In recent years intuition has emerged from obscurity, even suspicion, to be honored as the valuable life tool that it is.
What exactly is intuition? According to Merriam-Webster it’s quick and ready insight; immediate apprehension or cognition; the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference.
According to Intuition magazine online, it’s a “natural mental faculty, a key element in the creative process, a means of discovery, problem solving, and decision making.”
Remember those math problems you got the correct answer for, but you didn’t get full credit because you couldn’t show your work?
Intuition isn’t some mystical talent, it’s something we all have and can develop more of.
Where does intuition come from?
In their book, “A General Theory of Love,” authors Drs. Lewis, Amini and Lannon agree that we acquire complicated knowledge we can’t describe, explain, or recognize.
They cite researchers Knowlton, Mangels and Squire, who asked subjects to predict the weather in a simple computer model. They designed the experiment so that even though the cues looked worthless they did relate to the outcome but the relationship between cues and effects it was way too difficult for logic to unravel in even the smartest person.
No one was able to figure it out, but that still got better at this system they couldn’t understand or describe! After just 50 trials, the average subject was right 70% of the time, which means some were doing far better than that. What they were doing was gradually developing a feel for the situation, getting the gist of it.
We tend to believe that success can only come from understanding, but in reality our brains, when presented with ample opportunity, can unconsciously extract the underlying rules. “Such knowledge,” say Lewis, Amini, and Lannon, “develops with languorous ease and inevitability, stubbornly inexpressibly, never destined for translation into words.”
Things we can’t describe, but we “know,” come from our implicit memory which provides this “camouflaged learning.” Spoken language, for instance, is a complicated set sounds and rules we couldn’t possibly describe, yet we all learn to speak it as kids with no formal instruction.
In his book, Language Instinct, Steven Pinker observes that we all know that “thole, plast and flitch are not English words but they could be, whereas vlas, ptak, and nyip cannot be English. How? Well, just because, but wouldn’t you agree?
The advantages of intuition? It’s much quicker and surer. You have a greater grasp on reality, as it were, when you don’t confuse things by bringing in the neocortex. “Reason,” said Pascal, “is the slow and tortuous method by which those who do not know the truth discover it.”
We all have it and we can develop it Work with a coach, invite your intuition into your life and pump up the volume.
Susan Dunn, MA, Marketing Coach,
http://www.webstrategies.cc. Marketing consultation,
implementation, website review, SEO optimization, article
writing and submission, help with ebooks and other
strategies. Susan is the author or How to Write an eBook
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