Creative break: A video installation at London?s National Portrait Gallery showing David Beckham sleeping (AFP)

Perhaps it is no surprise that the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, should have argued that most of our real motivation lies below conscious awareness and requires the (expensive) services of a psychoanalyst so we can explain ourselves to ourselves. It will come as more of a shock to discover how many celebrated scientists who believe Freud exaggerated the importance of the unconscious in mental illness argue that it?s still a part of our minds we should learn to harness.

The great mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, collaborator with Bertrand Russell, seemed to be a cheer leader for unconscious mental processing: ?It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copybooks and by eminent people making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking about what we?re doing. The precise opposite is the case.?

Some of the greatest breakthroughs in creativity occur when a problem is consciously ignored for a while ? ?let?s sleep on it?, after which the unconscious offers a solution ? a process psychologists call incubation. Now the very latest psychological research confirms that we can all incubate a problem to our own advantage. Ap Dijksterhuis, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, has just published a series of experiments where students were presented with complex everyday problems to solve, like choosing the best flat and roommate.

In one experiment, the students were given time to think carefully about the decision. In another, they were distracted by an irrelevant task and then forced to make a decision before they had had a chance to adequately weigh up all the factors they should properly consider. The surprising result, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, was that ?unconscious? thinkers made the best decisions.

Timothy Wilson and colleagues from the Department of Psychology, University of Virgi-nia, conducted another experiment. Participants were presented with five posters and asked to choose one to take home. Later, they were called and asked how satisfied they were with their choice ? a measure of whether they made the right decision from a subjective point of view. Before choosing, some participa-nts thought about the posters for only a very short while, whereas others were asked to carefully analyse the pros and cons of each poster. People who analysed were less satisfied with their choice than people who merely thought about them briefly.

Paradoxically, it seems that those who used consciousness to carefully weigh the various attributes made relatively poor decisions. Some might think that this is good news for those who dislike the labour of conscious thinking. The unconscious can be legitimately left to deal with making decisions while consciousness can be directed elsewhere, such as having fun.

The bottom line is that both systems can be fast, slow, smart, or stupid. It all depends on what they are asked to do. However, current research suggests the somewhat counterintuitive idea that the more complex a problem is, the less likely it becomes that conscious thought can contribute much. If a problem is multifaceted, a lot of information has to be taken into account. Conscious thought is not good at this. So when it comes to intricate, difficult problems with many variables which are difficult to attach a precise weight to, take your time, and let the unconscious deal with it.

Using dreaming is one way of doing this; dreams are the part of sleep most strongly correlated with rapid eye movement (REM) and sleep has been associated with enhanced creativity and novel problem-solving while dreams were described by Freud as ?the royal road to the unconscious?. From the dreams of August Kekul?, which led to the conception of a simple structure for benzene, and of Dmitry Mendele-yev, which initiated the creation of the periodic table of elements, there are numerous demonstrations of scientific creativity during sleep.

However, the latest research suggests that if you really want to enhance unconscious problem solving you should try to think about your problems immediately after dreaming. In a recent experiment, psychiatrist Matthew Walker and colleagues from the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at Harvard Medical School woke up subjects immediately after REM sleep, or just after sleep with no dreams, and asked them to solve anagram puzzles. REM awakenings provided a 32 per cent advantage in the number of anagrams solved compared with non-REM awakenings.

But you don?t have to wait to fall asleep to use the unconscious ? we are more open to insights from the unconscious mind when we are not thinking of anything in particular, which is why daydreams are so useful in the quest for creativity. Anytime you can just daydream and relax is useful in the creative process: a shower, long drives, a quiet walk.

Daniel Goleman, the psychologist of Emotional Intelligence fame, urges us to be more aware of a key obstacle the conscious mind imposes on the unconscious, that of self-censorship. It?s the voice that whispers to you, ?they?ll think I?m foolish? or ?that will never work?, keeping you imprisoned within the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable. (The Daily Telegraph)