Alfred P. Sloan, the former CEO of General Motors, presents a nice contrast. He was leading a group of high-level policy makers who seemed to have reached a consensus. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here. . . . Then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”

Herodotus, writing in the fifth century b.c., reported that the ancient Persians used a version of Sloan’s techniques to prevent groupthink. Whenever a group reached a decision while sober, they later reconsidered it while intoxicated.

Listening to intuition is not the act of concentrating on what you think you want. It is not hedonism, a move toward the most pleasurable short-term alternative. It is not giving vent to the inner emotional child left over from your infancy. It is simply paying clear attention, without mind chatter and emotions, to the most appropriate alternative that comes from the creative Essence.

Our speakers seem to tell us that intuition kicks in precisely when they move through the stress and the frustration to a calm, clear state beyond. At that moment, the appropriate action appears almost as a solid conviction: take the case of Robert Medearis. Instead of emotion, he prefers to talk about energy:

I think everybody has a certain amount of energy about them. And I think that one of the critically important things is to allow that energy to take place. Don’t be afraid of it, don’t try to channel it. Let it emerge. Because that energy is the source, it’s the food for the idea… Allow it to ferment, allow it to come out, allow it to bubble up if you will even though you might think that it’s somewhat negative in origin. Allow it to manifest.

George Armitage Miller lived in a world of words. Every object that fell into his vision and every word he heard instantly set off a cascade of associations, synonyms, and antonyms that flashed through his mind. A psychologist with an interest in understanding the cognitive processes behind language and information processing, he founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard. And, in 1980, long before digital networks were part of everyday life, he was the driving force behind the development of Wordnet, a still functioning online database that details the myriad lexical relationships between most words in the English language.

But for a while in 1983 he was stuck looking for a word to describe the relationship between living organisms and information. A fan of Erwin Schrödinger’s What Is Life, Miller was certain that Schrödinger had left something important out of his definition of life. In order for living organisms to consume free energy per entropy’s demands, Miller insisted, they had to be able to find it, and to find it they had to have the ability to acquire, interpret, and then respond to useful information about the world around them. It meant, in other words, that a significant proportion of the energy they captured was expended seeking out information using their senses and then processing it in order to find and capture more energy.

Therefore, my dear sir, I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, the burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside. From the creator must be a world for himself and find everything in himself and in Nature to whom he has attached himself.

FIFTEEN: The Transformer

“Words themselves meant nothing: in isolation, they were arbitrary collections of sounds. The only way to capture their meaning was to draw links between them and other words in the text. So if you had a knowledge graph linking the words “hop,” “green,” “tongue,” “flies,” and “amphibian,” then you knew enough to guess that the word in the center was “frog.” Not only that, but the graph should look the same in German, French, Swahili, or Vietnamese. The word wasn’t the letters “f,” “r,” “o,” and “g”—those letters were just placeholders. The word, in a cognitive sense, was that unique map of links to the rest of the vocabulary.