“When the thinking isn’t done, the writing can’t begin.” That, in effect, is my motto when I get stuck writing. If I can’t push ahead in composing the next paragraph, I tell myself that I haven’t yet formed a complete thought. Or at least a thought worthy of publication.

What explains those times when the reverse happens: You sit down and the words come pouring out? Just the right words, dressed nicely in metaphor, without any effort? What accounts for such muse-full moments? As far as you know, you never focused attention on these ideas, not even for a moment, but there they are, flowing onto the computer screen.

My guess is that in fact you were thinking, and probably had done so for a long time. But you were not thinking consciously. The unconscious was instead working—and you didn’t even have to exert yourself. The unconscious whirred away and delivered.

We’ve all experienced this at times (too few of them, of course). And we’d like to make them happen more often. Is there some way to do so?

Research shows that the unconscious has a lot of mental muscle you can learn to flex. A paper by Ap Dijksterhuis and Loran Nordgren reviews a slew of experiments comparing the performance of the conscious and unconscious. The two researchers note that the conscious mind processes between 10 and 60 bits per second (reading these lines takes about 45). The entire human system processes about 11,200,000 bits per second (vision takes about 10 million).

The conscious, in other words, is a flea compared to the elephantine unconscious. What’s more, the unconscious performs neater tricks. Experiments show that the unconscious weights the importance of things better—as in which of the numerous, often tangled, ideas in your head deserve priority. The conscious mind, on the other hand, is lousy.

In one experiment, Dijksterhuis and Nordgren asked participants to weigh twelve attributes for four apartments and choose the best apartment (they learned one apartment had a grumpy landlord, another a noisy street, etc.). In advance, the experimenters manipulated the data so that, given enough time, anyone could determine that one apartment was more desirable, another clearly less, than the remaining two.

After reading about all four apartments, one group of people was allowed three minutes to consciously assess the options. Another group was immediately distracted for three minutes by another task and then had to make a choice. The people in the first group could rarely make a decision, owing to the complexity of weighting 48 unlike factors. The people in the second almost always made a decision—and correctly chose the most desirable apartment.

The unconscious elephant stomped the conscious flea.

And that gives you a hint of how to employ the unconscious for more muse-full moments. If you’re stuck, feed your brain data and ideas, distract yourself with some other task, and come back to your writing again. Especially when you’re struggling with complexity, you’ll often get the next page written faster by tending to your online shopping for a while than by trying to force something out of your conscious.

You may be wondering: What about creativity? Does the unconscious help there, too? It turns out that, yes, it does. Dijksterhuis and Nordgren asked two other sets of people to generate names for a new brand of pasta. People given time to think consciously came up with a number of similar names. People distracted by another task before answering came up with just as many and in much greater variety. The results were similar when two groups were asked to “generate things one can do with a brick.” The distracted group did much better.

Most of us know already that “sleeping on it” can help us come up with answers we couldn’t summon the day before. The unconscious does its job of sorting priorities effectively, weighting importance magnificently, and juicing our creativity reliably.

Of course, the conscious works much better for some things—math problems, for instance. But for writers stuck with unformed thoughts or a lapse in creativity, the unconscious elephant may be the animal of choice. You can sometimes win by staying in your chair and hammering away to solve problems, but that’s not always smart. You can’t squeeze straightforward thoughts from a spaghetti-filled mind.

As Dijksterhuis and Nordgren wrote, when you are thinking, “‘conscious thought stays firmly under the searchlight, [whereas] unconscious thought ventures out to the dark and dusty nooks and crannies of the mind.’’ The flea stays in the bright open spaces, the elephant pokes into the holes in the dark. Sometimes it’s better to place your bets on the elephant. Let the flea go.

[Revised January 2020. Originally published October 18, 2013]