In every category, each skill is tested at four levels of
difficulty of extracting information. The image most difficult to make
sense of is presented first. Each successive picture in each category
contains a progressively greater number of clues or increasingly detailed
information. In scoring the test, an answer furnished in response to the
first picture, the highest level of difficulty, scores the
highest.
Each of the four images in a sequence was painstakingly
constructed. We started with a photograph and computerized it. We pored
over thousands of pictures until I found the best one to fairly represent
each skill in each category of object. Then we used the computer to
progressively subtract a measured amount of detail. In testing, the image
with the least amount of detail-the image posing the greatest test of
intuitive power-is presented first. It has taken me the past two years
simply to assemble this test.
These 20 skills, each represented by four categories of objects,
and four levels of difficulty, add up to some 320 pictures; some skills
require a set up of more than four photos. The test runs one and a half
hours from a laser video.
Consider some examples: For the skill of anticipation, tested in
the animal category, a picture of horses racing is flashed on the screen
in minimal detail. The question asked is, "which of these race horses
will fall back?" The original photograph, which I happened to snap at the
racetrack, was taken a split second before one of the favorites died on
the track. If the subject does not answer in the seconds allotted, an
image of the same scene is shown in slightly greater detail, and so on,
until the correct answer is given. If after the subject sees the fourth,
and most detailed, image of the sequence, and still does not get it, the
score on that skill in that category is zero.
To test the skill of anticipation, this time through the category
of plants, a close-up photograph of flowers is shown. The test subject is
asked, which will bloom first? For a test of the same skill as deployed
on inanimate objects, the subject is shown a minimally detailed
photograph of a bowling ball heading down the alley, and asked: how many
bowling pins will remain standing? The intuitive skill of anticipation,
played out on the field of fellow man, is tested by means of an image of
runners competing in a dash; the test subject is asked, "who'll win this
race?"
Here's another sequence of images. The skill of hindsight, or
knowing why, in the human category is tested with the question, "What are
these people doing here?" The image shown, in progressively greater
detail, is of healing in the sacred Ganges.
To measure hindsight, using the category of plants, I ask, "What
destroyed this forest?" The image, shown in progressively greater detail,
depicts the devastation of a volcano. The skill of hindsight in the
animal category is tested with the question, "What injured this horse?, "
and the image of a horse near a wire fence. Hindsight, is measured in
inanimate objects through the question, "What broke the shingles off this
roof?", and an image of a house surrounded by crows.
UP TO SPEED
We have made an important discovery with the IQ2. Intuitive
capacity can be enhanced. imply taking the IQ2 test helps people improve
their intuitive capacity, not merely by sensitizing people to it, but by
challenging it.
Giving people seven seconds of exposure to images forces them to be
quick. We have observed that those who are intuitive, or initiated to it
(perhaps a tenth of the way through the test), move their eyes
differently from those who are not. Their eyes zigzag; they dart quickly
over an entire picture and make an accurate perception. When they are not
intuitive, or not initiated, their eyes move more slowly, more
systematically, and more uncertainly in circles until they find a point
to focus on-and it may be the wrong point. During the course of the IQ2,
we could detect which people found a pathway to intuition because they
changed their pattern of eye movements. Many people suspect that
intuition can be trained, but the eye effect is the very first evidence
that it can.
There is, in addition, "intuitive learning," an enduring memory
effect. Unlike analytical memory, once you know how to use the intuitive
process, answers are immediate, they are registered and retained in
immediate memory, probably photographically. The next time a picture is
shown, the subject has immediate access to the answer. By contrast, in
mathematics or any other form of analytic thinking, you have to rework
the problem.
And it is now possible to answer that old favorite: Do women have
more intuition than men? We will know definitively from applying the IQ2
to sufficient numbers of people. But clinically, judging from my
experience with 3,000 patients, I would say no. The false belief that
women are more intuitive than men was one of the reasons Western
societies, dominated by males and dominated by science, came to distrust
it.
On the other hand, anyone can see that women are quite a bit more
intuitive than men in human relationships. The likely reason is that they
were kept away from other more "cerebral" activities until the last half
century or so and, given full charge of child-raising and family life,
honed their social intelligence.
THE SECRET IS OUT
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