The Emotion Machine

structure is formed “whose elements are so harmoniously disposed that the mind can embrace their totality while realizing the details.” But how does that subliminal process know when it has found a promising prospect?

Poincare: “It is not purely automatic; it is capable of discernment; it has tact, delicacy; it knows how to choose, to divine. What do I say? It knows better how to divine than the conscious self, since it succeeds where that has failed.”

He conjectures that this ability to detect promising patterns seems to involve such elements as symmetry and consistency.

Poincare: “What is it indeed that gives us the feeling of elegance in a solution, in a demonstration? It is the harmony of the diverse parts, their symmetry, their happy balance; it is all that introduces order, all that gives unity, that permits us to see clearly and to comprehend at once both the ensemble and the details.”

Poincare did not say much more about how those detectors of ‘elegance’ might work, so we need more ideas about how we recognize those signs of success. Some of those candidates could be screened with simple matching tricks. Also, as part of the Preparation phase, we select some specialized critics that can detect progress toward solving our problem, and keep these active throughout Incubation.

Evaluation: We often hear advice that suggests that it’s safer for us to trust our ‘intuitions’—ideas that we get without knowing how. But Poincare went on to emphasize that one cannot always trust those ‘revelations.’

Poincare: “I have spoken of the feeling of absolute certitude accompanying the inspiration ... but often this feeling deceives us without being any the less vivid, and we only find it out when we seek to put on foot the demonstrations. I have especially noticed this fact in regard to ideas coming to me in the morning or evening in bed while in a self-hypnagogic state.”

In other words, the unconscious mind can make foolish mistakes. Indeed, later Poincare goes on to argue suggest that it often fails to work out the small details—so when Revelation suggest a solution, your Evaluation may find it defective. However, if it is only partially wrong, you may not need to start over again; by using more careful deliberation, you may able to repair the incorrect part, without changing the rest of that partial solution.

I find Poincare’s scheme very plausible, but surely we also use other techniques. However, many thinkers have maintained that the process of creative thinking cannot be explained in any way, because they find it hard to believe that powerful, novel insights could result from mechanical processes—and hence require additional, magical talents.[141] However, Chapter 8 will argue that outstanding abilities can result from nothing more than fortunate combinations of certain traits that we find in the ways that most people think. If so, then what we call ‘genius’ requires no other special ingredient.

Somewhat similar models of thinking were proposed in Hadamard (1945), Koestler (1964), Miller (1960), and Newell and Simon (1972)—the latter two in more computational terms. Perhaps the most extensive study of ways to generate ideas is that of Patrick Gunkel at http://ideonomy.mit.edu. In any case, however you make each new idea, you must quickly proceed to evaluate by activating appropriate critics. Then, if the result still has some defects, you can apply similar cycles to each of those deficiencies.

In my view, what we call ‘creativity’ is not the ability to generate completely novel concepts or points of view; for a new idea to be useful to us, we must be able to combine it with the knowledge and skills we already possess—so it must not be too very different enough from the ideas we’re already familiar with.

Collaboration.

We usually think about thinking as a solitary activity that happens inside a single mind. However, some people are better at making ideas, while others excel at refining them—and wonderful things can happen when ‘matched pairs’ of such persons collaborate. It is said that T.S. Eliot’s poetry owed much to Ezra Pound’s editing, and that A.S. Sullivan’s music was most inspired when he was working with W.S. Gilbert’s librettos. Another example of such a pair might be Konrad Lorenz and Nickolaas Tinbergen, as we see in their Nobel Prize autobiographies:

Niko Tinbergen: “From the start ‘pupil’ and ‘master’ influenced each other. Konrad’s extraordinary vision and enthusiasm were supplemented and fertilized by my critical sense, my inclination to think his ideas through, and my irrepressible urge to check our ‘hunches’ by experimentation — a gift for which he had an almost childish admiration.”[142]

Konrad Lorenz: “Our views coincided to an amazing degree but I quickly realized that he was my superior in regard to analytical thought as well as to the faculty of devising simple and telling experiments. … None of us knows who said what first, but it is highly probable that the [concept of] innate releasing mechanisms … was Tinbergen’s contribution.”[143]

For many people, thinking and learning is largely a social activity—and many of the ideas in this book came from collaborations with students and friends. Some such relationships are productive because they combine different sets of aptitudes. However, there also are pairs of partners who have relatively similar skills—perhaps the most important of which are effective tricks for preventing each other from getting stuck.

???????????????????

Do we normally think ‘Bipolarly’?

The processes that Poincare described involved cycles of searching and testing in which problems are solved over hours, days, or even years. However, many events of everyday thinking persist for just a few seconds or less. Perhaps these, too, begin by spawning ideas, then selecting some promising ones, and then dwelling on their deficiencies!

If so, then a typical moment of commonsense thinking might begin with a very brief ‘micro-manic’ phase. This would produce an idea or two—and then a short ‘micro-depressive’ phase would quickly look for flaws in them.

If those phases took place so rapidly that your reflective systems don’t notice them, then each such micro-cycle’ would seem to be no more than a moment of everyday thinking, while the overall process would seem to you like a steady, smooth, uneventful flow.[144]

The quality of such systems would depend in part on how much time one spends in each such phase. It seems plausible to conjecture that, when one is inclined to be ‘critical’ or ‘skeptical,’ one spends less time at Incubation and puts more effort into Evaluation. However, if anything were to go badly wrong with how those durations were controlled, then some of those phases might last for so long that (as suggested in §3-5) they might appear as symptoms of a so-called ‘manic-depressive’ disorder.

???????????????????

§7-8. Cognitive Contexts