The Emotion Machine

§7-7. Poincare’s Unconscious Processes

“We cannot kindle when we will

The fire which in our heart resides,

The spirit bloweth and is still,

In mystery our soul abides:

But tasks in hours of insight will’d,

Can be through hours of gloom fulfill’d”

—Matthew Arnold

Sometimes you’ll work on a problem for hours or days, as when Joan worked on her progress report.

She has been thinking about it for several days, but has not yet conceived of a good enough plan. Discouraged, she sets those thoughts aside … but then an idea ‘occurs’ to her.

But did Joan really set those thoughts aside, or did they continue in other parts of her mind? Hear a great mathematician recount some similar experiences.

Henri Poincare: “Every day I seated myself at my worktable, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results.”[139]

Most persons might get discouraged with this—but Poincare was inclined to persist:

“One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. By the next morning … I had only to write out the results, which took but a few hours.”

Then he describes another event in which his thinking seemed much less deliberate:

“The changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it. … I went on with a conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty.”

This suggests that the work was still being pursued, hidden away in ‘the back of his mind’—until suddenly, as though ‘out of the blue,’ a good solution ‘occurred’ to him.

“There was one [obstacle] however that still held out, whose fall would involve the whole structure. But all my efforts only served at first the better to show me the difficulty. … [Some days later,] going along the street, the solution of the difficulty that had stopped me suddenly appeared to me. … I had all the elements and had only to arrange them and put them together.”

In the essay from which these quotations come, Poincare concluded that when making his discoveries, he must have used activities that typically worked in four stages like these:

Preparation: Activate resources to deal with this particular type of problem.

Incubation: generate many potential solutions.

Revelation: recognize a promising one.

Evaluation: verify that it actually works.

The first and last of these stages seemed to involve the kinds of high-level processes that we characterized as conscious ones—whereas incubation and revelation usually proceed without our being aware of them. Around the start of the 19^th century, both Sigmund Freud and Henri Poincare were among the first to develop ideas about ‘unconscious’ goals and processes—and, if only for mathematical activities— Poincare suggested clearer descriptions of these but borrowed

Let’s consider what might be involved in each of the stages of such a process.

Preparation: To prepare to solve a specific problem, one first may need to ‘clear one’s mind’ from other goals— for example, by taking a walk, or by finding a quiet place to work. Then one must focus on the problem by deliberating to decide which of its features are central enough to suggest an appropriate Way to Think; here Poincare said, “All my efforts only served at first the better to show me the difficulty.”

Then, he suggest, you need to find appropriate ways to represent the situation; one needs to identify the parts of a puzzle before you can start to put them together—and until you understand their relationships well enough, you will tend to waste too much of your time at making bad combinations of them. This must be what Matthew Arnold meant when he said,

“This creative power works with elements, with materials; what if it has not those materials, those elements, ready for its use? In that case it must surely wait till they are ready.”

—Essays in Criticism, 1865.

In other words, blind “trial and error” won’t often suffice; you need to impose the right kinds of constraints and activate a set of resources that will tend to generate good possibilities—or else get lost in an endless search. Also, if you can’t deal with the problem all at once, then you make a plan that breaks it into smaller parts that you can hope to handle separately.

Incubation: Once the ‘unconscious mind’ is prepared, it can consider large numbers of combinations, searching for ways to assemble those fragments to satisfy the required relations. Poincare wonders whether we do this with a very large but thoughtless search—or if it is done more cleverly.

Poincare: “If the sterile combinations do not even present themselves to the mind of the inventor … does it follow that the subliminal self, having divined by a delicate intuition that [only certain] combinations would be useful, has formed only these, or has it rather formed many others which were lacking in interest and have remained unconscious?”

In other words, Poincare asks how selective are our unconscious thoughts; do we explore massive number of combinations, or work on the finer details of fewer ones? In either case, when we incubate, we will need to switch off enough of our usual Critics to make sure that the system will not reject too many hypotheses. However, we still know almost nothing about how our brains could conduct such a search, nor why some people are so much better at this: here is one conjecture about that.

Aaron Sloman:“The most important discoveries in science are not discoveries of new laws or theories, but the discovery of new ranges of possibilities, about which good new theories or laws can be formed.”[140]

Revelation: When should incubation end? Poincare suggests that it continues until some