from mass meditation have boosted the stock market.” The writer
of the article, knowing that WSJ readers are a hard-boiled bunch,
goes to great lengths to show that the researchers at MIU adhered
strictly to the rules of scientific method. The article quotes Bruce
Russet, editor of a respected scientific quarterly: “I decided that
these people had played the scientific game correctly.” The MIU
researchers had used sophisticated and legitimate methods for
confirming their hypothesis that when a critical mass of “super
radiance” is created, it can affect nonmeditators and even the stock
market.
All of this may seem a bit farfetched (I warned you that we
were leaving earth orbit after Chapter 20!) and largely irrelevant
to everyday financial concerns. But this attitude may be changing,
as excerpts from a book by Laurie Nadel, entitled The Sixth Sense
(Prentice-Hall 1990), suggest:- Stanford University’s School of Business teaches intuition
as part of its “Creativity in Business” course taught by
Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers. - Surveys show that many chief executive officers rate intu-
ition as their most prized creative asset. - Government experiments on intuition show that intuitive
skills can be learned.
Furthermore, the Federal Reserve Bank has explored intuitive
forecasting models (note: I’m not making this up): “In 1988, the
Fed published a research paper titled ‘The Seasonal Structure
Underlying the Arrangement of Hexagrams in the I Ching” (Nadel,
The Sixth Sense). The I Ching is a 3,000-year-old Chinese divina-
tion method; it’s used like tarot cards or astrology to foretell the
future. (If the Fed officials involved in this are anything like the
investors I know, they probably denounced and buried this study,
and then later—in the washroom—asked the author, “So, ah, where
do you think rates are going?”)The Case for Intuition 23726-29 ware 237 1/19/01, 1:19 PM