|
The question of intuition comes up eventually whenever people discuss
creativity, innovation, and how the creative process works. Some reject the
idea of intuition as something magical or spiritual. Others disregard it as
a shortcut for hard, intellectual work, and a principal source of error.
It's easy to understand such skepticism. Intuition appears to present
conclusions without apparent effort. People who use it with ease and
creativity can come to correct, even brilliant conclusions and artful
masterstrokes without having done their empirical homework. Or so it seems.
Because intuition is not clearly understood, you will find no shortage of
self-styled experts willing to explain it and offer methods and systems for
using it to improve you life. But now there's some empirical evidence of
intuition at work over time.
Dr. Christopher W. Tyler of the
Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research
Institute, San Francisco, made an intriguing discovery at the beginning
of this century. While studying how people react to famous paintings, he
examined 170 portraits created over the past 500 years. He noticed that
almost all classic portrait painters arrange their subjects so that one eye,
not the nose, is in the horizontal center of the image.
At first, this may not seem all that startling. Nevertheless it amazed
Tyler, so he looked for evidence that painting schools had taught such a
rule. He found none. It seems artists just simply decide, consciously or
not, to center an eye. "I concluded that it must be intuitive," he says.
It's fair to say we've all experienced the power of intuition at some point
in our lives. Now, with Dr. Tyler's discovery, the record of intuition has
taken on a richer and deeper historical perspective. In short, humans appear
to make consistent, unconscious, aesthetic judgments. How they do it is
still a mystery.
Eye Placement Principle.
|
