But it is more than a safety device: we have seen that the major phylogenetic changes were also brought about by a retreat from adult to embryonic forms. Indeed, the main line of development which led up to our species could be described as a series of operations of phylogenetic self-repair: of escapes from blind alleys by the undoing and re-moulding of maladapted structures. *
* Evidently, self-repair by the individual animal produces no evolutionary novelty, it merely restores its capability to function normally in a stable environment; 'phylogenetic self-repair', on the other hand, implies evolutionary changes in a changing environment.
As we move further up the ladder from reptile to mammal, the power of regenerating bodily structures decreases, and is superseded by the increasing powers of the nervous system to reorganise behaviour. (Ultimately, of course, these reorganisations of function must also involve structural changes of a fine-grained nature in the nervous system, and so we are still moving along a continuous line.) More than a century ago, the German physiologist Pflüger demonstrated that even a decapitated frog is not just a reflex automaton. If a drop of acid was put on the back of its left foreleg, it would wipe it off with the hind-leg on the same side -- this is the normal spinal reflex. But if the left hind-leg was immobilised, the frog used its right hind-leg instead, to wipe off the acid. Thus even the headless creature -- a 'spinal preparation' as it is euphemistically called -- proved itself capable of improvising when reflex-action was prevented.
In the first half of this century, K.S. Lashley and his collaborators, in a series of classical experiments, demolished the notion of the nervous system as a rigid mechanism. 'The results indicate', Lashley wrote, 'that when habitually used motor-organs are rendered non-functional by removal or paralysis, there is an immediate, spontaneous use of other motor systems which had not been previously associated with, or used in, the performance of the activity.' [5] The frog, using his left leg instead of the right one in the scratch-reflex, is a simple illustration of this; but Lashley showed that the nervous system is capable of incomparably more surprising feats; that brain tissues which normally serve a specialised function can, under certain circumstances, take over the function of other, injured brain tissues -- much as the foragers in a beehive take over the functions of the kidnapped builders (p. 107). To mention one among many examples: Lashley trained rats to choose between two alternative targets always the relatively brighter one. Then he removed the rats' visual cortex, and their discriminatory skill disappeared, as one would expect. But, contrary to what one would expect, the mutilated rats were able to learn the same skill again. Some other brain area, not normally specialising in visual learning, must have taken over this function, deputising for the lost area.
Moreover, if a rat has learned to find its way through a maze, no matter what parts of its motor cortex are injured, it will still make a correct run; and if the injury renders it incapable of executing a right turn, it will achieve its aim by a three-quarter turn to the left. The rat may be blinded, deprived of smell, partially paralysed in different ways -- each of which would throw the chain-reflex automaton, which it is supposed to be, completely out of gear. Yet: 'One drags himself through [the maze] with his forepaws; another falls at every step but gets through by a series of lunges; a third rolls over completely in making each turn, yet avoids rolling into a cul-de-sac and makes an errorless run.' [6]
Higher Forms of Self-Repair
As we arrive at the top of the ladder, we find in man the faculty of physical regeneration reduced to a minimum, but compensated by his unique powers to re-mould his patterns of behaviour -- to meet critical challenges by creative responses.
Even on the level of elementary perception, learning to see through spectacles which turn the world upside down (see p. 78) testifies to these powers. Experiments which create the same effect have been carried out on animals -- reptiles and monkeys -- by cutting the optic nerve and letting it grow together after twisting the severed end of the bundle half round the clock. As a result, the animals see the world upside-down, reach leftward when food is shown on the right, and downward if it is offered from above. They never get over the maladjustment. Human subjects, however, fitted with inverting glasses, do get over it. The effect at first is thoroughly upsetting: you see your body upside-down, your feet planted on a floor which has become the ceiling of the room. Or, with left-right inverters, you try to move away from a wall, and bump into it. Yet after a certain time, which may mean several days, the subject becomes adjusted to living in an inverted world, which then appears to him more or less normal again. The retinal image and its projection in the visual cortex are still upside-down; but, thanks to the intervention of some higher echelons in the hierarchy, the mental image has become reorganised. At the present stage of knowledge, physiology has no satisfactory explanation for this phenomenon. All one can say is that if our orientation, our postural and motor reactions to the visual field depend on wiring circuits in the brain, living in an inverted world must entail a lot of undoing and re-doing in the wiring diagram.
Inverting spectacles are drastic gadgets; but most of us go through life wearing contact lenses of which we are unaware and which distort our perceptions in more subtle ways. Psychotherapy, ancient and modern, from shamanism down to contemporary forms of analytical or abreaction techniques, has always relied on that variety of undoing-re-doing procedure which Ernst Kris, an eminent practitioner, has called 'regression in the service of the ego'. [6a] The neurotic, with his compulsions, phobias, and elaborate defence-mechanisms, is a victim of rigid, maladaptive specialisation -- a koala bear hanging on for dear life to a barren telegraph pole. The therapist's aim is to induce a temporary regression in the patient; to make him retrace his steps to the point where they went wrong, and to come up again, metamorphosed, reborn.
The same pattern is reflected in countless variations on the death-and-resurrection motif in mythology. Joseph is thrown into a well; Mohammed goes out into the desert; Jesus is resurrected from the tomb; Jonah is reborn out of the belly of the whale. Goethe's Stirb und Werde, Toynbee's Withdrawal and Return, the mystic's dark night of the soul preceding spiritual rebirth, derive from the same archetype: draw back to leap. (The French reculer pour mieux sauter is a more expressive phrase for it.)
Self-Repair and Self-Realisation
There is no sharp dividing line between self-repair and self-realisation. All creative activity is a kind of do-it-yourself therapy, an attempt to come to terms with traumatising challenges. In the scientist's case the trauma may be the impact of data which shake the foundations of a well-established theory, and make nonsense of his cherished beliefs; observations which contradict each other, problems which cause frustration and conflict. In the artist's case, challenge and response are manifested in his tantalising struggle to express the inexpressible, to conquer the resistance of his medium, to escape from the distortions and constraints imposed by the conventional styles and techniques of his time.
We can now pick up the thread from the previous chapter: the decisive break-throughs in science, art or philosophy are successful escapes from blind alleys, from the bondage of mental habits, from orthodoxy and over-specialisation. The method of escape follows the same undoing-re-doing pattern as in biological evolution; and the zigzag course of advance in science or art repeats the pattern of Garstang's diagram.
Every revolution has a destructive and a constructive aspect. The destruction is wrought by jettisoning previously unassailable doctrines, and seemingly self-evident axioms of thought. The progress of science, like an ancient desert trail, is strewn with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories which seemed once to possess eternal life. Progress in art involves an equally agonising reappraisal of accepted values, criteria of relevance, frames of perception. When we discuss the evolution of art and science from the historian's point of view, the undoing and re-doing is taken for granted as a normal, inevitable part of the story. If, however, we focus our attention on the concrete indivi
dual who initiated the revolutionary change, we are faced with the psychological problem of the nature of human creativity.
I have discussed that subject at length in The Act of Creation, but as it is pertinent to our present theme, I must briefly return to it. Readers acquainted with the earlier book may find that some passages in this chapter have a familiar ring; but they will also find that it carries the discussion a step further.
A quick glance at the evolution of astronomy will make the 'zigzag pattern' clearer. Newton once said that if he could see farther than others it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. But did he really stand on their shoulders -- or on some other part of their anatomy? He adopted Galileo's laws of free fall, but rejected Galileo's astronomy. He adopted Kepler's planetary laws, but demolished the rest of the Keplerian edifice. He did not take as his point of departure their completed 'adult' theories, but retraced their development to the point where it had gone wrong. Nor was the Keplerian edifice built on top of the Copernican edifice. That ramshackle structure of epicycles he tore down; he kept only its foundations. Nor did Copernicus continue to build where Ptolemy had left off. He went back two thousand years to Aristarchus. All great revolutions show, as already said, a notably 'paedomorphic' character. They demand as much undoing as re-doing.
But to undo a mental habit sanctified by dogma or tradition, one has to overcome immensely powerful intellectual and emotional obstacles. I mean not only the inertial forces of society; the primary locus of resistance against heretical novelty is inside the skull of the individual who conceives of it. It reverberates in Kepler's agonised cry when he discovered that the planets move not in circular but in elliptical pathways: 'Who am I, Johannes Kepler, to destroy the divine symmetry of the circular orbits!' On a more down-to-earth level the same agony is reflected in Jerome Bruner's experimental subjects who, when shown for a split second a playing card with a black queen of hearts, saw it as red, as it should be; and when the card was shown again, reacted with nausea at such a perversion of the laws of Nature. [7] To unlearn is more difficult than to learn; and it seems that the task of breaking up rigid cognitive structures and reassembling them into a new synthesis cannot, as a rule, be performed in the full daylight of the conscious, rational mind. It can only be done by reverting to those more fluid, less committed and specialised forms of thinking which normally operate in the twilight zones of awareness.
Science and the Unconscious
There is a popular superstition, according to which scientists arrive at their discoveries by reasoning in strictly rational, precise, verbal terms. The evidence indicates that they do nothing of the sort.* To quote a single example: in 1945, Jacques Hadamard organised a nation-wide inquiry among eminent mathematicians in America to find out their working methods. The result showed that all of them, with only two exceptions, thought neither in verbal terms, nor in algebraic symbols, but relied on visual imagery of a vague, hazy kind. Einstein was among those who answered the questionnaire; he wrote: 'The words of the language as they are written or spoken do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought, which relies on more or less clear images of a visual and some of a muscular type. It seems to me that what you call full consciousness is a limit case which can never be fully accomplished because consciousness is a narrow thing.' [8]
* Cf. The Act of Creation, Book One, Chapters V-XI.
Einstein's statement is typical. On the testimony of those original thinkers who have taken the trouble to record their methods of work, not only verbal thinking but conscious thinking in general plays only a subordinate part in the brief, decisive phase of the creative act itself. Their virtually unanimous emphasis on spontaneous intuitions and hunches of unconscious origin, which they are at a loss to explain, suggests that the role of strictly rational and verbal processes in scientific discovery has been vastly over-estimated since the age of enlightenment. There are always large chunks of irrationality embedded in the creative process, not only in art (where we are ready to accept it) but in the exact sciences as well.
The scientist who, facing an obstinate problem, regresses from precise verbal thinking to vague visual imagery, seems to follow Woodworth's advice: 'Often we have to get away from speech in order to think clearly.' Language can become a screen between the thinker and reality; and creativity often starts where language ends, that is, by regressing to pre-verbal levels of mental activity.
Now I do not mean, of course, that there is a little Socratic daemon housed in the scientist's or artist's skull, who does his homework for him; nor should one confuse unconscious mentation with Freud's 'primary process'. The primary process is defined by Freud as devoid of logic, governed by the pleasure-principle, accompanied by massive discharges of affect, and apt to confuse perception and hallucination. It seems that between this very primary process, and the so-called secondary process, governed by the reality-principle, we must interpolate several levels of mental activity which are not just mixtures of'primary' and 'secondary', but are cognitive systems in their own right, each governed by its own canon of rules. The paranoid delusion, the dream, the daydream, free association, the mentality of children at various ages, and of primitives at various stages should not be lumped together, for each has its own logic or rules of the game. But while clearly different in many respects, all these forms of mentation have certain features in common, since they are ontogenetically, and perhaps phylogenetically, older than those of the civilised adult. They are less rigid, more tolerant, ready to combine seemingly incompatible ideas, and to perceive hidden analogies between cabbages and kings. One might call them 'games of the underground', because if not kept under restraint, they would play havoc with the routines of disciplined thinking. But under exceptional conditions, when disciplined thinking is at the end of its tether, a temporary indulgence in these underground games may suddenly produce a solution -- some far-fetched, reckless combination of ideas, which would be beyond the reach of, or seem to be unacceptable to, the sober, rational mind. I have proposed the term 'bisociation' for these sudden leaps of creative imagination, to set them apart from the more pedestrian or associative routines. I shall come back to this in a moment; the point to retain is that the creative act in mental evolution again reflects the pattern of reculer pour mieux sauter, of a temporary regression, followed by a forward leap. We can carry the analogy further and interpret the Eureka cry as the signal of a happy escape from a blind alley -- an act of mental self-repair.
Association and Bisociation
A convenient definition of associative thinking is given by Humphrey: 'The term "association", or "mental association", is a general name often used in psychology to express the conditions under which mental events, whether of experience or behaviour, arise.' [9] In other words, the term 'association' simply indicates the process by which one idea leads to another.
But an idea has associative connections with many other ideas established by past experiences; and which of these connections will be activated in a given situation depends on the type of thinking we are engaged in at the moment. Orderly thinking is always rule-governed, and even dreaming, or daydreaming, has its own rules. In the psychological laboratory, the experimenter lays down the rule 'name opposites'. Then he says 'dark', and the subject promptly says 'light'. But if the rule is 'synonyms', then the subject will associate 'dark' with 'black' or 'night' or 'shadow'. To talk of stimuli as if they were acting in a vacuum is meaningless; what response a given stimulus will evoke depends on the rules of the game we are playing at the time -- the canon (see Chapter III) of that particular mental skill. But we do not live in laboratories where the rules of the game are laid down by explicit orders; in the normal routines of thinking and talking the rules are implicit and unconscious.
This applies not only to the rules of grammar, syntax, and common-or-garden logic, but also to those which govern the more complex structures we call 'frames of reference', 'universes of discourse' or 'associative contexts'; and to the 'hidden persuaders' w
hich prejudice our reasoning. In The Act of Creation I proposed the term 'matrix' as a unifying formula to refer to such cognitive structures, that is to say, to all mental habits and skills governed by a fixed set of rules but capable of varied strategies in attacking a problem. In other words, matrices are cognitive holons and display all the characteristics of holons discussed in previous chapters. They are controlled by their canons, but guided by feedback from the environment -- the distribution of the men on the chessboard, the features of the problem in hand. They range from extremes of pedantic rigidity to liberal open-mindedness -- within limits. They are ordered into 'vertical' abstractive hierarchies, which interlace in 'horizontal' associative networks and cross-references.
Let me repeat: all routine thinking is comparable to playing a game according to fixed rules and more or less flexible strategies. The game of chess allows for more varied strategies than draughts, a vaster number of choices among moves permitted by the rules. But there is a limit to them; and there are hopeless situatiom in chess when the most subtle strategies won't save you -- short of offering your opponent a jumbo-sized Martini. Now in fact there is no rule in chess preventing you from doing that. But making a person drunk while remaining sober oneself is a different sort of game with a different context. Combining the two games is a bisociation. In other words, associative routine means thinking according to a given set of rules on a single plane, as it were. The bisociative act means combining two different sets of rules, to live on several planes at once.