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Intuition and the brain
« on: 2002-11-14 12:35:33 » |
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The Captain Kirk Principle
Intuition is the key to knowing without knowing how you know
Source: Scientific American
Author: Michael Shermer
Dated: 2002-11-11
Initially posted by Bill Roh in the CoV mailing list
Stardate: 1672.1. Earthdate: October 6, 1966. Star Trek, Episode 5, "The Enemy Within."
Captain James T. Kirk has just beamed up from planet Alpha 177, where magnetic anomalies have caused the transporter to malfunction, splitting Kirk into two beings. One is cool and rational. The other is impulsive and irrational. Rational Kirk must make a command decision to save the crew, but he is paralyzed with indecision, bemoaning to Dr. McCoy: "I can't survive without him. I don't want to take him back. He's like an animal-- a thoughtless, brutal animal. And yet it's me!"
This psychological battle between intellect and intuition was played out in almost every episode of Star Trek in the characters of the ultrarational Mr. Spock and the hyperemotional Dr. McCoy, with Captain Kirk as the near perfect synthesis of both. Thus, I call this balance the Captain Kirk Principle: intellect is driven by intuition, intuition is directed by intellect.
For most scientists, intuition is the bete noire of a rational life, the enemy within to beam away faster than a phaser on overload. Yet the Captain Kirk Principle is now finding support from a rich emerging field of scientific inquiry brilliantly summarized by Hope College psychologist David G. Myers in his book Intuition: Its Powers and Perils (Yale University Press, 2002). I confess to having been skeptical when I first picked up the book, but as Myers demonstrates through numerous well-replicated experiments, intuition-- "our capacity for direct knowledge, for immediate insight without observation or reason"-- is as much a component of our thinking as analytical logic.
Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal of Harvard University, for example, discovered that evaluations of teachers by students who saw a mere 30-second video of the teacher were remarkably akin to those of students who had taken the course. Even three two-second video clips of the instructor yielded a striking 0.72 correlation with the course students' evaluations.
Research consistently shows how so-called unattended stimuli can subtly affect us. At the University of Southern California, Moshe Bar and Irving Biederman flashed emotionally positive images (kitten, romantic couple) or negative scenes (werewolf, corpse) for 47 milliseconds immediately before subjects viewed slides of people. Although subjects reported seeing only a flash of light for the initial emotionally charged pictures, they gave more positive ratings to people whose photographs had been associated with the positive ones-- so something registered.
Intuition is not subliminal perception; it is subtle perception and learning-- knowing without knowing that you know. Chess masters often "know" the right move to make even if they cannot articulate how they know it. People who are highly skilled in identifying "micromomentary" facial expressions are also more accurate in judging lying. In testing college students, psychiatrists, polygraphists, court judges, police officers and Secret Service agents on their ability to detect lies, only the agents, trained to look for subtle cues, scored above chance.
The Captain Kirk Principle: intellect is driven by intuition, intuition is directed by intellect.
Most of us are not good at lie detection, because we rely too heavily on what people say rather than on what they do. Subjects with damage to the brain that renders them less attentive to speech are more accurate at detecting lies, such as aphasic stroke victims, who were able to identify liars 73 percent of the time when focusing on facial expressions. (Nonaphasic subjects did no better than chance.) We may even be hardwired for intuitive thinking: damage to parts of the frontal lobe and amygdala (the fear center) will prevent someone from understanding relationships or detecting cheating, particularly in social contracts, even if he or she is otherwise cognitively normal.
Although in science we eschew intuition because of its many perils (also noted by Myers), we'd do well to remember the Captain Kirk Principle, that intellect and intuition are complementary, not competitive. Without intellect, our intuition may drive us unchecked into emotional chaos. Without intuition, we risk failing to resolve complex social dynamics and moral dilemmas. As Dr. McCoy explained to Kirk: "We all have our darker side-- we need it! It's half of what we are. It's not really ugly, it's human. Your strength of command lies mostly in him."
Michael Shermer is publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com) and author of In Darwin's Shadow.
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rhinoceros
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Re:Intuition
« Reply #1 on: 2002-11-14 12:37:07 » |
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Gifted few make order out of chaos
Source: New Scientist
Author: Rachel Nowak, Melbourne
Dated: 2002-03-06
Some people have a special gift for predicting the twists and turns of chaotic systems like the weather and perhaps even financial markets, according to an Australian psychologist.
Richard Heath, who has now moved to the UK's University of Sunderland tried to identify people who can do this by showing volunteers a list of eight numbers and asking them to predict the next four. The volunteers were told that the numbers were maximum temperatures for the previous eight days. In fact the numbers were computer-generated: some sets were part of a chaotic series while the rest were random.
Random sequences are by their nature unpredictable, whereas chaotic sequences follow specific rules. Despite this, chaotic sequences are very hard to predict in practice because of the "butterfly effect" - even an unmeasurably small change in initial conditions can have a dramatic impact on their future state.
Nonetheless, Heath found that a quarter of the people he tested could predict the temperature for at least the next two days if the sequence was chaotic, rather than random, even though there is no obvious pattern to the figures.
"The $64,000 question is what is going on in their heads," says Heath. He is now planning studies to find out whether the skill is related to specific personality types, or to aspects of intelligence such as mathematical ability.
No cheating
David Gilden, a psychologist at the University of Texas in Austin, doubts that people can detect the next step in any sequence that lacks a perceptible pattern. "It's a strong claim, to assert that the skill only exists implicitly," he says.
But others are convinced that Heath is onto something. "It's sound. The effect looks real," says artificial intelligence expert Jeff Pressing of the University of Melbourne.
He and others point to a crucial difference between this and previous studies claiming to show that people can identify the patterns in chaotic systems: Heath distinguished between the effects of chaos and other characteristics of the sequences that might help people make correct predictions.
In particular, Heath was able to exclude the possibility that the people making successful predictions were doing so by looking only at the last few numbers. In other words, they were not able to cheat by assuming that "the weather tomorrow is likely to be the same as the weather today".
If the finding does stand up, testing for sensitivity to chaos might help financial institutions identify people who would do well as financial traders. "Some guys can't communicate what they are doing, but they make millions," says Pressing. "They have some sort of intuition. My guess is that they are sensitive to subtle non-linear structures like chaos."
Journal reference: Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences (vol 6, p 37)
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Re:Intuition and the brain
« Reply #2 on: 2002-11-14 12:40:15 » |
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Is it true that creativity resides in the right hemisphere of the brain?
Source: Scientific American
Author: Michael Sheldrick
Dated: 1998-01-26
Ned Herrmann is an educator and consultant, who has spent two decades developing models of brain activity and its relationship to the creative process. Herrmann headed management education at General Electric and founded the Ned Herrmann Group in 1980. Here is his view.
In answering this question, I need to refer to both the left and right hemispheres, as well as the limbic system. The two hemispheres are frequently referred to as left brain/right brain.
The left brain/right brain concept of brain specialization was thoroughly researched and documented by the surgeon Joseph Bogen; Robert Ornstein, author of The Psychology of Consciousness; and Roger Sperry, the psychobiologist who conducted landmark "split brain" experiments, that earned him the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1981.
Bogen first suggested to Roger Sperry that he conduct experiments on his so-called "split brained" patients, those whose corpus callosi had been surgically separated to alleviate intractable epilepsy. These award-winning experiments demonstrated significant differences in the mental capabilities of the brain's two hemispheres. The left hemisphere was shown to be logical, analytic, quantitative, rational and verbal, whereas the right hemisphere was revealed to be conceptual, holistic, intuitive, imaginative and non-verbal. Thus a classic dichotomy was born.
Many brain researchers and authors have documented this dichotomy extensively over the past 20 years. Ornstein was among the first, but many others followed. And, through their writing, they popularized the notion of left brain/right brain mental processing. But having personally researched both brain function and creativity for the same 20 years, I have concluded that creativity is a mental process utilizing all of the brain's specialized capabilities. It is, therefore, "whole brained." The Whole Brain Model
FOUR QUADRANTS define not only the left brain (A, B) and right brain (C, D) modes but also the cerebral (A, D) and limbic (B, C) modes.
The significant link to the right brain is pretty clear. The specialized characteristics of the right hemisphere make it the seat of curiosity, synergy, experimentation, metaphoric thinking, playfulness, solution finding, artistry, flexibility, synthesizing and in general, risk taking. In addition, it is likely to be opportunistic, future oriented, welcoming of change, and to function as the center of our visualization capability.
Every one of these specialized modes is capable of enhancing an individual's creative thinking. For example, an intuitive idea that pops into your mind and appears to solve a problem can be experimented with, visualized, integrated with other ideas and ultimately developed into a possible solution. That's the right hemisphere part.
Now, to do something about that possible solution requires different specialized mental processes, and these, by and large, are located in the left hemisphere. Diagnosing the proposed solution to determine whether it solves the real problem makes use of our rational processes of analysis and logic.
The next creativity step might be how to factoring in sequence, timing or implementation procedures. Since the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere are massively interconnected (through the corpus callosum), it is not only possible, but also highly likely, that the creative person can iterate back and forth between these specialized modes to arrive at a practical solution to a real problem. If the right hemisphere were somehow disconnected from the left and confined to its own specialized thinking modes, it might be relegated to only "soft" fantasy solutions, pipe dreams or weird ideas that would be difficult, if not impossible, to fully implement in the real world. The left brain helps keep the right brain on track.
Overall, creativity is a whole brain process. The brain is an electrochemical organ that works on the basis of neural activity that occurs in the cortex; it is well demonstrated that "thinking" takes place exclusively within the cortex. There are four main structures in the brain with a "thinking like" cortex. Two of them are the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. The other two are the left half of the limbic system and the right half of the limbic system. The limbic system is a bilateral complex of specialized structures that deal with such processes as memory, emotion, sequence, time, fight or flight and sensory responses. The principal limbic elements, each with its own cortex, are the hippocampus, the thalamus and the amygdala. Just as the two hemispheres are hardwired together by the corpus callosum, the two halves of the limbic system are similarly joined by the hippocampal commissure.
A model can be constructed that displays the four thinking structures in four quadrants (illustration above). This Whole Brain Model depicts the four structures as viewed from the back of the head. Building on this model, it is also possible to develop two other related models that define the Four Selves and the Creative Self. The Four Selves model describes the thinking characteristics of an individual in every day situations, and the Creative Self model describes them when that same individual is acting creatively.
The Whole Brain Creativity and Innovation model (illustration below) shows how specialized thinking modes are allocated to the four quadrants; interconnecting arrows illustrate the iterative capability of the brain. What I consider to be the most understandable description of the creative process consists of six phases: interest, preparation, incubation, illumination, verification and application. Each step of this process has its own characteristic brain waves. Creativity-Innovation Model
From a left brain/right brain perspective, the creative process can be diagnosed as follows: Interest (left and right), preparation (left), incubation (right), illumination (right), verification (left) application (left and right). It is a balanced process--four "lefts" and four "rights."
Over the many years that I've worked with this whole brain concept, I've become aware of significant male/female differences in mental processing preferences and competencies. Several are particularly relevant to creativity. It's clear that although both genders have left mode and right mode specialties, they are very different. To take advantage of these differences, it is highly desirable to have a balance of males and females on any creative team. Creative teams comprised of only males or only females are usually mentally incomplete--which often results in them jumping to early conclusions, arriving at poor solutions or both.
In summary, the role of the right hemisphere is essential to the creative process. But it supplies only a quarter of the thinking needed to realize the full creative process. We also need the left hemisphere and both halves of the limbic system to optimize creative output. And gender-balanced teams are clearly the most creatively productive
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