In the movies, creativity often involves moments of
insight. A character struggles with an
idea. There is a montage of pained faces
and crumpled sheets of paper. Then,
suddenly, the light comes on. A choir
sings. A new creative moment has
happened.
When you see this movie scene, or you hear about a moment of
creative insight, there is an interesting question that comes up. Where, exactly, did this new idea come from? After all, it is pretty clear that there was
a lot of hard thinking going on. Yet,
suddenly, the new idea appears from out of nowhere.
A recent set of studies has focused on the difference
between conscious and unconscious thought.
Ap Dijksterhuis and his colleagues have pointed out that it is possible
to be thinking a problem, even when you are distracted. In this case, what seems to be happening is
that the problem you are solving is having a chance to find other knowledge
that relates to it and to bring that knowledge to mind.
One way to think about this is that researchers who study
creativity often distinguish between two phases of creative idea
generation—divergence and convergence.
In the divergent phase, you generate a lot of potential solutions to a problem. In the convergent phase, you evaluate those
ideas and focus on those that seem most promising.
The work on unconscious thought suggests that it may be most
effective for the divergent phase of creative thought.
A paper by Haiyang Yang, Amitava Chattopadhyay, Kuangjie
Zhang, and Darren Dahl in the 2012 volume of the Journal of Consumer Psychology explored this process in more
detail.
In one study, they had people generate as many uses as
possible for a paper clip. This task has
been used often as a way of getting people to think creatively. The experimenters varied both the amount of
time people spent thinking about their answers as well as whether they used
conscious or unconscious thought. Groups
spent either 1, 3, or 5 minutes thinking about the uses for a paper clip. The conscious thought group was simply told
to think about the problem. The
unconscious thought group was told to think about uses for a paper clip, but
then was asked to count backward by 3s.
This task made it hard for people to do any controlled thinking about the
task. After the thinking period,
participants had 2 minutes to write down their answers.
For the groups that spent one minute or five minutes on the
task, the conscious thought group came up with more ideas (and more novel
ideas) than the unconscious thought group.
For the groups that spend 3 minutes on the task, though, the unconscious
thought group came up with more ideas and more novel ideas than the conscious
thought group. A second study replicated
this finding with a different creativity task and found that while unconscious
thought at a medium duration could lead to more novel ideas, those ideas were
not necessarily more appropriate for solving the problem.
What is going on here?
Deliberate conscious thought involves both divergent and
convergent processes. You are reminded
of things you know about that might help you to solve the problem, and then you
evaluate those ideas and focus on the ones you like. In addition, as you think about the problem
consciously, you are able to generate new descriptions of the problem that may
help you to take a different perspective on it.
These conscious processes get better over time, so the longer you spend
thinking, the more you come up with.
Unconscious thought has just the divergent component. The description of the problem races through
your memory activating things that might be useful. At short durations, there isn’t enough time
to activate much. At longer durations,
some of the initial activation of an idea dies down and it is lost. At medium durations, though, the largest
number of different ideas are active.
How can you use this to help you?
In cases where you are stuck on a difficult problem, it can
be valuable to walk away from that problem and to engage in another
activity. Take a walk. Play a mindless video game for a few
minutes. Go to the gym. The other activity you do should not lead you
to think a lot about something new and difficult, it just occupy your conscious
train of thought. After some time away
from the problem, come back to it and see what you come up with.
