A colleague of mine recently sent me an article on the dangers of multi-tasking—an article that pointed to the neurobiological findings indicating the damages in terms of attention deficits that can be done when trying to do too many things at the same time. While the admonitions are justified and the advice given is to taken seriously, I was reminded of my yearly stay at a time-share in New Orleans. There is a kind of “multi-tasking” that takes place as I wander the streets or sit at an outdoor café in this remarkable city located on the Mississippi River. It is a state of mind that I cherish and that I think should also be cherished in the lives and minds of the men and women we coach.
This focus on New Orleans might at first seem a bit ironic. This is a city, after all, that has a reputation for laid back living (it is called the “Big Easy” for some reason). It is also (at the opposite extreme) noted for many years as an “unsafe” place to be (given its rate of crime and reputation of corruption and scandal). It is also a city that is rebuilding itself after a devastating hurricane. The single-minded, sustained concentration on the rebuilding is widely admired (though the crime and reputation for corruption and scandal also linger in New Orleans). Yes, New Orleans is filled with many ironies and contradictions. I suspect that this is one of the reasons I am pulled to The Big Easy every year. As Stephen Heuser (2013, p. K1) has recently noted (after the Boston Marathon bombing) with regard to the allure of many major urban areas that are also quite dangerous: “what we felt this week [after the bombing], the collective vulnerability, is an exact reflection of what makes cities work in the first place, what makes them productive, and vital, and almost unimaginably resilient . . . Increasingly we are recognizing that when new things happen, they happen in cities: the places where people stand shoulder to shoulder, meet strangers, have conversations they didn’t expect. Where they accept unpredictability.”
As Heuser mentions with regard to all (or many) cities, New Orleans has encouraged me to think of a different kind of “multi-tasking.” It is not the usual multi-tasking associated with doing a number of different cognitive tasks and seeking to accomplish a number of chores at the same time. We all know this kind of challenge in our busy lives—especially with the emerging world of multiple apps and social networking. I remember a colleague of mine in graduate school who would be reading a course assignment, while playing music and listening to a television program. Did he get less from each source: Advanced Cognitive Psychology, John Lee Hooker and an old episode of I Love Lucy? Yes, he probably did, though I suspect that the Advanced Cognitive Psychology text received the greatest attention, since he is a quite successful psychologist these days. I wonder, however, if there was some strange potion being brewed when my colleague combined cognitive psychology with John Lee Hooker’s blues and Lucy’s domestic chaos. Perhaps my colleague was formulating a new model of psychology that blended cognitive processing with depression and domestic crisis, as well as the therapeutic value of music and comedy.
When I am in New Orleans, all of my senses are alerted and they are intermixing. While walking down a street in the French Quarter I am surrounded with the sounds of music and the smell of food. I ease-drop on conversations being conducted in many languages and Louisiana dialects and feel the rich scented breezes arriving from the Louisiana Bayous. When I am sipping on a cup of hot chocolate or eating a sugar-frosted beignet at the Café du Monde, I listen to the jazz being played by musicians lingering around the edge of the Café. I also hear bells being tolled at the nearby cathedral and smell the flowers from the even closer Jackson Square. The street mimes, fortune tellers and artists displaying their often not-very-impressive paintings are also capturing my attention. This is not the matter of multiple tasks occupying my mind or of pressing business in many different sectors of my life. This is a matter of multiple source saturation that leaves me not exhausted, but rather exhilarated and filled with many new impressions and ideas.
I wonder if this is what many artists are trying to accomplish when they advocate the combination of multiple media in a single performance. Are many of the creators of opera and Broadway musicals seeking to accomplish this goal when envisioning works that interweave music, lyrics, dance and a compelling storyline? When Jonah Lehrer (2009) writes about the value of interplay between our prefrontal cortex and our more primitive (and more experienced) limbic system, is he capturing the essence of this productive multi-tasking experience? The interweaving of systematic reasoning (prefrontal) with intuition (limbic) might be something of what I am experiencing when enmeshed in the world of New Orleans. This may be at the heart of a New Orleans State of Mind and may at times be a condition that we wish to encourage and facilitate with our coaching clients.
Cooking on the Back Burner
This notion of appropriate—perhaps even essential—multi-tasking at the neurobiological level leads us to a fundamental dynamic: we are operating in our brains at many different levels at the same time. Much as Sigmund Freud noted with considerable insight more than a century ago, there are many different thoughts and feelings running through our brain at any one time. Some of these thoughts and feelings are operating at a conscious level while others are operating at an unconscious or vaguely conscious level. At some of these levels, we are working on the solution to complex problems, formulating creative ideas, linking together ideas from several different sources, and producing new narratives regarding people we know, events we have witnessed and even our own decisions and actions. We use the term “incubation” when trying to describe and analyze these elusive and wondrous processes. We are cooking on the “backburners” of our mind, ready to serve the tasty dish when the time is right.
Often this incubating “dish” is served when we are relaxed (for example, when taking a bath or shower) or when we are distracted by some other activity (such as when we are driving to the office). The multi-tasking that occurs on the backburners is quite remarkable. My own doctoral students often illustrate the power of backburner work. The Professional School of Psychology, where I have served as President for more than twenty five years, provides graduate education primarily to mature and accomplished men and women over thirty years of age. As you might imagine, most of these students are working fulltime. They typically have significant family obligations and are often dealing with major intrusive life events (such as the lingering illness or death of a parent). They have “no time” to work on a doctorate, let alone write a thesis or dissertation. Yet, we find that their many life challenges do not diminish their capacity to do graduate work; rather, they are able to let their work simmer on a backburner while meeting other obligations in their lives. When their graduate work is ready to move to the front burner, they can often write quickly and frequently link their “simmering” thoughts with events and lessons learned in other parts of their life. Conversely, when I was a full-time graduate student, living and working with other young full-time students, I often experienced “writer’s block” – as did most of my colleagues. I was focusing all of my attention on the graduate work I was doing and never moved it to my backburner. I soon learned that I worked best by having several writing projects operating at the same time, with one or more of these projects simmering for a while on the backburner. Is this good advice to give the men and women we are coaching? At the very least, shouldn’t we reassure them that it is not such a bad thing to be working on several projects at the same time?
We now know that this creative and productive multi-tasking occurs not just when we are awake, but also when we are asleep (especially during the REM state when we are dreaming). Brain imaging has revealed that while a large portion of our brain is shut down during most stages of sleep, the limbic system (site of our emotions as noted above) is active during the REM state, as are areas of our brain where secondary processing of sensory material takes place. The prefrontal cortex is among the areas of our brain that is shut down during most stages of sleep—and notably during REM sleep. The conditions are thus perfect for the generation of emotions that are unbridled by the rational and restraining forces of the prefrontal cortex. These emotions, in turn, trigger the secondary sensory processing regions of the brain, creating images and sounds that reflect the tenor and directions of the emotions. Multi-tasking is occurring big time—some researchers have actually described the dreaming process as the convening of a committee during sleep (e.g. Barrett, 2010). This committee brings together many different perspectives and can, at times, produce brilliant and often-insightful solutions to problems we have been pondering while awake.
Peremptory Ideation
During the 1960s, an extraordinary article was written by the psychoanalyst, George Klein (1967), regarding these complex, multi-dimensional, and multi-task processes. Klein (1967, p. 80) described a process that he called “peremptory ideation” which consists of a dynamic and highly influential train of thought: “. . . the capacity of an idea to take hold of behavior, exerting influence upon perception, imagery, symbolic construction, gesture, and action. It is one of the paradoxes of such a train of thought that it may gain in urgency from the very fact of being denied recognition and intentional acknowledgement—that its organizing theme evades reflection and recognition.”
Several controversial and often startling research projects were conducted by Klein and his colleagues at the time. Images that were projected on a screen for very brief periods of time (often at only 1/100 of a second) were found to influence later memory tasks and acts of imagination. These studies led to the popularization of a phenomenon called “subliminal perception” (in Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, 1957)—the frightening capacity of advertisers to slip messages into otherwise benign media presentations (especially movies). While the specific studies on which The Hidden Persuaders was based were deeply flawed, Klein’s own research proved to be valid and provocative. It appears that specific sensory experiences on which we are not focusing can “slip in the side door” of our consciousness and begin to interplay with or even help to precipitate Klein’s unconscious trains of thought.
These thoughts or “ideations” are peremptory in that they can commandeer or at least subtly redirect other work we are doing on our mental backburners. It has even been suggested that fine works of art impact on us emotionally not because of what we focus on at the center of the painting (or in the major theme of the symphony), but because of what the artist has presented at the periphery of the painting or in the subthemes or harmonic structure of the musical composition. We are multi-tasking while appreciating the painting or symphony. Some of these tasks might involve the unconscious appreciation of these unattended sensory experiences. These experiences may, in turn, become the main ingredient or at least a taste-enhancing ingredient in the dish we are preparing on the backburner. Perhaps this is what occurs when I am in New Orleans: many sensory experiences that are interplaying with, contributing to and at times waylaying my own unconscious trains of thought and emotion.
As coaches, do we ever play a role in helping our client access some of the material that is incubating for them? At times, do we provide the safe environment in which our clients can relax in a manner that enables their unconscious work to emerge and be articulated? Without playing the role of therapist or psychoanalyst, do we at least assist our client in fully appreciating their own “hunches” regarding people with whom they work or vaguely formulated solutions to problems they are addressing—these hunches or solutions having been first generated in a dream or in a meandering thought that popped up while they were eating dinner or playing games with their young daughter? These processes are all part and parcel of the peremptory ideation described by Klein and exemplify our most productive multi-tasking.
The Numinous
I wish to probe even deeper into the phenomenon of multi-tasking, peremptory ideation and the dynamics of a New Orleans State of Mind. I propose that when there is confluence of peremptory ideations—when highly motivated trains of thought and multi-source sensations converge and magnify one another—then there is the experience of what Rudolph Otto and, a little later, Carl Jung, called the numinous. When he first introduced the idea of numinous, Otto was focusing on profound religious experiences. Jung, however, described the numinous in much broader terms. In what some scholars identify as the first “psychological” analysis of religious experiences, Rudolph Otto identified something that he called the “numinous” experience. In his now-classic book, The Idea of the Holy Otto creates a new word, “numinous” (from the Latin word “numen” and paralleling the derivation of “ominous” from the word “omen”). Otto (1923, p. 11) writes about a powerful, enthralling experience that is “felt as objective and outside the self.” Otto’s numinous experience is simultaneously awe-some and awe-full. We are enthralled and repelled. We feel powerless in the presence of the numinous, yet seem to gain power (“inspiration”) from participation in its wonderment.
Using more contemporary psychological terms, the boundaries between internal and external locus of control seem to be shattered when one is enmeshed in a numinous experience. The outside enters the inside and the inside is drawn to the outside. We are transported to another domain of experience when listening to a Bach mass or an opera by Mozart or Puccini. It all depends on our “taste,” i.e. amenability to certain numinous-inducing experiences, when identifying either the Mozart or Puccini as numinostic. The horrible and dreadful images and pictures of gods in primitive cultures continue to enthrall us—leading us to feelings of profound admiration or profound disgust. We view a miracle, in the form of a newborn child or the recovery of a loved one from a life-threatening disease. This leads us to a sense of the numinous. Somehow, a power from outside time or space seems to intervene and lead us to an experience that penetrates and changes (though we don’t know how) our unconscious life (the “backburners”).
Carl Jung built on and extended Otto’s portrayal of the “numinosum.” He (Jung ,1938, p. 4) describes a numinous experience as one that “seizes and controls the human subject . . . an involuntary condition . . . due to a cause external to the individual. The numinosum is either a quality of a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence causing a peculiar alteration of consciousness.” Elsewhere, it is noted that Jung’s notion of numinous is “rooted in experience and not just in ideation. The numinous is an experience which the individual undergoes and not simply the non-rational quality of dream-thoughts and mythologems. The numen or object present in or to the numinous state of mind is experienced as a powerful and meaning-filled other. It transcends conscious intention and control.” (Chapman, 1988, p. 89) As in Klein’s model of peremptory ideation, Jung’s cognitive content picks up the emotional content and races along, accumulating more thoughts and feelings. In many ways, this expanding dynamic is similar to that which occurs when an avalanche recruits nearby snow, trees, and rocks while roaring down a mountainside. Complexity and chaos theorists speak of these dynamic processes as strange attractors. The volume of a snowpack at the bottom of the mountain is much larger than the snowpack that started to fall as an avalanche at the top of the mountain. Similarly, the numinous is much larger when it comes to prominence then it was when first precipitated by some profound external or internal experience.
The numinous experience for Jung can be evoked by an exceptionally beautiful sunset or by the overwhelming prospect of a loved one’s impending death. It can be evoked by a particularly powerful interpersonal relationship—one filled with lust, love, compassion or hatred. More generally, Jung seems to be speaking to the gradual evolution of human consciousness when writing about the numinostic experience. As one of his protégés, Erich Neumann (1954), has noted, human consciousness (replicating the evolution of organic life) begins in an undifferentiated state (which Neumann calls the “uroborous”). This state is represented in many symbolic forms, ranging from the many images of chaos (floods, wind, or ocean) to the more stylized image of the snake that is circling around to begin devouring its own tail. Jungians suggest that the experience of the numinous is composed of both the primitive, undifferentiated elements (the “uroborous”) and the much more complex forms of high-art. As in the avalanche, the high-art is recruited by the dynamic and compelling low-art of primitive consciousness.
Jung suggests that the numinous experience is quite frightening and often not welcomed. He proposes that we build societal norms and institutional structures to protect us from the numinous. Jung nominates the Catholic Church as an institution that has provided protection from the numinous, though its rituals and priestly roles. Jung (1938, pp. 22-23) suggests in Psychology and Religion that the Protestant revolution shattered this protection and left those who adhere to a Protestant faith fully exposed to the powerful presence of the numinous:
Protestantism, having pulled down many a wall which had been carefully erected by the [Catholic] church, began immediately to experience the disintegrating and schismatic effect of individual revelation. As soon as the dogmatic fence was broken down and as soon as the ritual had lost the authority of its efficiency, man was confronted with an inner experience, without the protection and the guidance of a dogma and a ritual which are the unparalleled quintessence of Christian as well as of pagan religious experience. Protestantism has, in the main, lost all the finer shades of the dogma: the mass, the confession, the greater part of the liturgy and the sacrificial importance of priesthood.
Without this religious institutional protection, Protestants have looked elsewhere for a barrier that can be erected between self and numinous. In Psychology and Religion (based on the pre-World War II 1937 Terry Lectures), Jung suggests that the Nazi regime in Germany may powerfully and horribly exemplify the substitution of a secular institution for a religious institution in blocking the emergence of numinous experiences. Whether or not Jung is correct in linking the Third Reich and ultimately the Holocaust to the threat of numinous experiences, we certainly can acknowledge and respect the power of these experiences.
To what extent is the numinous a flooding of our brains—ourselves—with rich multi-sensory experiences? Are we multi-tasking in the sense of taking in and seeking to organize content from many sources? Are the trains of thought and ideations converging to create a catharsis of thoughts and feelings? Are a mixture of powerful at-the-moment sensations provoking memories of the past (both positive and negative) which interweave with hopes and fears about the future? I believe that all of this produces a tapestry of great (awe-full) affective beauty and power. I find that cathedrals and temples are great dwellings for the numinous not just because they are sacred (though this helps), but also because they are filled with many strong sensory experiences: sound, sight, smell, touch and human interaction (often nonverbal). For me, the numinous is found in the Cathedral at Salisbury (near Stonehenge) in England, Notre Dame in Paris, a crumbling temple in Southern Taiwan—and at the Jackson Square cathedral in New Orleans.
It is not so much what happens inside the Jackson Square Cathedral—it’s what happens outside before I enter the cathedral: street musicians, painters, hucksters, tourists, the smell of coffee (from Café du Monde and other nearby cafes) and the Magnolia blossoms. My wife, Kathleen, prepared several sketches of the Cathedral towers while sitting on a bench in Jackson Square on a warm day in spring many years ago—some of the only art she has produced during the past busy decade of her life. Kathleen was multi-tasking in that she was taking in the warmth, sounds, smells and sights of the Square while sketching the Cathedral towers. These other “tasks” were inspiring her to sketch and influenced what she was representing on paper. As I mentioned above, the experience of the numinous is about the breaking of boundaries between the internal and external. Jackson Square and the Cathedral encourage one to “lose control.” They allow the internal and external experiences to intermingle, provoking new ideations that link with old memories and emotions as well as new hopes and aspirations. As coaches we can encourage our clients to find their own Jackson Squares and we might even at times be the Jackson Square for our client—helping them create their own multi-tasking New Orleans State of Mind.
Behavioral Economics
All of what I have been writing about with regard to New Orleans, peremptory ideation and the numinous might seem at best fanciful and at worst a distraction from the “real” and very serious work of coaching in an organizational setting. I would suggest that this notion of creative and productive multi-tasking is very serious and quite relevant to the business of professional coaching. I believe I can make this point briefly and in a persuasive manner by pointing to a newly emerging interdisciplinary field called behavioral economics. The work being done in this field suggests that critical multi-tasking occurs when the discipline of economics interplays with the discipline of psychology and when rational decision-making (particularly with regards to money) meets at an intersection with powerful human emotions.
In many ways, this new interdisciplinary field was inaugurated when Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve Bank, noted in a 2010 graduation speech that “we are social creatures. . . . [E]conomic policymakers should pay attention to family and community cohesion. All else being equal, good economic policies should encourage and support stable families and promote civic engagement.” (Weitz, 2012) Bruno Frey anticipated this merger in 2008 when he noted that “economics is undergoing a remarkable new development, which may even be called revolutionary.” He is speaking about the impact so-called “positive psychology” (the study of happiness, courage and other positive human conditions) might have on the formulation on economic policy. (Weitz, 2012) Several other books have also been precursors to the Bernacke speech—including Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness (2006), Dan Ariely’s (2008) Predictably Irrrational (2008), and Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide (2009). In each of these books, decision making processes are described as a mixture of cognitive (primarily frontal lobe) considerations and emotional (primarily limbic system) considerations. Ariely and, more recently, Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow, 2013) have focused often on decision-making processes that effect financial matters. They are describing the multi-tasking processes involved in effective policy-formulation, monitoring of economic outcomes, and (more basically) the nature and meaning of economic “success.”
I would suggest that these financial matters play a major role in the work professional coaches do when operating in an organizational context with clients who must make difficult, economically-based decisions. The multi-tasking in these instances might not take on the grandeur of the numinous, but it certainly involves peremptory ideation and the tendency of economic decision making processes to recruit the nearby debris of old decisions and anticipated successes and failures, as well as the multitude of data points that are converging on the present decision point. We are living in a postmodern world of complexity, unpredictability and turbulence. Some multi-tasking is required. A New Orleans State of Mind might be appropriate and our clients might try to find (with our help) their own Jackson Square.
References
Ariely, Dan (2008) Predictably Irrational. New York: Harper Perennial.
Barrett, Deidre. (2010) The Committee of Sleep. Oneiroi Press. ISBN10: 0982869509.
Chapman, J. Harley (1988) Jung’s Three Theories of Religious Experience. New York: Edwin Mellen Press.
Gilbert, Daniel ( 2006) Stumbling on Happiness. New York: Random House.
Heuser, Steven “Risk and the City.” Boston Globe: Ideas, April 21, 2013, p. K1.
Jung, Carl (1938) Psychology and Religion. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.
Kahneman, Daniel (2013) Thinking Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Klein, George (1967) Peremptory Ideation: Structure and Force in Motivated Ideas, Psychological Issues, vo. V, No. 2-3. New York: International Universities Press, pp. 78-128.
Lehrer, Jonah (2009) How We Decide. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Neumann, Erich (1954) The Origin and History of Consciousness. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Otto. Rudolph (1923) The Idea of the Holy [Translated by John W. Harvey] London: Oxford Press.
Packard, Vance (1957) The Hidden Persuaders. New York: Pocket Book.
Weitz, Kevin (2012) The Impact of Happiness Research on the Field of Economic. Unpublished doctoral essay. Sacramento, CA: The Professional School of Psychology.