The Physical Core: Creativity
The physical core of experience at the first tier of consciousness provides a substrate for intuition, wisdom and creativity. My years of experience in clinical practice serve as a source for the ideas and insights about the brain and consciousness that I have been developing. This unvoiced self within my core of experience has guided my thinking through issues that I could not have sorted through in my conscious thoughts alone. I once imagined this guidance as originating in a big self or whole self that represented the greater brain-body system, but the details of how this might work remained vague and open-ended. The concept of a physical core of experience only emerged in my thinking over the past 18 months, and it provides the much-needed substrate.
It has long been apparent to me that the kind of experience we accumulate is critical to the kind of expertise we develop. In my specialty of clinical neuropsychology, many practitioners are content to administer tests, evaluate the results and base their interpretations on test scores alone. I pushed this process further by exploring the test performances beyond the scores: observing closely, questioning patients about the difficulties they experience and extending test procedures. I remained closely involved in every aspect of the evaluation, seeking a comprehensive understanding of each patient’s disability in relationship to brain functioning.
I developed a “feel” for the evaluation process that enabled me to understand my patients and their disabilities more completely. Although I became skilled in carrying out these evaluations, it was difficult to translate this “knowing how” into a concrete set of principles that could be easily taught. I gained wisdom in evaluating the brain and behavior, and I’ve been guided by this implicit wisdom throughout my project on the brain and consciousness.
The ideas that arise in consciousness from the core of experience are intuitions, and the envisioned sequences that develop are imagined possibilities. I think of both of these original creations as plurabilities (see Of Two Minds #10) because they are generated by a continuous, unvoiced core that can potentially generate multiple, personally meaningful, consciously articulated insights. Many meanings can be extracted from the physical core of experience if we make room for them to gradually express themselves in words and images.
Nearly fifty years ago, I attended a talk at Stanford by Herbert Simon, the Nobel prize winning psychologist who was a leading expert on decision making and problem solving. He spoke about how creative individuals generate ideas and produce their creations. He proposed a “ten-year rule,” suggesting that the expertise necessary for the highest level of creative work requires at least ten years of intense experience in an area of specialization. He further indicated that this experience is accumulated in “chunks” of knowledge and that intuition involves the recognition of cues that serve as indexed entries to these chunks.
Simon’s ten-year rule roughly estimates the time required for intense involvement in a sphere of activity to establish a sufficiently rich physical core of experience as a source to draw upon in creative work. The core of experience is established in chunks because it involves a continuous flow of physical involvement. The chunks involve cues that trigger family resemblance identifications that can be recognized as entities within the verbal-symbolic tier of consciousness. These recognized entities serve as index labels to access and set in motion responses from the physical core.
The entities we have previously identified within our established core of experience function as Simon suggests. Identifications are quickly made within the realities we encounter that trigger recognition at the verbal-symbolic tier. Recognition responses serve as index labels to access core structures and generate a response. Simon states that intuitions involve nothing more than recognition. Intuitions, however, surprise us. They are not recognized because they are new to us; we must decipher or decode them. The plurabilities that emerge in creative work are new and personal whether received as intuitions or envisioned in imagination.
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