Carl Gustav Jung, founder of analytic psychology and explorer of the collective unconscious, was born on July 26, 1875 in the village of Kesswil, in the Thurgau canton of Switzerland. Above, we present a fascinating 39-minute interview of Jung by John Freeman for the BBC program Face to Face. It was filmed at Jung’s home at Küsnacht, on the shore of Lake Zürich, and broadcast on October 22, 1959, when Jung was 84 years old. He speaks on a range of subjects, from his childhood and education to his association with Sigmund Freud and his views on death, religion and the future of the human race. At one point Freeman asks Jung whether he believes in God, and Jung seems to hesitate. “It’s difficult to answer,” he says. “I know. I don’t need to believe. I know.”
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So begins one translation of the Tao Te Ching’s 18th Chapter. The sentence captures the frustration that comes with a lost epiphany. Whether it’s a profound realization when you just wake up, or moment of clarity in the shower, by the time your mind’s gears start turning and you grope for pen and paper, the enlightenment has evaporated, replaced by muddle-headed, fumbling “what was that, again?”
“Intelligence comes forth. There is great deception.”
The sudden flashes of insight we have in states of meditative distraction—showering, pulling weeds in the garden, driving home from work—often elude our conscious mind precisely because they require its disengagement. When we’re too actively engaged in conscious thought—exercising our intelligence, so to speak—our creativity and inspiration suffer. “The great Tao fades away.”
The intuitive revelations we have while showering or performing other mindless tasks are what psychologists call “incubation.” As Mental Floss describes the phenomenon: “Since these routines don’t require much thought, you flip to autopilot. This frees up your unconscious to work on something else. Your mind goes wandering, leaving your brain to quietly play a no-holds-barred game of free association.”
Are we always doomed to lose the thread when we get self-conscious about what we’re doing? Not at all. In fact, some researchers, like Allen Braun and Siyuan Liu, have observed incubation at work in very creatively engaged individuals, like freestyle rappers. Theirs is a skill that must be honed and practiced exhaustively, but one that nonetheless relies on extemporaneous inspiration.
Renowned neuroscientist Alice Flaherty theorizes that the key biological ingredient in incubation is dopamine, the neurotransmitter released when we’re relaxed and comfortable. “People vary in terms of their level of creative drive,” writes Flaherty, “according to the activity of the dopamine pathways of the limbic system.” More relaxation, more dopamine. More dopamine, more creativity.
Other researchers, like Ut Na Sio and Thomas C. Ormerod at Lancaster University, have undertaken analysis of a more qualitative kind—of “anecdotal reports of the intellectual discovery processes of individuals hailed as geniuses.” Here we might think of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose poem “Kublai Khan”—“a vision in a dream”—he supposedly composed in the midst of a spontaneous revelation (or an opium haze)—before that annoying “person from Porlock” broke the spell.
Sio and Ormerod survey the literature of “incubation periods,” hoping to “allow us to make use of them effectively to promote creativity in areas such as individual problem solving, classroom learning, and work environments.” Their dense research suggests that we can exercise some degree of control over incubation, building unconscious work into our routines. But why is this necessary?
Psychologist John Kounios of Drexel University offers a straightforward explanation of the unconscious processes he refers to as “the default mode network.” Nick Stockton in Wired sums up Kounios’ theory:
Our brains typically catalog things by their context: Windows are parts of buildings, and the stars belong in the night sky. Ideas will always mingle to some degree, but when we’re focused on a specific task our thinking tends to be linear.
The task of showering—or bathing, in the case of Archimedes (above)—gives the mind a break, lets it mix things up and make the odd, random juxtapositions that are the essential basis of creativity. I’m tempted to think Wallace Stevens spent a good deal of time in the shower. Or maybe, like Stockton, he kept a “Poop Journal” (exactly what it sounds like).
Famous examples aside, what all of this research suggests is that peak creativity happens when we’re pleasantly absent-minded. Or, as psychologist Allen Braun writes, “We think what we see is a relaxation of ‘executive functions’ to allow more natural de-focused attention and uncensored processes to occur that might be the hallmark of creativity.”
None of this means that you’ll always be able to capture those brilliant ideas before they fade away. There’s no foolproof method involved in making use of creative distraction. But as Leo Widrich writes at Buffer, there are some tricks that may help. To increase your creative output and maximize the insights in incubation periods, he recommends that you:
“Keep a notebook with you at all times, even in the shower.” (Widrich points us toward a waterproof notepad for that purpose.)
“Plan disengagement and distraction.” Widrich calls this “the outer-inner technique.” John Cleese articulates another version of planned inspiration.
“Overwhelm your brain: Make the task really hard.” This seems counterintuitive—the opposite of relaxation. But as Widrich explains, when you strain your brain with really difficult problems, others seem much easier by comparison.
It may seem like a lot of work getting your mind to relax, produce more dopamine, and get weird, circular, and inspired. But the work lies in making effective use of what’s already happening in your unconscious mind. Rather than groping blindly for that flash of brilliance you just had a moment ago, you can learn, writes Mental Floss, to “mind your mindless tasks.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
There may be as many doors into Alcoholics Anonymous in the 21st century as there are people who walk through them—from every world religion to no religion. The “international mutual-aid fellowship” has had “a significant and long-term effect on the culture of the United States,” writes Worcester State University professor of psychology Charles Fox at Aeon. Indeed, its influence is global. From its inception in 1935, A.A. has represented an “enormously popular therapy, and a testament to the interdisciplinary nature of health and wellness.”
A.A. has also represented, at least culturally, a remarkable synthesis of behavioral science and spirituality that translates into scores of different languages, beliefs, and practices. Or at least that’s the way it can appear from browsing the scores of books on A.A.’s 12-Steps and Buddhism, Yoga, Catholicism, Judaism, Indigenous faith traditions, shamanist practices, Stoicism, secular humanism, and, of course, psychology.
Historically, and often in practice, however, the (non)organization of worldwide fellowships has represented a much narrower tradition, inherited from the evangelical (small “e”) Christian Oxford Group, or as A.A. founder Bill Wilson called them, “the ‘O.G.’” Wilson credits the Oxford Group for the methodology of A.A.: “their large emphasis upon the principles of self-survey, confession, restitution, and the giving of oneself in service to others.”
The Oxford Group’s theology, though qualified and tempered, also made its way into many of A.A.’s basic principles. But for the recovery group’s genesis, Wilson cites a more secular authority, Carl Jung. The famous Swiss psychiatrist took a keen interest in alcoholism in the 1920s. Wilson wrote to Jung in 1961 to express his “great appreciation” for his efforts. “A certain conversation you once had with one of your patients, a Mr. Rowland H. back in the early 1930’s,” Wilson explains, “did play a critical role in the founding of our Fellowship.”
Jung may not have known his influence on the recovery movement, Wilson says, although alcoholics had accounted for “about 13 percent of all admissions” in his practice, notes Fox. One of his patients, Rowland H.—or Rowland Hazard, “investment banker and former state senator from Rhode Island”—came to Jung in desperation, saw him daily for a period of several months, stopped drinking, then relapsed. Brought back to Jung by his cousin, Hazard was told that his case was hopeless short of a religious conversion. As Wilson puts it in his letter:
[Y]ou frankly told him of his hopelessness, so far as any further medical or psychiatric treatment might be concerned. This candid and humble statement of yours was beyond doubt the first foundation stone upon which our Society has since been built.
Jung also told Hazard that conversion experiences were incredibly rare and recommended that he “place himself in a religious atmosphere and hope for the best,” as Wilson remembers. But he did not specify any particular religion. Hazard discovered the Oxford Group. He might, as far as Jung was concerned, have met God as he understood it anywhere. “His craving for alcohol was the equivalent,” wrote the psychiatrist in a reply to Wilson, “on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.”
In his reply letter to Wilson, Jung uses religious language allegorically. AA took the idea of conversion more literally. Though it wrestled with the plight of the agnostic, the Big Book concluded that such people must eventually see the light. Jung, on the other hand, seems very careful to avoid a strictly religious interpretation of his advice to Hazard, who started the first small group that would convert Wilson to sobriety and to Oxford Group methods.
“How could one formulate such an insight that is not misunderstood in our days?” Jung asks. “The only right and legitimate way to such an experience is that it happens to you in reality and it can only happen to you when you walk on a path which leads you to a higher understanding.” Sobriety could be achieved through “a higher education of the mind beyond the confines of mere rationalism”—through an enlightenment or conversion experience, that is. It might also occur through “an act of grace or through a personal and honest contact with friends.”
Though most founding members of AA fought for the stricter interpretation of Jung’s prescription, Wilson always entertained the idea that multiple paths might bring alcoholics to the same goal, even including modern medicine. He drew on the medical opinions of Dr. William D. Silkworth, who theorized that alcoholism was in part a physical disease, “a sort of metabolism difficulty which he then called an allergy.” Even after his own conversion experience, which Silkworth, like Jung, recommended he pursue, Wilson experimented with vitamin therapies, through the influence of Aldous Huxley.
His search to understand his mystical “white light” moment in a New York detox room also led Wilson to William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. The book “gave me the realization,” he wrote to Jung, “that most conversion experiences, whatever their variety, do have a common denominator of ego collapse at depth.” He even thought that LSD could act as such a “temporary ego-reducer” after he took the drug under supervision of British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond. (Jung likely would have opposed what he called “short cuts” like psychedelic drugs.)
In the letters between Wilson and Jung, as Ian McCabe argues in Carl Jung and Alcoholics Anonymous, we see mutual admiration between the two, as well as mutual influence. “Bill Wilson,” writes McCabe’s publisher, “was encouraged by Jung’s writings to promote the spiritual aspect of recovery,” an aspect that took on a particularly religious character in Alcoholics Anonymous. For his part, Jung, “influenced by A.A.’s success… gave ‘complete and detailed instructions’ on how the A.A. group format could be developed further and used by ‘general neurotics.’” And so it has, though more on the Oxford Group model than the more mystical Jungian. It might well have been otherwise.
Read more about Jung’s influence on AA over atAeon.
Note: Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
By now, it’s widely known that the Central Intelligence Agency ran a decades-long program of experiments involving LSD and other psychoactive drugs called MKUltra from the nineteen-fifties to the seventies. As one might suspect, that wasn’t the only research project into the manipulation of human consciousness the CIA had going on in the twentieth century. Another, a study of something called the Gateway Process, has more recently come to wide attention through an unlikely channel. The relevant documents “had been declassified for decades — but a new, younger audience was introduced to the Gateway when TikTok caught on in 2021.”
So writes Elle’s Hannah Summerhill, a self-described “longtime seeker” receptive to the Gateway Process’ concept of harnessing not drugs but sound to “the art of becoming more conscious of one’s particular inner resources, inner abilities, and, most of all, one’s inner guidance.” The documentation breaks down the levels of focus thus theoretically achievable into a series of levels: Focus 10 is “a meditative state conducive to healing, psychic abilities, and remote viewing (the ability to ‘see’ objects in real time from a distance). In the deeper Focus 12 state, participants report meeting their higher selves; in Focus 15, they can manipulate time and channel a ‘strong and guiding’ God-like figure.”
All this was originally conceived by former radio executive Robert Monroe, whose self-experimentation with the effect of sound on human consciousness — the same phenomena exploited by study-and meditation-assisting “binaural beats” — led to his founding the Monroe Institute. “In the late stages of the Cold War, convinced that the Soviets were researching psychic abilities for espionage, the CIA tapped the Monroe Institute to explore these methods for themselves,” writes Summerhill. You can read Lieutenant Colonel Wayne McDonnell’s declassified July 1983 report on Monroe’s techniques here, as well as Thobey Campion’s breakdown of its main points at VICEhere.
“A project like Gateway that marries science with the human yearning for meaning seemed awfully promising,” writes Popular Mechanics’ Susan Lahey. “But, as it turned out, the process was not a gateway between materialistic science and experiential consciousness; it was more like an effort to write a technical manual for the ineffable.” Even if it sounds plausible to you that a binaural beat-like sound recording “syncs the hemispheres of the brain into a single, powerful stream of energy, like a laser,” you may feel less confident when the report posits “a giant cosmic egg with a nucleus in the middle where the Absolute spews matter from a white hole into one side of the ovoid-shaped universe.” It seems that the CIA never did figure out a way to reliably engage in time travel, remote viewing or communication with the divine, but maybe the TikTokers will figure it out.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Robert Waldinger works as a part-time professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, but he also describes himself as a “Zen master.” This may strike some listeners as a presumptuous claim, but he has indeed been officially accepted as a rōshi in two different Zen lineages in the West. With one foot in psychiatry and the other in Buddhism, Waldinger (previously featured here on Open Culture for his work on happiness and loneliness) is well-placed to explain the latter in terms amenable to the former. In the Big Think video above, he breaks the ancient religion — or mindset, or way of being, or whatever one prefers to call it — into six distinct concepts: impermanence, noble truths, mindfulness, attachment, loving kindness, and beginner’s mind.
If you’ve felt any curiosity about Zen Buddhism and pursued it online in recent years, the term mindfulness will be familiar to the point of cliché. Waldinger personally defines it as “paying attention in the present moment without judgment.” You can work on your mindfulness right now, he explains, “by simply paying attention to whatever stimuli are reaching you. It might be your heartbeat, it might be your breath, it might be the sound of the fan in the room — anything — and simply letting yourself be open and receive whatever is here right now.” This can help us put into perspective the next concept, attachment, or our feeling “that the world be a certain way,” which causes no amount of our dissatisfaction and even suffering.
All of these ideas are much expanded on in primary and secondary Buddhist texts, which any enthusiast can spend a lifetime reading. My own interest was first piqued by a popular 1970 volume called Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, a compilation of talks by a famous rōshi called Shunryū Suzuki Waldinger references Suzuki’s work in the final section of this video, and specifically his observation that “in the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few.” In Waldinger’s own experience, “the older I get, and the more people call me an expert, the more aware I am of how little I know.” True mastery lies in the awareness not of the knowledge we have, but the knowledge we don’t.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
During the 1950s, a researcher gave an artist two 50-microgram doses of LSD (each dose separated by about an hour), and then the artist was encouraged to draw pictures of the doctor who administered the drugs. Nine portraits were drawn over the space of eight hours. We still don’t know the identity of the artist. But it’s surmised that the researcher was Oscar Janiger, a University of California-Irvine psychiatrist known for his work on LSD.
The web site Live Science has Andrew Sewell, a Yale Psychiatry professor (until his recent death), on record saying: “I believe the pictures are from an experiment conducted by the psychiatrist Oscar Janiger starting in 1954 and continuing for seven years, during which time he gave LSD to over 100 professional artists and measured its effects on their artistic output and creative ability. Over 250 drawings and paintings were produced.” The goal, of course, was to investigate what happens to subjects under the influence of psychedelic drugs. During the experiment, the artist explained how he felt as he worked on each sketch. You can watch how things unfolded below (or above):
20 Minutes After First Dose. Artist Claims to Feel Normal
85 Minutes After First Dose: Artist Says “I can see you clearly. I’m having a little trouble controlling this pencil.”
2 hours 30 minutes after first dose. “I feel as if my consciousness is situated in the part of my body that’s now active — my hand, my elbow… my tongue.”
2 hours 32 minutes: ‘I’m trying another drawing… The outline of my hand is going weird too. It’s not a very good drawing is it?”
2 hours 35 minutes: Patient follows quickly with another drawing. ‘I’ll do a drawing in one flourish… without stopping… one line, no break!”
2 hours 45 minutes: Agitated patient says “I am… everything is… changed… they’re calling… your face… interwoven… who is…” He changes medium to Tempera.
4 hours 25 minutes: After taking a break, the patient changes to pen and water color. “This will be the best drawing, like the first one, only better.”
5 hours 45 minutes. “I think it’s starting to wear off. This pencil is mighty hard to hold.” (He is holding a crayon).
8 hours later: The intoxication has worn off. Patient offers up a final drawing.
This past week, the influential psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman passed away at age 90. The winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Kahneman wrote the bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow where he explained the two systems of thinking that shape human decisions. These include “System 1,” which relies on fast, automatic and unconscious thinking, and then “System 2,” which requires attention and concentration and works more slowly. And it’s the interplay of these two systems that profoundly shapes the quality of our decisions in different parts of our lives, including investing.
In the interview above, Steve Forbes asks why individual investors persist in believing that they can pick stocks successfully over time, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Drawing on his research, Kahneman describes the “illusion of skill,” where investors “get the immediate feeling that [they] understand something,” which is much “more compelling than the knowledge of statistics that tells you that you don’t know anything.” Here, System 1 creates the “illusion of skill,” and it overwhelms the slower analytical thinking found in System 2—the System that could use data to determine that stock picking is a fool’s errand. When Forbes asks if investors should ultimately opt for index funds instead of individual stocks, Kahneman replies “I am a believer in index funds,” that is, unless you have very rare information that allows you to pick stocks successfully.
Later in the interview, Kahneman touches on another important subject. In his mind, the first question every investor should ask is not how much money should I plan to make, but rather, “How much can I afford to lose.” Every investor should assess their risk tolerance, in part so that you can handle turbulence in the market and stick with your initial investment plan. If you are not aware of your risk tolerance, “when things go bad, you will want to change what you are doing, and that’s the disaster in investing… Loss aversion can kill you.” He continues, “Emotions are indeed your enemy. The worst thing that could happen to you … is to make a decision and not stick with it, so that you bail out when things go badly, so that you sell low and buy high. That is not a recipe for doing well in the stock market, or anywhere.” Ideally, you should figure out upfront how much you want to put in the stock market, and how much you want to keep out, so that you can psychologically manage the ups and downs of investing.
From here, Kahneman comes to his most important piece of advice for investors: Know yourself in terms of what you could regret. If you are prone to regret, if investing makes you feel insecure and lose sleep at night, then you should adopt a “regret minimization strategy” and create a more conservative portfolio to match it. Read more about that here. Also see Chapters 31 (Risk Policies) and 32 (Keep Score) in Thinking, Fast and Slow where Kahneman talks more about investing.
This post originally appeared on our sister/side-project site, Open Personal Finance.
If you suspect that your brain isn’t quite suited for modern life, you’re not alone. In fact, that state of mind has probably been closer to the rule than the exception throughout modernity itself. It’s just that the mix of things we have to think about keeps changing: “The school run. Work calls. Inflation. Remember your lines,” says BBC science reporter Melissa Hogenboom in the video above. “Our brain never evolved for any of this, and yet here we are, getting on with it as best we can, and it’s all thanks to our brain’s incredible capacity to adapt, to learn, to grow” — the very subject she investigates in this series, Brain Hacks.
In search of neuroscientifically sound “hacks to help strengthen crucial connections and keep our minds younger in the process,” Hogenboom put herself through a “a six-week brain-altering course.” The first segment of the series finds her entering into a meditation program she describes in this article: “For 30 minutes a day, either as one single session or two 15-minute sessions, I practiced a guided mindfulness meditation by listening to a recording.” In addition, she had a weekly session with University of Surrey professor of clinical psychology Thorsten Barnhofer, who also appears in the video.
Can meditation, and the oft-discussed “mindfulness” it emphasizes, keep our minds from wandering away from what we really need to think about? “Mind-wandering is something that, of course, might be helpful in many ways,” says Barnhofer, “but it’s also something that can go awry. This is where repetitive thinking comes in, where ruminative thinking comes in, where worry comes in. Those are the factors which increase stress,” increasing the presence of hormones like cortisol. And “if levels of cortisol remain high, that can actually become toxic for your brain, for regions of your brain which are very plastic.” Stress, as Hogenboom sums it up, “is a direct inhibitor of neuroplasticity.”
“Research has found that after only a few months of mindfulness training, certain depression and anxiety symptoms can ease,” Hogenboom writes, and her own experience seems also to point in that direction. A brain scan performed after her meditation course found that “one half of my amygdala – an almond-shaped structure important for emotional processing – had reduced in volume,” possibly because the practice “buffers stress seen in the amygdala.” It also revealed growth in her cingulate cortex, “part of the limbic system that is involved in our behavioral and emotional responses,” which indicates “increased control of that area.” Hogenboom acknowledges that these changes “could also be random,” since “the brain is constantly changing anyway”; the trick, however and whenever possible, is to nudge it toward change for the better.
Bonus: Below, science journalist Daniel Goleman talks about mindfulness and how you can change your brain in 10 minutes with daily meditation.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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