Incubation: Your Unconscious Mind at Work

Key Points:

Think back to a time you were overwhelmed by a problem – by an exam question, with a management crisis, while writing a story. You tried and tried and tried but never came up with a solution. You gave up and moved on – you went for a walk, met up with some friends, took a shower. You forgot about your problem completely when – Eureka! Problem solved.

Is it any wonder that Archimedes' nearly 2000-year-old exclamation is still used today? How else to describe the sudden inspiration of the unconscious mind? It seemingly does what can’t be done by simply focusing, thinking and working hard – sifting through debilitating amounts of information, making unexpected connections between them, then structuring it all into an elegant clue you have no idea how you arrived at – all hidden behind a dark curtain.

So how does it work? Graham Wallas, an English psychologist, tried to answer this very question in 1926. In his book, The Art of Thought, he described his conception of ‘the creative process’ in four stages:

Preparation

This is when you plan out the task ahead, decide on a goal and consume relevant information till you’re saturated.

Incubation

Then you step away. You let the swirl of knowledge in your head settle while you distract yourself with something else. Now your unconscious is at work.

Illumination

A burst of insight signals that your unconscious mind has done its job. You should now have some clarity on how to proceed.

Verification

You critically analyze the solution – evaluate how well it fits, see if it holds up to scrutiny, and develop the idea further.

See Also: Q&A: How AI Affects Kids’ Creativity

Wallas’ theory was a hit (maybe he thought of it in the shower). It is still taught today and has led to a whole line of research into the processes that go into problem-solving. His idea of incubation has been of particular interest – perhaps because it seems to accurately describe the journey from problem to insight to solution but still doesn’t explain how.

Many experiments have been conducted over the years to shed some light on what goes on behind the mind’s curtain during incubation. Dutch social psychologist, Ap Dijksterhuis, gives an interesting example while writing for The Guardian:

A team of German researchers recorded sixteen clips of people telling stories – half true, half false. They then presented these clips one by one to three groups of people and asked them if the person in the clip was lying or telling the truth. The first group had to answer immediately after watching the clip, the second could think for a while before answering, and the third were distracted by a separate task before they could answer. The first two groups were able to answer correctly about half the time, as expected. But the third group, which had some time to incubate, was right more than 2/3rds of the time.

In a 2014 study titled Creativity—the unconscious foundations of the incubation period, Dijksterhuis evaluated many similar experiments to try and understand incubation better.

In his The Guardian article this year he specified three requirements for productive incubation:

Motivation

Your unconscious will only be able to solve your problem if you want it to, or in his words, “If we don’t want it badly enough, the Muse will not whisper anything in our ears.”

Expertise

Your unconscious can only construct a solution if it has a foundation to build upon.You need to know enough about the subject to incubate it properly.

Relaxed Activity

This is the most important prerequisite. You need to be relaxed and content enough for your mind to wander. If your mind is preoccupied with something else it won’t have the capacity to problem-solve, and if you are in a bad mood, it is likely to take that up as a problem itself and try to solve that instead.

Of course, this isn’t a hard and fast rule – sometimes you just end up stuck. But clearly there is a connection between problem-solving and your unconscious mind. Many scientists from many fields have tried to uncover this connection in many ways. Over the years, another unexplained phenomenon has come up in research in tandem with incubation – dreams.

We are not sure how they work or why we have them exactly, but they pop up in many anecdotes of incubation. August Kekulé discovered the structure of benzene inspired by a dream he had of a snake biting its own tail. Paul McCartney claims he first heard the melody for his song Yesterday in a dream. Ramanujan supposedly had visions of Namagiri Thayar, a local deity, in which she revealed mathematical equations to him. Many of Salvador Dalí’s paintings were inspired by his dreams.

Dalí even incorporated them into his creative process – he would go to sleep in his chair with a spoon in hand so that when he fell asleep it would clatter to the ground, waking him up so that he could immediately start painting while still in a ‘dream state’.

It is hard to deny that dreams, creativity, and the unconscious are all somehow linked – why else would the best scientists and artists cite their dreams so much? But how? We don’t know. [Rh/DS]

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