Imagine That!

Annals of Ordinary and Extraordinary Genius

by Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein

Intuition and the Logic of Sensual Thinking

Heart-felt intuition has its reasons.

Published on February 28, 2011 by Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein in Imagine That!

Thinking in images and feelings is often dismissed as mere intuition. When a person "just knows" without the language to articulate how or why she knows, there may be difficulties in the boardroom-or the bedroom. But sensual thinking can be surprisingly "logical" as well as heart-felt.

Poet Stephen Spender

For a full description of sensual thinking, we turn to the 20th century poet Stephen Spender, who spent many a long hour wondering where his poems came from. Or didn't come, as the case sometimes was. Sometimes the most brilliant image, the most inspiring idea simply went...no where. One of these was the allusive line, "a language of flesh and roses," which one day dropped mysteriously into Spender's mind. Try as he might, he could not develop the thought. It wasn't words he was after, either, but visual and aural and tactile images, sensual associations and feelings. The poem was dead in the water for Spender because there was none of this sensual thinking to be had, no "sense-impressions, which he [the poet] has experienced and which he can re-live again and again as though with all their original freshness." There was no opportunity, in other words, to re-experience what he called "the logic of images." (1)

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The logic of images?! What Spender had in mind is not the formal logic one learns about in school. Nevertheless, sensual thinking does make sense-and not just for poets.

Martha Graham wrote about a "logic" of dance movement that had nothing to do with words, as did that other pioneer of modern dance, Doris Humphrey, for whom that logic was "all in the realm of feeling, sensitivity and imagination..." (2)

The composer George Antheil sought to write music "following out only the inner pattern, the inner logic..." which logic resulted, according to Stravinsky, in musical form. (3)

Physicist Albert Einstein, too, suggested "a certain connection" between the kinesthetic and visual sensations he conjured imaginatively and the "relevant logical concepts" that eventually composed his theory of relativity. (4)

Likewise, the mathematician Norbert Wiener discovered that many of his body feelings could "act as a temporary symbol for a mathematical situation." No matter how private the experience of particular sensations and emotions, how personal the recall, their imaginative articulation very often follows, as the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam would have it, a "sort of meta- or super-logic with its own rules." (5)

At present the closest concept we have to describe this meta-logic is the intuition. The dictionary defines intuition as the act or process of gaining knowledge without reasoning, immediate conviction without rational thought. Words rarely announce the intuitive insight. We just "see," we just "get it," we just "feel," we just "know."

Precisely because intuitive thinking is non-linguistic it is difficult to communicate such thinking to others, to open up personal understanding for public discussion and exploration. Consequently, more than a few individuals have dreamed of mind-melding and machines that vicariously transmit inner experience.

That day may be coming, but it's not here yet. In the meanwhile, we can always do like Spender and others who try consciously to understand and express their sensual thinking. For unlike Pascal's heart*, intuition may have its reasons which reason can recognize and respect. And that's good news, no matter who we are or what challenges we face. Next time we baffle others with our intuitions we, too, can re-live the logic of visual, aural or body images in search of the right words, the right metaphor, the right story, the right line, the right color, the right formula or the right hypothesis and share a feel for we know.

*The French philosopher Blaise Pascal is famous for having said that the heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know.

Notes:

(1) From "The Making of a Poem," reprinted in Ghiselin, B. (Ed.). (1952). The Creative Process. Berkeley: University of California Press Ghiselin, p. 118-120.

(2) Graham cited in Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of Mind, The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books Inc., p. 224; Humphrey, D. (1959). The Art of Making Dances. New York: Grove Press, p. 31.

(3) Antheil, G. (1944). Bad Boy of Music. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Doran, pp. 126-127; Stravinsky, I. and Craft, R. (1959). Conversations with Igor Stravinsky. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, p. 15.

(4) Cited in Hadamard, J. (1945). The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 142-143.

(5) Wiener, N. (1956). I am a Mathematician. London: Gollancz, pp. 85-86; Ulam, S. (1975). Adventures of a Mathematician. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, p. 183.

Sources:

Spender portrait @ http://www.faber.co.uk/archive/asset/121561/

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Tags: albert einstein, boardroom, dance movement, formal logic, given line, inner logic, intuition, martha graham, modern dance, physicist albert einstein, theory of relativity

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Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein are co-authors of Sparks of Genius, The 13 Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People (Houghton Mifflin, 1999).

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