72 A Programmer’s Guide to the Mind
IntuitionA is the Perceiver analog to Mercy „doctoring.‟ Just as the
Mercy storage shed allows the Mercy person to come up with strange
solutions that work, so the Perceiver storage shed helps the Perceiver
person to develop unusual ideas that make sense.
Perceiver intuition gives us a sense for what is reasonable. The
Perceiver person lives within the Perceiver „room‟; the rest of us have this
mode of thought available under the surface. We all use Perceiver
reasonableness, for instance, when checking and comparing prices. For
example, we expect the cost of gasoline to vary by a few pennies between
service stations—this is reasonable. But if one station were to charge three
times the price of the other stations, or if the price of gasoline went up
overnight by two hundred percent, we would all consider this to be
completely unreasonable.
Intuition can be very helpful, but it can also be very wrong. How does
one build an accurate intuition? I suggest that the same three principles for
building a good Mercy storage shed of experience apply to the Perceiver
storage shed of facts: First, a mental storage shed only works effectively
when it is filled. The more facts I know, the more raw material there is for
intuition. For instance, my own personal storage shed of facts started
filling quite early—I read the encyclopedia even before I began school. I
have always read a lot and years of working together with my Teacher
brother have forced me to broaden my intellectual diet. Every time he
came up with a new theory, I would have to learn more facts in order to
know whether his ideas were right or wrong.
Reasonableness falls apart when Perceiver thought encounters a fact
that is completely new. Perceiver strategy puts its hand into the „storage
shed‟ and comes up with a blank: The new data does not remind Perceiver
strategy of any other facts, and therefore it cannot know whether this fact is
right, wrong, reasonable, or „out to lunch.‟ As a result, the Perceiver person
is often a conservative thinker. He prefers to stick with ideas which are
tried and true; he feels disoriented when he has to expand this base of
knowledge. When he encounters something genuinely original, the
temptation is for him to zero in on some error—real or perceived, and use
this as an excuse to label the material wrong and to reject it. Just as the
Mercy person can have problems with shyness, so the Perceiver individual
may hang on to the „apron strings‟ of limited knowledge. As a Perceiver
person, I can state that my intellectual horizons have generally been
expanded by other people. They prodded me over the initial hump of
uncertainty. Once I acquired a sense of reasonableness, then I could
usually motivate myself to study further.
A This book was written before we analyzed MBNI with its iNtuition,
Feeling, Sensing and Thinking. The term intuition in this book has a
meaning very different from that of iNtuition in MBNI.