‘Learning to loaf’ – this books explores the ways of knowing that require more time, the ways we have unlearned or ignore, but that are crucial to our complete mental development.

Ours is an accelerated age, and thought – we presume – must keep up with the rush. Clear, crisp, businesslike, our customary ways of thinking may serve us well – when we're confronting the expected questions. But increasingly we aren't. New technology and systems of communication no longer assure the certainties that we have become accustomed to. When confronted by these new demands, we become impatient with ambiguity and uncomfortable with metaphor; our hare brains are utterly unprepared for an age where certainty is deceptive, intuition all.

Traditional systems of thought have left us with little appreciation for ambiguity, paradox and the tinkering towards the truth that characterises the child's mind. The hare brain is always expected to win against the intuition of the tortoise mind. However, new research in cognitive science is forcing on us a new vision of the mind – one in which patience and confusion, rather than rigour and certainty, are seen to be vital precursors to wisdom, and in which acquired patterns of thinking get in the way. Guy Claxton, in this remarkable and radical book, argues that we must learn the patience not to force the issues; the readiness to mull things over and meditate; the humility to leave go of the controls and let our unconscious mind do the thinking for us. The tortoise cannot fail to win when it has intuition and inspiration at its command.

‘Learning to loaf’ – this books explores the ways of knowing that require more time, the ways we have unlearned or ignore, but that are crucial to our complete mental development.

The human brain-mind will do a number of unusual, interesting and important things if given time. It will learn patterns of a degree of subtlety which normal, purposeful, busy consciousness cannot even see, let alone master. It will make sense out of hazy, ill-defined situations which leave everyday rationality flummoxed. It will get to the bottom of personal, emotional issues much more successfully than the questing intellect. It will detect and respond to meaning, in poetry for example, that cannot be articulated. It will sometimes come up with solutions to complicated predicaments that are wise rather than merely clever. There is good, hard evidence, from cognitive science and elsewhere, for all these capacities. Claxton explores the slower ways of knowing and explains how we could/should use them more often and more effectively.