Non-verbal thought

I had an interesting experience today. We ran into a problem with the girl monkeys because their heads were cast of a significantly heavier material than the rehearsal puppets. The workshop design required them to be light. What to do.

After ages of trying different things and getting frustrated and thinking that we would have to recast them with featherlight, we decided to go to dinner and not think about it, hoping that our subconscious would present us with an answer later.

We got back to the studio, and Lo! the answer presented itself to me in beautiful three-dimensional renderings, with a clear plan on how to make it work. I exclaimed that I thought I had a solution. Emily asked me to explain. In the process of pulling the answer out of the non-verbal part of my head and translate it, the entire idea fell apart. It just didn’t make any sense at all.

I grabbed a reference book (Rod Puppets and Table-top Puppets, by Hansjurgen Fettig) hoping that I could bolster the crumbling idea with an illustration. As I was flipping through the pages, my brain offered me another idea.

Rather than explaining it to Emily, and risking losing it when I translated, I just built the thing. It worked, beautifully, and doesn’t require recasting. If I had to articulate the thought process now, I’d say that I stopped thinking about how to make it work like it did before, and started thinking about what the most comfortable hand movements were. That’s it. That would be all I’d be able to say verbally.

The rest of the idea happened in a space without words. Which makes me wonder, if I had just built the other one, would the idea have held up? I think it would have. It felt right. If I had time, I might try to pull that picture up and try to build it. I don’t have the time, but it still makes me wonder.

I’ll post a picture of the solution tomorrow. I’m very pleased with it.

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4 thoughts on “Non-verbal thought”

  1. I’m not so much sure that it’s subconscious rather than rational, but more that perhaps the subconscious creative process is a non-verbal thing. My solution was an entirely rational, tool-based creation, but there was no narrative to accompany it. I think what makes it seem as though it is the subconscious is that words are an entirely conscious artifact.

    I didn’t come up with the solution at dinner, but it did allow me the space to back up and approach the problem from a different angle and with a refreshed brain.

  2. Much of my fiction comes to me like that. I get an idea that’s tenuous and just out of reach. It percolates for some time and starts to form. Once I start putting words to paper, it gels into something tangible, and not always what I expect when I start.

    Of course, if I had trouble translating these subconscious ideas to words, they wouldn’t be worth very much.

  3. If you have access to a copy of the February 12th New Yorker, there’s an article about Paul & Pat Churchland, two lovely Canadians who study the conscious from a philosophical perspective. Or something. Here’s a link to site about the article – it’s not online yet, so let me know if you’re interested.
    http://www.portifex.com/BSPages/FridayFronts/H0209.htm

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