ABSTRACT
The mystery of where an idea, a poem or a piece of musical composition comes from is a recurrent theme in autobiographical statements made by poets, artists, inventors and mathematicians. It poses a very real problem for creativity researchers, for it forces them to confront the dilemma of the unconscious. One manifestation of this dilemma is the “eureka” phenomenon, the sudden, “out of the blue,” unexpected illumination so often reported by artificers. Early creativity theorists such as Graham Wallas have attributed this to an unconscious process called incubation.
In this chapter we confront this dilemma of the unconscious—not the “dynamic” or Freudian unconscious, but what cognitive psychologists call the cognitive unconscious. In particular, using a case study of the making of a poem by poet Robert Nichols, we illustrate how unconscious and conscious processing interleave in time and, in fact, most of thinking happens in the unconscious with interludes of conscious processing, a phenomenon observed by creativity researcher David Perkins.
We argue that while conscious processing is inherently serial in nature, the unconscious is where parallel processing occurs. Along these lines, a computational model of this interaction between serial conscious and parallel unconscious processing is described. Finally, we relate the conscious/unconscious dichotomy to the psychoanalytical ideas of “primary process” and “secondary process” thinking.
