Modes of thinking

 I’ve written a few posts on creative thinking as well as analytical and critical thinking. But, not that long ago, I read a not-so-recently published book (2015) by 2 psychologists (John Kounios and Mark Beeman) titled, The Eureka Factor; Creative Insights and the Brain. To quote from the back fly-leaf:
 
Dr John Kounios is Professor of Psychology at Drexel University and has published cognitive neuroscience research on insight, creativity, problem solving, memory, knowledge representation and Alzheimer’s disease.
 
Dr Mark Beeman is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Northwestern University, and researches creative problem solving and creative cognition, language comprehension and how the right and left hemispheres process information.
 
They divide people into 2 broad groups: ‘Insightfuls’ and ‘analytical thinkers’. Personally, I think the coined term, ‘insightfuls’ is misleading or too narrow in its definition, and I prefer the term ‘creatives’. More on that below.
 
As the authors say, themselves, ‘People often use the terms “insight” and “creativity” interchangeably.’ So that’s obviously what they mean by the term. However, the dictionary definition of ‘insight’ is ‘an accurate and deep understanding’, which I’d argue can also be obtained by analytical thinking. Later in the book, they describe insights obtained by analytical thinking as ‘pseudo-insights’, and the difference can be ‘seen’ with neuro-imaging techniques.
 
All that aside, they do provide compelling arguments that there are 2 distinct modes of thinking that most of us experience. Very early in the book (in the preface, actually), they describe the ‘ah-ha’ experience that we’ve all had at some point, where we’re trying to solve a puzzle and then it comes to us unexpectedly, like a light-bulb going off in our head. They then relate something that I didn’t know, which is that neurological studies show that when we have this ‘insight’ there’s a spike in our brain waves and it comes from a location in the right hemisphere of the brain.
 
Many years ago (decades) I read a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. I thought neuroscientists would disparage this as pop-science, but Kounios and Beeman seem to give it some credence. Later in the book, they describe this in more detail, where there are signs of activity in other parts of the brain, but the ah-ha experience has a unique EEG signature and it’s in the right hemisphere.
 
The authors distinguish this unexpected insightful experience from an insight that is a consequence of expertise. I made this point myself, in another post, where experts make intuitive shortcuts based on experience that the rest of us don’t have in our mental toolkits.
 
They also spend an entire chapter on examples involving a special type of insight, where someone spends a lot of time thinking about a problem or an issue, and then the solution comes to them unexpected. A lot of scientific breakthroughs follow this pattern, and the point is that the insight wouldn’t happen at all without all the rumination taking place beforehand, often over a period of weeks or months, sometimes years. I’ve experienced this myself, when writing a story, and I’ll return to that experience later.
 
A lot of what we’ve learned about the brain’s functions has come from studying people with damage to specific areas of the brain. You may have heard of a condition called ‘aphasia’, which is when someone develops a serious disability in language processing following damage to the left hemisphere (possibly from a stroke). What you probably don’t know (I didn’t) is that damage to the right hemisphere, while not directly affecting one’s ability with language can interfere with its more nuanced interpretations, like sarcasm or even getting a joke. I’ve long believed that when I’m writing fiction, I’m using the right hemisphere as much as the left, but it never occurred to me that readers (or viewers) need the right hemisphere in order to follow a story.
 
According to the authors, the difference between the left and right neo-cortex is one of connections. The left hemisphere has ‘local’ connections, whereas the right hemisphere has more widely spread connections. This seems to correspond to an ‘analytic’ ability in the left hemisphere, and a more ‘creative’ ability in the right hemisphere, where we make conceptual connections that are more wideranging. I’ve probably oversimplified that, but it was the gist I got from their exposition.
 
Like most books and videos on ‘creative thinking’ or ‘insights’ (as the authors prefer), they spend a lot of time giving hints and advice on how to improve your own creativity. It’s not until one is more than halfway through the book, in a chapter titled, The Insightful and the Analyst, that they get to the crux of the issue, and describe how there are effectively 2 different types who think differently, even in a ‘resting state’, and how there is a strong genetic component.
 
I’m not surprised by this, as I saw it in my own family, where the difference is very distinct. In another chapter, they describe the relationship between creativity and mental illness, but they don’t discuss how artists are often moody and neurotic, which is a personality trait. Openness is another personality trait associated with creative people. I would add another point, based on my own experience, if someone is creative and they are not creating, they can suffer depression. This is not discussed by the authors either.
 
Regarding the 2 types they refer to, they acknowledge there is a spectrum, and I can’t help but wonder where I sit on it. I spent a working lifetime in engineering, which is full of analytic types, though I didn’t work in a technical capacity. Instead, I worked with a lot of technical people of all disciplines: from software engineers to civil and structural engineers to architects, not to mention lawyers and accountants, because I worked on disputes as well.
 
The curious thing is that I was aware of 2 modes of thinking, where I was either looking at the ‘big-picture’ or looking at the detail. I worked as a planner, and one of my ‘tricks’ was the ability to distil a large and complex project into a one-page ‘Gantt’ chart (bar chart). For the individual disciplines, I’d provide a multipage detailed ‘program’ just for them.
 
Of course, I also write stories, where the 2 components are plot and character. Creating characters is purely a non-analytic process, which requires a lot of extemporising. I try my best not to interfere, and I do this by treating them as if they are real people, independent of me. Plotting, on the other hand, requires a big-picture approach, but I almost never know the ending until I get there. In the last story I wrote, I was in COVID lockdown when I knew the ending was close, so I wrote some ‘notes’ in an attempt to work out what happens. Then, sometime later (like a month), I had one sleepless night when it all came to me. Afterwards, I went back and looked at my notes, and they were all questions – I didn’t have a clue.