"Winsights" by Dr. Win Wenger

This is a compilation of the Winsights book gathered on the Internet site www.botree.com.

Part 2: A Guaranteed Way to Improve Your Intelligence By More Than 20 Points.
Part 3: Image-Streaming
Part 4: How to Feel Better Instantly
Part 5: A Fast Way to Get Your Best Answers
Part 6: A Partial Taxonomy of All Possible Methods For Solving Problems
Part 7: An Emphatic Recapitulation And Summary
Part 8: Make Learning Easier Part 1
Part 9: Make Learning Easier Part 2
Part 10: Solution of the Month
Part 11: Your Personal Empowerment
Part 12: Getting More Intelligence Online
Part 13: In 900 Minutes, YOU Can Be Composing
Part 14: A Fun Way To Teach Your 2-Year-Old
Part 15: HOW TO RUN BETTER MEETINGS, GROUPS, CLUBS AND CLASSES
Part 16: How to See with Artistic Eyes
Part 17: Some New Methods
Part 18: Help a Young Child to Flower
Part 19: Learning from the Lessons of the Future


A Guaranteed Way to Improve Your Intelligence By More Than 20 Points.

The procedure is called "Image-Streaming." It is a modernization of Einstein's "Deep Thought" Discovery Method, combined with a modernized version of Socratic Method. Both methods, throughout history, have been closely associated with extraordinarily high levels of mental, perceptual and intellectual performance. We finally figured out why this is so.

Einstein was not the first to use his method, but he was the first respected scientist to "go public" with it. He would let mental imagery play freely, and examine it as closely as possible to see what he could learn from what he observed (e.g. using this method he learned relativity). However, in its original form the Deep Thought Discovery Method is a very soporific process. He, and others who used it, would tend to nod off.

The Socratic Method arose from the context of the first schools in our civilization's tradition. Those schools were not for the sake of students. They were for the purpose of providing audiences to the leading thinkers of the times. They could better develop their thoughts and perceptions by describing them to those select audiences. In turn, the nicer people - especially the Sophists and most especially Socrates - would return the favor and draw out ideas from their listeners in turn. This drawing-out process proved so productive of miracle leaps in understanding that education itself became named after it, when observed in the root - "educare" (L.), "to draw forth."

Anything you fix your perceptions on, examine, and describe out in detail to a listener, you will discover more and more and more about. This should not surprise anyone familiar with laws of behavior and psychology, especially the Law of Effect: "you get more of what you reinforce." Further, when you describe your own perceptions (not someone else's second-hand information as is the case in today's didactic classrooms) you reinforce the behavior of being perceptive.

When the Socratic Method was in extensive use - in late classical Greece, of course, and again during the European Renaissance - those tiny population bases produced not only a higher ratio but an enormously higher absolute number of world-class geniuses than the number found in today's didactically taught 6 billion people! Think of this in terms of "what gets reinforced" and "what does not get reinforced" in these two approaches to "education."

Especially when we look not at the formalities of fierce argument and dialog in which the original Socratic Method was cast, but at what these methods did: cause people to examine their own inner and outer perceptions, and to attempt to respond to or describe what they discovered there.

Put this aspect of the Socratic Method together with the Einsteinian Deep Thought Discovery Method and suddenly you no longer have something so soporific. Instead you have a sensitive, subtle process delving deeply into one's own personal symbology in an intensifying, vivid experience of one's own free-flowing inner imagery. And that free-flowing imagery is always giving important insights, at any and every given moment, even though nearly all of us have been ignoring this remarkably invaluable personal resource all these years!

Image Streaming is the "purest" of the many forms of this combination of modernized Einsteinian and Socratic Methods. It not only shows you a wealth of in-sight and understanding, but reinforces more and more of whatever intelligence you may have online with your immediate consciousness. With this your performance on intelligence tests rises permanently, and the numinous qualities of experience more and more enrich your life day by day. Independently conducted state university tests have been demonstrating, since 1989, that even as few as 25 hours of easy, entertaining practice of Image Streaming improves your intelligence by, on average, 20 "IQ" points (Southwest State University, Dept. of Chemistry & Physics, Marshall, Minnesota; attn. Prof. Charles P. Reinert.)

Further, neither of us havebeen able yet to find anyone (out of thousands trained) who cannot learn and practice some form of Image Streaming and thus begin to harvest these intelligence gains and many other benefits!

Not only is Image-Streaming "good for you" like a medicine in that practicing it builds your mind and the interconnectedness of your brain. It is also: * Highly entertaining in its content! * Loaded with understandings about your world and about yourself and those important to you. * What was REALLY going on when you..... * Creative problem-solving. * Profoundly accelerated and improved learning. * Innovating and creating and inventing. * A fast road to scientific discoveries * A way to gain control of your autonomic physiological processes

Next week we will show you a step by step method for getting in touch with your own Image-Stream..

Getting At Your Own Einstein Factor:

Some Ways to Get At Your Own Real Genius:

Albert says: to practice some form of my Deep Thought Method: Let your imagery play, examine it as closely as possible to see what you can learn from it. We say, practice Socratic forms of Einstein's Deep Thought Method. While observing these free images, describe them in detail to a listener; be surprised at what comes up for you.

Here are a few of the many additional ways to bring up your own very real genius to enrich your life:

1) Find ways to "get on a roll," stay on a roll, get back to being on that roll, until more falls into it.

2) Find ways to verbally describe "the indescribable:" where you have to "reach" to convey an effect, is your growth zone.

3) Pick up on and describe subtleties and nuance. These arise in parts of your brain usually offline from where you are verbally focused, conscious. Describing subtler impressions reinforces more and more onto line with your immediate consciousness those subtler regions of your brain, together with their intelligence.

4) Improve the physical health and condition of your physical brain:

a) Improve circulation to your brain; b) Improve nutrition to your brain; c) Improve your brain's sub-routines.

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Image-Streaming:

Your Own Most Powerful Mode of Thinking

Here, as promised, are the instructions for your most powerful mode of thinking and perceiving: receptive visual thinking, or Image-Streaming. 25 hours of Image-Streaming increases intelligence at an average rate of 20 "I.Q." points. It also appears to improve the deeper and more numinous qualities of experience and ability to an even greater extent.

Image-Streaming is also the most fundamental version of the modernized Einsteinian Discovery Method or "deep thought experiment". Image-Streaming can powerfully help you to: solve problems; discover answers; profoundly accelerate learning; inform you about all sorts of aspects of your world and those around you and about yourself; and even accelerate and improve your reading.

You were born already thinking in images. For years that was how you thought, perceived and understood the world. When well-meaning parents and teachers and adults told you to stop daydreaming, stop looking out the window, to sit straight and pay attention, this most powerful of all your modes of learning, understanding and thinking did not go away. It merely went underground, so to speak. You still have within you a reflex response which draws upon all your resources including the deeper, subconscious powers of your mind for solving problems, increasing creativity, and crystallizing understanding. 99.999999% of your mental and intellectual resource, perception, awareness, and data-base is unconscious, and works much faster than does your conscious mind which has been trained by the language you speak to work at the speed of your talking.

Nearly all this data-base and awareness reside in portions of your brain which work in images rather than words and it is usually in images that the most reliable answers and understandings are expressed. --If an answer comes in words, did it come from these richer resources or from the limited left verbal focussed part of our brain with which we've been getting the same old answers? If it comes in images - especially if the imagery content is a surprise to us - this is an excellent indicator that we're getting in data from elsewhere in our brains besides the same old word-processor.

At every instant, part of ourselves is reflexively sorting through all our awarenesses and giving us a picture which best relates whatever is the present context. The context can be that of your reading this article, or you can shape context by asking your higher resources a question or pointing them to a problem and letting them answer you in images. Here is one of the many basic, step-by-step ways to sensitize to, use and understand your Image Stream:

1. THE QUESTION - ask yourself a question.

2. START TO IMAGE-STREAM, as follows. Have a live listener or tape recorder with you. Sit back, relax, close your eyes, and describe aloud whatever images suggest themselves. Go with your first or most immediate impressions and describe these images or impressions aloud, as rapidly as possible in as sustained a flow as possible, in richly textured sensory detail. Make it a kind of brainstorm of description, not of ideas but of adjectives, things you can say about the image(s) which somehow describe it or them. AS you describe, more free images will emerge: be alert to that or to other changes and describe these when they happen, instead of making it all into some sort of orderly story.

It's crucial to describe aloud to live or potential listener (as represented by that tape recorder), in order to bring more of your images into conscious awareness, no matter how unrelated the images may at first appear. They may seem to your focussed verbal left brain, at first, to be unrelated to the question or context but once you've let all of the data flow freely onto the table, so to speak, you'll find what you've been describing was amazingly and ingeniously straight on target: the right answer or a key insight.

Let yourself be surprised by what the images reveal to you. The more surprising, the more likely that you're getting fresh input from your subtler, more comprehensive and more accurate faculties.

(A few paragraphs below, we provide here some back-up procedures for those who, at first attempt, didn't seem to be able to get up images. If you were one of those, then you can work through one or another of these back-up procedures and then come back to this point to decipher the meaning of your images. The remaining five of the 7-step process for image streaming given here, are for purpose of getting at the meaning of your images. Whether or not you get at the meaning of your images, simply observing and describing them aloud WHILE observing them will still build your intelligence for that 20-point "I.Q." gain and more.)

3. FEATURE-QUESTIONING: while in the imagery, pick out some one feature of it - a wall, a tree or bush, whatever's there. Imagine laying a hand on that feature and studying its feel (and describe that feel), to strengthen your contact with that experience. Ask that rock or bush or wall, "Why are you (meaning that object) here as part of my answer?" (--Or as part of this message for me...) See if the imagery changes when you ask that question. Describe the changes.

4. INDUCTIVE INFERENCE: once you've gotten 5-15 minutes' worth of images described, thank your image-streaming faculties for showing you this answer. --And ask their help in understanding this answer or message. The help is by their giving you 2-3 minutes of entirely DIFFERENT images which nonetheless somehow are still giving you the SAME answer to the SAME problem. --Then a third set of images for just a minute or so, still the SAME answer or message but shown to you in yet an entirely DIFFERENT WAY!

5. WHAT'S THE SAME? When all else is different among these several sets of image, what IS the same? Maybe it's the color green, maybe it's triangular-shaped objects; maybe it's even just a feeling - whatever IS the same, it's the core of the message after all the ornamentation of these often-rich experiences is swept aside. These themes or elements-in-common are your core answer or message.

Herein is an additional powerful reason for wanting to describe as much detail as possible from your respective sets of images. --Not only because this helps to better integrate your brain and make you more intelligent, but because the more detail you have there from those several sets of image, the easier it is to find matches, themes, elements-in-common which then will let you make sense out of what you've seen.

6. RELATE: Go back to your original question or context and determine in what way or ways these core elements ARE the answer to your question.

7. DEBRIEF: When you go back through an experience, this often elicits for you secondary associations, thoughts and awarenesses not immediately apparent to you the first time. Summarize this whole experience either to another person (directly or by telephone), or to notebook or computer. This change of medium, and change of feedbacks, brings in fresh secondaries and should add further to your understanding.

Verification - you might want to test and check your responses with questions such as these:

1. "How can I make sure that I'm on the right track with this understanding?" (You should get back, through your imagery and assorted awarenesses, either a way to test and verify, or a reminder of real-time data or experiences which demonstrate that this is the right answer to be working with.)

2. "What more do I need to know in this context?"

3. What's a a good, practical, concrete first step to acting upon this understanding?"

One unique advantage of Image-Streaming: nearly all other creative problem solving methods invest most of their effort into redefining the question or problem, before they ever get started on finding answers. Your deeper faculties already know what the real issue, problem or question IS, and immediately get on with giving you answer to it.

Another is the speed-up of answer-getting, with practice. Though the intelligence-building effects of Image Streaming are an accumulation of the time invested in the activity, with practice you CAN get to your verified answer in a mere minute or so, when in that particular instance the answer sought is of more value to you than is the increment of intelligence-building experience.

Everyone can get these images and start gleaning their benefits. If you are one of those who couldn't immediately start getting images in the sections above, and need some help getting started, here's some help.

These "prompting techniques" work best if you have a helper, or listener, who can watch your "attention cues" (changes in your breathing-patterns, or eye-movements beneath your closed eyelids) and in such instance immediately ask you, "What was in your awareness just then?" to help you notice when these images happen, and start the flow of description going. This "Helper Technique" is in fact the form in which we first discovered Image-Streaming in 1973. Some other "prompting techniques:"

1. AFTER-IMAGING: Stare at a bright (but not blinding) light for half a minute, then close your eyes. Describe that after-image and continue describing it as it begins to change.

2. WORTH DESCRIBING: Even if at first you don't get clear images, you may get blobs of color, lines or patterns which you didn't report because you didn't think they were worth mentioning. IT'S ANY WAY YOU CAN GET UP THE FLOW OF DESCRIBING WHILE LOOKING, so describe even those trivial or meaningless-seeming blobs or lines, rapidly and in detail, alert to their changing. If this does not lead to more coherent or interesting images within 5-10 minutes, then deliberately look BEYOND the colors, patterns, etc., as if they were a screen, and describe your first impression of what's beyond that screen.

3. PHOSPHENES: Again on the principle of getting started that flow of describing-while-looking. Gently rub your closed eyes like a sleepy child. Leave them closed, and describe the light-and-c0olor blips which result. Keep on describing as these change....

4. DOOR: Imagine you are before a closed door. Tell how this door looks, then how it feels to your hand when you touch it. Then suddenly fling open the door to catch by surprise whatever is behind it. Describe immediately your first impression of what it is or might have been behind the door. (This method is excellent for finding answer to a question. While standing before the closed door, pose your question. The more unexpected the content of the imagery, the better your chances of getting sensitive, fresh new perspectives and insights.) WINDOW-SHADE - the release/roll-up kind: some people prefer using this old-fashioned window-shade instead of a door. Pose your question, look at and feel the bottom of the shade, tug and release: UP it goes! flap!flap!flap! and what are you looking at as your answer?

5. CLOSET LIGHT (or bathroom light) - with eyes closed, rapidly flip the light on-off-on-off a few times and describe the rich colors, patterns or other kinds if images which result, see what the flow of that description can lead into....

That's all we have space for here, but more than a dozen additional "prompting procedures" are published in my book, A METHOD FOR PERSONAL GROWTH & DEVELOPMENT which teaches, step by step, the whole range of modern Einsteinian technique from basic visual thinking to the most advanced forms of advanced high think-tank method. Chances are you won't need more such techniques; you've got enough here to get rolling on and to build your mind and intelligence without apparent limit. --But you should know that not one person has yet been found out of thousands trained (either in our own training sessions around the world or in the independently conducted state university studies in Minnesota which measured the intelligence gains) who has gotten through all those procedures withOUT "getting pix" and starting to reap the rich benefits. That means that intelligence - indeed, most of the qualities which make you most human - is not doled out by ration, leaving you stuck with the short straw. Intelligence and your most human qualities can be earned, they can be built, without apparent limits. everyone has unlimited access. If this address of "intelligence" be "elitism," then make the most of it! Or come fly with some of your fellow eagles!

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How to Feel Better Instantly

What does feeling good have to do with a series on factors affecting levels of intelligence, creativity and performance? Especially when it is possible to override illness and injury en route to a winning performance as we have so often seen in televised sports?

One of the most important considerations is the LONG-term stamina needed to see your idea or endeavor through to success. If your body is in the habit of prolonged ill feeling or weakness, it's much harder to stay with your effort Few in fact are able to do so.

Another is the clear functioning of your intelligence itself, which in large part is partially determined by the clarity or congestion of your senses. Try taking an "I.Q." test or playing a video game immediately after a Thanksgiving feast, for example.

There are many emotional factors that affect your intelligence. The techniques I describe below will help you get in control of you emotions. I will also show you a way to use virtually the same technique for problem solving!

These breathing techniques work faster than any pill with no adverse side-effects! The first time through, try each of these two breathing-patterns, "Velvety-Smooth" and "Relief Breathing," for 1-2 minutes each. Thereafter, use "Velvety-Smooth" ANY time, ANY occasion, to feel much, much better in only 5-10 seconds! Use "Relief Breathing" to win immediate relief from whatever is currently bothering you or causing you difficulties.

Note: most of the difficulty we encounter in life, we inflict on ourselves by our reactions. These are reactions not only to present situations but to most of our previous difficulties as well. If we could put all that aside, life would be much easier. All we'd have to deal with is the actual situation itself! Likewise, most of the pain we experience in any injury or illness, we inflict on ourselves. If you could somehow just set all that aside and have only the actual problem to deal with, you'd be almost invulnerable....... And here are two easy ways to set all of that aside.....

Relief Breathing:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Vividly imagine having to carry a heavy sack of groceries a lot farther than you had expected. Feel the weight, the sweat, the ache in your arms and shoulders, whatever that experience is for you. How strongly can you imagine, feel, see that?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Now imagine finally arriving at the table or counter or chair where you can finally set down that burden. Breathe your first breath of relief as that wonderful easing happens.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Now breathe your next breath as if it were that first deep sigh of relief from when you were finally setting down that burden.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Each next breath, when you get around to it (this should be a luxuriously slow process of breathing), make that your first great sigh of relief as you set down that burden at last. Make each next breath that first great sigh of relief..... (Continue for several minutes, s-l-o-w-l-y.)

It's as easy as that! Compare how you're feeling now. Better than when you started? Breath is regulated by, and provides a bridge to, your autonomic nervous system. By breathing in a focussed-relief pattern for several minutes, you signal your nervous system to relieve you of anything bothering you. This is a great little tactic to use when you find yourself below par or being bothered by something.

Not only do you breathe in characteristic ways in response to what's going on or how feel, but you can breathe deliberately in such patterns. This causes the autonomic nervous system to make your state-of-being congruent with that pattern of breathing! You can even "read" more from someone's breathing than you can from their "body language". Evidence? Compare, among the sensory handicapped, how well in society the long-term blind do despite the gravity of that handicap, as compared to the long-term deaf.

The easiest way to learn the various breathing patterns consciously and to use them for bringing about desirable conditions and states-of-being, is to closely observe infants or very young children. They breathe "transparently" and it's easy to learn from their breathing what's going on with them. Once you've learned a pattern there, you can then spot it also in fellow adults and experiment with it in yourself. This is what yours truly did, which led to 70-some identifiable patterns. About 40 of which were for desirable states-of-being or conditions. The best of these were published as "the Calm-Breathing Patterns" in my book "Beyond O.K. - Psychegenic Tools Relating to Health Of Body & Mind", way back in 1979) Someone else making such observations would no doubt develop a different categorical system, but it'd likely be as useful.

Velvety Smooth Breathing * Can you imagine how it would feel to your fingers, to be stroking gently a long smooth strip of sleek silk or plush velvet? Imagine the sheer luxury of that feeling. For 10-30 seconds, remember or imagine and intensify the luxurious feel of stroking that silk or velvet. Really get into the sheer luxury of that feeling. * Now let your breathing become long, slow, smooth, luxurious.... Let your breathing be like it's stroking you. --Stroking you gently like a long luxuriant piece of sleek silk or plush velvet. Let your breathing be stroking you as if your whole body, head to toe, were a long luxurious strip of silk or velvet. * With each following breath, find a way to breathe more like that than the breath before it. More luxuriously with each breath, as if you were that silk or velvet being stroked.

Practice intensifying - not just maintaining but intensifying, breath to breath, this luxury-feeling effect, for at least two more minutes. (Remember, s-l-o-w-l-y!)

After two minutes of this breathing, compare the way you are feeling now with the way you were feeling before you started. Memorize intently the resultant feeling. Use that remembered feeling as a takeoff-point next time or session, and breathe further into luxuriousness from there.

The occasions and situations in your life where this can make the biggest difference for you, are exactly those occasions and situations when you feel least like breathing in luxurious delight. Once you've practiced several good sessions of "Velvety-Smooth" you can revisit this experience at will. Any time you find yourself under stress, shoulders or neck stiffened or you're breathing high in your chest, you can use this technique and reap the most benefit.

Suggestion: you can further help the benefits of this technique by visiting your spice rack and opening your favorite aromas, such as vanilla, peppermint (or coffee or some favorite perfume). Have 2-3 various of these open which you can breathe one breath from each, back and forth for comparison, and make your breathing not only velvety-smooth but delicious!

Have you tried this Velvety-Smooth Breathing experience yet? Do so now. The two minutes invested now will be made back for you many times over. It will improve your productivity the next two hours or so, by relieving stress and making you feel better. Feel good right now! There's no charge or cost or penalty for feeling good this ultimately natural way.

Problem-solving: the solution in a breeze!

Not only will this technique make problem situations easier by setting aside all the frustrations you inflict on yourself. You can even use such breathing to discover solutions to problems!

The trick is to orient on a problem you've been working hard on, then set it completely aside and then begin either Velvety-Smooth or Relief Breathing or one of the other Calm-Breathing Patterns, this time not for 2 minutes but for as long as it takes to completely clear the problem away or even to nod off. When you find yourself perceiving the apparent answer, make yourself alert and work from there.

Traditionally, many creative people followed the practice of "going to sleep" on a problem and waking up with its solution. While this is a long way from our strongest creative problem-solving method, it does work often enough. It works because from the first instant of contact with a question or problem, the best answer or insight emerges deep in the back of your mind. Sometimes you've experienced the answer being not only "on the tip of your tongue" but on the "tip of your mind." What's in the way of that subtle signal is all the "noise" of our other mental and physiological operations. Bringing down the noise level - which these breathing patterns do as well as sleep does, and a lot faster - gives that subtle signal better chance to slip through.

The first time or so you might initially find some of that "noise" in the form of the problem recurring in your thoughts, the same way people have trouble not thinking about pink elephants once they decide not to. Just let that "noise" amuse you and then set it, and the problem, firmly aside and go back into the breathing and deeper luxuries as deeply as you can with the expectation that when the answer (not the problem) occurs to you, you'll recognize that moment and become alert to give it proper attention. Usually, it's on the edges of nodding-off, just when your "Velvety-Smooth" is lapsing into first-stage sleep-breathing.

As we said: not at all our strongest problem-solving method, but strong enough to work for most people. And the added benefit of this type of breathing for problem-solving is not only that of feeling much better for a long while after, but clearer senses and greatly improved productivity.

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A Fast Way to Get Your Best Answers

Last week (in the feeling-good procedures), we gave you a variation on a traditional method of discovering solutions. That method works some of the time. Here today is a much faster way to discover your best answer on just about anything, and it works nearly every time.

Things you know from earlier rounds of this column, and from elsewhere:

Thinking in images draws upon and involves a lot more of the brain than does thinking in words, which is largely limited to the left temporal lobe. Thinking in images was our original - and is still our strongest - modality for thinking, from birth on. It didn't disappear when parents and teachers told us to stop daydreaming, sit straight, pay attention, don't gaze out that window when I'm talking to you, etc. It only went "underground" and is still there - easily tapped by many of us, there but with a little digging for some of us. We haven't found anyone yet in whom this resource was not and in whom access could not be re-established.

Visual thinking a la Einstein, Tesla, the dreaming Kekule (the benzene ring, basis of all organic chemistry), the nightmare-struck Howe (the cannibals attacking in his dream had holes in the heads of their spears, the answer to his problem for inventing the sewing machine), is not the only type of method powerfully associated with ingenious creative and intellectual or artistic achievement. The Socratic method is one. It originated in the schools of classical Greece. (These were founded not to benefit students but to provide audiences to whom the leading thinkers, by describing their own perceptions, could further develop them....) Socratic method is associated with a rate of production of world-class genius hundreds of thousands of times higher than conventional teaching. It produces its miracles by getting people to examine their perceptions and to describe in detail what they discover there. This method is also closely - and causally - associated with historic traditions of high intellectual achievement.

Put these two effective mind-use systems together, each of them closely linked to historical traditions of profoundly high mental or intellectual achievement, and you get methods like the following "Over-the-Wall" procedure.

Another key, as we go into that procedure, is of the nature of problem-solving itself. It seems natural when facing an unanswered question or problem to review what we know about the problem situation and to seek its answer in terms of what we know. Alas, the problems which are left around us are the ones which were NOT (and will not) be solved that way. What we "know" has BECOME the problem by standing between us and fresh perceptions. Of thousands of creative techniques and a dozen major systems of such techniques now in professional use around the planet, each succeeds precisely to the extent that it somehow moves us BEYOND what we think we know about the problem, and into fresh perceptions on it.

Seems like all we have to do, then, is to put aside what we know and start examining again our actual perceptions in the problem context. Alas, within seconds, nearly all of us seem to find ourselves back in rehashing what we think we know about the problem. So, we've used types of visual thinking which leave behind our "knowledge" about the problem. These approaches look at the problem in imagistic or other special ways designed to get us around what our left temporal lobe EXPECTS, so we can SEE the answer. The "Over-the-Wall" technique below takes us beyond that left-temporal-lobe-expectant mind-set and into fresh perceptions and insights.

WE STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU HARDCOPY THIS FILE SO YOU CAN USE THIS POWERFUL PROCEDURE MORE THAN ONCE.

1. You MUST have either a live listener to describe and develop your perceptions to (and who can cue you to the next step in the process if need be so you can focus more completely on the experience), or at least a tape recorder (a cheap one or even an old dictaphone will do) and blank tape to record onto, representing at least a POTENTIAL listener. 2. Arrange your surroundings - including phone, secretaries, children, whatever - so you won't be interrupted for at least 30-40 minutes barring some real emergency. Later uses of this "Over-the-Wall" procedure will be quicker and quicker. With practice you will find ingenious answers to almost any problem or question in less than two minutes! 3. Decide upon and write out your question. Choose an issue or problem or topic you would truly desire to have good answer to - that desire or need helps involve more of your mental resources. The more difficult or seemingly impossible-to-solve the problem seems, the better for our purposes here. Your chances are good, even this first time and certainly in subsequent rounds, that you will discover a great and ingenious, retrospectively obvious, answer. If that is a matter which has baffled the experts, YOUR discovering an answer to it can be very empowering.

Once you've met these three conditions you can begin "Over-the-Wall". The steps are in a form which can be read aloud to members of a group. If working with a live person OR with a group: the instructions to be read aloud to your answer-seeking partner are in brackets. After the group form is a much briefer version for when working alone.

The Step-By-Step Procedure for "Over-The-Wall"

[_] Listener (or tape recorder) at the ready?

[_] Your selected question or problem issue written down? Excellent. Here are the step-by-step instructions for the rest of the "Over-the-Wall" procedure... 1. With your question established, simply set it aside and don't give it more conscious thought for a while. For a while, no longer confront the question directly. Instead, give your more sensitive resources the opportunity to set up a space where the answer to that question will be on display for you. To screen that answer space from interference by what you "know" about the problem in your conscious mind, imagine that this answer space is screened from your view by a great wall. --A wall you can't "see" past until you are beyond it yourself. With your eyes closed to see more freely, imagine that wall to be screening from sight your Answer Space on its far side while on this side, the nearer side, of that wall you are in a very beautiful garden, a garden extraordinarily lovely but very different from any you've ever seen before. Beyond that wall, without further concern or effort from your conscious mind, is now being set for you on display the best answer to that question you decided to address some moments ago. Over here, on this side of that screening wall, be in this exquisitely beautiful garden.... 2. {With your eyes kept closed without interruption, imagine being in the midst of this strangely beautiful garden. It might help to pretend that you are a radio reporter, setting background just before an expected event, "painting word pictures" of this garden for your listening radio audience. Starting with what is directly in front of you, there in that garden, and then all around, describe this garden in richly textured detail to your listening audience. Make your listener see and feel and smell and taste and experience the utter reality of your garden, through the rich textures of your describing--(5-10 minutes of rapid continuous description)} 3. {Now go up to this side of the wall and describe the wall the same way that you've been describing the garden. Don't sneak a peek yet at what is on the other side of that wall. But put your hand on the wall and study the feel of it, lean your face up against it, make the feel and smell of the wall real to your listeners as well as its appearance....} {(In all this description, notice when and if you get visual mental images in your mind's eye, like in a dream. If you see them, switch to describing THEM even if they go off into things other than garden and wall and answer space, because they can be a more direct route to what your more sensitive faculties want to show you.)} 4. {Don't sneak a peek yet, at the answer on display on the other side of the wall. SUDDENNESS is the key here, to catching your answer in view BEFORE your conscious "knowledge" about the question can jump in and say, "no, that can't be it, so the answer has to look like thus and so." The trick is to experience "jumping over the wall" so suddenly that you catch even yourself by surprise, to catch by surprise what's there now on the far side of the wall and you are yourself surprised by what you find there. Whatever is your very first impression of what's on the far side of the wall after you've jumped, when THAT time comes describe THAT. Continue describing AS IF you were still looking at it, even if it were just a glimpse or a momentary impression, and more of that impression will come. Sooner or later, you will discover enough of it through describing it that you will learn HOW what is here in this answer space is an effective answer to your problem.} (That suddenness can be supplied by your live listener - "jump NOW!" - after you've described the garden side of the wall for a while. Or, use anything happening in your auditory environment, perhaps out on the street with a car horn or dog bark, to abruptly jump over the wall even if you weren't ready to yet, in order to get that needed suddenness.) {(To the extent that what you find beyond the wall in the answer space SURPRISES you; the degree to which what you find over there is different from what you expected; is an indicator of your getting fresh input from your more sensitive faculties instead of simply recycling what you already "know" in your louder, conscious mind. Describe that very FIRST impression even if it seems unrelated or trivial at first -- describing this first impression regardless of what it is and whether it's a picture or just some sort of conceptual impression. The ACT of describing this first impression opens up on your ingenious and unexpected good answer.)} 5. {Continuing to explore and describe what you've found here in the Answer Space: is there some feature which especially attracts your attention? Is there some oddity which doesn't fit with the rest of the scene (often the subtler faculties' way of underscoring the key to the message)? Detail that further; or select some particular feature here, such as a bush, tree, or side of a house, and ask it mentally, "Why are YOU here, in this context? How do YOU relate to this answer?" In what ways does your picture or impression change, in response to your question? Detail these.}

(If by now you already fully understand the answer that has been shown you, skip on to Step # 7 below. If you do not yet understand that answer or understand it fully, go instead to Step # 6, next.) 6. {Mentally thank your subtler faculties for showing you the answer to your question--but ask their help in UNDERSTANDING it. Find some object in your Answer-Space which can serve as a screen, just as your garden wall did earlier. This can be the wall of a house, a thicket, an as-yet closed door, a curtain, a bend in a hallway, a cover to a photo album, a hillside, anything which fits the purpose of being a screen, behind which you "can't" see, until you suddenly go across into the space beyond it. Without sneaking a peek yet at what's beyond, go up to and lay your hand on whatever that screening object is, and ask your subtler faculties to show you, on its far side, exactly the SAME answer to the SAME question as before, but this time in an entirely DIFFERENT SCENE. In effect: you are creating a second answer-space, with an entirely different scene in it. What is the SAME between old and new pictures, when everything else is different, by inductive inference gives you the key to the "message" or answer! So: first detail out the new scene after going into it, then search for what's the same between the old and new pictures - perhaps it is grass, perhaps the color blue, perhaps water, perhaps people running or perhaps no one there, or triangular-shaped objects, perhaps a certain feeling to both pictures.....} 7. {Return to here and now fully refreshed. If you've been working with a live listener, now grab up your tape recorder, or a notepad and pen. If you've been working with a tape recorder, now is the time for your notepad and pen.... some different medium from what you were using for the original experience....} 8. Like an astronaut returning from a mission to some far world, DE-BRIEF. Describe in detail, to that different medium from the one you've just been using, a little of your garden experience, but every detail you can from when you jumped over the wall. This further, retrospective, describing is often the stage at which understandings and meanings click into place. Also: if you did the original experience with eyes closed, debrief with them open; if for some reason you did the original experience with eyes open, debrief with them closed. To make relation-building effects within your brain a little more immediate, try to use the present tense grammatically while describing and stay in that present tense mode, even though the experience is already in your recent past - e.g., "I AM looking at all this ripe wheat bending in the wind," not "I WAS looking...."

Short Form for "Over-the-Wall:"

In order that you don't have to keep looking over at the instructions to see what comes next, and in order to let your eyes stay uninterruptedly closed during the experience and free to deal fully with the subtler reaches of that experience....

--Here is the short form, with a memory device to help you remember each step and the step which comes next--

Describe, describe, describe in richly textured detail--

1. The Garden; 2. The Wall; and after your sudden jump over it, 3. The Answer-Space beyond that wall. G.W.A.S. ("gaWAS") - easily remembered word of initials to help you remember Garden, Wall, and the Answer-Space beyond it. Continuing from "gaWAS" - 4. Question some particular Aspect or feature in your Answer-Space (QA) 5. New Scene - same answer to same question, but shown differently (NS) so this part of the mnemonic is QANS; your total mnemonic is "gaWAS-qans," easy to hold in the back of your mind so each part of it in turn will remind you of the next step in the procedure. --Until the procedure becomes familiar enough to you that you no longer need any special devices to find your way with.

Getting The Meaning From Your Displayed Answers:

For inventions, technical or mechanical problems and art, these "over-the-wall" answers are usually quite literal. For most other issues, perhaps because of the sensory language in which the more sensitive regions of your brain work, the answer may be shown in some sort of metaphor - a cartoon, a parable, a pun or simile, in which case relating these sometimes takes effort to figure out consciously. The most important thing in figuring your answer out is: to not try to figure it out until after you've let the whole experience unfold, and you've described it out in detail. Always go for the sensory data first, figure it out AFTERward. If your a-HA! hits you in mid-stream, well and good - and that will happen more and more frequently as this process and set of skills become familiar to you. But going for meanings before you've fully detailed your experience, invites your conscious knowledge about the problem situation to come back in, interfering with your more sensitive internal data because it "knows" what the answer "ought" to be, stopping you short of seeing what the answer IS.

Once your experience is fully described and recorded, though, your "data out there on the table," so to speak, the conscious search for meaning can no longer hide or distort it. Here are several ways to improve your chances of finding the meaning of what you found over the wall (or the meaning of your dreams, for that matter)--

1. The more richly textured the detail in which you describe, the better your chances of discovering the meaning. 2. The more rapidly you describe, the better the chances of outrunning your internal editor and getting to the most meaningful part of the experience. 3. The more different senses you engage in the experience by noticing and describing--sight, touch, smell, movement, space and pressure, mass, temperature, texture, taste, atmospheric feel, etc.--the better your contact with your more sensitive faculties and the better your chances to discover the meaning. 4. After initially orienting to the scene: the more you experience moving around in or doing various things to what you find in the Answer Space, and observe and describe the results, the better your chances of discovering the meaning. 5. Question other objects or features in the experience, asking "why are YOU here in this experience, what role do YOU play in this answer - then observe and describe how the scene changes or what else happens in response (we call this procedure "Feature-Questioning"). Likewise, pursue what we call the "Clarification Question," asking your subtler faculties to help you in understanding their answer by showing you that same answer to that same question again, but through an entirely DIFFERENT scene (Inductive Inference again). Usually, three different scenes displaying the same answer are enough to let you infer the meaning from their common elements.

Follow-up questions: See also, and describe, what changes occur in your scene or impressions when you ask such questions as--

1. "How can I make sure that I'm understanding the correct answer here?" (How can I verify this answer?) 2. "What else should I know about this situation?" 3. "How best can I turn this answer into useful action?" 4. "What's 'Step One' in acting on this answer?" (If there is something else you have to do first, that is not 'Step One,' so what is 'Step One?" Whenever in doubt about what to ask, ask: 5. "What is the best thing for me to ask in this context - and the best answer to it?"

Most approaches to creative problem solving teach that one has to invest 90% or more of his total effort to finding the right question to ask about a situation. Yet your subtler faculties already know what is the most cogent question to ask about a given situation, so asking this directly lets you take advantage of that and saves you considerable time and effort.

Special note regarding verification

Even when some answers come through with the seeming certainty of the Word of God, it's a human instrument receiving them, just as subject as any other information instrument, process or content to the Laws of Entropy. Thus, to the extent that there are significant stakes at issue in the answers you get, even if these interior processes do tend to be more accurate than other information processes, it behooves you to check their validity against other indicators, just as you would and should for information from any other source.

Perhaps this deserves even further comment. Politicians speak in certainties even when they have only the vaguest clue, in order to get other people to follow their lead. Most organized religions exhort their followers to absolute belief - but it's interesting to note that the two greatest doubters in the tradition of the Bible, Gideon and Thomas, were rewarded, not punished, for having doubted.

You may remember the story of "Gideon and his brave three hundred." One day Gideon got the word from God, we are told, to rise up and overthrow the Mideonites who had established sway over Israel for generations. "How can I tell," asked Gideon, "that it's your word, Lord, that I'm hearing and not my own imagination or wishful thinking?"

The answer came back, to set out a sheep fleece that night and check it in the morning. So Gideon did. In the morning, the fleece was dry, while the grass was soaked with dew. "Well, Lord, that's very interesting, but...."

The answer came back, to set that fleece out again and to check the results in the morning. So he did. According to the story, in the morning the fleece was soaking wet with dew while the grass all around was bone dry. So he acted on the rest of his message and was rewarded with a most extraordinary victory....

Likewise, by the other story, if "Doubting Thomas" hadn't put his hands in Jesus's wounds, Christianity could not have spread nearly so rapidly nor far. For his doubts, Thomas was rewarded with sainthood, not punished.

Thus even in Biblical tradition, the basis of most of the established religions which are exhorting unswerving belief, the most outstanding instances of doubt are rewarded, not punished. All our human-instrumented information needs to be verified, whatever its apparent source. By now, with the bloodstained pages of history lying all about, we don't need to continue imposing our unverified certainties on each other. Check things out as you go.

Compare the fields of human endeavor which have advanced in the last thousand years - notably empirical science and technology - with those which have not, notably politics and religion. To progress, we have to be willing to risk our beliefs and put matters to test.

So please don't hesitate to ask your inner processes, "How can I tell if I'm understanding the right answer here?" or "How best can I test this to make sure it is so?" And be alert to some opportunities to check out your answers by other means as well, including conventionally gathered empirical and scientific data.

Frankly -- and this reflects the central theme and purpose of these "winsights" briefs -- over the years easily ninety per cent or more of everything I've been taught has been contradicted by direct observation. I suspect that a majority of what you or anyone has been taught is likewise contrary to what direct observation will show. Frankly, I trust what I can see for myself far better than I trust what I've been taught or "what everyone knows." By now, with all that has happened to and in our country, so should you.

Once verified, though, please note: an answer is not a solution until it is acted upon, and put into effect!

The easiest thing for many in the creativity field to do is settle for some easy generality as answer, and leave matters there. Your challenge is to move beyond such easy generality to action plans and action specifics and an immediate Step One from among those specifics and beyond.

Whether using a garden, park, wilderness, or perhaps one of the "running-start devices" among our "back-up procedures" (if you didn't get mental pictures, send us your ground-mail address with that request and we'll send them to you for free, NO one has to go without!!!); or whether using wall, screen, window-shade, curtains, door, thicket or other screening device to insulate your Answer Space until it's time to suddenly go land in it and catch your first impressions of what's there--

--Whatever the details of your preferred or present version of this post-Einsteinian "Over-the-Wall" discovering process:

A) Pose and write down a significant question or problem or issue beforehand so that the experience can show you its solution; B) Remember during the experience to orient on some one particular feature, ask it why it's there in that context - watch and describe what changes occur in the scene in answer to that; C) Ask to be shown another scene which shows you exactly the same answer to the same question but in an entirely different way; D) Remember to use your follow-up questions to verify your answer, and to develop specific actions. Remember that when you don't know what you should be asking, ask what it is you should be asking, and its best answer. Remember to ask what more you need to know about that context.....

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A Partial Taxonomy of All Possible Methods For Solving Problems

Our whole method and system and theory first began to evolve soon after I first came into the literature on creativity, in 1967 while I was still serving full-time as a college teacher. My one real contribution was his asking the proposition: if you have a good method for solving problems, one of that method's best uses is on the problem of how to create better methods for solving problems. One of their best uses is on the problem of how to create even better such methods.....

We in Project Renaissance have developed at least 40 "Toolbuilder" procedures by means of which to discover yet other and better procedures. You can make last week's column, "Over-the-Wall" into a "Toolbuilder" with this simple method. Have on display, in the "Answer-Space" on the far side of that garden wall, a highly advanced future civilization where everyone is a solution-finder par excellence. Far beyond anything seen here on our own Earth. Just beyond this point of the wall, let there be whatever it is that's made that civilization a population of ingenious problem-solvers. Let yourself be surprised by what you see there....

When hundreds of methods now exist in the art and science of creativity and effective problem-solving, we may need a map to find our way. Creating a "taxonomy" can provide us some sense of order and relationship among such methods.

Advantages of a taxonomy:

Such advantages are essentially the same as those of the periodic table of the elements in chemistry. Grouping specific elements into more general categories is conceptually easier. It brings into view regularities which in turn suggest potentially useful models and theories.

Please note also the general principle that no categorical system is "right" or "wrong" (except for needing to be reasonably consistent), so much as it is more or less USEFUL for the purposes to which you put it.

This present draft outline is an initial cut only. In no way is it to be regarded as an authoritative taxonomy. It badly needs extensive criticizing, revision, and testing. We hope this present draft stimulates creation of alternative models, comparison of which will lead toward an authoritative (or at least generally useful) taxonomy.

All of the great minds of the past had hit into only one or a very few such methods as basis for their successes. YOU now have all these available to you! Many of the methods listed are self-evident from their descriptions, and so their inclusion here provides you with a wider working toolkit of methods.

Each category or sub-category below contains one or several specific techniques. Some of the more successful techniques involve more than one category.

Sector One

Sector Two

Sector Three

Though discussed briefly at the start of this draft taxonomy, deserves to be a major division of problem-solving methods despite its usually being ignored: Reinvest whatever are your best methods for solving problems, into the problem of how to create new and BETTER problem-solving methods! Pursuit of this principle of reinvestment can build and has built phenomenal methodological capital over time.

Extending this "Sector Three" into a concluding comment:

Traditionally, each main school or proponent of creative problem-solving, developed (or borrowed!) one or a few good techniques and practices, and offered these as The Way to effectively solve problems.

In a world where problems are accumulating far more rapidly than solutions, we strongly urge more people to begin applying this principle of re-investing methods into better methods, building effective problem-solving into an even better science than it has recently become.

One way you can start doing this is to start brainstorming out, sorting out, and "taxonomicizing" everything that you know about creativity and answer-finding. You may have a lot more of this than you yet realize.

Hey - the whole universe is yours to draw upon. The resources available to your mind truly appear to be without limit, and having read this far, how can you not put at least some of all this to legitimate test. Having tested these matters and found something of what truly is at stake, how can any living human being not go forward with this, without apparent limits? --And look at all that wonderful scenery you get to take in along the way!

Indeed, we concur in yet one more regard with Dr. Jean Houston, who in her recent lectures has been saying that "for the uses we put our remarkably developed brain to, we are obscenely over-endowed!" You, for instance, have brains enough to run a galaxy. What have you been doing with them?

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An Emphatic Recapitulation And Summary

On your screen at this moment, and potentially in your printer, may well be some of the most valuable information you have ever handled in your life. You don't need to buy anything in order to benefit hugely from what you find in this brief. Our own motivation in giving you freely such extraordinary information? --Our belief that if many people begin seeing with their own eyes, thinking and perceiving for themselves first hand, a lot of the problems and difficulties around us all will be resolved.....

Thus far on Winsights you have learned how to:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Become more effective with yourself, with others, and with events....

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Pay less tuition for the lessons of life ("Nature is a rather severe teacher -- first comes the test, then the lesson....")

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Experience more satisfying richnesses of perception, understanding and meaning than you ever dreamed were possible....

Pay attention to your own perceptions; and respond to or act upon your own perceptions, even if and especially when they differ from what you expect to be seeing.

Our culture has raised us to be sheep. Even though you may think you are pretty observant, you'll be amazed at what you start noticing when you start to look for yourself, instead of settling for what everyone around you believes. Some of the ways Project Renaissance shares openly, by means of which to make yourself far more richly observant and effective and aware, are:

* Portable Memory Bank - carry around, and use, a notepad, index card, postits, even a pocket tape recorder, to capture and reinforce having each idea or thought or observation. Each one you capture, reinforces and sharpens your faculties and each of the hundreds you're always letting slip away unnoticed, dulls your faculties...

* Sidebands-of-Awareness: quick-capture techniques. Have a friend ask you, at unexpected intervals suddenly, "what was in your awareness just THEN?" Use that to describe to your friend everything that was in your awareness or on the edges of it besides the main thing you were tending to at that moment. You'll be surprised, after several of these, to discover that you have dozens, actually hundreds, of parallel semi-independent streams of thought and awareness going on some of them trivial but some of them far richer than what was immediately in your consciousness. It has to be suddenly and by surprise, or you'll start "saving up" impressions and reinforce different perceptual faculties instead. It has to be expressed - written out or described aloud or there won't be enough reinforcement to bring these sidebands of awareness online for you.

* Image Streaming (incidental by-product, according to independently conducted state university tests: 20 points of cumulative, apparently permanent I.Q. gain for only 25 hours of easy, entertaining practice; this seemingly remarkable rate of gain continues past this point even if most reliable testing does not); this also informs you profoundly about the world and about yourself;

* Quick Q/A and High Thinktank-method processing, by Einsteinian Discovery Technique, informing you extensively about everything you turn your attention to. (More on the quick Q/A in a few sentences below, and on The High Thinktank in a later column.)

Incidental by-product: When you speak directly from your own first-hand experience, you are powerful. When you speak from someone else's experience or belief, you are weak. Especially when you speak from your own first hand experiences on things which matter to you, are you powerful. (Nearly everything taught in speech & communications classes and in much about sales, is techniques to try to counterfeit the way you would come across if you were speaking directly from first-hand experience on things which matter to you! --But all that pales besides the real thing!)

Every time you notice and respond to one of your own perceptions and/or ideas, you make yourself more perceptive and/or creative. Each time you fail to respond at least in some way to one of your own perceptions and/or ideas, you make yourself less perceptive or creative. Know this not only from your own experience, but from the very most widely agreed-upon and accepted descriptive "natural law" of psychology or behavior: "You get more of what you reinforce."

Each time you notice and describe - to someone near you, or to a tape recorder, or even in a more limited sense to a notepad - one of your own perceptions, you accomplish these things:

1. You reinforce that perception. The more you describe about it, the more you will perceive about it, and about things relating to it, until you find yourself perceiving and understanding far more about it and generally than you dreamed were possible.

2. You reinforce the behavior and trait of being perceptive. Your own present level of consciousness and intelligence right now are largely the product of how much of your own perception you got to respond to and act upon in some way earlier on. To hear the most extreme form of this effect, get a description of the event and its aftermath from anyone who has ever really had to lay his life on the line for something he believed in or was necessary, such as plunging into a desperately dangerous situation to save someone else's life, and who survived to tell about it. By a little attention, system, and persistence, you can have the growth without the danger. (And without falling into the trap some fall into, who become repetitive dare-devils in a vain effort to recapture such moment-of-truth effects!)

--And if the perception being responded to is, at the start, subtle, therefore arising in parts of the brain fairly remote from where we lodge our loud verbal left-brain consciousness -- then you

3. Reinforce those remote regions of the brain more and more onto line with your immediate consciousness - together with those regions' resources and intelligence. This may well be our most powerful and rewarding area for growth.

There, in basic, is a key part of what is said in further detail by our well-received book The Einstein Factor. Much more is said in this extraordinary book--but here and now, already on your own screen and potentially in your own printer, is some more information crucial to you!.... How crucial? Only you can appreciate once you see what it is.....

Practical applications abound - if you bring more of your brain and mind online for current operations, ranging from answer-finding and creative problem-solving, to intelligence-building, to profoundly imnproved, eased and accelerated learning, to health aspects, to invention and discovery and the arts and design and athletic performance and many other things...........

YOU ARE BRIGHTER THAN YOU THINK! - much brighter!

For example: Even WHILE you're asking a question on virtually any matter, part of you Already is perceiving its best answer!

Whether or not you notice it doing so, your mind's eye always immediately shows that answer to you--

--The best, most ingeniously effective answer. Accurately and immediately! That's you, your more comprehensive brain resources, far brighter than you've come to think of yourself as being.

Don't take our word for it - or reflexively dismiss this either. Simply look!

Simply look for yourself. Thousands of people, all over the world, have learned how and where to look in their own mind's eye. Not one of thousands has been unable to, once taught. 10% or more of people already know where and how to look for this effect without ever having been taught to do so. Project Renaissance does have back-up procedures which ensure that everyone, without exception thus far, becomes able to tune in this natural reflex effect. Through July 4, 1997: we will send you those back-up procedures for free in return for 2 oz. postage and return-address label, or by request with any book order. --Or you can simply e-mail us the request for these back-up instructions at Win@thebestweb.com and we'll download those back-up procedures for you for free.

100% success, not only with those we've taught directly. Physics professor Charles P. Reinert, who performed the first independently conducted state university studies measuring some of the effects of Image-Streaming, has himself taught this and related procedures to thousands of students without a single failure and he, like thousands of others, learned it from one of our books. --And he also has had 100% success rate, without exception, in teaching Image-Streaming to his students...

All we're really saying is that it's very good for you to pay attention to your own perceptions, and to respond to what you perceive.

> You can build this range of effects entirely on your own, unassisted, continually taking whatever techniques you discover and using them on the problem of how to build even better such techniques, then using these in turn to build even better such techniques. As each technique reveals itself to you it will bring in a wealth of understanding and perspective that transforms everything that has gone before for you up to that point.

> Or you can take the short-cut and convenience, of teaching yourself some of this from the books and materials of Project Renaissance. Two books most recommended at this time are the above-mentioned Beyond Teaching And Learning and The Einstein Factor. (Details available at http://www.winwenger.com>)

You can choose to stay where you are. Or to follow some program or leader who has "the answers." --Or work with our "open-book" approach, with Project Renaissance or on your own. But before you make such a choice, we urge you to pay at least a little notice and response to some of your own perceptions. or to look for yourself into some of the effects of various of the simple Project Renaissance procedures. For example, regarding what we were just saying about part of you already instantly seeing answer to questions which you consciously believe cannot be solved or that you, at least, cannot solve them. We've already published in this e-magazine, in this column, easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions by means of which you can solve them! If you didn't have the wisdom to download them then, they are still in various of our books.

Free Instructions Here & Now, For At Least Some of You:

For many of you reading this now, it is already as easy as this:

1. Get someone to be your listener, or set up blank tape on a simple tape recorder.

2. Decide upon some question or problem you'd truly like to solve or find answer to.

3. Expect to see something surprising in your mind's eye once you look in.

4. Look in, and go with your first impression of what you see, feel, smell, taste or hear there. Describe that in rich detail because, whatever it is and how seemingly unrelated at first it may seem to your question, that imagery impression does contain somehow your answer!

5. Get 2 more sets of image-impression the same way. Each is to be the same answer, but shown in an entirely different way, with different images. What's the same when everything else is the core of your answer. Generate enough detail from each that you can perform the next step easily.

6. Find the elements or themes in common to those three sets of image or impression.

7. If the answer isn't already obvious to you from that, brainstorm all the possible ways in which those common elements could or might be somehow an answer to your question or problem, and see if you don't, somewhere in there, hit what you were looking for.

The parts of your brain you are contacting, don't work in words but in sensory images. This is your oldest, strongest, most powerful information-processing system. You thought in images from the first days of infancy - maybe even before, since fetuses dream in REM sleep. You did not lose this most powerful information processing system when parents and teachers taught you to sit up straight and stop daydreaming and don't gaze out the window, look ahead instead and pay attention! 80% of your brain is still involved in visual response, according to EEG studies. Your most powerful information-processing system merely went underground and for many of you now reading this, it's reflexive responses to contexts and answers to whatever questions are still close-enough in reach that you can already do the above or similar steps and get the desired results immediately.

>>> Half or more of us DO, though, have to learn Image-Streaming first from more detailed instructions and a few of us need to work through one or more of those free-for-postage/label back-up instructions, or instructions free upon request (until July 4, 1997) to win@thebestweb.com>

The parts of your brain you are contacting with the above 4 steps don't work in words but in sensory images. The more sensory detail in which you describe whatever impression, the more and better contact with these further reaches of your brain. (You might prefer also to do this search-&-describe with eyes closed to see more freely these subtler impressions.) Get enough sensory detail and the intellectual or insight content you were after, takes care of itself.

Hint: digging directly for the answer or insight throws you back toward your verbal left brain, which plods along at the pace of the language you speak and so can get around to only a few factors on any issue. Instead, describe directly those sensory impressions, building contact with where you are trying to get your information from until some of these, too subtle initially for your loud left brain to have picked up on on its own, come into focus to become your a-HA!

Like moving your left foot and then your right foot freely each in its turn, you report out the sensory data first and then figure out or let be revealed to you what it means, so you aren't hobbled in moving forward, or trying to jump along the whole way on just one foot alone. We have learned that the most "left-brained" people aren't using their left brains nearly as well as they could were they to engage also some of the faculties of their right -- any more than purely "right-brained" people who need to develop more of the resources in fact of their right by engaging some of the faculties of their left! Let's not go about life hopping on one foot alone!

More on Answer-Finding:

The kinds of problem which do solve as a result of our reviewing what we know about the problem situation, already did so. What we have left all around us are the questions and problems and difficulties which did not solve that way. There, what we "know" about the problem has become the problem by standing between us and the fresh perceptions needed wherein to find our answer. These receptive visual thinking-based, Einsteinian Discovery Technique methods are arguably by far the best way yet to get perceptive on even our most difficult, stubborn, crucial problems.

Get beyond what you expect, based on all that you "know," that the answer "ought to be!" Go for the unexpected, the surprise in what comes up in your imagery. If what comes up is what you would expect see in that context, have you gotten beyond what was standing between you and the fresh perceptions you needed? Surprise is a good indicator that you've gotten beyond what you consciously expect the answer ought to be, toward more direct perceptions of what is.

Once you've developed your sensory data by describing it in richly textured detail to your listener or tape recorder, you can interact with your imagery in ways to get more directly to understand what your imagery means - without too much distorting what your subtler resources are saying to you--

--By doing the above 7 steps, you've already provided the above three kinds of trait or behavioral reinforcement - of the particular perceptions themselves; of the behavior of being perceptive, and of the richer regions of your brain being brought more online with immediately useful, focussed, verbal consciousness (showing up as apparent intelligence-gain, among other effects).

The first time you work through this it could take you as much as an hour (still worthwhile to use on problems and questions which have gone unresolved for expensive years!). Second time and question, it might take you 40 minutes to work all the way through. Subsequent times and issues, conveniently down to very few minutes.

We strongly suggest that you then de-brief this whole experience either to another person (directly or by telephone), or to notebook or computer. This change of medium, and resulting change of the secondary associations and feedbacks evoked for you by communicating into this different medium, should add further to your understanding.

Then or later, we also strongly suggest that you ask your subtler faculties: "How can I make sure that I'm on the right track with this understanding of the answer?" Observe and describe whatever comes than enables you to test whether you've pretty well got the answer. Note also it is good to verify by other means as well, to the extent that an issue is important to you or to others affected by it, before acting to implement your answer. But test, don't just let an answer sit there reinforcing the trait of inaction or procrastination.

Then or later, we also suggest that you ask your subtler faculties: "What more do I need to know in this context?" Observe and describe whatever images or impressions emerge for you in response to that question.

Then or later, we also suggest that you ask your image-stream or subtle faculties: "What's a good, practical, concrete first step to acting upon this understanding? Observe and describe accordingly.

You don't have to look to us or to anyone else for the answers. You are, indeed, far brighter than you think, and your own testing of the above will demonstrate that. We do offer short-cuts through our books and occasional training workshops. --But in the larger sense, you already have what you need, just as you already have your own answers..... It's entirely up to you.

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Upcoming in winsights: what if you could acquire years of easy, rewarding proficiency in almost any subject, skill or profession, in only days or even hours? By any of eight various systems you now can. Become an effective expert for a tiny fraction of the cost in time, attention and resources it now takes to hire and manage one! Learn easily and immediately all those things which seemed to be worthwhile, but too difficult or involved or which had to be put off under pressure of more immediate demands. Look for this information to be freely given to you in easy-to-follow, specific steps and explanation, in some of the upcoming installments of winsights.

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Make Learning Easier Part 1

Learning Tips For All Ages

Just as in other multiplex dynamic situations such as games (where "a miss is as good as a mile" and even an inch makes huge differences in outcome): even the littlest things can make huge differences in how well or how poorly you learn. --Or how well others whom you care about are able to learn. Lack of some obvious practice or strategy can get you life-branded as a poor learner. Picking up on some little knack can get you on a roll instead and mark you as a great, gifted learner or even a genius. Here are some tips on some of these little knacks. If some seem overly obvious to you, others might not. If with some of these you think they couldn't possibly make that much difference, try them and see for yourself.

You've taken too many people's word for too many things. It's time you check some things out for yourself instead of waiting for school-based authorities (with their own mixed agendas and purposes) to tell you what's what. So--

Some Hot Tips for Little Knacks of Learning:

1. Turn "dry facts" into memorable experiences. Use your imagination and involve all your senses.

For example, turn the "dry facts" about such historic events as the Battle of New Orleans into: hunkering down behind hasty fortifications in the heat, with the smell of mud and sweat and gunpowder, watch the British main force coming directly at where you've fortified most strongly instead of where you were weakest and the mixed anxiety and relief feelings that gives you there at those main fortifications.... And the mix of feelings you get weeks later, after all that you and everyone went through to win that victory, when you learn that the War of 1812 with England had actually ended before you had to fight that battle.....

Or, for example, take the "dry facts" of C=2 pi R or A = pi R squared. Imagine being an inch worm the length of pi chasing his own tail around and across circles and observe everything you can from being that inchworm. Or measure off the relationships involved in terms of your own physical body, discover where pi comes to from here to there in your own body, feel those relationships in your own body....

--Or be a participle dangling on the end of a sentence or clause. With great effort and resolve, pull yourself back from the precipice toward a more comfortable place in that sentence.....

--Imagine the mixed exhaustion and elation and other feelings Thomas Edison must have felt all through his body when, at long last, he realized that he was looking at a successful filament for his light bulb....

--Or the astonishment and excitement Elias Howe must have felt as he emerged from the sweaty breathless dry-mouthed terrors of his nightmare. --When he realized that those odd holes in the spearheads of the attacking cannibals in his nightmare were the key solution for the sewing machine he had been trying for so long to invent....

Make your "dry facts" utterly memorable!

2. Talk your way through the key points or issues. --WITH someone.

Talk problems through with a pal, whether these are math problems, science problems, problems of the school, at home or personal problems. (Also keep a private diary or journal for these things, and/or record these things also onto a tape recorder.)

Take turns. Going through the problem, one of you describes everything that's going through your awareness as you do that, not just what you're "supposed" to be talking about - to give the rest of your mind the chance to relate to the problem.

Your pal is listener, not interrupting, just listening and urging you on when need be, until you hit your "a-HA!" Take turns and be patient enough as a listener to let your pal hit his or her own "a-HA!" instead of letting on how you've already figured things out.

When it's your turn to describe freely and to have a go at solving the problem, allow your own ideas and perceptions, and descriptions of your ideas and perceptions, to surprise you!--Because often the answer comes from unexpected directions if you let it, and balks when you don't.

3. Experiment and Record:

If a problem seems difficult, experiment with putting the problem into a different form and solving that one, then come back to the main one. Also--

Experiment with imagining whatever's in that problem being bigger or smaller, or changing with time, or standing it upside down, or being in different colors, as another way to "get a handle on it."

After such experimentation, and after talking problems through with a pal, review what you did to see if you can find out from what happened, something that will make your next problem-solving be easier and more accurate.

4. Treat what you don't understand, in what you're learning, like problems and do to them what you did to problems in #'s 2 & 3 above.

Whatever the state of your learning and your history as a learner, some parts of your learning have gone easier than have other parts. Not all of which is attributable to good or bad teachers or texts. Compare everything that was going on for you in your most successful leanings with the counterparts of those factors in your other subjects. Brainstorm all possible factors, don't edit until you have maybe 50 or more items. Then sit down to see what items you might find it useful to give some attention to.

5. To make sure you understand something, explain it to someone much younger than you are and make THEM understand it.

One of our most famous educators, Jerome S. Bruner, once said that you can teach any idea or concept to anyone at any age level, provided you put it to him in his own conceptual vocabulary. That is, in terms that he already understands. In your search to find the terms which someone much younger than you understands, you strengthen your own grasp on that point of understanding immensely.

To the youngest among my readers:

You might not have to get a teacher or parent to explain any of the above to you. --Just get together with two or three friends. Each of you take turns explaining the above to each other, in detail....

To all of you reading this:

You have brains enough to run a galaxy. What are you doing with them?

One of the most frequently used paths to genius: find a knack that works for you. Get on a roll. Find ways to stay on that roll. Find ways to return to being on that roll, until so much else falls into that roll that even you begin to realize that you are, indeed, a genius......

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Make Learning Easier Part 2

One of the Ways YOU Can Learn Like A Genius

Of eight major types of accelerated/enhanced learning presented in one of our recent books, I can give you at least a glimpse of one here. We call it "Periscopic Learning;" also "Borrowed Genius" and a few other things.

How To Learn Through A Periscope--

* We had enrolled our 4-year-old daughter in a neighborhood swim team, not for the sake of competing but simply for safety reasons, to ensure she would be competent in the water. During one of the team's meets, in one heat a clerical error had her swim as the only small kid among 8, 9 and 10 year olds. To our amazement, she swam far faster than ever before and finished right in the middle of the pack. "How did you do that?!?" we asked her. Her reply: "I made-believe I was one of the big kids."

* In Camelot, Merlin was working with young King Arthur at a point where Arthur was imagining himself to be a hawk. Asked Merlin of Arthur: "What does the hawk know, that Arthur does not know?" (According to the story, that was when the future king discovered that political boundaries were not visible from above, and resolved to fashion together one England.)

* Like projecting your view through a periscope: let some aspect or part of you "become" a whole, distinct person who happens to be the world's greatest genius in what you are trying to learn. Through that new vantage point cum periscope, see and understand easily what had been obscure to you before, as the hawk saw what Arthur had not...

* ...Just create such genius in the same sense that tribesmen of the Bear Clan wore the heads of bears to better understand the wilderness from which they made their living... A way of learning independently discovered by thousands of human cultures around the world.....

* ...Or take the story of one young lad. He was about to "not make" his high school's baseball team. He worked with us during an hour of "putting on the heads" of his various baseball heroes. He soon discovered through one of those "hero heads" how to get extra focus on the baseball by swinging, not at the baseball itself but at an imaginary flyspeck on that baseball. He made the team; his first ten games he batted 800; at season's end he was voted MVP by not only his team but his school's entire league.

* --Or in the same sense that in our very first 1977 experiment which launched Project Renaissance, a secretary starting to take violin lessons leaped from raw beginner to advanced student in two lessons by our special way of "putting on the head" of great violinists. She came by to visit our second experiment three weeks later and gave us a very nice concert. (ALL of us were getting similar results in our chosen areas even before we perfected this method!)

Each of the 47 diverse methods for Periscopic Learning, through Project Renaissance's strategies of contextual projection and description, enable one to learn with understanding, or gain in skills, years'-worth in only hours: truly "accelerated learning!" Periscopic Learning is only one of eight types of accelerated learning method unique to Project Renaissance. The strongest of these also feature different combinations of Socratic and Einsteinian process.

(Socratic in that one examines, or is led to examine, inner and outer perceptions and to describe in some detail what he or she discovers there. Einsteinian in that one sets mental imagery loose and then, as closely as possible, observes what it does to see what one can discover or learn from what he or she observes. The act of describing what you perceive, a la Socratic practice, reinforces both the particular perception and the behavior of being perceptive. Einsteinian imagery not only comes from where we do our pre-conscious understanding but, being initially subtle, arises in parts of the brain remote from our immediate verbal consciousness. --So that to describe, while examining it, Einsteinian imagery not only reinforces as above, but also reinforces previously unengaged parts of our brain onto line with immediate verbal consciousness, making more and more of whatever is our intelligence, developed or undeveloped, immediately available to us and enriching our life.)

Periscopic learning (where you move your point of view into another focus and look around from there to see and understand what you normally have not been seeing and understanding) first came to our own attention in the work by Vladimir Raikov, as reported in Ostrander and Schroeder's Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain. Students in an art class, each hypnotized into believing he was Rembrandt, sophisticated their art prodigiously. Many years later, I saw videos of Raikov in a music conservatory, working with students each of whom had been hypnotized into believing he was Rachmaninoff and whose piano-playing abruptly went to several "next levels." I just wish Raikov hadn't shot himself in the foot by going for stage money when he came briefly to the US a few years ago: I am convinced he knows a lot more than was apparent from his visit.

Fortunately, hypnosis is definitely not needed. Although, it is featured in the Merlin story above, in Raikov's work in Russia, and in the somewhat similar work by America's own Dr. Jean Houston (whose work with Hillary Rodham Clinton was so willfully misunderstood by the press). One of Dr. Houston's students, hypnotized for a few minutes into imagining she was attending a full semester at the world's leading art academy, came back with her art sophisticated to an extent which suggested that she had. My little daughter in that swim meet certainly never resorted to hypnosis. In all the time I've worked with and developed those 47 various "periscopic learning" techniques, only twice have I ever resorted to using hypnosis as an experiment, and clearly found that such effects are far harder to achieve by hypnosis than by our totally hypnosis-free Project Renaissance methods. Sorry to take some of the romance out of the field, but that is our experience.

With or without hypnosis, the fact remains that by the stronger of these periscopic learning methods, and by each of our seven other main types of accelerated learning method combining Socratic and Einsteinian principles, one may easily learn in several days, sometimes in only hours, and with far fuller understanding, proficiencies which otherwise conventionally require arduous years to build. --Especially in the sciences and in most of the humanities - and, oddly enough, athletics, where kinesthetic understanding is involved. Understanding is the key here: these are not memorization techniques. These methods are not especially helpful in courses whose contents are mainly the memorization of things, especially the temporary memorization for tests and then forgetting, which typifies far too many classes and classrooms today. Don't turn to our kind of method if what you aim is to memorize something for a test.

I hope that a few of those reading this still put a positive value on understanding.

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Solution of the Month

A new series within the Winsights series. For years, the writer has been creating and conducting thinktanks using various methods for creative problem-solving. On some occasions he has been able to run several thinktanks at the same time in parallel on the same issue or problem, each using different methods. --Perhaps the only place on Earth where this has been done, and very instructive ABOUT those methods.

This present series-within-the-series features, once a month, a different apparent solution to one of the great "impossible" problems of this country or of the world. Following its exhibit in "winsights," the solution will then migrate to our permanent homepage at http://www.winwenger.com/ This present article shows us how to dispose of our overflowing nuclear wastes...

Can We Make Part of the Problem

Into Part of the Solution?

Can the most nightmarish part of our environmental and global pollution problem actually provide a major part of the solution?

Let's look at power sources---

* There's only so much hydroelectric potential to go around.

* Conventional, fossil-fuel-burning power stations--

--use up fossil fuels(!);

--pollute air and water;

--worsen our accumulating world greenhouse CO2 effect; and

--if oil-fired, worsen our trade deficits and national dependency.

* Solar power, after many decades, we've never yet managed to master the art or science of making economical on a large scale. Hopes for space-based solar power have slipped another generation further back with the successive retreats of plans for the U.S. Space Station.

* Geothermal power pollutes air and water.

* Ocean waves and tidal inlets, after many decades we've never managed to make into an economical power source.

* Temperature differences within different layers of part of the ocean, after more than a decade we've not yet managed to make economically feasible as a power source. Perhaps the same principle could become feasible with the sharper temperature differences found in groundwater in desert regions. (Aluminum and bauxite companies, and municipal power companies in the southwest, please note!)

* Controlled fusion power seems more out of reach now than when we first invented nuclear reactors, and "cold fusion" has gone into the books as an example of myth and hysteria in science.

* Conservation of power, as relatively a power source, has begun to bump into its limits. Thermal insulation of buildings has run into radon. We don't seem to be able to push Detroit into much higher fuel efficiencies. Social resistance to further measures is climbing unless we radically adjust incentives. Only the computer revolution has significantly reduced power demand, and how much further can that aspect go?

* Nuclear reactors are not only directly dangerous a la 3-Mile Island and Chernobyl, but their greatest problem is the continued accumulation of radioactive wastes, already far more than we've figured out how to handle and potentially the most lethal threat to all life on Earth. To build any more conventional nuclear reactors would be one of the most irresponsible decisions in the annals of history!

--So what IS left? --Those very same radioactive wastes already produced!

The end product of radioactivity is heat. --Enough heat, when brought together, to melt and pump sodium as a thermal conductor, or oil or steam if less than that, to drive turbines or other power-generating devices.

Can there be much doubt that, as a working power source, a given set of radioactive "waste" would receive much more careful handling than it does now as "waste?" Still dangerous, but the assembly of radioactive wastes into "secondary," thermal reactors has to be counted as a major safety improvement over today's situation.

Every unit of power generated from radioactive "waste" is that much less greenhouse effect, that much less air and water pollution, that much less fossil fuel used up, that much less foreign trade deficit and dependency resulting from more conventional power generating.

Unlike conventional nuclear reactors, such "secondary" reactors from radioactive "waste" will not generate more such waste. In two senses it will make less such waste, in that--

1. It moves stuff from essentially uncontrolled "dumps" into much more carefully handled power plants; and

2. Its power can begin to replace conventional nuclear power, thus reducing the rate at which further such wastes are being created!

Design and building of these "secondary reactors" will also be a useful conversion of some of the technical resources of our dwindling defence industry, and a good spur to our economy --perhaps coming at a time most needed in our economic cycle!

In the 1940s and '50s we made the basic national decision, echoed elsewhere, to build regular nuclear power plants and to treat their non-power output as waste, rather than as part of a thermal, secondary power retrieval system. Whatever the economics were then as regards such secondary retrieval, those economics have certainly changed since, and the whole issue certainly bears rethinking.

When we originally made that basic national decision, we were in the throes of a technological fantasy about limitless clean nuclear power. Fusion power was just around the corner, we had not yet come to appreciate how hard it is to keep up safety standards in large-scale enterprises and over long periods of time, and we'd certainly not anticipated or come to appreciate the extent of the problem that we are now posed vis-a-vis horrendously accumulating, dangerous, nowhere safely disposable radioactive wastes. Each of these factors by itself fully justifies we rethink that decision of not converting radioactive wastes into secondary thermal retrieval power reactors. Taken together, it's quite remarkable that no one is exploring the issue.

It looks like the main reason this recourse has lain neglected so long, is that it is such an easy, low-cost way to both generate power and to handle the wastes. It's not "cutting-edge;" the romantic frontiers of technology have long gone far beyond it so no one is looking there to make an exciting career. It's about as exciting as burning garbage for power--which in fact it is! But what it could do for our power needs colliding with our environmental needs colliding with our political needs colliding with the needs of people living near where those teeming-over wastes are being stored? --Now that does look pretty exciting....

--And whatever the economics were then; and whatever the economics may be now: there is a very simple, direct and easy way to change those economics for the better. Exempt from all taxes for a decade, income from commercial exploitation of a long list of substances hitherto known as dangerous and toxic wastes! (--Including radioactive wastes.) Tax such income at half rates for the decade following and at normal rates thereafter. To take advantage of the tax break, all sorts of uses will come out of the woodwork to use up such "wastes." Any foregone tax revenues during that interval would be many, MANY times made up for by what we would otherwise have to spend in protecting and restoring our livingspace from those dangerous wastes, and our absolute societal and global costs saved would be many times more even than that!

Until World War II, a major part of the history of the industrial revolution was a matter of each generation finding commercial uses for the waste by-products and overlooked resources of the previous generation. Since then we appear to have let matters in this regard get away from us. The proposed tax incentive would bring us back in line with this historical precedent, and further would be very much in line with current social efforts to reclaim and recycle specific wastes such as plastic and aluminum.

Conclusion: we should immediately proceed to study the feasibility and simple design of secondary thermal recovery power plants using some of our radioactive wastes. The wastes we are so anxious (and unable) to control now should be made available to commerce under appropriately controlled and well-understood conditions. We should also begin immediately to determine how best to define and apply the proposed tax incentive to encourage the commercial using-up of all sorts of toxic and dangerous substances with which we've let our world become overrun.

Step One: please discuss this proposal with at least one other person whom you respect.

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Step Two: if this idea survives your Step One, please get in touch with us either care of this publication or via our homepage at http://www.winwenger.com or e-mail me at win@thebestweb.com/ Be advised: if more than two of you respond, depending upon the quality of response I will give you each other's addresses and let you take matters from there. We've too many apparent solutions, to too many of the seemingly impossible great problems, to push for any one of these; moreover, our efforts are toward equipping the free individual to be better able to solve problems around him, and empowering him to do so. If anything is going to be done with this proposed solution, YOU are the one who will have to do it. If you have reason to care about the nuclear wastes problem or about this our suggested approach to it, please get in touch.

Step Two-and-a-Half: ANY proposed new solution to ANY major problem is, by definition, controversial. If this one stirs any interest at all, I expect to see as much flak on it as on my space-launch invention released this June 26. Flak there will be. Some of it may be justified. If you have criticism of this solution, please send it to me together with permission for me to publish it in a future column -- which, if its good, I very well might and thank you!

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Your Personal Empowerment

1. Regarding first-hand observation and solidly skeptical testing: Our main purpose is to spark people at all levels into looking at matters afresh and into checking things out for themselves, first-hand, putting various issues to test instead of simply going along with what everyone believes.

That concern includes not "mere ordinary citizens" but specifically scientists and professionals as well, of all kinds. Science may be the best thing we have going on this planet, but we have to remember that "science" is first and foremost a human social group behavioral phenomenon first (including all that ethological bother of in-group and out-group behavior and territoriality!!!), and what it is supposed to be, only a very long second. In a field where you (or the institution which pays your salary) survive by grants; you'd best make sure that your research results come out like that grant source expects! Tell it like it actually happens and you're out in the cold - you scientists among my readers are under far more pressure to conform to conventional view, and to slide past present and past oversights and gaffes, than is our "mere ordinary citizen."

(--And if you are a grant source - especially with public money: you necessarily have to screen out all the wild ideas and wild people from whom, historically, nearly all our true breakthroughs came. You don't want a golden-fleece award to come looking for you! --And since resources and people in each field are drawn to where the money is, and virtually every field is now financed largely by public money: virtually every field has been sterilized of its potential for major, rapid breakthroughs. --Breakthroughs which would be happening onrush if the field were first the true science it is supposed to be, and other things second.)

Look with your own eyes, see things first hand for yourself, and you are in for surprises. Don't just drift with the cultural tide like so many dead fish.

Be skeptical. That is important. That is the impulse which, when we act upon it, moves us to find truth, and which has moved the more readily empirical sciences ahead of other human pursuits. When we deal with new techniques for various effects, as we do often in this column, we don't and can't depend upon belief to make things happen for us. Using belief to make things happen, makes for very sloppy techniques at best. The techniques (among other phenomena) we address here work for very nearly 100% of anyone trying them. Flip the light switch and, whatever our state of belief, the lights come on (nearly) 100% of the time. But for this to work --

--But for this skepticism to work at all for us, requires that magic word, "act" - the folded-arms, closed-face-&-mind kind of skepticism does us no good at all. Folded-arms automatic dysbelief is no more productive than is automatic naive belief.

Easily 90% of everything I've been taught has proven to be contradicted by what I can plainly see for myself. Which makes me wonder about what you've been taught. --Which makes me wonder about what you are teaching. --Which makes me wonder about what I'm teaching! Frankly, what I can see for myself, as imperfect even as that medium is, I trust a lot more these days than I do what I've been taught.

"Everyone knows" that you are stuck with the intelligence you were born with - meaning the lack thereof. More refined levels of argument have so much percentage of your intelligence due to genes and so much percent to environment. Think that dynamic situation through. What percent of the outcome of play at second base is due to the thrown baseball? Clearly, even slight variations in how you combine the effects of baseball, fielder, runner, second baseman, crowd reaction etc., will make huge differences in outcome all over the ballpark! With that one statement I just destroyed maybe six of the last eight major books on the subject of human intelligence. --And as for one slight variation--

--As for one slight variation, environmental in this instance the dynamic interplay of factors producing a given level of intelligence down the line: techniques we publish here in Winsights, techniques for receptive visual thinking as one of many means to work the various parts of the brain more closely together, in independently conducted state university studies have demonstrated an average 20 points I.Q. gain for each 25 hours of easy, pleasant, entertaining practice!

That ease and degree of intelligence gain just doesn't fit "what everyone knows," so chances are you never heard of the study until now (inquire to: Department of Chemistry & Physics, Southwest State University, Marshall, MN 56258). E-mail us at Win@thebestweb.com and we'll be glad to show you, for free, how to replicate those and additional effects.

Nor does it fit "what people know" that in almost any field, topic or skill, including especially the content of the sciences, that by any of a wide range of methods, one may readily gain years of proficiency in only hours or a day or so! (Read how to do so in the book Beyond Teaching And Learning.) Installments # 8 & 9 in this Winsights series will give you at least some of that.

--Nor did it fit my expectations when, in 1979, a classroom of EMRs (Educable Mentally Retarded persons), conducted in Windsor, Ontario by St. Clair Community College, using one of our procedures (the "Beachhead" procedure in Techniques of Original, Inspired Scientific Discovery, Technical Invention, and Innovation, were able to come up with original - and workable! inventions. 27 were in the class; 17 were able to give attention to the task; every one of those 17 mild retardates was able to come up with an original workable invention! Retarded people just don't do such things. To be an inventor, one is supposed to be six different kinds of genius.....???

2. Empowerment:

The point being that what everyone knows, especially what everyone knows about everyone's limitations, can stand some modification. YOU are brighter than you think. So is the person next to you. Very little of your intelligence is online with where you are conscious from. Given the way we raise children in this culture and treat one-another, it's a miracle that any of your intelligence got reinforced into consciousness instead of having to go underground. Few if any of us actually intended the vast array of suppression and shut-down effects with which we've laced each other's existence, but maybe a brief history lesson is in order at this point.

Until a few hundred years ago, it required the more-or-less willing services of many, many human beasts-of-burden to be able to support a few people in more appropriately human conditions. A few of those few, in turn, would deal with the larger needs and issues of the culture while the rest wasted their bounty and opportunity a la Thorstein Veblen. Only those cultures survived long which found ways to make most of their people content to be beasts of burden, hewers of wood and haulers of water. The stabler cultures evolved a zillion features and practices to assure that outcome. Other cultures without that stabilizing feature disintegrated or became absorbed by those which featured it.

Then came steam power and the industrial revolution. We no longer needed hewers of wood and haulers of water, thank you! we needed instead interchangeable cogs in the machine, with technicians and middle-level managers to maintain it.

Everything transformed - or so we thought. Where previously we had fought over who got to rule, now we fought over how that rule was conducted. We went through ideologies, world wars, all kinds of paroxysms reflecting the changing nature of society's need vis-a-vis what it means to be human. --But: we changed almost nothing. That vast webwork of practices, a few conscious or deliberate but the vast majority unconscious and reflexive, which had been used to make most people content to be hewers of wood or haulers of water, now were used to make most people content to be technicians and middle-level managers.

Bang! --Here came the information revolution. Now we no longer need middle-level managers, and soon will no longer need most of the technicians either. All that struggle and redefinition to do over again!...... Now we have to learn to use one-another as full human beings, here in the information age. Nothing less will do. We can cut to the quick and start treating with one-another - and with ourselves! as full-fledged human beings, or we've got a lot more wars and ideologies and struggles to go through.

Before I say this next thing, let me give you my definition of one term we've bandied about, a definition which could lend some meaning to all of this. The term, which everyone has used to mean something unintelligibly different from each other's usages, is: "Democracy." "Democracy" I define as "people having a meaningful say in the decisions which affect them."

With that definition, unlike the others, one can look at a given situation and specify exactly how much "democracy" is actually present.

Why is this an issue for us in this context?

Every aspect of your life is being constrained, assaulted, reshaped, without your having an input into the decisions of the decision-makers who are thus affecting your life. More to the point, it has become convenient to the various establishments conducting our society, that most of you find the world too confusing, bewildering, and uncomfortable to think about very deeply or to look closely at. It's the working belief of most who are in those establishments that most of you aren't worth consulting with anyway, that there's little if anything of value which any of you "laymen" (from their perspective) could contribute to the outcomes. It's easier for them if you don't get in their hair. They prefer that you settle for the evening TV news, some beer, and maybe a joke or so at the office.

--Not that any or many of "them" are conscious of this attitude. Most have verbal-based attitudes and beliefs which run in a very different vein. But "they" are embedded - as are we - in a massive, nearly invisible soft web of reflexes and practices shaped for us all in those bygone centuries when most people of a society had to be made content to be mere hewers of wood and haulers of water.

I respectfully submit: if some major national or world problem is affecting you, your children, your well-being, much of what you've struggled so on behalf of: that you own that problem as surely as does the president or agency head or legislative leader or the company boss. You have every right to input on that issue, whether we call that "democracy" or "only fair!" The second part of what Winsights is about, week by week, is the fact that contrary to what everyone knows, you are fully capable of learning about, dealing with, finding effective answer to, just about any major problem or issue! You are more than a match for almost any situation, if you pay enough attention to your own first-hand perceptions and free up a few notches from what everyone knows. You can find effective answers where our pitifully helpless chronic experts cannot.

From time to time in Winsights, we provide a working tool or so such as in installment # 5, "Over-the-Wall Problem-Solving" or in our various other published techniques on effective/creative problem solving, on the prime intelligence-building procedure Image-Streaming and on other enhancers. But the main thing is: that you begin paying more attention to your own first-hand actual perceptions, as contrasted to what everyone knows and what you "know." Go see for yourself; test things out for yourself. Test what? For starters--

Everyone knows you can't meaningfully increase intelligence. For free, learn and practice the procedure, as a test, which has thus far demonstrated 20 points I.Q. gain + other more significant kinds of gain for 25 hours' easy, entertaining practice.

Everyone knows people can't learn a new skill or even a profession in a day; it takes years of hard, concentrated work and sacrifice. Many test by getting a little of that effect going with Winsights installments # 8 & 9, then see where to go from there if you like that kind of results....

Everyone knows hardly anyone can invent or innovate, or make meaningful scientific discoveries.... Everyone knows that world poverty can't be solved, or lasting peace, or the problem of nuclear wastes (see installment # 10), or the destruction of the rain forests, or global warming, or recurrent recessions and sluggishness from time to time in the economy......

Friend, YOU can readily discover effective solution to each of these grave issues, just as you can also surmount the toughest issues in your own immediate life. Friend, we're looking right now at apparently effective answers to each of these more general or global matters! --Rather than promoting our wonderful answer to this or that, though, what we are about and what Winsights is about----

It doesn't matter, certainly it doesn't matter to us, whose solution fixed the problem, only that it gets solved effectively. My belief is that as you become empowered to deal more effectively with what's in your own life and around you, and others become likewise empowered by these tools and with this see-with-your-own-eyes perspective, more of those greater problems will get solved.

As you heighten your capabilities and make your own life better and more rewarding, that helps improve the life of us all. --And you have every right to do so, no matter how inconvenient that might sometimes be to existing arrangements.

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Getting More Intelligence Online

The oldest, most universally agreed-upon natural law of behavior, like gravity is a pretty universally-agreed natural law of physics, is: "that you get more of what you reinforce." Also known in psychology as "The Law of Effect," this law also has a number of agreed-upon corollaries, among them the descriptive statement that the more immediate the feedback or reinforcement, other things equal, the more that such reinforcement shapes traits and behaviors.

Also widely observed and agreed: our EXternal senses (sight, sound, touch, etc.) are much more immediate and focussed than our equally important INternal senses (feelings, images, pre-verbal thoughts and understandings, sense of nuance, etc.). That is why, for most people, games and sports have a greater attraction than the intellectual and aesthetic activities which can be of such far greater value, but which are in large part a learned taste. Putting these two widely-agreed sets of observation together:

If the functions of widely separate, hitherto unrelated regions of the brain are EXPRESSED TOGETHER in a combination EXternal activity, THE IMMEDIACY OF EXTERNAL SENSORY FEEDBACK FROM that external activity builds a more and more immediate relationship between those formerly unrelated brain regions. This then causes those brain regions to become more and more accessible to each other, and the INTELLIGENCE of each part of the brain to become more and more immediately available to the other part(s).

If one of these hitherto less-related or unrelated regions of the brain is the left temporal lobe and verbally focussed conscious mind, as is the case when we describe a perception: if the perception is a subtle or nuance-involved one originating therefore in a region or in regions of the brain not immediately related to our verbally-focussed consciousness, TO DESCRIBE such perceptions brings such remote-from-consciousness regions of the brain more immediately on line with consciousness, making their resources and intelligence more immediately available to our focussed verbal consciousness. This will manifest with improving "I.Q." scores and other positive changes relating to "intelligence" and intellect.

Indeed this prediction is borne out in a series of independently conducted state university studies, which since 1989 have been measuring the effects of perhaps the purest form of such externalizing-through-describing such awareness, the process called " Image-Streaming." On average, as little as 25 hours of easy, entertaining practice of Image-Streaming results in 20 points of "I.Q." gain, together with apparently even greater gains in the more numinous aspects of intelligence, creativity and experience. (Department of physics and Chemistry, Southwest State University in Marshall, Minnesota.)

Does this mean that intelligence can be earned or built? Apparently yes. Operationally, at least, there seems little difference between TRANSFER of intelligence withIN the brain, as seems the case here, and an absolute increase in intelligence such as can also be obtained through improving physical circulation to the physical brain to improve its health and operating condition (Project Renaissance will send you free on request, in return for 4 oz. postage, an article on "breathtaking awareness" full of instructions how to produce that effect); nutritionally at least for short-term effects--longer run effects depend upon the uses put to brain functions during those immediate intervals of nutritional advantage; through re-working the sub-routines of the brain to better support its higher functions [many sensori-motor ways of doing so are provided in Win Wenger's older book HOW TO INCREASE YOUR INTELLIGENCE]; and through training of physical visual response patterns as has been performed since the 1920s by developmental optometrists.)

For whom can this be accomplished? Astonishingly, apparently EVERYone. Of thousands trained, either directly by Project Renaissance or at the university in Minnesota, not one person has yet been found who was unable to learn and practice the procedure for Image-Streaming, and so to begin harvesting its benefits. Besides the main procedures for Image Streaming, Project Renaissance has developed more than 20 back-up procedures to assure that absolutely everyone becomes able to perform Image Streaming. All educational levels, all ages from infancy to nursing home, all "I.Q." levels, appear to benefit.

This picking-up on, sensitizing to, and describing-aloud of, internal awarenesses and imagery, which we call Image-Streaming, also has enormous practical usefulness as well. It is the main basis of arguably the most powerful and accurate solution-finding creative problem-solving system of methods now in professional use anywhere on Earth. (That modern form of Einsteinian Discovery Method is set forth mainly in two books by Win Wenger: the problem-solving one titled A METHOD FOR PERSONAL GROWTH & DEVELOPMENT, and the currently new book on discovering and inventing: TECHNIQUES OF ORIGINAL, INSPIRED SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY, TECHNICAL INVENTION AND INNOVATION. It is the main basis of six diverse systems of method for profoundly improving and accelerating learning (six of the eight systems set forth in Wenger's BEYOND TEACHING AND LEARNING). One form of use of Image-Streaming directly improves reading comprehension nine-fold; another set of uses of Image-Streaming is associated with the even greater reading gains of Paul Scheele's PhotoReading system. Many more practical uses for Image Streaming have been found in a great variety of other contexts.

To see learn the Image-Streaming technique, see Winsights Part 3.

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In 900 Minutes, YOU Can Be Composing

Very Fine Music in Your Own Genre

Even though recent Winsights columns have been very strongly into science and technology, the arts are virtually as crucial in our concern for improving human ability, performance, and well being. Today's example presents the little-known fact that you, or virtually anyone, can become a highly original composer of really fine music. --Your preferred type of music, though this writer is steeped in the classical. Whether you play an instrument with any skill whatever, or are just a bathtub singer, the same principles hold.

All you need do to find yourself composing astonishingly good music, is to set up a tape recorder where you will be attempting to create music, and to follow the simple 900 minute self-training program we call "Improvitaping."

Yes, this simple 900-minute program does involve improvising, but even the narrowly formally classically trained can do as we describe below and your payoff will utterly astonish you. But unlike improv jazz and improv in other branches of music, you do not build up routines. In fact, any time you find yourself playing familiar themes or anything you recognize, you change away from it and let the feedback system we've designed do its integrations at a deeper level instead.

In only 900 minutes, you will be creating entire fine pieces of music, in your own preferred genre, highly original, and in their own elegant form without your ever having had to wrestle with composition formalities or other music theory. Just do the following simple 900 minute self-training, and feedback and your own brain will take care of the rest. Here is this simple 900-minute self-training program, 180 minutes total per day for 10 days:

The Improvitape Technique---

1. Simply play your chosen instrument (or bathtub-sing!) for a half hour per day while recording on blank tape. Try to make it sound like a "real" piece, keep going for a half hour per day....

2. In so doing, steer away from recognized themes and patterns. Keep on doodling for that half-hour per day, trying to make it sound like "a real piece."

3. --And then the hardest part! --Play back the tapes you make, for an hour per day. --A half hour while paying attention to the contents; the other half hour as background while you are doing other things.

--As simply as that! Within 10 days, doing this at-least-90-minute-per-day program, as you run this simple flow-with-feedback process, you will be amazed to discover:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * How much of what doesn't work drops out;

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * How much of what bores the ear drops out; and

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * How much of what does work reinforces up into good new pieces of music!

It's probably 'wince-and-grown' for you at first....

You will likely experience going through these three distinct stages, during your 900-minute evolution into becoming a good, original composer:

1. Wince-and-groan Stage, while you are playing back the first tapes of your improvisations. Bear with it--this is the hardest part right there, and it lasts only for the first 3-5 days. You won't believe how quickly you move on into the stages of pleasant surprises.....

2. Mining Melodies: good thematic material and figures will start surprising you, showing up here and there in your taped improvisations. You can "mine" this increasingly high-grade "ore" to extract from these tapes these instance of good original melodies, motifs and patterns. Even if you did not take the Improvitape Technique any further than this, you could use these good original themes for pieces which you then compose conventionally. But if you continue this Improvitaping program for 3 to 6 days further, you reach---

3. The Stage of Elegant Whole Pieces: the music flows, following its own intrinsic logic, developing its own form, and your improvitapes emerge as complete original compositions. Finer and finer works emerge from this flow, each of them a rich surprise. At times while playing, you won't know that anything special is happening until afterward, when you are playing the tapes back and sit in stunned disbelief that l'il ol' you could possibly have come up with such a wonderful thing. Real hair-raising at times! --And nothing else quite so extraordinarily rewarding as this experience, which - if you continue Improvitaping - will occur for you again and again and again with different wonderful pieces each time.

From that point on, most musicians who have done this simple 900-minute program, over 10 days, will find themselves generating a mixture of Stage Two (Mines) and Stage Three (whole pieces) tapes. Expect a variety of valid musical forms and, increasingly, instances of breathtaking elegance.

I challenge you to do this simple 900 minutes without getting at least these high-level results!

I know it doesn't seem fair - the above Improvitape Technique in composing music, or our hundreds of other techniques for improving various areas of human ability, performance and well being, when so many people have by more formal training labored so hard for such results as they are getting now or are not getting now! I am reminded of how a certain unnamed major university, with whom I had arranged an intelligence-building study which had been about to go to catalog, suddenly had fierce objections and an overrule from unnamed sources within. One quote which got back to me was: "You can't increase human intelligence and, furthermore, you can't increase it HERE!"

Well, this one you can do here, or there, or wherever you please, on your own and no one to overrule you. And as is the case with each of the techniques we've offered here in "winsights," you can reasonably infer with the results you get from this one what the likely verity of the other ones must be. So we invite you: make this simple 900-minute experiment and, while judging therefrom the verity of results of our procedures and something of the huge human stakes riding with them, enjoy harmlessly your own creation in a highest-quality experience wholly beyond any you could normally expect to get elsewhere - and enjoy it for a rich full lifetime!

Next: how to happily teach sight-reading and playing of music to your 2-year-old. --And something of why that's one of the best things you can possibly do for her or him!

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A Fun Way To Teach Your 2-Year-Old

to Sight-Read & Play Music--

And Expand the Core of His Intellectual Capacity!

The bulk of the following article was written in October, 1989 and published in SALT in 1990, but the crucial event concerning it may be said to have occurred in early February, 1995.

I have never met Washington Post reporter Susan Okie, but I am eternally grateful to her. Without her "Science Notebook" for 2/6/95 having crossed my desk, I would have missed entirely:

1) The publication in Science February 3, 1995, of Gottfried Schlaug, Lutz Jancke, Yanxiong Huang, and Helmuth Steinmetz: "In Vivo Evidence of Structural Brain Asymmetry in Musicians."

2) The crucial footnote which cited studies I had missed demonstrating that the crucial trait, musical perfect pitch, basis of Schlaug's article, is trainable. It's one thing to know that perfect pitch is trainable because of your own personal experience and because of the by-product of the method described below. It's another to see the formal study cited which demonstrates that fact and tells one that he is not alone on some of the important issues. This had to be buried among the footnotes where editors and peers at Science wouldn't catch it, because Science wouldn't be caught dead publishing the out-of-paradigm fact that human intelligence can be profoundly improved, regardless of whatever evidence. In the Schlaug paper, the key footnote is # 20, citing D. Sergeant (1969), A. Bacham (1975), C./L. Krumhansi (1991), and others in a series of studies demonstrating the trainability of what has always been assumed to be a "born" trait, like intelligence itself has for so long been so considered to be.

3) The whole body of important work going forward at Dusseldorf University by Schlaug and his colleagues.

As you will see below, we had taken an interest in musical development during early childhood because our theory of building up crosslinks in the brain ("Pole-Bridging") told us that children who sight-read and played music, as distinct from only playing music at an early age a la Suzuki Method, would enjoy great intellectual advantage over their counterparts.

I knew of the many powerful advantages conveyed when children learn to read the printed word at an early, pre-school, age. The methods which achieved that at age 2 years, 1 year, often 6 months of age, had to be pleasant games - you couldn't push" a child 2 years or younger into reading. So, figuring that the younger the child, the greater the developmental boost to the brain also for learning to sight-read and play music, I wondered out loud to Susan, my brilliant and creative wife, what kind of game method might be invented to achieve that combination of skills for children one and two years old. She told me! The method published below is her invention.

--But the best was yet to come.

1) The incidental by-product of her method, published in 1989-90, is that the children so taught develop not only relative but perfect musical pitch.

2) The Dusseldorf Study, published by Schlaug in Science Feb. 3, 1995, demonstrates that people who have perfect musical pitch also have a left plenum temporales which is physically double the size of that crucial organ in the brains of ordinary people!!! Part of our word-processing left temporal lobe, the left plenum temporales is the part of your brain which handles nuances of word-meanings, and so is the very core of your intellect!

This core organ of intellect is not only physically larger in people who enjoy perfect pitch - it is so much larger that it is physically double in volume that of people who don't have perfect pitch. That is a huge, profound physical difference, utterly astonishing to see in terms of the physical brain, and has to convey enormous intellectual advantage!

We had not sought to create perfect pitch - until Schlaug's study I had considered perfect pitch a mixed blessing at best. I am cursed with it, in that ensemble groups and choral groups I've been part of, seem to love to transpose for the convenience of one member or another the music into different keys. Hence, I had to transpose back in my mind as we went - no problem for those without such pitch; probably no problem for the many whose musical skills vastly exceed mine - but a major bother for me. However, I've also felt that somehow my musical perfect pitch was a key part of my quick ability to understand what other people are saying or leading up to.

Summary/Significance:

- People with perfect pitch have a profoundly superior left plenum temporales and intellect. - Following is much of the text of the article describing a simple method to create, among other things, perfect pitch in young children from an early age. - Do this for your child, grandchild, niece/nephew or the kid next door and you create for him or her a tremendous, wonderful intellectual advantage and basis of life understanding.

Training Music Sight-Reading and Perfect Pitch in Young Children, As a Way to Enhance Their Intelligence

Win Wenger, Ph.D. and Susan Honey Wenger, M.A. Gaithersburg, MD 20884

Abstract: The following paper suggests an experimental program for easily training children, ages 1-5 years, to sight-read and play music and to gain relative or perfect pitch. By integrating phase relationships between widely separate, key regions of the brain, the writers propose an easy, game-like procedure that will significantly increase the lifetime intelligence of children.

As simply as this:

1. Face the young child away from the piano or other keyboard instrument, as part of a game.

2. Sound a single note on the piano, while saying (or singing) the name of the note - "A," "B," or whatever. (Flats and harps can be introduced a little later in this training, other than being named when hit during the child's "miss.") 3. The game is to have the young child turn to the keyboard and try to hit the same note on the keyboard - on first try if possible. When s/he strikes a single note, say or sing the name of the note s/he struck - but the correct "hits" then get reinforced with laughter, applause, hair-tousle, hug or whatever is reinforcing for that child in that context in a light-hearted kind of way. The "misses" are part of the game but are less reinforced - too absolute a non-reinforcement would be another kind of reinforcement and make the game less light-hearted. 4. At the start of each round, set a 3" or 56" or larger card vertically on the music rack above the keyboard, just a short segment of base and treble clef bars upon which rides, prominently, the note you're about to hit.

Don't point out the card. Just change the card each time to the next note you're about to hit. It may be immediately, or it may be several hours (spaced, of course, over several weeks at 2 to 5 minutes of this game each day or so), before the child catches on that the card has something to do with the note you are hitting. Only when s/he asks about it do you minimally explain that where the note is on the card, shows where the note is on the keyboard. Now the child has both eye and ear to help guide him or her on the keyboard.

After the child has the first game well in hand (including, eventually, those sharps and flats): you can do the same thing with sequences of 2 and 3 notes. Once that skill is well in hand, simple tunes will make sense to the child and be well within his/her competence to likewise pick out and play. Likewise combinations of notes, chords. Likewise the game of which other note most sounds like this one, as developing the sense of octaves.

From there, the child will be well equipped to take full advantage of conventional music training if desired, or of Suzuki training, now widely available and which is excellent for developing playing skills and attitudes. If you use Suzuki, though, continue to reinforce the sight reading on the side or at home, since Suzuki training does not teach sight reading until much later and it'd be a pity to waste the reading skills already developed. Even without such follow-up musical training, though, a major boost to the child's intelligence will have been accomplished by the above game.

Children too young (or developmentally too young) to as yet be able to pick out a single key on a conventional keyboard, may be able to do so with full benefits by being started on a special keyboard whose individual keys are broader, so long as its pitch is true.

(The above technique was created by Susan Wenger during October, 1989.)

Purpose of this technique:

The purpose of this technique and game is not that of training the child to become a musician. That may indeed often develop, and a musical perception and background make for a far richer and more rewarding lifetime experience. --But the purpose here is not that of making the child into a musician.

The purpose of training perfect pitch and music sight reading skills, in children between ages one and five years old, is to substantially improve their intellectual intelligence for a lifetime.

We predict that normal children ages 1 to 5 years will, within several years, average no less than ten to thirty points "I.Q." higher, similar to though not quite so strong as the gains made from another brain-building procedure, Image Streaming as discussed below. In very young children who Image-Stream, sharp gains are observed immediately. In older children and in adults, and in most developmentally young people of any chronological age, such gains are also substantial but gradual, though these gains continue developing for some time beyond the interval during which Image Streaming was practiced. Since the structure of brain process in Image Streaming is so similar in principle to that of the sight-reading and playing of music, we can expect the patterns of gain to likely be similar.

Even in adults and college students, the eventual gains from Image Streaming, per eighty minutes of practice, accumulate at the rate of a full point I.Q., so we expect substantial gains with some form of this sight-reading training procedure even with older children. However, the greatest and most immediate gains may be expected with children who are so young that most of their habits and short-cuts for perceiving and thinking have not yet been formed and who, for that reason, can obtain the most benefit from a given amount of such training.

Why should training to sight-read bring any benefit in terms of intellectual skills or intelligence? Can an early experience in music relate somehow to later academic abilities?

Why are people who learn, early in childhood, to sight-read and play music, usually several standard deviations above average in intelligence? It's long been assumed that they had an inborn natural "gift" - most of which, of course, are never developed. Early economic and cultural disadvantage can be a preventing factor, though ours is an information-pervasive environment. There definitely do appear to be some instances of special "gift." Recent discoveries, however, point toward early musical development itself being a main cause of this subsequent higher intelligence, not merely a co-by-product of social privilege or the magic wand of a "genius gene."

Discovery of Brain-Integrative Factors:

The phenomenon of Image Streaming (defined below), was discovered early in 1975. From that time on, we observed that the practice of Image Streaming enriches the intelligence of its practitioners. In 1984, we developed a simple hypothesis to account for this increase in intelligence (as set forth below). In spring of 1989, with the results of the Reinhert Studies, which formally measured and are measuring some of the effects of Image Streaming on physics students at Southwest State University, this hypothesis, called "Pole-Bridging," became a supported theory.

Definitions:

Image Streaming is the practice of letting oneself become aware of the spontaneous free-flow, free-association, visual mental imagery which is going on all the time as a reflection of unconscious perceptions, thoughts and understandings. Part of this practice also is the describing of these images aloud while examining them. To be effective, this describing bust be out loud, to an external focus - a person as a listener, or to a tape recorder as potential listener.

This is quite different from the directed imagery which is familiar to many people and programs. Image Streaming, being undirected, when brought conscious constantly surprises the viewer with unexpected images and associations,. This imagery appears to arise in other, subtler-signalling regions of the brain. This different location is significant in giving rise to higher intelligence, according to the theory of Pole Bridging.

This constantly ongoing stream of images is usually unconscious, but virtually every person can readily self-train or be trained to bring this resource stream conscious./ That general ease of training, in turn. makes Image Streaming an excellent candidate for any program which seeks to improve the intelligence of large numbers of people. In the aforementioned study, students who practiced Image Streaming as an enrichment outside of class, gained in general intelligence at a rate of a full point's "I.Q." per eighty minutes of practice, 20 points for 25 hours of practice, among other benefits.)

Pole-Bridging - Combines in expressive form the activities and/or perceptions which are characteristic of widely separate regions of the brain. One should involve these perceptions or activities closely together, for an immediacy of experience feedbacks which forces those widely separate regions of the brain to work closely together.

--In Image Streaming, the left temporal and parietal lobes (expressive and articulative, and specific associative) are caused to work closely with the right temporal lobe (making general sense), and with wide additional regions of the brain including apparently the right optic chiasm at the rear of the brain.

--In the above method for developing both sight reading and music playing skills and relative or perfect pitch. much of the motor cortex is involved with the left temporal (reading recognition), the right temporal (music and aesthetic response), and with wide-ranging auditory regions of the brain. In addition one of the writers, who enjoys perfect pitch, speculates that this automatic ready-made auditory orientation becomes a great help to all the areas of the brain which make sense out of or otherwise sort out sounds. / (This hypothesis, concerning effects of perfect pitch, might eventually be tested by bio-instrumented comparison of the brain behaviors of persons with and without perfect pitch, in response to diverse auditory stimuli.)

Obviously, causing widely separate regions of the brain to work closely together, by building up communication between those regions, will cause the resources of each such region to become more available to the operations proceeding in the other regions. This is a factor in the improved intelligence observed to follow such Pole-Bridging activities. A still more significant issue in Pole-Bridging, though, is the factor of Phase Relationships.

Phase Relationships concern the length of time between when one part of the brain receives a stimulus and when other parts of the brain become involved in the processing of that stimulus.

Significance of Phase Relationships (in Pole-Bridging Theory)

All of the brain sooner or later lights up on any major stimulus. The length of time before this happens, though, is the critical issue. Ertl, Herrmann, and others have consistently found for decades, that closely integrated phase relationships between left and right hemispheres, at least, are associated with higher intelligence; wide lags with lower levels of intelligence. One of the writers found this same relationship, left-right, in studies he performed on his own students during 1969-70 and again in 1970 in testing eight pre-identified geniuses.

If there is too great a delay between the time when some initial part(s) of the brain get(s) that stimulus and the rest of the brain thence receives that stimulus, then the first part completes its operations and writes close-out instructions into that stimulus as it is passed along into the rest of the brain. (In effect, the first part says, "That's the way it was done, folks!" and the rest of the brain, saying "Yeah," shuts down.)

If the phase relationship is closer, however, other parts of the brain are reverberating with the first on that stimulus before the first has completed its processing. What results then is a much more involved set of instructions getting written into that stimulus as it is passed along into the rest of the brain. (In effect: "Here's what we've come up with so far, folks, but there's this to be checked out, that to be investigated, with such-&-such still to be found out!")

A brain so instructed does many more things, and much more involved things, with that stimulus. Consequently:

A person with well-integrated, tight phase relationships (not only left-right but, apparently, in all directions within the brain) will characteristically sense more relationships, and perceive more and richer meanings with that stimulus and generally. --In other words, be considerably more intelligent.

The Reinert Study (1989, 1990 op.cit.)/ supported this theory of phase relationships and Pole Bridging, in 3 ways:

1. The overt, overall gain in intelligence of Image Streamers at a rate of a full point "I.Q." per eight minutes of easy home practice - a considerably greater rate of gain in intelligence than by other means thus far studied. 2. In perceptual and learning styles, the students who Image Streaming zipped strongly and immediately into integrated balance of brain functions, as measured on the Kolb. Students who enriched with a different method, moved sharply further toward extreme imbalance, as most college physics students do during their course of study. 3. The combination, of viewing these inner images and describing them aloud, was crucial to the outcome. Those students in the Reinert (1989) study who did everything else in the procedure but did not describe aloud those images to a listener or to a tape recorder, not only did not gain as much as those who did so: they showed no gain whatever during the interval of the experiment It is the combination of these regions of the brain which is significant in increasing intelligence, and in the other benefits associated with Image Streaming or other forms of Pole-Bridging.

With modern PET-Scan, CAT-Scan, blood-flow imaging and other equipment, it should be far easier than ever before to test further the theory: that to integrate phase relationships between various regions of the brain by Pole-Bridging between those regions, combining those regions several activities into some expressive form which yields immediate experiential feedback, increases intelligence.

Relationship to the proposed early training of music skills in young children:

As an excellent further test of the Pole Bridging theory, we suggest a longitudinal study of intellect and intelligence in young children taught as described at the start of this paper, compared with closely matched children not so taught. Such musical Pole-Bridging integrates brain behaviors which are very different from those of Image Streaming, and brain regions which are somewhat different. If the behaviors so integrated are different and intelligence still increases substantially, then the common factor causing the increase will be the integration of diverse brain functions - the dynamic principle, not just the particular brain behaviors which happened to be combined in the one lucky technique of Image Streaming.

The prediction is that young children who learn these music skills by such a method will enjoy more than 10 points I.Q. advantage over children who are not so trained. To be frank, this average advantage in intelligence could well be upwards of 30 points I.Q. - with all which this can mean in terms of a lifetime of enriched experience and in terms of potential contribution to our society and culture.

If this prediction is confirmed in the context of music training, that should cause a significant increase in public support for the arts and for arts education. As already shown at the start of the (music sight-reading article segment of this) paper, this particular procedure is certainly simple and easy enough to make testing this proposed experiment feasible for any reasonably competent musician, music teacher or music education program which can also arrange access to the appropriate child-level I.Q. tests. Even ordinary parents, siblings or tutors who at least know musical notation should be able to conduct this program successfully.

Such further confirmation, from another context, of the Pole Bridging Theory, should encourage further investigation and development of this theory. Given the great number of diverse brain functions, and of the identified regions of the brain where some of these functions are localized, it should soon be feasible to create 10,000 different specific Pole Bridging techniques, each effective in increasing intelligence, or as therapies and/or remediations.

[We abridge the foregoing article at this point, to better pursue the goals of this present paper. Please note that although the contents of the foregoing were touched up for editorial purposes of readability, their meaning was unchanged and, in particular, the predictions made then were not in any way "touched up" but appear as they were published in 1990.]

The gist: Image-Streaming, and this easy game form of teaching young children sight-reading, both express activities of widely separate regions of the brain. When those activities are expressed together in such forms, immediate feedback induces these widely separate regions of the brain to work more closely together, with improved phase relationships. This results in cumulatively higher intelligence.

--This apart from, and in addition to, the intelligence gains to be obtained from training perfect pitch, an accidental by-product of the Susan Wenger method of training sight-reading, which expand the size and powers of the word-meanings-involved left plenum temporales.

Conclusion:

When the hard physical evidence of cat-scans et al demonstrates that incredible doubling in physical size of the brain's main organ for intellectual understanding, how can anyone of conscience go on letting our present schools and home practices lay such terrible waste to our own children's minds? Please let us hear from you, in the forum here at Botree, or at my world wide web site winwenger.com or by e-mail at win@thebestweb.com

Gifted Computer Games Programmer wanted: to work on spec, own part of the results. We have outlines for a computer game to develop in preschoolers inner musical skills to Mozart-like level; also for another game to teach preschoolers in weeks of fun a quantity-sense, number sense, relationships-sense, and the whole of arithmetic and secondary school level math. Why make 12 years of drudgery and misery out of what can be accomplished to far higher level in a few playful, joyous weeks? The music program would implement advanced versions of the above Susan Wenger Method (1) to a far finer degree than even gifted musician parents could normally take it; (2) bring these advantages within reach of all children and not just those of parents who can themselves sight-read and play music and are alive enough to want to share that with their children. Please get in touch with us at the above address(es), and/or bring this to the attention of those of your friends who are gifted computer games programmers. Thank you.

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HOW TO RUN BETTER MEETINGS, GROUPS, CLUBS AND CLASSES

Have you ever had the experience of having something important to say but no opportunity to say it? How easy or hard is it for you to really hear and respond to what someone else is saying while you're sitting there seething with your own thwarted urgent contribution?

--Same for your participants. Every time you've done your job as chair ore moderator so well that your people have gotten interested and involved, you inflict that perception-inhibiting frustration on your brighter members and in direct proportion to the degree that each has something important to contribute!!!!!

--Same for your students! Every time you've done your job so well that your lecture starts to get interesting, you inflict that perception-inhibiting frustration on your brighter students and on your class generally!

In a corporation where time is money, how much time is wasted in board and staff meetings, either in lengthy discourse by the chair or CEO while expensive specialists and executives sit mute, or in pre-orchestrated speech presentations whose "discussion" outcome was determined long since, or in a chaos ended only when the chair or CEO goes out and either does things himself or by dictate, dismissing 99% of all that was said at the meeting? Or where everyone is saying only what the chair or CEO wanted to hear, providing no meaningful feedback or direction?

--So why the heck HAVE such a meeting? IS there a way to make meetings contribute positively and meaningfully to our affairs?

Here is how to get the best out of your group or staff, instead of settling for the lowest common denominator of performance. Here, then, follow in summary a very few, very simple provisions through which you can build interest, sustain tight topical focus while fostering dynamic expressive interaction, wonderfully integrating and developing your group's various perceptions and perceivers. You will find that you can maintain a stronger, better topical focus with these interactive group-managing techniques than you can sustain now in solo lecture! This is not loose soft-minded stuff about letting employees or students or members express themselves: this is highly efficient group, boardroom or classroom MANAGEMENT. You've been getting your group's seemingly inevitable idiocy: now, through "Dynamic Format," discover and focus your people's (your people's!!!) very real genius.

Dynamic Format--introduction:

Dynamic Format fits comfortably with and can benefit most other group methods and procedures. It can turn miraculously productive, all kinds of group meeting from classroom (and even faculty meetings!!!!!) to board room to sales meeting to Town Hall and civic clubs. --Be first in your block to try it out!!

Dynamic Format will enable you to easily get the members of your group actively, richly exploring, debating, investigating, and relating to any topic or issue, yet staying far better focussed than can the most forceful lecture or most rigorous use of Robert's Rules. Dynamic Format helps your participants to participate without getting in each other's way or in your way. Dynamic Format is a set of very simple managing techniques to conduct the transaction of information and/or decision with maximum sensitivity and breadth of consideration and perception quickly, crisply, in depth but efficiently. (Doesn't sound like meetings you've been in before, does it? We've all heard the old joke about an hippopotamus being an animal designed by committee, meaning that group outcomes normally are a joke or come out close to being the lowest common denominator. Getting genius from such a group?!? Unthinkable! --But within a few paragraphs you'll be seeing how to easily do so...)

The simple "house rules" of Dynamic Format enable your people to be interactive, thoughtful, perceptive, expressive, comprehensive, and yet to maintain a tight, clear progressing focus on your topic. Dynamic Format allows a group to movedeftly, crisply and quickly, without heavy-handed directing and without having to wander through mishmash.

Dynamic Format Instructions:

Here is how to bring about these and other desirable effects from a group meeting---

FIRST: Have any group of more than 5-6 participants to subdivide at the start of your session, so each is already in place with his or her partner(s) on a stand-by basis. That will let you move swiftly and smoothly and deftly in and out of the interactive mode when you come to the point in your session where you want to use it. Have your people stay oriented with their partner(s) even while functioning in your larger (plenary) group. This way, when you want to switch modes, neither logistics nor shuffle is required. You are free to move crisply between levels of interaction as well as from step to step, or into interaction and crisply back to formal lecture or other formal process.

Your teams can be pairs, or threes, or you can have "buzz groups" consisting of as many as 5-6 participants, depending upon what you want to do with them. Each participant in a pair has far more "air time" in which to examine and describe what she perceives, in the context of the defined topic or question. The larger your sub-divided groups, the more chance that someone in each will catch on to what you want and model how it is done. The more difficult your question or task, therefore, the larger you want your sub-groups up to a maximum of six, to ensure that someone there in each group will be able to comprehend and get things moving as you want. Most of the time, though, to get the maximum of Socratic benefit,/ the maximum of perception-developing "air time" for each, work your participants in pairs. You can even have your participants, as this writer has often done with his participants in his workshops and classes and demonstrations, orient in pairs within larger sub-groups of 4 to 6 members.

SECOND: From the very start of such a session, set up at least some of the following "Core Agreements" or "house rules for this session," to make it easy for you to swiftly and gently guide and focus or refocus your people into, through, and out of highly involved, highly interactive "buzz-sessions."

A. Waterglass Rules. The waterglass, ashtray or chime which can be heard easily when everyone is talking at the same time -- so your voice won't have to compete with all the other voices--

1. Three 'bings' = Instant Pause in Talking. Rule: the moment you hear 3 'bings," pause in talking not only in mid-sentence but in mid-word so that you and others can hear the next topical question or step of instruction. The game: to not be the last one caught talking after the third bing. (Keep the whole process light-hearted.)

Over the many years since I started demonstrating this process in classes and conferences, I've seen many conference presenters adapt this part of the process to use with light switches, drums, pianos, party horns, even in one instance a trumpet! Make the sensory-attention-catching device pleasant and agreeable, however. This works by far the best if you keep your participants in good spirits.

2. One 'bing' = Half-Minute's Notice, before the 3-binger. Rule: keep on doing what you are presently doing but be ready a half-minute after this one 'bing' to pause in talking, to hear the next instruction. Because the chime is so different a sound from human voices, it is heard easily through the buzz-murmur. You don't have to be strident: even a very light chime will carry through and can be made to sound quite pleasant.

3. Hand-Up = Instant Talk-Pause + Hand-Up, this simple device often used by the Scouts. This is best for very large groups, of one hundred or more members. Rule: the instant you notice either the leader's hand go up or other people's hands going up, pause instantly in your talking and get your own hand up! (On-off flicks of the room lighting can serve the same purpose, especially in starting groups that have not yet previously been introduced to these house practices.)

B. RELEVANCY CHALLENGE. Make a triangle of your thumbs and fore-fingers. Sight at the speaker through that triangle. Rule: on that instant, whoever is speaking must

* Demonstrate how his/her remarks relate to the topic; or

* return to the topic; or

* yield the floor. Instantly.

How many times have you been reluctant to shut off someone's story but had to stand there bleeding internally while s/he got further and further off the subject and broke your hard-built context?!? You can see how, with just a little simple pre-arrangement, major group dynamics can be set in motion or stopped, directed, focussed. You can orchestrate these effects to produce a maximum in terms of meeting-goal, in terms of learning, in terms of creative production, in terms of arriving at decision and consensus. Simple arrangement of easily used signals as standing rules or agreements allows you to orchestrate a wide range of group behaviors virtually without effort or delay. On the same principle, from time to time you may want to set up these special-occasion rules for particular situations--

C. Support-First Rule. Used to obtain creative production, fresh ideas and perceptions, innovations, and answers to questions or issues whose outcome is not narrowly predetermined. To get more and better ideas contributed, the first response to the contributing of an idea should be a positive reinforcement. However off-the-wall an idea or input may seem at first, the first response to it must be some form of meaningful, content-related support! After that meaningful first support, then it's o.k. to carve that weird notion into corned beef hash. --So long as the support came first. Every major system of creativity training or creative problem solving now has some form of this rule. To use it effectively, simply put it in this form:

1. Any time you observe an idea not getting supported first, whether yours or someone else's, clasp your hands together over your head for a second or so while looking wistfully upward, then go on.

2. Don't use this support-first rule where you don't want richly expansive creativity, multiple considerations, and enthusiastic participant expression. In much of schooling, for example, information is arranged to have only one right answer and creativity might be in the way of the leader's or teacher's immediate objectives. To avoid creativity being obstructive, have your audience know when this rule is in effect and when it is not.

3. Note: the best ideas usually are those which were greeted first with a burst of laughter. You may wish to give those laugh-burst ideas special attention. In any case, make sure that the first response to whatever input positively reinforces that act of creating and contributing ideas and fresh perceptions. Win your way past the usual reflexive self-censorings that stifle creative thought and perceptiveness.

D. 3-Sentence Limit. (Or 4, or 2, or simply a 1-minute limit per input, depending upon the size of group and the nature of the process you are working.) Once this rule is invoked. any time you notice someone going beyond the set limit, simply lean forward with hands clasped in front of you. E. Make Record of the Run-Pasts! This is an additional way to correct the main frustration about any group discussion or process which gets interesting enough to provoke a lot of desire to participate/ Rule: Anything you notice that seems worthy of mention, but which the group process (or lecturer!) has stampeded past: make a written note or record of it, immediately! So reinforce YOUR OWN perceiving of overlooked aspects, not merely just that particular point! (--And clear the traffic jam in your perceptions between what you have to say and giving more attention to what others are saying now! --And if others also follow this Record Run-Pasts Rule, your inputs when you do get to make them will receive attention.

Sometimes: there is a chance before the end to pick some of these points back up and consider them. But the main purpose of this rule is to reinforce your own perceptiveness and integrity of view. Any time you notice someone else seething with an overrun point, point to his or her notepad and waggle pen or pencil at it.

Boardroom, Clubhouse, City Hall:

Note that Robert's Rules of Order were designed to shut down communications within a group so that business can be transacted. The too-typical result leads to all those tired old outcomes about which we all make all those tired old jokes. Dynamic Format, instead, elicits focussed communications in a way that causes the business transacted to reflect the highest considerations and actual genius of the group!

--Yes, your group! Working this format, you have some very pleasant surprises coming to you.

Board meetings, annual business meetings of societies, faculty or staff meetings, planning groups, task forces, town meetings, political meetings, etc., all are appropriate for this set of focussing strategies. This form of participant involvement, fostering expression from each participant's own perceptions while sustaining a tight topical focus, yields results far superior to those of the methods historically or currently in general use. Any corporation, society, committee, task force or staff can immediately, easily and sharply improve its performance and product, and greatly reduce the time, attention and cost required to arrive at objectives.

Aside: A Lecture to Teachers---

The lecture method was invented for the situation, back in the Dark Ages before printing, when only one copy of some book would be at the university. There the most qualified person would both read aloud from that book to the class, and comment or lecture based upon it, for the benefit of all the students who otherwise had no access to that book and its contents. A few of the relevant circumstances have changed since then! Some churches and most schools have continued the practice, though. All most classrooms need to become a religious service is a hymn or so! (The prayers can be said secretly! --if many of our children have a prayer of making it through intact!)

Even if you are wedded to the lecture method and have never "buzzed a group" in your life, you can experiment just a little. Identify the key point you've just been trying to make in your lecture, and instruct your students to "turn to your partner(s) (or "the person next to you" if you've not pre-set the class) and, between you, let's see which pair of you can come up with the best statement of this issue" (or the best answer...) Or, turn your main point into a question and ask that question. (Indeed, any question you would ordinarily ask rhetorically can be usefully handled in this manner.)

* Get them started. (By look or persuasion, make sure all are participating.)

* Allow 3-4 minutes. * 'Bing' and state the half-minute's notice, or hold up with the 'bing' a sign that says, "KEEP GOING - BUT IN A HALF MINUTE BE READY FOR THE NEXT STEP" * Gently or moderately THREE-bing your waterglass, cup or ashtray to end or pause the "buzz." * Sound out (and give at least a little somewhat positive reinforcement to) each of a few pairs' wording of the issue (or answer). If possible, hear what they actually are saying instead of what you expect to hear, but keep orienting toward your intended insight. Reinforce from there the point you were making, and move on.

Now, that wasn't too hard, was it? --And easier to do next time. Courage, there, for lo you can soon be effortlessly moving your students in and out of interactive process, and through different levels of process, with amazingly well-focussed discussions, like a pro. --Like a master conductor directing his well-trained orchestra! Yes, you!

You can manage easily your students, even your students, into ever more excellent topical focus and intensity and in-depth understanding.

Consider: of what value even the most eloquent lecture, or cleverest workbook, if little is learned from it? What matters is what is learned, not what is taught. Dynamic Format lets you have it both ways.

Whether board room, club room, Sunday school, task force, public committee, or classroom: your only possible drawback to doing this is that you might actually achieve some of your stated objectives, and then where'd you be???

If you are shy about it, test out these rules one step at a time until you feel them working for you, and you see and are pleased with the results.

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How to See with Artistic Eyes

What follows goes far beyond art appreciation, to enrich the raw stuff of perception per se. It is a really great way to create a "high" experience, one of the more enjoyable of your life.

You can enhance this highly repeatable experience even further on special occasions with a temporary boost effect via simple nutrition. For that temporary boost effect before an intended main enrichment experience, just as you would before an important sports competition, you might wish to nourish your organs of perception with Vitamin A or beta carotene, the nucleic acids RNA/DNA, and/or brewers nutritional yeast. Heavy foods, alcohol or artificial substances just prior to a main perceptual enrichment experience would impede the highest qualities of perception even though the following protocols (behavior recipes) may be strong enough to carry past such hindrances.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * 1. Flick-Gazing. [For here now and at the art museum later.] Simple way to counter neuronal habituation which, to a greater or lesser degree, normally deadens everyone's senses. Nerves, circuitry and the brain itself go to sleep on a constant signal, awaken on a changing signal. Arousing the sensory nervous system by rapid change of stimulus (as in sequential rapid montages) lets you perceive with far more aliveness.

Training plan, phase one: the "flick-gazing" exercise conducted here, by yourself or, preferably, in a group. [Originally published in my book (still available from Project Renaissance--contact <http://www.winwenger.com> or e-mail me at <win@thebestweb.com>) How To Increase Your Intelligence.) See if, by looking at a different face or different feature of this room every half second or so for 3 to 5 minutes, you don't awaken your vision to see nearly as much of what you were looking at during that half second as you normally would by staring at it. The importance of vision--80% of the area of the brain is involved in visual response. This simple flick-gazing trains that much of your brain to handle more information far more quickly. If that increases intelligence, then make the most of it!

Training plan, phase two: (Here, now, on a walk through the landscape or streetscape just outdoors; the Art Museum later). While here, alone with a tape recorder or preferably with a live partner or so: pick at least one, preferably two partners from here who will also be going over to the museum. Here, describe in detail what you encounter, to tape recorder and/or live partner(s). (Teachers: this is also a great thing to do for your classes, especially before any field trip, not just visits to an art museum!) At the museum, each of you together (a) remind each other to flick-gaze at the works around you on exhibit; (b) do so yourself; (c) immediately from flick-gazing, orient on one or two especially outstanding works to examine with awakened eyes, pointing out and describing in detail to each other all the features which to you are so special about that work.

"Brainstorming" rule of Description: if it occurs to you in the context, go ahead and say it. Keep on finding all the fresh things to say about it which somehow further describe it.

Note: this descriptive phase should run 10-20 minutes, and reach a point where it becomes a real challenge to convey through your language the effects you are describing. The more you have to "reach" to effectively describe such effects, the greater your gains in your own powers of language, observation, and intellect!

Further note: working with partners as urged here, will let you master the techniques to such an extent that you not only transform the special experience tonight at the museum but then are able forever after to use these ways on your own to enrich your life whenever you are in a beautiful setting, artistic or natural. If you opt not to work with partners tonight, you may or may not have enough of any of the techniques to be useful to you.

2. Cleansing the Windows of Perception: using a breathing meditation to clarify, among other things, vision. Preferred: that form of the psychegenic "Calm-Breathing Patterns" known as "Noise-Removal Breathing," originally published in Beyond O.K.

Phase One: group training here in this breathing pattern.

In brief: With each slow breath, breathe in as if you were breathing in from below and from behind. Breathe in as if you were breathing in all the way up from the very bottoms of your feet, while releasing each breath luxuriously out through normal channels. Luxuriate also with the feeling of as-if your breathing were coming in and working its way through all the tissues and cells of your feet, ankles, legs and lower body up to where you release and profoundly let go through normal channels. Make each next breath feel more luxurious than the previous slow breath; manage to let go still more with each next slow breath out than with the previous breath out. Like the wind swirling around corners of buildings, swirling up debris and dry leaves and carrying them away, let your incoming breath seem to be swirling through all your tissues and cells of your feet, of your ankles, of your lower legs, swirling through all the nooks and crannies and swirling up and away whatever didn't belong there - all tensions, toxins, tiredness like those dried leaves. Let these release in your outgoing breath, as they hit the open air let them release into hot bright sparks of fresh new life energy. See how much of the tiredness or other stuff, other "noise" that didn't belong, you can sweep up and away out of various parts of your body and turn into those hot bright sparks of fresh new life energy....

.....Make this into a well-practiced, very good feeling, meditation, 5-20 minutes at a time. See if you can get in at least 3 rounds of such practice before you go to that art museum experience....

.... Fix your gaze upon some feature of the room or landscape across from you, or later at the museum upon some work of art... Sweep your incoming breath through that space between you and what you are gazing at, sweeping up and away whatever had been between you and fuller, richer perception of what you are gazing at.....

Phase Two: with your previously selected partner(s), at the Museum, using the Noise-Removal Breathing to intensify/ clarify perception of select works of art, comparing notes in detail with your partner(s) as to what this breathing brings into view for you about that particular work of art.

3. Seeing Through And With The Eyes of the Artist. Experience "putting on the head" of some artist to "become" that artist. First, here, experience an imaginary garden landscape, describing to your partner(s) every detail. Then bring in the artist, describe her or him or it, to live partner or to your tape recorder. Imagine putting on the head of that artist, as concretely as you can. Waft forward into that imagined artist, bring your eyes to where the eyes are of this artist so you are looking through and with those artist's eyes. Bring your ears and other senses to where those of the imagined artist's are, so you are listening and sensing through and with those of the artist. Use her or his senses and sensibilities to look around at this same garden landscape and amazedly detail what the artist is seeing that you hadn't noticed before you became that artist. Then and only then go through some of the experience of that artist creating his/her art.

At the Museum: with your partner(s) (or pocket tape recorder), view select works of art first with objective (your own) eyes; then put on the head and eyes of that work's artist, richly describing in detail to one-another the resulting changes in perception of the painting or sculpture.

Note: this "putting on the head of the artist" is also used to actually and rapidly learn the skills of the artist, and can be used to accelerate and enrich the learning of virtually any subject or skill. It is a form of "Periscopic Learning" or "High Leverage Learning" as trained in detail in the book Beyond Teaching And Learning. In turn, this type of learning method is only one of a dozen major types of accelerated/enhanced learning method now in world use. Some types, as does "Periscopic Learning," feature use of forty or more specific individual methods and techniques, each of which conveys years of learning or sophistication within hours of practice. The first mention in the literature of periscopic-type learning as an accelerated learning procedure was Schroeder and Ostrander's early report on art classes (and later music) conducted by Russian hypnotist Vladimir Raikov.

4. Tuning into the Infinite Aesthetic Hologram--(whimsically, this may also be referred to as "tuning into the G.H.P.B.S. network broadcast"--the Galactic Holomindartcast Public Broadcasting Service!)

Here: learn to Image Stream, as per previous " Winsights" entries, or send for your set of free instructions how, to <win@thebestweb.com>.

At the end of the Museum experience or immediately thereafter, while you are still with one or both partners: Let your arts-stimulated image streaming faculties show you their art gallery. While you describe back and forth with your partners, let your "Arts Channel" Image Stream show you works of art possibly even more beautiful than those you have been viewing at the Museum.

This "Arts Channel" happens spontaneously anyway if you do some practice in Image Streaming, and the arts reward is so strong we don't try to interpret the meaning of the images in that channel--we just detail and enjoy the beauty. You may be astonished at how intensely your beauty-perceiving faculties may be activated.

------------------------

These 4 protocols are yours to enjoy and, if you so choose, to share with co-explorers and people whom you care about, even to teach. It is a way to enrich without significant cost, not only the experience of art and beauty, but life generally.

Note: Not only the arts themselves, but the act of art criticism and music criticism, by expressively working together widely separate regions of the brain working together, may cumulatively integrate phase relationships between those regions of the brain and so build intelligence--see our descriptions, in "Winsights" and elsewhere, of brain-based "Pole-Bridging." --So detail those descriptions!

Amended for this "Winsights" column, these 4 protocols were developed by Project Renaissance specifically for the Arts Themebase of the 1994 Creative Problem Solving Institute, for educative purposes. Copyright 1994, 1997, by Win Wenger, Ph.D., 301/948-1122 or Box 332, Gaithersburg, MD 20884-0332 U.S.A. However, this paper may be freely reproduced (in whole, including this copyright notice, but not in part) to share with people whom you care about. Enjoy!

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Some New Methods

Unlike hundreds of other profoundly accelerative or enhancing techniques developed by Project Renaissance, these are two methods of teaching and learning which have not yet been tried. We'd like to see what you can do with them. Let us hear from you.

Some untried new methods to experiment with and report on, to improve: learning, perception, and conceptual ability in young children.

1. Sherlock Cruises The GEOGRAPHIC

Organize children into tables or teams of 3-4. Provide each team with a selection of 2-3 or more pictures from The National Geographic or equivalent.

Level One:

A] One child describes as much as s/he can of the one selected picture while the other children either look away or "rest their eyes" and try to picture in their own mind's eye what's being described.

B] Each of the listening children then tries to tell everything that that description suggests to them about the location, climate, culture, demographics, whatever else about who and what is depicted in that picture, from the one child's description.

C] Now everyone looks at the picture, and the former listeners describe what differences it makes for them actually seeing the picture, in what they were guessing or speculating about who and what were in the picture. Example: the steep roofs of buildings suggesting the climate has much heavy rain or snow; clothing that suggests a hot time of year in an otherwise cool climate.....

Caption and brief digest of article from which the picture was excerpted, provides feedback. Each child gets his/her turn as observer-describer, on a different picture. Emphasize this as game and treat, not as a lesson.

Level Two:

Most of my techniques are intended for easy use by teachers, without time and effort spent in special preparation. In Level Two, however, this could be made into somewhat more of a scored game if the teacher has points of geography he/she wants to teach with this, or to give a little more formal structure and/or competitive impetus w/o actual competition. If the 3-4 pictures cycled are on the same locale and people, a simple checklist or "test" of who, what, where and how at the end of the cycle could lend an informal scorecard so long as the teacher goes to some lengths to keep this an informal game and not a "lesson." More important by far than any particulars of correct or incorrect will be getting children used to looking at all sorts of things with an increasingly perceptive eye and being entertained by what they can figure out. Letting this become a lesson or a real competition would kill such a development in all but a few, whereas we want everyone to become more observant, and more entertained by what s/he can figure out from what s/he sees.

An easy further step is to get children to "go meta" to their own perceptual and thought and languaging processes. This greatly encourages the growth and development of their higher-level functions, to such a splendid extent that it is one of my own major objectives to get young children, especially, to start looking at their own perceptions and thinking analytically and creatively about their own thinking.

Variance: Some few young individuals will stand out spectacularly well in the above activity; others will not. We need to find some ways to support these few individuals in the further development and upper ranges of their success, without daunting the other children before they can bring their own functions up. Prediction: without exception, these few young individuals will usually also be voracious, wide-ranging readers who have built a broad information base through their irrepressible reading-for-entertainment. Problem: if that prediction holds true: how to use that outcome to motivate voracious reading in other children without targeting one-another's differences and without daunting some of the children whose initial "Sherlockian" performances are much more modest.

2. How did they DO that? - an art-related developmental procedure.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Arrange children in pairs; the pairs also paired closely enough to overhear each other but not interacting formally. Only within their own pair will the children interact formally. Taking turns, each with a different picture work of art-- A. One child describes in as much detail as s/he can the one picture. The other looks away or "rests his/her eyes," then asks questions about the picture and/or tries to "predict" other aspects or features of that picture from that description. B. Describer then identifies 2-3 special features about the painting and speculates what the artist did which enabled him/her to so create or execute that feature. Did he sketch first and paint over; did he use such-&-such a brush stroke or other technique? Did he lay down one color first and then daub over it? Just guessing, how did the artist DO that? C. Listener now looks at the painting, and describes-- 1. What's now in his awareness about the painting that wasn't before he looked at it? 2. Counter-speculations about how the artist executed each of those 2-3 features. 3. 1-2 further such features in the painting and speculations how the artist achieved those effects. D. Both children now begin experimenting onto paper testing their hypotheses how the artist may have created each of those special feature effects. Then go on to free-form their own paintings, with or without regard to the foregoing. E. The paired groups de-brief to each other. Note: encourage children to describe in detail everything that went through their minds as they painted their pictures and while they were creating this or that feature. Objectives: To engage the power of description to enrich and inform vision in the context of art. To make it real for children how there are different ways of seeing things, and different ways of creating effects in and out of art. Also to start especially young children thinking in terms of how they might portray this or that effect, and to let that thought further inform their vision. Becoming more effective representational artists can be a further objective - the ease with which this is achieved by this and similar approaches can be important to self-esteem and thus to achievement and performance in all other areas of the curriculum. The previous objectives are, however, the more important and must be protected from any tendency of students to either formally compete or to become invidiously self-critical.

If you perform such an experiment as either of these: inform me of the details and as much on the results as possible. If you get up anything at all worthwhile, I will help you publish, on several levels.

I will also welcome suggested procedures from you which extend the range, interest and variety of colorful activities wherein children develop their conscious minds, their language, their intelligence, their vision, and their independence of vision, by interactive, expressive, increasingly articulate means. Between us, perhaps we finally can fire up our children and our schools with better methods and better results - in time to help the ones you care about!!!

Unlike hundreds of other profoundly accelerative or enhancing techniques developed by Project Renaissance, the above two methods have not yet been tried. We'd like to see what you can do with them. Let us hear from you.

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Help a Young Child to Flower

With all our references to and even columns instructing on, how to Image-Stream...

--That powerfully brain-integrative process 50 hours of whose easy, entertaining practice builds 40 points' improvement in both "I.Q." and in more meaningful forms of intelligence, according to independently conducted state university studies--

--That simple, pleasantly entertaining practice which absolutely no one out of thousands has been unable to learn and do and thus to start benefiting therefrom--

...some of you must have wondered what you might be able to do for your own young children. Of many things, two are given you today in this column, freely. Use them with your children, aged 2 to 11 years, and please share with us your resultant joy in the results.

As cited above, we know some of the rate of gain in adults. For young children it appears to be far more helpful and powerful even than for adults. And only takes a few minutes to teach.

The impact of Image Streaming in a young child, upon language, brain, perception, understanding, thoughtfulness and apparent intelligence is so great and so immediate, that to see those immediate effects has been, time and again, this writer's most rewarding experience ever!

Each time you have a young child Image Stream, in the days ensuing you will find extraordinary improvements in that child's general joy of life, not "merely" that child's quality of perceptiveness and insightfulness, from then on! What is now known about the brain in relation to such processes makes it appear that such improvements always will result from a young child's Image-Streaming.

For another good look at why, and to teach yourself Image-Streaming well enough to model it for your child in the manner shown you below, you might want to take a look at the following site: < http://www.anakin.com >. Pay particular attention to his description of image-streaming principles, and his free reprint of the whole text of You Are Brighter Than You Think. It contains excellent instructions on how to Image-Stream.

Become, then, at least a little smooth at Image-Streaming and you not only build your own intelligence, but you are able then to model the procedure for your own child in the way shown you just below. Following that, a brief set of instructions how to make your slightly older child (age 6-12 years) not only able to sustain such a practice but to become far better at solving problems and difficulties. First, and for as young as the child is able to use language, is basic Image-Streaming--

Teaching Image-Streaming to a Young Child:

1. Be fairly smooth and/or practiced with your own Image-Streaming so the following example is a real one and from you, and not just a script. Say something like this to your child:

2. "John (or Mary), I think that even when we are awake, we still have dreams going on somewhere inside of us - let's see - when I close my eyes and look to see what's going on there, I see.....

(such as the following, only your own Image-Stream segment: "Two green bushes, must be springtime because most of the leaves are dark green but some leaves are smaller and almost golden toward the tips of the branches. two entirely different sets of leaves on the same bush. The grass is just starting to turn green, still a lot of grey and brown there. I see a moss-covered brick sidewalk in front of the bushes....")

3. "O.K., for fun - John (or Mary), when you close your eyes, tell me what you see there....."

If need be, "play the game" with another adult or older child to model the process, then the young child joins in. Because of shorter interest span, a young child responds to this approach far better than to the lengthier steps used in Project Renaissance's adult instructions, not only to the simpler vocabulary.

Often, a very young child will just name objects instead of describing them. Although this is an important start, you want to get the child into describing things - whether things actually visualized, things just made up, or things present in the here and now and objectively looked-at. The more word-picture sensory evocative adjective-rich the details described, the sooner and stronger the resulting brain and language development. If this is performed with eyes closed, building up the visual feedback effects, the sooner and stronger will the child's own innate visual thinking abilities, originally his prime mode of thinking and learning, will come back on line and develop and enrich.

The tradeoffs-- its easier with older children with better-developed vocabularies; it's effects are more powerful and immediately visible in younger children. The benefits do appear to be permanent, and to view these and to know you had something to do with that child's richer, higher and more wonderful development, is truly one of the most profound joys an adult can know.

If need be to encourage actual descriptions instead of mere namings of things envisioned, model this describing aspect as a separate game, with another adult or older child until the young child joins in. If need be, for starters go around the house seeing how colorfully you can make richly detailed descriptions of even the most familiar, ordinary, objects and situations. Even without the visualizing, this is an invaluable way to develop the left brain of the child, together with the child's entire perceiving and reasoning apparatus and intelligence. The child is still a child - but far more richly so, fully as himself or herself, than would have been the case otherwise.

Until recently, the strongest known method for integrating left and right brains in young children was to teach them to sight-read and play music. That is still a very effective way, especially if done early enough to make much difference in the maturing of the corpus callosum, entirely aside from the high value of the music as such. Now it appears that to describe from ongoing spontaneous mental visual imagery is far more powerful even than that, and far easier and quicker to accomplish. --Still better, though, if you did both.... (If you go back to Winsights Part 14 , though, we outline there a pleasant game-like way to teach even 2-year-olds to sight-read and play music, instead of the harshly driven methods familiar to some of you - and with some effects even more remarkable than any cited here thus far!!!)

Extending Inner-Image Response into Practical Problem-Solving:

With somewhat older children, ages 6-12, here is a simple way to extend Image-Streaming and equip the child to cope effectively with many things which other children are helpless before. Once some problem, question or difficulty has been identified, tell the child:

1. "Imagine a door. Something like a dream is on the far side of that door. That dream may tell you an ingeniously clever wonderful effective solution to this problem - or at least a way that works.

2. "Dreams being what they are, that answer may not be in words, but somehow in what is shown you. Maybe some of what is shown you will surprise you, or seem to have nothing to do with answering the problem but when we look at it closely, maybe we'll find somehow that the answer is in there somehow.

3. "Let's see if you can tell me everything in this dream-behind-the-door, or in what you imagine on the far side of the door, tell me everything about it while you're looking at it....

4. "--So when you're ready, open your door suddenly and start telling me what you see there on the other side of it...."

If the child has had some Image-Streaming experience, he should be ready to get intelligible answers from beyond the door. If not, he may or may not. You might need to just make a game of seeing what you can see-and-tell about what's beyond the door, without regard to any problem or difficulty, a round or so before using this on problem-solving.

If the actual answer is not fairly readily apparent in the content of what's beyond the door, have the child go through another door in answer to the same problem, but with an entirely different scene behind it which somehow is nonetheless the same answer. If you have enough descriptive detail from both scenes, some detail or adjective or aspect will overlap. What's the same when all else is different, is core to the actual answer. Looking for same and different, in this inductive inference solution-finding, may well be better for the child's mental development and for the child himself/herself than any particular answer might be. Please refrain from interpreting for your child and getting between him/her and access to those inner resources. You can ask slightly leading questions, but not heavily leading: let the child discover, even if it takes awhile. You'll be so very, VERY glad you did.

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Learning from the Lessons of the Future

As we gradually begin at last to find our way past the C-prompt sign, into the human brain:

We've found one type of format or "software program" to be especially useful for solving a wide range of problems, and for creating new designs, innovations and inventions. The "main menu" of this software involves visiting, in imagination, an advanced world a la science fiction, to make observations "there" that are useful to you "back here."

Absolutely necessary to this format is your describing aloud, to a live listener or tape recorder (as potential listener), every detail that you can observe or bring yourself to notice. This describing-as-you-go, and this format, gives your subtler brain resources a very effective way to make known to you the designs, devices, answers, and even advanced scientific discoveries which "work."

Jean Houston's "Exploratory Anthropology" procedure (from Mind Games) is a direct ancestor to our present futures-visiting methods, but lacked (as did all her wonderful mind games) this concurrent describing-aloud feature which is so essential to development of the vision in each instance.

Also essential is to put aside the stereotypes and other expectations you might have, relevant to your area of investigation, before hopping over into that imagined future world. Let yourself be surprised by what comes up in the imagination or vision. Surprise is the indication that you are reaching beyond your conveniently loud (but narrowly focussed) verbal left brain and into your subtler reaches.

For example: during a workshop we were conducting back in 1977, during the energy crisis, one kid wanted to find a cheap source of energy. Along the way he also wanted to see futuristic cities and vistas. To his surprise and disappointment he found himself to be instead in what seemed to be an ordinary cow pasture, nothing else in view or vista except a fringe of trees to one side of that pasture. Worse, he kept stumbling over trailing cables....

Persuaded-upon to go on with his describing-aloud, despite his surprise and disappointment the kid finally focussed on those pesky trip-over cables. These led to that fringe of trees. The trees were so rigged that every time the wind moved them, they tugged along guywires or cables at one-way ratchets, which in turn drove little generators like old-fashioned car generators or telephone generators.

That looks to be a highly appropriate way to power hard-to-reach unelectrified rural regions. Beyond that: using trees as nature's already-built windmills might indeed present an economical source of power. The sense was that a modest woodlot could power a neighborhood; a small forest put enough power into the net to supply a small city's worth of consumption - certainly in the windier stretches of the country.

That system may or may not prove to be economical. The point is, though, that you need to set aside your expectations as to how things "ought to be," and let yourself be surprised by what actually comes up in your imagination or vision. No way could have that kid have come up with the "nature's windmills" invention had he clung to his expectations.

The third essential is to actually notice what's happening in your imagination or vision and report that out in your describing.

Train THAT faculty to notice things, and you'll be far better able to notice things "here" in the "real world" as well. For example, millions of Americans have visited Stockholm on tour or business. Not one has ever brought back with him for use here, any version of Stockholm's traffic signal control system, which uses auditory cues along with the visual lights to direct Stockholm's pedestrian-encumbered streets. The system is at least a half century old. Set up in most American cities, that same system or approach could be saving hundreds of American lives a year.

But no one has noticed, except persons practicing the "futures-visiting" process which trains oneto notice......

Nor have any Americans noticed the Swedish use of hot-water feedpipes into bathrooms. Those hot water pipes are exposed as finished towel racks, adding a touch of real luxury at no cost. Some builders here in America could make a bundle if anyone noticed this.

We spend incredible sums in America on retirement homes and communities; these now competing rather ruthlessly with one-another. How many Americans have been in Italy? How many Americans are or have been musicians? Near the start of this century, Giuseppe Verdi began a successful retirement home for musicians, which is still going. The sensibilities of a lifetime, built up during a career in classical music, or a career in art, or a career in various types of writing----these sensibilities are not easily surrendered. Other things equal, I imagine that such arts-specialized retirement homes and communities could be extremely successful here in the States - if anyone noticed!

To say nothing of the European nickel-cadmium battery which ran for a half-century without any American or American firm noticing it or exploiting it.

If you practice noticing what you are noticing, in these visits-in-imagination, you start noticing all sorts of things here in "the real world" - and some of these might be very beneficial or profitable..

--And much of what you view in your own inner vision may prove profitable as well! Take a good look at some of these visions following below which were not gotten, for the most part, by our invention-seeking procedures which might be expected to be productive of such things. These following visions were incidental by-products from other kinds of excursion into "the future" or from simple Image-Streaming. If you use our futures-visiting procedure next time you can expect to run across - if you notice them as they are happening! - your own such visions of possibly useful products and developments and designs. Of the following visions: are there any you are (1) clever enough, and (2) situated to be able to, turn some of the following to gold?

Incidental By-products of Einsteinian-type "Visits to the Future:"

In our various "excursions into the future," especially with the procedures we've published in the new book Techniques of Original, Inspired Scientific Discovery, Technical Invention, and Innovation: in search of inventions, answers and other matters, we've necessarily run across a wide variety of both architectural and landscaping features. Some of these were attractive and some not. Some of these are easier than others to describe. Any architect, any landscaper, any design engineer who decides to use these inner-vision procedures to find rewarding new design principles and designs themselves, will be endlessly rewarded. At a layman's level, let us cite a very few examples of what came up, not as result even of search for these, but as incidentals in support of the context of the various "futures" through which we were digging for various answers.

Breezegarden * --a garden planted with weeping willow, birch, wild cherry, aspen, other trees and shrubbery whose willowy branches and fronds move very responsively to even the slightest breeze.

Greenblocks * --densely populated suburbia which looks like nothing but rolling countryside. In most areas, the houses are lowset and screened by smallish trees; section by section of the neighborhood is screened by shrubbery. Some sections of taller houses are screened by larger trees. Effect: viewed from any distance at any near-horizontal angle, you see what seems to be rolling wooded hills and fields. Streets are hedged and curve. It's as if you were out in the fresh countryside on some road, neighbors to each side of you; theirs and your own house and the road the only artifacts in this densely populated bucolic-seeming setting. Supporting this effect are low ridges crossing over the region at intervals (perhaps to enclose utilities), 3-6 feet high and crowned by hedges or shrubbery to provide additional greenery screening in support of the bucolic illusion.

NJ Blocks * --Where the town is run-down and the air polluted but people still have to live. Enclose entire blocks with ionized-and-filtered ventilation in this manner. The four to sixteen homes maintain a common wall to the street, and surround the rim of the block, like a Mediterranean great house surrounds an interior garden and patio. The whole is roofed over, possibly with glass, plastic or some sort of translucent panelling for part of the diurnal lighting, but airtight for the integrity of the ventilation system. Part of the open interior is commons to preserve a feeling of space; shrubbery partially delimits individual private areas. The housing of the common ventilation system and/or other utilities backs up to the chimney of the house which has the fireplaces, and also has mounted on it a deluxe barbecue pit with forced-draft automatic flue. The rest of the commons is an attractive yard/garden combination. Parking is on street.

Secure Blocks * --Similar to above but in crime-ridden regions, with these adaptations: the above is up one floor. Ground-floor is small shops as in a shopping mall, a return in that sense to older midtowns where responsible owners are present at all times--by day in the shops, by night in the homes or apartments, and are in fact encouraged to be "snoopy neighbors." Residential parking is in an interior, ground-floor or underground garage with security videos and one entrance, manned by security guard. Outside that one guarded entrance, there are no street-side exterior alcoves or recesses convenient for loitering or covert activities, and corners-mounted videos survey all four fronts. Yet internal living is spacious, clean, secure, and essentially as private as in the better residential suburbs.

Some of this writer's visions were influenced by having read, long ago, R. Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House autobiography, which helps account for these two following--

Forest Spread * --Suspend hearty cable between 2, 3, 4 or more stout trees, ends of such cable anchored in suspended heavy concrete blocks or other weights. Suspend a network of lighter cables over the heavier cable. Mount, above and below the cablework, layers of transparent or translucent fabric. The airspace between the layers is ventilated and provides thermal insulation. Thus enclose, for slight cost, a huge residential space most sectors of which, visually and by psychological feel, it becomes difficult to tell what's outside and what's inside. A ground-floor kitchen-and-utilities core supports balconied second-floor bedrooms and/or a multi-purpose open platform still with plenty of spacious headroom beneath the overhead canopy. The part of this "living acre" which fronts the main approach to this spread can be facaded to look more conventional (until neighbors and mortgage holders get used to such designs), the wall of which contains most of the storage spaces. This "glorified tent" can easily encompass 3-5 times as much livingspace as a conventionally built house of the same cost, and be far more pleasant to live in. Without trees, the same structure can be accomplished with strong poles supporting the initial strongest cables--but without forest around, the eventual results wouldn't be nearly so much fun or pleasant. The interior furnishing of this "living acre" should, for the most part, help support the illusion of being unseparated from the woodland outside.

Buildowns-- * Another way of escaping from the 20th Century's disease of having endlessly to look at one-another's walls. This one might have been instigated in some futures by shifting property tax bases, from corruptible estimates of market value, to the amount of above-ground cubic space enclosed. Many versions and sizes of buildown have been seen, the counterpart of tall apartment complexes and office buildings only dug in around a common opening like an amphitheater, only with attractive balconies and promenades instead of row seats. From outside, one sees unspoiled countryside or pleasant, low-lying cottage-type effects. In some of these visions, there is one common "pit" perhaps an acre or half-acre, with trees, shrubbery, garden, recreational or leisure areas. In other such visions the "pits" and buildings are linked by a major thoroughfare which is strongly screened by greenery and baffle from the garden areas. Entire cities can be "trenched" out in this way, leaving nearly the entire countryside unspoiled or modestly suburban. Both drainage and ventilation pumps are powered in excess of need, and have independent power units for back-up, secure against almost any emergency.

Riverbankery * Where a river has cut fairly deeply. Residential and/or mixed light commercial/recreational complexes, dug into offsetting areas of the riverbank. Natural riverbank, hanging garden, restored riverbank, natural or artificial waterfalls, and forest are what's opposite each complex and, together with the river itself, is all that is in view from each river-fronting such complex. Topside service areas are carefully arranged to maintain recreational and leisure commons overlooking the scenic sectors of the river and opposite riverbank.

Grotto House * Single-household version of "Buildowns." Dig a 20-or-so foot deep hole, bottomed by a sunken garden and pond or pool, walled with trailing greenery, waterfall, other effects. Wrap the much-balconied house around half to 2/3 of the hole to make an exceptionally pleasant grotto space for living.

Lightslabs * --for non-load-bearing interior walls and as insulating decoration on load-bearing walls. Very, very light-weight; in some visions seen literally as inflated like balloons, though it was not clear in instances checked thus far how pressures were maintained for the long run. In other instances pressures could be deliberately let out as part of a remodelling or moving process, then restored in the new setting. Other slabs would be like bubbled plastic or styrofoam, but lined permanently smooth, and colorful. Some, translucent, would be internally lit. Some of these would backlight a panel diorama or hologram which gave good illusion of a window looking out on some excellent scenery.

Treetops * Whether a commercial restaurant or businessplace, a classroom, or even a livingroom, everything is in little platforms at different levels, with greenery, so arranged as for everything to appear to be little alcoves and platforms up in some great tree. When experienced, this seems to yield a great deal of at least atavistic satisfaction, a very attractive effect.

Space Habitats * From even before the time we developed these techniques and programs, we knew that the popular notion of large scale space habitats as rotating cylinders needed to be amended to idea of concentric cylinders realizing still greater economies-to-scale, per person and absolutely, and providing greater security to its inhabitants. Not all shells have to be at one gee. Realization in 1992 that only about 2/3 of the ship would be these concentric shells and 1/4 to 1/3 would be huge cylindrical open space, providing visual and psychological relief for its inhabitants while still substantially realizing aforementioned economies-to-scale.

One vision showed yours truly a popular way of getting around inside such large-scale rotating cylindrical spaces will be by glorified pogo stick; wasn't sure about jet assist although the math seems to call for it. Have not yet read any S-F story envisioning people boinging around all over the place across the rotating space by these glorified pogo-sticks, so it seems to be an original vision...

Jovian Mine * First seen--a "Y." Top part of "Y" on closer inspection a broad saucer, dirigible and supporting a small colony. Tail of "Y" a long, LONG stovepipe drawing up matter from far deeper in the gas-planet's atmosphere, for processing. Automatic anchor boats outride on tether, at nearly the level of the inhabited dirigible-supported saucer, for added stability when and if turbulence further down reaches up to this level. Skimmer-jets ram-jet in hydrogen to climb from mine to near-space pick-up; conventional atmospheric breaking for the return voyage, with inflatable dirigible capability for flying around if miss the landing web.

Ending Hunger * by sea farms: pump air down to sea bottom to bubble up--usually by solar power, though differential currents, differential temperatures, or even waves can be a source of the needed power for the pumps. Bubbling air up from bottom (1) oxygenates the water and (2) brings up minerals to enrich the sea water, creating a rich habitat for fish. One such farm could provide 2-3% of the world's protein needs: one standard-sized GM auto plant could if desired turn out 100 or more complete such farms per year. Addressing distribution issues is another problem, including the livelihood of those providing current sources of protein in the world market. Note that 2/3 of Earth's oceans at the present time are essentially desert, very low in biomass production and support; most of this desert is over depths which are suited for such farming.

Hybrid Vehicles * --Most notably, semi-dirigible helicopters, seen in several futures as the "family car." Low-flying, slow, light, can't fall, worst it can do is only to drift if its power fails; following radar/radio beacons like roads; low-powered and fuel efficient. No more traffic problems: just mount another beacon-channel to fly through between widely spaced poles; safety overrides force drift-down with distress beacon if leave pre-programmed channel or power fails. Wind and storm warning provisions built into override system. If drifts down onto water, will float indefinitely. Emergency anchors and anchor for normal tethering when onsite.

Going beyond these envisionings to detailed, workable inventions and true scientific discoveries: see Techniques of Original, Inspired Scientific Discovery, Technical Invention, and Innovation, details posted at the website http://www.winwenger.com, or you can inquire to win@thebestweb.com. A much shorter work is a kit for hosting a party whose central feature, for all that these are effective, serious techniques for viewing and learning from the future, by procedures like "Over-the-Wall" published recently in this column, are offered as an entertainment. Let your guests come in for fun, and unexpectedly discover that they can forecast (or invent, or problem-solve, or many other things) with uncanny accuracy. Right now this "Futures Prediction Party Kit" is in hardcopy for $4.95 + $2 mailing costs but we plan soon to have the whole kit as a FREE downloadable at website: http://www.winwenger.com> We will meanwhile and soon, publish one of the procedures from this Kit in this column so YOU, like your guests, discover some of what you can do with uncanny accuracy.