Frequently Asked Questions
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1. What is Project Renaissance?
   
   
2. Who is Win Wenger?
   
   
3. What is "Creative Problem-Solving" and why is it important?
   
   
4. What is "Accelerated Learning"? Who can use it?
   
   
5. What is "Image-Streaming"? Does it really work?
   
   
6. What if I don't get images?
   
   
7. Is it ok to explain and/or analyze what I am seeing in my image stream?
   
   
8. What advice do you have for people new to Image-Streaming? For students?
   
   
9. Why is describing out loud, to a person or a tape recorder, such an important part of the Image-Streaming process?
   
   
10. I am a "visualizer," but I am having a hard time describing what I see. Any suggestions?
    
    

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11. Is Image-Streaming like meditation?
    
    
12. My imagery seems to transform into scary images, awful happenings, monsters, etc. ... with the result that I don't want to do Image-Streaming for fear of seeing horrible things again. How do I deal with this?
    
    
13. If I can't relax at all, and I'm training Image-Streaming, will my intelligence still increase?
    
    
14. Does Image-Streaming increase mathematical skills?
    
    
15. Can Image-Streaming, or any other method you advocate, help foreign language learners? Would positive effects on verbal skills be greater for the native language than the foreign language?
    
    
16. When I Image-Stream, I get caught up in the (developing) "storyline." The crux of your technique is in exercising all the senses using our own feedback by describing something, correct?
    
    
17. Isn't just describing the details of an image mentally, rather than aloud, enough? I was under the impression that just thinking about an activity exercised most of the circuits in the brain associated with actually doing the activity.
    
    
18. Is it possible to image-stream 7 hours a day, if I tried my hardest and I had the time? I just want to play with the possibilities.
    
    
19. Sometimes my images are cartoon images. Should I describe them, too? Is it as effective as "normal" Image-Streaming?
    
    
20. Should I do my daily Image-Streaming in bulk or can I split it into many sessions?
    
    

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21. In my streams there are often animals. Is it OK to describe the same animals over and over if that is what I am seeing?
    
    
22. Can I freenote audiotapes and books, or does it have to be a lecture?
    
    
23. I have been having some trouble isolating valuable images. They have been of the day-dreaming, garbage variety and of no discernible use. Does this effect fade with practice?
    
    
24. When I am not able to receive complete images, I fill them in from my own imagination, creating a picture of a tree, a path, etc... I feel that this is forcing the images. Is this something that I should not be doing?
    
    
25. How does Image-Streaming fit with the practice of meditation, in which you avoid images or thoughts and focus solely on breathing?
    
    
26. Hyperzine A (a Chinese herb) increases growth of dendrites. Does it increase the intelligence-boosting ability of Image-Streaming?
    
    
27. I heard some exercises could be replaced with various other procedures, including breathing techniques. What are they?
    
    
28. I read that cutting off the supply of oxygen to your brain for 3 minutes or longer results in neuron death — brain damage. So wouldn't holding your breath for such a long period of time be harmful?
    
    
29. I'm a student. Is there anything I can do to increase my IQ in 6 weeks? I have three hours' free time each day that I’m willing to spend on an intelligence-raising procedure.
    
    
30. Are the results from Image -Streaming permanent? You say the human brain has an IQ over 300. If this is true, what barriers prevent us from reaching that?
    
    

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31. In the Reinert studies of Southwest State University physics students, why was the Kolb inventory used instead of a standardized test like SAT, GRE, Stanford-Binet IQ, or some other IQ test?
    
    

The Osborn-Parnes CPS Method, and Synectics, demonstrated that even very "uncreative" people could be retrained to be highly creative and effective problem-solvers. Osborn's demonstration of "deliberate creativity" has been widely received in results-oriented business and industry and has made wide differences in many individuals' careers and personal lives.

It has made only spotty progress in schools, government and statescraft. The high point in statescraft thus far was the use of Osborn-Parnes CPS Method to mediate a peaceful outcome to the apartheid crisis in the Union of South Africa. With problems piling up across the world much faster than they are getting solved, we in Project Renaissance feel there to be some urgency to getting more people — and more of the decision-makers — equipped with effective methods for solving problems.

Many proponents of various CPS methods feel theirs is the answer to everyone's problems. However, among the varieties of problems, some solve more easily by one approach than by another, and true professional consultants or CPS professionals should have many various methods in their toolkit, each as a back-up to the others.

Other forms work with preferred cognitive styles or preferred learning styles among learners, matching content to those various styles to facilitate learning. Howard Gardner's "seven intelligences" is an example of such an approach. Cooperative Team Learning in its various forms also represents an approach which considerably facilitates learning.

All the above are methods for putting information in, and most of them are concerned with how rapidly and for how long one may take ininformation content.

The practice of Image-Streaming is to "look inside," allowing ourselves to become conscious of whatever imagery happens to be playing in "the back of our mind" — or "in the Mind's Eye," and to involve all the senses, not just vision.

To be a true Image-Stream, the visual and sensory content must be "spontaneous" — i.e., coming from elsewhere in your brain than where you consciously make your choices and decisions. It must not be a made-up story as in most daydreams; its contents should be free from your conscious direction in the sense that you decide to see a tree and then visualize a tree. Your conscious direction can be engaged in the very general regard that you can think of a question and then let your greater, sensory mind answer that question with unanticipated images. The more surprising those images, the more likely that you have engaged those further, beyond-conscious regions of the brain and mind which you are seeking to consult.

For a true Image-Stream, you also need to be describing those images aloud to a listener while you are experiencing and examining them. A listener will elicit from you the kinds of description which will most strongly, detailedly and effectively develop your conscious perception of your imagery. See Image-Streaming for detailed instructions.

Besides its entertainment value, besides aesthetics (much of the contents of this sensory imagery are most extraordinarily beautiful), and besides its practical value in answering questions, solving problems and bringing key insights into focus in education, there is some indication that Image-Streaming also integrates the brain and results in permanent gains in both meaningful intelligence and "I.Q."

Formal studies are very much sought to more definitively determine this issue. Also needed are some high-speed, high-resolution scans of the brain during Image-Streaming, which could tell us very much about information-processing in the human brain.

1. Do 5-15 minute segments of Noise-Removal Breathing (NRB) until you have accumulated a few hours of combined experience.

2. Noise-removal breathe while putting your full attention on those frightening experiences and images. Allow yourself to feel all your fear. Expose those feelings to the ongoing NRB, allowing them to be "swept up and cleanly away" out of your body in those bright showers of sparks turning into good clean life energy...."

3. If need be, blowtorch-breathe on the worst fear-figures and see what you can burn up with those extra-hot showers of sparks.

4. When the fear is used up, satisfaction-breathe on the range and depth of experiences over which you now have control.

5. Next time a fear-figure shows up, in the freedom of your own mind, NRB "up and away" whatever had made it hurt.... — this almost always turns into a most beautiful and illuminating experience.

A second reason is that, for bio-evolutionary reasons, our sensory feedback from external senses is more rapid and immediate than is our sensory feedback from internal senses. Coordinating what we express externally — if we can get the activities of subtler-perceiving, further-perceiving, reaches of the brain expressed externally — forces a more immediate relationship to form between those regions of the brain and our verbally based everyday consciousness. Only 2% of your brain associates in words; most of your brain associates in sensory images. Where, then, is most of your intelligence to be found?