CONNECTICUT LIBRARIES
January 1997, Vol. 39, No. 1

The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought
by David Gelernter
A Review by Vince Juliano

When I was a child my father would sometimes bite off a little more home improvement challenge than he really had the time for. He would inevitably run into a problem that defied solution. He would stop working, concentrate real hard, start whistling, hurl expletives at the problem, and send me off for tools that even I knew wouldn’t do him any good. Eventually, my mother would perk some coffee, make some sandwiches, and artfully coax him away from the site of his frustration. He and Mom would talk about almost anything, except what Dad was working on. Gradually, he’d relax and stop thinking about the problem. All of a sudden, he’d get a look in his eye like he was seeing something that the rest of us couldn’t quite make out. Before I knew it, he’d be back to work with a smile on his face. It amazed me how he could come up with solutions to a problem that he had stopped thinking about!

We have all experienced this enigma. We focus all of our attention on a problem, and we get nowhere. We take a lunch break or turn on the ball game, and eureka!, we have the answer. Logically, it makes no sense. David Gelernter explains that logic has nothing to do with finding the solution in these situations. While most of us view human thought as the same thing as logic and reason, Gelernter hypothesizes that reason and logic are merely the tip of the iceberg, or “spectrum,” that is human thought. Logic is at the “high focus” end of the spectrum, where we are analytical, tightly focused on the problem at hand, and rational, rather than emotional. We investigate, review options, and formulate a plan of action.

But this is not how we always think. Instead, we travel up and down our spectrum as the situation requires. Moving toward the “low focus” end of the spectrum, our concentration relaxes and our thinking becomes more diffuse. Emotion, instead of logic, leads us from one recollection to another. We experience “affect linking,” a process by which one remembered experience recalls another, not because of the similarity of factual content between the two experiences, but because of the shared emotional content. Our low focus minds connect very complex thoughts and ideas that appear to be totally unrelated. So, at low focus, humans experience creative insights that they cannot achieve through logic, reason, and concentration. Emotion is not separate from human thought. Rather, it is a vital element.

Now, if you are interested in artificial intelligence, as is Gelernter, this creates a challenge. Your field has concentrated on emulating high focus human thought, and it has assumed a dichotomy between thought and emotion that does not exist. Your goal is to build the full spectrum of human thought, including “emotion,” into your software. Of course, the author has not yet succeeded. However, read his description of what he and his colleagues are doing with their FGP Program, and you can decide for yourself if they are on the right track.

I could not help but wonder how much library work is based on low focus thinking. How much of what we learned in the Effective Reference Performance workshops could Gelernter program into the FGP machine? Maybe novelist and library critic Nicholson Baker is justfiably angry with us for taking away his card catalog--not because it was a better information tool than the OPAC, but because it stimulated low focus “affect linking” that gave him creative insights into his work.

This book reflects tremendous interest in, and respect for, human thought and feeling. The author quotes the Bible, Thomas Carlyle, Coleridge, Freud, Shelley, and Yeats as comfortably as he draws upon the writings of leaders in the field of information technology. He applies his high focus/low focus spectrum theory to human growth, and to Western history. He argues convincingly that our passage from childhood to adulthood is characterized by an overall shift from low to high focus thinking. Similarly, he re-reads ancient literature through the crystal of his spectrum theory. He maintains that our civilization has exhibited a shift from predominately low focus thinking to increasingly high focus thought. He suggests that one of the prices our modern world pays for its high focus is the loss of the prophecy so common in the ancient world. He wonders how long before our civilization completely loses its poetry. Ironically, if his view is correct, if we humans continue on our evolutionary path toward higher and higher focus thinking, our only source of poetry and creativity will be the computers into which we program that functionality.

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