The Anatomy of Intuition

What's your Intuition Quotient?

By Daniel Cappon, published on May 01, 1993 - last reviewed on August 30, 2004

We'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.