Tolerating uncertainty: lessons from cryptic
crosswords and scientific research
I’d like to
invite you to participate in a little experiment, to wit a cryptic crossword
puzzle.
The clue is ‘Die of cold’, and the solution is two words – 3 and 4
letters. The answer is on page xx, BUT
I’m asking you to refrain from looking at it until you have finished reading
what follows.
Cryptic
crosswords are all about meaning – making sense of the clue - and tolerating
uncertainty – there is usually no obvious or quick answer. The challenge is to
stick in there, tolerate the feeling of frustration in attempting to work it
out, be willing to take time to play with the clues, come up with possible
answers only to have to let them go, engage our lateral thinking and intuition
and feelings even – and stay with the process with no guarantee of finding ‘the
answer’! Sound familiar? Life,
relationships, parenting, being a therapist!
My childhood
felt a lot like a cryptic crossword puzzle. By the time I was 8 years old I was getting
pretty desperate to work out what the hell was going on around me. Things were getting more and more confusing
and I needed to make sense of things! I
came up with what I thought was a brilliant solution – I would become an
expert! Then I’d know a lot and be able to work things out, and I’d be able to help others. That way, just maybe, I’d become liked, and famous and maybe even wealthy. If only it had been that simple, and I’m
still not wealthy or famous! Let’s face
it, things – cryptic crosswords, life - are just damn complicated, especially when it comes to
understanding people. Since aged 8 it’s
been a long road littered with mounting uncertainty and the disillusion of my
expert fantasy - (‘expert’: 1.a.
practiced, skilful, 2.n.person
expert in subject, 3. Latin root –
‘ex’ meaning has-been, ‘spurt’ meaning drip under pressure).
How do we live
with uncertainty? Here are two recent
stories-with-lessons.
Only a few
years ago, in what is probably one of the most ambitious and expensive
scientific studies ever conducted, 3,000 scientists were working on something
called the ‘Large Hadron Collider’. They
were attempting to understand the universe at a microscopic level, and in
particular to test the prediction of the existence of the Higgs-Boson
particle. I remember reading something that
one of those scientists said:
‘we scientists at the LHC aim to confirm or exclude
the existence of the Higgs-Boson particle…..Excluding
it would, perhaps, be even more exciting (emphasis added) than discovering
it , as it would mean that the theory that has described the building blocks of
our universe is wrong. We would have to
go back to their blackboard and come up with a new one.’
I must say the
fact that they were planning to use a blackboard as a fall-back option did
worry me somewhat! However what struck
me was their humility about their theories, but in particular their tolerance
of uncertainty - that they might well be proved wrong, and that they would even
welcome such an outcome.
More recently I
read an article reporting a research study undertaken at Department of
Psychiatry at Cambridge University which looked at the brain’s habit of
predicting what it expects to
experience, filling in the missing gaps in reality, in order to make sense of
things. Having a predictive brain makes
us efficient and adept at creating a coherent picture of an ambiguous and
complex world. In other words we are
hard-wired to make sense of our perceptions involving uncertainty.
Two groups of
subjects, one with signs of mental illness and another who showed no such signs, were shown black and white images that looked
little more than a collection of lines and blotches, and were asked to fill in
the missing parts of the pictures and work out what they represented. The ‘mentally ill’ group performed better
than the ‘normal’ group, coming up more quickly with answers about what the
pictures represented. Paradoxically, my understanding
of this outcome is that the ‘mentally ill’ group were less able to tolerate the
uncertainty about what the pictures might
represent, and were more likely to want to impose a solution quickly in order
to reduce anxiety, in a process similar to what Freud called ‘verwerfung’,
translated by Lacan as ‘foreclosure’. In
other words, an aspect of ‘mental health’, and maybe a defining feature of Adult
functioning, much like good scientific practice, is the capacity to stay with
and tolerate an experience of uncertainty, of not knowing how to make sense of
experience.
From this
perspective a contamination in TA could be thought of as not so much as a
belief that is at odds with here and now reality, but more as a self-protective,
premature foreclosure of the process of staying with and making sense of
experience. Putting it this way reminds
me of my early Gestalt learning in the value of inviting clients to ‘stay with’
a difficult experience, and/or explore their difficulty with doing so.
Back to the
cryptic crossword. Did you stop and
attempt to find an answer; and if so what was your experience of tolerating the
difficulty of working it out? Did you go
along with my suggestion of reading to the end before looking at the answer;
and if so, what was it like to resist the temptation to look? If you did
look at the answer before finishing reading, what do you imagine it would have been like to have resisted the temptation?
And finally,
nice answer eh? Maybe even nicer if we’ve been through the process of
tolerating the uncertainty inherent in attempting to work it out?
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