacity for higher-level strategy and planning. Jordan was in “the zone”—that mythic state achieved when the unconscious clicks into its highest gear and the conscious mind tranquilly adds its own special contributions. Sports announcers in fact often describe a basketball player on a hot streak, who seemingly can’t miss, as “unconscious,” implying a level of performance higher than what can typically be attained through fallible, slow, limited conscious means.
Of course, as much as we want to “Be Like Mike” (as the Gatorade advertising slogan had it), all the unconscious problem-solving in the world won’t give us his experience, physique, and skills from years of dedication and practice. To take such full advantage of unconscious help we have to first do the conscious work—as had Mailer, Archimedes, and Kekulé, in their own domains. Jordan certainly did his conscious homework: he was known to say that during his career he took more shots in his mind than he ever did on the court. And I didn’t have my own little dream about the alligator until I’d first spent years of thinking and reading about my own personal puzzle.
But Michael Jordan’s unbelievable outburst that April afternoon in Boston does show what fruits can be harvested if you follow Norman Mailer’s advice and give your unconscious assignments as if it were your partner, and begin work on important tasks and goals early enough to reap the benefits of creativity and problem-solving while your conscious mind is on other things. In writing this book I have made frequent use of this advice—reading and starting to think about the next chapter a day or two before I’d actually have the time to work on it. What I have discovered is that ideas will come to me, and I will notice stories in the news or remember examples from the past that I would not have had or noticed otherwise. And I give this advice to my students as well: not to wait until a week before a paper is due, or a job talk is to be given, before starting to work on it, but instead to start early just to get that goal running and working for them—and in doing so glean the insights and advantages of that goal working in the background while they are consciously taking care of other things.
When the mind is not busy dealing with the present, it tends to focus on the future, working on goals and simulating different solutions. Thinking is “expensive” in terms of how much energy it requires—the human brain constitutes on average 2 percent of a person’s total body weight but consumes about 20 percent of the energy a person expends while awake—and over evolutionary time we did not always have stores of food so readily available, and often had to spend a lot of our energy just finding our next meal. In other words, making efficient use of our mind’s capacities by doing things more cheaply in the background makes a lot of adaptive and calorie-saving sense.
This arrangement reminds me of a project launched in 1999 to make use of downtime on thousands of PCs in order to search through massive sets of radio wave data recorded from different places in the universe. The point of doing so was to assist the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. SETI@home was conceived by David Gedye along with Craig Kasnoff at the University of California, Berkeley, and is still a popular volunteer-distributed computing project. Proposed government funding for SETI was ridiculed by members of the U.S. Congress, most famously by Senator William Proxmire and his “Golden Fleece” awards, as wasteful and frivolous. So Gedye and Kasnoff looked to alternative, much cheaper ways to analyze the massive amounts of radio wave data. They did so by having volunteers (I was one of the early ones) download sets of the radio data that would then be analyzed on our own PCs when we weren’t using them, with the results sent back automatically to SETI headquarters. In the same way, your mind is using downtime to work on your important goals and current concerns, and sending the results back to your consciousness—especially when solutions are discovered, as in the occasional spectacular dreams that culminate a great deal of intense, and expensive, conscious thought.
Sometimes our mind grabs on to downtime a bit too eagerly, such as when we are studying something for a test that we are not all that interested in, or a boring section of a book or newspaper that we are generally interested in. Our mind can wander away, and we find ourselves staring at the page, and even turning the page mechanically, without really reading what is on it. Our mind is thinking about something else entirely. What are those other things and why does the mind wander to them so much?
Motivational scientist Eric Klinger has studied these questions his entire career. On the average, we are awake and conscious sixteen hours of the day, and having conscious thoughts all that time. Klinger estimates that we have about four thousand discrete thought segments (thoughts on one topic before they switch to a different one) every day. His research has shown that fully one-third to one-half of all your waking thoughts are not focused on what you are doing or seeing right now, but are instead your mind wandering around to other topics. Evidently, these are topics it finds more interesting than whatever it is you are doing right then. (This is why I am sure this has never happened to you not even once while reading this book.) Students reading textbook chapters, and even people relaxing with a good book with less-than-engaging passages, turn instead to other thoughts: Why didn’t my boyfriend call, where do I want to go for dinner, will I ever get a job, am I ready for tomorrow’s lecture, how am I going to afford that car I promised my son for his high school graduation?
When our mind wanders, its wandering is being directed. It has a purpose, and it isn’t random—it is all about our future, our important, unmet, still-standing goals, the things we are worried about and the things we need to get done pretty soon. The mind is making productive use of its downtime, much like the way your PC schedules updates and virus checking for the downtimes when you aren’t using it.
Let’s return to the mysterious “messages” of dreams. Modern psychological science research on this area, much of it by motivation expert Klinger, has shown that our currently important goals occupy not only our waking mental downtime but our sleeping minds as well. Klinger and his team studied people while their subjects were asleep, and when they showed the signs of being in the dreaming state (that is, when they displayed REM, or rapid eye movement, activity), he played words and phrases to them though headphones. These were designed to be relevant to the current life goals of the sleeping person—important goals such as “want to join a helping profession” or “be friends with my son again.” In a control condition, words and phrases relevant to another sleeper’s goals, but not their own, were played to the person. After a few minutes, the dreamers were woken up and asked to report what they had just been dreaming about. The dreamers were three times more likely to have dreamed about topics and themes related to the words and phrases if those words were related to their important goals than if they were not. During the night, the unconscious mind was clearly wide awake.
So even while we are dreaming, our mind is unconsciously working on our important goals and concerns, and is more sensitive than usual to incoming information relevant to those goals. It works on goals such as how to fix an important relationship that has gone sour, solving a problem at work, finding the right birthday present for your spouse or child, and even larger life goals related to your career. Klinger and his colleagues concluded that the priority your mind gives to your important goals continues to operate in your dreams while you sleep.
The influence of the future on the unconscious mind can also seem unpleasant at times. There are some objectives we can’t just let go of when we want or even need to, like a looming term paper deadline or a painful conversation we know we should have with someone. We might procrastinate and put off those unpleasant but necessary activities for another day, going out drinking instead of studying, or telling ourselves we’ll have that conversation later on in the week. In these cases, unresolved goals can continue to operate unconsciously even when we are actively avoiding working on them consciously. As Norman Mailer put it, “Rule of thumb: Restlessness of mind can be measured by the number of promises that remain unkept.” Remember, your future-oriented mind is not all about making you feel relaxed and happy; it is all about getting your important goals and tasks completed. And if that means nagging you with worries and anxiety, so be it. Such stubbornness often leads to one’s mind going bump in the night. In other words, it can lead to bad sleep.
A commonly reported problem in sleep studies is that when people wake during the night, worries and anxieties spontaneously pop into mind that prevent them from going back to sleep. While we are sleeping, the same areas of the brain that were consciously working on problems are continuing to try to solve them unconsciously. The unconscious is not very good at making specific plans for the future—good at finding solutions to problems, and pursuing a goal in general, yes, but not so good at formulating concrete plans for specific sequences of actions—so it punts the problem to the conscious mind, saying, “Here, you deal with it.” If these worries are significant—like a test or presentation or whether to break up with our boyfriend or girlfriend—they come up as spontaneous thoughts once we awaken. One of my favorite Talking Heads songs put it best: it’s the middle of the night and everyone else is asleep, but “I’m wide awake on memories—these memories can’t wait.”
In a study of insomnia that compared good and poor sleepers, of the people who reported having difficulty sleeping, more than 80 percent had difficulty getting back to sleep after waking in the nighttime. This is a problem people can have their entire lives. On the average these people had trouble getting back to sleep for more than seventeen years—one person had the problem for sixty years. The researchers found that by far, the most common type of thought that kept them awake, nearly 50 percent of them, was about the future, the short-term events coming up in the next day or week. Their thoughts were about what they needed to get done the following day, or in the next few days. Even the relatively positive thoughts of the night were about uncompleted tasks for the next day, such as getting a birthday present for a loved one. In short, the main cause of not being able to get back to sleep at night was negative, anxiety-provoking thoughts about the near future, about things they had to get done, problems they needed to solve.
Why did the mind, working unconsciously on these problems while the person slept, have to nag and bother them about the problem as soon as they woke up? Because the problems were important and time-sensitive ones that could not be solved unconsciously. They needed conscious problem-solving help. So as soon as the person woke up, as soon as their conscious mind was online again, these pressing goals and concerns were waiting for them in their mental in-box. In particular, what the unconscious process was asking for was a concrete plan. This is the specialty of conscious thought processes, and not something that can be done unconsciously, so the unconscious process nags. Once the plan is in place, the nagging tends to stop. You even might be able to get back to sleep.
Imagine you wake up and start to worry that maybe you left the oven on last night, or forgot to lock your door. You can lie there and worry, or you can get up and check. Then you can get back to sleep because the problem is taken care of. But other problems causing troubling thoughts in the night are not so easily fixed at three in the morning. Perhaps you have a health issue that you’ve been meaning to get checked but haven’t yet, and you wake up worrying about that. You can’t take care of it right then, but you can make a firm plan and commitment that the next morning when the doctor’s office is open, you will call and make an appointment. Making that plan is all the unconscious goal is asking you to do, and you should be able to get back to sleep again.
Researchers have experimentally demonstrated how these plans can turn off the distracting, pestering influences of incomplete goals. Ezequiel Morsella and I and our colleagues showed how unfulfilled goals intrude on your conscious thoughts. Some participants in the study were told in advance that they were later going to take a geography quiz, in which they would be asked to name every state in the U.S.; the other participants were told they would be speed-counting the number of letters in state names presented to them (for example, WISCONSIN = 9). The key difference between these two future tasks was that one of them would be easier to do if one thought about it beforehand (naming all the states) and the other one would not (counting the number of letters in a state name). So we expected that having the state-naming goal would cause more intrusive thoughts (because the person would be unconsciously working on that goal in advance) compared to the letter-counting goal. The important part of the study came before the participants actually did their assigned task—we asked them to do an eight-minute meditation-like exercise requiring one to clear the mind of excess thought and to focus on breathing only. During this time they wrote down any intrusive thoughts they might have. Those participants who expected to name all fifty states reported having seven times more intrusive thoughts (thinking of all the state names they could) than did the participants who were expecting to do the letter-counting task. This shows the first part of the “nagging unconscious” effect, especially during downtime.
What about the second part? Would making a concrete plan for how to complete that incomplete goal cut down on the nagging thoughts? To examine this, researchers E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister first had their participants write about two important tasks they needed to finish, such as a term paper that was due soon, and then gave them a passage from a mystery novel to read—The Case of the Velvet Claws, by Erle Stanley Gardner, featuring the infallible defense attorney Perry Mason. After they read about the exploits of the intrepid Mr. Mason, they were asked how often their mind had wandered while they were reading, and also how much they had thought about that unfinished task. As you might expect, participants reported many thoughts about the looming term paper, as their mind wandered away from the mystery novel. However, a different group of participants, before they read the book passage, had been instructed to make a plan for exactly how they were going to complete the unfinished task. These participants reported having significantly fewer intrusive thoughts about the incomplete goal during their reading.
In a further experiment, participants were told that later on in the study they would be asked to list as many sea creatures as they could. But first they had to complete a task having nothing to do with sea creatures. Nonetheless, names of various sea creatures popped into their heads uncontrollably during this first task, distracting them from doing well on it. Not so for another group of participants who were given a good plan for how later to come up with a lot of sea creature names—by going through the alphabet and coming up with a name for each letter. With that helpful plan in place, thoughts about the upcoming task intruded much less on their first task. Having a concrete plan to complete a pressing, upcoming goal really cuts down on the unconscious goal’s pestering. Finally, Masicampo and Baumeister also showed that making concrete plans cut down on the nervousness and anxiety we feel about deadlines and important but incomplete projects.
As Mailer admonished us, a good relationship between unconscious and conscious mental states isn’t free. It is based on trust, so for it to work you have to live up to your part of the bargain. If you fulfill your part of the deal, and really do follow through, then the next time you try the middle-of-the-night trick of making a plan to get those nagging thoughts to stop, it will continue to work. But if you don’t carry out that plan, maybe the next time the nagging will continue because you have shown that you really don’t mean what you say when you make those plans. The nagging might not stop in fact until you actually do, say, call the doctor, or solve the problem, meaning you might well be up all night with thoughts that can’t wait.
A few months after my sister in California had her first child, we had a mini family reunion in Illinois so we could all meet the new arrival. Her baby was the first of the next generation of our nuclear family, so we siblings gathered round the new mom in the living room to hear all about it, after she had settled the baby in a back bedroom for a nap. After fifteen minutes or so, she was midsentence in a really interesting story when she suddenly stopped talking, just stopped cold, and I saw her eyes shift hard right like she was trying to look behind her down the hallway. Puzzled, we asked what was wrong, and after a pause she explained she thought she’d heard something. None of the rest of us had heard anything at all. The back bedroom where her daughter was sleeping was more than sixty feet away. We stayed quiet for a while so that she could make sure there weren’t any cries or sounds of distress, and then she continued her story.
Our most important goals and motivations are on the job 24/7, constant, vigilant sentinels for anything going on that is relevant to them. They are active in the background when we are engrossed in other activities or even when we are asleep. Sleeping parents can become instantly awake at the sound of a baby’s whimper yet sleep contentedly through a raging thunderstorm. To make this possible the sleeping human brain continuously processes sensory signals, even when we are literally unconscious during sleep, and then triggers full awakening to important, critical stimuli in less than a second. It’s amazing.
There is a classic experimental task in psychology that shows how attention-grabbing our goals are, even when we are trying to ignore them and pay attention to something else. It is called the Stroop task, invented in 1935 by one John Ridley Stroop of George Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee. In this task, all you have to do is to name the colors in which words are printed when presented to you one at a time. You don’t have to name the words; actually the word itself is not relevant to your assigned chore of just saying what its color is. The interesting part of the Stroop task is that we can’t help but read the words; it is an automatic and uncontrollable response. And then because we are reading the words, if they are relevant to our important goals then the goal will cause us to pay attention to them even when we are trying not to—because doing so distracts us from what we are supposed to be doing, which is to name the color of the word as fast as we can. The more the meaning of the word distracts us, the longer we take to say the color.
You can use how long a person takes to name the colors of particular categories or types of words as a measure of how interested they are in that category, or if those words correspond to an important goal or need for them. The longer they take to name the color, the more distracting and the more motivationally relevant that category of words. For example, in one such study, frequent drinkers of alcohol were slower to name the colors of alcohol-related words such as beer, cocktail, and liquor than were those who did not drink as much. What is more, the amount of this distraction, the degree to which the alcohol-relatedness of the words slowed down the color naming, was a function of how much that person usually drank in a week. The more important the goal, the more grabby were words related to it, and the more distraction caused by those words when the person was just trying to name their color as fast as possible. The distraction, caused by the automatic attention given to goal-relevant words, happened even though the person was not currently thinking about that goal at all, and when thinking about it would hurt their performance on what they were trying to do at the time, and even when, as in this experiment, there is no forewarning that anything related to the goal was about to happen—for the alcohol-related words to be distracting, it had to be because the goal of drinking was constantly vigilant in the background.
This is why cell phones are so dangerously distracting while you are driving. Texts or phone calls from those you are closest to, friends and family, are highly relevant to your important social relationship goals. Those central goals are constantly vigilant, ready to distract you by directing your attention toward your friends and loved ones. By now we all realize how dangerous texting while driving is, because you have to look away from the road to look at your device, then read it, and then (worst of all) type in your response. Of course, these instinctual reactions take your conscious attention away from the crucial demands of safely navigating your car through traffic.
And it is not just texting—today there are many other apps that drivers engage with while they are on the road. Navigational aids (which help with your current goal to get to where you’re going); Snapchat, on which you can post photos while you are driving that show the speed of your vehicle (that meet your social goals of interacting with friends and being noticed by and popular with many others); and (even worse) Pokémon Go, which has drivers looking for game creatures out on the highways (with the goal of competing against friends and others). No wonder we in the United States are now recording the highest-percentage increases in highway fatalities in fifty years. This is after four decades of steady decline. The rate jumped in 2015 and increased even more sharply in 2016—there were 17,775 highway deaths in just the first six months of the year. And state police and other authorities blame this sudden increase on cell phones and phone apps. For example, one accident near Tampa, Florida, killed five people, and right before the crash a teenager in one of the cars had posted a Snapchat video showing the car in excess of 100 mph.
In response to this crisis, automakers say that new hands-free phone systems solve the problem because they keep the hands on the wheel and eyes on the road even while a driver is using the smartphone. But what they (and probably most people) don’t appreciate is just how attention-demanding and distracting talking on the phone can be while you are driving. Even when it is “hands-free” (though often it is not even that), and even though you don’t take your eyes off the road, the conversation itself can strongly distract your limited conscious attention, taking it away from where it needs to be—on your driving and your readiness to react to sudden unexpected moves of the other drivers. Conversations regarding issues at work, or problems at home, or, God forbid, arguments with your children or spouse are highly relevant to your very important goals regarding your close relationships, your career and job pressures, your chores, and other family tasks. Even pleasant conversations while driving can be distracting, when they are full of news or new developments or feelings being expressed. After all, we only have a limited amount of attention, and when it is taken away by something else, it leaves less for all that is involved in driving safely.
Have you ever been stuck behind a really slow driver, and when you finally get to pass him, you see that he’s been on the phone the whole time? Distractions slow us, slow down our reaction times to sudden emergency situations, and take our attention away from monitoring the complex road or highway situation. One way that we compensate is to drive ever more slowly, often without realizing it, because at that lower speed we gain back the time we need to be able to react. This happened to me once, when I had come home from New York to visit my family up in northern Michigan and my mom had picked me up at the airport. While I was driving the forty-five miles on local roads to our cabin, she was filling me in on all the family news. I remember being very engrossed in all that she was telling me. But suddenly she went completely silent and looked over at me quizzically. “You do realize you’ve completely stopped, don’t you?” And there we were, in the middle of state highway M-72, slowed down to almost a complete standstill.
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Your important goals never sleep. They operate unconsciously in the background, without your needing to guide them or even being aware of them, vigilantly monitoring your environment for things that might help meet that need. Answers to problems can then pop into your mind out of seemingly nowhere. Sleep is a big chunk of downtime when conscious activities are at a minimum, and your mind uses that time unconsciously to continue to work on problems. The good news is that sometimes it is successful, providing a breakthrough answer or solution to a problem or puzzle you’ve worked on consciously for quite a while. The bad news is that if it is not making enough progress and time is short, your mind will nag at you and cause worries and anxiety. Your mind is not trying to torture you, no matter how it may seem. Rather, it has reached an impasse that can only be broken by a bit of conscious work—conscious work in the form of making a concrete plan for how to solve that problem in the near future.
Conscious and unconscious processes interact with and help each other. In this chapter we’ve described many ways that the unconscious takes the baton from conscious efforts and continues to work on the problem even after we’ve given up on it or moved on to other things we need to do. Like close colleagues or teammates working together to get something done, unconscious processes point your conscious attention to important information; they communicate honestly with your conscious mind about whether they are having any success or not. Sometimes for very difficult problems the answer will even come to us in a dream, but usually only after a lot of conscious struggle with the problem. Creativity often relies on these unconscious activities—whether you’re Michael Jordan, Norman Mailer, or plain old me.
It is okay to “sleep on it” or take your mind off a problem after giving it a lot of thought. In fact it could be very beneficial to do so. For one thing, conscious effortful cogitation is limited and tiring and so it is a good idea to refresh it by doing something else for a while. I’ve learned to trust myself when I want to get up from the desk and take a break, to make some coffee or walk out in the yard for a few minutes; this usually occurs when I have a vague but not fully formed idea of what I want to write next. The break usually helps; it gives unconscious processes a crack at it in a mini-Mailer way and I sit down again with a clearer notion of where to go. Many writers and thinkers espouse walks or exercise as a powerfully renewing practice for the mind. I used to do a lot of long runs in the countryside and would often have insights and research ideas that I would write down as soon as I got back home. While you are engaged in such exercise activities, your goals and unconscious problem solvers can take advantage of the downtime and often accomplish things you are having trouble doing consciously.
Talking to yourself as Mailer advises, giving yourself assignments, may sound a little weird. When I first moved to New York, there were “talkers” who were having conversations with themselves out loud while walking alone, and we knew they were a bit off and gave them their space. (Today there are many more “talkers” than there used to be, but now they have headsets and smartphones.) But if you think about it, isn’t our normal conscious thought just internal talking to ourselves? And in fact this internal speech to ourselves actually starts out in young children as talking out loud to themselves, having a little conversation with themselves, and even telling themselves what they are going to do next. This short stage of development, around age three, was first noticed by the Russian developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky in the 1930s. As they are developing the ability to think consciously, children first talk out loud to themselves, and only after doing so become able to “talk” silently, mentally, to themselves.
So what Mailer practiced and suggested to aspiring writers was actually a quite natural way of operating our mental machinery, one that takes more complete advantage of the cooperative nature of our conscious and unconscious modes of thinking and problem-solving. Our abilities to control ourselves, to self-regulate, actually depend on this ability to talk to ourselves—only after we are able to do so does self-control begin (around age four). And this ability to control our own minds and actions, to more effectively attain our important goals by making use of unconscious as well as conscious means to those ends, is the focus of the final chapter.