By |

Aha, Uh-Oh, and D’oh! The Psychology of Insight

The duck-rabbit illusion
The duck–rabbit: nothing changes but the way of seeing.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

How to think outside the box and have more original ideas.

The word ‘insight’ is sometimes used to mean something like ‘self-awareness’, including awareness of our thought processes, beliefs, desires, emotions, and so on, and of how they relate to one another and to the truth.

Of course, self-awareness comes by types and degrees. Owing to chemical receptors in their tendrils, vining plants know not to coil around themselves, and in that much can be said to have awareness of self and not-self. Infants only begin to develop reflective self-awareness at around 18 months of age, enabling them to recognise themselves in pictures and mirrors.

But insight is also used to mean something like ‘penetrating discernment’: a deep understanding of a person, problem, or situation. Such understanding may emerge gradually, but it can also arrive all at once, with a previously hidden truth—or the solution to a previously intractable problem—suddenly flooding the mind. This sudden apprehension of an insight is sometimes called an epiphany (Greek, ‘manifestation’, ‘coming into the light’), revelation, or ‘aha’ moment.

It is this epiphanic form of insight with which I am principally concerned. Unlike analytical thinking, which proceeds consciously and laboriously from one step to the next, it seems to come from nowhere. One moment, we are staring helplessly at the problem; the next, we can see straight through it. It is rather like climbing a mountain in fog, turning round, and suddenly seeing the entire landscape spread out below.

The Anatomy of Insight

Such ‘aha moments’, epitomised by Archimedes’ cry of Eureka! Eureka! (Greek, ‘I found it! I found it!’), involve a sudden shift in understanding, often by seeing something familiar in a new light or bringing previously disconnected elements together. They carry a characteristic feeling of clarity and conviction, and often delight—though they can also devastate, depending on what has been apprehended.

It is said that, upon sinking into his bath, Archimedes noticed the water level rising and suddenly understood that the volume of water displaced corresponded to the volume of the parts of his body that had been submerged. Less rarefied examples of aha moments include suddenly understanding a joke, or suddenly ‘seeing’ the other aspect of a reversal image such as the duck-rabbit (pictured).

Aha moments, it seems, primarily arise from unconscious and automatic processes, and—you might have noticed—our eyes naturally tend, when mulling over insight problems, to look away from visual stimuli. Brain-imaging studies suggest that this withdrawal of attention, or ‘looking inside’, may be part of the mechanism of insight. By screening out the immediate environment, the mind creates the spare capacity for loose associations to come together. The flash of insight may be sudden, but the work that produces it is not. Indeed, that work may draw upon a lifetime of experience and study.

This helps explain the so-called incubation effect. We wrestle with a problem, reach an impasse, and put it aside—only for the answer to come to us in the shower, on a walk, or upon waking. Had Archimedes not already been wrestling with the problem of measurement, his bath would not have become so famous.

Insight is closely related to intuition. If an intuition is a disposition to believe without conscious deliberation, an epiphanic insight is the sudden apprehension of a previously hidden relation. Intuition may lead to insight, but it can also remain no more than a hunch—rather than a sudden coming together.

Aha moments of the Archimedean kind might be distinguished from uh-oh moments, in which we become aware of an unforeseen problem, and from d’oh moments, popularised by the Simpson patriarch, when a foreseeable but unforeseen problem hits us or we have a flash of insight into our complete lack of insight.

In all three cases, something previously hidden is suddenly revealed, be it an answer, a danger, or our own stupidity.

Although insight often puts us in touch with some truth, there can also be false insights. Insight, therefore, is not exempt from analytical verification. Insight proposes; reason disposes. The highest thinking is not the one or the other, but both together.

The Price of Seeing Differently

‘Thinking outside the box’ is a cognitive feat. When we understand something in a particular way, it is very difficult to apprehend it in any other way, even in the face of the strongest contradictory evidence. It is not merely that we cannot imagine the answer; often, we are trapped inside the wrong question or assumption.

In When Prophecy Fails (1956), the social psychologist Leon Festinger discusses his experience of infiltrating a UFO doomsday cult whose leader had prophesied the end of the world. When the end of the world failed to materialise, most of the cult members dealt with the dissonance that arose from the cognitions ‘the leader said that the world would end’ and ‘the world did not end’ not by ditching the cult or its leader, as you might expect, but by rationalising that the world had been saved by the strength of their faith. Taking their assumptions for facts, the cult members simply reinterpreted the evidence in a way that preserved their existing beliefs.

Very often, to see something in a different light also means to see ourselves and the whole world in that new light, which can threaten and undermine our sense of self and raise atavistic defences. It is more a matter of emotion or self-conception than of reason or intelligence, which explains why even leading scientists can struggle with contravening evidence.

As the physicist Max Planck (d. 1947) observed, ‘A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’ Or, to put it more pithily, science advances one funeral at a time.

What is true of eminent scientists is true also of us. Our life cannot possibly have been a long list of mistakes. A new insight can demand a new self—which is a higher price than we are willing or able to pay. Younger people, having less to lose, can still afford to be open to ideas—but not for long. By the age of about 22, there is little left of the god in them.

Our attachment to our beliefs is so strong that contravening evidence or attempts to convince us otherwise can in fact entrench them—which is why, as a psychiatrist, I rarely challenge my patients, or indeed anyone, directly. But you don’t have to take my word for it: in a study, supplying ‘corrective information’ to people with serious concerns about the adverse effects of the flu jab made them less willing to receive it. This more than substantiates the German proverb: ‘Never give uninvited advice. The wise won’t need it, the fools won’t heed it.’

Some Insights Into Having Insights

So, short of dissolving our egos, which might take twenty years in a temple, or, ironically, an unusually strong ego, what can we do to increase our cognitive flexibility?

Naturally, it helps to have the tools of thought, including language fluency and multiple frames of reference as given by knowledge and experience. But more important is to develop that first sense of insight—namely, insight as self-awareness.

Self-awareness enables us to distinguish the problem from the assumptions that we have brought to it. At a practical level, we can change the way in which the problem is represented: draw it, explain it aloud, reverse it, reduce it, enlarge it, or translate it into an analogy. More searchingly, we can ask: What am I taking for granted? What would someone from another discipline, culture, or period see here? What if the opposite were true? What am I reluctant to notice because noticing it would cost me something? And how much more is it costing me to be that sort of person?

More benignly, we need to create the time and conditions for thoughts to connect. My own associative thinking is much more active when I’m both well-rested and at rest, for example, standing under the shower or ambling in the park. The very title of this essay came to me while cooking dinner and pouring a glass of wine, after the essay had been written. Jack Welch (d. 2020), as Chairman and CEO of General Electric, spent an hour each day in what he called ‘looking out of the window time’. And August Kekulé (d. 1896) claimed to have discovered the ring structure of the benzene molecule while daydreaming about a snake biting its own tail.

We tend to treat looking out of the window as the opposite of thinking. Often, it is thinking relieved of its supervisor. In my early twenties, as a strategy consultant in Paris, I would get told off for going out for walks. I once responded, ‘How do you expect me to think, locked up in a cubicle?’ (They didn’t like me.) Modern life supplies endless stimulation and very little mental vacancy, leaving us rich in information but poor in opportunities for this information to reorganise itself.

Time is a very strange thing and not at all linear: sometimes, the best way of using it is to waste it.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking and How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Cognition essays

By |

The Psychology and Philosophy of Solitude

Jove decadent (1899), by Ramon Casas.
Jove decadent (1899), by Ramon Casas.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Solitude and loneliness are not synonyms; if anything, they’re opposites. Whereas there is not much to recommend in loneliness, solitude gives us the freedom to think our own thoughts, follow our own inclinations, and live, if only for a time, entirely at our own pace.

Other people constrain us. They may be too inhibited for us, shrinking from thoughts that we would pursue, or unable to have them; or they may be too boorish, offending our sensitivities with their nasty habits and crude opinions.

Company, like employment, is a trade-off. A job provides income, security, and structure, but at the cost of our best life. Similarly, company provides affection, stimulation, and distraction, but at the cost of sinking our time and potential. For many people, this is a bargain well worth making. But perhaps not you, or you wouldn’t have read this far.

The Metaphysics of Loneliness

We tend to think of lonely people as single people, assimilating people who are lonely with people who are alone, and people who are alone with people who are single. But people who are single are not necessarily alone, and people who are alone are not necessarily lonely. Conversely, it is possible and even common to feel at our loneliest when completely surrounded by partner, family, and friends.

Many people choose to remain single, and some even choose to isolate themselves, or, at least, not to actively seek out social bonds. Such ‘loners’ (the very term is pejorative, implying, as it does, abnormality and deviousness) may revel in their rich inner life or simply dislike or distrust the company of others, which, they feel, comes with more costs than benefits. Many loners are actually very good with people when needs must, or when the right person turns up.

Timon of Athens, who lived at around the same time as Plato, began life in wealth, lavishing money upon his fawning friends, and, in accordance with his notion of friendship, never expecting anything in return. But when he ran out of coin, all his friends deserted him, reducing him to the hard toil of labouring the fields.

One day, as Timon tilled the earth, he uncovered a pot of gold, and, suddenly, all his former friends came tumbling back. But rather than welcome them with open arms, he cursed them and drove them away with sticks and clods of earth. Timon declared his hatred of humankind and withdrew into the forest—where, much to his chagrin, people sought him out as some kind of holy man.

Did Timon feel lonely in the forest? Probably not, because he did not believe that he lacked for anything. As he no longer valued his friends or their company, he could not have desired or missed them—even though he may have pined for a better class of person, and, in that limited sense, felt lonely. Loneliness is not an objective state of affairs so much as a subjective state of mind, a function of desired and achieved levels of social interaction and also of types of interaction. Lovers often feel lonely in the single absence of their beloved, even when completely surrounded by family and friends. Jilted lovers feel much lonelier than lovers who are merely apart from their beloved, indicating that loneliness is not merely a matter of the amount or degree of interaction, but also of the potential or possibility for interaction—as brought home during the coronavirus lockdowns.

Conversely, it is common to feel lonely within a marriage because the relationship is no longer validating or nurturing us, but diminishing us and holding us back. As the writer Anton Chekhov (d. 1904) admonished, ‘If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.’

And yet for many people marriage is, among others, an attempt to flee from their lifelong loneliness and escape from their inescapable demons.

At the bottom, loneliness is not the experience of lacking but the experience of living. It is, in other words, part and parcel of the human condition. Unless a person is resolved, it can only be a matter of time before the feeling of loneliness resurfaces, often with a vengeance.

On this account, loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of meaning from the universe, an absence that is all the more glaring in modern societies which have sacrificed traditional structures of meaning on the thin altar of truth.

So much explains why people with a strong sense of purpose and meaning, or simply with a strong narrative, such as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, or St Anthony of the Desert, are protected from loneliness regardless of the circumstances in which they may find themselves.

St Anthony (d. 356 CE), like Thoreau centuries later, sought out aloneness precisely because he understood that it could bring him closer to the real questions and value of life. He spent fifteen years in a tomb and twenty years in an abandoned fort in the desert of Egypt before his devotees persuaded him to withdraw from his seclusion to instruct and organise them, whence his epithet, ‘Father of All Monks’ (‘monk’ and ‘monastery’ derive from the Greek, monos, ‘solitary’, ‘alone’). Anthony emerged from the fort not broken and emaciated, as all had been expecting, but healthy and radiant, and expired in his hundred and sixth year—which in the fourth century might in itself have counted as a minor miracle.

Loneliness vs Solitude

St Anthony did not lead a life of loneliness, but one of solitude. Loneliness, the pain of being alone, is distressing; solitude, the joy of being alone, is freeing and empowering.

Our unconscious requires solitude to process experiences and unravel problems, so much so that our body imposes it upon us each night in the form of sleep. By removing us from the constraints, distractions, and opinions imposed upon us by others, solitude frees us to reconnect with ourself, assimilate ideas, and generate identity and meaning.

For Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900), people without the aptitude or opportunity for solitude are mere slaves because they have no alternative but to parrot culture and society. In contrast, anyone who has unmasked society naturally seeks out solitude, which becomes the source and guarantor of a more authentic set of values and ambitions.

Nietzsche was never one to mince his words:

I go into solitude so as not to drink out of everybody’s cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think I really think. After a time it always seems as if they want to banish my self from myself and rob me of my soul.

Solitude removes us from the mindless humdrum of everyday life into a higher consciousness which reconnects us with our deepest humanity, and also with the natural world, which quickens into our muse and companion. When we think of company, we usually think of people. But animals too are company, as are plants, the sea, wine, and all beautiful things. I call them ‘low intensity company’, and, often, I prefer them.

By loosening the bonds of dependency and the constraints of compromise (and compromise about compromise), we free ourselves up for problem solving, creativity, and spirituality. If we are able and willing to embrace it, this opportunity to refine our perspectives creates the strength and security for still greater solitude and, in time, the substance and meaning that guards against loneliness.

The life of St Anthony can leave the impression that solitude is at odds with attachment, but this need not be the case so long as the one is not pitted against the other. For the poet RM Rilke (d. 1926), the highest task of lovers is not merely to tolerate but ‘stand guard over’ the solitude of the other.

Of his early mentor, the sculptor Auguste Rodin, Rilke wrote: ‘Rodin was solitary before he was famous. And fame, when it arrived, made him perhaps more solitary.’ Other creatives who found inspiration in solitude include Emily Dickinson, Frida Kahlo, Marcel Proust, Nikola Tesla, and Vincent van Gogh.

In Solitude: A Return to the Self (1988), the psychiatrist Anthony Storr persuasively argues that: ‘The happiest lives are probably those in which neither interpersonal relationships nor impersonal interests are idealised as the only way to salvation. The desire and pursuit of the whole must comprehend both aspects of human nature.’

Be this as it may, not everyone is capable of solitude, and for many people aloneness will never amount to anything more than bitter loneliness. Younger people often find aloneness difficult, while older people are more likely, or less unlikely, to seek it out. So much suggests that solitude, the joy of being alone, stems from, as well as promotes, a state of maturity and inner richness.

Profound peace of heart and perfect peace of mind, these highest earthly goods after health, are to be found in solitude alone, and, as a permanent disposition, only in the deepest seclusion. And if our own self is great and rich, we enjoy the happiest state that can be found on this miserable earth. —Arthur Schopenhauer

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Heaven and Hell and The Art of Failure.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Emotions essays

Explore all Mental Health essays

Explore all Relationships essays

Explore all Success & Failure essays

By |

What the Logicians Have Missed

Le Char d'Apollon, by Odilon Redon
Both Plato and the Katha Upanishad compared the human soul to a chariot.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Plato was a master of metaphor. He compared the soul to a chariot and the state to a ship at sea. He compared his teacher Socrates both to a gadfly and to a midwife.

But the most famous of all his analogies is the Allegory of the Cave, in which he compares unphilosophical people to prisoners who, having spent their entire lives in a cave, are unable to imagine a world beyond.

How exactly do allegories work? An allegory (Greek, ‘a speaking about something else’) is a complete and cohesive narrative, for example, a myth, or George Orwell’s Animal Farm, that seems to be about one thing but is actually about another. Or, to put it differently, it is a story with two (or more) meanings: a superficial, literal meaning, and a deeper, figurative one.

Allegories are often described as ‘extended metaphors’, so one way of understanding the allegory is by understanding the smaller metaphor. Whereas an allegory is a complete narrative that seems to be about one thing but is actually about another, a metaphor is a sentence or short segment that equates two seemingly unrelated things. For example, Solomon 2:1-2:

I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.

The first sentence consists of two metaphors (‘I am the rose of Sharon’ and ‘I am the lily of the valleys’), and the second sentence consists of a simile.

Metaphor, Simile, and Analogy

What is the difference between a metaphor and a simile? In two words, not much. Whereas a metaphor says that something is something else, a simile says that it is like or as something else.

Simile might be considered a type of metaphor, as might also analogy, which involves drawing a comparison for the purpose of explaining or clarifying an idea, for example, if I say, ‘Scientists are as blind to their own paradigms as fish to water.’

In fact, the second sentence from the Solomon (‘As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters’) is more properly an analogy than a simple simile. But my broader point is this: they are close relatives and their boundaries are porous.

Metaphor and simile are figures of speech, which are a type of rhetorical device (also called, depending on context, literary or poetic device). They are both forms of analogy, which can be purely cognitive as well as rhetorical—in the mind and in the mouth, or in the mind only.

Metaphor and the Structure of Thought

Unlike other rhetorical devices, such as alliteration and resonance, metaphor is not merely ornamental, but a cognitively respectable way of knowing.

Metaphor and analogy enable an abstract or unfamiliar idea to be grasped in terms of a more concrete or familiar one. What’s more, the superimposition or juxtaposition of two superficially dissimilar ideas brings out any hidden or secondary correspondences between the two. This is not unlike formal deductive logic, which marries two ideas to give birth to a third—and is, in fact, a lot more common.

Logicians and their students prefer to focus on deduction and induction, but it may be that analogy is the principal form of human reasoning.

Faced with something new, the mind reaches for something familiar: What is this like? It then carries the structure of the familiar over to the unfamiliar, enabling us to make inferences that it may not otherwise have made.

We reason by analogy whenever we apply the lessons of one situation to another. A historian reaches for the past to illuminate the present, a doctor compares a new presentation to previous ones, a lawyer argues from precedent. Darwin reasoned from artificial selection to natural selection. In each case, analogy helps us connect the familiar to the novel.

In the words of Aristotle, whom Dante described as ‘the master of those who know’:

It is a great thing, indeed, to make a proper use of the poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.

What Makes for a Good Metaphor

The force of a metaphor depends above all upon its freshness and originality, in some sense, upon its disruptive qualities.

If a metaphor is overused, it becomes a cliché, and some metaphors are so tired that they are no longer visualised or even thought of as metaphors. For instance, in English (as opposed to, say, Spanish), we tend to talk of time in terms of space and distance, even if we are no longer aware of doing so: ‘I won’t be long’, ‘Let’s look at the weather for the week ahead’, ‘His drinking finally caught up with him.’ Metaphors such as these that are no longer visualised are called dead metaphors, and language is full of them.

Indeed, an argument could be made that all language is either onomatopoeic (or imitative, like ‘cough’, ‘splash’, and ‘thud’) or metaphorical. After all, what else could it be? The word ‘metaphor’ derives from the Greek for ‘a carrying over’, so it is itself a metaphor.

In its broadest, Aristotelian sense, metaphor is the carrying over of meaning from one thing to another on the basis of some perceived relation between them. Metaphor is a large family, including simile, analogy, metonymy, synecdoche, and more. Here’s a metaphor, or arguably a simile, by Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

I have bought this wonderful machine—a computer…it seems to me to be an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.

Unlike tired or dead metaphors, fresh, vivid metaphors like this one are experienced as beautiful and pleasurable. Beautiful because they are so concise and condensed. Pleasurable because, like humour, which they often contain, they exercise our cognitive range and flexibility. And like humour, they can be a little playful, a little naughty, and a little dangerous.

In the words, again, of Aristotle:

To learn easily is naturally pleasant to all people, and words signify something, so whatever words create knowledge in us are the pleasantest.

The Most Brilliant Metaphors

Now back to the allegory. Like the metaphor, the allegory serves to convey abstract and at times subversive ideas in more concrete and condensed forms that then become symbolic of the ideas, making them easier to reveal or conceal or otherwise play with.

When an abstract notion is given the form of a person or animate being, this is known as personification. Narcissus, for example, is a personification of vanity and self-absorption, and Icarus of hubris. The Mahabharata, the Iliad of India (although a lot longer), presents three approaches to moral problems, personified by Bhima (brute force, ego, desire), Yudhishthira (rigid moral law, deontology), and Arjuna (virtue ethics, moral indeterminacy), who, wavering between the paths of his two elder brothers, is forced to make difficult, existential choices.

An important advantage of the allegory is that it can be approached on more than one level, meaning that people can enjoy it as it suits them, and see in it as much or as little as they are prepared to see—or indeed, whatever they wish to see, bending the allegory to the curve, or twist, of their minds.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero and Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Rhetoric essays

Explore all Cognition essays

Explore all Aristotle essays

By |

Hate Noise? You Might Be a Genius

My silent writing retreat
Where I Wrote The German Greeks, surrounded by all the right sounds.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Silence is God’s first language; everything else is a poor translation. —Thomas Keating

I am excruciatingly sensitive to noise. I always carry earplugs and sometimes fantasise about living in the middle of the woods or on top of a hill. If I were browsing property listings, the first word I’d search for would be ‘secluded’. Is the problem with me—or with the world?

As a misophone (‘hater of sounds’), I’m in pretty good company. Kant hated noise, as did Proust, Kafka, and Darwin—and even, ironically, Wagner. Kant is said to have moved lodgings on account of a crowing rooster, while Proust lined his bedroom with cork.

Among all the great thinkers, none hated noise more openly or fervently than Arthur Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer and the Noisy Seamstress

In August 1821, while living in Berlin, the 33-year-old Schopenhauer had an altercation with a neighbour, the 47-year-old seamstress Caroline Louise Marquet. On that day, he was enraged by the noise of three women talking in the private anteroom to his apartment. When he demanded that they leave, two of the women complied but Marquet refused.

Later, Marquet claimed that Schopenhauer kicked and punched her and threw her down the stairs, leaving her paralysed on the right side and unable to work. He countered that he had only pushed her, and that she fell to the ground on purpose so that she could sue him.

Following a six-year legal battle ending in May 1827, he was made to pay her medical expenses along with a maintenance allowance of 60 thalers per annum for the rest of her life. On the day she died in 1842, the great philosopher of compassion recorded in his ledger, in Latin, Obit anus, abit onus (‘The crone dies, the burden is lifted’). Moral of the story: Don’t make noise around philosophers.

Schopenhauer built his pessimistic philosophy on that of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who lived all his life in Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad). Although gregarious and fond of laughter, Kant needed absolute quiet to write. In May 1784, he penned a letter to the police superintendent to complain about the ‘stentorian singing of prayers by the hypocritical inmates of the jail’ (in the Iliad, the Greek herald Stentor had a voice as loud ‘as fifty voices of other men’). He was offended not merely by the noise but also by the insincerity of the prayers, which were offered, he thought, simply to appear God-fearing to the jailor.

Schopenhauer on Noise

In his essay On Din and Noise (1851), Schopenhauer rails hardest not against the nattering of women but the cracking of whips in narrow resounding streets (the nineteenth-century equivalent of revving motorbikes, or those fart-can cars with modified exhausts): ‘Hammering, the barking of dogs, and the screaming of children are abominable; but it is only [his emphasis] the cracking of a whip that is the true murderer of thought.’ To him, the cracking of whips was all the more unbearable for being unnecessary and, worse than unnecessary, useless.

He goes on to link noise intolerance (misophonia, ‘the hatred of sound’) with intellect and creativity:

Certainly there are people, nay, very many, who will smile at [my predicament], because they are not sensitive to noise; it is precisely these people, however, who are not sensitive to argument, thought, poetry, or art, in short, to any kind of intellectual impression: a fact to be assigned to the coarse quality and strong texture of their brain tissues.

The Difference Between Sound and Noise

But not every sound is noise. The difference between sound and noise is not merely one of acoustics but also of perception. The sounds of nature, I find, are almost always more tolerable than those of man. Years ago, I toured Copenhagen Zoo—the only thing open on a Monday—and noted that the most disturbing cries came not from the animals but from the human children.

I enjoy birdsong, the burbling of a stream, or waves lapping or breaking on a shore, but not, say, an air conditioner humming (unless it is very hot outside), children crying, or people shouting or talking without saying anything useful, interesting, or amusing. If I believe that something is important, meaningful, or beautiful, the sound that it makes is much less likely to constitute noise. Noise, then, is whatever I don’t think is worth hearing. In the final analysis, it is whatever dissipates rather than concentrates my energies.

For Schopenhauer, genius is precisely this: the ability of the mind to remain focused on a single point and object. But as soon as a focused mind is interrupted or distracted, it is no better than an ordinary mind. It is, says Schopenhauer, as with a large diamond, which, if shattered, loses most of its value; or as with an army, which, if dispersed, loses most of its power.

It is not merely a matter of genius but also of happiness. For anyone who has experienced it, deep concentration is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Aristotle famously conceived of God, the traditional fount of all reason, as a mind that turns blissfully upon itself. In contrast, people who are too frightened to put two and two together, or too dense to do so, use noise to occupy and numb their minds.

The Stoic Answer: Can We Rise Above the Noise?

Unlike Schopenhauer, the Stoic Seneca (d. 65 CE) sought not to eliminate noise but to rise above it. In his Letters to Lucilius, he claims to be living above a bustling Roman bathhouse, and paints a vivid picture of the soundscape: the grunts of the weightlifter, the slaps and pummelling of the masseur, the splashing of the enthusiast who bombs into the pool, the ceaseless chatter of the hair-plucker who makes his victims yell… ‘So picture to yourself the assortment of sounds, which are strong enough to make me hate my very powers of hearing!’

Despite the din, Seneca remains able to read and write, assuring Lucilius that ‘this racket means no more to me than the sound of waves or falling water.’

Still, he recognises that some noises are worse than others. Intermittent noises, he says, are more upsetting than steady ones. Spoken words are more distracting than mere sounds, in that they demand our attention: compared to speech, even the saw-sharpener is easier to bear. 

Yet Seneca is able to force his mind to concentrate and ‘keep it from straying to things outside itself’. More than that, he sees this as a test of his Stoicism, mental fortitude, and even virtue. Ultimately, he reasons, noise only disturbs us insofar as it resonates with our own emotional turmoil. If our mind is still, no amount of noise can unsettle it; but if our mind is angry or fearful, or burning with greed or envy, no amount of silence can still it: ‘For of what benefit is a quiet quarter or neighbourhood if our emotions are in an uproar?’

We tend to associate sleeping with resting. But unless we are able to still our mind by the use of reason, the night merely changes the form of our worries. Real tranquillity, in contrast, ‘is the state reached by a rational mind when it is at rest.’

I think there is a lot of truth in that. When overwhelmed by noise, I find it helpful to ask myself, ‘Is my annoyance more to do with me or my prejudices than with the noise itself?’ But I would contest that even if we are able to concentrate in a din, our concentration is less profound or complete than it would otherwise have been, and more wearing too.

Seneca concedes that, having tested ourselves, it is simpler to avoid the uproar, or block it out, just as Odysseus blocked his ears and had his men row faster to get past the Sirens. According to lore, the Sirens were fated to die if someone ever escaped their singing, and after Odysseus were never again seen or heard.

Continue Exploring

I explore Schopenhauer and the German philosophers in The German Greeks, and Seneca and Stoicism in Stoic Stories.

You may also enjoy

Explore all German Philosophy essays

Explore all Stoicism essays

Explore all Cognition essays

By |

The Psychology and Philosophy of Imagination

John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral
John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831).

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Einstein held that imagination is more important than knowledge: ‘I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.’

What Is Imagination?

Imagination is the faculty of the mind that forms and manipulates images, propositions, concepts, emotions, and sensations above and beyond and sometimes independently of incoming sensory stimuli, opening up the realms of the abstract, the figurative, the possible, the hypothetical, and the universal.

Imagination comes in many forms and by many degrees, ranging from scientific reasoning to musical appreciation, and overlaps with a number of other cognitive constructs including belief, desire, emotion, memory, supposition, and fantasy. Belief, like perception, aims at according with reality, while desire aims at altering reality. Like belief, emotion also aims at according with reality, but more particularly at reflecting the significance of its object, or class of object, for the subject—an aspect that it shares with many forms of imagination. Like imagination, memory can involve remote imagery. But unlike imagination, memory is (or aims to be) rooted in reality and serves primarily to frame belief and guide moment-by-moment action. Memories are often more vivid than imaginings, which are, in turn, more vivid than mere suppositions. Suppositions tend to be cold and cognitive, lacking the emotional and existential dimensions of imagination, and much of its vividness. Finally, fantasy may be understood as imagination directed towards the improbable.

I say the improbable rather than the impossible, because there is a theory that, just as perception justifies beliefs about actuality, so imagination justifies beliefs about possibility (or at least, metaphysical as opposed to natural possibility). To quote David Hume, ‘it is an established maxim in metaphysics, that whatever the mind clearly conceives, includes the idea of possible existence, or in other words, that nothing we imagine is absolutely impossible.’

Could ghosts, the devil, time travel, and other imaginary things really be possible? I think inconceivability may be a better guide to impossibility than conceivability to possibility. But what does it mean for something to be conceivable or inconceivable, and by whom? It is easy to conceive of something other than oxygen in the place of oxygen, if one does not know anything about oxygen. In that much, knowledge and science constrain imagination—although, no doubt, they also help to focus it. The interplay between knowledge and imagination is most problematic when the ‘knowledge’ is wrong.

In any case, until very recently, most human societies did not mark a strict divide between imagination and belief, or fiction and reality, with each one informing and enriching the other. In fact, it could be argued that, in many important respects, the fiction took precedence over the reality—and even that this has been, and no doubt still is, one of the hallmarks of Homo sapiens. Today, there are pills for people who confuse imaginings and beliefs, but back in the day no one ever thought that life, despite its much harder hardships, might be meaningless—which I think tells us quite a bit about imagination and its uses, and also, incidentally, about mental illness and its causes.

Imagination and Meaning

The uses of imagination are many, more than I can enumerate. Most children begin to develop pretend play at around 15 months of age. What are children doing when they pretend play? And why are they so absorbed in works of imagination? When I was seven years old, I devoured book after book and pleaded with my parents for those not already in the bookcase. By playing out scenarios and extending themselves beyond their limited experience, children seek to make sense of the world and find their place within it. This meaning-making is full of emotion—joy, excitement, awe—and finds an echo in every subsequent act of creation.

Whenever we look at an object such as the Mona Lisa, we see much more than just the frame and the brushstrokes. In fact, we barely see the brushstrokes at all. In imagination as in our dreams, we ascribe form, pattern, and significance to things, and then reflect them back onto those things. Without this work of interpretation and assimilation, the world would be no more than an endless stream of sense impressions—as it may sometimes seem to those who lack imagination—with no hope of escape or reprieve.

Imagination in Everyday Life

More than that, by imagination we are able to complete the world, or our world, by conjuring up the missing parts, and even to inhabit entirely other worlds such as Middle-earth or the Seven Kingdoms. Imagination remains highly active throughout adulthood. What are novels, films, computer games, and even pornography if not aids to the adult imagination? 

If imagination lets us feel at home in the world, it also enables us to get things done in the world. Science advances by hypothesis, which is a function of imagination, and philosophy makes frequent use of thought experiments such as the brain in the vat, the trolley problem, and Plato’s Republic. More than that, imagination enables us to form associations and connections, and thereby to apply our knowledge to real-life situations. It opens up alternatives and possibilities, and guides our decision-making by playing them out in our mind. So many of our failures—and, dare I say, a few of our more boring successes—are in fact failures of the imagination.

Imagination and Other Minds

Imagination also enables us to talk to one another, understand one another, and work together. Without it, there could be no metaphor, no irony, no humour, no past or future tenses, and no conditional either. Indeed, there could be no language at all, for what are words if not symbols and representations? Every conversation depends upon imagination—for every listener must recreate in the theatre of the mind what the speaker can only suggest. By imagination, we can put ourselves in other people’s shoes, think what they think, feel what they feel, and project them and our relationship into the future. Difficulties with imagination are thought to contribute to some of the characteristic features of autism, including impairments in social interaction and communication together with restricted interests and patterns of behaviour.

Cultivating the Imagination

Imagination is the highest form of thought, and almost divine in its reach. With enough imagination, we could identify and solve all our problems. With enough imagination, we would never have to work again—or, at least, not for money. With enough imagination, we could win over, or defeat, anyone we wanted to. But our imagination is so poor that we haven’t even imagined what it would be like to have that kind of imagination.

I’m lucky to have received a decent education, but one thing it certainly didn’t do for me is cultivate my imagination. In fact, medical school in particular did everything to destroy it. In recent years, I’ve been trying to recover the bright and vivid imagination that I left behind in primary school. For that, I’ve been doing just three things, all of them very simple—or, at least, very simple to explain.

  • Recognising the importance of imagination.
  • Making time for sleep and idleness.
  • Taking inspiration from the natural world.

I’ll conclude with these few words from William Blake:

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking and How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Cognition essays