[lit-ideas] Unconscious Thought

  • From: Eternitytime1@xxxxxxx
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 26 Feb 2006 00:29:49 EST

Hi,
Did anyone else read this?  (I apologize if someone else posted  it...)
 
Kind of intriguing...
 
Best,
Marlena in Missouri
 
 
(From Secrecy News put out by the Federation of American Scientists)
 
SCHOPENHAUER AND UNCONSCIOUS THOUGHT

"Contrary to conventional  wisdom, it is not always advantageous to
engage in thorough conscious  deliberation before choosing,"
according to a paper published in the latest  issue of Science
magazine.

Unconscious thought, defined as "thought or  deliberation in the
absence of conscious attention directed at the problem,"  can
sometimes yield superior results, University of  Amsterdam
psychologists found.  And they suggest that the same effect  can be
"generalize[d] to other types of choices -- political,  managerial,
or otherwise."

See "On Making the Right Choice: The  Deliberation-Without-Attention
Effect" by Ap Dijksterhuis, et al, Science,  vol. 311, 17 February
2006 (free abstract):

_http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/311/5763/1005_ 
(http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/311/5763/1005) 

So  does that mean that the processes of political deliberation
should be  restructured to place greater emphasis on intuition and
"hunches"?  Not  exactly.

The strengths and limits of "unconscious thought" were  considered
by author Sue Halpern in a review of Malcolm Gladwell's  book
"Blink" in the New York Review of Books (April 28,  2005):

_http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17954_ 
(http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17954) 

"Intuition  is often understood as an antithesis to analytic
decision-making, as  something inherently nonanalytic or
preanalytic," Halpern quotes  neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg.
"But in reality, intuition is the  condensation of vast prior
analytic experience; it is analysis compressed and  crystallized."

In other words, the productivity of "unconscious thought"  is
probably dependent upon all of the conscious thought, analysis  and
experience that precedes it.

(Making a similar point, a favorite  teacher once advised that "It
is one thing for Aldous Huxley to take LSD,"  since Huxley was
immensely learned.  "It is something else for *you* to  do it.")

"The possibility of unconscious thought (as well as the term)  was
explicitly used for the first time by Schopenhauer,"  write
Dijksterhuis et al in their new Science paper.

The German  philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was also
credited by Freud as a  forerunner of psychoanalysis.

"Schopenhauer argued at length, and with a  psychological insight
which was altogether unprecedented, that empirical  evidence points
to the conclusion not only that most of our thoughts and  feelings
are unknown to us but that the reason for this is a process  of
repression which is itself unconscious," wrote Bryan Magee in  his
magnificent "The Philosophy of Schopenhauer" (Oxford, rev.  1997).

In several respects Schopenhauer was an unsavory character.   He had
a bad case of anti-semitism which earned him a favorable mention
in  Hitler's Mein Kampf.

But Magee does for Schopenhauer what the late Walter  Kaufmann did
for Nietzsche several decades ago -- he makes him intelligible  to
the non-specialist reader, as well as interesting and,  quite
unexpectedly, important.

Magee served briefly in British  intelligence (to return to more
familiar territory) and wrote a  quasi-existentialist spy novel
called "To Live in Danger" (1960, long out of  print) that is not
entirely bad.

Other related posts: