I Reject Intuition and Insight

I think of the word intuition and the word insight as far too-comfortable and simplistic euphemisms for complex associative / syncretic /concilliative processes that operate in the brain all the time, and that we are too lazy to examine. We use the words intuition and insight to cover up the fact that we do not know how creativity operates, or what it really is. I don’t trust many of the words in common use that have to do with the mind and the brain, and with thought.

I never allow myself to deceive myself by using these words. Words are like stage ‘magicians’ who are distract us from what is really happening to the rabbit. Words like these, unexamined operational terms, have the reflexive effect of make us incurious and complacent. In this case, we end up remaining ignorant and believing in magic instead of science.

Intuition and insight are usually identified as the sources of ideas and sudden insights. Not so. We and our accumulated experiences, and the amassed brain associations among superficially dissimilar (but deeply similar) things are the sources of our own creativity.

Because I need to understand how creativity works, I reject the illusions of intuition and insight.

 

Comments

[Mayer Spivack]

response to comment below by mariana:
The beast is us. We and 'it' are not genies or a gods or tooth fairies for that matter. Nor is idea and the name of "creativity" beyond examination and renaming. Renaming gives us the opportunity of reexamining and redefining the mechanism of what we are naming differently. At that moment we may be able to break the puzzling thing into parts and see how they work. We tend to avoid rigorous examination of things that we believe that we understand already. Most good discoveries and science can be found in this kind of mind-experiment. I agree, there is no magic in a name, or in a new name, they are merely words. BUT if we examine how something works and re-name it it becomes a different, more transparent beast. So do We.

Mayer Spivack

[mariana]

A trick of the human mind has us believe that if we rename something, we have changed the fundamental nature of the beast, but we have not.
Take care M