William Duggan - The Seventh Sense: How Flashes of Insight Change Your Life

The Seventh Sense: How Flashes of Insight Change Your Life — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Seventh Sense: How Flashes of Insight Change Your Life" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...33

The Seventh Sense

WILLIAM DUGGAN

HOW FLASHES OF INSIGHT CHANGE YOUR LIFE

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright 2015 William Duggan

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-53943-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Duggan, William R.

The seventh sense : how flashes of insight change your life / William Duggan.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16906-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-53943-2 (ebook)

1. Insight. 2. Creative ability. 3. Creative thinking. 4. Epiphanies. 5. Change (Psychology) I. Title.

BF449.5.D84 2015

153.3dc23

2014045625

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .

Cover design: Noah Arlow

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For Lynn and Emmaline

Contents

I THANK MY MANY MBA and Executive students who put so much of themselves into the personal strategy part of the course that I teach at Columbia Business School. I and this book have benefited greatly from their work and thought. Some of their work appears in these pages. I offer special thanks to Hana Reznikov, an MBA graduate who pushed me to write up that part of the course so that she and others have something to pass on to their friends and relatives who might find it useful too. This book is the result.

And I owe a debt to the publisher, Myles Thompson, whose unfailing and creative support has served as inspiration for me for many years now. And then there is the editor, Bridget Flannery-McCoy. As you might guess from our names, she and I are both of Irish stock. So please forgive my blasphemy, but if you saw this manuscript before and after she got her hands on it, you would know that I do not exaggerate when I say: St. Bridget performed another miracle.

IT GOES BY MANY NAMES:

A flash of insight.

The Eureka moment.

A spark of genius.

The big Aha!

An epiphany.

Its the moment when a new idea forms in your head, and you suddenly see a way to accomplish something meaningful in your life. All the great minds, all the great leaders, all the great achievers have had at least one of these moments.

And you can too.

Thats because in recent years, thanks to the modern science of the brain, we know enough now about flashes of insight to take full advantage of this mysterious power of the human mind.

Thats what this book is about.

Here I call it the seventh sense. You know about your five sensessmell, taste, touch, sight, and hearing. Scientists have studied them for hundreds of years. What you might not realize is that your five senses are mental abilities. A sensation starts at your nose, your tongue, your skin, your eye, or your ear, but then nerve cells connect it to your brain, and thats when it becomes a sense. Your nose takes in an odor, and your brain turns it into the smell of warm rain. Your tongue feels a tang, and your brain turns it into the taste of lime. Your ear hears a sound, and your brain makes it birdsong.

The key way your brain turns sensation into sense is through memory. Modern neuroscience has revealed the importance of memory in how humans make sense of the worldstarting with your five basic senses. You recognize the smell of a rose because youve smelled it before. Its in your memory. If you smell an odor and cant tell what it is, thats because its not in your memory: you cant make sense of the sensation. If you smell something and think its familiar but cant place it, your brain searches your memory to identify what it is.

Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize in 2000 for his pioneering work on how the brain learns and remembers. He says in his Nobel speech:

For me, learning and memory have proven to be endlessly fascinating mental processes because they address one of the fundamental features of human activity: our ability to acquire new ideas from experience and to retain these ideas in memory. In fact, most of the ideas we have about the world and our civilization we have learned so that we are who we are in good measure because of what we have learned and what we remember .

Learning and memory play a key role in the sixth sense too. The most common name for this sense is intuition. You make a snap judgment, or you get a feeling about something because youve seen it before in some other situationeven if you cant quite recall what exactly that situation was. Herbert Simon won the Nobel Prize in 1978 for his work on intuition and memory, and today Gary Klein is one of the fields leading scholars. Malcolm Gladwells popular book Blink presented recent research on the power and pitfalls of the sixth sense.

Think firefighters, emergency room nurses, or soldiers in battle. They all make quick decisions that repeat in some way what theyve done before. They all have a strong sixth sense. As you get better and faster each time you do some complex task, that builds up your sixth sense. If youve ever mastered a musical instrument or any kind of sport, you know what its like to have a sixth sense. Or if you walk into a meeting and know exactly whats going on, before anyone explains itthats your sixth sense in action. Its a form of dj vu. Youve seen some version of the situation before, and your brain calls it up from your personal memory.

Thats the power of the sixth sense. But theres one situation where it doesnt work at all, and can actually lead to you make the wrong decisions: when you think youre seeing the same situation, but youre not. Daniel Kahnemans Thinking Fast and Slow is full of clever experiments that made even experts jump to the wrong conclusions. Their sixth sense failed them. You can probably recall times yourself when your intuition was wrongwhen you followed your gut and it turned out to be a mistake. Thats because you recognized something familiar, but the rest of the situation was new. Your intuition only works when you encounter something very similar to what youve seen before. If the situation is new, your sixth sense isnt enough.

For a new situation, you need a new idea. And your sixth sense cannot give it to you. Your intuition gives you the same idea, again, faster and better with each repetition. For new situations, for new ideas, you need something else.

You need the seventh sense.

The seventh sense is the mechanism of the human mind that produces new ideas. Its the epiphany, the flash of insight, the Eureka momentin the form of an idea you never had before. And in its highest, rarest form, its an idea that no one else had before either. The seventh sense is how new ideas are born. And not just new ideas, but useful ideas. Human achievement advances through flashes of insight that come from the seventh sense.

Some new ideas lead to major changes in how the world works, but the majority of them just change the world of one person. Behind the scenes, lost to history, are millions of new and useful ideas that solve individual problems of life or work. A painful family or romantic relationship might call for a new and useful idea to heal it, and to solve that problem you need the seventh sense. Or a project gets bogged down at work, and you need a new idea to save it. These personal creative ideas, for work or life, are just as important for advancing human achievement and the quality of our lives as great innovations like electric light or the personal computer. And they happen in your brain in exactly the same way too. All of them come from the seventh sense.

Next page

1234567...33

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Seventh Sense: How Flashes of Insight Change Your Life»

Look at similar books to The Seventh Sense: How Flashes of Insight Change Your Life. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Mohammed bin Maktoum

Flashes of Thought: Lessons in life and leadership from the man behind Dubai

John Kounios

The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain

Barbara Oakley PhD

Uncommon Sense Teaching: Practical Insights in Brain Science to Help Students Learn

William Duggan

Creative Strategy

Rogers

High performance fencing: the seventh essential

Ramo

The seventh sense: power, fortune, and survival in the age of networks

Tina Seelig

Insight Out: Get Ideas Out of Your Head and Into the World

Joshua Cooper Ramo

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks

Lyn Buchanan

The Seventh Sense: The Secrets of Remote Viewing as Told by a Psychic Spy for the U.S. Military

Hans M Hirschi

Common Sense - in Business & Life

Cyrill Harnischmacher

Tabletop Photography: Using Compact Flashes and Low-Cost Tricks to Create Professional-Looking Studio Shots

Javy W. Galindo

The Power of Thinking Differently: An Imaginative Guide to Creativity, Change, and the Discovery of New Ideas

Discussion, reviews of the book The Seventh Sense: How Flashes of Insight Change Your Life and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.