[lit-ideas] Re: Unconscious Thought
- From: JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 26 Feb 2006 06:22:51 EST
I saw that somewhere on-line a few days ago.....I felt validated that some
scientist somewhere supported what I've always asserted <g>. Somewhere some
long time ago in a previous life I heard a piece (might have been on NPR, but
God only knows), about the functioning of the consciousness saying that
humans typically use only 4 to 10% of their brain potential (that's not news),
BUT, also, recounting the story of a man who completely baffled Doctors -- he
had some sort of birth defect which left him with a very, very tiny mass of
gray matter -- he should have been dead, really -- but he had a Doctoral
degree
(I don't remember in what) and was brilliant. The Dr's hypothesized that he
had adapted and was able to use a far greater percentage of his brain than
most people, a use of the brain which is typically the subconscious in most
humans. I wish I had written down the names, etc. It was about 25 years ago
and I can barely remember what I did last week. Obviously I'm down to about
2%
of my brain use. I've always wondered if that concept could explain what
used to be called "idiot savants" (I don't know the current term, I just
always
remember Leslie...does anyone else?). C. S. Lewis does a pretty fascinating
conjecture on the subconscious and conscious in The Problem Of Pain .....
if I can remember, I'll post a short paragraph tomorrow, er, today.
Julie Krueger
========Original Message======== Subj: [lit-ideas] Unconscious Thought
Date: 2/25/06 11:30:21 P.M. Central Standard Time From:
_Eternitytime1@xxxxxxxx (mailto:Eternitytime1@xxxxxxx) To:
_lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(mailto:lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) Sent on:
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.
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