This being the title of chapter 9 of reference 1. A sprightly dismissal of unconscious thought in less than 15 not very big pages. This despite the rather more substantial tome at reference 2 (to mention just one of what must be a mountain of books about the unconscious); getting on for 900 pages of text which I still own and once read. It is, I believe, something of a classic. This in the context of a sprightly and provocative book which dismisses all kinds of things as illusions, not so say delusions. Also rather irritating at times. More positive, lots of stuff which is supportive, in a general way, of the approach taken in LWS-N.
Chater is a psychologist based in Warwick University, also a media person and very much the sort of person who gets to sit on government committees. He is also mixed up with the company at reference 3.
I start with the many people who believe that you can go to bed with a problem, have a good night’s sleep and wake up to the problem solved, to a flash of conscious insight. With Chater citing an eminent scientist and an eminent composer, both of whom claim such flashes of insight or inspiration. Flashes which are sometimes attributed to the work of the unconscious, sometimes to the brain having been able to reboot, as it were, a device which gets it out of the cul-de-sac which it had got itself into. Something which often seems to happen, for example, when one is trying, unsuccessfully, to remember some particular word or name on the basis of a few clues – with the right answer only popping into mind after you have taken your attention elsewhere, possibly some hours later.
We move onto a couple of well known visual puzzles, one of which is reproduced above. With the solution to the puzzle often coming in just such a flash of inspiration, with the solution usually being fairly permanent. Once you have seen the answer, you always see the answer. Which in my case, in this particular case, is not altogether true. First, there are clues in the image which you can work on in a conscious way; the answer does not just pop out of the void. Second, the solution is not terribly permanent, not terribly stable. But cavils aside, the puzzle is real enough. Maybe guessing the password to someone’s account is a reasonable analogy. One just keeps trying until, just when one is about to give up, the account suddenly opens. Nothing much is going on in the unconscious, rather the conscious brain is just pegging away at trying to get into the image until it lights upon the right way in. Trial and error rather than brain power.
But I argue that this overstates the case. While one might have a flash of conscious inspiration that the answer is a helix, that flash was preceded by a gradual accumulation of bits of evidence, of this bit fitting with that bit, when all of a sudden one does see that the helix, barring a few niceties and oddities, does the whole job, terribly economically. While sometimes, all of a sudden one sees a torus. Maybe that is the answer – to be rapidly disappointed. Maybe I persist, pushing and pulling the torus this way and that, then suddenly flipping from a torus-like to a helix-like perception. I associate to television detectives, first chasing one red herring then another. But who is to say which parts of this process are conscious and which parts are unconscious?
Chater argues that whatever else might be going on here, the unconscious does not carry on while you take a break by doing something else. To solve serious life problems the brain needs to activate large networks which criss-cross the brain, to occupy central resources, thereby more or less hogging the problem solving resources that are available. The resources to work on two serious problems at the same time are just not there.
To illustrate this contention in a more concrete way, he takes us through the well known fact that you can do all sorts of stuff while you are driving along, perhaps on a busy road, perhaps during the rush hour. Many of us will claim that such additional stuff is not affecting our driving. Many of us will have had the experience of thinking about some problem, perhaps some work related problem, to arrive at the office car park not being able to remember anything much about the business of getting there but with the problem solved. Perhaps a case of the unconscious driving the car while the conscious attends to the more important business of the work related problem. Chater argues not, citing an array of evidence to the effect that one’s driving is badly degraded by secondary activities. Do not use your mobile while driving, let alone while in motion!
OK, so maybe one can’t actually do more than one thing at a time, but maybe the brain can do background stuff like searching the memory banks, without disturbing the primary activity. Again, Chater argues not, citing an array of evidence to the effect that you can only search for one thing at a time. So you probably can’t search at all if you are driving your car. See references 5 and 6. There is also the matter, not mentioned by Chater, that thought involving language tends to hog the vocal apparatus, of which there is, indeed, just the one. See, for example, reference 7.
However, by now, I think Chater has gone way too far. The primary activity might well be degraded by a secondary activity, but the two can co-exist after a fashion and it does seems likely that much of a well known primary activity – like driving, laying bricks, digging a hole or cutting a mortice joint – can be managed subconsciously, otherwise unconsciously. You need to be awake but you do not need to be paying attention in a terribly conscious way. You really can be thinking about how you are going to spend your evening.
That said, some primary activities, like playing championship golf, should not be combined with secondary activities. Let the unconscious do most of the work, but just empty the conscious. Do not think about anything else.
But Chater goes no further, there is no more evidence. He has set some limits but he has not delivered what he says on the tin.
I now cite a few more or less stray thoughts in favour of the unconscious:
- There is no doubt about memory. So if there is computational power available, there is plenty of raw material, plenty of data, over and above anything that might be coming in, in real time, from elsewhere
- There is no doubt that we can do more than one thing at a time, with just one of those things being conscious. Like walking along the country path, without crashing into trees, while thinking about prime numbers. Although, to be fair, one sometimes gets so engrossed in the prime numbers that one does indeed crash into a tree, or at least get rather too close for comfort. More successful people just stop walking, without being aware of it, but carrying on thinking about prime numbers, possibly making very unusual, audible sounds, while just standing there, for the amusement of other walkers
- When counting, for one reason or another, the process of counting often seems to go underground, to become unconscious, only to surface a few moments later, not obviously having lost its place in the meanwhile. This happens to me when counting the steps when I climb out of tube stations
- When, for example, talking or writing, the words usually just seem to flow out with little conscious thought. Clearly the heavy lifting is being done somewhere else
- There is another sort of heavy lifting going on when one asks oneself a tricky question, perhaps some interpersonal thing rather than some more obviously computational thing. Who to invite to dinner? Who to ask to help me with my pet project? With my very important committee? One poses the question, then there is something of a blank and then, sometimes, out pops the right answer. Once the name arrives, verification is more or less instant: one might want to do the verification, but the unconscious has done the work.
All of which lead us to the question of what might be meant by the phrase ‘the myth of unconscious thought? What might this myth be about?
It seems reasonably clear that there is an unconscious, so the question must be what constitutes thought. Does it, for example, have to involve language? Presumably the definition is cast so as to exclude all the complicated – and entirely unconscious – goings on of the cerebellum, as worrying about the control of our limbs scarcely constitutes thought worthy of academic interest. Or does it? On these matters we are not helped – but perhaps that will turn up in some chapter to come.
We are given more help in the related matter of parallel processing. Here the claim is that the brain cannot manage two streams of complicated processing at the same time, conscious or unconscious. It cannot, for example, do the mental arithmetic to come up with the factorisation of 3,850 at same time as working out how much 6 tons and 7 cwt is at 8/7½ (8 shillings, seven and one half pence in old speak) a hundred weight – this last sort of thing at least being the staple of the arithmetic of my early school days – and it would be a clever person who could quickly switch between two such sums on paper, never mind in his head. So the interest here is in what sort of streams can co-exist – a question on which we could no doubt do a lot more work. Indeed, in the previous chapter, which addresses this very issue, Chater cites the case of the experimenter from Exeter who persuaded typists to repeat out loud what they were hearing in their head phones while, at the same time, happily copy typing some quite different text at their typewriters. This was two streams of complicated processing which the brain could manage. He also cites the well-used case of the gorilla in the basketball game, which many of us don’t see at all.
From where I associate to a story from the Royal Institute, in which Professor Glazer told us about a senior colleague who was able, in a useful way, to visualise and then rotate the structures of complicated crystals in her head. Yet another example of the oddity of the whole business of consciousness, in that one would be conscious of the rotating crystal and would be conscious of the desire to rotate it, but more or less unconscious – I would have thought – of the actual business of the rotation. The unconscious just gets on with that, presumably guided by its experience with the rotation of real rigid objects like building bricks and toy tractors.
With an example which is more familiar to me being the animal game (of reference 9) where the idea is to come up the name of a mammal for each letter of the alphabet, with no mistakes, no extras and no long pauses. One is conscious of making mistakes, but one is not conscious of coming up with the mammals. In fact, getting the sequences of the right names and nothing but the right names coming into the conscious mind is one of the points of the game. Consciousness is just a series of snapshots of the product of the unconscious.
Unconscious thought is not a myth, it is the revealed truth!
Summary of chapter by numbers
Page 160. Poincaré (mathematician) and Hindemith (composer) and their flashes.
Page 161. Tricky images of dogs and cows.
Page 163. Brain as a cooperative computing machine.
Page 164. Mental cul-de-sacs and getting out of them.
Page 166. Poincaré, Kekulé (chemist) and Hindemith revisited.
Page 168. Driving.
Page 171. Memory games.
Conclusions
The allegation as it stands is neither carefully stated nor proven.
But I will say that the page-keyed notes and references at the back of the book were very helpful, with most of the references being both easy enough to track down and mostly open access. Also that there is plenty of stuff of interest here. One might not agree but one is stimulated.
References
Reference 1: The Mind Is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind - Nick Chater – 2018.
Reference 2: The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry - Henri F. Ellenberger - 1970.
Reference 3:
http://www.dectech.co.uk/. ‘Dectech is comprised of three Practices that help businesses and policymakers understand and manage customer decision-making’.
Reference 4:
https://images.google.co.uk/. Google image search knows all about this picture and had no trouble working back from it to various places in which it has been used.
Reference 5: High-speed scanning in human memory - Sternberg, S. – 1966. A great deal of work has been done on whether memory involves serial or parallel processes – with serial favouring the Chater position. This particular bit of work was seminal and is both readily available and accessible.
Reference 6: Searching for two things at once: Evidence of exclusivity in semantic and autobiographical memory retrieval - Mayler, Chater and Jones – 2001. A contribution from Chater and colleagues to the same debate. Readily available but not quite so accessible.
