Creativity and Nonconscious Cognition: A Conversation with Mary Zournazi and N. Katherine Hayles

Summary

In the fourth episode of the 'Care and the Future of Learning' series, Mary Zournazi engages in a fascinating conversation with Professor N. Katherine Hayles, a distinguished literary scholar with a background in sciences. They delve into the concepts of human consciousness, non-conscious cognition, and their interplay with technology and creativity. Hayles discusses her groundbreaking books 'How We Think' and 'Unthought,' emphasizing how technology shapes consciousness and the role of non-conscious cognition in fostering creativity and intuition. This dialogue underscores the importance of considering multiple cognitive levels in education and the broader implications of these ideas for understanding human and non-human meaning-making processes.

Highlights

• Hayles introduces the concept of 'technogenesis,' where human evolution is intertwined with technological advancements. 🔗
• Non-conscious cognition, operating below conscious awareness, handles complex sensory information quickly. 🌟
• Intuition, linked to non-conscious cognition, often guides creative processes before conscious thought takes over. ✨
• The discussion explores how technology helps harness participatory and intuitive thinking for ethical and future-oriented learning. 💻
• There's an emphasis on broadening educational approaches to incorporate multiple levels of cognition beyond mere consciousness. 🧠

Key Takeaways

• Non-conscious cognition operates faster and deeper than conscious thought, processing information that’s too dense for consciousness to handle. 🚀
• Our neuron connections are shaped by our environment, adapting our brains to fit our social and physical surroundings. 🌍
• Technology and human cognition have always been intertwined, influencing how we think and interact with the world. 💡
• There’s a growing recognition of intuition’s role in creativity, often acting before conscious thought steps in. 🎨
• Understanding non-conscious cognition could lead to more holistic learning and communication methods. 🎓

Overview

In a compelling dialogue, Mary Zournazi and N. Katherine Hayles explore the fascinating world of creativity intertwined with non-conscious cognition. Hayles discusses her significant works, 'How We Think' and 'Unthought,' explaining how her scientific background informs her views on technology and its profound impact on human consciousness. Her insights reveal how our non-conscious mind works faster and often more efficiently than conscious thought, underpinning creativity and intuition.

The conversation shifts towards the intriguing idea of environmental influence on neuronal connections. Hayles explains the concept of technogenesis, emphasizing that human cognitive development has always been closely linked with technological progress. This relationship shapes not only our thought processes but also how we adapt to our surroundings, highlighting the vital role of non-conscious cognition in daily decision-making.

Finally, the discussion touches on the future of learning, proposing a shift to education that embraces all cognitive levels. By recognizing and integrating non-conscious cognition, education can become more comprehensive and reflective of true human experience. This broader approach can transform not just classrooms but also how we interact with technology and interpret our environment, promising a future where learning is as dynamic and multifaceted as the human mind itself.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 02:00: Intro and Professor Hales' Background The chapter introduces the series 'Care and the Future of Learning' and its fourth episode featuring Professor Catherine Hales. Professor Hales is invited to introduce herself to the audience, acknowledging that some may be familiar with her work while others may not. The session promises a conversation around a collaborative piece done for a special issue, though details are not yet provided within the transcript.
• 02:00 - 08:00: Technogenesis and Non-Conscious Cognition The chapter begins with the speaker, a literary scholar with a background in sciences, discussing their mixed educational background. They have built their career at the intersection of literature, science, and technology, focusing on the integration of these fields in both research and teaching. This unique perspective allows them to explore concepts such as technogenesis and non-conscious cognition, bridging the gap between humanities and scientific disciplines.
• 08:00 - 14:00: Role and Impact of Consciousness and Intuition The chapter discusses the interplay between consciousness and intuition, exploring their roles and impacts. It references influential books that merge literary scholarship with scientific insights, enhancing our understanding of thought processes.
• 14:00 - 18:00: Biosemiotics and Meaning Beyond Language The chapter delves into the concept of non-conscious cognition, examining how human consciousness is profoundly influenced by interactions with technology throughout history.
• 18:00 - 25:00: The Future of Learning and Closing Remarks The chapter, titled 'The Future of Learning and Closing Remarks,' begins with a discussion on the domestication of fire as a technological achievement. It explores how technology throughout history has not only impacted interactions between groups but has fundamentally shaped the human body, nervous system, and consciousness. The concept of 'technogenesis' is introduced, suggesting an intrinsic link between technological progression and human development. This excerpt sets the tone for a broader discussion on the evolving nature of learning and its future directions, as well as offering concluding thoughts on the subject.

Creativity and Nonconscious Cognition: A Conversation with Mary Zournazi and N. Katherine Hayles Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 okay uh welcome everybody to care and the future of learning uh Series this is episode four with Professor Catherine Hales and um I like Professor Hales to if you'd like to just introduce yourself to the audience some people may know your work some people may not and then we'll get into a conversation about um the piece that we did together for the special issujin well thank you very much Mary for having me on I appreciate the odd opportunity
• 00:30 - 01:00 to talk with you and your audience I'm a basically a literary scholar but before I began my career in literature I was actually training in the Sciences so I come to my field with a mixed background in literature and Science and most of my research and also my teaching has been in the field of literature Science and Technology yeah because that's I mean one of the um
• 01:00 - 01:30 fantastic well there's a couple of fantastic books that I've been engaged with um but particularly how we think and the young thought which you can maybe tell us a little bit about in a second but but they're incredibly uh they have this literature literary scholarly uh intake in a sense but they're very informed by by scientific um argument and knowledge and it's and it and it comes together so incredibly well to enable us to think about how we
• 01:30 - 02:00 think or what you now call uh non-conscious cognition so could you perhaps just walk us through some of your key ideas around that because that will help situate our conversation as well sure so in how we think I was interested in how human consciousness in particular has been shaped by our experiences with technology and the human engagement with technology goes back to the very beginning of the species we can consider
• 02:00 - 02:30 the domestication of fire for example a technological achievement and throughout the ages technology has shaped how groups interact but more fundamentally it has also shaped how you the human body the human nervous system and Consciousness itself has been formed so that book was really a deep plunge into the idea of technogenesis that is
• 02:30 - 03:00 that the human and the technology are braided together they were from the beginning and they continued to be into the present so kind of central to to that idea is the notion of synaptic winnowing phenomenon that Gerald Adelman is called neural Darwinism so the idea behind that is that those synaptic connections that get reinforced
• 03:00 - 03:30 by the environment strengthen and grow those that don't wither and eventually may disappear altogether so that means at Birth every human child is engineered so to speak by his environment to have the kind of neuronal structure that fits that particular context whether that's 20th century or 21st century Urban America like Los
• 03:30 - 04:00 Angeles or whether it's a tribal area in Africa those children will be neurologically adapted to whatever their environment is suited for that's a kind of profound realization about the connection between human thought and the environment and of course technology now in the 21st century is a major factor in urban uh settings in particular like the city I
• 04:00 - 04:30 live in Los Angeles California so that was uh that was the book how we think um and in the sequel to that called unthought the power of the cognitive non-conscious I turned from Consciousness and the imprecation of Consciousness with technology to the non-conscious and this is a relatively recent [Music] um experimental Discovery in cognitive
• 04:30 - 05:00 science psychology and so forth where it has been revealed that a level of neuronal processing exists below consciousness that operates much faster than Consciousness does and is able to parse the information to dense and complex for Consciousness to understand so this is what I call the non-conscious the cognitive non-conscious it's closely
• 05:00 - 05:30 tied in with the body and with the immediate environment the non-conscious is responsible to create a coherent body image and it has a much less tendency to fabulate than Consciousness does so one of the primary one of the primary tasks of Consciousness is to make the world make sense and if something bizarre or unusual happens Consciousness simply makes up a story to explain that even
• 05:30 - 06:00 though it may be completely false the non-conscious is not primarily verbal it's tied in with all of the sensory systems it can to a very limited extent communicate verbally but primarily it's not verbal so it's more directly related to the environment and um it it is what first receives sensory
• 06:00 - 06:30 information about the environment and also the internal body States and then Consciousness comes on almost a full half second later yeah so information is processed first by non-conscious cognition and then Consciousness becomes aware of what is happening in non-conscious cognition and once the global workspace is ignited as stanislaw
• 06:30 - 07:00 dehane says then one can continue to think about that thought indefinitely but it's non-conscious that processes that information first and non-conscious is closest to what's actually happening in the world yes yes I think that a traditional name per non-conscious cognition is intuition something that hovers at the edge of Consciousness often precedes
• 07:00 - 07:30 Consciousness but there's a growing sense of the importance of something and that has been now experimentally verified to occur through non-conscious cognition so I think that non-conscious cognition is deeply tied up with creativity yes it is responsible for those flashes of insight or those moments of intense intuition when we sense something even
• 07:30 - 08:00 before we consciously understand what it is yes and that's the the amazing I think um interest I've had in your work too is this kind of sensibility around uh the non-conscious and in our conversation uh for the journal we spoke about that correlation between uh creativity and or the non-conscious and creativity but I I just wanted to pick up um the the kind of threads there because
• 08:00 - 08:30 it's just that thinking about that moment before and how in a way Consciousness sort of you could almost call it it's it needs to be a servant to the kind of intuition almost because in fact it's intuition that really um given what you're saying as well it's it's in a sense not being acknowledged perhaps in in particularly in the uh recent maybe scientific Revolutions of its significance in actually
• 08:30 - 09:00 establishing um our connections to to the environments in which we inhabit in other words what I what I'm trying to say is that it orients us and I think I gave you this example before and then as a filmmaker because I shoot with a camera the camera becomes an extension in a way of my own bodily thinking and it's it's often reliant on intuition it doesn't um and it's through that that I can actually document or tell stories as
• 09:00 - 09:30 opposed to perhaps that notion of you know the the thinking mind setting up well what you're saying actually is the thinking mind sets up fabulation in a way and we need storytelling and we need population but what is is fascinating and what we touched upon a little bit in our conversation but what's really fascinating to do right now is that is that that notion of the way in which technology perhaps enables some of that participatory intuitive intuitive
• 09:30 - 10:00 thinking and also the ethical realm in which we can inhabit to enable perhaps changes in the ways in which um you know or the ways in which the future is headed if that makes sense I mean the journals about care and future of learning but what we're concerned with kind of that technological lens of of non-con non-cognitive thought if that all makes sense yes well we I don't mean to downplay the importance of Consciousness it's just
• 10:00 - 10:30 that we've had a couple of Millennia now uh patting ourselves on the back because we're conscious creatures and say thinking that he'll Homo sapiens are superior to every other life form because we know that we're conscious uh and so forth but uh what we have in common with many other life forms basically is cognition and much of that cognition is non-conscious so it's a way
• 10:30 - 11:00 of taking a more accurate measure of how Homo sapiens fit into the the general picture of biota on Earth and assigning a more realistic and perhaps a humbler place uh among all of the cognitive creatures on the planet yes I think that's that's what I find um very intriguing about your work and about this idea also the non-conscious is that it's putting us within a system
• 11:00 - 11:30 of of um of worldly kind of inhabitants and that in that sense um you know cells in our body have a cognitive intelligence that doesn't maybe speak in you know a language but has its own language and how do you understand that kind of uh relationship becomes I think central to to the Future and to the care of the future in that sense too because um it opens up our Horizons about our own bodies so for instance as they
• 11:30 - 12:00 participate in the world but also the world and how it in some ways sees us or participates with us I mean I just find that just so rich in terms of uh you know moving forward yeah and also it opens up uh the whole question of meaning and traditionally of course humans have thought of meaning as a verbal construction and because we're the only species that have has language uh there's been a tendency to think that
• 12:00 - 12:30 only humans can create meaning but if we take a biosemiotic approach meaning is a way of interpreting information from the environment and if we think about meaning in those terms then every life form has the capability to engage in meaning making practices including bacteria including plants including organisms without brains or neurons and that too I think is a really healthy
• 12:30 - 13:00 corrective to our our traditional focus on human generated meanings absolutely yeah and I'm I'm hoping that more and more that enables us to make kind of changes really to to how we you know deal with ourselves and with each other but with the with the planet more generally you know um did you uh I think we we've come to the
• 13:00 - 13:30 sort of end of this um short uh episode did you want to uh say anything more reflect on any other point before we finish up well I think that this also has a lot of implications for the future of learning and I understand the focus of the issue is the future of learning and it suggests that learning should be much more multifaceted than just the focus on Consciousness that would be particularly important for children and young people
• 13:30 - 14:00 but really for everyone at every age that learning becomes a venture into experiencing the world on multiple levels not simply what we think about the world yes absolutely absolutely and the the journal in many ways some of the the pieces in it also have this um I guess uh a predisposition towards trying to find other ways of making meaning and I think uh but what's so I
• 14:00 - 14:30 think wonderful about your work is is that it gives us a handle I suppose into uh thinking through uh emotionally physically as well on how to actually perhaps adapt some of this thinking into into the classroom but also more broadly into aesthetic and cultural work I mean I think that's what's so so powerful about it so I'd like to thank you kindly for uh joining for this episode and also
• 14:30 - 15:00 for being part of the conversation and the issue it's just been a great privilege for me so thank you it's been a great pleasure for me as well and thank you for your invitation