Here's a wonderful description by Henry Poincaré (Science et Méthode, 1908) of how mathematics can indeed be done by parts of your brain you are not aware of:
"À ce moment, je quittai Caen, où j'habitais alors, pour prendre part à une course géologique entreprise par l'Ecole des Mines. Les péripéties du voyage me firent vite oublier mes travaux mathématiques ; arrivés à Coutances, nous montâmes dans un omnibus pour je ne sais quelle promenade ; au moment où je mettais le pied sur le marchepied, l'idée me vint, sans que rien dans mes pensées mathématiques parût m'y avoir préparé, que les transformations dont j'avais fait usage pour définir les fonctions fuchsiennes étaient identiques à celles de la géométrie non euclidienne."
An English translation:
"At that time, I left Caen, where I was then living, to take part in a geological excursion under the School of Mines. The vicissitudes of the journey made me quickly forget my mathematical work; reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to drive somewhere; when I set foot on the step it occurred to me, without anything in my mathematical thoughts having prepared me for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical to those of non-Euclidean geometry."
Researching creative thinking processes over the last decade, this is a no-brainer (pun not intended).
There is so much complexity to the brain that it's hard to imagine a time when we, as human beings, will ever really understand how much of it works. It's no surprise there's a lot going on "behind the veil" of consciousness, and I'm glad researchers continue to show this is the case.
Similar studies have shown that the subconscious can recognize ambigious shapes without the subject consciously becoming aware, solve problems completely before raising solutions to the consciousness, and more.
How exciting to be driven by (or driving, depending on what you believe) such a vastly complex thing.
I often get asked by people things like "how did you think of that?" - and the honest answer is - I didn't.
I "think" by largely shutting off higher rational thought, and just let a problem freewheel through my mind. Either an answer comes pretty much instantaneously, or it doesn't at all.
I don't logically think things through - I find the answer, then it justifies itself.
This was always infuriating for my teachers, as I'd look at a problem in Maths or Physics, write down the answer, and then, if I felt like it, figure out what the "working" was.
I think we've largely forgotten how to think. Language oriented symbol linking and logic is slow - it's a whole abstraction layer that you can just sidestep, if you trust your mind.
> I "think" by largely shutting off higher rational thought, and just let a problem freewheel through my mind. Either an answer comes pretty much instantaneously, or it doesn't at all.
I have gone out of my way to find ways to 'step out of the way' of my subconscious for many years. For me, big, non-trivial answers don't come quickly or in full. As ideas, thoughts and proto-answers surface, I let them 'float' for a minute, and then let them sink back below the surface for a while longer.
In the end, I have 'in hand' a nice tidy pile of possible answers/directions, which I can then apply rational thought to in order to select one or more as the concrete course/courses of action.
I use spatial and visual centres, I think, as I tend to view problems in an almost mechanistic fashion, as components in a multidimensional space, which interact, and have causal results. Of course, if it's a non-abstract problem, then I visualise it directly - or abstract it to then visualise a general class of problems it sits under. Most things fit into a finite number of patterns.
It's really hard to explain, but it makes for easy and rapid evaluation of possibilities, as you can just "see" what fits, and what doesn't.
I'm a writer. As much as I work on my craft, when I sit down and put my fingers on the keys I'm not doing any of it. 95% of what I write I have no conscious decision in making.
I remember completely scrapping a 1500 word piece, rewriting the whole piece and resubmitting it to my editor. He was amazed I did it so quickly, I was quite disturbed I'd written the whole thing with barely an iota of conscious thought going into it.
I don't think I'm riding shotgun for my consciousness, I think I'm a kid in the back of the wagon.
Also a writer. The first time I was given a writing prompt as a timed exercise I was surprised by what I came up with. If I'd sat and thought of what to write I never would have written what I wrote in a five minute unthinking flurry.
This is arguably true for most writers I think. Not all writing types, of course, but for many. I created an iOS app around this very topic if you're interested, it's fittingly called: Prompts.
I'm glad to hear that. I write by reading a page or two where I left off, then starting to type. What comes out is often a surprise to me. Of course there's much editing afterward, but the story happens 'by itself'.
when it comes to problem-solving in software development, I tend to regard my subconscious as a black-box object with a fuzzy help me! method I can call. If I have a coding problem I'm not sure how to solve, I go for a brisk walk and let my mind wander. By the time I'm done, I've got the answer. If it's a tougher problem, I might need to go home and get a good night's sleep. Then I usually wake up with the answer fully-formed in my head. I give a silent moment of thanks for "the boys downstairs" and go about my day.
I spend 7-8 hours at my desk every day. I get about the same amount of work done each day, but I don't consciously control how I'm spending those hours. I might be reading / posting on HN, thinking about personal stuff, or even coding. When doing the latter, sessions start when I feel motivated to code and stop the very instant I'm not feeling it anymore.
After I stop, my subconscious goes to work. While I'm 'screwing around', insights will bubble up concerning the broader architecture of the platform I'm building and where the thing I'm coding now fits into it. At some point I'll realize why I stopped coding and what I need to do to continue. It's inevitably some deeper consideration that I never would have thought of had I not taken a break. I've also stopped making mistakes more than once. The second I make one, I lose motivation to work until my subconscious has worked out why I made it and how not to make it in the future.
I had to 'give myself permission' to operate in this way. Conscious mind just doesn't want to give up control, you need to exercise will in order to give up will. It was a little scary at first. As I built up confidence, I started trusting myself to do it more and more.
i spent a long time struggling with mental illness, and it was only when i began to understand the need to work _with_ my subconscious instead of fighting it that things went better for me.
If it is not too personal, can you elaborate on how you manged to work with your subconscious rather that fight against it? Was it through meditation and/or other simple practices?
Jordan Peterson - in his personality series - talks often about depression, and how tending to the subconscious can result in positive outcomes. Importantly - I think - he suggests that people should stop deceiving the subconscious, and instead listen to it, and work with it. Unfortunately, he fails to mention any meaningful ways to accomplish this.
Personally, I accomplished "working with it" by changing my outlook on life: instead of trying to achieve happiness (which was impossible during a prolonged depression), I tried to achieve putting my socks on. Most of my life during those periods translated into tiny goals like this.
Some days it was not possible to do anything. Eventually I learned that it can be OK to not be able to do anything too (instead of trying to focus on forcing myself to do things, which never worked anyway).
These things come down to hearing "I'm too tired to do all of that" and instead of saying "No, I can do all of this" (deception), saying "Maybe I'll try for something smaller". You repeat that process until you arrive at a point where everything doesn't seem impossible anymore. I think that is what is meant by working with your subconscious.
I think most people don't "get over" depression, so much as learn to live with themselves and the world and their new outlook. It's how I feel about it at least, and it's not hard to recognise it in others.
The process can take many years. There's still joy in the world, but I find I have more conscious awareness of it.
I'd be really interested to see studies of people who "recovered" from depression. Maybe there are two cohorts; those who get their rose-coloured glasses back, and those who have to learn to cope with what they feel. [That sounds worse than I intend it to, but I can't think of a better way to express it].
> I'd be really interested to see studies of people who "recovered" from depression.
Indeed. I'd be interested in reading case after case of people that recovered from depression. But for all the industry has put out (drugs, therapy) they do not seem interested in interviewing those people that they say got better in their abstracts. I guess the academia is not interested in that.
> driven by (or driving, depending on what you believe)
Belief requires free will, making "driven by" contradictory. There may be a mixture or a degree removed, but the idea that free will doesn't exist is always self-contradictory.
I haven't read parent's point, but I guess one could argue that belief requires the hability to ponder opposing views and choose one. The choice part is where free will comes in.
The word "believing" doesn't imply choice anymore, for example you can say an earthworm believes all big animals are the same just because that's how it thinks, not because it made a choice to think that way.
You guys may also be interested in reading Daniel Kahneman's Bounded Rationality, or Dual Process of Cognition. It talks about the relationship between two systems, one of which correlates to what we're talking about.
I'm currently reading "Thinking, fast and slow" by Daniel Kahneman himself and I couldn't recommend it enough.
One point he makes early in his book, though, is that when he talks about "System 1" and "System 2", it is merely a figure of speech, that he talks about two systems, two minds, precisely because of how we tend to relate to each one of them as an agent. But he wants to be clear that reality, as far as his research goes, is not "two systems". Or at least that's what I got from it!
I really liked this idea– I think by Robin Sharma [1], but by many thinkers, really– that your subconscious is way smarter than you (where you = your conscious, thinking self. The spotlight of your mind). It has more bandwidth than you. It processes a lot more information than you.
Many, many great athletes, musicians, thinkers, etc– (there's a quote by Plato in Plato's Republic where he talks about how while you can create conditions for people to learn, the actual learning is a sort of madness) describe how their performance is something almost out of their control. They control the practice schedules, they do the hard training. The actual performance is something they surrender to.
So in life, generally speaking, if you want to "live fully" (harnessing all your abilities, perceptions, judgements, 'power'), you need to get your subconscious involved.
Dan and Chip Heath used an elephant-and-rider analogy [2]. You are the elephant rider. Your subconscious is the elephant. If you want to achieve great things, you have to enlist the elephant. To do that you need to get acquainted with it. Understand what it likes, dislikes, what it wants, etc.
And a very humbling and inspiring realization (for me, at least) is that the subconscious is harder to bullshit. If you're spouting bullshit, it doesn't get involved. It shuts off and stays quiet. For you to get your subconscious involved (and now I'm thinking about Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk [3] about the muse, the genius, inspiration), you have to earn its respect.
You have to do the work, show up every day (also read– Stephen Pressfield's The War Of Art [4]). Winning over your subconscious is just as hard– if not way harder– than winning over other people.
There is really an endless amount of material about this. Charles Duhigg alludes to it [5] when he talks about the power of habit– we make very few decisions everyday, and mostly defer to our encoded behaviors.
TLDR:
If you want to do anything substantial, you're going to have to get your subconscious involved. And this is a very humbling process that the usual chest-beating motivational bravado tends to overlook.
Also recommended: Paul Graham's essay the Top Idea In Your Mind [6]
>(there's a quote by Plato in Plato's Republic where he talks about how while you can create conditions for people to learn, the actual learning is a sort of madness) describe how their performance is something almost out of their control. They control the practice schedules, they do the hard training. The actual performance is something they surrender to.
The conscious mind is like writing code, it's not easy to do, and takes a lot of thinking to get anything done.
The subconscious mind is like the execution of compiled code.
As I've gotten older, I've learnt to just accept things for how they seem to be, rather than how I might "logically" think they should be and this is why I sleep on things.
More times than I could bear to count, I've stopped deliberating on a (usually technical) tricky problem and then the next day an elegant solution jumps to mind at an often unusual time. It's a great way to annoy customers or people you're collaborating with (who think you're being lazy), but then they enjoy the end results anyway so I can get over it.
I'm skeptical. For example, in my bedroom, I have 2 cabinets. A while ago, I moved my socks and underpants from one cabinet to the other. Afterwards, I kept going to the "old" cabinet every morning for quite a few days. I'm wondering if this is an indication how how smart my own subconsciousness is...
The brain doesn't rely on computation for intelligence, rather, storing and identifying patterns. When you change something that is part of a habit, you have to wait for your brain to rewire itself with the new behavior before it becomes second nature.
People learn about this stuff, and can often end up over-extrapolating it. For every story of it doing something astonishing and powerful, an observant person can find it doing something blitheringly stupid when examined by the cold light of reason. It may be true that your subconscious is more powerful than naive ideas would lead you to believe, but flipping to the opposite idea that it must be brilliant and the conscious mind extraneous or unimportant is merely the complementary naive idea. The conscious mind may be riding the elephant, but the rider still exerts a lot of important influence over the elephant.
Another subconscious anecdote: I read new modules quickly, just paging through and letting my eyes view it, not thinking anything about it. Afterward I can navigate around the terrain much faster than if I haven't 'walked the property' first.
The subconscious also seems smart enough to fool modern medicine into believing that something's physically wrong with your body when in fact there's just emotional turmoil in the brain, see TMS.
Seconded, BBC science articles are dreadful. I am sick of their 1-2 sentence 'paragraphs' and dumbing down of concepts. There is better science writing in the Daily Mail, which is a depressingly low standard to be beaten by.
Agreed, BBC news in general has gotten pretty bad in general lately. It has gotten much more link bait articles, pointless 2 line pieces and biased articles that I can't treat it seriously anymore.
Is there such a thing as consciousness at all? Maybe we're just more or less conscious of different interactions and these tests are really only showing what we find the most difficult?
Bruce Lee said, "You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend."
Perhaps you mind is best left empty and in this emptiness lies life's greatest achievement?
I think it is more important to use the consciously rational mind to filter the water before it fills the vessel. That way you know what you will be getting when you drink from it later.
"À ce moment, je quittai Caen, où j'habitais alors, pour prendre part à une course géologique entreprise par l'Ecole des Mines. Les péripéties du voyage me firent vite oublier mes travaux mathématiques ; arrivés à Coutances, nous montâmes dans un omnibus pour je ne sais quelle promenade ; au moment où je mettais le pied sur le marchepied, l'idée me vint, sans que rien dans mes pensées mathématiques parût m'y avoir préparé, que les transformations dont j'avais fait usage pour définir les fonctions fuchsiennes étaient identiques à celles de la géométrie non euclidienne."
An English translation:
"At that time, I left Caen, where I was then living, to take part in a geological excursion under the School of Mines. The vicissitudes of the journey made me quickly forget my mathematical work; reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to drive somewhere; when I set foot on the step it occurred to me, without anything in my mathematical thoughts having prepared me for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical to those of non-Euclidean geometry."