When You Get Stuck Thinking, It’s Okay to Give Up for a While
And let your unconscious mind take over and do magic
When I was in the middle of finishing my undergraduate thesis, I encountered many hurdles. I changed topics ten times. Feeling that I will never find any suitable topics and convincing thesis statements, I decided to 'distract' myself by shelving it off in my brain for a while. Until one day, while riding my motorcycle home during a sunny day, a thesis statement, complete with its structures and subtopics suddenly came to mind. The result of my thesis defense was above my expectation.
It was one of the simple yet mysterious life-changing moments in my life. Without that, I might graduate a lot longer or worse, without a satisfying magnum opus after 4.5 years of studying in one specific major.
But ever since that day, I became aware of the many surfacing unconscious thought that follows later in life. Usually when I am showering, my mind's empty, there are always things that come up unsolicited.
The thing I noticed is that the ideas that come are usually the things that I've been thinking about in the past or a new realization of something that I've known before. It seems that my unconscious mind has been working on the thought that my conscious self left dormant for a while.
Have you ever encountered a ‘Eureka’ moment like I did? When you weren’t deliberately and consciously thinking about something, suddenly a great idea comes to you?
Surprisingly, transferring the authority of thinking to the unconscious part of our brain can really help us in learning and decision-making.
Consciousness Is as Huge as a Country; Unconscious Thought, a Galaxy
Our consciousness is wired to our brain. A part known as the cerebral cortex contains cortical tissues which are called posterior hot zones. When those tissues are gone, we will lose the ability to recognize shapes, images, colors, and sounds. We will lose the ability to experience the real world, to be conscious of things.
But consciousness only belongs to a small part of our brain. The part of the brain that is responsible for conscious thinking and decision-making can only process 40–50 bits of information per second. Meanwhile, other parts of the brain that is doing their own background activity can process a dazzling 11 million bits of information per second.
The most common example in the gap of conscious and unconscious thought is when you have so much going on in your mind, when you imagine the grandest scenarios of the things you want to talk about, only for you to speak only a fragment of what’s inside your mind.
When there are many things inside our minds, some other ideas recede into the unconscious. That’s why, to speak in a structured and complete manner, as a conscious act, we need to be guided by notes and other cues.
This notion that the unconscious thought-process is the breadwinner for our ideas is called “Passive Frame Theory”. It states that most of our thoughts are processed behind the scene, which never dawns on our consciousness. Only when we need to decide on something or think about a specific topic that relates to the same unconscious thought, does the conscious mind start to work.
Although, when it does work, conscious thought capacity is still limited at best.
One experiment showed that people who decide things consciously only do it best when choosing things with fewer attributes. Suppose you have an option to buy 4 almost identical cars. There are 4 attributes that you have to assess, with one car having the most positive attributes. People who decide consciously and unconsciously pick the best car. But when the attribute is added to 12, the latter does it better than the former.
This is because the conscious mode of thinking cannot handle big, holistic problems all at the same time. The more complex a problem is, the harder it is to focus our conscious thought.
In addition, conscious judgment is biased and inconsistent. Because we are a creature that is always in flux and adopts new things and forgoes the old. Meanwhile, our unconscious thought is more consistent because it already processes a lot of things and creates a kind of a holistic summary of the things we see and learn.
When in Doubt, Shelf Your Thought into the Unconscious
The same thing happens when you learn new things. In which you’re about to enter vast, uncharted territories, our consciousness will rarely be prepared.
If I have to write upon some rather difficult topic, the best plan is to think about it with very great intensity — the greatest intensity of which I am capable — for a few or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done — Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
Reading this passage a few weeks ago made me ponder that I might’ve done the same with what Bertrand Russell was doing with his works. If you ever got stuck on a topic that you’re learning, you can:
- Learn hard about the structure and concepts of a particular topic. Knowing a pattern and conceptual connectivity is important.
- When encountering a looming wall of an unsolvable puzzle, put off your learning for a while.
- Focus your mind on other things. Come back a little later (another day, week, or month).
I remember during high school when I first tried to read an English translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. As a person that had never before entered the world of foreign language works of literature, I spent more than an hour trying to make sense of the passages. I decided to give up because it was tiring. I accepted my defeat and admitted that I wasn’t ready. I read other novels and about a year or so later I came back. Suddenly, I can read the book seamlessly.
Same with the story of my thesis at the beginning of this article, to be able to solve the problems I was facing, the first thing to do is to gain many perspectives and patterns. For example, by reading other literature, I gained more reading comprehension and conceptual connectivity. Then, I let my unconscious do the organizing. Because of its greater capacity, our unconscious thought is a better organizer.
One more example is when I learned English. I used to enroll in English classes. But I think it was not very effective. Then I started to read, listen to music, and watching movies. I never learn consciously about grammar. Yet I derived some patterns in how native speakers talk. To stretch it further, sometimes I can imitate the writing style of authors that I’ve read.
At this point, you might wonder, “What is the proof that the unconscious can think?”.
Research conducted by Cresswell et al. in 2013 in which the participants are given a choice of a pair of the same thing with different attributes. One thing has more positive attributes than its counterpart.
When they were distracted after having to decide consciously, the fMRI test showed that the unconscious continued to process the information (the attributes of things) in the background. The participants also didn’t recall consciously thinking about their decision when distracted.
In short, our unconscious is working their ass off while our sober mind ditches its main job and gets distracted.
A Summary to Ease Your Conscious Reading
Your mind is like when you're at an early stage of getting to know a stranger. They don't know your life's hardships and what it shows you. But the one who is unaware of the power and capacity, of the way our unconscious thoughts work, is ourselves.
And just like icebergs, your visible, conscious mind has a smaller capacity in containing and processing information than your unconscious thought.
Because of it, our consciousness is more suited to solving little chunks of problems and accessing or deciding on things that don’t contain too many attributes at one time. Furthermore, our consciousness is also prone to bias and inconsistencies because we are aware of and have the power to modify our thoughts. Meanwhile, we aren’t even aware of what happens in the back of our minds.
The unconscious can do what the conscious needs more time or even external tools to organize your decision and learning results better. They are natural organizers.
Hence, sometimes your unconsciousness can be your deus ex machina. Helping you after a hard thought only to repeatedly encounter the great wall of mounting cluelessness.
