Intuition, Creativity, Innovation

Henri Samier

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781786302915
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119572534
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

This book explores the scientific perspective on the concept of intuition, particularly in relation to vibration, music and emotion. Taking a multimedia approach, it contains practical exercises that will help the reader to achieve greater intuition and develop their capacity for creativity and innovation.

The exercises in this book come from over a hundred workshops worldwide in both business and higher education. They include, for example, the "Mind Map of Me", an introspective exercise designed to develop trust and confidence in the self and the reader's own intuition.

The book opens the field of possibilities to the reader, offering encouragement and motivation to explore new approaches and techniques. With these tools, intuition can become a valuable ally in everyday life.

1
Understanding Intuition

We will start by exploring intuition from the point of view of etymology, history, and philosophy in order to explain it later based on current scientific knowledge. Once intuition has been justified scientifically, we will put forward some practical exercises that can test and prove these hypotheses. Explaining rationally the intuition process, which is a priori and essentially irrational, is perhaps a paradox, which will be dispelled in this work.

The etymology of intuition, intueri, intuitio, intuitus, intueor, reveals that intuition can be seen as a spontaneous gush coming from within, an ability to see all at once and a type of immediate knowledge that does not derive from a rational process or logical thinking. The process incorporates a double notion of a series of steps and complexity [HAL 11], so that intuition can then be defined as an intuitional process [HAL 17].

Man’s intuition emanates from within, from his mind and from his unconscious. It is a movement, an inner process that gushes outwards. Intuition is an unconscious¹ process that springs up in our consciousness and requires constant work, like Poincaré’s “intuition effort” [POI 08].

Intuition can be defined as a process, an apperception and an immediate type of knowledge that does not belong to either a cognitive process or an intellectual reflection. According to Kuhn, intuition depends on abnormal experience, in keeping with and acquired through an old paradigm. There is no logical connection between intuition and an interpreted experience. An “intuitive interpretation” corresponds to intuitive insights through which a new paradigm is born [KUH 62].

Is intuition merely an impression, a sensation or a feeling? If an individual has the impression that something has already happened before, is this a feeling or an unvalidated type of knowledge? If someone has the impression that something is going to happen, is this an anticipation, a premonition or a prediction? These are all questions that humans have asked themselves in the past, are asking themselves today and will perhaps ask themselves in the future. Some questions cannot be answered scientifically today, let alone yield rational models or equations that could account for the intuition phenomena.

Teilhard de Chardin [TEI 56] agrees with the idea that intuition comes from within: “Man, in whom the existence of a within can no longer be evaded, because it is the object of a direct intuition and the substance of all knowledge”.

According to Laborit [LAB 93], intuition is at the root of the irrational and constitutes the source of our creativity. The method guiding Henri Laborit’s exploratory research was based on intuition, analogy and boldness.

Throughout history, scientists, philosophers and experts in the “psyche” have debated the term intuition, its genesis and the way it functions. We can now find a substantial amount of literature on the topic, while questions are being asked about how intuition can be accessed or the development of related methods [CHO 18, GAW 18, GEE 10, KLE 03, MYE 02, OHA 11, STR 17]. Bergson established a relationship between intuition and inner experience on which consciousness was founded. He pointed out that intuition was possible only after a sustained intellectual effort [BER 38].

Hodgkinson defined the verb “intuit” as the complex set of interdependent cognitive, affective and somatic processes that include no deliberate intervention of rational thinking [HOD 08].

Intuition could then be considered as the missing link in the notion of exformation established by Nørretranders [NØR 99]. According to him, exformation is “the missing information” in communication.

For Jacques Fradin, “the concept of intuition can cover widely different realities. Can prefrontal intelligence use the form of ‘epiphany’ or insight illustrated by the famous Eurêka? This form naturally meets the prefrontal criteria that we will define later on. Conversely, intuition can originate in emotion, the association of ideas or feelings, and even instinctive emotions, such as the assessment of the danger posed by an individual or a situation (involving, for example, the limbic amygdala)” [FRA 10].

In this work, we will build on scientific foundations in order to explain how the intuition phenomenon manifests itself, we will put forward a method for developing intuition and systematize it and, therefore, for turning it into an “intuitive process”.

More than 300 doctoral theses have so far been written in France on the topic of intuition in its broad terms. This research has been carried out in such disparate fields as philosophy, psychology, linguistics, cognitive sciences, neuroscience, economics, management science, bioengineering, medicine, arts, social sciences, sociology, science education and language sciences. All these works of epistemological, psychological and philosophical analysis reveal the interest in the topic. Among these studies, Claire Petitmengin’s work demonstrates that the emergence of an intuition from the consciousness is an ineffable, subjective experience [PET 01].

The hard sciences and “scientific reasoning” are now based mainly on the three steps of the following approach:

• – step 1: observation and measurement: the observation step of the phenomenon is carried out with invasive measuring tools that do not modify the environment measured;
• – step 2: modeling and understanding: the modeling step resorts to mathematical, physical or thermodynamic models, among others, to understand and explain the phenomenon and the static and dynamic way in which it works;
• – step 3: synthesis and reproducibility: the synthetic step aims to demonstrate the limitations of the phenomenon and its modeling in order to show that the phenomenon can be explained and reproduced and, on the other hand, to put it into perspective with the aim of developing new research.

These three main steps are essential for the development of basic and applied sciences. However, they also raise the issue of scientific limitations in terms of measuring tools and mathematical models. For example, one of the difficulties faced by quantum physics involves measuring tools that in practice modify the “quantum” environment measured.

If we adopt the same approach employed by scientists who believe that intuition is a process springing up from within outwardly, we can then refer to the measuring tools called “internal” and non-invasive.

For example, to observe cerebral phenomena, we could refer to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and measuring tools: to measure blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, pulse and breathing rate; to observe changes in the states of consciousness and, why not, to m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Understanding Intuition
• 2 Exploring Our Intuition
• 3 Releasing Our Intuition
• 4 Developing Our Intuition: The “Mind Map of Me”
• 5 Intuition and Creativity
• 6 Intuition and Innovation
• 7 Intuition and Management
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement