Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind Read online

  Dedication

  For Jo

  Epigraph

  Everything is gestation and bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life. Being an artist means not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap, and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  List of Figures

  1 The Speed of Thought

  2 Basic Intelligence: Learning by Osmosis

  3 Premature Articulation: How Thinking Gets in the Way of Learning

  4 Knowing More than We Think: Intuition and Creativity

  5 Having an Idea: the Gentle Art of Mental Gestation

  6 Thinking Too Much? Reason and Intuition as Antagonists and Allies

  7 Perception without Consciousness

  8 Self-Consciousness

  9 The Brains behind the Operation

  10 The Point of Consciousness

  11 Paying Attention

  12 The Rudiments of Wisdom

  13 The Undermind Society: Putting the Tortoise to Work

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Acknowledgements

  There are many people who have supported, encouraged and guided me throughout the long gestation of this book, and to whom thanks are due. They include Stephen Batchelor (for duck dinners), Mark Brown (for his enthusiasm), Merophie Carr, Polly Carr, Isabelle Gall, Rod Jenkinson (who wanted it to be The Sin of Certainty), Kikan Massara, Helen and Colin Moore (for their room), and my mother, Ruby Claxton (for her love and for not interrupting). Among those who offered me scholarly advice and generously shared their time and knowledge were Peter Abbs, Maurice Ash, Brian Bates, Susan Blackmore, Alan Bleakley, Laurinda Brown, Fritjof Capra, Martin Conway, Peter Fenwick, Brian Goodwin, Susan Greenfield, Valerie Hall, Jane Henry, Tony Marcel, Richard Morris, Brian Nicholson, Dick Passingham, Mark Price, Robin Skynner, John Teasdale, Francisco Varela, Max Velmans and Larry Weiskrantz. Special thanks to Margaret Carr for wonderful conversations, and to her and her husband Malcolm for their friendship, and the use, yet again, of their muse-filled beach-house in Raglan, New Zealand. Michelle Macdonald, Steven Smith and Christopher Titmuss helped me to practise the art of thinking slowly. And Christopher Potter and Emma Rhind-Tutt of Fourth Estate believed in the book enough to chivvy me into improving it. Emma’s love of language and her persistent refusal to let me get away with sloppiness of mind or prose helped enormously to shape the book for the better. Such inaccuracies and infelicities as remain are, of course, down to me.

  I am grateful to the following authors and publishers for permission to reproduce quotations and illustrations.

  Academic Press Inc., and Professor Patricia Bowers (executor of the estate of the late Professor Kenneth S. Bowers), for two panels from figure 2, p83 in ‘Intuition in the context of discovery’, by K.S. Bowers, G. Regehr, C. Balthazard and K. Parker, reprinted with kind permission from Cognitive Psychology, vol 22, pp72–110, © 1990 Academic Press.

  American Psychological Association and Professor]. Schooler for illustrations from the appendix (p182) to J.W. Schooler, S. Ohlsson and K. Brooks (1993) ‘Thoughts beyond words: when language overshadows insight’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol 122, pp 166–183; © 1993 by the American Psychological Association. Reprinted with permission.

  The British Psychological Society for extracts from the report ‘Fostering Innovation: A Psychological Perspective’ by M.A. West, C. Fletcher and J. Toplis, March 1994.

  Cambridge University Press for extracts from A.E. Housman, The Name and Nature of Poetry.

  Elsevier Science Ltd for the extract from ‘How does cognitive therapy prevent depressive relapse and why should attentional control (mindfulness) training help?’ by John Teasdale, Zindel Segal and Marie Williams, reprinted from Behavior Research and Therapy, 1995, vol 33, pp25–39. © 1995, with kind permission from Elsevier Science Ltd, The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, 0X5 1GB, UK.

  Faber and Faber Ltd. for the extract from Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making, published by Faber and Faber Ltd., London 1967. ©Ted Hughes 1967, reprinted with kind permission.

  HarperCollins Publishers for extracts from Discourse on Thinking, translated by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund by Martin Heidegger. Copyright © 1959 by Verlag Gunther Neske. Copyright © in the English Translation by Harper & Row, Publishers Inc. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Excerpts from Women’s Ways of Knowing by Mary Field Belenky et al. Copyright © 1986 by Basic Books, Inc. Reprinted by permission of BasicBooks, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

  The MIT Press for the extract from P.S. Churchland. Neuropkilosophy, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. © 1986 Patricia S. Churchland.

  Oxford University Press for the extract from Arthur Reber, Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious, OUP, Oxford, 1993.

  Princeton University Press for the extract from D.T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, Princeton University Press, 1959; and for the extract from J. Hademard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, Princeton University Press, 1945.

  Random House Inc. for the excerpt from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night, published by The Bodley Head; and for the excerpts from Tom Peters, The Pursuit of Wow!, published by Vintage Books.

  Scientific American Inc., New York, for permission to reproduce the schematic representation of a neuron first published in ‘The chemistry of the brain’ by Leslie L. Iversen, in Scientific American, September, 1979, and later in The Brain: A Scientific American Book.

  Simon and Schuster Inc. for the extract from Richard Selzer, Mortal Lessons, © 1974, 1975, 1976.

  John Wiley and Sons Ltd. for the extract from Nicholas Humphrey, in discussion of Chapter by John Kihlstrom, in CIBA Symposium 174, Experimental and Theoretical Studies of Consciousness, Wiley, Chichester, 1993.

  Figures

  1. Sample grid of numbers used in the Lewicki experiments

  2. The Rubik cube

  3. The mutilated chessboard

  4. The polar planimeter

  5. Bowers’ degraded images

  6. Insight problems

  7. What does the doctor reply?

  8. A stylised neuron

  9. A simple neural net for distinguishing rocks from mines

  10. A map of neural pathways

  11. Brainscape and wordscape

  12. Illusory shapes and contours, after Kanizsa (1979)

  13. The solutions to the insight problems in Figure 6

  CHAPTER 1

  The Speed of Thought

  Turtle buries its thoughts, like its eggs, in the sand, and allows the sun to hatch the little ones. Look at the old fable of the tortoise and the hare, and decide for yourself whether or not you would like to align with Turtle.

  Native American Medicine Cards

  There is an old Polish saying, ‘Sleep faster; we need the pillows’, which reminds us that there are some activities which just will not be rushed. They take the time that they take. If you are late for a meeting, you can hurry. If the roast potatoes are slow to brown, you ca
n turn up the oven. But if you try to speed up the baking of meringues, they burn. If you are impatient with the mayonnaise and add the oil too quickly, it curdles. If you start tugging with frustration on a tangled fishing line, the knot just becomes tighter.

  The mind, too, works at different speeds. Some of its functions are performed at lightning speed; others take seconds, minutes, hours, days or even years to complete their course. Some can be speeded up – we can become quicker at solving crossword puzzles or doing mental arithmetic. But others cannot be rushed, and if they are, then they will break down, like the mayonnaise, or get tangled up, like the fishing line. ‘Think fast; we need the results’ may sometimes be as absurd a notion, or at least as counterproductive, as the attempt to cram a night’s rest into half the time. We learn, think and know in a variety of different ways, and these modes of the mind operate at different speeds, and are good for different mental jobs. ‘He who hesitates is lost’, says one proverb. ‘Look before you leap’, says another. And both are true.

  Roughly speaking, the mind possesses three different processing speeds. The first is faster than thought. Some situations demand an unselfconscious, instantaneous reaction. When my motor-bike skidded on a wet manhole cover in London some years ago, my brain and my body immediately choreographed for me an intricate and effective set of movements that enabled me to keep my seat – and it was only after the action was all over that my conscious mind and my emotions started to catch up. Neither a concert pianist nor an Olympic fencer has time to figure out what to do next. There is a kind of ‘intelligence’ that works more rapidly than thinking. This mode of fast, physical intelligence could be called our ‘wits’. (The five senses were originally known as ‘the five wits’.)

  Then there is thought itself: the sort of intelligence which does involve figuring matters out, weighing up the pros and cons, constructing arguments and solving problems. A mechanic working out why an engine will not fire, a family arguing over the brochures about where to go for next summer’s holiday, a scientist trying to interpret an intriguing experimental result, a student wrestling with an examination question: all are employing a way of knowing that relies on reason and logic, on deliberate conscious thinking. We often call this kind of intelligence ‘intellect’ – though to make the idea more precise, I shall call it d-mode, where the ‘d’ stands for ‘deliberation’. Someone who is good at solving these sorts of problems we call ‘bright’ or ‘clever’.

  But below this, there is another mental register that proceeds more slowly still. It is often less purposeful and clear-cut, more playful, leisurely or dreamy. In this mode we are ruminating or mulling things over; being contemplative or meditative. We may be pondering a problem, rather than earnestly trying to solve it, or just idly watching the world go by. What is going on in the mind may be quite fragmentary. What we are thinking may not make sense. We may even not be aware of much at all. As the English yokel is reported to have said: ‘sometimes I sits and thinks, but mostly I just sits’. Perched on a seaside rock, lost in the sound and the motion of the surf, or hovering just on the brink of sleep or waking, we are in a different mental mode from the one we find ourselves in as we plan a meal or dictate a letter. These leisurely, apparently aimless, ways of knowing and experiencing are just as ‘intelligent’ as the other, faster ones. Allowing the mind time to meander is not a luxury that can safely be cut back as life or work gets more demanding. On the contrary, thinking slowly is a vital part of the cognitive armamentarium. We need the tortoise mind just as much as we need the hare brain.

  Some kinds of everyday predicament are better, more effectively approached with a slow mind. Some mysteries can only be penetrated with a relaxed, unquesting mental attitude. Some kinds of understanding simply refuse to come when they are called. As the Too Te Ching puts it:

  Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.

  Those who are bound by desire see only the outward container.

  Recent scientific evidence shows convincingly that the more patient, less deliberate modes of mind are particularly suited to making sense of situations that are intricate, shadowy or ill defined. Deliberate thinking, d-mode, works well when the problem it is facing is easily conceptualised. When we are trying to decide where to spend our holidays, it may well be perfectly obvious what the parameters are: how much we can afford, when we can get away, what kinds of things we enjoy doing, and so on. But when we are not sure what needs to be taken into account, or even which questions to pose – or when the issue is too subtle to be captured by the familiar categories of conscious thought – we need recourse to the tortoise mind. If the problem is not whether to go to Turkey or Greece, but how best to manage a difficult group of people at work, or whether to give up being a manager completely and retrain as a teacher, we may be better advised to sit quietly and ponder than to search frantically for explanations and solutions. This third type of intelligence is associated with what we call creativity, or even ‘wisdom’.

  Poets have always known the limitations of conscious, deliberate thinking, and have sought to cultivate these slower, mistier ways of knowing. Philosophers from Spinoza and Leibniz to Martin Heidegger and Suzanne Langer have written about the realms of mind that lie beyond and beneath the conscious intellect. Psychotherapists know that ‘the unconscious’ is not just a source of personal difficulties; a revised relationship with one’s unconscious is also part of the ‘cure’. And the sages and mystics of all religious traditions attest to the spontaneous transformation of experience that occurs when one embraces the ‘impersonal mystery’ at the core of mental life – whether this mystery be the ‘godhead’ of Meister Eckhart or the ‘Unborn’ of Zen master Bankei. Even scientists themselves, or at least the most creative of them, admit that their genius comes to them from layers of mind over which they have little or no control (and they may even feel somehow fraudulent for taking personal credit for insights that simply ‘occurred to them’).1

  It is only recently, however, that scientists have started to explore the slower, less deliberate ways of knowing directly. The newly formed hybrid discipline of ‘cognitive science’, an alliance of neuroscience, philosophy, artificial intelligence and experimental psychology, is revealing that the unconscious realms of the human mind will successfully accomplish a number of unusual, interesting and important tasks if they are given the time. They will learn patterns of a degree of subtlety which normal consciousness cannot even see; make sense out of situations that are too complex to analyse; and get to the bottom of certain difficult issues much more successfully than the questing intellect. They will detect and respond to meanings, in poetry and art, as well as in relationships, that cannot be clearly articulated.

  One of my main aims in writing this book is to bring this fascinating research to a wider audience, for it offers a profound and salutary challenge to our everyday view of our own minds and how they work. These empirical demonstrations are more than interesting: they are important. For my argument is not just that the slow ways of knowing exist, and are useful. It is that our culture has come to ignore and undervalue them, to treat them as marginal or merely recreational, and in so doing has foreclosed on areas of our psychological resources that we need. Just like the computer, the Western mind has come to adopt as its ‘default mode’ just one of its possible modes of knowing: d-mode. (The ‘d’ can stand for ‘default’ as well as ‘deliberation’.)

  The individuals and societies of the West have rather lost touch with the value of contemplation. Only active thinking is regarded as productive. Sitting gazing absently at your office wall or out of the classroom window is not of value. Yet many of those whom our society admires as icons of creativity and wisdom have spent much of their time doing nothing. Einstein, it is said, would frequently be found in his office at Princeton staring into space. The Dalai Lama spends hours each day in meditation. Even that paragon of penetrating insight, Sherlock Holmes, is described by his creator as entering a meditative state ‘with a dreamy vacant
expression in his eyes’.

  There are a number of reasons why slow knowing has fallen into disuse. Partly it is due to our changing conception of, and attitude towards, time. In pre-seventeenth-century Europe a leisurely approach to thinking was much more common, and in other cultures it still is. A tribal meeting at a Maori marae can last for days, until everyone has had time to assimilate the issues, to have their say, and to form a consensus. However, the idea that time is plentiful is in many parts of the world now seen as laughably old-fashioned and self-indulgent.

  Swedish anthropologist Helena Norberg-Hodge has documented the way in which the introduction of Western culture has radically altered the pace of life in the traditional society of Ladakh, for example.2 Until ten years ago, a Ladakhi wedding lasted a fortnight. But their lifestyle rapidly altered following the introduction of some simple ‘labour-saving’ changes: tools, such as the Rotovator, to make ploughing quicker and easier; and some new crops and livestock, such as dairy cows. Compared to the traditional yak, cows yield more milk than a family needs, creating a surplus which can be turned into cheese and sold to bring in some extra cash. While there is no harm in making life a little easier, in encouraging families to accumulate a little ‘wealth’, unfortunately this apparently benign ‘aid package’ also gave the Ladakhis a new view of time – as something in short supply. Instead of the Rotovators and the cows generating more leisure, they have in fact reduced it. People are now busier than they were: busy creating wealth – and ‘saving time’. Today a Ladakhi wedding lasts less than a day, just like an English one. Within the Western mindset, time becomes a commodity, and one inevitable consequence is the urge to ‘think faster’: to solve problems and make decisions quickly.

  Partly the decline of slow thinking is to do with the rise of what the American social critic Neil Postman has called ‘technopoly’ – the widespread view that every ill is a problem which has a potential solution; solutions are provided by technological advances, which are generated by clear, purposeful, disciplined thinking; and the faster problems are solved, the better. Thus, as the Ladakhis have recently joined us in believing, time is an adversary over which technology can triumph. For Postman, technopoly is based on