The US military are using the same ‘weapons’ as artists.

Artists learn to make decisions on the basis of what feels ‘right’. ‘Intuition’ determines the way that things are put together. It’s one of those elusive abilities which is hard to measure and therefore tends to be under-rated.

Soldiers are using this same skill when they notice something ‘not right’. In Iraq and Afghanistan it helps them navigate the endless booby traps of a guerilla war.

The Learning Connexion has been paying attention to intuition ever since the school began in 1988. In the early days of TLC about 90% of our students showed an ‘intuitive’ preference compared to the general population average of 25% based on psychometric tests). This led us to believe that the school system as a whole may have a blind spot for intuition.

Possibly intuition has a hard time because it gets no credit in conventional assessments and is therefore off the radar. The main areas where it can flourish are the arts and sport. Outside of school you can add politics, parenting and business to the list. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why success in business doesn’t correlate closely with academic success.

The US Army, which pays attention to survival, is working hard to quantify intuitive skills and to train people to be intuitive. The fact is that intuition is an aspect of perception and it improves by being used. It was given plenty of practice in the distant days when we had to be constantly aware of predators and enemies. In the modern world intuition gets less of a workout. Ironically war zones come close to duplicating the situations in which intuition made the difference between who lived and who died.

There are several ways to improve your intuition. The first step is awareness. If you have a feeling that friends are suddenly going to arrive – and then they do – pay attention. After many such events you’ll get better at distinguishing real perception from fears and wishes.

In art, students gradually discover that their intuitive decisions get stronger results than ‘painting by numbers’. Their art ‘works’ better.

Parents learn to distinguish very subtle clues about whether their children are OK. Very young children are great trainers because all their communication is non-verbal and they force adults out of their usual ways of thinking.

The US Army is testing and training by using some fairly old-fashioned techniques, such as spotting a hidden item in a picture. The catch with this approach is that it’s boring, whereas a real-life battle situation has all senses on heightened alert. I believe they could improve their training by using art. The New Zealand Army took a tentative step in this direction when it hired TLC to do some leadership training back in the 90s. One of the early findings was that army officers had a considerably lower intuitive preference than art students. I suspect the project could have been taken further.

Academic researchers are gradually building a case that fuzzy attributes like emotions and intuition are intimately connected with rational thinking. Dr Antonio Damasio*, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, says: “We understand emotions as practical action programs that work to solve a problem, often before we’re conscious of it. These processes are at work continually, in pilots, leaders of expeditions, parents, all of us.”*

There are big implications for education. In difficult economic times it’s all too easy to over-ride the value of intuition and put all our resources into building a nation of half-wits.

* New York Times.