The Anatomy of Intuition

What's your Intuition Quotient?

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

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."