Learning and Intuition

We have all experienced the situation that the solution to a problem presents itself while riding your bike, walking home, “relaxing” in the washroom, waking up in the morning, taking your shower etc. Importantly, it did not appear while banging your head against the problem in a conscious effort to solve it, staring at the equations on a piece of paper. In fact, I would claim, that all my bits and pieces of progress have occured while taking a break and “relaxing out of the problem”. Greek philosophers walked in circles when thinking about a problem; most of us stare at a computer screen all day. The purpose of this chapter is to make you more aware of where your creative mind is located and to interact with it in afruitful manner.

My general thesis is that contrary to popular belief, creative thinking is not performed by conscious thinking. It is rather an interplay between your conscious mind who prepares the seeds to be planted into the unconscious part of your mind. The unconscious mind will munch on the problem “out of sight” and return promising roads to solutions to the consciousness. This process iterates until the conscious mind decides the problem is sufficiently solved, intractable or plain dull and moves on to the next. It maybe a little unsettling to learn that at least part of your thinking goes on in a part of your mind that seems inaccessible and has a very limited interface with what you think of as yourself. But it is undeniable that it is there and it is also undeniable that it plays a role in the creative thought-process.

To become a creative thinker one should how learn to play this game more effectively. To do so, we should think about the language in which to represent knowledge that is most effective in terms of communication with the unconscious. In other words, what type of “interface” between conscious and unconscious mind should we use? It is probably not a good idea to memorize all the details of a complicated equation or problem. Instead weshould extract the abstract idea and capture the essence of it in a picture. This could be a movie with colors and other