Abstract
There is a dominant movement in contemporary cognitive science that stresses the unconscious automaticity of much (if not all) of our thought processes. Whatever minimal functions consciousness might perform, it has been demonstrated over and over again how judgment and reasoning can take place automatically with very little influence from what we usually call the self, or consciousness. Even the highest forms of intellectual expertise are, to borrow the words of Malcolm Gladwell, “thinking without thinking.”1 The model of a “cognitive unconscious” constituted a new explanatory frame for understanding how creative and innovative ideas emerge from our minds.2 “The creative process is characterized by flashes of insight that arise from unconscious reservoirs of the mind and brain.”3 Those moments of insight, when one experiences, like Archimedes did in his bath, that “Aha!” feeling of suddenly solving an intractable problem, have been shown to be preceded by unconscious cognitive activities traceable by sophisticated brain imaging techniques.4 And so, for many cognitive scientists today, the mental feats of the genius can still be described as visitations from some otherworldly realm. Creativity, insight, intuition, judgment, intelligence—all of these mental capacities can now be studied as emanations from the unconscious, a world that we can glimpse only as it is revealed within the controlled conditions of psychological experimentation and brain scanning.
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Notes
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Bates, D. (2016). Insight in the Age of Automation. In: Chaplin, J.E., McMahon, D.M. (eds) Genealogies of Genius. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137497673_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137497673_10
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