Ap Dijksterhuis

That's an experiment where, yeah, I had two groups.

So one group...

I simply asked, name as much cities and villages starting with the letter A in the Netherlands and the other group.

I said, you know, later I want you to list as many cities or villages with the letter A, but we're first going to do something else.

And again, they engaged in a few minutes in solving word puzzles.

with the idea that they would think unconsciously about these cities and villages with the letter A. And in terms of the sheer number they came up with, the number of villages and cities, it was the same between the two groups.

People who thought consciously came up with the more obvious choices like Amsterdam or the bigger cities.

And people who thought unconsciously, who were doing the word puzzles first, they came up with much more, you could say, unusual, you know, villages that some of them I had never even heard of.

Yeah, the gist.

That's probably the single best word to describe it.

So if you think about something consciously, you focus also on the precise wording of information.

If you think about something unconsciously, you look at the gist about what are the underlying traits.

We have done...

experiments for instance where people have to form an impression of an of a hypothetical person and you describe this person with all kinds of behavioral information like he likes to read newspapers he's he's usually very late and if you then later ask people what they remember about the the person you see that people who thought about it consciously

have much better memory for the concrete information reading the newspaper for instance and people who thought about it unconsciously they have a feeling for what the underlying trade is is somebody forgetful or chaotic or maybe very intelligent or so you you the unconscious is more about the underlying meaning of things

Yeah, I think that is also one of the things unconscious thought is capable of doing.

You know, for instance, even childhood memories can be part of such an unconscious thought process.

And it's almost like a definition of creativity, that you combine things that aren't usually combined.

And this is something our unconscious is known to be better at than if we think about something very consciously, very attentively.

Yeah, first it leads you deeper into the mire, as sometimes scientists say.