Friday 31 July 2020

Unconscious Thought Theory as a Creativity Tool

(This is a near transcript of the workshop I ran at the 2020 World Science Fiction Convention, held virtually in Auckland, New Zealand.)

Hi, my name’s Luke Kendall. I’m writing a series of sci-fi/fantasy books about a lovable young female assassin. Thanks for choosing to attend this session, “Unconscious Thought Theory as a Creativity Tool”.

I’ve never run this workshop before: so, welcome to a world first!

I’ve laboured on this and I’m enthusiastic about the subject both because I know it works, and I know why – and also because it’s not just true, it’s based on a deep truth.

Because there’s a lot to get through I’ve practiced and rehearsed this, and ended up with a script to keep myself on-topic. So you won’t need to take notes because I’ll be posting the transcript on my website, A Toe in the Ocean of Books. It’s also being recorded, and I’ll share the presentation slides too.

Why Listen To Me?

Although I’m no expert on the Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT), I may be one of the few people with experience in consciously applying it to the writing process – until after today?

From 1991-2015 I worked for Canon’s Australian research centre. Around 2014, they paid for a full day workshop for thirty or so people on what UTT was and how it could be used in innovation.

In 2014 my wife of 30 years died. A few months later I was retrenched.

But thanks to a life-changing suggestion from an insightful career counsellor (Karen Tisdell), I decided to pursue my lifelong dream of becoming an author.

I had a 140k word MS I’d first drafted in 1993 and reworked off and on up until around 2005 when I just set it aside.

Mid 2015, following advice from my editor in Ireland (ThEditors.com) that I had 2-3 books crammed into this single MS, I had a big problem – after splitting it in two, I needed a new plot and climax for what had been the midpoint,

I found the solution by taking what I’d learned about UTT for innovation, and applying it to my creative writing.

How can Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT) help in writing?

BTW: make sure you have a piece of paper and a pencil or pen to hand for a little later on…

In this workshop I’ll share what I know about using your unconscious mind for creative work – specifically, by applying the UnconsciousThought Theory. We’ll also try it out with a practical exercise.

So here I’ve listed some things I’ve found it useful for:

  1. Plotting

  2. Inventing stuff

  3. Restructuring a story

  4. Coming up with twists

  5. Solving continuity problems

  6. Fitting new elements into an existing story

  7. Overcoming some kinds of Writer’s Block

  8. Escaping corners you may have painted yourself into

What is UTT, and the science behind it

It’s a relatively new, and mildly controversial theory about unconscious thought processes, that’s grounded in science.

The handout has lots of links to papers and studies and talks – they’re not to look at now, they’re for the convenience of anyone who wants to dig a little deeper, later.

I summarise the theory this way: we have a rational, conscious part of the mind, and an unconscious part of the mind – and the two work very differently.

  1. The rational part is more logical, analytical, and sequential.

  2. The unconscious part is highly parallel, and great at finding patterns and making connections.

  3. We can consciously prod our unconscious into tackling problems for us, provided we distract our conscious mind in the right way at the right time.

Here’s a quote from the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who wrote:

“One might almost believe that half of our thinking takes place unconsciously… I have familiarized myself with the factual data of a theoretical and practical problem; I do not think about it again, yet often a few days later the answer to the problem will come into my mind entirely from its own accord; the operation which has produced it, however, remains as much a mystery to me as that of an adding-machine: what has occurred is, again, unconscious rumination.”

A few references:

One of the first psychological experiments leading to UTT involved asking people to solve some real life problems like rating a set of apartments.

The experiment presented four apartments – one desirable, one undesirable, two neutral – and provided information like how big the apartment was, how old, whether it was close to public transport, hospitals, and so on… twelve aspects across four apartments, giving a total of 48 pieces of information to absorb.

Then they broke up the people in the study into three groups.

  1. One group was asked to work out the best apartment rationally, in three minutes;

  2. a second, to decide immediately.

  3. But the third group was distracted for three minutes then asked to decide.

They found that only the 3rd group performed significantly better at choosing the desirable apartment.

Functional MRI studies have shown that when your unconscious mind is at work on a problem, up to fifty areas of the brain go active. In contrast if you’re doing a logical task, there will be just one or two parts of the brain active.

The unconscious works in parallel, the conscious mind is serial, working on things one step at a time.

The unconscious can process, store, and link large amounts of information; the conscious comfortably remembers about seven things at a time. But the unconscious is very poor at working out logical stuff: it can’t do arithmetic, it doesn’t do if-then-else chains of reasoning. But it is great at finding patterns and weighing up fuzzy pros and cons.

Just don’t ask your unconscious mind to do your tax return for you.

The key idea of UTT is just this:

“Simply stated, people can either think about things or not.  UTT adds the idea that we [can] think unconsciously.”

Practical exercise (part 1 of 2)

Okay, with that basic information, and given this is a workshop, let’s try the technique ourselves right now. Grab that paper and pencil, and what I want you to do now is think about some problem that needs some creativity to solve.

  • Step 1: Write down, in bullet points, what you know about the problem
    • That consciously freshens up what you know about the problem
    • That information feeds into your unconscious and helps signal that it’s something requiring attention
  • Step 2: read over those notes
    • Add more points if they occur to you while doing this
  • Step 3: think about the problem any way you like (logically, idly, …) for just a little while
    • But if you do start thinking logically/analytically, be very wary of that; this is the phase we’re just collecting all the pieces.
  • Step 4: distract your conscious mind.
I’m going to keep waffling for a little, while write down the problem and its parts – not solve it. Just ignore me – turn me down somehow or take off your headphones for three minutes. I’ll wave when the time’s up.

When you jot down whatever you can about the problem, that includes things like all the conflicting goals you’re trying to achieve. I had a tricky plot point where I ended up listing six or more things I wanted to achieve, all at the same time. Write down the things you must have, and the things you must avoid. Or that you’d like to have, or avoid. Stuff that could be involved; including people.

What about the tone of the solution? Write down some possibilities. Dramatic? Touching? Sad? Happy? How much time might pass – minutes, days, years? What resources do the characters have available? Basically, write down anything you feel could be relevant. If you were alone and working on your own time, you might also consider whether you’ve already made notes of ideas to consider later, fragments of things that could be useful to you one day – in which case you could dig out those old notes and read them. Or do some searches for helpful information that might factor in.

Once you’ve written them all down, read them. You might think of extra details you want to factor in. You might have bits of inspiration already, ideas that feel like they might be pieces of the puzzle. Write them down.

Once you feel you’ve got everything kind of piled up and buzzing around in the back of your mind, you can think about them in any way you like – rationally or not – for a little while. But if you find you’ve started to think logically about the problem, be very wary of that. Unless your gut instincts are telling you you’re finally on the right track: if so, charge on ahead.

[Waves.]

At some point though, if you haven’t solved the problem, especially if you feel you’re going in circles, that’s the point to stop. So at that point we want to stop the logical part of your mind from trying to calculate the answer, and let your unconscious mind get to work on it. By now it knows you want a solution to this problem, but it doesn’t hurt to tell yourself that explicitly as well. Even write that down if you want. And then you distract your logical mind for a while so it can’t get in the way.

Right. So what we’ve just done is the first half of the practical part of this workshop. I’m not claiming you’ll definitely have an answer by the end of it – but you might! This will be our little experiment. I think this is being recorded, so if at any point you want to mute me or take off your headphones because you’ve just had an inspiration, then go ahead. You can replay the part you miss later, or skim the handout to get the gist of it and catch up.

So now I’ll distract your conscious mind by telling you…

How UTT worked out for my writing

So for my 1st book, the major feedback from my editor handed me a BIG plotting problem to solve. After going round and round in circles and getting nowhere, it occurred to me to take the theory I’d learned about for business innovation, and try it out for writing.

I did, and a few days later came up with a solution. Afterwards I realised, “Holy smoke, that worked!”

Later in that 1st book I had another smaller plot problem to solve, so I applied UTT again, and soon tweeted that I’d solved it with what I called a ‘horrifying teacher’ idea.

So the next time I needed a creative solution, I tried it again. Lo and behold, it worked again. I kept using it, and it kept working.

What I did discover was that depending on how tough the problem, the more time it took.

So, not knowing if the solution was there yet, I’d ‘check in’ by popping back to the problem and sit with pencil and paper and write down any fresh thoughts I had – more aspects of the problem to consider, or more ideas of things that might help, that might partly solve it. If my unconscious had the solution ready, I found that when I started writing, the solution would emerge, a sentence or a thought at a time, and I’d write that down, and then the next, and the next, until I had it all – or mostly – solved. At other times, nothing would come, and I’d realise it wasn’t ready yet.

Now, I think this approach keeps your unconscious working on the problem.

For me, using UTT often feels like working on a jigsaw puzzle – sometimes finding pieces, sometimes fitting a few pieces together.

Another of the nice things about UTT is it takes some of the self-critical pressure off you. Instead of thinking “I don’t have a solution; I’m stuck”, you can honestly tell yourself “I’m still working on it: don’t rush me! Good things take time.”

Suppose you’re writing about a character and they’re currently stranded in a desert. If you have negative thoughts, like “There’s no way she can survive in the desert without water!” either add that point to the list of things to factor in: “My character needs to find a way to survive in the desert” – or if that point’s already on your list, just say “Yep, so that’ll make a great surprise for the reader when she overcomes that!”

Do others use their unconscious for creativity?

You bet! I was listening to a Ted talk by Elizabeth Gilbert speaking about the pressures that creative careers place upon you: Your Elusive, Creative Genius. She said the notion that all creativity came from within the individual – and so the artist alone deserved both all the joy of success, or all the pain of failure – only arose in the last 500 years.

Before that, people felt the burden of both success and failure was a shared one. E.g. the ancient Romans believed in a ‘genius loci’, a spirit that lived literally in the walls of their home, and when propitiated helped the creator invent, among other things.

She interviewed the great American poet Ruth Stone in her 90s who spoke of being able to sense when a poem was on its way: to her it was like a thunderous wind barrelling toward her across the plains, a great storm. And unless she could get inside and get to a pencil and paper, by the time this mighty storm train of a poem crashed through her she would lose it. So she’d run for the house: if she got there in time, she could capture the poem and copy it down; but if she was too late, it would surge through her and past and be lost. But if she could grab a pencil before it had passed completely through her, she could kind of reach out spear it with her pencil tip, and drag it back inside her body, gripping it until she could find a piece of paper, in which case she would then haul it back inside her, word by word, transcribing it onto the paper. And most fascinating of all, it would be in reverse: word for word, backwards.

[As further evidence of UTT, thanks to a dream this morning, I worked out why it came out in reverse!]

Elizabeth also interviewed the musician Tom Waits, who had similar experiences, until in middle life he did something novel one day which changed his whole process. She tells how he was driving on the freeway in Los Angeles, unable to stop, and suddenly heard in his head a most delightful melody, and knew he had to capture it at once or it would be lost. So all the usual stress and tension started building up. But instead of panicking he looked up into the sky and said out loud “Excuse me, do you not see I’m driving? Does it look like I can do anything for you right now? So, either you come back later, when I can give you the care and attention you need, or go and bother someone else; go and bother Leonard Cohen.”

She told the story of one of the depressing times while working on Eat, Pray, Love, when she became convinced that what she was writing was not just going to be the worst book she’d ever written, but the worst book ever written. But remembering what Tom Waits had told her, she leaned back in her chair and said to an empty corner of the room: “Look, you and I both know this isn’t all just on me: I’m doing the best I can; I’m putting everything I have into this; but it needs the both of us. So if you’re not going to do your part… well, I’m going to sit here and keep working. But I’d like the record to show that I showed up for my part of the job.”

Elizabeth’s thought was that by putting all the credit for success and failure on the shoulders of a single person, we’re putting incredible pressure on each creative individual, and it’s this awful pressure that leads to so many well known stories of writers and other artists literally dying: if not through conscious suicide, often through disabling addictions or disastrous life choices. And that by acknowledging a spiritual dimension to the process, that huge burden can be shared.

So just knowing your unconscious is able to help solve your problems, eases that burden.

It’s hard to avoid stumbling over evidence the unconscious mind is routinely used to solve creative problems.

  • James Watson dreamed of a spiral staircase as part of his and Francis Crick’s discovery of the double helix of DNA.

  • Neil Gaiman talks of his ‘compost heap’, which he fills with random facts and ideas, from which ideas flower.

  • Even our expression “I’ll sleep on it,” is an explicit recognition of the creative problem-solving abilities of our unconscious minds.

If you search the internet for how to come up with ideas for stories, you’ll often find suggestions like using the I-Ching, or tarot cards, which may be ways of tapping into a spiritual well of creativity. I basically agree, except I see that well as being inside us, and the springs that feed it are everything we experience.

I sometimes use a stirring piece of music to get into the right frame of mind to write a dramatic scene. Music is known to activate almost every part of the brain – quite like how the unconscious does. Interesting, eh?

UTT for Writer’s Block?

Writer’s block is a fuzzy sort of term, possibly unhelpful or damaging. Some say it’s not a thing in itself (a symptom not a cause), others disagree. But let’s set the term aside. If you suspect something is blocking your writing, put some conscious thought into that. There’s no reason you can’t tackle that itself with UTT!

Of course there are many, many things that can interfere with or stop you from writing, so how to get past the block probably depends on the cause. But I’ll mention a few I overcame with UTT.

For me, remembering the elements for a scene or story arc – characters, plots, resources, setting, tensions, and so on – takes mental effort. I found by writing that stuff down it removed that burden. On more than one occasion, I couldn’t progress because I was mentally juggling all these things and had no spare capacity to invent what I needed to move forward. So that’s one thing that can block me.

Writing it down also primes the unconscious, so it can start looking for patterns, making connections, and extrapolating from what’s there.

On other occasions I had my plans for what was going to come next, but somehow kept finding other things to do first. Sometimes they were real life issues I had to deal with as a priority – but not always.

But then, more than once, when I stopped and had time to let my mind wander, a great new idea emerged very quickly. So quickly, in fact, I suspect I’d felt distracted or demotivated because my unconscious had the idea waiting but I hadn’t given it the stillness it needed for the idea to surface consciously. On a couple of occasions, the new idea saved me from heading down a plot path that would have dead ended and needed to be thrown away.

(Sometimes of course it was a real life problem that needed to be dealt with.)

Practical Exercise (part 2 of 2)

I think it’s time to return to our workshop exercise. Go back to the problem you posed yourself. Now skim to the end, and over the next thirty seconds, start writing something relevant: ideally the solution. It might emerge as you start writing. But don’t start trying to reason out the answer, just start writing. I’d like you all to silence me for 40 or 50 seconds so I don’t distract you as I keep talking. Let’s see how we all do. I’ll keep talking to avoid dead air… (but it’s captured on the next slide, so you won’t really miss it).

I think the unconscious is often the source of lots of our ideas. The trick to using it is threefold:

  1. First, just knowing it exists and that you can use it to solve some kinds of problems;

  2. Second, feeding it enough raw materials, so there are bits and pieces for it to connect to solve the problem;

  3. Third piece, leaving a silent space for it to present its answer to you.

I’ve found the more I use it, the more I come to know the feeling when my unconscious has something ready for me. It’s by no means obvious. At least for me, it’s not a voice in my head that tells me the answer.

[Waves to try to attract attention.]

How did we all do, I wonder? I’d like to hope that many people cracked a knotty problem, or at least now see a path to the solution. If not, just keep checking back in every day or few, to see if your unconscious has cobbled together the patchwork genius idea you need. Feel free to leave a comment in the Chat, either way.

Luke’s Tips

So here’s my list of other things to do, to help you use UTT in your creative endeavours. They’re in no particular order.

Write stuff down. That’s a key point: don’t rely on your memory. If you don’t record the ideas, you’ll waste mental energy consciously remembering them or worrying about them. Also, once they’re written you can re-read them if you find yourself in a hole.

Clear the decks of clutter. For the intense parts of the creative thinking process – the parts where you make the act of creation your top priority and give yourself time exclusively for that – you need clear mental space. If you have other tricky problems you need to solve, either deal with them first, set them aside, or accept that you’ll take longer because your unconscious will be working on multiple problems at the same time.

Sometimes you can clear mental space for a problem, by writing it down just as a “to do” thing.

Don’t allow yourself to get daunted. The funny thing is, that although the number of pieces to a problem might look scary, each issue is just another piece of the puzzle. In a way, it adds to the richness of the solution; it adds to the stuff your unconscious can use to create an arrangement that makes them all fit, or at least blend.

Allow yourself time. Set aside distractions as far as you can and give yourself time. Do this as often as you need to, in each attempt to come up with the needed idea(s).

Try and try again. You don’t need to solve the problem in a single session. Sometimes the solution will turn out to be a jigsaw that needs to be assembled. Sooner or later though you’ll probably start sensing the big picture: and then it will start filling in quickly.

Trust your instincts. Your gut will often tell you “This idea feels right” – trust it. Think about the idea, and around it. ‘Your gut’ is your Unconscious talking to you. Don’t ignore it!

Missing Facts? It’s possible you’re blocked because you’re missing some pieces of the puzzle. E.g. in one instance I simply hadn’t imagined the physical layout fully, so I stalled when trying to write the action parts of the scene.

I’ve blogged about UTT and creativity several times, probably in too much detail. But that may be helpful for anyone who’d like to read more about applying the technique, and I captured just such an example here, which happened to me while writing book four in my series.

For authors and artists, everything you do, every movie you watch, every poem or piece of music that resonates with you, every person you meet, every pain you suffer or joy you feel, it all goes into the Aladdin’s treasure cave of your unconscious, where the alchemy of the most complex thing in the universe – the human brain – goes to work to transmute it into thoughts and ideas and works of creation.

We each carry around inside us a fount of creativity that we can tap into quite easily. It’s sensitive to our moods, it’s sensitive to and absorbs facts and impressions, sights and sounds and smells, from the world around us; it’s synthesising ideas and joining facts together, juggling things and looking for patterns, and best of all, if something is important to us and we consciously pose a problem, that mighty unconscious array of mental powers goes to work trying to solve it.

Humans are imagination engines, naturally generating ideas like the sun generates light.

It’s what we do.

Thanks for listening to me, and I hope this little workshop will prove useful for you in the future.


Some further references

  • The article that kicked it all off (about 45 very readable pages): A Theory of Unconscious Thought

  • An overview of incubation (sleep, shower…) and its underlying causes: Creativity—the unconscious foundations of the incubation period
  • The nature of consciousness itself: Passive Frame Theory – suggests it’s a kind of spontaneous symphony bubbling up:
      “the information we perceive in our consciousness is not created by conscious processes, nor is it reacted to by conscious processes. Consciousness is the middle-man, and it doesn’t do as much work as you think.”
  • This study shows complex ideas can enter consciousness automatically.
  • Exploring the elusive gap between anecdotal and empirical support for UTT in creative problem solving: The Merits of Unconscious Thought in Creativity:

      “unconscious thought cannot ‘create’ knowledge; conscious learning and thought process are needed to establish a knowledge base.”

  • In case you’re wondering: the company that provided the innovation training was called Inventium. They have a few blog posts about UTT.

Post-workshop chat

I think dreams in which ghosts tell us things or do things that predict real-life experiences are your unconscious communicating to you that it’s been acting like a detective, and worked something out from subtle clues you had not consciously noticed.

I realised I conflated two separate Kate Bush songs when I was reaching for the Gurdjieff connection - it was “Rolling the Ball” where she mentions Gurdjieff as one of the “wonderful people [ready?] to teach me”.  The link from Cloudbusting to the strangely subversive Wilhelm Reich and his Orgone Energy was a complete furphy, sorry!

I think the purest experience of our unconscious mind is when we’re dreaming.  It’s why dreams can be so illogical: because the conscious, rational part of our mind is not participating (or minimally participating), because it’s asleep.

And the explanation for why Ruth Stone transcribed these poems backwards?

I think it’s simply because that’s how we can remember dreams. I think dreams are our unconscious telling us stories: which are largely the things it creates.

Usually the last part of a dream is the thing you remember - maybe the only thing.  But if you try to remember what led to that, how you got there, you can remember the previous scene in the story.  And from that one you can step back to the one before that, and so on.  So you recover the memory by working backwards, chasing the links from one piece of story to the one before, and that’s why her poems had to be remembered backwards.

Copyright © L. J. Kendall 2020. Permission granted to reproduce for free, provided this notice is included.

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