The Act of Creation (26 page)

p. 84
).
In the classical tragedy, on the other hand, it is the gods, or the stars,
who turn the tables on the mortal hero, or lure him into appointments in
Samara. They particularly like to use seemingly harmless coincidences --
the blind gaps in the meaningful order of events -- as levers of destiny.
In later forms of literature, it is characters which are made to stand on
their heads, or are turned inside out like a glove. Prince Mishkin, the
'Idiot', is revealed as a sage in reverse; saints are sinners, sinners
are saints, heroes are cowards, adults are children, and every Jekyll
has something to Hyde.
In visual perception we find a parallel phenomenon in the reversible
figure-background relation. If one stares at the mosaic on the bathroom
floor, unconscious and often uncontrollable shifts in perception make
the pattern of black tiles stand out at one moment, and the pattern of
white tiles at the next. A more dramatic illustration is the following,
found in many psychological textbooks:

 

Urn or profiles -- whichever is master for a while, will become slave in
turn, 'figure' will change into 'ground', 'noise' into 'information', in
a kind of visual saturnalia. The two perceptual matrices are reciprocal,
and their alternation seems to be determined by unconscious physiological
processes.

 

 

Some of the great revolutions in the history of painting entailed
almost equally brutal reversals of vision. Up to the late Venetians,
the landscape on the canvas was primarily perceived as a conventional
background against which human figures were displayed; roughly from
Giorgione onward it became possible to paint landscapes in which
the human figure played an accidental part. At different stages one
finds similar reversals in the logic of the eye: from ornate drapery
to personal expression, from contours to surfaces, from naturalism to
other isms of perception. At each of these upheavals the cat without a
grin was superseded by the grin without a cat.

 

 

In the realm of music the relativity and reversibility of 'figure' and
'background' (accompaniment, counterpoint, fugue) is self-evident. It
is less obvious in modern theoretical physics, although it is implied
in one of its basic postulates: according to Niels Bohr's "Principle
of Contemplementary" the ultimate constituents of the universe --
electrons, protons, photons, etc. -- behave on some occasions as if they
were particles, that is, hard lumps of matter, on other occasions as
if they were ripples of energy without definite location. Although the
two descriptions are mutually exclusive in terms of traditional physics
and philosophy, the theory works remarkably well. As a matter of fact,
most physicists are not much bothered by the inherent contradiction,
and are quite content to believe that the 'wavicles', the actual stuff
the world is made of, are at one moment like the solid urn, and the next
like the empty space between the two profiles.

 

 

That the most brilliant scientists of this century should be capable
of accepting this paradox is a rather striking indication of the
susceptibility of the human mind for reversals of logic, and the
unification of opposites. The complementarity of energy and matter
in quantum-physics is not so far removed as it would seem from the
dualism of Yang and Yin, the feminine and masculine principles in Taoist
philosophy. I do not mean that Lao-Tse, in the sixth century B.C., foresaw
the behaviour of alpha-particles in a Wilson chamber; I mean that it is
a timeless characteristic of the unconscious mind to work in that way.

 

 

 

Analogy and Intuition

 

 

The great biologist Elie Mechnikoff felt rather lonely one
afternoon in 1890 'when the whole family had gone to the circus to
see some extraordinary performing apes, and I remained alone with my
microscope'. [13] The microscope was in a laboratory of the École
Normale which Pasteur had given him; Mechuikoff was observing the life of
the mobile cells in the transparent larvae of starfish, and idly threw a
few rose-thorns among them. The thorns were promptly surrounded by the
larvae and dissolved inside their transparent bodies -- they had been
gobbled up and digested. This reminded him of what happens when a human
finger is infected by a splinter: it will be surrounded by pus which,
like the starfish larvae, will attack and try to digest the intruder. By
this analogy Mechnikoff discovered the organisms' main defence mechanism
against invading microbes: the 'phagocytes', cell-eaten, a population
of mobile cells among the white blood corpuscles.

 

 

The starting point of Kepler's discoveries was a supposed analogy
between the role of the Father in the Trinity and the role of the Sun
in the Universe. Lord Kelvin hit on the idea of the mirror galvanometer
when he noticed a reflection of light on his monocle. Sultan saw that
a branch was like a stick; Newton saw that the moon behaved like an
apple. Pasteur saw the analogy between a spoilt culture and a cow-pox
vaccine; Fleming saw the analogy between the action of a mould and the
action of a drip from his nose. Freud, on his own account, conceived
the idea of the sublimation of instincts by looking at a funny cartoon
in the
Fliegende Blätter
-- the one-time German equivalent
of
Punch
. In the first picture a little girl was herding a flock
of goslings with a stick. In the second she had grown into a governess
herding a flock of young ladies with a parasol. [14]

 

 

Some writers identify the creative act in its entirety with the
unearthing of hidden analogies. 'The discoveries of science, the works
of art are explorations -- more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness',
Bronowski wrote. [15] But where does the hidden likeness hide, and
how is it found? Sultan's branch could literally be seen as a stick --
though even in this case, a change of the perceptual frame was required
to discover the likeness. But in most truly original acts of discovery
the 'seeing' is in fact imagining; it is done in the mind's, and mostly
the unconscious mind's eye. The analogy between the life of one kind of
microbe inside a cow and another kind of microbe in a forgotten culture
tube was not 'hidden' anywhere; it was 'created' by the imagination;
and once an analogy has been created, it is of course there for all to
see -- just as a poetic metaphor, once created, soon fades into a
cliché.

 

 

Analogy, in logic, means a process of 'reasoning from parallel causes';
in common parlance it means that two situations or events are similar
in some respects, but not in all respects. The rub is in the words
'parallel' and 'similar'; the latter, in particular, has bedevilled
psychology ever since the term 'association by similarity' was invented
(by Bain, I believe) as an explanation of how the mind works. A Chinaman
who collects stamps is 'similar' to a Negro in that both are males;
he is similar to a Chinese girl in that both are Chinese; and he is
similar to other stamp-collectors of any nationality. Mathematics began,
wrote Bertrand Russell, when it was discovered that a brace of pheasants
and a couple of days have something in common: the number two.

 

 

'Similarity' is not a thing offered on a plate (or hidden in a cupboard);
it is a relation established in the mind by a process of selective
emphasis on those features which overlap in a certain respect -- along
one dimensional gradient -- and ignoring other features. Even such a
seemingly simple process as recognizing the similarity between two letters
a
written by different hands, involves processes of abstraction
and generalization in the nervous system which are largely unexplained.

 

 

Thus the real achievement in discoveries of the type mentioned in
this section is 'seeing an analogy where no one saw one before'. The
scientist who sets out to solve a problem looks at it from various angles,
through glasses of different colours, as it were -- in the jargon of
the present theory, he experiments with various matrices, hoping that
one will fit. If it is a routine problem of a familiar type, he will
soon discover some aspect of it which is similar in some respect to
other problems encountered in the past, and thus allows him to come to
grips with it. Some of the mental operations involved in such routine
cases we have already encountered in discussing the solving of witty
riddles (
pp. 84-6
): extrapolation, interpolation,
transposition. These are 'rules of the game' which enter as sub-codes
into any complex mental skill. To put it in a different way: solving
a problem means bridging a gap; and for routine problems there usually
exist matrices -- various types of prefabricated bridges -- which will
do the job; though it may require a certain amount of sweat to adjust
them to the terrain.

 

 

But in original discoveries, no single pre-fabricated matrix is adequate
to bridge the gap. There may be some similarities with past situations,
but these may be more misleading than helpful, and lure the victim into
fruitless experimentation based on traditional rules of the game. Here
the only salvation lies in hitting on an auxiliary matrix in a previously
unrelated field -- the larvae of starfish or the Holy Ghost. One may
call the process which follows
after
the hit 'reasoning from a
parallel case' -- but the real achievement was to 'appoint', as it were,
the larva as a parallel case to the pus, and the action of the Holy Ghost
as 'similar' to the action of gravity. It is an achievement much closer
to the birth of a poetic simile than to a logical production. After all,
the Walrus too was arguing by analogy when he talked
Of shoes -- and
ships -- and sealing wax / Of cabbages -- and kings
.

 

 

The essence of discovery is that unlikely marriage of cabbages and kings
-- of previously unrelated frames of reference or universes of discourse
-- whose union will solve the previously unsoluble problem. The search
for the improbable partner involves long and arduous striving -- but
the ultimate matchmaker is the unconscious. I have discussed several
tricks which qualify it for that role: the greater fluency and freedom of
unconscious ideation; its 'intellectual libertinage' -- as one might call
the dream's indifference towards logical niceties and mental prejudices
consecrated by tradition; its non-verbal, 'visionary' powers. To these
must be added, in our present context, the dream's tendency towards
creating unusual analogies. These may be verbal puns, or 'optic puns'
or visual symbols; but there is another type of vague and cloudy analogy
generated in the dream and half-dream, which disintegrates on awakening
and cannot be put into words -- except by muttering 'something reminded me
of something, but I don't know what reminded me of what, and why'. Some
dreams have a way of dissolving in the wakening mind like solid crystals
melting in a liquid; and if we reverse the process we get at least a
speculative pointer to the manner in which those 'somethings' vaguely
reminding me of other 'somethings' condense into a nascent analogy. This
may be a hazy, tentative affair -- the dance of Poincaré's unhooked
atoms; and its shape may be changing from camel to weasel, as Hamlet's
cloud. The unconscious regions of fertile minds must be pullulating
with such nascent analogies, hidden likenesses, and the cloudy forms
of things unknown. But most clouds form and dissolve again; only a few
intuitions reach the stage of 'seeding the cloud' which results in the
formation of verbal drops; and cloud-bursts are a rarity.

 

 

Two final examples may serve to illustrate the actual process of
discovering hidden analogies. The first is related to clouds in a literal
sense -- Franklin's invention of the lightning conductor.

 

 

Benjamin Franklin became interested in electricity in 1746 when he was
forty, and began playing about with Leyden jars -- a kind of electrified
bottle which gave one fearful shocks. Within the next three years
he rediscovered by himself virtually everything that was known about
electricity to that date, and added several fundamental discoveries of
his own.

 

 

In 1749 he noted in his diary that he thought lightning and thunder
to be electrical phenomena.* He also found that when brought near
to an electrified body, a pointed object, like a finger, will draw a
much stronger spark than a blunt one. 'To know this power of points',
he musingly wrote, 'may possibly be of some use to mankind, though we
should never be able to explain it.' He then drew an analogy between
a cloud and an electrified body, and concluded that lightning was an
electrical discharge phenomenon. But if that was the case, mankind could
protect itself against this cosmic scourge:

I say, if these things are so, may not the knowledge of this power of
points be of use to mankind, in preserving houses, churches, ships
& cont. from the stroke of lightning, by directing us to fix on
the highest parts of those edifices, upright rods of iron made sharp
as a needle, and gilt to prevent rusting, and from the foot of those
rods a wire down one of the shrouds of a ship, and down her side till
it reaches the water? Would not these pointed rods probably draw the
electrical fire silently out of a cloud before it came nigh enough
to strike, and thereby secure us from that most sudden and terrible
mischief? [16]

However, before he could convince mankind to put 'Franklin rods'
on their houses he had to prove his fantastically sounding notion
that thunderclouds were in fact giant Leyden jars floating in the
air. He waited for some time hopefully for the erection of a tall
spire at Philadelphia, intending to fix a pointed rod on top of it,
and so to bring down the electricity from a passing thundercloud. But
the difficulties of the project proved insurmountable; it was during
this period of impatient waiting and restless searching for a simpler
method to prove his theory that he hit on the fantastic yet at the same
time astonishingly simple idea of the kite.
How did it happen? Franklin was an expert swimmer. On his first sojourn
in London, at the age of nineteen, he swam from Chelsea to Blackfriars,
a distance of three miles, 'performing on the way many feats of activity
both upon and under the water' -- and was advised by some English
gentlemen, who watched him, to open a swimming school. He did not do
that, but he devised a new method of learning to swim: 'Choosing a place
where the water deepens gradually, walk coolly into it till it is up
to your breast, then turn around, your face to the shore, and throw an
egg into the water between you and the shore.' The learner then must
'boldly retrieve the egg' -- and in the act of retrieving acquires the
art of swimming.
Even earlier on he had devised another aquatic sport: as a boy he used to
drift for hours on a lake, floating on his back, and towed by the string
of a kite. He suggested that this method might be utilized by swimmers
to cross the Channel from Dover to Calais -- with the judicious addendum:
'The packet-boat, however, is still preferable.'
It is easy to imagine how, in a moment of weariness and 'thinking aside'
from that wretched spire in Philadelphia, a pleasant childhood memory
rose like a bubble to the surface of his consciousness: drifting on
the lake attached to the kite in the sky. Eureka! With the enthusiastic
assistance of his young son, Franklin fabricated a kite out of a cross
of cedar wood and a silk handkerchief. All he needed now were a few
good thunderclouds -- which conveniently appeared in June 1752. Father
and son sent up the kite and, with due precaution, drained the clouds'
electric charge into a Leyden jar; 'by the electric fire thus obtained
spirits were inflamed and other experiments performed'.
Such was the excitement caused all over the world that one of Franklin's
imitators, a certain Monsieur Riehmann, was killed in St. Petersburg by
the lightning discharge he drew from a cloud. He was worshipped as a hero
and found many would-be imitators; among them the German inventor Herr
Boze. Even Joseph Priestley, one of the great British scientists of the
century, rhapsodized about 'the sentiments of the magnanimous Mr. Boze,
who with a truly philosophic heroism, worthy of the renowned Empedocles,
said he wished he might die by the electric shock, that the account of
his death might furnish an article for the memoirs of the French Academy
of Sciences. But it is not given to every electrician to die the death
of the justly envied Riehmann.' [17]
There are two successive Eureka processes involved in this story. In
the first, the bisociative link was what Franklin called 'the power
of points'; it gave rise to the analogy: pointed finger discharges
Leyden jar, pointed rod discharges cloud. It may have been attained
by ideation on a relatively conscious level, probably with the aid of
visual imagination. The second stroke of genius was the use of the kite
to reach the thunderbolt. It illustrates the argument I have put forward
earlier in this chapter: one can hardly say that a hidden analogy was
pre-existent in the universe between a kite used as a sail by a boy
floating on a lake, and a lightning conductor. What actually happened
was that Franklin was desperately searching for a means to make contact
with a thundercloud, thinking in habitual terms of tall spires, long
iron rods, and perhaps the Tower of Babel. But all these approaches
proved impracticable, and the matrix was blocked -- until in a moment
of lassitude and day-dreaming the previously unrelated memory-train of
swimming, egg-retrieving, and kite-sailing was brought to bear on it.
The last example that I shall quote in this section is a particularly
impressive illustration of the unconscious in the role of matchmaker. I
am referring to the discovery, in 1920, of the chemical transmission of
nerve-impulses by Otto Loewi. Since the matter is somewhat technical,
I shall give a simplified account of it.
Before Loewi's discovery it was generally believed that nervous control
of bodily functions was exercised by a direct transmission of electrical
impulses from nerve-terminal to muscle or gland. But this theory failed to
account for the fact that the same type of electric impulse travelling
down a nerve had an excitatory effect on some organs, an inhibitory
effect on others. Now certain drugs were known to have precisely the
same effect. In a discussion with a friend in 1903, it occurred to Loewi
that the chemical agents which were contained in these drugs may also
be present at the nerve-terminals; the electric impulse would initiate
chemical action, which in its turn would act on the muscle or gland.
But Loewi could not think of an experimental method to test the idea --
and forgot it for the next seventeen years.
Fifteen years later, for quite different purposes, he designed an
experiment. He made preparations of two frogs' hearts which were kept
beating in salt solutions to see whether their activities gave out any
chemical substance. In the sequel he forgot all about the experiment.
Another two years passed until the critical event:

The night before Easter Sunday of that year [1920] I awoke, turned
on the light, and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of thin
paper. Then I fell asleep again. It occurred to me at six o'clock in
the morning that during the night I had written down something most
important, but I was unable to decipher the scrawl. The next night, at
three o'clock, the idea returned. It was the design of an experiment to
determine whether or not the hypothesis of chemical transmission that
I had uttered seventeen years ago was correct. I got up immediately,
went to the laboratory, and performed a simple experiment on a frog
heart according to the nocturnal design. . . .

No lesser person that Walter B. Cannon, the discoverer of adrenalin, has
described this noctural design as 'one of the nearest, simplest, and most
definite experiments in the history of biology'. Loewi again isolated two
frog hearts, the first with its nerves, the second without. He stimulated
the vagus nerve of the first heart for a few minutes. The vagus has
an inhibitory effect on the heart, and its beats slowed down. Loewi
now removed the salt solution from the first heart and applied it to
the second. It slowed down just as if its own (no longer existent)
vagus had been stimulated. . . . He repeated the experiment, this time
stimulating the accelerator nerve of the first heart. When the liquid
was transferred to the second heart it accelerated. . . . He concludes:

These results unequivocally proved that the nerves do not influence
the heart directly but liberate from their terminals specific chemical
substances which, in their turn, cause the well-known modifications
of the function of the heart characteristic of the stimulation of
its nerves.
The story of this discovery shows that an idea may sleep for decades in
the unconscious mind and then suddenly return. Further, it indicates
that we should sometimes trust a sudden intuition without too much
scepticism. If carefully considered in the daytime, I would undoubtedly
have rejected the kind of experiment I performed. It would have seemed
likely that any transmitting agent released by a nervous impulse would
be in an amount just sufficient to influence the effector organ. It
would seem improbable that an excess that could be detected would
escape into the fluid which filled the heart. It was good fortune that
at that moment of the hunch I did not think but acted immediately.

For many years this nocturnal emergence of the design of the crucial
experiment to check the validity of a hypothesis uttered seventeen years
earlier was a complete mystery. [18]
In 1955 -- thirty-five years after the discovery, which earned him the
Nobel Prize -- Loewi had to compile a bibliography:

I glanced over all the papers published from my laboratory. I came
across two studies made about two years before the arrival of the
nocturnal design in which, also in search of a substance given off from
the heart, I had applied the technique used in 1920. This experience,
in my opinion, was an essential preparation for the idea of the finished
design. In fact, the nocturnal concept represented a sudden association
of the hypothesis of 1903 with the method tested not long before in
other experiments. Most so-called 'intuitive' discoveries are such
associations suddenly made in the unconscious mind. [19]

Let me briefly recapitulate the three stages of this drama. The first
is the sudden emergence, during a conversation in 1903, of the hunch
that his problem could be solved by switching from a 'spark theory' to
a 'soup theory' (in neurological jargon, 'spark' refers to electrical,
'soup' to chemical transmission of nerve impulses). But a hunch of this
kind as often as not turns out to be a fallacious over-simplification; so
the idea went into the incubator for the next seventeen years, till 1920.
Act Two. In 1918, fifteen years after the hunch, Loewi performs certain
experiments for which purpose he has to design a technique for the
detection of fluids secreted by the frog's heart. He then forgets all
about it.
On the night before Easter Sunday the two previously unrelated memories
meet; but their meeting place is so deep underground that the next morning
he can remember nothing, and cannot even decipher his own scribbled
note. He has to wait until the next night for another underground
excursion -- which takes place at 3 a.m., followed by the rush to the
laboratory.
After the event one wonders, of course, why one idea had to wait for
seventeen years, the second for two years, and then choose such a secret
place for their final rendezvous that the identity of the second was
only revealed another twenty-five years later. The first was a theory
of the transmission of nerve impulses to organs by a fluid; the second
was a technique for tracing fluids in an organ; what could be more
logical than that the twain should meet? Yet they did not meet through
all those years because mortal minds, even those of genius, are not
governed by logic but by habit, and the two ideas were embedded each in
its own habitual context. Wallace, too, had been thinking of evolution
for two years, and had read Malthus many years before the two fused --
during an attack of tropical fever. It seems that encounters of this kind
can occur only when the normal rules of the game are suspended and the
unconscious match-maker enters into action. Loewi's inability to read
his own note, and other cases of 'snowblindness' which I shall mention,
indicate the stubborn resistance of habit against such breaches of the
rules and illicit liaisons.
'We are somewhat more than ourselves in sleep and the Slumber of the Body
seems to be but the Waking of the Soul', Sir Thomas Browne wrote three
centuries ago. Yet it is difficult and frustrating to write consciously on
the unconscious, rationally on the irrational. It is rather like praising
the beauties and expounding the grammar of the Sanskrit language -- but a
Sanskrit which you speak only in your sleep and the command of which you
lose when awake. Only fragments of it emerge to the surface -- disjointed
memories and the testimonies of creative minds. When these fragments are
pieced together, as best we can, they do not form a coherent pattern --
but they do provide evidence that such a pattern exists.
Summary
The interlocking of two previously unrelated skills or matrices of
thought was again seen to constitute the basic pattern of discovery in
the illustrative cases of Gutenberg, Kepler, and Darwin-Wallace (Chapter
VI). Gutenberg combined the techniques of the wine-press and the seal;
Kepler married physics to astronomy; Darwin connected biological evolution
with the struggle for survival.
On the question how the new synthesis comes into being, the evidence
indicates that verbal thinking, and conscious thinking in general,
plays only a subordinate part in the decisive phase of the creative
act. Hadamard's inquiry among leading mathematicians in America revealed
that 'practically all of them . . . avoid not only the use of mental
words but also . . . the mental use of algebraic or any other signs'. On
the testimony of those original thinkers who have taken the trouble to
record their methods of work, this also seems to be the rule in other
branches of science. Their virtually unanimous emphasis on spontaneous
intuitions, unconscious guidance, and sudden leaps of imagination which
they are at a loss to explain, suggests that the role of strictly rational
thought-processes in scientific discovery has been vastly overestimated
since the Age of Enlightenment; and that, contrary to the Cartesian
bias in our beliefs, 'full consciousness', in the words of Einstein,
'is a limit case'.