« Right Brain Workouts

Centered Eye

By Peter Lloyd

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

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.
Next Workout »
Newsletter Sign Up

Join 40,000+ subscribers who receive our Open Innovation Newsletter every other week.

Subscribe