Conscious and Unconscious Thought

of the unconscious argue that it is a part of our minds which we should learn to control and take advantage of. The great mathematician Alfred North Whitehead seemed to be a supporter of unconscious mental processing when he said: ‘It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copybooks and by eminent people making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking about what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case.’ What Whitehead meant by this is that some of the greatest breakthroughs in creativity occur when a problem is consciously shelved for a while — ‘don't think about it, just sleep on it’ — after which the unconscious mind offers a solution. This is a process which psychoanalysts call ‘incubation’. Now the latest psychological research confirms that we can all incubate a problem to our own advantage. Ap Dijksterhuis, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, has recently published a series of experiments in which students were presented with complex everyday problems to solve. In one experiment they were given the opportunity to think carefully about a decision; in another experiment they were distracted by an irrelevant task whilst making a decision. The surprising result, published…