Great scientists and artists have long known about the unconscious mind. The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, argued that most of our real motivation lies below conscious awareness and that we require the services of a psychoanalyst to explain ourselves to ourselves. Even those celebrated scientists who believe that Freud exaggerated the importance of the unconscious argue that it is a part of our minds which we should learn to control and take advantage of.

The great mathematician Alfred North Whitehead seemed to be a supporter of unconscious mental processing when he said: ‘It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copybooks and by eminent people making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking about what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case.’ What Whitehead meant by this is that some of the greatest breakthroughs in creativity occur when a problem is consciously shelved for a while—‘don't think about it, just sleep on it’—after which the unconscious mind offers a solution. This is a process which psychoanalysts call ‘incubation’.

Now the latest psychological research confirms that we can all incubate a problem to our own advantage. Ap Dijksterhuis, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, has recently published a series of experiments in which students were presented with complex everyday problems to solve. In one experiment they were given the opportunity to think carefully about a decision; in another experiment they were distracted by an irrelevant task whilst making a decision. The surprising result, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, was that ‘unconscious’ thinkers made the better decisions.

Timothy Wilson and colleagues from the University of Virginia's psychology department conducted another experiment. Participants were presented with five posters and asked to choose one to take home. A little later, they were telephoned and asked how satisfied they were with their choice—a measure of whether they had made the right decision from a subjective point of view. Some participants had picked their poster straight away, whereas others were asked to analyse carefully the pros and cons of each poster. It turned out that people who had analysed were less satisfied with their choice than people who had not applied logic. Paradoxically, it seems that those who had consciously weighed up the various attributes had made relatively poor decisions.

The conclusion that has to be drawn from current research suggests the somewhat counter-intuitive idea that the more complex a problem is, the less likely it becomes that conscious thought can contribute much. If a dilemma is particularly difficult, a lot of information has to be taken into account and it appears that conscious thought is not good at this. The message is that when it comes to intricate problems with many variables, you should let the unconscious deal with it.

Using dreaming is one way of doing this. Dreams are the part of sleep most strongly correlated with rapid eye movement (REM) and have been associated with enhanced creativity and novel solutions. The latest research suggests that, if you want to enhance unconscious problem-solving, you should try to think about your problems immediately after dreaming. In a recent experiment, psychiatrist Matthew Walker and colleagues from the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at Harvard Medical School woke up half of their experimental subjects immediately after REM sleep, and the other half just after sleep with no dreams, and then asked them to solve crossword puzzles. REM awakenings provided a 32 per cent advantage in the number of puzzles solved, compared with non-REM awakenings.

But you don't have to be asleep to use the unconscious mind when you are not thinking of anything in particular, which is why daydreams are so useful in the quest for creativity. Daniel Goleman, the famous psychologist who proposed the theory of ‘emotional intelligence’, urges us to be more aware of, and discount, a key obstacle that the conscious mind imposes on the unconscious: that of self-censorship. This is the voice that whispers to you, ‘they'll think I'm foolish’ or ‘that will never work’, keeping you imprisoned within the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable. Howard Gardner, a professor of cognition and education at Harvard University, suggests that we free ourselves from the straitjacket of always doing things the same way. In seeking to go beyond the routine and conventional, you will gain confidence in trusting your unconscious, he says.