Intuition and emotion in creative thinking

By David Jiles Ph.D.

Great ideas arise in the strangest ways and are blended from the oddest ingredients, such as gut feelings, intuitions and emotions.

Gut feelings don't make obvious sense. Consider, for example, the experience of young Barbara McClintock, who would later earn a Nobel Prize in genetics. One day in 1930 she stood with a group of scientists in the cornfields around Cornell University, pondering the results of a genetics experiment. The researchers had expected that half of the corn would produce sterile pollen, but less that a third of it actually had. The difference was significant, and McClintock was so disturbed that she left the cornfield and climbed the hill to her laboratory, where she could sit alone and think.

Half an hour later, she jumped up and ran down to the field. At the top of the field she shouted, "Eureka, I have it! I have the answer! I know what this 30 percent sterility is." Her colleagues naturally said, "Prove it." The she found that she had no idea how to explain her insight. Many decades later, McClintock said, "When you suddenly see the problem, something happens that you have the answer --- before you are able to put it into words. It's all done subconsciously. This happened many times to me, and I know when to take it seriously. I'm so absolutely sure I don't talk about it, I don't have to tell anyone about it, I'm just sure this is it."

This feeling of knowing without being able to say how one knows is common. The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal is famous for his aphorism "The heart has its reasons that reason cannot know." The great nineteenth-century mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss admitted that intuition often led him, to ideas he could not immediately prove. "I have had my results for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them." Claude Bernard, the founder of modern physiology, wrote that everything purposeful in scientific thinking began with feeling. "Feeling alone," he wrote, "guides the mind." Painter Pablo Picasso confessed to a friend, "I don't know in advance what I am going to put on canvas any more that I decide beforehand what colors I am going to use.

Knowing in such ambiguous, inarticulate ways raises an important question. McClintock put it this way: "It had all been done fast. The answer came, and I'd run. Now I worked it out step by step -- it was an intricate series of steps -- and I came out with what it was� It worked out exactly as I'd diagrammed it. Now, why did I know, without having done the thing on paper? Why was I so sure that I could tell them with such excitement and just say, ‘Eureka, I solved it'?"

Where do creative insights come from?

McClintock's query strikes at the heart of understanding creative thinking, as do the experiences of Picasso and Gauss, of composers and physiologists. Where do sudden illuminations or insights come from? How can we know things that we cannot yet say, draw, or write? How do gut feelings and intuitions function in imaginative thinking? How do we translate from feeling to a word, emotion to a number? Lastly, can we understand this creative imagination and, can we exercise, train, and educate it?

Philosophers and psychologists have pondered these related questions for hundreds of years. Neurobiologists have sought the answers in the structure of the brain and connections between nerve synapses. Full answers still elude us. But one source of insight into creative thinking has been greatly undervalued and underused: the reports of eminent thinkers, creators, and inventors themselves. Their introspective reports cannot answer all of our questions about thinking, but they certainly provide important and surprising new avenues to explore.

Take the testimony of physicist Albert Einstein, for instance. Most people would expect Einstein to have described himself as solving his physics problems using mathematical formulas, numbers, complex theories, and logic. In fact, according to a book by Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, Creating Minds, Einstein is the epitome of the "logico-mathematical mind." His peers, however, knew that Einstein was relatively weak in mathematics, often needing to collaborate with mathematicians to push his work forward. In fact, Einstein wrote to one correspondent, "Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics. I can assure you that mine are still greater."

Einstein's mental strengths are quite different, as he revealed to his colleague Jacques Hadamard. "The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily' reproduced and combined�The above mentioned elements, in my case, of visual and some muscular type."

In a kind of thought experiment that could not be articulated, he pretended to be a photon moving at the speed of light, imagining what he saw and what he felt. Then he became a second photon and tried to imagine what he could experience of the first one. As Einstein explained to Max Werteimer, a psychologist, that he only vaguely understood where his visual and muscular thinking would take him. His "feeling of direction," he said, was "very hard to express."

McClintock, for her part, talked about developing a "feeling for the organism" quite like Einstein's feeling for a beam of light. She got to know everyone of her plants so intimately that when she studied their chromosomes, she could clearly identify with them:

"I found that the more I worked with them the bigger and bigger [they] got, and when I was really working with them I wasn't outside, I was down there. I was part of the system. I even was able to see the internal parts of the chromosomes -- actually everything was there. It surprised me because I actually felt as if I was right down there and these were my friends� As you look at these things, they became part of you. And you forget yourself. The main thing about it is you forget yourself."

A similar emotional involvement played a critical role in the pre-logical scientific thinking of Claude Bernard, who wrote, "Just as in other human activities, feeling releases an act by putting forth the idea which gives a motive to action."

For Wolfgang Pauli, a Nobel Prize mathematical physicist, emotional response functioned in place of ideas that had not yet been articulated. Within the "unconscious region of the human soul," he wrote, "the place of clear concepts is taken by images of powerful emotional content, which are not yet thought, but are seen pictorially, as it were, before the mind's eye."

Some scientists insist that thinking in feelings and mental images can be rationally manipulated. Einstein suggested "a certain connection" between "the psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought" and "relevant logical concepts." Mathematician Stanislaw Ulam made the argument even more strongly. He experienced abstract mathematical notions in visual terms, so the idea of "an infinity of spheres or an infinity of sets" became "a picture with such almost real objects, getting smaller, vanishing on some horizon." Such thinking is "not in terms of words or syllogisms or signs" but in terms of some "visual algorithm" having a "sort of meta- or super-logic with its own rules."

For William Lipscomb, A Nobel laureate in chemistry and, not incidentally, a fine musician, this kind of thinking is a synthetic and aesthetic experience. In his research into the chemistry of boron he found himself thinking not only inductively and deductively but also intuitively. "I felt a focusing of intellect and emotions which was surely an aesthetic response," he wrote. "It was followed by a flood of predictions coming from my mind as if I were a bystander watching it happen. Only later was I able to begin to formulate a systematic theory of structure, bonding and reactions for these unusual molecules� Was it science? Our later tests showed it was. But the processes that I used and the responses that I felt were more like those of an artist."

Gut feelings, emotions, and imaginative images do make sense in science, but, like the meaning of dance or a musical theme, that sense is felt rather that defined.

The relationship between thinking and feeling

To think creatively is first to feel. The desire to understand must be blended with sensual and emotional feelings and whipped together with intellect to yield imaginative insight. Indeed, the intimate connections between thinking, emotions, and feelings are the subject of a startling book called Descartes' Error (1994), which revisits the famous philosopher's separation of mind (and thinking) from body (and being or feeling) more than three hundred years ago. The author, neurologist Antonio Damasio, finds that neurological patients whose emotional affect is grossly altered due to strokes, accidents, or tumors lose the ability to make rational plans. Because they are unable to become emotionally involved in their decisions, they fail to make good ones. Our feelings -- our intuitions -- are not impediments to rational thinking; they form its origin and basis. For Damasio, body and mind, emotion and intellect are inseparable. Not only do scientists feel their way toward logical ideas, but creative thinking and expression in every discipline are born of intuition and emotion.

For many people this might come as something of a surprise. Cognitive scientists such as Herb Simon and Noam Chomsky define thinking only as the logical procedures of induction and deduction or the rules of linguistics. Even Howard Gardner, who promotes the notion of more diverse ways of thinking in Creative Minds and Frames of Mind, argues that the thinking of creative people is best categorized by the one mode in which they express themselves. For Gardner and his colleagues, scientists such as Einstein, McClintock, and Feynman are logico-mathematical thinkers; poets and writers are characterized as highly verbal thinkers; dancers as kinesthetic thinkers; artists as mainly visual thinkers; psychologists as intrapersonal thinkers; and politicians as interpersonal thinkers. All of these characterizations seem to make sense.

However, characterizing individuals by a single element in their mental processes is as misleading as describing Einstein as -- primarily -- a logico-mathematical thinker. Artists, for example, draw only partially upon visual stimuli. Emotions, kinesthetic feelings, philosophy, life itself, are other sources of artistic ideas. Painter Susan Rothenberg describes her process of painting as "really visceral� I'm very aware of my body in space -- shoulders, frontal positions. I have a body language that is difficult to explain. A lot of my work is about body orientation, both in the making of the work and in the sensing of space, comparing it to my own physical orientation."

Sculptor Anne Truitt also feels her art in her body. In describing her apprenticeship, she writes:

"It was not my eyes or my mind that learned. It was my body. I fell in love with the process of art, and I've never fallen out of it. I even loved the discomforts. At first my arms ached and trembled for an hour or so after carving stone; I remember sitting on the bus on the way home and feeling them shake uncontrollably. My blouse size increased by one as my shoulders broadened with muscle. My whole center of gravity changed. I learned to move from a center of strength and balance just below my navel. From this place, I could lift stones and I could touch the surface of clay as lightly as a butterfly's wings."

Similarly, painter Bridget Riley describes her paintings as "intimate dialogue[s] between my total being and the visual agents which constitute the medium� I have always tried to realize visual and emotional energies simultaneously from the medium. My paintings are, of course, concerned with generating visual sensations, but certainly not to the exclusion of emotion. One of my aims is that these two responses shall be experienced as one and the same."

Picasso, Gardner's prototype of the "visual tinker," clearly would have concurred. He believed that all sensation, all forms of knowing, are interconnected; "All the arts are the same: you can write a picture in words just as you can paint sensations in a poem. ‘Blue' -- what does ‘blue' mean? There are thousands of sensations that we call ‘blue.' You can speak of the blue of a packet of Gauloises and in that case you can talk of the Gauloise blue of eyes, or on the contrary, just as they do in a Paris restaurant, you can talk of a steak being blue when you mean red."

Those who look at pictures and do not feel these (or other) associations miss the point. The mixture of feelings and sensations is what gives rise to the painting in the first place.

Because most artistic ideas begin non-visually artists also experience the process of translation that Einstein, McClintock, and others have described. Josef Albers may have expressed this process most succinctly when he wrote that art is "the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect� [a] visual formulation of our reaction to life."

Sculptor Louis Bourgeois says, "I contemplate� for a long time. Then I try to express what I have to say, how I am going to translate what I have to say to it. I try to translate my problem into stone."

Swiss architect Max Bill describes the object of art in similarly sweeping terms, as "the expression of the human spirit� Abstract ideas which previously existed only in the mind are made in a concrete form." Painting and drawings are "the instruments of realization [by means of] color, space, light, movement."

American artist Georgia O'Keeffe, known for her synthesized abstraction of painting, wrote, "I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at -- not copy it."

Thus, the images of art are no more a direct reflection of the feelings, concepts, and sensations from which they arose than are a scientist's formulas direct expressions of his thoughts. All public languages are forms of translation.

Even those who express themselves in words find that they rarely think in words or generate their ideas in words. The poet E. E. Cummings, for one, challenged the assumption that poets are essentially wordsmiths manipulating the rules of grammar, syntax, and semantics. "The artist," he wrote, "is not a man who describes but a man who FEELS." American poet Gary Snyder, has expanded on that theme, saying that to write he must "re-visualize it all� I'll replay the whole experience again in my mind. I'll forget all about what's on the page and get in contact with the preverbal level behind it, and then by an effort of re-experiencing, recall, visualization, revisualization, I'll live through the whole thing again and try to see it more clearly."

English poet Sir Stephen Spender provided an almost identical description of his own creative process:

"The poet, above all else, is a person who never forgets certain sense-impressions, which he has experienced and which he can re-live again and again as though with all their original freshness� It therefore is not surprising that although I have no memory for telephone numbers, addresses, faces, and where I may have out this morning's correspondence, I have a perfect memory for the sensation of certain experiences which are crystallized for me around certain associations. I could demonstrate this from my own life by the overwhelming nature of association which, suddenly aroused, have carried me back so completely into the past, particularly into my childhood, that I have lost all sense of the present time and place."

The crafting of imaginary worlds, in both Cumming's and Spencer's cases took more than a mastery of language; it took an ability to relive sense impressions almost at will. Other writers have said much the same. Robert Frost called his poetry a process of "carrying out some intention more felt than thought� I've often been quoted: ‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise for the reader.'"

The American novelist and short-story writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who brought the Montessori method of child rearing to the United States, also needed to experience what she wrote in order to write well. "I have," she said, "intense visualizations of scenes� Personally, although I never used as material any events in my own intimate life, I can write nothing if I cannot achieve these very definite, very complete visualizations of the scenes; which mean that I can write nothing about places, people or phases of life which I do not intimately know, down to the last detail."

Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, too, plans her books "in a very organic way. Books don't happen in my mind, they happen somewhere in my belly� I don't know what I'm going to write about because it has not yet made the trip from the belly to the mind. It is somewhere hidden in a very somber and secret place where I don't have any access yet. It is something that I've been feeling but which has no shape, no name, no tone, and no voice."

David Jiles is the author of Creativity and the Secret Language of the Mind and may be contacted at david50jiles@gmail.com.