Writing > On Creativity > Bluebeard's Key > The Castle 01 02
 

Analysing thought and thinking techniques 02

"There is a whole rich world of mental phenomena that accompanies the nonrational states of mind. It is a strange-seeming world, uncanny even, in which thoughts are vivid and thought streams can be oddly and illogically built, where unexpected connections emerge like the features of a moonlit landscape as you grow used to the dark, and the memories are slippery: its hard to recall just what has happened, and where you have been..."  David Gelernter

In 'teaching' creativity, I am of the opinion that an approach that emphasises the problem / question formulating phase of the process will produce the most significantly different results. You have to upset the basic premise of at least twelve years of right-answer training, to open minds to the fact that the teachers do not only lack the answers, they don't even have the questions!

There is another approach to cognitive process. One of the most impressive thinkers I encountered on this part of the planet, is professor David Gelernter of Yale University. The following thoughts have been sifted and adapted from his book on artificial intelligence - The Muse in the Machine (Computers and Creative Thought).

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"Children have short attention spans.

There is nothing remarkable about that, but it perfectly epitomises the sort of fact that appears to be wholly unconnected to topics like computer science or the philosophy of the mind. Most practitioners of those disciplines would agree: children have short attention spans ... so what? Everyone knows about children's short attention spans and, for the record, studies confirm them.

Very young children have another related characteristic that's harder to study but just as interesting. If you listen to an intelligent two and a half year old holding forth, you may notice that his conversation has a plastic quality: one topic turns abruptly into another, with no respect for narrative logic. We might call this 'stream of consciousness' style conversation, but it strongly resembles another phenomenon as well. Dreams work this way. It's perfectly normal in the course of dreaming for one scene to transform itself abruptly and 'illogically' into a different one. Now it's an interesting fact, less well known, that some ancient literature is marked by this same kind of plastic, illogically put-together quality. What is it about dreams, childhood and the ancient mind that makes thought run, sometimes in funny ways?

Could it be something that they share? These states of being have been compared often before, there is a certain obvious vulnerability in all three states, but I refer to a resemblance in the styles of thinking, in the method by which thought trains are assembled.

Returning to dreams; their defining quality is that, although they are constructed of memories, they seem real. "Dreams are hallucinations." And on reflection, thoughts about childhood and in childhood are both tinged, also, with hallucinatory overtones.

First, certain childhood memories, suddenly recollected, can take an adult out of the present and place him in a different time and place with near-hallucinatory force. Further: Young children are often themselves observed to have vivid imaginations. If we say you have a vivid imagination, we mean that what you imagine seems real to you.

In classic ancient texts, we often come across the phenomenon of gods directly dictating passages as if ancient man boldly drew on his vivid imagination, as John Keats describes it: "Holy were the haunted forest boughs, Holy the air, the water and the fire"

What is it that the mental states of dream, child and ancient man share?

And why is it that, after the dream has passed, we have so much difficulty remembering it? And that after early childhood has passed, we have so much difficulty remembering it?

Symbolism is basic to dreaming. Everyone is aware of occasions on which X occurred in a dream, but we know immediately that X really meant Y. A symbol might be purely arbitrary. More often, there's a connection between 'symbol' and 'symbolised'. In more than one way, dream thought traffics in associations, in unexpected connections. It's remarkable that childhood thought does too. A common characteristic of young pre-school children's conversation is chaining - that is, free associating. A series of studies have shown young children to be strikingly good at metaphor as well. Metaphor hinges on meaningful but non-obvious connections.

What is it exactly that dream and child share? Let's shift gears. What are children bad at?

Logic and analysis are not childhood specialities. More generally, children tend to be poor at manipulating abstractions. But adults are also conspicuously incompetent at logic, analysis and abstraction - when they are sleepy. A psychiatry textbook notes that drowsiness is characterised by, among other things, 'a tendency to concrete thinking'. Adults are very bad at logical thought when they are asleep. A certain amount of problem solving can occur in a dream, but dream thought is notably not logical and not analytical. Nor is it abstract. Freud remarked that words are treated in dreams as if they were concrete things; concrete is a word that keeps recurring in the literature on dreams.

Logic, analysis and abstraction are non-specialities of ancient man as well. The great archaeologist William Foxwell Allbright used the term 'proto-logical' to distinguish the thought style of the oldest class of western literature from ordinary logical thinking.

There is an obvious antithesis then between the mental universe of antiquity, dream and child and the analytic rigor of 'rational' man.

That there are two styles of thinking is an old observation. In modern psychology, an analytic, or rational or convergent style is contrasted with something called divergent or productive or lateral or metaphoric thought. Sometimes 'left-brain' thinking is held up to 'right-brain' thinking in a broadly similar way. None of these dichotomies is a good match to the antithesis that I've been describing. But in any case, the dichotomy itself is not the point. Mine is a story of continuity: of one cognitive style unfolding smoothly into another. What the dichotomists miss is merely the crux of the matter: that these styles are connected; that a spectrum joins them, a spectrum that runs in one continuous, subtly graded arc, from the intense violet of logical analysis all the way downward into the soft slow red of sleep.

Let's invent something called a person's mental focus. One end of the spectrum corresponds to maximum mental focus, and the other end to minimum. As we twiddle the knob from the high 'analytical' end to the low 'metaphoric' side, we are gradually turning mental focus lower.

Many separate cognitive events accompany the move down-spectrum, ranging from a loss of control over the thought stream to increased propensity to have creative insights and to encounter vivid imaginings or even hallucinations, a relaxation of logic, a loss of 'goal directedness', and all directedness, and the emergence of emotion as the main glue of thought."

David Gelernter, from The Muse and the Machine - Computers and Creative Thought.

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Clearly, as this view of human thought and creativity unfolds, we are leaving the purely rational, clear and cold logic of mere intellect, and we are forced to consider a wider perspective.

Posted 04 August 2006, www.annisnyman.co.za, author: Anni Snyman

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