4 Unconscious Thought: The Key Ingredient
Geniuses work long and hard. Ideas don’t arise out of nothing. In 1908, pioneering French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher Henri Poincaré laid out the four stages that lead to a new idea apparently leaping from nowhere into consciousness.55
In 1881, twenty-seven years earlier, Poincaré had just put his foot onto the bottom step of a horse-drawn omnibus when he suddenly realized the answer to a mathematical problem he’d been worrying over. He had never thought of taking geometry into account—but in fact the answer lay in non-Euclidean geometry, an entirely different class from the standard geometry. The result was a major breakthrough and the discovery of an entire class of mathematical functions.
At the moment that Poincaré had this breakthrough, he hadn’t been thinking about mathematics at all. He’d been thinking and talking about something entirely different. The key, he realized, was unconscious thought.
Mathematician Jacques Hadamard attended Poincaré’s 1908 lecture and was inspired by his comment that what is really important in a scientific discovery is the way it was discovered, a topic that should be of great interest to psychologists.56
Psychologist Graham Wallas went on to expand on Poincaré’s four-stage model in his 1926 book The Art of Thought.57 It is still discussed today, and its framework remains solid. It is an inspiring and deeply informative way of describing the creative process, showing that new ideas do not just pop up out of nowhere, even though they may seem to.
The Four Stages of Creativity
1. Conscious Thought
Ideas don’t arise in an intellectual vacuum. The first step is conscious thought, feeding the brain with the material you’re working on: working at your desk, reading, thinking, planning, focusing, gathering information. It’s like sowing seeds and giving them water.
2. Unconscious Thought
When philosophers, scientists, artists, researchers—anyone toiling over a problem—hit a wall, they take a break. But the passionate desire to solve the problem keeps it alive in the unconscious, where it can be mulled over freely in ways not possible with conscious thought because of all the barriers and inhibitions there. Unconscious thought is all-important. This phase is like waiting for your seeds to germinate. You could take a bath, take a nap, or go for a walk—and let the mind wander.
3. Illumination
We have all experienced an aha moment when the solution to a problem we’ve been worrying about comes to mind unexpectedly when we’re running for a bus or about to fall asleep.
Just as you stop thinking about a problem, suddenly the solution flashes into your mind. Poincaré called this “sudden illumination.”58 It’s like the moment when the first shoots of your newly planted seeds appear above the surface.
4. Verification
This last stage is every bit as important as the previous three. You still have to use your critical thinking skills to hone and craft your newfound idea. The idea will not necessarily leap out perfect and fully formed. It needs to be checked, and its consequences deduced, which demands discipline, attention, will—that is, conscious work.
The four-stage model of creativity is the best way to explore high-level thinking because it reveals how, in a prepared unconscious, connections can occur between widely disparate concepts.
Another way that creativity researchers work is to assume that the difference between creative and noncreative thinkers lies in their database of knowledge. Creative thinkers build up their expertise by accumulating a vast amount of material. They are also skilled at sifting through this material and using it to solve problems. This is certainly an interesting approach, but it doesn’t tackle the essence of highly creative thinking—and certainly not that of geniuses who it is hard to imagine laboriously sifting through data in an organized manner.59 Such an analysis also suggests that hard work alone will make you a great thinker, or even a genius, which is sadly unlikely.
The Importance of Taking Time Off
When the French psychiatrist Édouard Toulouse interviewed Poincaré in 1897, he reported that he “never does any important work in the evening in order not to trouble his sleep. … It is a manner of work uncommon in scientific matters and constitutes a character well suited to the mental activity of M. H. Poincaré.”60 In other words Poincaré had complete confidence in the power of his unconscious and knew when to stop conscious work on a problem so that “his unconscious [could] continue the work of reflection.”61
Poincaré’s belief in the best way to nurture creative thinking was similar to that of other eminent scientists, such as the German polymath Hermann von Helmholtz. Originally trained as a physician, Helmholtz made important contributions to psychology, physiology, physics, and theories of vision and perception, as well as writing penetrating essays on philosophy. He wrote of how a period of hard work culminated in intellectual fatigue. “Then after the fatigue of the work had passed away, an hour of perfect bodily repose was necessary before the fruitful ideas came. Often in the morning upon awakening.”62 He also quoted the German poet Goethe’s famous lines on the workings of the unconscious: “What man does not know / Or has not thought of / Wanders in the night / Through the labyrinth of the mind.”63
On another occasion, Helmholtz mentioned the German mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss’s remarks on how ideas occur on awakening in the morning: “The law of [mathematical] induction was discovered January 1835 at 7 am, before rising.”64
Poincaré’s creative work yielded a solution fairly quickly, but for Helmholtz solving a problem sometimes took “weeks or months,” resulting in a “sharp attack of migraine.” Helmholtz complained that when trying to solve a problem he could never find “the royal road [because] he was not clever enough.” Afterward, he reviewed the numerous pages of his work, with all their dead ends and false starts—and, lo and behold, the “royal road” emerged, as he reveals in his published papers.
Toulouse’s book on Poincaré is probably the most complete psychological profile ever of a major scientist. Besides Poincaré, he also carried out observations on Émile Zola, sculptors Jules Dalou and Auguste Rodin, and composer Camille Saint-Saëns. These observations led him to abandon the original assumption that underlaid his project: “genius is a neurosis.”65
Toulouse carried out his interviews in 1897 and he did not complete his book until 1910. But this delay did not impinge on his analysis of his interviews. He mentions Poincaré’s lecture of 1908, in which he laid out the four stages of creativity, almost at the very end of his book, and then only in support of his own findings regarding Poincaré’s own emphasis on the power of unconscious thought.
In 1897, Poincaré was immensely busy, yet he still took the time to participate in Toulouse’s research on creativity. I believe the reason is Poincaré’s intense interest in scientific discovery and in creativity in general, a theme that runs throughout his many fascinating essays on the foundations of science.
One thing that sparked Poincaré’s interest was a series of psychological questionnaires on scientific creativity sent out between 1902 and 1908 by a team of French psychologists. The responses were disappointing. In fact, the only well-known scientist to reply was Ludwig Boltzmann, famous for his work on the theory of gases and on entropy, a measure of disorder. In response to the question, “What advice would you give to a young man pursuing his mathematical studies?” he replied, “I have only one piece of advice for young mathematicians: ‘Be a genius!’ The rest is unimportant.”66 Poincaré was aware of the failure of the questionnaire and wanted to bring the question of creativity to the attention of not only the intellectual community but also the curious layperson. His bestselling books with their huge readership were the best vehicle.
Some years ago, I had the good fortune to discover Poincaré’s archival materials. Several documents verify the account he gave in his lecture of how he came to make his great discovery. It is clear that he did not feel that he had to come up with an on-the-spot description of a scientific discovery in response to Toulouse’s questions. Conversely, this is exactly what Belgian chemist August Kekulé did in 1890 when he made up an on-the-spot story for a journalist about how he had discovered the cyclical structure of the benzene molecule. He claimed that while dozing in front of the fire at the University of Ghent, he dreamt of six monkeys forming a hexagon by grabbing the tail of the one in front and realized that the structure of the benzene molecule was hexagonal, as indeed it was. It’s such a great story that even though it’s been known since 1954 to be apocryphal, it persists in many analyses of creativity.67
Strangely, Henri Poincaré helped spark the explosion of creativity that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century in that he was the common denominator between Einstein and Picasso. He was one of the inspirations for both Einstein’s relativity theory of 1905 and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.68 Both were acquainted with Poincaré’s best-selling Science and Hypothesis, published in 1902. In Berne, Switzerland, Einstein read it with members of his think tank, one of whom recalled that it “profoundly impressed us and held us spellbound for weeks on end.”69 Einstein was undoubtedly inspired by Poincaré’s masterful essays on the nature of space and time. But in the end, he disagreed with Poincaré’s understanding of space and time and of the physics of that era, which he replaced with his relativity theory.70
In Paris, Maurice Princet, a member of Picasso’s circle and an accountant with a penchant for advanced mathematics, described the book in after-dinner lectures that Picasso attended.71 Poincaré piqued Picasso’s interest in how to view four-dimensional space, in which, if you could place yourself in it, you would see every perspective of a scene at once. (To repeat, for Picasso the fourth dimension is a spatial dimension.) The problem was how to project all these perspectives onto a flat canvas. But in the end Picasso disagreed with Poincaré’s suggestion that the way to project an image in four-dimensional space onto a canvas was to do so one perspective at a time. Picasso wanted to project all perspectives at once, which led to cubism.
Poincaré was so near, yet so far, in both science and art.
Another example of the power of unconscious thought is Archimedes’s famous Eureka moment in the bathtub. This was preceded by months of mulling over the problem his king had set him as to whether the crown that had recently been made for him was pure gold. The snag was that this had to be solved without melting the crown down. Out of this came the famous Archimedes principle.
There are many more examples of sudden flashes of illumination coming at unexpected times. One of Einstein’s inspirations for relativity theory came while he was daydreaming, pondering what it would be like to catch up with a point on a light wave. He concluded that you can’t. As for why, that was another matter he had to struggle with. It came down to the nature of time and how we measure it. Heisenberg hit on the crucial element in quantum mechanics while admiring the scenery on the island of Heligoland, where he was recovering from hay fever. And Alan Turing dreamt up the “logical computing machine” while thinking about typewriters. But all these moments of illumination came not out of nowhere but after long periods of mulling over a problem.
Like Archimedes’s bathtub and Poincaré’s omnibus, traffic lights too can play a role in creativity. Waiting at a traffic light at a London intersection one day in 1933, physicist Leo Szilard swore that by the time it turned green he would have cracked the problem he had been working on for months—to find a way to harness the energy in the nucleus of an atom. He did. Similarly, physicist Steven Weinberg was driving to work in 1967 when he hit on the key to the standard model, which substantially added to our understanding of the subatomic world.
Beethoven’s daily creative rhythm was to improvise at the piano, sketch out some music as his desk, then go for a walk. “Walking was as much a part of the process as the rest of it,” writes Jan Swafford in a recent biography.72
Steve Jobs was in the appliance section of Macy’s one day at a time when he was trying to think up an elegant design for the cover of the Apple II. There he was struck by the sleek case of a Cuisinart food processor, made of one piece of light, molded plastic. It was precisely what he had been looking for.
John Hegarty, a creative director at Bartle Bogle Hegarty who dreamt up groundbreaking advertising campaigns for Levi’s and came up with the slogan “Vorsprung Durch Technik” for Audi, writes: “When I’m asked, When do you do your best creative thinking? My answer is always, When I’m not thinking.”73
And then there’s Mozart. Every now and then someone appears for whom the normal rules of life seem not to apply, who throws all our theories into disarray. According to legend, Mozart wrote a letter to his father in which he described how he composed music not line by line but in a burst, “all at once.”74 Sadly, scholars doubt the letter’s authenticity.75
Fortunately, there is a better, genuine letter that Mozart wrote to his father on December 30, 1780, about his work on the opera Idomeneo. “Everything is composed, just not copied out yet,” he writes, an extraordinary statement if one thinks about it for a minute.76 It seems Mozart could conceive of an entire piece of music in his mind and hold it there until he had the chance to sit down and transcribe it, transcription being an act he found so appallingly boring that he usually did so while chatting with friends—and perhaps telling a scatological joke or two, at which he was superb.
Another example of Mozart’s extraordinary abilities is displayed in a letter he wrote to his sister Marianne, nicknamed Nannerl, on April 20, 1782. In it, he says, “I composed the fugue first and wrote it down while I was thinking out the prelude.”77 This is nothing short of amazing. He is describing how he composed his Prelude and Fugue in C Major. The prelude is an exploration into complex pianistic techniques, just as many of Bach’s inventions were, involving not only music but problems of touch, all of which Mozart had to keep in mind while transcribing the fugue.
For ordinary mortals, the moral is that instead of sweating over a problem, it’s better to take a break, go for a walk, have a snooze. The solution may just come to you out of nowhere.
Unconscious Thought and Computers
[Scientific creativity] is the process in which the human mind seems to borrow least from the exterior world.
—Henri Poincaré78
We are never not thinking. Solutions to problems we have labored over for hours, days, months, or names of people we embarrassingly could not remember when we met them, often pop up when we are thinking of something else—the “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon.
During unconscious thinking, the mind mulls over many different approaches to a problem, using facts stored in our deepest memory, as well as material used in the original version of the problem. The unconscious mind tries them all out in ways and areas that may at first seem unconnected. Inhibitions and other barriers prevent this freewheeling approach from operating when one is using conscious thought.
For more insight into unconscious thought, I’ve formulated what I call a model for network thinking, based on Poincaré’s four stages of creativity. According to this, consciously working on a problem primes the unconscious to continue this work, even when we are no longer consciously thinking about it. A helpful way to imagine what happens in unconscious thought is to picture it as many lines of thought taking place at once in parallel, coming together from time to time to enrich each other. This leads to the illumination, the solution.
Essential to the process are information on the problem at hand, background knowledge, and reasoning methods. The brain assesses each of the resulting combinations of facts using aesthetics along with other criteria, depending on the field. We then reject most combinations, sometimes using our intuition. Intuition is a much-misunderstood notion. It is nothing more than the culmination of experience, of having made numerous mistakes and thought deeply about them. An art critic’s ability to make an instant decision as to whether an artwork is genuine is awe-inspiring, but it is not innate. It has been learned the hard way.
This model of network thinking can be reproduced on a computer able to do many calculations at once—that is, in parallel. A computer’s central processing unit (CPU) is where it performs calculations on problems fed to it by the computer’s programs or software. We can add more CPUs, thus building up the number of calculations in parallel—parallel lines of thought—it can deal with. The model for network thinking is an ongoing project.79 As well as offering insights into unconscious thinking, it may also be useful in understanding how computers work.
So how close are human thought processes to the way computers work? To what extent can computers mimic the human brain? And are they—or will they ever be—capable of unconscious thought?
We’ve looked at what goes on in the brains of geniuses like Einstein, Bach, and Picasso. But what about computers? What goes on in their brains?