Our brains do the work we give them. How is complicated, even mysterious, and the unconscious plays a critical role, particularly in creativity. With surprising speed, as the work shifts brain function shifts, evidenced by Ukrainian software engineers who rapidly went from coding to killing. Since leaving the corporate world, I gave my brain a different problem to solve and I suspect what I’ve observed since provides a lesson for anyone trying to tap their own creativity, which is what today’s post is about.
Different Forms of Brain Work
For roughly a quarter-century, I was in corporate—Dow Jones, BankBoston, Bridgewater. For roughly the quarter century before that, I was in school. While we use many parts of our brain at once, looking back, in each stage there was a dominant brain function the environment rewarded.
In school, the survival skill is to quickly process information. The faster you process, the more rewards you get, measured in GPA and prizes. You aren’t creating so much as ingesting and repeating. A Rhodes Scholar is distinctive for their ability to mentally organize an enormous amount of information. If you listen to my podcast with Congressman and Rhodes Scholar Jim Himes you can get a sense of how a mind like that operates.
In a corporation, the survival skill is to get along. By definition, a corporation is engaged in work too large and complex for any one individual to negotiate. Yes, an accountant’s job is different than a salesman’s. Still, there are rewards for managing your boss, or bosses, well. Call it “team work” or “office politics,” a big slice of brain function goes to managing your corporate tribe.
My current gig—Substack, books, investing, developing or deepening a relationship with you (note the new chat!)—relies above all on creativity. I have a small team who are critical to this effort, but my brain is no longer occupied with managing up. Instead, I find my brain is doing something it didn’t do before. When I wake up, inexplicably, I know what to write next. How does that happen?
Cormac McCarthy’s Answer
Cormac McCarthy provided me with an answer as to what might be going on. Cormac is the author of No Country for Old Men, Blood Meridian and The Road. Some regard him as America’s greatest living writer, the descendent of Hemingway and Faulkner.
As far as I know, he has written just one non-fiction essay, the Kekule Problem. The title refers to August Kekule, who figured out the structure of benzine. Kekule was struggling with the answer when he fell asleep and saw an image of a snake coiled in a loop with its tail in its mouth. He awoke and said “it’s a ring.”
“I think there is a deep puzzle there, we don’t know what it is,” said Cormac.
Cormac believes Freud and Jung are off course about the unconscious.1 Freud believed the unconscious held repressed, socially unacceptable ideas—like sexual desire. These desires popped out involuntarily, via dreams or verbal mishaps, thus a “Freudian slip.” Jung believed in a “collective” unconscious.
Cormac asserts the unconscious is an ancient part of our brain, wired for survival. The unconscious is, he guesses, roughly 1 million years old while language is as recent as 100,000 years. This explains why the nudges given are in images, not words. “The idea exists independently of language and that’s a problem, we don’t know how it works,” he said.
The unconscious is a powerful, somewhat spooky system that runs in the background and solves “whatever problem we give it,” according to Cormac. “We don’t know what the hell it is, but there is something there.” Yet, the unconscious leads to answers that are provably true, like the structure of benzine and much else.
Tapping Your Unconscious—Theory and Practice
Reading Cormac helped put other data points into perspective—like the role of sleep and meditation. Berkeley researcher Mathew Walker’s book Why We Sleep showed how critical sleep is to health. In my first Bridgewater performance review, Ray Dalio inveighed on me to take up meditation.
But only after reading Cormac did I see the connection—sleep and meditation give the unconscious time to do its thing. What I’d always thought of as an indulgence I now look at as part of the work itself. This means President Clinton or Prime Minister Thatcher, both of whom prided themselves of sleeping four hours a night, were on the wrong track.
A final piece to the puzzle is a curious book called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. My son gave this to me while I was still in corporate. Once I left, I went back it. I’ve since found that this book is a bible for writers, directors, artists and many others. One of its key recommendations is to sit down first thing in the morning and write out “morning pages” freehand. Doing so perhaps helps extract concrete ideas from the unconscious mud.
These processes work together. We need to give the unconscious time to run and we need to be mindful to extract its treasures. We live differently than 200 years ago precisely due to an accumulation of discoveries in part driven by this process. Each of us has that internal problem solver, the question is how best to access it. Sleep, meditation and morning pages help.
An AI Coda
Cormac’s perspective raises an interesting point about Artificial Intelligence. The promise of AI is that it can solve problems, like genome sequencing, that humans can’t. It is “logical” without relying on human logic. But if we don’t understand the unconscious and it is the source of much of our problem solving, are we as logical as we think? AI may be able to out-logic us but can it out-unconscious us?
Investment Outlook, the Numbers
Ah yes, after such high-minded thoughts, the banal numbers we must obey in the day-to-day to earn our bread.
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