In baseball, there are nine players on a team. The two key players are the pitcher, who throws the ball, and the catcher, who catches it. 

We usually conceive of our conscious mind as a ‘pitcher’. For creative persons, the conscious mind ‘throws’ ideas.   And like baseball pitchers, we can train our mind, it is thought, to throw more and better ideas.

Now, comes some research from two brilliant neuroscientists, Joydeep Bhattacharya (London) and Bhavin Shetch (Univ. of Houston), showing our conscious minds are not pitchers — but rather, catchers. They catch ideas. But from where? Where are the ideas thrown from? 

From our unconscious minds — our ‘intuition’ where our brain works on problems without our being aware of it. Their work is summarized in the April 19 issue of The Economist. 

Here is their lovely experiment. Subjects were given a problem.

There are 3 light switches on the wall, on the ground floor of a 3-storey house. Two of the switches do nothing. One turns on a bulb on the second floor. When you begin the bulb is off. You can make only one trip to the second floor.  How do you work out which is the one that turns on the light?

Subjects were wired with EEG caps — electro-encephalograph machines that detect the magnitude and location of brain activity.

Their key finding? The EEG machine predicted which subject would get the answer, up to 8 seconds before they actually solved the problem! Subjects who cracked the problem had an increase in high-frequency gamma waves from the right frontal cortex before they solved it. They themselves were not aware they had solved it for several seconds. 

“Conscious thought does not solve problems,” summarizes The Economist. “Instead unconscious processing delivers the answer to consciousness once it has been arrived at.”

Conclusion: Think hard about a problem, hard enough to get your subconscious, or intuition, or ‘third eye’, interested.  Then forget about it — and wait for it to ‘pitch’ the solution to your conscious mind. But be ready! Listen hard. And be sure to exercise your intuition, not just your conscious thought processes. 

Malcolm Gladwell’s recent book  Blink – The power of thinking without thinking  summarizes a lot of evidence about the power of the unconscious.

P.S. The answer to the light bulb problem? 

Turn on switch #2 and turn it off. Turn on switch #3 and leave it. Go up to the 2nd floor. If the bulb is on, it is switch #3. If the bulb is off, but is warm, it is #2. If the bulb is off and is cold, it is #1.