As part of playing the Feelings Collector this year, I read widely about the creative process, which led to developing the Rock Tumbler metaphor. I’m still working out the kinks with the metaphor, but it is a useful image to help remember Graham Wallis’s famous four-stage model of: (1) preparation/saturation, (2) incubation, (3) illumination, and (4) verification/implementation.
I’ve also written before about how the incubation stage may be the most important of the four and how it is perhaps the most paradoxical. I find myself coming back to this idea over and over, as I am back into full-time writing professionally again and at times find it difficult to access the stillness of mind required to generate insights related to my academic practice. Many people, not just creatives, would agree that the best ideas and the brightest insights come when we are otherwise occupied. Why is this so?
Well, as it turns out, there is a growing—and admittedly, controversial—body of psychological and cognitive research that suggests that our unconscious mind may be better at thinking and deciding than we tend to give it credit for. On the face of it, this makes a great deal of sense—think about how many things we do every day without putting a great deal of thought into it, like getting dressed in the morning or making breakfast. Think too of the advice given to anyone learning a skill that requires full-body coordination or a new sport: “Don’t overthink it, just try to do it!”
To quote from an article that I annotated but which now appears to be a broken link:
Here is an example of unconscious thought. Imagine you are listening to a song and can’t remember the name of the artist. You try to think hard, but are still unable to come up with it. So you tell yourself, “I’ll stop thinking about it, and it will come to me in a minute.” This is fascinating. In fact, there is an automatic process that continues to work on your question in the back of your mind. We call that process “unconscious thought.” Unconscious thought can do more than just help you remember facts. It actually has the power to fuel the creative process. Have you ever found yourself struggling with the wording while writing a paper, but after taking time away from it, you’re able to quickly find the right words? This is your unconscious mind at work. While our conscious mind is focused on other matters, our unconscious mind can process the relevant information we need to make important decisions. (emphases added)
The research this article was drawing on suggests that the unconscious mind works best—or at least better than the conscious mind, anyway—at making complex decisions, judgments and actions where large volumes of information must be integrated. The conscious mind may be better at resolving rule-based selections (“if this, then that”-type reasoning), but it seems that unconscious thought operates more smoothly when it comes to generating connections between previously unrelated pieces of information or solving problems for which there are no solution-precedents.
Naturally, a balance of conscious and unconscious thought processes is the ideal. Unconscious intuition appears to be just as likely as not to present ineffective solutions to problems or half-baked ideas. By the same token, however, an overreliance on conscious thought can easily lead to analysis-paralysis.
But on some level, I only partially agree with the author of the quote above. While unconscious thought may “fuel the creative process,” it properly applies to just one of the phases. Conscious thought and deliberation is equally necessary to the creative process, especially in the final stage: implementation/verification. The intuitions generated by the unconscious-driven incubation period, once captured in the moment of illumination, require validation against common sense, feasibility, and everything else that requires conscious and analytical thought.
And that’s a wrap for this week. I realized that I have been putting a lot of time into working through my notes in a somewhat linear fashion. I wanted to get through all of them by the end of the year so I can clear up headspace for next year’s Feelings Collector project. But then I realized that I would like to continue blogging on these subjects as a separate thing—it’s a regular part of my life now, and a fairly well-defined area of activity. Plus, there’s the whole Daoism thing that I’ve only just scratched the surface of.
Anyway, back to the point. My annotations are more or less in chronological order, which has meant that each week when I sit down to write, I’ve just been tackling the next set of paragraphs, quotes and fragments that I haven’t yet got to. But, as I get toward the bottom (as of today, I am on page 40 of 53), the material gets more complex and challenging.
In other words, I need to let my unconscious do some processing if I’m really going to get the most out of working up the rest of this material. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want to improve the blog in the coming months and especially over the next year. A big part of what I want to do is for each of the posts to work as a more self-contained essay. Right now, I use a lot of concepts, terms, and jargon that I’ve either borrowed or developed to make things easier on myself. But they don’t make things easier on you, the reader! And of course, as I develop more expertise in these subjects through writing about them, I would like to actually start doing a bit more to spreading my writing. My goal for this year was to teach myself this material—my goal will still be that, first and foremost, but I eventually want to move in the direction of teaching others. We’ll see how far I get with that, but it’s the horizon I want to orient toward.
So for the rest of my writing time today, I’m going to put some rocks in the tumbler by sifting through my notes and saturating my mind with the material. Then I’m going to go do some other flow activity and thereby switch the tumbler on, letting the unconscious take over and do its work.