Getting a New Idea is Actually Impossible

Look at all the things that stop you having new ideas. Society doesn’t want them, you don’t want them, your conscious brain doesn’t want them, the environment is all against them and—the final conclusive proof that they can’t happen—they don’t exist in symbol form, or in any form that your conscious brain can use. They are not filed away in the memory store. You cannot consciously think of something for which there is no reference centre. You can day-dream, yes. You can let your imagination wander. But in doing this you are only wandering among permutations of existing images. (It is, nevertheless, an activity to be encouraged because it appears that conscious meandering leads to the escape of new ideas.)

So the new concept must be formed in a place where these barriers don’t exist—in the subconscious brain. Let’s trace an imaginary case history of failure.

1. You have a problem; or, you may simply be curious about the nature of something; or, you may be searching for a way of expressing yourself in an art form.
2. The problem is codified to some extent by your conscious brain, using known symbols to frame it.
3. It is passed back to your subconscious while your conscious gets on with other things.
4. Your subconscious powerhouse comes up with a number of possible answers, probably at once.
5. The solution may require one or more new symbols that don’t exist in your memory store. Even if the subconscious can visualise them, it has no way of putting them into the store so that the conscious brain can draw them out.
6. The subconscious hunts about for existing symbols that will serve approximately. (e.g. Newton’s apple.)
7. The subconscious projects symbols to the conscious—symbols which it thinks are precise in meaning, without regard to logic.
8. The conscious brain becomes aware of symbols that seem to be irrelevant to the problem, because it has different, logical applications for those symbols.
9. The conscious brain rejects the notion.

Now let’s see how the process might succeed:

1. You register the problem as before.
2. You codify it to some extent.
3. It is passed back to the powerhouse.
4. Your subconscious gets the answer.
5. Your subconscious visualises new symbol requirements.
6. It finds some existing symbols that approximate.
7. It projects them to the conscious, in the form of day-dream, fancy, heightened perception of symbols being received from environment, forced analogy, awareness of association or some such device.
8. The conscious brain becomes aware of irrelevant or absurd thoughts. It does not dismiss them. It examines them to see if they might possibly be distorted but meaningful signals. (‘Why do I have a heightened perception of that falling apple?’ asks Newton. ‘What is the symbolism here?’)
9. The absurd is considered as though it were not absurd, by the conscious brain. The symbolism is interpreted and the conscious brain constructs new symbols on the strength of it. The new idea has happened.

Let’s suppose you are examining the possibility of replacing pneumatic tyres on motor cars with some new, better device. After all, riding about on vulnerable tubes of air seems a bit silly. Surely, with improvements in road surfaces and car suspensions and with tough, flexible materials being developed all the time, there must be a better answer.

Your subconscious gets to work and comes up with an idea—a solid polythene disc that is honeycombed with air pockets and braced with steel studs. (All right—so it’s a rotten idea. That’s beside the point!) How does it get this new symbol-complex into your conscious brain? It has to find existing symbols that are usable. A wheel runs hot (your conscious brain was worried about that when trying to solve the problem logically and your subconscious took note of it) so it picks the ‘sun’ symbol, spinning round. A honeycomb of air pockets? How about bubbles? Now—metal studs embedded in the circumference … let’s use an image of bullets being fired into it. So you get a sudden fancy—the sun with a halo of bubbles, being peppered by an unseen machine gun. You dismiss it immediately and pour a bit more water in your scotch. Only an eccentric would toy with such an absurd image.

Perhaps the example I’ve used is both clumsy and inexact. But if you can bring yourself to believe that something like this is going on in your mind, you’ll be some way to speeding up your own imaginative processes.

There may be a great storehouse of ideas in dreams. It seems likely that with the conscious mind just lying there, the subconscious could be pushing all sorts of useful stuff into it. Do you remember your dreams? For some reason, I seldom do, despite all sorts of tricks and devices that have been suggested. But if you can develop the habit of remembering dreams and writing down the substance of them, you might—just might—strike a vein of gold.

There’s no real evidence of inspiration ever having been disciplined in this fashion and the initial enthusiasm surrounding hallucinatory drugs such as lycergic acid seems to be waning. The heightened perception and release of tensions and inhibitions has not produced notable art or invention—only the ephemeral, euphoric simulation of it. Perhaps the built-in safeguards are too deep to be influenced by the drugs, despite the remarkable effects they have at a conscious level.

However, these abstruse lines of enquiry are best left to experts.

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