The Anatomy of Intuition

What's your Intuition Quotient?

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

o passive imagination, which is the ability to generate images spontaneously. You are shown a black background, with nothing on it, and asked how many images come to mind. Also a background of white, of blue, and of yellow. It is a pristine measure of imagination, the pure production of images.

o psycho-osmosis, a word I invented for knowing the unknown. This skill enables you to recognize a dinosaur egg without ever having seen one before. "I didn't know I knew this," you are likely to say. This skill suggests some sort of collective memory bank of the species, because you couldn't have known on your own and no one ever taught you. Such a skill is necessary for surviving the flood that's coming. No one teaches you, there's no writing, but you survive anyway. Otherwise you drown.

While the input skills are passive, or static, the output skills must be activated by some event. These skills include:

o active imagination, the kind stimulated by pictures such as the Rorschach test, but differently directed for my purposes. I present an image of a snake. I am looking just for how many images come to mind.

o anticipation, or foresight, which is the ability to know what happens next. When is the horse going to fall down? When is the skater going to leap off the ice?

o optimal timing of intervention, which is the sense of when the time is ripe for something new. This skill is famous for making entrepreneurs rich. It is knowing when to buy the stock, when to sell it. On the battlefield, it's knowing when to attack. Or when to run. This is a skill intrinsic to survival and success.

o the hunch, or seeing the solution to a problem before you have it. This skill kicks off every major scientific discovery or work of art.

o the choice of best method, which is the crux of demonstrating rationally the truth of a hunch-knowing the right method to prove something or to create something. Michelangelo wanted to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, but how was he going to do it? By lying on his back on a ladder for seven years.

o the choice of best application of a discovery, which is the secret of innovative technologists and industrialists. Alexander Fleming, for example, not only had to see what the penicillin was doing in the petri dish-destroying the microbes-but to visualize that it could cure diseases by being formulated into a pill. It took another scientist to see the application, and a reasonably long time. Very rarely does the inventor apply the discovery. That's for the technologist.

o the hindsight that uses empathy and identification in order to divine the cause of things; this is the ability to put oneself in the place of another or to identify so closely with a person or object of the past as to come to understand its laws of operation. Historians apply this power to explain the past. Three Nobelists that I know of Jonas Salk, Barbara McClintock, and Albert Einstein-immersed themselves so deeply in their objects of study-viruses, genes, and a beam of light, respectively that they empathized and identified themselves with them! I had watched Fleming identifying with the microbes that were destroyed with penicillin. This allows them to apprehend the causes of things. You see a picture of a valley. It is devastated; all the trees are gone. You should be able to tell it wasn't a fire. It was volcano-burnt.

o associative and dissociative matching, which I call synthesis of cognitions. You look at a picture and know which elements are appropriate, which are not. These are the kinds of skill good detectives and graphologists have.

o seeing the meaning of things, a skill of seeing a symbol-a cross, a crown-and understanding its meaning.

Once I identified the skills involved in intuition, my colleagues and I could build a test around them. To test for intuition, of course, we first had to find a way to minimize the opportunity for analytical thinking. We needed to force fast extrapolations. There was only one way-to present visual images and to present them quickly, and to apply questions that would best fit the 20 skills.

For the test, I flash visual images of various aspects of human experience on a screen at a consistently steady pace and put to the pictures the universal questions of human experience-who, what, which, how, when and why. Exposure time to questions and images averages seven seconds.

If my theory on the origin of intuition is correct, only a test that's totally visual can get at the intuitive capacity. Vision, after all, is the modality of primary, primitive thinking. We know this because it is the language of sleep, of dreams, of fantasy, and of the imagination. Vision is more culture-free than any other modality because it is universal. It is carried with the greatest speed-the speed of light. And perhaps most important, vision packages more information than all the other senses put together. It lends itself to problem solving at speed. It dominates the interaction between all the senses. It is best fitted for representations of archaic and fundamental problems in living. And it lends itself to playfulness.

The playing grounds of intuition encompass all of human experience. So in the images we use we have taken pains to tap all possibilities for the play of intuition in human experience. We assay each skill against each of the four categories of objects in the world-inanimates, plants, animals, and humans.