The Anatomy of Intuition: What's your Intuition Quotient? by Daniel Cappon, Psychology Today, Issue 26(May-June) 1993We've been running on a very narrow spectrum of human intelligence, and it's landed us in social and environmental crises. Our very survival now depends on reclaiming other, wiser parts of our minds. Enter the IQ2.
Intuition is like a very old whore who is now being revitalized and rejuvenated and who is on her way to becoming a very respectable lady. She is, in fact, the archetypal jewel in the crown of human intelligence. The old whore previously inhabited the red light district at the intersection of Psychics Lane and the mystic Lunatic Fringe Boulevard. Today the lady is being courted by reputable scientists, by major corporations, and of course, by all the arts. She is thriving in my psychology lab. For the past three years, several colleagues and I have been busy developing a test that, we believe, measures intuition, that most elusive way of knowing. I call it the Intuition Quotient Test, or IQ2. The "quotient" does not refer to chronological age, as in the traditional intelligence test, but to that proportion of general intelligence that intuition makes up. Although a trained scientist and great believer in rational thought, I am convinced that intuition is the older, wiser, and perhaps greater part of human intelligence. It has taken many years for my interests in science, humanity, and the environment to coalesce into a formal exploration of intuition. But that, it turns out, is just typical of intuition, where zigzagging activities are integral to the process. As a psychiatrist, I was painfully aware that there was really no such thing as mental science. Psychiatry was treating patients after the damage was done. Early on I decided that prevention offered the only chance for "cure" Increasingly, I came to believe that the key to prevention was the environment, the natural physical environment, the man-built environment, and the social environment. After all, illness rarely develops in a vacuum. York University was founded in Toronto in 1959. In 1969 it established a faculty for environmental arts and sciences and I became its first full-time professor. My goal was to protect the health of humans and of the environment by preventing its many hazards. Although a scientist, I became increasingly familiar with the limitations of science and its application to such problems. Fact-based, deductive, and analytical thinking is too late; it goes after the fact. Nor is it sensitive to circumstance, or the complexity, contradictions, and variability of human nature and especially relationships. It is simply not enough for the many challenges and constancy of change of modern life. I began to marvel at the phenomenon of intuition and determined to study it. Over this time, my clinical experience with some patients has allowed me to make many constructive observations. I was aware, of course, that intuition had a bad reputation. It was seen, at best, as a woman's gift in a man's world. Intuition is denigrated by a Western culture obsessed by "facts" and science. it struck me that the only way intuition could be accepted was to subjugate it to the methods of science itself-an apparently absurd contradiction. I've since learned that like all the either/or arguments, such as nature vs. nurture, the fact is that neither really has primacy. Both interact. And can be made to reflect each other. My clinical experience has convinced me that intuition is very democratic -- everyone has some capacity for it. Not everyone uses it. And not all those who apply it use it equally. Nor was Carl Jung right in making a personality type out of it; there's no evidence that a particular personality favors intuition, although elements of personality, such as rigidity vs. openness, influence it. Armed with the IQ2, psychologists will be able not merely to test people for their intuitive capacity, but to help further its development. Preliminary evidence from the IQ2 itself demonstrates that intuition can be trained. INTUITION FROM INSTINCT Intuition has always been a vital part of human intelligence. It encompasses skills that have always been critical to human life. In a sense, intuition is responsible for the survival of the species. Its long evolutionary history has made it a deeply buried power of the mind. Intuition most likely has its origins in ancestral instincts for survival and adaptation. There is no way that our human ancestors could have survived without intuition. There could not have been much conscious thinking before speech evolved, some 250,000 years ago, yet Pithecanthropus erectus goes back some 4.5 minion years. Old Pith could not possibly have survived predators or such natural threats as the melting of the ice age without intuitive decisions-where to make a fire, when to store meat, when to move to the highlands. There was no time for thinking or laborious logic. Responses often had to be instantaneous. The sound of movement in the brush required an immediate reaction. Those who failed to respond were removed from the gene pool by voracious predators. For Old Pith, intuition was likely the only form of organized preverbal intelligence. The original instincts, now distilled as intuition, were probably based on a rapid access or fast-track system, separate from conscious thought, unencumbered by hesitation and doubt. Once speech was developed, allowing the transfer of information, the brain began its rapid expansion and evolved the ten-billion-cell neocortex. Here, logical, speech-promoted intelligence took over at the expense of experiential-based instinct. And the mind developed barriers, or censors, to protect the concentrated attention of clear, alert reasoning from invasion by all else stored in the brain; we now know that these barriers become porous during dreaming, defective in psychopathology, and collapse altogether in senility. Intuition is, in my view, the product of all the processed ancestral instincts of the species, through which unconditioned reflexes become conditioned and organized into patterns of adaptive behavior called instinct. Ultimately instincts coalesce into intuition, the capacity for which is stored deep in the brain. The wisdom of language suggests that this is so. Despite the fact that many people have little respect for the concept of intuition (in these days of over-reasoning), all of us still refer to intuition as instinct. "It was an instinctive reaction." "I have a good instinct for this." Of course, the greatest evidence is simply the survival of the species in the face of extreme and unpredictable events of nature.
CRITICAL CONDITIONS Intuition, then, is necessarily processed unconsciously. As a result, it has been reduced to a myth and allowed to sink into the province of mystics and fringe groups. Nevertheless, the descent of intuition from prehistory as a means of surviving changes and predators and finding ways to deal with enemies ensures that it is still the intelligence of everyday life. Human relationships, especially child-rearing, matching oneself to a mate and a job-these are the chief provinces of intuition. In its wholeness, intuition is the form of intelligence that includes our social sense, familiar with the endless variety of human relationships and deeds. In elevating rational-scientific thinking, and dismissing intuition, the Enlightenment confined its approval to a very narrow band of human intelligence-logical, deductive, proof-oriented mental operations. That intelligence has brought us the scientific revolution, high technology, and a great many material goods. But it does not take an intuitive genius (all geniuses are) to observe that the wanton application of this line of thinking now endangers human society and its terrestrial home. The earth is so terribly befouled and overpopulated that our very advances now threaten our very survival. By their very nature, the study and control of these titanic forces cannot be accomplished by exact science. Increasingly over the last decade, businesses have begun to realize that analytical thinking arrives too late for a 24-hour global marketplace. In its quest for an edge, private enterprise has become very receptive to the idea of intuition-although intuition has yet to make inroads in public management, marketing, or advertising. As a way of advancing both the research and application of intuition, particularly in the business world, a Global Intuition Network (GIN) was set up in the late 1980s by Weston Agor, Ph.D., former professor of management at the University of Texas, at the behest of an American industrialist. Comprised of people all over the world who are working independently on intuition, the network sponsored its first conference in 1991, in Hawaii. Last summer, I convened the second GIN conference, in Toronto. By this time, there was important representation of serious scientists paying attention to research in intuition-engineers, mathematicians, and psychologists. Intuition is clearly undergoing rehabilitation. But it isn't just scientists and business leaders who are interested in this power of the mind. Inquiries come from people in all walks of life-people eager to know that there is more to intelligence than science and technology have given us. They perceive the limits of the technological way of looking at things. They sense that a larger spectrum of intelligence needs to be brought to bear on the world's problems. Of course, creative artists have always known that creativity is cradled in intuition. If intuition were not already available today it would have to be invented.
MOWED DOWN IN THE FIELD In my studies of intuition, I started where all scientific ventures start -- the hunch, itself an intuitive skill. I set out to prove the hypothesis that intuition is the secret of success in most endeavors, and especially in business. I began with a field study of organizations, to see whether those that were successful had intuitive people at the helm. I wanted to see where those given to intuition-intuits were located on the organizational ladder, whether they were at key decision-making jobs. And to see whether those who weren't so located were unsuccessful. Success would be measured in terms of the world of business-bottomline profitability, efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness, with job satisfaction running as the dark horse. In order to detect the likelihood of intuitiveness, in 1989 I developed my own survey tool, the Cappon Intuition Profile, a 15-page descriptive questionnaire designed to see who is intuitive, who is not. This profile simply asks people to describe themselves and what others have said about them; whether or not they know it of themselves, people usually hear that they are intuitive from the reflection of others. The profile does not get at the intuitive capacity itself, or its accessing variables-that is, what kicks it off. I wanted to see whether there was a correlation between intuitive people, as picked up by the profile, and organizational and personal success. I didn't get very far. I soon found out that the more intuition-sensitive the company, like advertising and polling, the more they shut their doors to such in inquiry. These were largely companies dealing directly with people and services, where science is minimal and "flying by the seat of one's pants" is maximal. Sure they used market research. But clearly they felt the public would lose faith in them if they were found to be running on gut feeling as well. The only exception was a pollster who made no bones about the use of fact-based intuition, which made his predictions so precise. Interestingly, companies that produced things rather than services-manufacturers of all kinds-opened their doors with a welcoming smile. This, it turns out, is an irony that parallels the position of intuition in the academic community. Modern psychology, and especially cognitive psychology, yearns for much of the certainty of science ephemeral and illusory as it is-and eschews intuition. Only a handful of brave researchers have worked to bring intuition into the realm of science in this century, and one of them at my very own university, Malcolm Wescott, Ph.D. Yet mathematicians, physicists, and hard scientists have embraced intuition all along. They are high-minded-enough to admit to it. Einstein was intuitive and said so. I interviewed Nobelists Linus Pauling, Albert Szent Gyorgyi, Lord Adrian, and Jonas Salk. They said, "Of course, we have hunches. We know the answer before we work it out." Science, at its best, is the working out of things out later.
WINNIE (CHURCHILL), THE POOH, AND PIGLET One of the difficulties in tackling the proper study of intuition has been the lack of an agreed upon definition-although this sort of thing has not stopped conventional psychometrists from inventing the original IQ tests while operating without the license of a generally approved definition of intelligence. I started by carefully compiling a comprehensive list of everything everybody ever said about intuition. I drew on the expressions they used in describing it, and their feelings and speculations about their experiences. I paid particular attention to what was said by established "self-avowed initiates"--a term applied to intuits by the Italian writer and scholar Umberto Eco. I surveyed Eco and other writers, including Aldous Huxley, Isaac Azimov, Mary Stuart on Merlin, Patrick Suskind's Perfume, and Benjamin Hoff on The Tao of Pooh and ne Te of Piglet. I interviewed and studied the writings of Nobel laureate scientists, including Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, with whom I had once worked. After all, all great science begins with a hunch, an intuition, with is then pursued painstakingly through what may be years of experimentation. I devoured biographies of historical figures like Churchill. And I drew on my own population of patients, whom I had asked to rate themselves on intuition. Looking at the essence of good decision-making, intuition can be called the essence of common sense" -- which, we all know, is all too uncommon. Hoff says that "intuition is being sensitive to circumstance. Efraim Fischbein, an Israeli scientist, defines intuition as "direct self-evident knowledge . He differentiates a cognitive type of intuition, dubbed affirmatory, from a global, unhesitant form of insight, which he dubs anticipatory. Others-- and I am one of them -- see intuition as closely related to creativity. Looking epistemologically, it's obvious that the rational intellect is analytical, fragmenting, sequentially linear, syllogistic, and favours deductive reasoning. Intuition, on the other hand, is consistently described as a more holistic, mosaic, "big picture," insight-oriented intellect favoring inductive reasoning. Most everyday descriptions of intuition get at bits and pieces of the whole, and usually point more at its emotional traces than at intuition itself. The emotion may be somatized as in "gut feeling," which implies a feeling of certitude through the stomach. But emotion is only an accompaniment, not the main thing. Like a "flash," "a nose for it," these are accessories, the visible emotional traces intuition leaves so that we can access this unconscious process again. They are reminders that intuition has to be called up from somewhere else in the mind. Cerebrally, intuition is sometimes referred to as lateral thinking. But that is not a definition; it simply suggests that intuition, unlike logic, is not sequential and forward-moving; it moves sideways. Perhaps my favorite description of intuition occurs in William Manchester's biography of Winston Churchill. The statesman was a notoriously poor student academically. But, as Manchester observes, he had "a zigzag lightening of the brain."
Some people call intuition "the sixth sense," but that is misleading for several reasons. Most importantly, intuition goes way beyond its perceptual base. To paraphrase Mark Twain, "Everyone has an opinion on intuition but no one does much about it"
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Public Address: Coming Home: Body Image and Breast Cancer Presentation for George Washington Breast Cancer Center Luncheon, 10/16/08. This talk is copyright 2008 by Lynn Grodzki, all rights reserved. Reprint by permission only. Thank you for inviting me to be here with you today. This is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and breast cancer has been in the news. Christina Applegate, the star of the TV show called Samantha Who, was recently featured on Oprah and in People magazine as the “modern woman” with breast cancer. She is 36 years old and had a bilateral mastectomy with reconstruction. She told People magazine that she saw one upside of her situation. Christina said: “I will have cute boobs until I’m 90.”
When it comes to processing through loss, acceptance is the end stage. On a cold afternoon in November, 2005, while I was waiting for my next psychotherapy client to arrive, I hurriedly phoned the hospital for my biopsy results. I was sure that they were negative. (I was in a bit of denial myself.) Instead, I was put through to my doctor who told me that my biopsy showed early stage, but widespread cancer, requiring a mastectomy of my left breast. I remember walking out of my office to the waiting room to cancel my next client’s session, and then breaking down in tears. Love After Love, I also see my shoulder muscles and strong legs. I am an athlete. I smile and send a message of love to my body. This is the new me, the future me. In the words of Walcott, “I love again the stranger who was myself.” Dr. Spiegal says: Don’t hide your cancer from yourself or anyone else. Live beyond it. Just as he suggests, everyday, my cancer-free body beckons me to come home -- and if I listen closely, I can hear her call, loud and clear. |
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